AustLit

'These days, poetry is primarily a visual experience. So claims the American poet and theorist Cole Swensen, whose essay ‘To Writewithize’ argues for a new definition of ekphrasis. Traditionally understood to be writing about visual art, ekphrasis typically has a poet stand across from a painting or sculpture, in a kind of face-off, and write about it. To ‘writewithize’, however, is to take a different approach: this is not writing made about art but made with it. This is writing that, in Swensen’s words, ‘lives with the work and its disturbances’. Two new Vagabond releases by Bella Li and LK Holt are doing ekphrastic and intertextual work that is exquisitely disturbing. These are moody books of allusion and visual play by two of Melbourne’s most brilliant poets.' (Introduction)

'When I was a kid, Warlpiri people were an idea, a story, a mythology that hung on the walls and in the air around the dinner table when my dad would talk about his childhood at Yuendumu. He was kindergarten age when he ran inside the mission house, forgetting to pull his shoes on at the door as per my grandmother's rules, and announced, 'We caught a lizard, mummy, and we ate it. Don't worry, Charlie picked the poos out.' Darling anecdotes like this pepper my grandmother's mission diaries. In one entry, my dad as a toddler narrates an imaginary trip to Alice Springs: 'T'rific dust ... I got bogged ... shot a kangaroo with my 303.'' (Introduction)

'Seeking to fully know the other can have the effect of minimising the wholly different gestalt of the other’s lifeworld. This mode of knowing can thereby be a means of reduction, generalisation, possession, and control. In this essay, the author analyses a contemporary ethnography of Warlpiri women’s song-poems, Jardiwanpa Yawulyu: Warlpiri Women’s Songs from Yuendumu (2014). This ethnography is theorised as a mode of open text that animates a collision of epistemologies: those of Western settler culture, and those of the Warlpiri women who collaboratively authored the book. The author emphasises the cultural lenses that she brings to the intellectual and emotional work of reflexive close reading, and insists that her own position as whitefella, settler, Westerner, combined with the necessary partiality of the text, renders her incapable of any sort of comprehensive access to the ‘total poem,’ the ritual situation, which the
book represents.'

Source: Abstract.

'Two very recent books by two mid-career Melbourne poets offer distinct intellectual gymnasiums in which to lift and push and run and sweat. I may not have been able to master these books, but they knocked the breath out of me.' (Introduction)

'These poems were written across 2016 when Kevin Brophy was living in the remote community of Mulan, home to the Walmajarri speaking custodians of the Indigenous Protected Area (IPA) around Lake Paruku (Lake Gregory in many maps) in Western Australia.'  (Introduction)

'The classic lyric preoccupation with interiority, and how internal life touches and changes the outside world, finds expression in two recent collections of poetry: Fiona Wright’s Domestic Interior and Carolyn Abbs’s The Tiny Museums. In both collections, the speakers draw the shapes of their internal furniture, while building monuments to the intimate scenes and common spaces that define them.' (Introduction)

'The intricate and inscrutable workings of Central Desert Law and mythopoesis continue to hold sway over the Australian settler imagination. We are moved to vertigo by the vibrating fields of dot paintings, and the brutal exploits of Dreaming heroes suggest enigmatic codes for social behaviour and care of country. Those of us who feel affronted and sorrowed by the ongoing colonial suppressions of Indigenous sovereignty, such as the Northern Territory Intervention, may wish to deepen our understanding or be an ally. Our anger is fueled by our imperfect intuition of the deep knowledge of the land held by Central Desert peoples. However, navigating the ethical and political space between settler, or kardiya, and Central Desert Aboriginal, or yapa, remains fraught. One of the under-sung guides to working in this intercultural space is the psychoanalyst, scholar, and poet Crag San Roque. San Roque's intercultural work might help kardiya understand how an inherited cultural framework can obscure our capacity to fully understand the Aboriginal lifeworld. Reflexive in philosophy, exploratory in intention, and privileging the imagination above all, San Roque's work is unique among those working in, and with, Central Desert communities.' (Introduction)

'Dr. Jordie Albiston is one of Australia’s premiere contemporary poets. She is the recipient of numerous literary prizes, and the author of nine collections of poetry, three of which are documentary in nature.' (Introduction)

Two recent collections by two very different voices have both been ‘blurbed’ as works of fragmentation. In her début collection, Cassie Lewis is described as speaking for ‘a generation whose ambitions and emotions have become very fractured and fragmented’. Eddie Paterson’s new book is full of redacted texts of digital trash and treasure; it is a blacked-out, cut-up collage of the textual chatter of our ‘post-digital existence’. The lyric voice of The Blue Decodes, however, is less fracture and fragment, and more a compelling portrait of an alert mind in tension with itself. redactor is composed of censored, dismembered, remembered emails, memos, text messages, and webfeeds. While this might qualify as ‘uncreative writing’, in that its conceit is seemingly the inverse of the personal lyric, it, too, is a portrait of the artist reading, absorbing, repelling, mocking, and finding delight in a weird, flat, bewildering multiverse of screens where poems are being written all the time. (Introduction)