Tag: poetry

How coded is that : reading Susan Wheeler

24 October 201223 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog1 Comment

Pam Brown Now that no one can remember how they lived before computers came into their homes almost a quarter of a century ago, I thought I’d say something here about Susan Wheeler’s Source Codes. It’s a collection of poetry, drafts, code and photo-collages published back in 2001. At first these poems can seem discordant but if you stick with them you’ll find that they’re firmly congruent with their sources, and are, in fact, assiduously organised. A ‘source code’ is a written instruction in a list of textual commands that programmers compile and translate into ‘machine code’ that a computer…

Thinking in collage : reading Duncan White

15 October 201223 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog3 Comments

Pam Brown This week, as well as distractedly scrolling down hundreds of posts on the corporate social advertising site, facebook, I read hard copies of the Sydney Morning Herald every day, reviews in the London Review of Books, plus real time + onscreen, Rabbit issue 5, Art Monthly, various poems and essays in the current Southerly andvarious articles in Lemon Hound, Rhizome, E-rea, The Believer and Triple Canopy online magazines. I also caught up with the second issue of Pete Spence’s new handmade magazine ETZ . ETZ #2 has poems by Laurie Duggan, Michael Farrell, Berni Janssen, Rae Jones, Kent…

Atoms of language : reading Joseph Massey

9 October 201223 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog1 Comment

Pam Brown Sometimes when I start to read a new book of poems that immediately strike me as poems I’m going to love and most probably be influenced by, I can hardly continue reading the book. I have to close it straightaway and put it aside. I feel a mixture of ardour and mildly disconcerting anticipation where I’ve recognised an aesthetic disposition that seems uncannily aligned with my own. Then later, once I’ve recovered from this short shock, I return and read it like an addict absorbing an anodyne. It happened today when I opened Joseph Massey’s At the Point.…

Sounds, Markings, Places

30 August 201223 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog1 Comment

Jill Jones I was at the Queensland Poetry Festival last weekend at the Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts in ‘the Valley’. I had been thinking for a while about how place and poetry work together. I mean, more than usual, as place is important to my poetry. I am to teach into a course about writing and place next year, so there is a work-related imperative. I had also done a conference presentation on ‘Ken Bolton’s Adelaide’ earlier this year. Ken wrote in an email to me that his naming of certain places in poems was a way of…

Homage and influence, naked and otherwise

27 August 201223 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog

Jill Jones I was looking over some notes the day I wrote this post (Wednesday). They were towards a piece I had begun some time ago, not completed, about the Canadian poet, Phyllis Webb. As well as reminding me about life’s unfinished projects, it got me thinking about homage, paying respects. I have a wonderful book by John Ashbery, Other Traditions: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures (Harvard University Press). In the introduction, Ashbery says he did not want to explain his poetry and chose to speak about poets “who have probably influenced me”. The word “probably” seems to be a…

Erasures of the self: the body’s poetry

26 July 201223 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog5 Comments

Michelle Cahill In this last post for Southerly I would like to share the detours of my writing and spiritual journeys, with brief reflections of a more general nature on Australia’s cultural and literary engagement with Asia. I began my sojourns in Buddhist monasteries in Thailand thirteen years ago when I was disillusioned with capitalism, with what the West had taught me about happiness: commodities, acquisitions, the posture of ego, the indoctrinations of education, culture, all of which, without exception had left me unfulfilled and restless. My teacher Pra Ajahn Po had trained under theradical-conservative Thai monk Buddhadhasa Biku, who left the dirty and…

Out of Sight for the Ends of Being: Transcending Morality and Slavery

12 June 201223 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog3 Comments

Michelle Cahill In sonnet 43 Elizabeth Barrett Browning describes the soul reaching to surpass the feeling of disconnection from “the ends of Being and ideal Grace.” She speaks to the mystery of thought and feeling contained yet unbounded by love. The transcendent state is measured by physical criterion of breadth, height, depth, reach, and by everyday items which confer the passing of time, “sun”, “candle-light”, “breath”. The sonnet’s ardent logic, its repetitions and intensity create an interior world of “breath” and “breadth”, as it structures love’s fabric as paradoxical and conflicted, made more intense by the awareness of death. Barrett…

Icarus Downstage, Right: Writing Art

30 March 201223 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog1 Comment

Kate Middleton This past week I gave a talk on ekphrasis and the ways in which pictures in themselves may tell stories. In part I wanted to give a little history, and so looked back to Homer’s description of Achille’s Shield, as well as to consider the ways in which, despite being saturated with images, we are less skilled in reading them now—simply because we are no longer accustomed to spending a lot of time with a single image. The other aim of the talk was to discuss my own practice and think about the different ways I have approached…

Bias

18 October 201123 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog

Ali Cobby Eckermann She had to suffer and survive a long painful journey, for the privilege to stand proud and tell people who her family was, and where they come from. The changes this brought to her life made it all worthwhile. Memories began to heal, and fade away like unimportant dreams. Or do they? She has one friend who tells everybody “I knew her when she was white.” (lots of smiles and laughter). She don’t care; he’s her friend and he has proven that over many years. But it upsets other friends of hers. “Why do you let him…

Home

9 October 201123 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog

Ali Cobby Eckermann The door slams. Someone’s here. I’ll just lie here and wait. Maybe it’s Audrey. I know a Nana shouldn’t have her favourites, but she is mine. Reminds me so much of myself when I was her age. But I never had the courage she has for her passions. Jeffro enters my bedroom. “How are you, Mum?” he asks. “Get me a cuppa tea,” I say as I begin the uncomfortable struggle out of bed. These winter mornings are getting worse! I hate the arthritis! Don’t reckon I deserve it, really. Never had a cigarette or a sip…

Song

6 October 201123 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog

Ali Cobby Eckermann The air sound from under a parrot’s wing is quite different from other birds. It seems to contain magical bells, just out of earshot. It reminds me of waking in the early dawn, in the villa at Taman Bebek, when I attended the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival in Bali last year. I love birds, or ‘tjulpu’ in my language. Every bird offers a relationship. We are lucky at Koolunga, to have birds and bird song all day long, without industry noise or traffic gossip in the background. It is a peaceful town, filled with amusing and peaceful people. Angry noises caught my…

Wind

28 September 201123 February 2015 SoutherlyBlog2 Comments

Ali Cobby Eckermann The weather changed rapidly overnight, and I woke to a warm wild windy sunrise. The avenue of old gum trees in the main street of Koolunga were shaking with fatigue already. No galahs or parrots were resting on those trembling tree limbs this morning. My cat Mavis and I watched the ever-moving horizon of trees through the kitchen window. Only after my second cuppa did I venture outside. The apricot tree beside the outside bathroom offerred some respite from the wind. Wheelbarrows full of sour sop weeds were filled and carted to the trailer. Shovel loads of…

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