'This anthology...is a negotiation of many spaces. That of poets and their work, the idea of "Australia", the idea of being "represented" in a different demographic (America), personal or textual issues with anthologiser, who else is being included (though none outside myself and the publishers have knowledge of this until publication). Vitally, whoat matters is the conversations that arise from the anthology going public, and how the poets and readers deal with this community that has been organically and artificially induced.' John Kinsella (Source: backcover)
'There has been a rich history of anthologising Australian poetry this far into the twenty-first century. This article claims that contemporary poetics, with a renewed focus on the recoprocal relation between cultural and linguistic inquiry, can rediscover alternative ways of reading the history of Australian avant-garde, inventive and experimental work. Considering several key anthologies published after the turn of last century, the article provides readings of both the frameworks the anthology-makers provide and the poems themselves, claiming that mark, trace and lexical segmentivities can already be read as social. It then proposes a new possibility for an experimental anthology that might bring these facets into lived praxis: the chrestomathy.' (Publication abstract)
'Einstein’s theory of general relativity states that matter can cataclysmically implode, creating a state where a given density and the space-time curvature split towards infinite values. This is referred to as a singularity, or – as it is known to ordinary folk – a black hole. Extending out from a black hole’s unfathomably dense centre and extraordinary gravitational pull is a finite volume of space that ends in an event horizon: a demarcation – a line in the cosmic sands – from which nothing inside can escape: not rock, metal, Judas Priest, photons, alliteration or anything else. The closer that matter gets to a singularity, the more the laws of physics fail, eventually collapsing entirely.' (Introduction)
'Einstein’s theory of general relativity states that matter can cataclysmically implode, creating a state where a given density and the space-time curvature split towards infinite values. This is referred to as a singularity, or – as it is known to ordinary folk – a black hole. Extending out from a black hole’s unfathomably dense centre and extraordinary gravitational pull is a finite volume of space that ends in an event horizon: a demarcation – a line in the cosmic sands – from which nothing inside can escape: not rock, metal, Judas Priest, photons, alliteration or anything else. The closer that matter gets to a singularity, the more the laws of physics fail, eventually collapsing entirely.' (Introduction)
'There has been a rich history of anthologising Australian poetry this far into the twenty-first century. This article claims that contemporary poetics, with a renewed focus on the recoprocal relation between cultural and linguistic inquiry, can rediscover alternative ways of reading the history of Australian avant-garde, inventive and experimental work. Considering several key anthologies published after the turn of last century, the article provides readings of both the frameworks the anthology-makers provide and the poems themselves, claiming that mark, trace and lexical segmentivities can already be read as social. It then proposes a new possibility for an experimental anthology that might bring these facets into lived praxis: the chrestomathy.' (Publication abstract)
