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y separately published work icon Collected Poems : 1970-1998 collected work   poetry  
Issue Details: First known date: 2001... 2001 Collected Poems : 1970-1998
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Contents

* Contents derived from the Rose Bay, Sydney Eastern Harbourside, Sydney Eastern Suburbs, Sydney, New South Wales,:Brandl and Schlesinger , 2001 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
Foreword, Gig Ryan , single work criticism (p. 11-15)
Introduction, Don Anderson , single work criticism (p. 17-23)
Orange Sonnet/Imitation Orange Sonneti"oranges in my experience not yet ripe", John Forbes , single work poetry (p. 27)
Trenku Rengai"answer with no slip of the tongue", Mark O'Connor , John Forbes , single work poetry (p. 28)
Note: Author note: Written with Mark O'Connor
Am I a Door? / Six Poems Say Yesi"A sentence against humanism", John Forbes , single work poetry (p. 29-31)
On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Schemei"On the very idea of a conceptual scheme", John Forbes , single work poetry (p. 32)
Note: Appears without dedication
Herei"rims", John Forbes , single work poetry (p. 32-36)
The Venice Lettersi"`Stand roughly here' the silence was", John Forbes , single work poetry (p. 37)
A Floating Lifei"the subtle justice of a rich man", John Forbes , single work poetry (p. 38-39)
After the Bombs We Invent the Futurei"Let's paint the ideal supper on the back of", John Forbes , single work poetry (p. 40)
Adi"the pleasures of bubble", John Forbes , single work poetry (p. 41)
Admonitionsi"The happiest of cannonballs", Mark O'Connor , John Forbes , single work poetry (p. 42-43)
Note:
  • Author note: Written with Mark O'Connor.
  • A poem in 2 numbered parts.
Clear Plastic Sugari"In the frigidaire sense of the word", John Forbes , single work poetry (p. 44)
The Classical Headi"Nature in her wisdom has formed the human head", John Forbes , single work poetry (p. 45)
Four Heads and How to Do Them, John Forbes , sequence poetry (p. 45-49)
The Romantic Headi"The Romantic head begins with the hands cupped", John Forbes , single work poetry (p. 46)
The Symbolist Headi"No longer begins with even a mention of anatomy,", John Forbes , single work poetry (p. 47)
The Conceptual Headi"The breeze moves", John Forbes , single work poetry (p. 48-49)
T.V.i"don't bother telling me about the programs", John Forbes , single work poetry (p. 50)
Ode to Tropical Skiingi"After breakfast in the Philippines", John Forbes , single work poetry (p. 51-52)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

    • Rose Bay, Sydney Eastern Harbourside, Sydney Eastern Suburbs, Sydney, New South Wales,: Brandl and Schlesinger , 2001 .
      image of person or book cover 8230451668985609698.jpg
      Image courtesy of publisher's website.
      Extent: 264p.
      Description: port.
      Note/s:
      • Photograph on page 2 by Sandy Scheltema, courtesy of the Age.
      ISBN: 1876040270

Works about this Work

Essential Gossip : Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan and U.S.-Australian Poetics Brendan Casey , 2023 single work criticism
— Appears in: Cordite Poetry Review , 1 February no. 108 2023;

'In 1985, when the bulky anthology Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia, Europe and Oceania (first published in 1968) was printed in a new edition, it was advertised with the curious dust jacket recommendation: ‘hailed by the Los Angeles Times Book Review as one of the hundred most recommended American books of the last thirty-five years’. The volume’s inclusion on this list is remarkable, for, as an anthology of world poetry, it is not in any simple or traditional sense an ‘American book.’ Its opening sequence, titled ‘Origins and Namings,’ includes selections drawn from Central Australian Arrernte song cycles, passages of the Chinese I Ching and text from a shrine to Tutankhamun, all carefully organised to mirror the narrative and themes of the Biblical genesis myth (5-45). But for the Los Angeles Times Book Review, the anthology’s status as an ‘American book’ rests on the credentials of collection’s poet-editor, Jerome Rothenberg, who not only selected and arranged these foreign texts, but appended each with his own copious annotations and explanatory notes. Indeed, as Rothenberg contends in a Foreword to the collection, it is from his position as an anthologist that he rescues various religious or anthropological works, claiming them for genre of poetry. His insight, as one reviewer puts it, was twofold: that ‘poetry could be drawn from ritualistic experiences, chants, incantations, and shamanic visions that originated in Africa, Asia, Oceania, or within Native American groups’ and that ‘cutting-edge (American) avant-garde poetic advances (find) unexpected resonances in these ancient texts’ (Marmer). John Vernon concurs, describing Rothenberg’s anthology as having ‘all the earmarks (…) of a search for land, that is, a search for America, for an American tradition’ (825). For Rothenberg, contemporary American poetry must act as a creative archaeology of geography and origins: U.S. poets, he suggested, were not only reckoning with their present or future, but also re-staging their relation to the history of world poetry.'  (Introduction)

What I’m Reading Elena Gomez , 2019 single work column
— Appears in: Meanjin Online 2019;
Tricked Myth-Machines : Self-Mythologising in the Poetry of John Forbes and Ted Berrigan Duncan Hose , 2011 single work criticism
— Appears in: Refashioning Myth : Poetic Transformations and Metamorphoses 2011; (p. 163-181)
'...Duncan Hose examines the personal mythopoeic tendencies of John Forbes and Ted Berrigan "as a synthetic poetic praxis of mythography and mythopoesis; that is, a constant rereading and re-writing of one's own myths." The everyday and the mythological are thus seen to enter into a dialectical exchange even as Berrigan's collage method works against self-mythologising. Hose claims that Forbes's poetry reminds us "that our everyday thinking, our being interpellated as subjects by our culture, our families, our literature, places us immanently within the processes and logic of myth." He identifies, in these poets' work, a tension between identity/Self as a composite product of myth and the active production of the Self through myth.' (Source: Introduction pp. 4-5)
Smooth and Troubled Passages Across the Pacific Kevin Hart , 2010 single work criticism
— Appears in: Reading Across the Pacific : Australia-United States Intellectual Histories 2010; (p. 119-148)
'How do American poets see Australia in their poems? How do Australian poets see America in their poems? These two questions are answered in part by attention to several poets on either side of the Pacific. In America: Karl Shapiro, Herbert Morris, John Ashbery, John Koethe, August Kleinzahler. And in Australia: Les Murray, John Forbes, John Tranter, Robert Adamson and Robert Gray.' (Authors's abstract)
Instruction for an Ideal Australian : John Forbes’s Poetry of Metaphysical Etiquette Duncan Hose , 2010 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , Special Issue 2010;
'The question of value in poetry or poetry of value often resolves to a question of metaphysics: what goes in to a poem or how it carries its symbolic freight will tell of the poetics involved in the practice, more particularly how the poem might function as a specular technology. Crudely, we might say that some poems are written as paeans to the ephemera of the world by a sovereign soul that is tonally and formally certain of a metaphysical guarantee (even in the expression of uncertainty), either through theosophy, 'pious self-regard,' or just good luck. There are other poems, not pagan exactly, but which seem to have an appetite for the material-historical circumstances of the world in which they find themselves, that go for the world in its lurid contingency, where there might be a wilful and cheeky inclusion of things that are not only ephemeral but redundant to good taste, thereby threatening the traditional sacred territory of the poetic itself.
By way of luxuriating in the habitus of his work, this paper argues that the poetry of John Forbes presents a reformed metaphysic of surfaces that, far from flattening 'deeper' concerns of literature, offers a new kind of etiquette for the spirit by which our perception, symbolic inception, and response to the world is a constant kind of poesis, or creative production of our selves that is at once more lively and Ideally less delusional. It will examine Forbes's conception of poetry as the ultimate technology for regulating and playing with the processes of self-mythologising by fiercely interrogating the symbolic economies, or the textural architectonics of communities, from which selves are made and through which they are cultivated as beings of language.' (Author's abstract)
Forbes Reveals His Mixed Poetic Heritage Angus Nicholls , 2002 single work review
— Appears in: Antipodes , June vol. 16 no. 1 2002; (p. 86-87)

— Review of Collected Poems : 1970-1998 John Forbes , 2001 collected work poetry
[Review] Collected Poems : 1970-1998 Lyn McCredden , 2002 single work review
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 1 no. 2002; (p. 106-108)

— Review of Collected Poems : 1970-1998 John Forbes , 2001 collected work poetry
Talented, Oblique Chronicler of our National Mores Geoff Page , 2001 single work review
— Appears in: The Canberra Times , 18 August 2001; (p. 16)

— Review of Collected Poems : 1970-1998 John Forbes , 2001 collected work poetry
Listen to the Maker & Breaker, Watching & Singing Peter Steele , 2001 single work review
— Appears in: The Sydney Morning Herald , 29-30 September 2001; (p. 17)

— Review of Collected Poems : 1970-1998 John Forbes , 2001 collected work poetry
Man at Work David McCooey , 2001 single work review
— Appears in: Eureka Street , October vol. 11 no. 8 2001; (p. 40-41)

— Review of Collected Poems : 1970-1998 John Forbes , 2001 collected work poetry
On Looking into The Collected John Forbes i "I was getting", Nigel Roberts , 2008 single work poetry
— Appears in: The Age , 17 May 2008; (p. 29) The Best Australian Poetry 2009 2009; (p. 66-67)
Instruction for an Ideal Australian : John Forbes’s Poetry of Metaphysical Etiquette Duncan Hose , 2010 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , Special Issue 2010;
'The question of value in poetry or poetry of value often resolves to a question of metaphysics: what goes in to a poem or how it carries its symbolic freight will tell of the poetics involved in the practice, more particularly how the poem might function as a specular technology. Crudely, we might say that some poems are written as paeans to the ephemera of the world by a sovereign soul that is tonally and formally certain of a metaphysical guarantee (even in the expression of uncertainty), either through theosophy, 'pious self-regard,' or just good luck. There are other poems, not pagan exactly, but which seem to have an appetite for the material-historical circumstances of the world in which they find themselves, that go for the world in its lurid contingency, where there might be a wilful and cheeky inclusion of things that are not only ephemeral but redundant to good taste, thereby threatening the traditional sacred territory of the poetic itself.
By way of luxuriating in the habitus of his work, this paper argues that the poetry of John Forbes presents a reformed metaphysic of surfaces that, far from flattening 'deeper' concerns of literature, offers a new kind of etiquette for the spirit by which our perception, symbolic inception, and response to the world is a constant kind of poesis, or creative production of our selves that is at once more lively and Ideally less delusional. It will examine Forbes's conception of poetry as the ultimate technology for regulating and playing with the processes of self-mythologising by fiercely interrogating the symbolic economies, or the textural architectonics of communities, from which selves are made and through which they are cultivated as beings of language.' (Author's abstract)
Smooth and Troubled Passages Across the Pacific Kevin Hart , 2010 single work criticism
— Appears in: Reading Across the Pacific : Australia-United States Intellectual Histories 2010; (p. 119-148)
'How do American poets see Australia in their poems? How do Australian poets see America in their poems? These two questions are answered in part by attention to several poets on either side of the Pacific. In America: Karl Shapiro, Herbert Morris, John Ashbery, John Koethe, August Kleinzahler. And in Australia: Les Murray, John Forbes, John Tranter, Robert Adamson and Robert Gray.' (Authors's abstract)
Tricked Myth-Machines : Self-Mythologising in the Poetry of John Forbes and Ted Berrigan Duncan Hose , 2011 single work criticism
— Appears in: Refashioning Myth : Poetic Transformations and Metamorphoses 2011; (p. 163-181)
'...Duncan Hose examines the personal mythopoeic tendencies of John Forbes and Ted Berrigan "as a synthetic poetic praxis of mythography and mythopoesis; that is, a constant rereading and re-writing of one's own myths." The everyday and the mythological are thus seen to enter into a dialectical exchange even as Berrigan's collage method works against self-mythologising. Hose claims that Forbes's poetry reminds us "that our everyday thinking, our being interpellated as subjects by our culture, our families, our literature, places us immanently within the processes and logic of myth." He identifies, in these poets' work, a tension between identity/Self as a composite product of myth and the active production of the Self through myth.' (Source: Introduction pp. 4-5)
Foreword Gig Ryan , 2001 single work criticism
— Appears in: Collected Poems : 1970-1998 2001; (p. 11-15)
Last amended 14 May 2019 09:52:56
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