Tag: poetry

July Monthly Blogger – David Musgrave!

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A huge thanks to Marija Peričić for her excellent posts. Our blogger this month is David Musgrave. You can read all about him below: David Musgrave has published six collections of poetry, the most recent being Anatomy of Voice (GloriaSMH, 2016) and a novel, Glissando (Sleepers, 2010) and was co-editor and publisher of the anthology Contemporary Australian Poetry, published by Puncher & Wattmann, which he founded in 2005. He teaches creative writing at the University of Newcastle.  

Caravan to Yale – A Tjindarella Story

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by Natalie Harkin I am above the clouds, floating on my contemplations and looking for patterns and remnant bush in cleared and carved-up landscapes.  I’ve just parted ways with my friend and fellow poet at the Adelaide airport – she to Sydney and me to Canberra, each for work.  We talked briefly about this blog, as I’ve been thinking a lot about the way her work has been represented in the mainstream media when news of her literary Prize went viral. The March 2017 announcement for the Windham-Campbell Prize, administered by Yale University in the US, was truly sensational.  It…

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My ‘Avant-Garde Card’: Five Aesthetic Categories

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by A.J. Carruthers ―For Pam B., Michael B., Fiona H. & Justin C.  In this final blog post I want us to all get making. To get into the spirit of active experimentation, I want to share some personal writing practices here in the form of five achievable aesthetic categories: stale, flat, daggy, austere, and vaporous. These “categories” are also primers for writing. At the end of each section there are exercises to try. To speak about aesthetic categories in poetry is to issue a pragmatics of the experimental writing process. These primers are pragmatic and constructivist. Sianne Ngai, in introducing…

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The Australian Neo-Avant-Garde: Beginnings, 1973-1992

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by A.J. Carruthers   It is imperative that studies of the neo-avant-garde in Australia, and I think avant-garde studies in general, strike a balance between theory and history. One cannot just have a history of the avant-garde: a slew of good examples without a theory of what it is that makes these examples avant-garde (and in poetry, to catalogue an exhibit of key works without interrogating their poetics and aesthetics). Neither can one simply have a theory of the avant-garde that doesn’t take into account its specific histories, especially transcultural avant-gardes, those outside centres of cultural influence, those that cross…

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Australian Experimental Poetry: Critical and Historical Perspectives

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by A.J. Carruthers These blog posts will contain some critical explorations, reflections and polemics concerning my second book project titled The Languages of Invention: Australian Experimental Poetry and Literary History, 1973-2014. This project comes after Stave Sightings: Notational Experiments in North American Long Poems, 1961-2011,[i] a book I have called a “critical experiment” which examines the use of notational methods and actual musical scores in expansive works by Langston Hughes, Armand Schwerner, BpNichol, Joan Retallack and Anne Waldman. These are disruptive and radical case studies, poetries that test our reading practices, oftentimes engaging in trenchant cultural critique through the registers…

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March Monthly Blogger – AJ Carruthers

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Many thanks to Allison Whittaker for an excellent series of blogs. This month our blogger is A.J. Carruthers. A.J. Carruthers is a critic and experimental poet, author of Stave Sightings: Notational Experiments in North American Long Poems, 1961-2011 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), and a lifelong long poem, the first book of which is AXIS Book 1: Areal (Sydney: Vagabond, 2014). Other titles include The Tulip Beds: Toneme Suite (Vagabond, 2011), Ode to On Kawara (Buffalo: Hysterically Real, 2016) and Opus 16 on Tehching Hsieh (Oakland: GaussPDF, 2016). He works as an editor for Rabbit Poetry Journal and founded SOd press in 2011. From…

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‘Such Human-Scale Signatures’

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Kate Fagan Here is one “photograph in the brain” from Berkeley. I’m sitting with Pete at the foot of a towering sequoia. The tree is beside a small canal. Students zigzag over a bridge. Every backpack is a house. A man on a bicycle looks like Kit Robinson. The sequoia is a column of quiet, stretching from a subsonic hum in the ground. Actually the tree makes the quiet. I’m saturated in the vertigo of memories arriving before they are made. A crow on the bridge. It’s good, the imperfect drift, the narrative, the backpacks. Leaning on acres of bark…

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‘Written to Music’

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Kate Fagan Leave the long fall between us (peak after peak) Here were my paints and there were my powders And then I was drunk and we lost each other My shadow tumbled after Soaking cinnamon leaves in the lake of the moon The roll of the damned drum calls me to duty The dice in the light of the lamp I hear a stone gong I lean full weight on my slender staff Yellow leaves shaken and petals confused to my garden The hard road is written to music – Cedar Sigo, from ‘Panels for the Walls’ in Language     …

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Letters

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by Eileen Chong 23 June 2016 1:44am                                                                          Sydney, Australia Dearest Joci, Hello! As I’m writing this, you must be in the waiting room of your doctor’s office. I hope the wait isn’t too long. I can’t believe what happened to you, or the fact that five-leaved clovers are so unlucky. Life is a bit of a joke at times. I don’t even know how long it has been since I last saw you. I think it was in 2005 or 2006, in Singapore, when you visited. I still have the wonderful blue and gold swirl mosaic tile you made…

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Eileen Chong interviews Eileen Chong

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By Eileen Chong Tell me a little about yourself. My name is Eileen Chong and I’m a poet. I’m a bit of an accidental poet – I took Judith Beveridge’s poetry class when I was at Sydney University doing an M. Litt mostly because I was trying to avoid any modules in which I would have to write essays. How long have you been writing poetry? I first started to think that I might be a poet in 2009. Now I realise my relationship with poetry goes much further back than that, to when I was studying poetry in school.…

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Literary Commons

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By Christopher Raja When asked about his approach, the iconic artist and blogger, Ai Weiwei said:  ‘we’re actually a part of the reality, and if we don’t realise that, we are totally irresponsible. We are a productive reality. We are the reality, but that part of reality means that we need to produce another reality.’ Ten Dalit tribal writers visited Australia to engage with fellow Indigenous writers. This event, Literary Commons, organised by Dr Mridula Nath Chakraborty, was about cutting edge literature as well as politics. It highlighted to me the synergy that takes place when you blend cultural and political…

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