Tag: David Musgrave

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

SoutherlyBlog

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?

SoutherlyBlog

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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Inside-out or outside-in?

SoutherlyBlog

by David Musgrave In May I had the good fortune to be invited to the 4th China-Australia Literary Forum in Guangzhou. There I met four Chinese poets: Yang Ke, whose work I was already familiar with through Simon Patton’s translations, Xi Chuan, Professor at Beijing Normal University, Huang Lihai, a Guangzhou-based poet published by Kit Kelen’s Flying Islands Books (feed birds rainbows, 2014) and Zheng Xiaoqiong, who I’ll talk about first[1]. The poetry panel, which was chaired by Xi Chuan, and also featured Yang Ke, Kate Fagan, and Zheng Xiaoqiong, consisted of each poet reading a brief paper about their…

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On Smokeflowers and Hawaiian Pizza

SoutherlyBlog

by David Musgrave   A little while ago I returned from three months living in Beijing and found my world subtly changed. I’d gone there with the intention of continuing my study of Mandarin, but in a more intensive fashion than hitherto, and succeeded in that aim to the extent that maybe for one whole month I didn’t have a conversation in English with anyone at all, apart from writing emails. This of course does not mean that interesting conversations in English were replaced with interesting conversations in Mandarin: on the contrary, most of the time I felt like a…

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July Monthly Blogger – David Musgrave!

SoutherlyBlog, News

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.  

Long Paddock for Southerly 70.2: Romance

SoutherlyLong Paddock

Is Australian romance an oxymoron? It has been long thought so; not for us Don Juan or Don Quixote but Ned Kelly and Tom Collins. Even when romance rears its alluring head in Australian fiction, as with Harry’s wooing of Sybilla in My Brilliant Career, it is often quashed as a distraction or delusion. More recently, celebrated texts of their times such as Puberty Blues (1979), Oscar and Lucinda (1988), Praise (1992) have confirmed the view that romance is difficult in Australia – and in Australian fiction. If we have prided ourselves on taking the steely-eyed view without the filter…

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