Tag: australian poetry

Nibbling on the hand that feeds me, with an occasional sharp nip

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by David Musgrave Co-editing Contemporary Australian Poetry with Martin Langford, Judith Beveridge and Judy Johnson was one of the biggest projects I’ve ever worked on: it was like doing a PhD all over again, but without the pool-playing. Because the anthology covered poetry published in the period 1990-2015 (excluding verse novels), I want to make a few general comments about the state of the artform as I experienced it from researching and reading pretty comprehensively in the period. Any Australian writer who wishes that they were American, like a novelist of my acquaintance, need only have a look through the…

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Does Australia Need an ICAC for Poetry?

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by David Musgrave I’ve been running a publishing company for over 12 years now, and as part of this series of blogs for Southerly, I’ve been asked to write on some aspect of the inner workings of a publishing company, and so I will – on the most important part, which is how it makes me feel: deeply ambivalent. I’ll deal with the positive stuff first. One of the great things about running an independent literary publishing house is the people you mostly work with, the authors. The overwhelming majority of them are a pleasure to deal with, which is…

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July Monthly Blogger – David Musgrave!

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A huge thanks to Marija Peričić for her excellent posts. Our blogger this month is David Musgrave. You can read all about him below: David Musgrave has published six collections of poetry, the most recent being Anatomy of Voice (GloriaSMH, 2016) and a novel, Glissando (Sleepers, 2010) and was co-editor and publisher of the anthology Contemporary Australian Poetry, published by Puncher & Wattmann, which he founded in 2005. He teaches creative writing at the University of Newcastle.  

My ‘Avant-Garde Card’: Five Aesthetic Categories

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by A.J. Carruthers ―For Pam B., Michael B., Fiona H. & Justin C.  In this final blog post I want us to all get making. To get into the spirit of active experimentation, I want to share some personal writing practices here in the form of five achievable aesthetic categories: stale, flat, daggy, austere, and vaporous. These “categories” are also primers for writing. At the end of each section there are exercises to try. To speak about aesthetic categories in poetry is to issue a pragmatics of the experimental writing process. These primers are pragmatic and constructivist. Sianne Ngai, in introducing…

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Contemporary Experimental Poetry in Australia: Tendencies and Directions

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by A.J. Carruthers In building an argument for the second half of the project The Languages of Invention: Australian Experimental Poetry and Literary History, 1973-2014, I’ve drawn closer to what has been happening around me, yet tried to maintain some perspectival distance. What can prepare a critic for the onslaught of the contemporary? The kinds of critical armature one builds over time are an enormous tangle of accidental dalliances, wise guidance, aesthetic bonds and associations, extraordinary friends with astonishing minds, and erratic critical swerves. So what I have found is very much dependent on my own reading history, some sense…

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March Monthly Blogger – AJ Carruthers

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Many thanks to Allison Whittaker for an excellent series of blogs. This month our blogger is A.J. Carruthers. A.J. Carruthers is a critic and experimental poet, author of Stave Sightings: Notational Experiments in North American Long Poems, 1961-2011 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), and a lifelong long poem, the first book of which is AXIS Book 1: Areal (Sydney: Vagabond, 2014). Other titles include The Tulip Beds: Toneme Suite (Vagabond, 2011), Ode to On Kawara (Buffalo: Hysterically Real, 2016) and Opus 16 on Tehching Hsieh (Oakland: GaussPDF, 2016). He works as an editor for Rabbit Poetry Journal and founded SOd press in 2011. From…

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Eileen Chong interviews Eileen Chong

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By Eileen Chong Tell me a little about yourself. My name is Eileen Chong and I’m a poet. I’m a bit of an accidental poet – I took Judith Beveridge’s poetry class when I was at Sydney University doing an M. Litt mostly because I was trying to avoid any modules in which I would have to write essays. How long have you been writing poetry? I first started to think that I might be a poet in 2009. Now I realise my relationship with poetry goes much further back than that, to when I was studying poetry in school.…

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10 outrageous things that happened in poetry in 2015. You won’t believe what number 6 is!

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by Liam Ferney, This is and isn’t a top ten poetry list for 2015. There are ten entries. They’re not all poets or books. Very few, if any, were actually published this year. But it is an opportunity to share the work that most shaped my thinking about poetry this year. I said enough about Michael Robbins last week, but if I hadn’t The Second Sex would be on my list. Next year I’ll be contemporary. I promise. deciBels (Vagabond Press) Pam Brown’s brilliantly curated deciBels series, Vagabond Press’ Rare Objects replacement, proved a fertile well. Familiar faces in the…

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December monthly blogger – Liam Ferney!

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A huge thanks to Felicity Castagna for her wonderful posts. Our blogger this month is Liam Ferney. His bio is below: Liam Ferney is one of Australia’s leading younger poets. His latest book, Content (Hunter Publishing), is a hand grenade tossed into the middle of polite society that uses the argot of politics and the internet to tackle religion, war, love and late capitalism.  It follows on from Boom which was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literature Awards and the Queensland Literary Awards. He is a former Poetry Editor of Cordite and regularly reviews poetry for Rabbit, Cordite and Southerly.…

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Toby Fitch’s New Adventures

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The most excellent Toby Fitch has been Southerly’s Poetry Reviews Editor for the past five years. He’s commissioned, edited, and organised all the poetry reviews you read in the journal and online. But now, Toby is off on new adventures. He will begin as Poetry Editor at Overland Journal, taking over from Peter Minter, in 2016. He will also help judge Overland’s Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets. We’ve loved him, we’ll miss him, and we wish him all the best. Thank you, Toby!  

Vale JS Harry

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JS Harry (1939-2015) JS Harry, one of Australian poetry’s “great transgressors”, described by Peter Porter in 2007 as “the most arresting poet working in Australia today”, died peacefully in her sleep Wednesday morning 20th May. It followed a long and debilitating illness, which she bore uncomplainingly with the good humour and grace that was so typical of her. Until her final days she continued to respond with wisdom, acuteness and appreciation to visiting family and friends. Born in South Australia, Harry spent most of her life in Sydney. Early on she began submitting her stories and poetry to children’s magazines…

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