Tag: rereading

Luminous with Manifold Illusion: Rereading as Postmortem or Death of the Poet

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Georgia Rose Phillips “I can recover my calm by living the metaphors of the ocean.” – Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 28.   The day I heard a line from Ashbery’s poem “Syringa” when walking up Semaphore beach (“The seasons are no longer what they once were”), something equally as intriguing started to transpire. Ashbery’s line prompted me to think of the final two lines of TS Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men”. This oft-quoted work ends on the troubling but oracular note, “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but with a whimper”. As…

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Enter the Ghost, Exit the Ghost: Rereading as a Haunting–Phantom Texts, Hauntology and Spectral Readers

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Georgia Rose Phillips For a long time, I have been rereading John Ashbery’s poem “Syringa” in the way I occasionally reread certain poems—feeling as if the lines I have committed to memory have become the echo of my own emotion. When I experience grief, I often hear the line from Joy Harjo’s poem, “Desire”, “Say the stars have never learned / to say goodbye” (99). I see a muted twinkle against a stretch of navy and feel the pang of the star’s condition of being permanently suspended outside the redemptive thralls of language. When I first learnt how to create…

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In Praise of Rereading: Iterative Inhabitations and Sheltering the Paradise of Words

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Georgia Rose Phillips Sometimes, the line of a poem leaps out unexpectedly from the well of my consciousness when I encounter something close to what it resembles in the real world. On an unseasonably cold November day in Semaphore, South Australia late last year, I heard a line from Ashbery’s “Syringa” as I walked up the beach. I had been pressing through the afternoon’s sharp sandy gusts and feeling the overhang of winter in the cold sting of the breeze. As I moved towards the grey surface of water, dotted with white foamy caps, I had been starting to doubt…

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Re-reading

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Fiona Wright It’s only in this last year that I’ve started re-reading. I’ve always kept and collected my books; not all of them, there are many I’ve been content to trade in at the overstuffed and slightly mouldy Elizabeth’s Bookshop on King St that I use too often almost as a more expensive lending library, especially as I’ve moved and shifted through various sharehouses at the whims of landlords and the shifting allegiances of housemates. I’ve always held on to far too many books: almost all of the poetry, all the books I’ve worked on or written for, but especially…

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Rereading

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John Kinsella At the age of fifty, I am rereading books I first read when I was in my mid-to-late teens. These are the books I was reading when I wrote my novel Morpheus which, after thirty years and various acts of reconstruction to cover the lacunae of  lost chunks of manuscript, is about to be published. Reading was the most essential referent in the creation of this 400-page ‘text’, and, in going through copy-edits and then proofs, I thought it would be a self-enlightening process to revisit the works that ‘informed’ my late-teenage writing process. Of course, there were…

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