Tag: poetry

The Ham Actor

SoutherlyBlog

by Corey Wakeling 1. A secret to admit. I’ve been writing novels lately, but only as a bellows to an unlit fire. The tinder of poetry hasn’t taken for almost a year, shooting a few sparks in the last week, but otherwise perfectly unlit since February 2015 when I moved from my home of six years, Melbourne, to Western Japan. Initially when I arrived here last year I wrote poetry kind of desperately. Because of a month’s window of free time but also due to unexplainable bodily malaise, I was feeling mortally determined to preserve what thinking was immediately at…

… read more

10 outrageous things that happened in poetry in 2015. You won’t believe what number 6 is!

SoutherlyBlog

by Liam Ferney, This is and isn’t a top ten poetry list for 2015. There are ten entries. They’re not all poets or books. Very few, if any, were actually published this year. But it is an opportunity to share the work that most shaped my thinking about poetry this year. I said enough about Michael Robbins last week, but if I hadn’t The Second Sex would be on my list. Next year I’ll be contemporary. I promise. deciBels (Vagabond Press) Pam Brown’s brilliantly curated deciBels series, Vagabond Press’ Rare Objects replacement, proved a fertile well. Familiar faces in the…

… read more

Nothing makes poetry happen

SoutherlyBlog

by Liam Ferney Chris said he’d start World War 3. Rand told on Chris but nobody listened. Donald said he’d confiscate the bad kids’ Facebook. Jeb said Donald was chaos. Donald called Jeb names. Ben said he could kill thousands of children because he’s saved thousands of children. Or something. Nobody understands Ben. Wolf’s parents made him invite Carly and John but they just stood in the corner. No one spoke to them. Ted said Marco said. Marco said Ted said. And they all said Barack was bad and he wasn’t doing anything, but given the chance they’d do exactly…

… read more

Why I Won’t Get Married in September

SoutherlyBlog

by Liam Ferney It was our first visit to a wedding venue. We’d done the tour. Have you got a date in mind, the manager asked? Anytime but the last weekend in September, I replied quickly. Sarah looked surprised. We hadn’t really discussed dates. It’s the AFL Grand Final I explained. They both shook their heads. Before this year I never really thought I’d get married but I always knew that if I ever did I’d steer clear of September. There are plenty of other Saturdays in the year and what if, just what if, our 50th anniversary coincides with a…

… read more

The Sound Of Music

SoutherlyBlog

by Samuel Wagan Watson My next collection of poetry should now be a semi-completed manuscript in the custody of my publisher. It should be, it would be, it could be…shoulda, woulda, coulda…Truth be told, I rounded a jagged edge a couple of weeks ago in the writing and now I’m stuck on a splinter-curve in the pages. Getting around this particular corner is dangerous. I’m not writing enough to progress and I run the risk of writing too much in the wrong direction and could easily jack-knife my journey all together. I am notorious for allowing a manuscript to cook…

… read more

Flat-Lines

SoutherlyBlog

by Samuel Wagan Watson 2:23AM I probably don’t need to shake-it for another couple of hours.  I’m flying out at around nine o’clock from Brisbane airport, and it’s a Thursday.  Tuesday mornings are the worst.  Traffic is congested on the Gateway Arterial from 6.30am until around 9.  No one knows how to merge onto the Gold Coast motorway!  In my day-to-day work as a writer I need to know this because I haven’t missed a flight…yet.  I dread the moment that happens.  I’ve never paid for a flight in my life, and I wouldn’t know how to, and my agent…

… read more

Pot Tent Shell Litter Rat Shore

SoutherlyBlog

by Justin Clemens Although I’d intended to move onto a rather different topic with this, my final post for the Southerly blog, I’ve found myself stuck on the problem of poetry and computing I briefly discussed last week. Although my thinking on this remains pretty infantile, I would want to say that there is an irreconcilable difference between language and information. To commit the unforgivable gaffe of auto-citation: ‘If almost all inherited elements of human communication have now been decisively reconfigured by the new technologies, this is on the basis of essentially technical, trans-human routines of “information-as-code” not “language-as-symbolic-exchange.”’[1] Whatever…

… read more

Vale JS Harry

SoutherlyNews2 Comments on Vale JS Harry

JS Harry (1939-2015) JS Harry, one of Australian poetry’s “great transgressors”, described by Peter Porter in 2007 as “the most arresting poet working in Australia today”, died peacefully in her sleep Wednesday morning 20th May. It followed a long and debilitating illness, which she bore uncomplainingly with the good humour and grace that was so typical of her. Until her final days she continued to respond with wisdom, acuteness and appreciation to visiting family and friends. Born in South Australia, Harry spent most of her life in Sydney. Early on she began submitting her stories and poetry to children’s magazines…

… read more

Revelators, Visionaries, Poets and Fools: the palimpsest of Sydney’s western suburbia

SoutherlyBlog

by Luke Carman The suggestion that Australia’s literary ‘centre’ appears to be shifting – or leaning, at the least – towards Sydney’s ‘suburban frontier’ is becoming commonplace. Perhaps the first (certainly the most emphatic) recognition of this decentring to find its way into print was provided by Sam Twyford-Moore, director of the Emerging Writers’ Festival, who stated in an interview last year that ‘Western Sydney is the capital of Australian literature… if not already, then certainly it’s the future’. As someone with a sensitive ear for the minor tremors of our most aspirant and incubational writers, Twyford-Moore can reasonably be…

… read more

&Now: Blast Radius – writing and the other arts

SoutherlyBlog

by Anna Gibbs Experimental writing often seems like a rather small and obscure – if vivacious and highly engaged – field of practice in Australia. But a trip to the biannual ‘&Now’ festival of experimental writing at CalArts in Los Angeles last week served as a reminder of the different kinds of energy that can be created both by critical mass and by the cross-currents activated in the expanded field formed when writing conjoins, cooperates or collides with other practices. The festival, whose theme this year was ‘Blast Radius: Writing and the Other Arts’, covered work ranging from the relationship…

… read more

Voice in poetry: on the page and in performance

SoutherlyBlog1 Comment on Voice in poetry: on the page and in performance

by Hazel Smith My third and fourth blogs will be on voice in poetry. This third blog is concerned with voice on and off the page, the fourth and final blog is about the digital manipulation of voice in conjunction with other literary and performance modes. An engagement with the concept of voice straddles many disciplines: media and communication, music, literature, drama.[i] But the concept of voice in poetry has long been slippery and multi-layered.[ii] It is often used to talk rather vaguely about the distinctive presence of the poet in the text. This idea of voice as the authentic…

… read more

Four Things About ‘Teaching’ Poetry

SoutherlyBlog1 Comment on Four Things About ‘Teaching’ Poetry

by Geoff Page Recent events have suggested there may soon be a renewed emphasis on teaching poetry in Australian schools. To Australian poets, and lovers of poetry, these rumours should be welcome. For course designers and English teachers there may now seem to be an attractive vacuum – which needs to be filled intelligently. Extremes, such as the rote learning of a few nineteenth century poems ‘set’ by the teacher (or some distant committee) or the imposition of a swag of pseudo-postmodern ‘critical theory’, need equally to be avoided. As a poet and a former teacher of poetry at secondary…

… read more