Tag: poetry

To The Invisible

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Peter Minter 3. Cranes, Hiroshima 1986   Cranes      Hiroshima, 1986.   When the rice farmer trances over the fields his paper room is waiting. Even the blades of grass beside the road are the colour of polishing oil. Autumn is the perfect season for walking home. Overhead, during the day, did you see the cranes swirling in the fickle wind, spiraling round in leaves, in clouds that left no shadows ? “I keep the deities to one side of this life you lead me into. They smile like framed portraits of people in old clothes.”   Madeleines for the survivors.…

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To The Invisible

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Peter Minter 2. Hiroshige’s Journey, Yokohama 1986   Hiroshige’s  Journey Yamashita Park, Yokohama, Winter 1986.   an old man who walked past here cloaked against the blue sky and wind now seems a mile away the white birds there are so many white birds beside the sea.   Why is it that so much of our thinking and writing about poetry is monopolised by a rhetorics of dramatic visibility, clarity and focus? The vivid image, the intense phrase, the memorable line, lucid brilliance and the glow of authenticity are primary objectives in many a poetry workshop and poetry “how too.”…

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To The Invisible

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Peter Minter 1. Gimen no soko no byōki no kao, Yokohama 1986 Gimen no soko no byōki no kao: Sick Face of the Earth Hagiwara Sakutarō (1886-1942) In the earth I see my face, a lonely sick person’s face. From the ground’s darkness grow my eyes like stems of grass, like a fieldmouse from its house of confusion into a field of trembling hair, from the sick and lonely ground of the winter solstice where the roots of the thin new bamboo spread and spread; this pathetic blunder I see today and am forced even more today, today, to see…

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The Power and the Passion

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Judith Beveridge I’ve always been drawn to this statement by the Irish poet Michael Longley: “The poet makes the most complex and concentrated response that can be made with words to the total experience of living. For these reasons I would go on trying to write poems even if no one wanted to read them.” I find this a very enabling comment and one that cuts through the frustrations that beset any poet who begins to dwell on the vast absence of poetry readers. It also harks back to the statement Keats made about poetry, that it is essentially about…

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“Poetry, I too dislike it”

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Judith Beveridge While I have been convalescing from a flu virus, I’ve spent the last week reading. I finished Louise Glűck’s “Poems 1962-2012” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2012) – a most rewarding and deeply moving book. I’ve been a fan of her work for years. Her spare, honed style, her precision with language, the ever-present, needling emotional trouble with which she imbues her poems have always won me over. Her poems are clean and swift, except for the longer form she uses in her 2006 volume, Averno, which is my least favourite of her books because it seems…

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Maximum Heat

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Judith Beveridge I’m writing this on the day when catastrophic fire conditions are expected and a maximum of 43 degrees in Sydney. I also have a fever, so it seems heat is absolutely inescapable today as it ravages over the landscape and pushes well above the normal level on my oral thermometer. The fires in Tasmania and Victoria are still burning as well. I feel a strong sense of nervousness about the day. At the moment there’s a small amount of cloud cover and the wind is just starting up. I can hear some insects outside doing their high-pitched, electronic…

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Beginnings and endings

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Judith Beveridge As it’s the beginning of the new year and the ending of the old year, I have been prompted to think about the beginnings and endings of poems. I always find beginning and ending a poem the hardest aspect of writing. I very rarely have quick flashes of thought and feeling that lead me into a poem, it’s more a matter of trying various lines and phrases until something starts to sound promising. But even more difficult for me is ending a poem, so I recently purchased Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s highly regarded book Poetic Closure: A Study of…

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Authority and Flood

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Lisa Gorton From time to time, these days, I wonder why I have spent so much of my life reading – what I have gained by that, and what I have lost. When I was seven years old, I was reading in the bath with the taps running. All at once, my mother was standing over me, her pale look changing to frustration. The bathwater had run over the walls of the bath, flooded the bathroom, run into the hall. She thought that I had drowned but I was only reading. I remember seeing the water and thinking, first, that…

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Shakespeare’s sonnets: stones and weeds

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Lisa Gorton This week, I’ve been rereading Shakespeare’s sonnets. I’m thinking ahead to ABR’s sonnet-o-thon at Boyd on Wednesday 28 November. (Yes, a promo! But the event is free: www.australianbookreview.com.au/events/fireside-chats.)  We’re lining up to read as many sonnets as we can in an hour and a half. Some day – some festival – I wish someone would read the lot. Taken together, they repeat and rework images until they make, as much as anything, a study of the way obsessions work in time. And how strange they are.  All those one-syllable words: the sonnets sound clear but get stranger the…

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On realism, Walter Benjamin and cricket commentary

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Lisa Gorton Lately, driving here and there, I have been listening to cricket on the radio. In truth, I take no interest in the game; but talk has its genres, too, and I have been amusing myself by trying to classify cricket commentary. It seems to offer the comfort of realism. Here are men talking together, looking over the same field: a green field of shared experience.  Listening to the men talk, it seems as though this pitch, this green field, has been fenced off from all that Walter Benjamin notices in his sad and brilliant essay, ‘The Storyteller’. In…

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Poetry Prize – Helen Bell Poetry Bequest Award 2013

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The Department of English at the University of Sydney is pleased to announce that the first biennial award under the Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest  will be made in 2013.  Under the terms of Helen Anne Bell’s will, a cash prize of $5,000 will be offered for the best collection of 30 poems by a female poet over the age of 18.  Applicants must be Australian, and the poems submitted must be “about Australian culture,” broadly defined. The submitted poems should not previously have been published in collected book form, whether in print or on the virtual domain.  The successful…

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Holey holey holey : reading Kim Hyesoon

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Pam Brown In the “Translator’s Note” for Korean poet Kim Hyesoon’s book All the Garbage of the World, Unite!, Don Mee Choi says that she responded to a condescending request from a US literary journal to “change the word ‘hole’ because it has negative connotations”.  She wrote: “During the Korean War (1950 – 1953), about 250,000 pounds of napalm per day were dropped by the United States forces. Countless mountains, rice fields, and houses were turned into holes. Four million perished, leaving more holes. It’s a place that is positively holey. Kim Hyesoon’s hole poem comes from there, and so…

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