Tag: guest

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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Australian Experimental Poetry: Critical and Historical Perspectives

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by A.J. Carruthers These blog posts will contain some critical explorations, reflections and polemics concerning my second book project titled The Languages of Invention: Australian Experimental Poetry and Literary History, 1973-2014. This project comes after Stave Sightings: Notational Experiments in North American Long Poems, 1961-2011,[i] a book I have called a “critical experiment” which examines the use of notational methods and actual musical scores in expansive works by Langston Hughes, Armand Schwerner, BpNichol, Joan Retallack and Anne Waldman. These are disruptive and radical case studies, poetries that test our reading practices, oftentimes engaging in trenchant cultural critique through the registers…

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Pocket thanks

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by Alison Whittaker     Dunno if you remember me, tid. You and me went to school together in 2005.   I’ve got these vignettes of you in my head. First we walked together on a tour of the school grounds like fluffy juvenile magpies – except it was so hot we were slick, drippy and dragging. Then, we sat at the front of English class together and didn’t speak. I remember you doodled in your corners and I anxiously marked out a margin (three centimetres; parallel to the page edge; red pen).   Year 7 is hard enough. We…

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Talking about: talking about

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by Alison Whittaker   ‘In conversation’ is the lie I tell myself to get to a venue where I’ll talk about writing.   Harmless little chat. It’s a harmless little chat.   Here’s the real harmless little chat, twenty minutes before: From there, a writerly discussion event is just projecting some tight-packed, thought-out writerly version of myself at someone else and a smattering of people who watch on.   I think: ‘Don’t look at them. Probably shouldn’t look at them.’ I also think: ‘Chin up, gut in. Surely you know what you’re talking about.’ I think: ‘On brand.’ When was…

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Writing and

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by Alison Whittaker   The writer and the writing life, two off-cut conversations that have planted themselves anew in 2017.   On the Southerly blog last month, Roanna Gonsalves breathed The Double Lives of Writers, a sobering bulletin that etched out the invisible financial and labour roots that give water to even prolific writers. Katerina Bryant in Overland wrote Have You Thought About Law?, on the tensions between practice and prestige and the ‘day job’ in writing. Both are relatable; I bring in most of my money through working in law and legal research. While this continent descends into another…

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Why do we bother to write?

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by Roanna Gonsalves     A few days ago, the National Human Rights Commission in India noted the suspicious deaths, over the course of a decade, of 500 indigenous (tribal) girls in government-run Ashram schools in the state of Maharashtra, India. In Australia we heard that a white supremacist was stockpiling weapons with the intention of carrying out a mass shooting in a shopping centre on the Central Coast of New South Wales. On the 26th of January, Invasion Day / Survival Day / Australia Day 2017, a group of concerned citizens issued statements condemning the physical and psychic violence…

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September Monthly Blogger – Bruce Pascoe!

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Many thanks to Tara June Winch for her excellent posts. This month our blogger is Bruce Pascoe. Bruce, a Bunurong man, is a member of the Wathaurong Aboriginal Co-operative of southern Victoria, and an awarding winning Australian writer, editor, and anthologist. Bruce published and edited Australian Short Stories magazine 1982-1999, was the winner of the Prime Minister’s Literature Award for Young Adult fiction (Fog, a dox) 2013, recipient of the Australian Literature Award 1999, the Radio National Short Story 1998, and the FAW Short Story 2010. Bruce’s publications include: Night Animals, Shark, Ocean, Bloke, Cape Otway, Convincing Ground, Little Red Yellow and…

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On Writers Block

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I’m meant to write this final blog, I said I would, I made a promise. I must, but, I can’t, I’ve tried for a week and nothing comes up, a blank abyss, I’m writing fiction at least – my head is engulfed in fiction right now and there is absolutely no way I can maneuver it to this promised blog post. I’ve been trying to write about Virginia Woolf’s electric, 1929 call to arms essay, A Room of One’s Own and muse on that early line that – “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”. But I can’t write about it because my desk is literally in the living room, the kitchen, the front door and the back door at once and I just couldn’t grab an ironic break to think this week.

April blogger – John Kinsella!

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Thank you, Peter Minter, for your wonderful posts last month. This month, our blogger is John Kinsella. His bio is below: John Kinsella’s many volumes of poetry include Armour (Picador, 2011), Jam Tree Gully (WW Norton, 2012) and The Jaguar’s Dream (Alma/Herla, 2012). His recent book of stories is In the Shade of the Shady Tree (Ohio University Press, 2012). His novel Morpheus will be published in a couple of months by BlazeVox. He is a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University. He is poetry editor for Island magazine.

Our first guest for 2013 – Judith Beveridge.

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Thanks to Lisa Gorton for your wonderful posts to round out 2012. Next, and our first for 2013 is Judith Beveridge. Judith Beveridge is the author of The Domesticity of Giraffes, Accidental Grace, Wolf Notes and Storm and Honey. Her prizes include the NSW, Victorian and Queensland Prizes for Poetry, the Grace Levin Prize, the Wesley Michel Wright Award and the Josephine Ulrick Prize. She is the poetry editor for Meanjin and teaches poetry writing at post graduate level at the University of Sydney. Her new volume of poems will be published in 2013.

The Future Freeze

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Lisa Gorton Cryogenics is probably the weirdest version of ambition. It proves how hard it is to think about the future: its images have no intimacy. This difficulty is probably identical to the difficulty of imagining the past not as it appears in retrospect, but as it was when its future was undecided, alive with possibilities. Nothing shows how habit has consumed strangeness so much as reading an out-of-date book of prophecies. Take Archibald Williams’ book, The Romance of Modern Invention. You can read it here: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/41160. It covers the telephone, ‘mechanical flight’ and ‘horseless carriages’.  Here is its prediction…

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