Tag: Michelle Cahill

Erasures of the self: the body’s poetry

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Michelle Cahill In this last post for Southerly I would like to share the detours of my writing and spiritual journeys, with brief reflections of a more general nature on Australia’s cultural and literary engagement with Asia. I began my sojourns in Buddhist monasteries in Thailand thirteen years ago when I was disillusioned with capitalism, with what the West had taught me about happiness: commodities, acquisitions, the posture of ego, the indoctrinations of education, culture, all of which, without exception had left me unfulfilled and restless. My teacher Pra Ajahn Po had trained under theradical-conservative Thai monk Buddhadhasa Biku, who left the dirty and…

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Of Asylum and Aliens

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Michelle Cahill  Like most of us I’ve been disturbed by the boat tragedies off the coast of Christmas Island. I sometimes describe myself as an “economic refugee” since my family’s postcolonial transit from Kenya to the UK and thence Sydney was in many ways bumpy so the extent and suffering of displaced peoples troubles me. At the end of the month I plan to travel to Medan to spend a week with the Jesuit Refugee Service and to visit the international detention centre in Bedawan as well as community- based refugees. Australia has been slow at processing its quota of…

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Race, Privilege & the Dark Side Of the Dream

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Michelle Cahill There’s a growing awareness within our literary communities and among public intellectuals that the obstacles faced by those marginalised in terms of cultural and literary representation need to be reappraised by a more rigorous analysis of white privilege, and white racial domination. Racial privilege is the notion that a passive benefit is accrued to one race by the manner in which its identity is constructed as superior to Others. Analysis of racial domination goes further by revisiting the historical, economic and legal processes which secure white privilege. For Oz Lit the aim of such analysis is to begin…

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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

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…

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