Tag: Joshua Mei-Ling Dubrau

Subject/ed?

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by Joshua Mei-Ling Dubrau Perhaps the biggest reason for not knowing if we’re there yet, as discussed in the previous post, is that nobody is quite sure where there actually is. The development of literary modes / –isms / genres / forms tends, on the whole, to be reactive rather than proactive. That is to say, the writer does often work from the starting point of wanting to bring a unique method of expression into the public discourse, but this particularity is generally based on a movement away from a form of expression thought to have lost its currency. There…

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Are we there yet?

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by Joshua Mei-Ling Dubrau About six weeks ago, I was tagged in a Facebook post by Australian author Shady Cosgrove asking various folk for ‘recommendations for essays that dissect what, exactly, constitutes Australian literature’. She was asking fellow academics and writers, yet other than some suggestions about what we don’t think Australian literature is, or should be, or what it used to be, the response, on the whole, was a fairly solid ‘dunno’.* As a sometime reviewer of Australian short stories, more so than novels, I could name a handful of stylistic devices that seem to crop up in volumes…

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Hipoetical Context

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by Joshua Mei-Ling Dubrau Reading and analysing (and perhaps even enjoying poetry) are complicated by competing perspectives, both current and historical, on what actually constitutes ‘poetic language’. A major player in the formation of such perspectives are the questions of if, how and why a written art-form which is subject to all the normal limitations of language can present thoughts, events, feelings, concepts or combinations of these in a manner which transcends language’s significatory limitations to create a poetic text-object which is more than the sum of its linguistic parts. Does poetry create or only represent its subject matter, and…

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Croajingalong Walkaround (An Australia Day reflection of sorts)

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by Joshua Mei-Ling Dubrau The most anticipated highlight of this trip for me was a chance to revisit the small town of Mallacoota just past the NSW/Victoria border, and Croajingalong National Park. I hadn’t been back since my daughter, the half-a-teenager flopped over a table in Braidwood two posts ago was about eight months old. Mallacoota is an inlet town with creeks and lakes curving and pooling out into the ocean. Everything is pretty low key; the river aspect means it’s remained more of a small fishing town than a beachfront high-rise development. The prevalence of brown and orange in…

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Here We Go Round The Prickly Pear

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by Joshua Mei-Ling Dubrau I feel like I’m going round in circles thinking about Eliot’s formula for the ‘objective correlative’ as set out in my last post – ‘a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion’. This seems to imply that the emotion, not the objects, comes first in the creative impulse. But does it? And does the dogmatic-sounding nature of the statement render it impractical for the composition or criticism of poetry  – a mode to which the idea of formula is often anathema? In some types of poetry, generally…

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Re/solved?

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By Joshua Mei-Ling Dubrau It was inevitable, I suppose, that the first Southerly blog post of 2014 should involve the dreaded topic of the New Year’s Resolution (and in line with most people’s resolutions, mine is being put into practice now, after I’ve, erm, had a chance to get a feel for the upcoming year). Resolutions often involve quantitative changes that we hope will lead to qualitatively attractive outcomes. Cutting down on cigarettes involves subtracting a concrete number of gaspers from the currently consumed amount, but the benefits – the increased volume of oxygen in the breath, the return to…

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January monthly blogger – Joshua Mei-Ling Dubrau!

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Enormous thanks to Kathryn Heyman for her excellent posts. What a wonderful way to end the year. To start 2014, we have the fabulous Joshua Mei-Ling Dubrau. Her bio is below: Joshua Mei-Ling Dubrau holds a PhD from UNSW. Her work, both critical and creative, has appeared in Poetry and the Trace (Puncher & Wattman, 2013) Southerly, Cordite, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, The Night Road (Newcastle Poetry Prize judges’ anthology 2009) and Computer Music Journal. Current projects include further development (in collaboration with Mark Havryliv) of the P[a]ra[pra]xis software suite, a realtime poetry and audio generator based on…

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