Tag: poetry

On the “travel” of poetry and Omar Sakr’s “Algo in the Genocide”

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Axel-Nathaniel Rose Omar Sakr’s “Algo in the Genocide” is printed on the back of the shirts of Readers and Writers Against the Genocide (‘RWAG’), a collective protesting Australia’s ongoing ties to Israel’s government and military. It is a listing poem, structured around that which is forbidden from public discourse about the genocide—through either social media content filters or through censorship under the name of “respectability”. Through brutal repetition and omission, it demonstrates how the algorithmic policing of language undermines the humanity of Palestinians. It reminds me of Audre Lorde’s “Poetry is Not a Luxury”, which reads now like an inverted…

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Entries now open for the David Harold Tribe Fiction Prize and the Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest Award for 2019

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The Department of English at the University of Sydney is pleased to invite entries for two literary awards, made possible through generous bequests to the University. The Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest Award 2019 This is the third biennial award made under the Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest. The award is open to Australian women poets over the age of 18, for an unpublished full-length poetry manuscript of 50-80 pages. The winner will receive $7000 and publication of their manuscript with Vagabond Press. Judges: Pam Brown, Fiona Hile and Kate Lilley. The David Harold Tribe Fiction Prize 2019 This award has been made…

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My Spine, Your Pillow

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Daniel John Pilkington When the sun sets and everything is cellophane Exquisite adjectives Velleity Thoughts that make us feel younger Names for stray cats Dumplings Psilocybin The significance of hair The heating should be more than quiet A hierarchy of self-contradictions When a man lives alone The most common dreams Humidities Theories of why we laugh Artifacts we dare to call natural My favourite apocalypse Plums Things once thought to be aphrodisiacs Things that suggest hidden worlds Possible bookmarks Hypocrisies Numbing things Once when I understood my anger When I was the first to leave and the last to arrive…

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“London” by Kevin Hart

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You take a trip to London for a laugh And in a brawling boozy sleep you dream The Queen has kicked the bucket. “Treachery!”   They scream, and soon enough some stiff old gent With scratchy wig roars out, “Off with his head!” (Then whispers, “Nothing personal, old boy.”)   Turns out that you’re awake: they’re dragging you To Tower Hill, and it’s a lovely day! Turns out you gotta tip the brawny guy,   No cash, and so you give him all your cards. “It’s nothin’ personal,” the headsman says. Next thing your skull is leering from a bridge…

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John Watson: “David Brooks in Slovenia”

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Words || John Watson  ‘Swimming when the bell strikes five’: The bell shakes drops into the sea, The fifth finds me, as ever, there. Swallows like jets on swooping raids Sky-larking in the pulsing air “Make my head their conning tower.’ Then wasps in summer heat drop in To sip sweet wine lees from the glass ‘And dip their feet in cooling waves.’ Dusk comes at last. The swallows nest. The wasps have gone. The night still warm ‘I write until the bell strikes ten.’ He swan-dives round and through the page; Wasp-like he harvests subtle lees. He writes and writes…

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Andrew Burke reviews Pam Brown’s ‘click here for what we do’ & Ken Bolton’s ‘Starting at Basheer’s’

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“One can only write if one arrives at the instant towards which one can only move through space opened up by the movement of writing.” Maurice Blanchot These two books sit on my desk with my favourite pages marked like kite feathers: Pam Brown’s click here for what we do and Ken Bolton’s Starting At Basheer’s, both published by VAGABOND PRESS in 2018. These two poets have been publishing through many different publishers at regular intervals since the Sixties, both with titles numbering in their twenties. The world around them has changed markedly and yet their creative personalities still shine…

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Simeon Kronenberg: “Rain” and “Unaccompanied”

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These poems are part of the Long Paddock series for 78.1 Festschrift: David Brooks.  Unaccompanied Reading The Unaccompanied, Simon Armitage   You write of an igniting field, scrapes on bone   about half puddled snow and lonely souls   buried in ill-fitting clothes or decked on a car ferry   as it engines white water backing in to dock and home,   where someone waits with tea and biscuits wanting news.   You watch up close, but you’re targeted,   hedged in, as if discovered running guns after days of rain.   Rain I love the rain as it clatters…

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Uli Krahn: Postcards from Kings Cross

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This suite of poems is part of the Long Paddock series for 78.1 Festschrift: David Brooks.                              23 Start with explaining intelligence prof, says the little pigeon. Fortunately, Adorno has been paying attention. How do you find back after going to the tasty trees in the park? The ibises look blank. You sort of look, and there’s stuff and places you know and … says That ibis. No, coo the pigeons. You shut your eyes, and then you know. One ibis honks in disgust. Classic pigeon logic.…

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“The Shell Road Atlas” by Andrew Taylor

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Nowhere along here do the maps offer much more than a hope we’re heading the right way. Each page offers a new start and confirmation of the Irish saying ‘If you want to get there you shouldn’t be starting from here.’ The place names are printed so small they’re self-effacing, roads wander and peter out like creeks in a drought, mountains of course are paper flat and the red hatching of a firing range is mute but enticing. Cartographers in some quiet studios have traced their reveries across these pages of beautiful artwork, while here wind blows, birds sing, and…

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Nibbling on the hand that feeds me, with an occasional sharp nip

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by David Musgrave Co-editing Contemporary Australian Poetry with Martin Langford, Judith Beveridge and Judy Johnson was one of the biggest projects I’ve ever worked on: it was like doing a PhD all over again, but without the pool-playing. Because the anthology covered poetry published in the period 1990-2015 (excluding verse novels), I want to make a few general comments about the state of the artform as I experienced it from researching and reading pretty comprehensively in the period. Any Australian writer who wishes that they were American, like a novelist of my acquaintance, need only have a look through the…

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Does Australia Need an ICAC for Poetry?

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by David Musgrave I’ve been running a publishing company for over 12 years now, and as part of this series of blogs for Southerly, I’ve been asked to write on some aspect of the inner workings of a publishing company, and so I will – on the most important part, which is how it makes me feel: deeply ambivalent. I’ll deal with the positive stuff first. One of the great things about running an independent literary publishing house is the people you mostly work with, the authors. The overwhelming majority of them are a pleasure to deal with, which is…

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Inside-out or outside-in?

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by David Musgrave In May I had the good fortune to be invited to the 4th China-Australia Literary Forum in Guangzhou. There I met four Chinese poets: Yang Ke, whose work I was already familiar with through Simon Patton’s translations, Xi Chuan, Professor at Beijing Normal University, Huang Lihai, a Guangzhou-based poet published by Kit Kelen’s Flying Islands Books (feed birds rainbows, 2014) and Zheng Xiaoqiong, who I’ll talk about first[1]. The poetry panel, which was chaired by Xi Chuan, and also featured Yang Ke, Kate Fagan, and Zheng Xiaoqiong, consisted of each poet reading a brief paper about their…

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