Tag: Luke Beesley

December Monthly Blogger – Best Southerly Blogs of 2016

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Many thanks to Nic Low for a fantastic month of blogging. To see out 2016, this month we’re featuring some of our most visited blogs posts of the year. We’ll be back in January 2017 with more great blogs and bloggers, beginning with Roanna Gonsalves author of The Permanent Resident.    2016 in review: Luke Beesley, ‘Poets in Cars, An Interview with Nicholas Powell‘ Eileen Chong, ‘Eileen Chong Interviews Eileen Chong‘ Kate Fagan, ‘Into the Interior‘ Liam Ferney, ‘10 outrageous things that happened in poetry in 2015. You won’t believe what number 6 is!‘ Nic Low, ‘The secret history of Australia’s…

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Poets in Cars, An Interview with Nicholas Powell

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by Luke Beesley …turn on that dishwasher John Ashbery, ‘Wooden Buildings’ My old mate, poet Nick Powell, visited Melbourne last week with his family – it was his first trip back to Australia in 4 years. Nick’s partner, Laura, is Finnish and he has lived in Helsinki (with short stays in Australia) since 2008. We both spent a large part of our childhoods in Beaudesert, a country town south-west of Brisbane but we first met in Toowong (hilly and green inner-west Brisbane) about 15 years ago – Nick moved into the same apartment building, which became the headquarters of Men’s…

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Followed by Patrick Modiano’s Dog: What I’ve Been Reading, Last Part

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by Luke Beesley Having just finished Cesar Aira’s Shantytown, which in the end was probably my least favourite Aira, I’ve just begun Beauty is a Wound by Indonesian Eka Kurniawan, mostly because of how much I enjoyed the tinge of the absurd in these two sentences, on the second page, which follow other sentences about a character, Dewi Ayu, who has just risen from the grave: “A woman tossed her baby into the bushes and its father hushed a banana stalk. Two men plunged into a ditch, others fell unconscious at the side of the road, and still others took…

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Ardent Dentists and Artists’ Cupboards: Raymond Roussel and Gerald Murnane in Days of Heaven

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by Luke Beesley John Ashbery apparently went into a bookshop in Paris in the late 1950s and said something along the lines of what’s the craziest French writing around, and the shopkeeper had no hesitation in handing him a book by Raymond Roussel (1877-1933). Ashbery brought Roussel’s writing back to New York and showed his friends and not only did they sit wide-mouthed as they imagined the temerity in Roussel’s commitment to a beautifully strange literature, they named their new poetry journal after one of his novels – Locus Solus. Ashbery and Schuyler later went and wrote a collaborative novel,…

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Cesar Aira and The Green Ray: What I’ve Been Reading, Part One

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by Luke Beesley I’m currently reading Shantytown by Argentinian author Cesar Aira. It’s the seventh Aira (6 novels and a short story collection) I’ve read since I began reading him in – when was it? – late 2014? He really was the literary discovery of 2014/2015 for me, and as I began reading I simultaneously learned of his eccentric processes or methods, which involve sitting in a café each morning with an espresso, writing one-or-two pages in fountain pen on paper, picking up from the hijinks (the plot) of the day previous, and then spending the rest of the day…

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Paul Foot Meets W. G. Sebald in a Light Blue Pencil

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by Luke Beesley This is the first time I’ve ever “blogged”, and it included a false start. I wrote a whole “blog entry” and then I looked back on it only to realise that it was too much in the tone of previous essays or reviews of books etc I’d written in the past. It’s a necessary tone in the context of a literary review which requires a certain objectivity or more a formality such as a collared shirt. But increasingly given over the last many years I’ve worked at home or in a small studio casually wearing jeans through…

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May Monthly Blogger – Luke Beesley!

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A warm thanks to Christopher Raja for his excellent posts. Our blogger for this month is Luke Beesley. His bio is below. Luke Beesley is a poet, musician and artist, and he has won numerous awards and fellowships. Jam Sticky Vision, his fourth poetry collection, was published by Giramondo in 2015. He lives in Thornbury, Melbourne. www.lukebeesley.com

Long Paddock for Southerly 72.3: Islands and Archipelagos

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Southerly 72.3 is available to purchase here. This link will take you to our old GumRoad storefront (an external site). Remaining issues will be moved to our own site, here, soon. POETRY Rebecca Law, Kalorama Park Stuart Barnes, Conversation Stephen Oliver, Rendezvous and Nocturne Petrina Barson, Cacique Dos Kate Middleton, A Reckoning pony, Ankles ESSAYS Demelza Hall, Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria REVIEWS Luke Beesley on Kate Fagan Andy Carruthers on Mez Breeze Petra White on Bonny Cassidy and John Watson Sarah Holland-Batt on Anthony Lawrence and Aly Cobby Eckerman NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS LONG PADDOCK, Southerly 72.3 – Complete   Click here…

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