Cirrus@Austlit

'‘Dispatch from the Future Fish’ is a visual poem that is deliberately referential, opening up conversations and foregrounding the notion of writing into certain traditions: those that are given to us and those that we choose.'  (Introduction)

'The last time I saw Kathy Acker was in London, in July 1997. I wasn’t sure how she felt about me at that point. I had failed to drop everything to be with her in San Francisco the year before, and I had failed to make a job materialise that would have brought her to Sydney, as she wanted. Things had, I felt, ended in a disappointing but amicable dead end. ‘Just be my friend,’ Kathy said, early on, and I had promised I would.'  (Introduction)

An indelible part of the Brontë mythology is their symbiotic development as young artists in an isolated environment. Some time ago, Juliet Barker’s biographical scholarship on the culture at the parsonage and the Brontë siblings’ lives in Haworth has questioned that isolation in terms of the rich resources available to the Brontës siblings and a family culture that strongly encouraged their imaginative and artistic development. More recently, director Sally Wainwright’s TV movie To Walk Invisiblehas meticulously recreated the dynamic relationship between the Brontës’ childhood fantasy worlds and their adult writing, along with the strategic ways in which the three sisters built a professional path towards their lives as novelists directly through their sibling bonds. Wainwright’s interpretation of the sisters’ creative lives has gone some way in recovering both the weirdness and the ordinariness of the Brontës in it they seem closer (more graspable) than in any recreation of their lives encountered before.' (Introduction) 

'I was radicalised in my youth. I came back from a year in Paris in ’68-69 with my parents, and went to Monash University, a ‘radical’ campus when it was new. I was not a leader; I was still too young for that, but being radical was a trend. In Paris I had been knocked to the ground by the CRS, the riot police. Back home I went to all the demos. I refused to go to Vietnam, and Gough’s election in 1972 saved me from a court case that would have punished me for non-compliance with the draft.'  (Introduction)

'The poetry of Yoogum and Kudjela man, Lionel Fogarty, may be hard to follow, often distorting colloquial phrases or standardised grammar to retool the colonising English language into a form of resistance. His description of it here as ‘double-standard English’ conveys Fogarty’s intent to demonstrate how the English language can oppress Aboriginal peoples, forcing non-Indigenous readers to experience what it feels like to be alienated by a literary text. These actions have led Ali Alizadeh to describe his poetry as an expression of his ‘staunchly decolonised, Aboriginal identity’. I would argue that to read Fogarty is not to be positioned as an outsider, but rather to be given the challenge to conceptualise new reading methods as he positions us in a world estranged from itself.'  (Introduction)

'Read. This is poetry. Both a praise and a lament for Country. Read. There is little like it. Australia struggles with an embrace of the past, but Louise Crisp does not flinch from the intimacy of fact. If there is regret here, there is also hope – hope and a plea to you, reader, to witness the works of those for whom the land is not their mother.' (Introduction)

'Ken Bolton’s thinking is never too relaxed, but moves restlessly and anxiously, across people, cultural references and disparate locations even as he writes, or so it appears. And the resultant poems also seem to be unfiltered by any desire on the poet’s part to be ‘poetic’. But perhaps this is illusory. The poems are, after all, carefully considered and crafted, occupying the page determinedly even though the poet writes as if the events and thoughts he references are taking place in an ongoing, urgent present, via a stream of consciousness, and that the last thing on his mind is making ‘poetry’. Indeed, Bolton records something that looks like immediate, unfiltered thought and his compelling purpose is to register rather than editorialise.' (Introduction)

'In a judicious review of two ‘lucid and intelligent books’ on the job of the literary critic* and of a new edition of Eric Auerbach’s Mimesis, Edward Mendelsohn argued against the essential nostalgia of criticism in favour of a version of Kant’s ‘universal subjective’: finding ways to cross ‘the disputed border between popular and elite culture … without pretending it doesn’t exist’. One of the recurring negotiations for the critic – and, I would argue, for the poet – is the difficult business of intimacy: how to inscribe the subjective as both ‘confessional’ (and ‘lyrical’) as well as observational, satirical, evaluative.' (Introduction)

'In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a surge in material on gender and sexuality being produced by a profusion of switched-on contemporary thinkers. In Australia, Puncher & Wattmann published the anthology Out of the Box – Contemporary Gay & Lesbian Poets almost a decade ago. Currently you’ll find queer poets (many of them students of writing and literature) swarming around venues like Sydney’s Subbed In, Freda’s and Sappho’s. Literary magazines have published dedicated lgbtqi issues and Melbourne-based Archermagazine declares itself ‘The world’s most inclusive magazine about sexuality, gender and identity’. In 2018 the organisation Australian Poetry hosted lgbtqi Big Bent Readings at the Sydney and Melbourne writer’s festivals. In Cordite Poetry Review, the most recent issue was themed TRANSQUEER.'  (Introduction)

'While Paul Croucher has previously published A History of Buddhism in Australia 1848-1988, this is his first poetry collection. Embedded within the poet’s attention to nature is a Buddhist understanding of suffering as a necessary part of existence and at times his spiritual beliefs are expressed explicitly. In ‘Theravadin’ the speaker asks his ‘Ajahn’ (teacher) why he has been reincarnated and is told: ‘Not enough suffering / the first time’. The notion of ‘samsara’ – the cycle of birth and death to which non-enlightened beings are subjected – is reiterated in ‘After All’, a poem in which a courtesan states, ‘there’s / no future, / but there’s / no / end to it’. '  (Introduction)