Cirrus@Austlit

'The long-winded title page of Louisa Anne Meredith’s last volume, Bush Friends in Tasmania (1891), attests to her eclectic experience as a prose-writer, poet, botanist and illustrator.' (Introduction)

'Beauty has a quality about it that pretends to neutrality and universality, despite being steeped in asymmetrical constructions of aesthetic judgement. Of course, this is no surprise in a hierarchical world; ‘Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.’ (Bourdieu Distinction xxix) In his poetry collection, Terminally Poetic (2020), Ouyang Yu scathingly critiques hegemonic and Anglocentric aesthetics, raising instead the generative potential of the ugly and the imperfect. Writing in a literary market that moves cosmopolitan capital and commodifies ‘ethnic’ difference, Yu writes to unsettle normative aesthetics that are contingent upon colonially inherited Eurocentric notions of beauty and relegates ‘ethnic’ alterity to easily digestible images of Orientalist fantasy. In this essay, I explore how Terminally Poetic unsettles aesthetic and linguistic whiteness in two parts. I begin by articulating how Yu de-centres Anglocentric aesthetics, contaminating the high cultural register of poetry with an aesthetic of the profane and vulgar. In doing so, he suggests that neutral sounding notions of aesthetic standards and propriety are not so neutral after all. I then argue that Yu’s undermining of Anglocentric aesthetics marries his critique of Australia’s ‘monolingual mindset’, revealing the limitations of Australia’s reliance on colonially inherited linguistic aesthetics in opposition to a plurilingual reality. Analysing his radical poetics through his linguistic play, I suggest that Yu articulates an enmeshed multilingualism that challenges the neutrality of monolingualism.'  (Introduction)

'When I first became interested in computer-generated text, it was through Twitter bots. Littered periodically through my feed were posts from these odd machines: whether it was emoji art, micro-stories, or news-headlines-turned-haikus, I loved how these varied outputs brought a whimsical inflection to my doom-scrolling. My favourite bot was called @a_long_drive, which posted short prose fragments of two unnamed characters on an endless, unsettling road trip:'  (Introduction)

'I do not long for a dick. This comes easily to me, I don’t say it defensively. I am lucky to not long for a dick because I was assigned male at birth. As the story goes, when the doctor spilled my freshly birthed body into my mother’s arms, she held me and looked up, dopy, exhausted, into my father’s eyes and said ‘Robbie, what’s wrong with his penis?’ He replied ‘Kim, it’s a girl.’ This was obviously a lie. The correct answer was there is so much wrong with my penis. I was assigned fucked up dicked at birth. My mother says she was so used to birthing boys at this point that she assumed my vulva, swollen and red from the constriction of birth, was a penis. But that version of a dick – the engorged vagina – is exactly the type of dick, one of them, I have now and is, in fact, everything I want in a dick.'  (Introduction)

'I first heard of Elena Gomez when a friend of mine who was living in London DM’d me a link via Instagram with the message ‘another commie poet in Melbourne!!’. I had just started writing poems, so this was kind of like when a parent notices you are in an awkward phase of identity, and naively suggests you hang out with the cool girl at school who is two years above you. I love hearted their message and ordered Elena’s recently published debut book, Body of Work. When I met Elena a year or so later, we were both in a Marxist reading group, which I soon realised was made up of mostly poets. Elena and I were sitting across from each other on low sagging couches while two people between us engaged in one of those conversations poets are often guilty of: the topic is something tangible and relatable, like work and gender, and yet it turns into something that is abstracted to the point that no one knows what’s going on, or if they ever did. At some point in the reading session, Elena intervened and summed up the conversation with a famous line from the Wages Against Housework movement: ‘They say it’s love, we say it’s unwaged work’. I thought, I love this bitch.'  (Introduction)

'Barrina and I connected in 2022 through Invisible Walls, a literary exchange program between Australian and Korean poets, co-facilitated by Dan Disney and myself. Invisible Walls poets were chosen via a competitive selection process. From a large pool of submissions, Barrina was one of twelve successful applicants. The striking language, imagery, and emotion of her poetry stood out immediately. Through working on the project itself, I came to know Barrina as not only a brilliant poet, but a deeply thoughtful, kind, and giving person, too. In late 2023, we met on Ngunawal and Ngambri Country (Queanbeyan, NSW) for a coffee and chat. Below is an edited transcript of our exchange.'  (Introduction)

'When briefing commissioned poets on what I imagined this volume of Tell Me Like You Mean It to embody, I eagerly told them to simply ‘tell me like you mean it’. I didn’t care if it was a declaration, a meditation, a lyric or an ode but bring me the view, the slant, quirk and queer orientation of where you are in this world.

'My aim was to create a space where diverse voices could resonate and find new meanings through their interplay. What emerged was a collection of poems exploring what it means to perceive and be perceived, to interpret and be interpreted. To me, they exemplify a poetics in pursuit of nuance.

'As you read through this collection, consider how each poem offers a distinct perspective, a unique way of seeing and interpreting the world, a poetic voice deeply concerned with understanding the where of its annunciation. Through a triangulation of everyday experiences, observations, and reflections, we are given insight to broader conversations about what it means to live, understand and be misunderstood on Aboriginal lands. Through these poet’s words we are invited to imagine the familiar anew and to continue being concerned about the catastrophic- come-all-too-familiar.' (Introduction)