Tag: guest

Beyond tropes: Why Eve Langley’s legacy must be understood through a trans inclusive lens

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Sam Elkin The sad tale of Eve Langley, author of the 1942 picaresque classic The Pea Pickers, has transfixed readers for generations. The Pea Pickers, a fictionalised autobiography, tells the story of Steve and Blue, two gender non-conforming sisters who don men’s attire to work as agricultural labourers outside Bairnsdale in Gippsland during the Great Depression. The book, long accepted as an Australian classic (albeit one marred by racism), perhaps captivates readers today less than the sad, complex story of Langley themselves. Soon after the publication of The Pea Pickers, Langley was sent to a mental asylum in Auckland as…

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By the People, For the People: Trans Poetics and DIY Culture, Part 2: The Ephemeral Things That Save Us

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Rae White Acknowledgement: This piece was written on stolen lands in Magandjin, the lands of the Jagera and Turrbal people. Sovereignty was never ceded. This always was and always will be Aboriginal land. One of the most fascinating things about zines and open mics is how temporary they are compared to the endurance of their emotional impact. A zine fair might last six hours at a local hall. An open mic might run for an evening before everyone disperses into the night carrying notebooks full of half-finished poems. But these fleeting gatherings can completely alter the trajectory of a person’s…

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By the People, For the People: Trans Poetics and DIY Culture, Part 1: ‘Jagged Edges and Rough Words’

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Rae White Acknowledgement: This piece was written on stolen lands in Magandjin, the lands of the Jagera and Turrbal people. Sovereignty was never ceded. This always was and always will be Aboriginal land. I’m at one of my fave poetry open mics, Echoes from the Cave Inn, waiting for my name to be called. The crowded room is full of fellow queer, trans, and gender diverse people eating freshly made pizza, sipping beers, and hugging mates they haven’t seen since last month’s open mic. I get up on stage wearing my jorts, and bright pink and orange tie-dye shirt that…

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I had no words to describe my self: Job scarcity and identity in the dying university

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Jessie Seymour Check email again. Not expecting anything, but not quite able to stop myself. There’s a new message. It’s a rejection. Automated and impersonal. Doesn’t even have my name at the top. Relief. At least it’s an answer. This wasn’t even an academic job. I already applied to those – lectureships, short-term contracts, anything remotely within the field I trained for. No, this was a Casual Janitorial Staff role. They don’t even want me cleaning on campus. I close the inbox. * I’m trying to decide how I feel about being an academic. Or if I’m even allowed to…

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Un/telling y/our story, part four

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Amelia Walker Acknowledgement: I live and write on the lands of the Kaurna people. I pay respect to Kaurna Elders, and to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Sovereignty was never ceded. This always was, always will be Aboriginal land. The seminar room is filling up, colleagues and students ambling in, finding seats. I nod silent greetings to those I know, grinning as though everything is normal, as though I haven’t just recognised an uncomfortable parallel between myself and one of western thought’s most reviled figures. Surely that’s overblown. Heidegger was a card-carrying nazi (Ettinger 10). I’ve simply failed…

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Un/telling y/our story, part three

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Amelia Walker Acknowledgement: I live and write on the lands of the Kaurna people. I pay respect to Kaurna Elders, and to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Sovereignty was never ceded. This always was, always will be Aboriginal land. What does it mean to have loved someone who later loved fascism? The question consuming me as I gaze through the bus window at streets you and I once walked together mirrors one Derrida might have pondered after learning of de Man’s past writings. With them, fascism came before the friendship, so “later” would have been “earlier”. Still, the…

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Un/telling y/our story, part two

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Amelia Walker Acknowledgement: I live and write on the lands of the Kaurna people. I pay respect to Kaurna Elders, and to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Sovereignty was never ceded. This always was, always will be Aboriginal land. I’m still on the bus. That’s a lie. Or is it? As I commit these words, it is later, many laters. I’m curled on a couch, notebook on knees, its pages filling with blue scrawlings I cross out, rewrite, cross out, rewrite, letters smudging as my frantic hand drags across not-yet-dry ink. Now I’m at a desk, squinting as…

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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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