'On the roofs of windowless malls and advertising conglomerates, Kent MacCarter is dancing. Shimmy, bebop, pogo, he's climbing billboards to wall-flip up high over the parking lot, its asphalt vistas, naturalising heaps of disposable packaging, target markets heading to their cars under the power grid. He's making a maelstrom up there, sucking it all in-real maraschinos, Donkey Kong, nuclear reactors, fibromyalgia, quietude, cup-a-soups. It's 'draping sparkle on the troposphere'. It's giving the republic of letters its republic back. '& it's a total fucking gas'.
- Lisa Gorton
'Kent MacCarter is writing like no other poet. His post SF Renaissance and post-language new lyricism are all tussling with an Australian sense of edges. Transcultural and non-national, these poems rip through assumptions and leave us flabbergasted. A generative tension drives word deployment, with words making meaning, developing that 'genuine strangeness' that shifts poetic discourse into something differentiated, generative, essential. In MacCarter's work, the 'ordinary' becomes strange and a lens through which we might re-see our certainties. There's an accentual and cultural slippage grappling with the 'new' in interrogative ways that are beyond satirical-the poet inside and outside what is being critiqued, culpable and also stunned by what is seen. Inside, because he is a participant in the cultural debates and discussions of the modern, and outside because his language is so self-propelling that the poet follows in its wake, watching on. These critiques of commercial fetishisation and gender stereotyping/exploitation are politically and ethically driven challenges to us all, requiring us to question our own modes of reading. This is a riveting work-compulsive, committed and drop-jawed wondrous.
- John Kinsella
Epigraph:
Gawddamit Slinger! there you go
wreckin my Witrlitzer again
sittin there
in that tipped back chair,
can't you go over to the machine
and put the money in and push
the button like a normal bein?
We're at the Very beginning of logic
around here
-Edward Dorn
I am agog for foam. Tumultuous come -Basil Bunting
Bella Li launches Kent MacCarter's California Sweet.
'An editor at a nationally-prominent, poetry-specific publishing house and I were recently talking about “the industry.” After reading my manuscript, she relayed that, despite the fact that she found the poems to be of “high enough standard,” her press would not be able to publish it. This was simply for the reason that the press wasn’t taking on any new work whatsoever. I was both surprised and dismayed, and not only for reasons of self-interest. This news came amidst the recent downturn in Australian poetry more generally, and to see yet another press fold made me concerned for all the poets I knew, and the hungry readers of poetry that I know exist.' (Introduction)
'Australian poetry tends to enjoy a scrap, whether or not there’s an actual point at stake – cf. what Ali Alizadeh called the ‘abundantly unnecessary poetry wars’ – but even so Robert Wood seems to have raised eyebrows for more substantial reasons in a bizarre piece published in the Los Angeles Review of Books last week.
'Briefly, Wood manages to turn a review of Kent MacCarter’s recently released collection California Sweet, published by Five Islands Press, into a jeremiad bemoaning an apparent crisis of opportunity instigated by his own experience of rejection from ‘a nationally prominent, poetry-specific publishing house.’ Inauspicious, but it gets worse. From the sweeping and fatuous claim that ‘individual poems and reviews of poetry books are no longer in Australian newspapers’ – instantly corrected on twitter by The Australian’s poetry editor Jaya Savige – we move on to an old-fashioned cultural cringe:
But I do not know of any Australian poetry press that is a hot ticket in global, literary markets.'
(Introduction)
'Australian poetry tends to enjoy a scrap, whether or not there’s an actual point at stake – cf. what Ali Alizadeh called the ‘abundantly unnecessary poetry wars’ – but even so Robert Wood seems to have raised eyebrows for more substantial reasons in a bizarre piece published in the Los Angeles Review of Books last week.
'Briefly, Wood manages to turn a review of Kent MacCarter’s recently released collection California Sweet, published by Five Islands Press, into a jeremiad bemoaning an apparent crisis of opportunity instigated by his own experience of rejection from ‘a nationally prominent, poetry-specific publishing house.’ Inauspicious, but it gets worse. From the sweeping and fatuous claim that ‘individual poems and reviews of poetry books are no longer in Australian newspapers’ – instantly corrected on twitter by The Australian’s poetry editor Jaya Savige – we move on to an old-fashioned cultural cringe:
But I do not know of any Australian poetry press that is a hot ticket in global, literary markets.'
(Introduction)
'An editor at a nationally-prominent, poetry-specific publishing house and I were recently talking about “the industry.” After reading my manuscript, she relayed that, despite the fact that she found the poems to be of “high enough standard,” her press would not be able to publish it. This was simply for the reason that the press wasn’t taking on any new work whatsoever. I was both surprised and dismayed, and not only for reasons of self-interest. This news came amidst the recent downturn in Australian poetry more generally, and to see yet another press fold made me concerned for all the poets I knew, and the hungry readers of poetry that I know exist.' (Introduction)
Bella Li launches Kent MacCarter's California Sweet.
