AustLit

Author's note:

The above seven poems are reading drafts from a finite series of sixteen poems dubbed the EM+ stanzas. Each has a seed text, The Darkening Ecliptic (hence EM, Ern Malley), and a number of “additional” source texts. Hence the titles are EM-DM (the DM being Dora Montefiore, Australian socialist feminist), EM-NK (Ned Kelly), EM-HK (Henry Kendall) and EM-JHD (Jas H. Duke, specifically his 1978 concrete novel-poem-drama Destiny Wood). The seed is either an acrostic or an “antecrostic”; following the end letter of the line rather than the first. After laying out the seed text I spontaneously and freely “pulled” a word from a section in the source, written conventionally from left-to-right. Care was taken to use rhythms from “surrounding” words or phrases not used, in the next stanza.