Cirrus@Austlit

'Crankhandle is the latest part of an ongoing Notebooks series, the first part of which was published as Sidetracks: Notebooks 1976–1991 (Auckland University Press 1998). Between Sidetracks and Crankhandle comes a longer unpublished section, Melbourne Journal: Notebooks 1998–2003, begun when I first came to Australia. From the beginning, these writings were never seen as notes or sketches towards poems that were yet to be fully realised – each entry was intended to be as finished an act of writing as any other, longer, individual work.

'Over the nearly forty years of this endeavour, there have of course been gaps, but the Notebooks provide a way for me to be quickly attentive to my environment, and to circumstances of wherever I might happen to be sitting, standing, waiting, travelling at any time. Perhaps one could speak of the individual pieces as ‘fragments’, but they are not fragments in the way that ancient Greek poetry has come to us on torn, worn, eaten, half-destroyed bits of papyrus. If these works are fragments, then each of Ezra Pound’s cantos are also fragments, placed against the totality of all poetry, from all over the planet, and from throughout recorded world history. In this sense, fragments are all we have, and will ever have. If some are very long and some very short, then that is simply how things are.

–Alan Loney' (Publication summary)

'In his retelling of the myth of Orpheus – where Eurydice is described as ‘the profoundly obscure point to which art and desire, death and night, seem to tend’ – Maurice Blanchot charts the relationship between poetry and loss, by which to desire is to necessitate, even to invoke, obscurity: to confine the object of desire, along with the poet, to song; to translate life into word, and, through word, into dream. In this conception, to write is always to admit to, but also to dwell with, loss – to experience the loss of a once-loved person as a mode of living. When Nerval writes that dreams are a second life, he not only refers to the dreams we experience in sleep, but also to the dreams that arise as a consequence of lost desires, dreams perhaps thwarted by chance: of lives once meant, but never lived.

'These lives often coexist with our own as lost alternatives, counter-experiences or impossible possibilities; they lie within the everyday like a subtext, or a haunting. To transmute desire into language is to erect a monument to that desire, to announce it as permanent, but also to profoundly transform both the subject and the object of desire: to confine them, in their relationship, to the monument and the tomb. Since evocation presupposes loss or absence – as Mallarmé showed – then to write is to desire something that continually slips away, and must once again be invoked in a series of repetitions and beginnings that both conjure and obscure. '–John Hawke' (Publication summary)

'Where does it take place, Stone Grown Cold?

'Let yourself think it’s a town you know well. Some bits are real and help like the sun on your back. Other bits have been gathered from gossip, screens and scumbags. There’s a good dose of sex in it and knucklehead glamour. It’s such a town. For good and for bad. With dazzle all over it. Dumb-arse to match. More gorgeous than reasonable. With everything you want. And who gives a fuck? Not prepared to play or say nice. Not much shame about the wrong things. Except on the quiet.

'Most citizens are nine-to-fivers. They’re always bumping into folks who are not:

sham company promoters; hollow share hawkers; men loitering in yards; mendacious women importuning on telephones; purveyors of poorly provenanced smallgoods; covert-camera seducers and follow-up extortionists; hotel ‘barbers’; boarding-school snow-droppers; hospital potion filchers; theatre impresarios and fanciful futures conjurers.

'Best accept it’s a town knows you well.' (Publication summary)

–Ross Gibson

'Dirty Words, an A to Z index of poetry, is a restless offering; an unfolding that may begin on any page. This to-ing and fro-ing of observation is an un-binding of sorts; a mournful rage with beauty and deep love between the lines to disrupt and transcend the pain and disdain. This book is a reminder that what is (re)produced and (re)presented for general consumption, by institutions of power, is often steeped in myth-making and persistent colonial ideology. This small contemplation on nation and history is informed by blood-memory and an uncanny knowing beyond what we are officially told; a reminder of multiple lived-histories, of other ways of knowing and being in this world. Our elders and ancestors fought for the right to exist and speak up into the future – there are traces and signs, and there was always resistance. Dirty Words is my ‘note-to-self’ to speak up, to unsettle and to be brave; to not be silent when another voice would be easier or expected. There is still work to be done, and difficult conversations to have. Hidden stories can be honoured, exposed and shared, and there is always poetry.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'She Woke & Rose is an obsession with interiors, an attempt to forge openings, to merge letters as means of release, slowly, slowly feels the longing, the fractures and the loss.

'‘When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse – it does not mean – me – but a supposed person’, Emily Dickinson reveals. Here are multiple voices and personas rising and falling after their flowering periods.

'Alice Notley stresses that ‘words are one way to get at reality/poetry, what we’re in all the time’. When it comes to my reality and poetry, Inger Christensen’s fourth sequence in Alphabet simultaneously summarises and complicates it all for me:

doves exist, dreamers, and dolls;

killers exist, and doves, and doves;

haze, dioxin, and days; days

exist, days and death; and poems

exist; poems, days, death

'To make a stand and push it over, acknowledging the theatrics and violence of it all. I wish to confront rather than confess and as Felicity Plunkett writes it’s ‘when you pin and catch feeling in words / the tissue of its inconstancy / flakes away in your hands.’'

–Autumn Royal (Publication summary)

'I have written elsewhere that we need the transformative power of art, any art, in order for life to be endurable. (This is not original; Nietzsche more or less said the same.) In ‘being, its own reward’, I say that ‘I have no power of observation, and mere description (mimetic simile) leaves me cold’, for I believe in potential literature, the potential of literature. This is especially true of conceptual poems, such as these contained here, although I have splashed a few similes about (who could live without ‘like’?). I also said in my poem that ‘[p]oetry, like water, is necessary for life to flourish. Like breath. Unpredictable’. Anaïs Nin saw the journey of art in terms of a solar barque (commun[icat]ion); John Ashbery, a psychopomp (communicator) – and André Breton had his ‘communicating vessels’, where they, like most artists, called upon mythology to further their insights.

'I also mentioned in ‘being, its own reward’ that art does not replace life. I agree with T S Eliot on the ‘continual extinction of personality’, if he meant autobiographical or so-called confessional poems, and with Voltaire, who said that poetry was the music of the soul. The conceptual poems here ‘forget the currents’, whatever the vogue is nowadays, instead finding their ‘own level, above and below consciousness.’ Being is its own reward. Words are empty vessels for the reader to fill. We do not need (auto)biography. Is not poetry a journey, an odyssey or an exploration of sorts? I end (my poem) by saying ‘[w]ithout poetry, we are deluded; we should surely grow older earlier.’

–Javant Biarujia' (Publication summary)

A guided meditation, proceeding backwards through the four parts of Common Sexual Fantasies, Ruined:

'Goldfish Oil: Consider an orange. It has many pleasing features: bright peel, pungent scent, pleasing heft in your hand. But none of these features is the orange. You could paint the orange purple, de-scent it, dangle it in zero gravity … and it would remain an orange. Where, then, is the essence of the orange? Whence its orangeness?

'Bitter Berries Bite Back: Are you holding an orange? If so, eat it before reading any further; it’s important to the example, and you’ll need the sustenance. Good. Now you’re clutching something even more marvellous and mysterious than any fruit: the absence of fruit. It has no colour, no scent, no heft … yet there it is, in the palm of your hand. (It’s also stashed underneath your chair, balanced atop your head, and stuffed into the toe of your left shoe.) Check all these places and see for yourself: no fruit. How can you perceive what isn’t there?

'Closets: Consider the inside of your own head. It’s more tractable than any pumpkin or melon: you’ve lived there all your life. Do you have secrets up there: old love letters, embarrassing self-portraits, or half-starved animals scrabbling to get out? Did you leave a crate of oranges there once, and forget about it? What happens to oranges when they can’t breathe?

'The Rug from under You: If you have one apple, and you take away two apples, how many apples do you have? If two potatoes are launched towards each other at a velocity of 100 kph, where will it end? If this sentence is true, then you are an orange. Slip out of your pith, into a poem.

–Rachael Briggs' (Publication summary)

'I wrote most of this book on campus in Singapore, surrounded by a ring of jungle that couldn’t encroach as fast as it was being thinned out. The circles and mosses of that location tilt and transect others – Auckland, Bicol, an empty Bangkok penthouse, and somewhere else, entirely see-through. It seemed important to be as close to sleep as possible, so I closed windows and wore headphones. Not to shut things out or make them stranger, but to soften and modulate the tensions of exchange.

'In Bangkok, excavators swim up and down the canals. They float on barges and scoop themselves through the water. The water pools and resists, carrying places to places on its way.

'In the ‘epoch of simultaneity’ not all spaces are equally accessible to thought or description. Rituals of immersion, of the maze and the gate, may not open anything but the body’s ability to accumulate and to disperse, to be near and far, here and there. Memory, presence and imagination fold and run together. I was looking for gaps to step through, for ways both forward and back.

–Jen Crawford' (Publication summary)

'Dear reader,

'The poems that follow are a few stories. At their most straightforward, they are the stories of a day in the life of my family – when we buried someone we love. Trying to tell these stories meaningfully in a book has been hard. It has seemed important and respectful to undo them into others, bigger and deeper than ours. The lake that delimits the site of this book, Tuggerah Lake, is located on the Central Coast of New South Wales, Australia. Long before us and long after us the area is home to the Darkinjung, Awabakal and Kuringgai peoples. Because of its interest in the dead things of Tuggerah Lake, I initially called this collection a ‘necro-geography.’ I have since read Joyelle McSweeney’s ‘What is the Necropastoral?’, which says:

'The Necropastoral is a strange meetingplace for the poet and death, or for the dead to meet the dead, or for the seemingly singular-bodied human to be revealed as part of an inhuman multiple body.

and

'Necropastoral is a political-aesthetic zone in which the fact of mankind’s depredations cannot be separated from an experience of “nature” which is poisoned, mutated, aberrant, spectacular, full of ill effects and affects.

'The poems in this book do not always start and end on discrete pages, and none have titles, although sometimes the index points a way. Muddle-headed pronouns, tenses and other grammatical disagreements reflect the porousness of subjecthood, action and time. Such disagree-ments are always fluoresced by subjects like love, death and life. Where there is blank space in these poems, as with most blank things, it is not empty. '

–Claire Nashar (Publication summary)

'I wrote many poems before I published a single word of fiction, short or long. Some of the poems I was happy with. Others were terrible. Thankfully, most of the bad stuff was never published, although a couple of the more atrocious ones were. I hope they’re being taught somewhere as examples of bad writing and giving students a laugh. The poems of mine that I’m most happy with, while not being ‘found’ poems, riff off the political words of others, hammered into shape with anger, and sometimes caressed with love. Other institutional words, phrases and sentences I picked up along the way, interrogating them until they confessed their hidden meaning. Any dictatorship worth its violent salt executes the poets first. It is the way it should be, as a great poem cuts through the crap and goes for the heart and heat like a double-barrelled shotgun.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.