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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'Where Only the Sky had Hung Before disassembles and reassembles language found in the textual wastelands of the internet and the literary canon. Across many spectrums, from slippery lists of factoids to indices of figurative language, from a pantoum of #staywoke tweets to deep cuts and collage treatments of The Waste Land, The Argonauts, and The Left Hand of Darkness, these poems mobilise tensions and continuities between form and fluidity, gender and genre, literature and spam, childhood and adulthood, the virtual and the real.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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Jeremy George Reviews Where Only the Sky Had Hung Before by Toby Fitch
2020
single work
review
— Appears in: Mascara Literary Review , August no. 25 2020;
— Review of Where Only the Sky Hung Before 2019 selected work poetry'For all the obvious reasons I have been reflecting lately on what Walter Benjamin’s observes in his essay ‘The Storyteller’ ; “Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience… [however] his nesting places — the activities that are intimately associated with boredom are already extinct in the city”. If Benjamin draws a causal link between the destruction of experience and the genesis of modern information; the decline of “storytelling” and the rise of “news”, it is hard to imagine what his judgement would be of our relationship to the web today. The internet is, of course, a fundamentally nauseating and overwhelming ex-American military technology of mass surveillance. However, it is simultaneously (and undeniably) the nexus of new “experiences” and modes of living. The internet is an experience, indeed, strictly in Benjamin’s sense. If anything has brought the activities that are associated with boredom back to the city, it is the internet – the inventor of the “infinite scroll” sincerely regrets the consequences of his actions. So, what’s the pay-off regarding experience?' (Introduction)
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Rebellious Tropes
2020
single work
review
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , May 2020;
— Review of Where Only the Sky Hung Before 2019 selected work poetry'In an indignant letter, written on 12 December 1918, to S. Nevile Foster, editor of Land and Water, the novelist and former ship’s captain, Joseph Conrad, questions the suitability of the illustration of his story ‘Rescue’, which they were about to publish. He begins by describing himself ‘as an artist in another medium’, and remarking that he had ‘always been treated by his illustrators with a certain amount of consideration … with that loyalty which is due from a conscientious artist to the conceptions of another’. He questions whether the illustrator of ‘Rescue’ has ‘ever seen a yacht’s gig’ (a type of boat)? Or a man standing in one? Or any boat that looked like the one in the illustration? Had he ‘looked with an artist’s eye ever in his life at the leech of a sail, either full or aback, the most definite and expressive line in the world? The whole thing’, Conrad adds, ‘is false enough to set one’s teeth on edge; and of unpardonable ugliness … There are ways of rendering the luminous quality of a tropical night & there was no reason to cram ugliness into the very sky.’' (Introduction(
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‘The Amorphousness of Meaning-making’ : Elena Gomez Interviews Toby Fitch
Elena Gomez
(interviewer),
2020
single work
interview
— Appears in: Cordite Poetry Review , 1 February no. 95 2020;'Toby Fitch is a poet who has not only published a number of books, most recently Where the Sky had Hung Before (Vagabond, 2019), but also worked across many different roles in the literary community. Aside from writing award-winning poetry – his book Rawshock (Puncher & Wattmann) won the 2012 Grace Leven Prize for poetry – he also teaches creative writing, runs workshops and events, including the monthly poetry reading night at Sappho Books Café & Wine Bar, a Sydney institution, and is poetry editor at Overland magazine. I was lucky enough to catch Toby in person during a brief Sydney visit, and we met at his local pub, Newtown’s Carlisle Castle, to talk about poetry games, the limits of precarity for poets and Robert Klippel.' (Introduction)
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December in Poetry
2019
single work
review
— Appears in: Overland [Online] , November 2019;
— Review of The Gang of One : Selected Poems of Robert Harris 2019 selected work poetry ; Where Only the Sky Hung Before 2019 selected work poetry
-
December in Poetry
2019
single work
review
— Appears in: Overland [Online] , November 2019;
— Review of The Gang of One : Selected Poems of Robert Harris 2019 selected work poetry ; Where Only the Sky Hung Before 2019 selected work poetry -
Rebellious Tropes
2020
single work
review
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , May 2020;
— Review of Where Only the Sky Hung Before 2019 selected work poetry'In an indignant letter, written on 12 December 1918, to S. Nevile Foster, editor of Land and Water, the novelist and former ship’s captain, Joseph Conrad, questions the suitability of the illustration of his story ‘Rescue’, which they were about to publish. He begins by describing himself ‘as an artist in another medium’, and remarking that he had ‘always been treated by his illustrators with a certain amount of consideration … with that loyalty which is due from a conscientious artist to the conceptions of another’. He questions whether the illustrator of ‘Rescue’ has ‘ever seen a yacht’s gig’ (a type of boat)? Or a man standing in one? Or any boat that looked like the one in the illustration? Had he ‘looked with an artist’s eye ever in his life at the leech of a sail, either full or aback, the most definite and expressive line in the world? The whole thing’, Conrad adds, ‘is false enough to set one’s teeth on edge; and of unpardonable ugliness … There are ways of rendering the luminous quality of a tropical night & there was no reason to cram ugliness into the very sky.’' (Introduction(
-
Jeremy George Reviews Where Only the Sky Had Hung Before by Toby Fitch
2020
single work
review
— Appears in: Mascara Literary Review , August no. 25 2020;
— Review of Where Only the Sky Hung Before 2019 selected work poetry'For all the obvious reasons I have been reflecting lately on what Walter Benjamin’s observes in his essay ‘The Storyteller’ ; “Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience… [however] his nesting places — the activities that are intimately associated with boredom are already extinct in the city”. If Benjamin draws a causal link between the destruction of experience and the genesis of modern information; the decline of “storytelling” and the rise of “news”, it is hard to imagine what his judgement would be of our relationship to the web today. The internet is, of course, a fundamentally nauseating and overwhelming ex-American military technology of mass surveillance. However, it is simultaneously (and undeniably) the nexus of new “experiences” and modes of living. The internet is an experience, indeed, strictly in Benjamin’s sense. If anything has brought the activities that are associated with boredom back to the city, it is the internet – the inventor of the “infinite scroll” sincerely regrets the consequences of his actions. So, what’s the pay-off regarding experience?' (Introduction)
-
‘The Amorphousness of Meaning-making’ : Elena Gomez Interviews Toby Fitch
Elena Gomez
(interviewer),
2020
single work
interview
— Appears in: Cordite Poetry Review , 1 February no. 95 2020;'Toby Fitch is a poet who has not only published a number of books, most recently Where the Sky had Hung Before (Vagabond, 2019), but also worked across many different roles in the literary community. Aside from writing award-winning poetry – his book Rawshock (Puncher & Wattmann) won the 2012 Grace Leven Prize for poetry – he also teaches creative writing, runs workshops and events, including the monthly poetry reading night at Sappho Books Café & Wine Bar, a Sydney institution, and is poetry editor at Overland magazine. I was lucky enough to catch Toby in person during a brief Sydney visit, and we met at his local pub, Newtown’s Carlisle Castle, to talk about poetry games, the limits of precarity for poets and Robert Klippel.' (Introduction)
