Tag: writers

Caravan to Yale – A Tjindarella Story

SoutherlyBlog

by Natalie Harkin I am above the clouds, floating on my contemplations and looking for patterns and remnant bush in cleared and carved-up landscapes.  I’ve just parted ways with my friend and fellow poet at the Adelaide airport – she to Sydney and me to Canberra, each for work.  We talked briefly about this blog, as I’ve been thinking a lot about the way her work has been represented in the mainstream media when news of her literary Prize went viral. The March 2017 announcement for the Windham-Campbell Prize, administered by Yale University in the US, was truly sensational.  It…

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The Australian Neo-Avant-Garde: Beginnings, 1973-1992

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by A.J. Carruthers   It is imperative that studies of the neo-avant-garde in Australia, and I think avant-garde studies in general, strike a balance between theory and history. One cannot just have a history of the avant-garde: a slew of good examples without a theory of what it is that makes these examples avant-garde (and in poetry, to catalogue an exhibit of key works without interrogating their poetics and aesthetics). Neither can one simply have a theory of the avant-garde that doesn’t take into account its specific histories, especially transcultural avant-gardes, those outside centres of cultural influence, those that cross…

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Australian Experimental Poetry: Critical and Historical Perspectives

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by A.J. Carruthers These blog posts will contain some critical explorations, reflections and polemics concerning my second book project titled The Languages of Invention: Australian Experimental Poetry and Literary History, 1973-2014. This project comes after Stave Sightings: Notational Experiments in North American Long Poems, 1961-2011,[i] a book I have called a “critical experiment” which examines the use of notational methods and actual musical scores in expansive works by Langston Hughes, Armand Schwerner, BpNichol, Joan Retallack and Anne Waldman. These are disruptive and radical case studies, poetries that test our reading practices, oftentimes engaging in trenchant cultural critique through the registers…

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Pocket thanks

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by Alison Whittaker     Dunno if you remember me, tid. You and me went to school together in 2005.   I’ve got these vignettes of you in my head. First we walked together on a tour of the school grounds like fluffy juvenile magpies – except it was so hot we were slick, drippy and dragging. Then, we sat at the front of English class together and didn’t speak. I remember you doodled in your corners and I anxiously marked out a margin (three centimetres; parallel to the page edge; red pen).   Year 7 is hard enough. We…

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Talking about: talking about

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by Alison Whittaker   ‘In conversation’ is the lie I tell myself to get to a venue where I’ll talk about writing.   Harmless little chat. It’s a harmless little chat.   Here’s the real harmless little chat, twenty minutes before: From there, a writerly discussion event is just projecting some tight-packed, thought-out writerly version of myself at someone else and a smattering of people who watch on.   I think: ‘Don’t look at them. Probably shouldn’t look at them.’ I also think: ‘Chin up, gut in. Surely you know what you’re talking about.’ I think: ‘On brand.’ When was…

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Writing and

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by Alison Whittaker   The writer and the writing life, two off-cut conversations that have planted themselves anew in 2017.   On the Southerly blog last month, Roanna Gonsalves breathed The Double Lives of Writers, a sobering bulletin that etched out the invisible financial and labour roots that give water to even prolific writers. Katerina Bryant in Overland wrote Have You Thought About Law?, on the tensions between practice and prestige and the ‘day job’ in writing. Both are relatable; I bring in most of my money through working in law and legal research. While this continent descends into another…

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Why do we bother to write?

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by Roanna Gonsalves     A few days ago, the National Human Rights Commission in India noted the suspicious deaths, over the course of a decade, of 500 indigenous (tribal) girls in government-run Ashram schools in the state of Maharashtra, India. In Australia we heard that a white supremacist was stockpiling weapons with the intention of carrying out a mass shooting in a shopping centre on the Central Coast of New South Wales. On the 26th of January, Invasion Day / Survival Day / Australia Day 2017, a group of concerned citizens issued statements condemning the physical and psychic violence…

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New Writing for the Real Australia

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Nic Low   Last week I mentioned the State Library of Victoria’s archives relating to Australian literary magazines. I’ve since learned that their existence is well-known among literary scholars, and several studies of individual magazines have drawn on the material. But I think the original point stands: it’d be valuable to look at that body of rejected work collectively, as an expression of Australia’s literary unconscious. A week of fruitful conversations with various editors and archival staff means we’ve come up with a method for analysing what’s there. More on that in a moment, but for now, the manifesto I…

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‘Such Human-Scale Signatures’

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Kate Fagan Here is one “photograph in the brain” from Berkeley. I’m sitting with Pete at the foot of a towering sequoia. The tree is beside a small canal. Students zigzag over a bridge. Every backpack is a house. A man on a bicycle looks like Kit Robinson. The sequoia is a column of quiet, stretching from a subsonic hum in the ground. Actually the tree makes the quiet. I’m saturated in the vertigo of memories arriving before they are made. A crow on the bridge. It’s good, the imperfect drift, the narrative, the backpacks. Leaning on acres of bark…

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‘Into the Interior’

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Kate Fagan Mountain, mountain, mountain, marking time. Each nameless, wall beyond wall, wavering redefinition of horizon. – Denise Levertov, from ‘Into the Interior’ in O Taste and See[i] It takes a long time to write precise things. Mountain, mountain, mountain. This is the only way Levertov can describe what her speaker is thinking and feeling in the poem ‘Into the Interior’. Which interior? And is the observer a guest or stranger there? Each mountain is a marker of time and place. But ‘mountain’ is also an average, a changeable outline imposed on a living system. For a second Levertov’s poem…

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The Good Book

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©Bruce Pascoe 2016 George Augustus Robinson was as randy as a turkey and twice as vain. He fornicated with the wives of his friends, the daughters of clergymen, the wives of the people he promised to save. Oh, the power of the good book and its promise of holiness. Or maybe he was just a terrific root. Or the soldiers and clergymen on whose women he preyed were too pissed to notice. George was on a mission, a Friendly Mission. He got friendly with the wife of one of the officer’s on Flinders Island while the man was away. In…

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