December 2012
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THE FULL PORTFOLIO OF LAMENTATION / CHRIS...
Allow me to begin with a very dark poem by this linguistically rich poet. It was written some time after the suicide of Porter’s first wife. It is called, “The Easiest Room in Hell”, let me add; and very few poets dare to mention Hell, these days. However, its tone is far from being his only register:[[MORE]]
At the top of the stairs is a room one may speak of only in parables....
November 2012
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'INTERFERON PSALMS' BY LUKE DAVIES / PHILIP SALOM
Open Interferon Psalms towards the front and you encounter this kind of writing:
The blade of my happiness broke at the hilt. I flailed without balance, at air. A break in the hilt is a bad break to fix. Life in search of a blacksmith. Of bellows and tongs I knew little. The rumpled magazines of waiting rooms. The great lakes came and went. Winter rolled in for ten thousand years. I dreamed...
October 2012
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'SOUTHERN BARBARIANS' BY JOHN MATEER / ELIZABETH...
To be a poet is not my ambition, It’s my way of being alone.
Alberto Caeiro (Fernando Pessoa), trans. Richard Zenith
To travel! To change countries! To be forever someone else, With a soul that has no roots, Living only off what it sees!
Alvaro de Campos (Fernando Pessoa), trans. Richard Zenith
You spoke my name in King Joao Library, the hall...
September 2012
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THE WORLD IS BUT A WORD (IN ANSWER TO THE...
Steward: O my good Lord, the world is but a word. Were it all yours to give it in a breath, How quickly were it gone. Timon: You tell me true. [Timon of Athens]
As a rule poets find it very difficult to describe what they write about. In answering similar questions the novelist will happily tell you about the characters who inhabit his worlds....
August 2012
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POETRY AND ITS KEEPERS / PETRA WHITE
Poetry may be a (sob!) neglected art, but it can still attract devotees who are as scary as Collingwood supporters. It was wonderful to visit the Laurel Villa guesthouse in Margherafelt, Northern Ireland, ‘Heaney country’. Laurel Villa is a shrine to twentieth-century Irish poetry, with poems by Irish poets (particularly Seamus Heaney) on Belfast linen framed on the walls. Each room...
April 2012
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THE POET CRITICS / PETRA WHITE
So Long Bulletin salutes Southerly for the broad approach to poetry reviewing outlined in its new statement. Reviews editor Toby Fitch aims to cut across ‘cliques and coteries’ and ‘transcend the comforts of pack mentality’ by encouraging ‘the rabbits to review the monkeys, the monkeys to review the elephants, and the elephants to review the dinosaurs’. I admire Fitch’s intent to shake up the...
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BEST OF 2011
Well, SLoBs, it’s April, so it is now time to comment on the year that has passed. 2011 was a most poetic year. Australian Poetry Limited launched its first international tour, to Ireland in 2012. Much poetry written in Australia is world class, but it rarely gets the chance to travel to wider audiences. Congratulations to Petra White and Paul Hetherington, who will be touring Ireland. SLB hopes...
February 2012
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WONDROUS CAULD / BONNY CASSIDY
An artist made a drawing A base was built in Antarctica fuel tanks laboratories warehousing accommodation. that another artist rubbed out Now they are dismantling that base shipping it piece by piece to Australia. entitled Rauschenberg’s Erased De Kooning It has...
December 2011
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November 2011
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AILEEN KELLY / CATHERINE BATESON
I first met Aileen Kelly when I ran La Mama Poetica in the early 1990s. She was one of our featured readers and I can still remember my delight in her poems, in particular, ‘My Brother’s Piano’. This is a persona poem written from the point of view of Sigmund Freud’s sister, a promising concert pianist, who was forced to practise on a silenced piano so she didn’t disturb his writing. The poem...
October 2011
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ON BAKER AND BANTICK / PETRA WHITE
There seems to be an idea afoot that ‘slam’ can make all poetry popular. In The Age, slam poet Emilie Zoey Baker wistfully imagines poetry having its own reality tv show – MasterPoet perhaps – promising viewers the ecstasy of having ‘your soul unravelled like a ribbon’. This is the kind of hype that is often used by promoters of poetry; we don’t just want it on peoples’ bookshelves, we want it...
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YOUNG POETS: A PREFACE / JOHN LEONARD
Readers of poetry have a weather eye for the new, young talents whose work ensures the serious continuance of an art that is possibly vulnerable from being too little read. Slightly surprisingly, it always arrives, robust with the strange fusion of ambitious intent and self-effacement that serious artistry requires. It is true that, occasionally, there is premature praise from critics and...
September 2011
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To our readers in Hungary:
Australian poet Jennifer Harrison will be reading in Hungary with András Imreh
at Massolit Books and Café Budapest VII Nagy Diófa 30 Tuesday, 13 September at 7pm
Melbourne poet and child psychiatrist, Dr Jennifer Harrison, has written five poetry collections, the most recent being Colombine New & Selected Poems (Black Pepper 2010), which is currently ...
August 2011
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DAN DISNEY'S 'AND THEN WHEN THE' / KEVIN BROPHY
Mallarmé apparently said something to the effect that the purpose of all life is to find itself one day in a book. We here at Collected Works, which is the centre of the universe of books, know that to be true, but it is wise to keep this from all those out on the street who think life begins and ends out there. In the first poem in this glowing object, and then when the, Dan Disney brings the...
July 2011
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REFLECTIONS ON TEACHING POETRY / ELIZABETH...
I am a poet and a secondary school teacher. For me, one of the most funnest – as the kids might say – things in the world, is working with senior secondary students who care, to read poetry. I have been immensely lucky in working at a school where a large proportion of the students care very much indeed. I also work as a freelance presenter of poetry workshops and – my most favouritest thing –...
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THE INCREDIBLE VANISHING POET / BONNY CASSIDY
You need only think back to the discrepancies between versions of classical myths, to notice the way that mythology tends to sprawl rather than contain itself or anything else. The thing about mythology is that it is unwieldy and uncontainable; conflicted and inconsistent. We create myths to give order to the world – its origins, its events, its future, our experiences and expectations – and...
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BEYOND THE READING / ELIZABETH CAMPBELL
So Long Bulletin congratulates the Melbourne Poets’ Union for recent events which go beyond the poetry reading. A couple of months ago, we spent a wonderful evening with Alex Skovron, as he reflected on his life, his writing and his influences. On Friday 24th, we fulfilled a long-held ambition to hear Michael Farrell discuss the meanings, intentions, influences and purposes of his work. On July...
June 2011
4 posts
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Dear SLoB readers: we draw your attention to... →
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ON YOUR BACKCOVER / PETRA WHITE
So Long Bulletin has been perusing the various blurbs on the back covers of poetry books lately, and sees a niche in the market for the services of our own blurb writers, our eminent poets-in-residence, Mr Old-High-Kudos and Ms Young-Powerful. Our prestigious fully-emerged and most name-droppable poets will write up to 100 ecstatic words per cover of absolutely any book regardless of quality,...
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WORDS NOT TO USE IN POEMS / ELIZABETH CAMPBELL
Someone likened me to the Taliban the other day, because of my desire for less dreadful poetry to be published in this country. Seriously. Apparently wishing for fewer bad books is the first step toward burning books. Hmm. Even we irascible SoLongistes probably couldn’t muster that much fiery loathing for the bad, to put in for the council permit. Best if they’re just not published in...
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WORD FROM THE SKY / PETRA WHITE
So Long Bulletin is pleased to learn that the Emerging Writer’s Festival is looking for poetry in all the right places:
‘As part of the Emerging Writers’ Festival, Lego Poetry is a chance for us all to build with words. Lego poetry will be located at the Festival Hub as buckets of words for people to come down and write their own poetry using LEGO bricks that are covered in words...
May 2011
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RE-READING PETER STEELE'S 'EXPATRIATES' /...
Worrying my shelves the other day, I pondered once again the age-old question of whether to file volumes of poetry criticism amongst the poetry or separately. I decided to leave the criticism where it is, indiscriminately sprinkled between collections of poems because, as I have concluded so many times before, criticism is not separate from or inimical to poetry – it is the salt of poetry’s...
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ON REVIEWING, OR NOT REVIEWING / ELIZABETH...
Last week I released my second collection of poems. Kindly civilians have already enquired about the reviews, and are surprised to hear that I can’t be confident that there will be any.
Friends from an older generation of poets assure me that when they started out, perhaps twenty years ago, all books of poetry, good and bad, were greeted with reviews. And fifty years ago, in a letter to...
April 2011
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WALKING TALKING MELONS / LK HOLT
I have discovered that pregnancy poetry is quite often bad. One of Plath’s least successful poems, ‘Metaphors’ (to bear, get it?), is an exercise in and about pregnancy:
I’m a riddle in nine syllables, An elephant, a ponderous house, A melon strolling on two tendrils. O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers! This loaf’s big with its yeasty rising. Money’s new-minted in this fat...
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ON POETRY & WORK / PETRA WHITE
When Peter Porter and Les Murray were around my age (35) both retired from full-time work to become full-time poets. While Porter continued to work as a freelance writer for money, his days of writing poems in the office toilet were over. Both had taken the step of putting ‘poet’ as their foremost identity, or profession. It’s a thing I can’t imagine doing: I need the stability and anonymity of...
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March 2011
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FOR THE BIG GUY: LES MURRAY & THE NOBEL /...
In September 2010 I walked into the giant independent bookstore Hodges Figgis in Dublin. In the front part of the store are wooden display shelves with the numbers 1-10: ranking the current bestsellers. Above Room, Joseph O’Connor’s Ghost Light, and undoubtably, some new excursion in dreary dullness by Colm Toibin, was – Human Chain, Seamus Heaney’s newest collection! In...
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FIELDS / BONNY CASSIDY
On the day I visit the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art, summer sun is stinging my eyes. In the museum, the blurred world is replaced by images of cool canals and floor tiles from the Delft School of painting. Already, in Delft at the start of the seventeenth century, the single-point perspective of the Renaissance was beginning to be displaced. The painter Carel Fabritius’s...
February 2011
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ECOPOET: MARK O'CONNOR'S 'PILBARA' / PETRA WHITE
Ecopoetry is a recent movement, formally beginning in the early 2000s. It now has a Wikipedia entry and a Neil Astley anthology, Earthshattering: ecopoems. Ecopoetry, sometimes referred to as the new ‘nature poetry’, takes a distinctly ethical position regarding human relationships to nature, and considers human responsibility, rather than seeing nature as a passive reflector of human emotions....
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WORD FROM THE SKY / PETRA WHITE
For those who haven’t been paying attention, our AP-appointed poet laureate has been moving fast. She word-wept on the clifftops of Christmas Island; she crept up on the Queensland floods and exposed them for what they were – liquid! – and she published a poem about Cyclone Yasi before it even made landfall (thank God those poor Queenslanders had a poem to recite while they waited!). Most...
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ON AUSTRALIAN PUBLISHING / ELIZABETH CAMPBELL
Quite frequently, some well-meaning civilian congratulates me on ‘being published’. It is, they understand, very hard to ‘get published’ in poetry?
‘Not at all!’ I reply, with a vehemence surprising to the civilian.
Of course, what is hard is to ‘get published’ by a large publisher, with money, distribution and a public profile. We hear about the...
January 2011
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WEBB-WAGG THE DOG / LK HOLT
It’s very exciting: Francis Charles Webb-Wagg’s Collected Poems is being published next month by UWA Press (ed. Toby Davidson). I only discovered Webb recently, and I’m pretty smitten, particularly with the ‘Ward Two’ sequence, and particularly with ‘Harry’ (found in full here).
‘Harry’ was written during one of Webb’s near-contiguous stints in psychiatric hospital. Webb was...
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MY DIRTY BIG LOVE OF GWEN'S BEAUT DREAMS /...
It’s not hard to become obsessed, as I am, with Gwen Harwood. Reading the several volumes of her letters, Blessed City, and A Steady Storm of Correspondence, I yelled aloud with laughter at her absurd slangy private jokes, and, yes, movie-goers, I promise you, teared and wept over the intimate ways in which she owns and invokes her intense consciousness of mortality.
Harwood loved the...
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ON READERS / PETRA WHITE
I was spurred to write this post after seeing Australian Poetry’s link to a site it had endorsed and was promoting on Facebook: www.deadpoets.com.au. This site is rather disconcerting. Describing itself as offering ‘a modern take on the classic movie’, it aims ‘not to celebrate Byron, Shelley and the traditional “gods” of poetry’, but ‘your mother, my dad, your aunt, grandfather and great uncle,...
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AN AMERICAN STORY / ELIZABETH CAMPBELL
In the October issue of Poetry (USA), (I promise I only read it for the articles!) the young poet and critic Michael Robbins published a lively, funny, clear-sighted and irreverent review of Robert Hass’ The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/article.html?id=239972
In the following issue were seven letters to the editor, mostly bewailing...
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READING PETER PORTER / PETRA WHITE
Reading poetry is about forming a relationship with the poet. Just as the poet imagines the distant reader, the reader can’t help experiencing the sense that the poet is speaking to them personally. There is a residue of this feeling even if the poet is anonymous. Poetry makes a new reader out of its reader: a reader who learns to trust the peculiarities of a voice or a style; a reader who...
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TRIGGER-APPY / LK HOLT
I’ve recently discovered the free iPhone app ‘Poetry’, released by The Poetry Foundation (USA), found in your iPhone’s App Store with a Pegasus for logo. ‘You can now take hundreds of poems by classic and contemporary poets with you wherever you go’—unless, of course, you are on the good-as-Icarus Vodafone network.
It’s not often one can write a poetry tech review. I feel a thrilling inkling of...
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UNSPIKED! / ELIZABETH CAMPBELL
Wishing to be fair, and in a spirit of goodwill for that excellent journal, I sent my post ‘Spiked’ to David Brooks at Southerly (the unnamed journal mentioned). He explained that the problem with the link was in fact technical, and not a darkly sinister and nefarious conspiracy to censor and suppress my views or generally thwart the forces of light in our poet-bedarkened twilight....
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SPIKED! / ELIZABETH CAMPBELL
Last year I was invited to write a review on books of my choice, for a special poetry issue of an Australian journal which shall remain nameless. I chose to review two first books: Sarah Holland-Batt’s Aria and Emma Jones’ The Striped World, the first because I liked it, the second because I was surprised that it had been so highly awarded and acclaimed, when I felt it was very...
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AN IRISH STORY / ELIZABETH CAMPBELL
In Ireland recently, I found myself watching with fascination, a storm in the beerglass of Irish poetry.
Poetry Ireland Review, the biggest poetry journal, had published a celebratory issue, looking back on the previous ten years of PIR. Two critics, Fiona Sampson of PN Review, and the young Irish critic Maria Johnston, had been commissioned to write essays looking back on the journal’s...
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THE SONNET ACCORD / LK HOLT
Jordie Albiston’s masterful latest collection, the sonnet according to ‘m’, can be described with either hand—the right or the sinister. On one hand this book is a compact audit of daily doings, of emotional expenses and returns, of exactitude and itemisation; exemplar of the poet as bookkeeper. On the other hand it is a jangling box of talismans, occultish, wondrous, murderous; exemplar of the...
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ON WHY WE AREN'T READY FOR A 'POET LAUREATE' / ...
So the mild demand for an Australian poet laureate has reared up again; this happens every few years. The latest wish comes from Australian Poetry (AP), who have just installed their inaugural ‘poet in residence’, Sandra Thibodeaux. AP expresses hope that, as part of her role, Thibodeaux will ‘persuade the Federal government to pay for a poet laureate’. (How she is to complete this mighty feat...
