Tag: poetry

Obscurity in Poetry — A Spectrum

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by Geoff Page (Developed from a short talk given in Bondi on November 7, 2014 at the salon of Luke Fischer and Dalia Nassar) Firstly, we need to remember a successful poem is both an act of communication and a work of art. There is a tension between the point I first heard from John Tranter (“If I wanted to tell you something I’d have sent you a telegram”) and the fact that almost all poems (even the most obscure) are an attempt, in one way or another, to address a putative reader or listener. There exists in current Australian…

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The Reef is Not a Poem

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by Nicolette Stasko When I began to think about a topic for my first post I realised that I had an opportunity to write about something I am passionate about but don’t usually get to address: conservation and the environment as represented by the natural phenomenon of the Great Barrier Reef. Readers who are familiar with my poetry or my book Oyster: from Montparnasse to Greenwell Point, would not find my interest surprising. For me, like many poets (including Judith Wright, whose work is also a main focus of this piece), the land and especially the sea is a ‘manifestation…

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Riddle

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by Angela Rockel Rogue intensities roam the streets of the ordinary. Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects There’s a memory I carried as a series of sensations, wordless, all through my childhood: I’m looking at something that fills my visual field. It’s a surface, squarish, textured and undulating, patterned with lines. Around its edge it separates into projections – I discover that I can move the thing, turn it and find another side, a different texture. Eventually words attached themselves to this experience – surface, line, projections, move – but it was twenty years or more before I put them together to…

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Comrade Kibalchich

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by Aashish Kaul Marseilles. Late winter, 1941. Icy winds. A boat preparing to depart for Martinique in the Caribbean Sea, a boat with just two cabins and a total of seven bunks for the lucky few. For the rest, the hold with little light or air, with makeshift bunk beds hurriedly assembled. A very long and distressing voyage ahead for nearly four hundred men, women, and children escaping one or another persecution, now being herded into the steamer by armed gendarmes, free with their hands and insults, as if these hapless passengers were convicts in the process of deportation, or…

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James Dickey

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by Anthony Lawrence “What a view, I said again. The river was blank and mindless with beauty. It was the most glorious thing I have ever seen. But it was not seeing, really. For once it was not just seeing. It was beholding. I beheld the river in its icy pit of brightness, in its far-below sound and indifference, in its large coil and tiny points and flashes of the moon, in its long sinuous form, in its uncomprehending consequence.”                   James Dickey, Deliverance Watching Deliverance again after many years, waiting for the…

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Fireworks Below the River

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by Anthony Lawrence Swamp Riddles: Robert Adamson In 1978, my mother met me at the door and handed me a note, saying “This is what you have to do if you’re serious and want to be a real poet.” She had written a list that included: – read everything you can get your hands on – go to second hand bookshops and start a poetry collection – write every day – say no to your friends more often I assumed that while I’d been at work, she’d had a major epiphany about poetry, and was now passing on this crucial…

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Sharon Olds: The Regret of the Body

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by Anthony Lawrence Photo of Sharon Olds by Matt Valentine Sometime in 1990 I was at home in Geraldton, WA. I was at the kitchen table, writing. It was late morning. I heard a car pull up. The front gate creaked open, there were footsteps, a thump, and then a woman shouted: “Arsehole!” When I reached the screen door, I saw her striding away. She had dark hair and was wearing a white shirt and black pants. She got into her car and drove away. I looked around. Near the door was a cardboard box. I picked it up and…

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Paul Muldoon

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by Anthony Lawrence I thought I’d begin my Blog with a close reading from a small selection of Paul Muldoon’s poems. I consider him to be one of the major poets writing in English, and I’d like to share some thoughts on why his work has been so influential. Muldoon emerged, as did Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, Eavan Boland, Ciaran Carson and others, from Belfast into international prominence. The Belfast renaissance of the late 60’s produced a potent list of poets whose work would inspire generations and, in Muldoon’s case, many imitators. The story goes that when Muldoon,…

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Subject/ed?

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by Joshua Mei-Ling Dubrau Perhaps the biggest reason for not knowing if we’re there yet, as discussed in the previous post, is that nobody is quite sure where there actually is. The development of literary modes / –isms / genres / forms tends, on the whole, to be reactive rather than proactive. That is to say, the writer does often work from the starting point of wanting to bring a unique method of expression into the public discourse, but this particularity is generally based on a movement away from a form of expression thought to have lost its currency. There…

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Are we there yet?

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by Joshua Mei-Ling Dubrau About six weeks ago, I was tagged in a Facebook post by Australian author Shady Cosgrove asking various folk for ‘recommendations for essays that dissect what, exactly, constitutes Australian literature’. She was asking fellow academics and writers, yet other than some suggestions about what we don’t think Australian literature is, or should be, or what it used to be, the response, on the whole, was a fairly solid ‘dunno’.* As a sometime reviewer of Australian short stories, more so than novels, I could name a handful of stylistic devices that seem to crop up in volumes…

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Hipoetical Context

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by Joshua Mei-Ling Dubrau Reading and analysing (and perhaps even enjoying poetry) are complicated by competing perspectives, both current and historical, on what actually constitutes ‘poetic language’. A major player in the formation of such perspectives are the questions of if, how and why a written art-form which is subject to all the normal limitations of language can present thoughts, events, feelings, concepts or combinations of these in a manner which transcends language’s significatory limitations to create a poetic text-object which is more than the sum of its linguistic parts. Does poetry create or only represent its subject matter, and…

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Croajingalong Walkaround (An Australia Day reflection of sorts)

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by Joshua Mei-Ling Dubrau The most anticipated highlight of this trip for me was a chance to revisit the small town of Mallacoota just past the NSW/Victoria border, and Croajingalong National Park. I hadn’t been back since my daughter, the half-a-teenager flopped over a table in Braidwood two posts ago was about eight months old. Mallacoota is an inlet town with creeks and lakes curving and pooling out into the ocean. Everything is pretty low key; the river aspect means it’s remained more of a small fishing town than a beachfront high-rise development. The prevalence of brown and orange in…

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