Cirrus@Austlit

'There is a story told in Svetlana Alexievich’s Chernobyl Prayer I’ve never been able to forget. It’s about a cameraman who longed for a medal. This cameraman had read a lot of Hemingway, and he knew from his reading that war makes you real, so he went into the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Zone of Alienation to do some filming. This was soon after the explosion, when the place was being ‘cleaned’ and the people were being evacuated. He saw villagers washing the roofs of the buildings and Soviet workers burying the very soil of the place deep in the soil. He saw cattle being shot and the bulldozers that had dug a giant trench to bury the cattle. Everything went deep into the ground.' (Introduction)   

'Jeanine Leane and I met in the Spring of 2022 to plot this interview over coffee. Jeanine has a quick, ferocious intelligence that moves associatively, while her fingers make languid circles in her hair. She is fine-boned and extremely upright. The day we met, she wore a fitted, double-breasted greatcoat with military detailing that flared at the waist. She told me she picked it up in Cambridge, England, on a day she was there as an invited speaker. After the talk, she said, while walking along the rigidly manicured paths of the Cambridge campus, she stopped to gesture at a flowering bush and was instantly policed by a porter, one of those grounds-guards in bowler hats who keep non-fellows from walking on the grass. ‘Do you know what day it is?’ Jeanine said to the porter. ‘It’s invasion day today, in so-called Australia. I’ll point at any flower I please.’' (Introduction)

'Every poet has his or her addictions: words they use over and over again, ones they own ‘by right of obsessive musical deed’ (to quote Richard Hugo). For Emily Dickinson, it was thee, thou, and Death. For Sylvia Plath, it was him, nothing, go, and gone. For Gabriel García Lorca, it was sangre, lagrimas, negro, and corazón. For Jordie Albiston, it just might be world, the word that aims to contain everything.'  (Introduction)

'Madrid, Spain 2019. The end of the UN Climate Change Conference--another moral failure on the part of those who could have made change. I go back to the labour union hall that all the activist groups have been using as a headquarters to help with the clean-up. There are only a few of us left. I take on the communal kitchen and bin heads of broccoli gone to dusty seed and half-used jars of slimy lima beans. I wash towers of greasy plastic cups with cold water and floor cleaner, because that's all there is. The door to the room that held the expensive sound equipment has been broken--no, not just broken, but thoroughly smashed. There is talk of a missing key, something lost in translation. The word 'smithereens' comes to mind.

'In a back room littered with cardboard and paint tins, I find a giant papier-mache head of a grandmother that First Nations activists fashioned for their part in the climate march. Alone in the echoing halls, it feels like silence and time are demanding something of me--an act of great care--though I don't know how to rise to it. The crisis is upon us, but abstraction is a bulwark; deafness, everywhere. We have come to an edge. I want to find a way of taking the truth into my body, and then putting it down into the ground. From somewhere offstage, a misery of voices starts to murmur in the scrounge. What starts up is a grief work. I wrap the grandmother head in a pall of plastic sheeting and carry it across the city to Desperate Literature bookshop in the rain.' (Publication summary)

'These days, poetry is primarily a visual experience. So claims the American poet and theorist Cole Swensen, whose essay ‘To Writewithize’ argues for a new definition of ekphrasis. Traditionally understood to be writing about visual art, ekphrasis typically has a poet stand across from a painting or sculpture, in a kind of face-off, and write about it. To ‘writewithize’, however, is to take a different approach: this is not writing made about art but made with it. This is writing that, in Swensen’s words, ‘lives with the work and its disturbances’. Two new Vagabond releases by Bella Li and LK Holt are doing ekphrastic and intertextual work that is exquisitely disturbing. These are moody books of allusion and visual play by two of Melbourne’s most brilliant poets.' (Introduction)

'When I was a kid, Warlpiri people were an idea, a story, a mythology that hung on the walls and in the air around the dinner table when my dad would talk about his childhood at Yuendumu. He was kindergarten age when he ran inside the mission house, forgetting to pull his shoes on at the door as per my grandmother's rules, and announced, 'We caught a lizard, mummy, and we ate it. Don't worry, Charlie picked the poos out.' Darling anecdotes like this pepper my grandmother's mission diaries. In one entry, my dad as a toddler narrates an imaginary trip to Alice Springs: 'T'rific dust ... I got bogged ... shot a kangaroo with my 303.'' (Introduction)

'Seeking to fully know the other can have the effect of minimising the wholly different gestalt of the other’s lifeworld. This mode of knowing can thereby be a means of reduction, generalisation, possession, and control. In this essay, the author analyses a contemporary ethnography of Warlpiri women’s song-poems, Jardiwanpa Yawulyu: Warlpiri Women’s Songs from Yuendumu (2014). This ethnography is theorised as a mode of open text that animates a collision of epistemologies: those of Western settler culture, and those of the Warlpiri women who collaboratively authored the book. The author emphasises the cultural lenses that she brings to the intellectual and emotional work of reflexive close reading, and insists that her own position as whitefella, settler, Westerner, combined with the necessary partiality of the text, renders her incapable of any sort of comprehensive access to the ‘total poem,’ the ritual situation, which the
book represents.'

Source: Abstract.

'Two very recent books by two mid-career Melbourne poets offer distinct intellectual gymnasiums in which to lift and push and run and sweat. I may not have been able to master these books, but they knocked the breath out of me.' (Introduction)

'These poems were written across 2016 when Kevin Brophy was living in the remote community of Mulan, home to the Walmajarri speaking custodians of the Indigenous Protected Area (IPA) around Lake Paruku (Lake Gregory in many maps) in Western Australia.'  (Introduction)

'The classic lyric preoccupation with interiority, and how internal life touches and changes the outside world, finds expression in two recent collections of poetry: Fiona Wright’s Domestic Interior and Carolyn Abbs’s The Tiny Museums. In both collections, the speakers draw the shapes of their internal furniture, while building monuments to the intimate scenes and common spaces that define them.' (Introduction)

'The intricate and inscrutable workings of Central Desert Law and mythopoesis continue to hold sway over the Australian settler imagination. We are moved to vertigo by the vibrating fields of dot paintings, and the brutal exploits of Dreaming heroes suggest enigmatic codes for social behaviour and care of country. Those of us who feel affronted and sorrowed by the ongoing colonial suppressions of Indigenous sovereignty, such as the Northern Territory Intervention, may wish to deepen our understanding or be an ally. Our anger is fueled by our imperfect intuition of the deep knowledge of the land held by Central Desert peoples. However, navigating the ethical and political space between settler, or kardiya, and Central Desert Aboriginal, or yapa, remains fraught. One of the under-sung guides to working in this intercultural space is the psychoanalyst, scholar, and poet Crag San Roque. San Roque's intercultural work might help kardiya understand how an inherited cultural framework can obscure our capacity to fully understand the Aboriginal lifeworld. Reflexive in philosophy, exploratory in intention, and privileging the imagination above all, San Roque's work is unique among those working in, and with, Central Desert communities.' (Introduction)