AustLit

'The writing that follows arose from states of joy, anguish, ambivalence and contemplation. The poems come from a period of ten years, while other poetic, essayistic and diaristic pieces were produced with intensity over a shorter duration.

'Not long ago we humans began to share typed and contained expressions – whimsical, crass, artful, profound, wounded – instantly and with a large audience, through an expanding web of fibre optics. The poems straddle the rise of networked and relatively indiscriminate platforms for communication: some were produced before their rise, and fed by silence, while others were produced after, and fed by the ghost crackle of digitised speech.

'The prose poems and prose all come from after, but from a period within the after when I’d left the main conduits. At the outset of my asceticism, I found I had a compulsion to communicate to a wide audience. I sought to satisfy this compulsion, which I’d never felt so strongly, and began sending letters to myself by email, with a changing group of people as BCC recipients. As I wrote I felt I was consciously or unconsciously blending an older, poetic address – Eliot’s ‘I’ talking to itself or to nobody in particular – with recent communicative impulses. This seemed to create new possibilities for what the poem could be, and what it could enter into, as a form of mediated performance.'

Source: Author's blurb (via Cordite).

'Marionette: a biography of Miss Marion Davies is an audio adaptation of Jess Wilkinson’s biographical collection of poems, marionette: a biography of miss marion davies, published by Vagabond in 2012. The adaptation comes in a stylised red CD sleeve (and is also available as a download), with cover art evoking a puzzle – showing parts of the subject’s face on squares of film reel. It features music composed by Simon Charles, and is performed by Jenny Barnes, Andrew Butler, Phoebe Green, and Michael McNabby, with spoken word by the poet herself.'' (Introduction)

'This essay seeks to illuminate the entwined aesthetics of Vicki Viidikas’s poetry. Viidikas was a Sydney poet: she lived in Balmain, and spent long periods of time in India later in life. She was part of the generation of ‘68, which revelled in the countercultural spirit of the 1960s and 70s. Viidikas published three books of poetry in her lifetime: Condition Red (1973), Knäbel (1978), and India Ink (1984), as well as a book of short stories and prose poems, Wrappings (1974). Between 1985 and 1998 she published only a handful of poems in journals; India Ink would be her last book.

'The essay uses formative aesthetic, political, and material influences to read Viidikas’s work from 1973 to 1998. I argue that there are three major aspects in Viidikas’s poetry: the confessional, the surrealist, and the feminist. By contextualising her work in the confessional poetry genre, the surrealism of André Breton, and second wave feminism, I show that these aspects interact and overlap in subtle ways in her poems. Viidikas was steeped in feminist ideals for women’s writing, and was committed to representing female subjectivity in highly personal and uncensored ways. I show that in her poetry, a feminist ethos energises both her confessional voice and her surrealism. I also pay attention to the material circumstances of her poetry’s production, and the social and aesthetic practices of the generation of ‘68. This situated reading of Viidikas’s poetry allows me to look to the last 14 years of her life, when she retreated from publishing. While critics typically focus on her drug addiction in explaining her later marginalisation, I posit that the anti-capitalist values that Viidikas absorbed in her youth played a significant role in her withdrawal, in the 1980s and 90s, from the literary networks that had previously sustained her.' (Publication abstract)