Tag: guest

September monthly blogger – Belinda Castles!

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A big thanks to Jill Jones for her fabulously interesting posts. This month we have Belinda Castles blogging for us: Belinda Castles is a writer and editor. Her most recent book is Hannah and Emil, a novel based on the lives of her grandparents. Her grandfather was a German anti-Nazi refugee who met her British-born grandmother when fleeing Germany in 1933. In 1940 he was arrested in Britain and sent to Australia on the infamous HMT Dunera. Belinda’s previous novel, The River Baptists, won the Australian/Vogel Award for Literature for 2006. In 2008 she was named one of the Sydney Morning…

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Homage and influence, naked and otherwise

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Jill Jones I was looking over some notes the day I wrote this post (Wednesday). They were towards a piece I had begun some time ago, not completed, about the Canadian poet, Phyllis Webb. As well as reminding me about life’s unfinished projects, it got me thinking about homage, paying respects. I have a wonderful book by John Ashbery, Other Traditions: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures (Harvard University Press). In the introduction, Ashbery says he did not want to explain his poetry and chose to speak about poets “who have probably influenced me”. The word “probably” seems to be a…

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The present of books

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Jill Jones Just recently, I found myself receiving a number of books from different sources over a matter of a couple of days. They are all, of course, poetry books. Despite the fact that poetry publishing is not a best-seller type of enterprise, there’s plenty of us who buy or acquire and are interested in books of poetry. I’ve even noticed a welcome increase in poetry reviews in the newspapers. Not all the reviews are terribly well done, or maybe they were savaged by sub-editors (who knows?), but at least they are providing space for dialogues about poems, poetry and…

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August Blogger: Jill Jones

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Many thanks to Michelle Cahill for her excellent, thought-provoking posts. Our next blogger is Jill Jones. Jill Jones has published six full-length books of poetry including Dark Bright Doors, 2010; Broken/Open, 2005; Screens Jets Heaven: New and Selected Poems, 2002; The Book of Possibilities, 1997; Flagging Down Time, 1993; and The Mask and the Jagged Star, 1992. She has also published a number of chapbooks including Senses Working Out, Vagabond Press, 2012, and Struggle and Radiance: Ten Commentaries, Wild Honey Press, Eire, 2004. A new full-length book, Ash Is Here, So Are Stars, is due in later 2012. Her major…

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

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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…

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Our next guest writer, Michelle Cahill

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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…

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Dinner

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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…

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Abstract extracts from my travel journal: June to August 2011

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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…

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

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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…

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

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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…

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Last 2011 monthly blogger – Angela Meyer!

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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…

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Collaboration – Best with a Little Stir

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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…

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