Cirrus@Austlit

'I snap a picture of a poem and send it to a friend. I send it because this friend says he is newly interested in poetry. I send it because this is a poem that intrigues me.' (Introduction)

'William Blake pinches himself. Yes! He is alive, not in heaven or hell for all eternity, but on earth, for just as long as I need him for the purposes of this essay. In the almost two hundred years since William Blake died many things have changed. William Blake knows very well that he was not all that successful last time he was alive, definitely not famous. He was hardworking, but also pretty weird, and not great at self-promotion. Luckily, William Blake has a smart phone so he can look himself up on Encyclopaedia Britannica (William Blake avoids Wikipedia because it campaigned to weaken Australian copyright law). William Blake reads that after he died the Pre-Raphaelites got interested in his work, and so did Yeats, T S Eliot, and Northrop Frye. William Blake does a quick vanity search on duckduckgo.com. There are a lot of entries. Wow, his drawings and paintings are in the Tate! And his poem ‘Jerusalem’ is sung at rugby matches, cricket games, and Women’s Institute meetings. You can even buy collections of his poetry in the bookshop in Wollongong Mall. And then an ad pops up for a Dr. Martens boot that features his painting ‘Satan Smiting Job with Sore Boils’. William Blake thinks a pair of Birkenstocks would suit him better, but he’s not sure of his shoe size, so he has to leave this essay and wander down to the shops to try on sandals, where he will discover that if you say ‘tyger tyger’ to a person of a certain age, they quite often say ‘burning bright’ back to you. Goodbye William Blake. Enjoy the shoe shopping. We’re going to stay here and talk about poetry.' (Introduction)

'In her eagerly awaited second collection, Superette (Puncher & Wattman, 2018), Melinda Bufton delivers dramatically on the promise announced in her 2014 debut, Girlery (Inken Publisch, 2014). Girlery performs a provocative en guard to a literary culture overly sanguine in its dismissal of all things ‘girl’. In it, Bufton subverts the charges of superficiality and irrelevance that are often levelled at the popular culture of girls and instead celebrates this culture in loving, defiant detail. Fans of Bufton’s poetry, among whom I happily count myself, will be delighted to know that her second collection does not tone down, or retreat from, the concerns of her first. If anything, this collection is louder, smarter, deeper, and more glorious. Superette is Girlery’s dark and dangerous big sister.' (Introduction)

'Judith Beveridge is the author of six collections of poetry and throughout her writing life she has received multiple awards, including the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award, Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards and the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry. As a teacher of creative writing at Sydney University and the University of Newcastle as well as the poetry editor of Meanjin, Beveridge is undoubtedly one of Australia’s most engaged, dedicated and supportive writers.'  (Introduction)

'‘Shipwrecked on the shoals of contingency’, Australian poetry is haunted by Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem Un Coup de Dés. Its publication in Cosmopolis in Paris in 1897 struck a nerve or, rather, a vessel within Australian poetry bloodlines, starting with Christopher Brennan. Un Coup de dés was the score that inspired him to compose ‘Musicopoematographoscope’, also in 1897, a large handwritten mimique manuscript, or pastiche, that transposed the more extreme aesthetics of an avant-garde French Symbolism into the Australian poetic psyche. Now well into the twenty-first century, Un Coup de dés is still a blueprint for experimentation in Australian poetry, spawning a number of versions, two of which are homophonic mistranslations – ‘A Fluke’ by Chris Edwards and ‘Desmond’s Coupé’ by John Tranter – both published in 2006, and both revelling / rebelling in the abject, and in “errors and wrecks’. This essay/assay provides a comparative reading of these homophonic bedfellows, traces their relation(ship)s to their antecedents, to various theories of translation and punning, and begins an enquiry into the significant influence of Mallarmé’s great ‘vessel’ on Australian poetry and poetics.' (Introduction)