Tag: poetry

Here We Go Round The Prickly Pear

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by Joshua Mei-Ling Dubrau I feel like I’m going round in circles thinking about Eliot’s formula for the ‘objective correlative’ as set out in my last post – ‘a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion’. This seems to imply that the emotion, not the objects, comes first in the creative impulse. But does it? And does the dogmatic-sounding nature of the statement render it impractical for the composition or criticism of poetry  – a mode to which the idea of formula is often anathema? In some types of poetry, generally…

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The writer’s li[f]e

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by Joshua Mei-Ling Dubrau This post, and the next two or three, will be written enroute. You’ll note I haven’t specified a destination. This is a holiday; a pack the tray, jump in the ute and drive off holiday. Heading South. Being away from home and office and institution brings both blessings and curses in terms of blog-writing. There is the joy of seeing, smelling, tasting the new as kilometres unfurl beneath us and sensory experiences spark new thoughts and new connections to (or at least positions in relation to) the Australian landscape, both physical and social. On the other…

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January monthly blogger – Joshua Mei-Ling Dubrau!

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Enormous thanks to Kathryn Heyman for her excellent posts. What a wonderful way to end the year. To start 2014, we have the fabulous Joshua Mei-Ling Dubrau. Her bio is below: Joshua Mei-Ling Dubrau holds a PhD from UNSW. Her work, both critical and creative, has appeared in Poetry and the Trace (Puncher & Wattman, 2013) Southerly, Cordite, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, The Night Road (Newcastle Poetry Prize judges’ anthology 2009) and Computer Music Journal. Current projects include further development (in collaboration with Mark Havryliv) of the P[a]ra[pra]xis software suite, a realtime poetry and audio generator based on…

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A Wrap: “as if we were just out of reach of ourselves”

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by Mark Tredinnick 1. Just as I was posting this, the news came through. And it changes everything. Just another death. But what a death! What a life ended. Half the words in the world seem suddenly to have gone. I can’t write a word on poetry without lighting a candle first and walking some kind of a vigil into the midnight. Seamus Heaney, who can never possibly die, has died. His leaving leaves us poorer, rich though his life was in beauty and wisdom, grace and humour, kindness and accomplishment. What will we do without him? Remember him. Read…

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Three Days in Late August: some thoughts about bluewrens and everyday immanence

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by Mark Tredinnick Sunday. The bluewren is back. 6:27 this morning, she woke me, her knocking as deft as needlepoint. Wake, she spelled. And I did (if not for long). The birds have this way with me of telling me they’re here and who they are, before they’re here, before they are. She woke me (the pocket beloved) from a dream of Montreal (hello, Asa); she woke Lucy (my young girl) from a dream—a dream as intricate and endless as a life—of Peter Rabbit, Timmy Tiptoes, the whole Potter crew, bouncing on the bed. The rabbits Mrs. McGregor had put…

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Speaking of love

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by Mark Tredinnick It’s true I don’t wake in my own bed as often as I might; I have been elsewhere, this past fortnight, as much as I’ve been here. But every morning at seven, since August began, a bluewren has come to the window and rapped it like a stenographer on a contraband Remington. A couple of deft swoops each visit, bill drilling the pane, a memo about some urgent thing or another, tapped out in rapid arpeggio. There’s no explaining this. All one can do is witness—which may be most of the work we’re here for. But it…

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Driving yourself out of your mind; walking yourself out of your head

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By Mark Tredinnick When Tessa rang me to ask me to blog this month, I was wrangling my dog into the back of a (two-door) car. And then I was starting the car and backing it and turning it onto a public road in the State of New South Wales. We talked, Tessa and I, fairly fast, and hands free (earpiece in, I promise), as I drove to school to pick up the children, running, as ever, just a little bit late. And now I’m writing this—my first blog—in a cab. Last night we launched Australian Love Poems 2013 at…

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August monthly blogger – Mark Tredinnick!

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A huge thanks to Fiona Wright for her excellent and insightful posts. This month, our guest blogger is Mark Tredinnick. His bio is below: Mark Tredinnick is a celebrated poet, nature writer, essayist, and writing teacher. The winner in 2011 of the Montreal Poetry Prize and in 2012 of the Cardiff Poetry Prize, Mark is the author of Fire Diary, The Blue Plateau, The Little Red Writing Book, The Road South, and eight other works of poetry and prose. His other honours include two premier’s literary awards, the Blake and the Newcastle Poetry Prizes, and the Calibre Essay Prize. Mark…

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Uses of Knowledge/Data/Detail in Writing and Reading

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by John Kinsella I’ve always loved ‘data’, though I am sceptical of how it is sourced and utilised. This re-engineered novel I’ve been talking about over recent weeks, Morpheus, is a book stuffed with data, yet aims to be a challenge to the ‘empirical’; the data of ‘learning’ — from school, the first year or two of university, private reading and even (scientific) researching. While writing Morpheus, I was studying and occasionally working in my own home lab, complete with Mettler balance, Bunsen burners, titration equipment and micro ground-jointed organic glassware, including Liebig condensers and even a Friedrichs condenser, and…

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I’ll tell you a story

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by John Kinsella I possess two items from my childhood. Both are books. Somehow I have held on to these through the upheavals of my life, including having twice sold vast collections of books to support my various needs (and long-past addictions) twenty and more years ago. When I did my last big ‘sell-off’ in the early nineties, I managed to hang on to my early J. H. Prynne Poems and a few signed collections of poetry as well, but that’s about it. I occasionally run into people who remark that they own books containing dedications from writers to me.…

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The Eternal Work-in-Progress

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by John Kinsella, Writing Morpheus in my late teens went hand-in-hand with a fascination on my part for long, cumulative works of poetry. In Morpheus, through the character of Thomas, I was subtextually mapping possible approaches to creating the work-in-progress, with its echoes of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Also, though I despised him politically, like many of the ‘left’ I felt intrigued and compelled by Ezra Pound’s unfinishable life-work, The Cantos. I have a strong scepticism of Pound these days, but he convinced me, along with Olson’s Maximus Poems and Zukofsky’s ‘A’, that anything we write is inevitably part of what…

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To The Invisible

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Peter Minter 4. Leave-taking, Sydney 1987   The garden blooms no more, my egotist. Day’s butterflies have fled to other flowers, And now the only visitors will be The butterflies of night. Apollinaire “Flower Picking”  (205)   … it is impossible to return to the subjectivity of the experience because it is no longer possible to access the geography in which the language event occurred …   If forgetting is some kind of beautiful annihilation, how is that together with frailty and contingency and indeterminacy it is also so creatively vital? Alongside various others, this question or something like it is at the heart…

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