Cirrus@Austlit

Source: Abstract.

'Drawing on media such as musical notation, Carruthers writes in vertical verse stanzas that can be read in any direction; recalling the the palindromic poems in the Chinese poetic tradition, they challenge the dominant linear mode of thinking and writing in the West. Z book 3 is the third book in the AXIS series, a lifelong project begun in 2011.' (Publication summary)

'Book 2 is made of 3 microbooks – Blazar, Chorastics, Disk – & comprises 30 poems in total. Blazars; black hole objects with jet axes pointing towards earth. Chorastics; a chorus, a human cluster. Disk; the shape of some galaxies but also a compact storage device. Each microbook; equal number of lines for each register. Blazar in 3 registers (258 lines), Chorastics in 4 (680 lines), Disk in 5 (360). Ends with music.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

For well over two decades now, since the middle 1990s, Mez Breeze (born Mary-Anne Breeze), has remained at the forefront of digital and electronic poetics over a period of time in which its basic functions morphed or were variously updated. A full `cyberbibliography' of her career, from older work with `net.art narratives, through what she has thought of as the "Golden Phase of Mezangelle," to her work on games like #PRISOM (2013), will turn up a vast and evolving ouevre with recurrent strands. Her most well-known invention is the generative language of "Mezangelle," which uses code, MUD (Multi-User-Domain), online chatlogs, avatars, JavaScript and HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) as procedural, linguistic and textural means, and ends, for poetics. The result is an absorptive and playful reworking of these into poems and, as I will pay special attention to here, sequences of poems. Breeze's writingways share topoi that interweave the digital and ethics, language and ecology, the abstraction of contemporary life and what she described to me in an email as "A sense of sP[I]ace collapsing + concertinaed comprehension-nesting, of contractions and expansions." Such writing is situated in spatial locales both matrixial and fractal; "shaped by my own personal intrigue with language and the land, of openings within openings, of lingual whorls and patterns that blossom + contract." ' (Introduction) 
 

'The critical study of Australian poetics has often been unable to account for those more difficult limit-cases in neo-avant-garde and contemporary experimental poetry. This article examines the heterogeneous works of Jas H.Duke (1939-1992) as both resolving and opening up further contradictions around questions of "derivation" in antipodal experimental writing. Duke's poetics, performances and writing practices are informed by Dadaism, Expressionism, Suprematism and Concrete Poetry, but also rework these histories; sometimes sarcastically, but always with close attention to their aesthetics. I put a special focus on those works of Duke's that critique notions of Australian nationhood, public policy and cultural assumptions, poems which call for a localised yet transcultural avant-garde poetics. Implicit here is that critical study of Australian poetry must begin to make sense of its languages of invention, and to find ways of reading those poetries that call for a more total emancipation of disjunction.' (Publication abstract)

'From shell to kernel and kernel to shell: poetry of this guise is not referential toward or unto an external event because the poem itself is an event. Internal meaning plus intrinsic structure: whether much or nothing "happens" in a poem is of secondary concern. If nothing seems to be happening, critics may pay close attention. How extrinsic reversals occur in rhythm and rhythmic concepts of the poem is how outscape moves to outstress.' (Publication abstract)

'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)