Cirrus@Austlit

'For a long time after my daughter was born, I looked for representations of motherhood everywhere. I looked for it in casual interactions with other mothers in the park and on the street, I looked for it with friends, in mothers’ groups and on the screen. I looked for it in my memories of mothers (including my own), and I looked for it in books. In the first six-weeks or so after my daughter was born I tore through Elisa Albert’s After Birth and Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work. I remember them like balm, even though I cannot remember much of the content of either book now. I read and re-read Maya Angelou, Marguerite Duras, Julia Kristeva, Maggie Nelson and Adrienne Rich all of whom I had read before but reading them as a mother felt different. I read Elena Ferrante for the first time and was in awe at the way she wrote about mothers. I read Deborah Levy’s fiction and nonfiction and thought her novel Hot Milk would have been more satisfying had it been a nonfiction account of the central mother-daughter relationship (reading into that novel Levy’s complicated relationship with her mother). I heard the poet Rachel Zucker interviewed about her book MOTHERs on a parenting podcast and when I bought that book, I tore through it too. Again, balm. I read Jacqueline Rose’s Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty and though aspects of the book annoyed me, I was grateful for it.' (Introduction)

'On my job application to the ABC in 1983 I mentioned that I was a poet, even though the job advertised was for a purely technical position as a trainee sound engineer. Positions for technicians were all that were on offer at that time in Adelaide. Landing a job as a sound engineer was a way into the monolith.' (Introduction)

'When I think about the music that’s closest to me, that’s an inextricable part of my identity in how unwaveringly I have carried it through time, it’s music that has made me see the world – or maybe feel is the more accurate word here – in a way I never have previously. Listening to this music, I’ve always felt like I’m shifting into an altered frame of consciousness. There’s a playlist of songs I have this relationship to, and when I listen to it, it’s also as if I’m revolving through different textures of being, different avatars of self. I listen to ‘Constant Surprises’ by Little Dragon, and I’m reminded of how it coloured life at twenty-one, inducing an embodiment that facilitated extraordinary dreaming.' (Introduction)

'Jaya Savige was born in Sydney, raised on Bribie Island, and lives in London. Jaya has lived overseas since 2009, when he received a Gates Cambridge Scholarship to read for a PhD on James Joyce at the University of Cambridge (Christ’s College). Since 2013 he has lectured in English Literature and Creative Writing at the New College of the Humanities in Bloomsbury, a block from the British Museum, where he founded the Creative Writing degree. His first poetry collection, Latecomers (UQP, 2005), published when he was 26, won the New South Wales Premier’s Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for a number of other awards; his second, Surface to Air (UQP, 2011) was shortlisted for The Age Poetry Book of the Year and the Western Australian Premier’s Award for Poetry. He is the long-standing poetry editor for the Weekend Australian, the recipient of travelling fellowships from the Marten Bequest and Brisbane Lord Mayor, and Australia Council residencies at the B R Whiting Studio, Rome, at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris.' (Introduction)

'Adelaide poet Jill Jones sits down 1,525.5 km from me, Claire Albrecht in Newcastle, to discuss her sparkling twelfth book A History of What I’ll Become. That’s a lot of ground to cover – along the way we talk grit, sexuality, anxiety, and the way these might be captured by observations and processed by repetition, hesitations, and formal experimentation into a poem. We dig up the sublime and consider shared modes of composition between poetry and a symphony. We die symbolically on the beach. We write to control. Strap in.' (Introduction)

'Homings & Departures is a poetry translation project of the China Australia Writing Centre (CAWC) at Curtin and Fudan Universities, and the International Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI) at the University of Canberra. As worldwide borders close and movements are restricted, the project’s title has gained a pressing new relevance. If bodies cannot travel then words, at least, can. In a spirit of nuanced exchange, CAWC at Curtin and Fudan, along with IPSI, continue their creative collaboration at a time when it is increasingly vital.' (Introduction)

'A line from 1855, first published by Walt Whitman in the poem ‘Song of Myself’, appears again at the beginning of a film produced during a Creative Arts Fellowship at the Australian National University in 1969.  Out of the 19th century transcendentalism of New England, the film’s subject emerges as ‘Anarcho-Technocracy’, specifically as it was theorised and transmitted by expatriate poet Harry Hooton (1908-1961). Hooton had died in middle age in Sydney, celebrated as the ‘poet of the 21st century’ by his friends and devotees. In this way, the trans-mediation of his poetry and philosophy onto film seemed strangely appropriate for his ambitious idealism: Leave man alone, man is perfect. Concentrate instead on matter.' (Introduction)

'Poetry has a long history of disruption, resistance, and revolution, overlapping the concerns of politics with literature and the boundaries of language. In globalised, late-stage capitalism, the place of language as a tool for propaganda, denial, and romanticisation is ever shifting to accommodate online engagement metrics and algorithms that alter and manipulate one’s lens onto the world. ‘Late’ as a qualifier for capitalism is used here to loosely encompass the end of the 20th and into the 21st century as a period over which the individualistic ideology of neoliberalism has grown and prospered. Rather than address inequity on a systemic or structural, neoliberal individualism instead charges the consumer with endless self-improvement tasks purported as a way to use systemic oppression to one’s advantage. For Australian poets Ali Alizadeh and Melinda Bufton, writing into and around capitalism means subverting the figure of the individual by positioning the lone poet against the systems of power that uphold inequity and oppression. Both Bufton and Alizadeh identify the hollowing out of language as a key component to capitalistic dominance whether through jargon as elitist gatekeeping or sexism in-built to corporate culture.' (Introduction)