Cirrus@Austlit

'There could be no more apt place or no-place to read Corey Wakeling’s Uncle of Cats than in an hotel room in the American Midwest, rain outside, sudden sunlight, rain resumes. Here, time feels to be suspended and shuffles in cloud strata while bursts of indignation skitter from the TV. Now-time arrives as arbitrary markers slicing through no-time, making for a jump-cut prosody. Wakeling’s poems acknowledge, in passing, since all is in passing, those past and present stars that still deliver, now and then, ‘formerly inconsecutive’ lines. They shift as light girders, constructions, blinking from Ted Berrigan, Tom Raworth as well as Modernist Japanese poets.' (Introduction)   

'Formally consecutive but radically paratactical, these lines are never let loose portentously to dilate. While Wakeling's poems may aim to nullify Larkin and bog men, archaeologies of cultural inheritance, neither do the poems' Japanese intertexts serve any smug distortion from empty mind to Western mindfulness, a 'porcelain pseudo-history' glazed with ego delusory in vaunted self-denial.

'That's what these poems offer old lyric technology turning against its partiality to lull, to wrap up, the poems are fast as ice. I go outside and at the top of the street, it is bitterly cold and at the bottom sweltering, humid. Here is the street, here is the weather at every extreme. Transit becomes transit.' John Wilkinson' (Publication summary)

'Elegiac poems by Australian late modernist poet Martin Johnston (1947–90) expose key anxieties about lyric poetry after American mid-century late modernism. Johnston, like other of his contemporaries, experimented with elegy in order to rethink the lyric in ways conscious of innovative mid-century and post-1960s developments from American poetry. Johnston’s discomfort with elegy and the elegiac tradition, and his subsequent effort to expand upon the concept of the dead poet since romanticism using social poetics, illuminate wider tendencies in late modernist poetics shared with other Australian peers. This essay insists that the late modernist question of social poetics can be studied via the tentative process the antipodean poet Johnston adopts in his complex relationship to elegiac lyric.' (Publication abstract) 

'This chapter outlines how the 1970s brought radical expression, new explorations of poetic persona, and increasing belief in the poet’s role to advocate for rights and freedoms. It argues that anthologies seeking to capture the zeitgeist failed to do so, sometimes due to using frameworks borrowed from North America that elided local diversity. The chapter asserts that small press culture constituted a provisional, heterogeneous commons that undid traditional definitions of authorship and form, and offered a space to air the previously taboo. It traces the turn to America as well as to popular culture, other media, and documentary. Through an examination of Michael Dransfield’s reception, it demonstrates how umbrella terms delimit complex individual poetics while demonstrating affiliations in Dransfield’s self-examination with contemporaries like Pam Brown, Nigel Roberts, and Vicki Viidkikas. The chapter also considers the impact of the first anthology of women’s poetry, Mother, I’m Rooted. It redresses the elision of its editor, Kate Jennings, from other anthologies and critical framings of the period, as well as the marginalisation of Kevin Gilbert.'

Source: Abstract.