Tag: guest

Out of Sight for the Ends of Being: Transcending Morality and Slavery

12 June 201223 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog3 Comments

Michelle Cahill In sonnet 43 Elizabeth Barrett Browning describes the soul reaching to surpass the feeling of disconnection from “the ends of Being and ideal Grace.” She speaks to the mystery of thought and feeling contained yet unbounded by love. The transcendent state is measured by physical criterion of breadth, height, depth, reach, and by everyday items which confer the passing of time, “sun”, “candle-light”, “breath”. The sonnet’s ardent logic, its repetitions and intensity create an interior world of “breath” and “breadth”, as it structures love’s fabric as paradoxical and conflicted, made more intense by the awareness of death. Barrett…

Our next guest writer, Michelle Cahill

8 June 201223 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog

Our thanks to Pip for her wonderful posts over these last few weeks. Now please welcome Michelle Cahill, who will be joining us throughout June. Michelle Cahill lives in Sydney. She is the author of two collections of poetry and two chapbooks, most recently Vishvarupa (5IP) and Night Birds (Vagabond). Michelle received the Val Vallis Award and was highly commended in the Blake Poetry Prize, the Wesley Michel Wright Prize and long listed in the Carmel Bird Short Story Award. She was an International resident at Sanskriti Kendra in New Delhi, a Fellow at Hawthornden Castle and has received grants…

Dinner

28 January 201223 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog

Kate Livett Not a little fit, not a little fit sun sat in shed more mentally. Let us why, let us why weight, let us why winter chess, let us why way. … — Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons (1914). Utterly different from its use by Gertrude Stein in Modernist experimental poetry, ‘fit’ has become a pop culture word of the 2010s, meaning the ‘fit’ between product and consumer, between organisation and employee, between equally ridiculous celebrities. Give us some examples, you say? Okay. Some perfect ‘fits’: The Wiggles and small children. Apple computers and art/design students. Brad Pitt and Angelina…

Abstract extracts from my travel journal: June to August 2011

20 December 201123 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog2 Comments

Angela Meyer This post is partly a peek into my process. If you read more of my writing you may notice thoughts, imagery, themes popping up that originated from this trip and my recordings. But I like to think these carefully chosen ‘abstract extracts’ – deliberately taken out of context – form a little narrative of their own. Paris Cars and motorbikes honk, a man vomits into the bin and hobbles away. We are halfway around the world, we desperately need showers and we are happy. …the best part of the day, I think, was all the stairs and the…

Recently read: non-reviews of The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary, Flying with Paper Wings, The Cook

9 December 201123 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog3 Comments

Angela Meyer The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary by Andrew Westoll, UQP (Aus), 9780702238468, July 2011 (paperback) This book has been near the top of my pile since July and I finally picked it up to start reading on a flight to Sydney recently. I am an animal lover but have barely read any books on animals! What seduced me about this book was the pictures and descriptions of the resident chimps of Fauna Sanctuary in the middle of the book, ie. under the picture of Binky: ‘Binky may look tough, but he’s actually a very sensitive and loving chimpanzee as well as…

Tempeh matters: the launch of Janet De Neefe’s Bali: The Food of My Island Home

5 December 201123 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog2 Comments

Angela Meyer Recently I attended the launch of Janet De Neefe’s new cookbook Bali: The Food of My Island Home. De Neefe moved to Bali 26 years ago after falling in love with the place and with a local man. She has founded two restaurants in Ubud: Casa Luna and Indus. She also founded the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, which I have attended twice: once as an audience member, once as a guest of the festival. Her large and lavish launch brought a bit of the Ubud Writers and Readers Fest to Melbourne. We sampled tempeh, arancini balls, beef…

Last 2011 monthly blogger – Angela Meyer!

1 December 201123 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog1 Comment

Thank you, Andrew Burke, for your excellent posts. Please don’t forget to check out his blog: http://hispirits.blogspot.com/ For our final monthly blogger for 2011, we have the ever-fabulous Angela Meyer of Literary Minded! Her bio is below: Angela Meyer is a Melbourne-based writer and reviewer. Her stories and criticism have been published widely, including in The Lifted Brow, Wet Ink, Seizure, Cordite, AntiTHESIS, Bookslut, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age and the Australian. For Southerly, she once interviewed author Cate Kennedy. She is a former acting editor of Bookseller+Publisher – the Australian book industry magazine – and runs a popular blog…

Collaboration – Best with a Little Stir

28 November 201123 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog1 Comment

Andrew Burke Recently I posted here about Collaborative poetry, citing examples by renga poets, a ‘mock’ poet, and an award-winning Canadian poet, Phil Hall, and myself. As usual, I stepped in blindly, and started writing before I had done the research. This is the creative side of me: I’m just an excitable boy, as some pop song said years ago. When I was a university lecturer, I warned students off relying on Wikipedia for their research. It was early days for the online encyclopaedia; many of the entries were biased and incomplete. I still believe Wiki has to be used…

Collaboration

21 November 201123 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog

Andrew Burke hey cuckoo– are you scolding the loafer? – Issa, 1813 Friend and fellow poet, Canadian Phil Hall, has just won the prestigious Governor General’s Poetry Award for 2011. His winning book was Killdeer, published by Bookthug. You can read more here.I’ve been procrastinating for days about writing this. I have no idea why, but events have caught up with me and now is the time. Being only human, I tend to pay more attention to the books and poems of the poets I know personally, so I’ve been reading and, frankly, puzzling over a lot of Phil’s work…

Flight Log – Poetry with Wings

12 November 201123 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog2 Comments

Andrew Burke Boarding cards were the ultimate bookmarks – you were issued one before you left and when you woke somewhere between here and Frankfurt they reminded you at bleary breakfast that Fiona had just been cornered in a grimy basement and you were winging now over Romania and would be free in two hours. From an unpublished poem Vanishing Species by Andrew Taylor. This poem is a wonderful example of a new breed of poem which has grown up since the Wright Brothers took to the air. When people say there is nothing new for poetry to say –…

Day One

8 November 201123 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog4 Comments

Andrew Burke Today, I read a sign which said, ‘When you write your life story, don’t let anybody else’s hand on the pen’. Now, that feels so right to me when I apply it to poetry – but then … there’s a multi-handed force directing my hands called ‘influence’. We all have them, no matter how we try to ditch them along the way. Even Tranter with his tricky manoeuvres – they’re learnt from Oulipo and his influence from Ashbery is well documented. Or the poets who murmur Sylvia Plath poems to their pillows and write their shadow texts at…

Next Monthly Blogger – Andrew Burke!

28 October 2011 SoutherlyNews

Ali Cobby Eckerman has provided us with a month of thought-provoking posts and fabulous poetry. Next up is Andrew Burke. His bio is below: Andrew Burke is an Australian writer with publications going back to the 1960s. He has published mainly as a poet, but has also had small plays on the boards, tiny films on the screen and short stories sprinkled over the years. After one career as a Creative Director in advertising, he went into academe in mid-age. He fancies being a ringmaster in a circus next. His most recent collections Beyond City Limits (Edith Cowan University, 2009), Blue Rose (novel,http://etextpress.com/books.htm)…

Cart