Cirrus@Austlit

'This is going to be a rather disordered list of undeveloped and not closely connected thoughts about ‘the suburban’ and its binary partner ‘the urban’. Not my thoughts, for the most part, but my list of thoughts generally available. Something that might do to serve Cordite Poetry Review as preliminary, to obviate the need for their re-stating or further discussion, a kind of background or context-setting. A sample of ‘received ideas’ almost, not quite the full Bouvard & Pecuchet Dictionary of them.' (Introduction)

'Sometime in 1953 my parents bought a house in Clayton (Victoria, Australia), then on the edge of south-east Melbourne. We moved there from a decidedly different environment: the guest house that my Grandmother owned. This was on Beaconsfield Parade in South Melbourne. In those years that suburb was largely working class with connections to the Port Melbourne wharf and the further dockside territory along the Yarra River. This guesthouse and the country around Ensay in the Tambo valley of East Gippsland where my father was born were ghost presences as I was growing up – imaginaries of an existence I might have had (urban / rural). We would visit my uncle and aunt in Ensay (travelling by train and bus until around 1960 when we finally owned a car) and we would venture into the inner suburbs occasionally where I would get to look at the ‘slums’. I’m not sure what significance these places had for my parents or even why they wanted to take me there. It could have been as a ‘this could have happened to you’ lesson, though I suspect this was not the case. The places we visited may have had more of an affirming effect for my parents. For me, the inner suburbs were simply ‘picturesque’. In art classes at Huntingdale High School I would often draw or paint decaying buildings from the images I had taken on my box Brownie camera. These were sketchy romantic visions lifted probably from the work of Sydney artists like Sali Herman or Donald Friend (encountered in the library rather than the art gallery).'  (Introduction)

'I once read that the word ikebana (生け花), denoting the Japanese art of flower arrangement, can be roughly translated into English as ‘living flower,’ or ‘bringing life to the flowers.’ This summary sounds too easy, too graceful; there is an air of internet mythology to it, the truth of it smoothed and polished like a well-handled stone until it becomes convenient, small enough to tweet or swallow. I don’t know Japanese, and even if I did, I doubt whether my clumsy English renderings would do any more justice to the words’ original elegance: to the 生 rooted in life, meaning raw, growing, being born – to the bloom of the 花 recalling cherry blossoms, paper petals, grass. But somehow, despite my ignorance or because of it, I find joy in the deconstruction of the word, in the Googling of its kanji, the deciphering, the re-making. The word ikebana is a little poem, and I am its fumbling, ill-equipped translator.' (Introduction)

'On 23 November, 2017 at the NSW Writers’ Centre in the Sydney suburb of Rozelle, poets Amanda Stewart, Nick Keys, Peter Minter, Michael Farrell and myself presented ‘The Centre For Deep Reading’s Talking Writing: Wrighting’ in the Judith Wright Room. Minter acknowledged this Wangal and Gadigal country. We each spoke for 15 minutes on Wright, and each did a mini-read of our own poems that reacted to or expanded on Wright’s work.' (Introduction)

'When I was 17 and finishing my high school exams the petrol station around the corner from our house exploded. I didn’t hear it but my twin brother did: he jingled the keys and we drove in his Subaru ute to check out the damage. The smoke came into view as we passed over the train line by the Bunnings on Albany Highway – the sky a bleached October blue, the kind that drains the colour from the world and makes the grass slump yellow, as if the earth was giving up for the season.' (Introduction)

'This interview was conducted with an awareness of the many rich dialogues with Ouyang Yu that have come before it, such as the recent conversation with Melinda Smith at the National Library of Australia, and the four interviews conducted between 2003 and 2008 which close his essay collection Beyond the Yellow Pale: Essays and Criticism, the conversations with Prem Poddar and Steve Brock particular highlights here. Ouyang has also written poetry that describes disastrous interviews. The abundance of interviews means it makes sense to not begin (again) with the basics. By now it should be taken as a given – along with Ouyang’s importance as a literary figure in both Australia and China – his longstanding commitment to bilingual poetry, the importance of translation and self-translation to his practice, his complex drawing out of a poetics from, and between two different literary, linguistic and national cultures.3I took this interview as an opportunity to talk about his most recent and most experimental poetic activities. Given the way Ouyang’s work persistently engages with temporality and the material text, it is fitting to note that this interview took place over Microsoft Word email attachments between Wednesday, 20 December, and Friday 22 December, with us both located in Shanghai. One of the many joys of moving to Shanghai has been getting to know Ouyang, and participating in the intensive online discussions around poetry and poetics that he facilitates through the WeChat poetry group ‘Otherland原乡砸诗群’.' (From introduction)

'To read Hile’s poetry is to encounter what it means to be a desiring subject in a contemporary world. Her use of vernacular recalls and transforms the details of everyday life, while gesturing toward the grand themes of a European philosophical tradition, including the problems of love, of being a woman – in the broadest sense – that of desire, the dialectic, the universal, and the particular. Her poetry is as disarming as it is humorous and inventive, reminding us of the movements and counter movements that define the twin-experiences of pleasure and loss. This interview was conducted in 2015, with these themes in mind. It is part of a larger project led by Justin Clemens, titled, Australian Poetry Today.' (From introduction)

'The subject of my interview with Cahill is her second book of poems, Vishvarūpa, which is a highly unusual book by a contemporary Australian poet. In VishvarūpaCahill reanimates figures from ancient Hindu mythology. Cahill takes Hindu gods and goddesses and drops them into suburban Sydney, and into various Indian cities. The poet adopts the voices of Hindu gods in the first person, in poems such as ‘Pārvatī in Darlinghurst’ and ‘Laksmi Under Oath,’ and writes them into poems in the third (‘Hanuman,’ ‘Sita’). Vishvarūpa is an experimental rendering of myth that is well known, in its conventional form, to Hindus, but would be relatively unknown to the Australian or Western reader; it contains a comprehensive glossary for this reason. The book draws on the Mahābhārataand the Rāmāyaṇa – Hindu narrative epics – and philosophy and scriptures in the Vedas. Cahill’s own background is Christian, as she tells me, although her ancestors were Hindus before India was colonised. As such, Vishvarūpa is the poet’s attempt to reconnect to a Hindu tradition that is in fact part of her heritage. Cahill has Goan-Anglo-Indian – or Eurasian – ancestry, and cultural identity is a prominent theme in her work.' (From introduction)

'Ten atmospheres is a graphic sequence that embeds the word atmosphere in a matrix of the alphabet. Ten letters in the word give ten pages; five have the word picked out vertically, five have it picked out horizontally. The colour sequence for the consecutive pages, and for consecutive letters in the word, is taken from the order of colours available in the modifiers of the word program. Although the patterns are visual, they are not pictorial. Instead of presenting a picture of atmosphere, the texts work on the usual convention of left to right flow, using memory and prediction as reading qualities. The reader is asked to experience what the word stands for through their reading, at the scale of the individual page and the scale of the set.' (Introduction)

'We are researching western Melbourne waterways through the period of the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to write and produce a suite of creative works which explore industrial history and environmental change over time, and the lives of people who lived and worked along their banks. This version of the project includes poems and accompanying visuals, with the aim to develop the project further to include songs and maps for later release. Newer Volcanics is the working title of our project and much of the research has been conducted under a State Library of Victoria Creative Fellowship. Our focus is on the Birrarung (Yarra River), Moonee Ponds Creek, former wetland of West Melbourne Swamp, Maribyrnong River, Stony and Kororoit Creeks, and Skeleton Waterholes Creek in Altona.' (Introduction)