Ruby Street

I just found an old essay, commissioned by an organisation but never published (slight grump), on the poetry of Judith Wright and, specifically, her Collected Poems. It's a bit overviewy, as that was the commission, however, considering that I'm thinking at the moment about domestic space, intimacy and ecopoetics, these few paragraphs seem to contain some useful reference points. So, here's the extract: "If the poems in Judith Wright’s Collected Poems are approached in a way that does not seek to read Wright simply through themes of, for instance, landscape and nature or dub her as an activist poet or a lyric poet, solely, the poems can offer a broader field for exploration. The poems of her later years, such as the rather spare poems reproduced from the book Alive, allow a focus on the primariness of the lived space, of dwelling and intimacy with non-human space and place. This is exemplified in the long poem sequence ‘Habitat’ in which the poet, among other thing...

I think nearly all my most recent writing has something to do with how ‘the local’, gender and intimacy intersect in a kind of ecopoetics. That ‘something’, of course, can take many different forms, however, at least in my mind, remains connected to those ideas, even if tenuously. I’m not exactly sure what a suburban queer ecopoetics might look like, in general, but to my mind, it’s what I’m doing in my own way. In other words, how apparently mundane locations of ecological shifting and climate change/breakdown can figure in a poetry that recollects or reimagines embodied (human and non-human) locatedness and intimacy. If that doesn’t sound too stodgy. It was certainly what I had in mind with my most recent book, last year’s Viva the Real (UQP 2018), as well as in my previous book, Brink (Five Islands Press 2017). And it is what I’ve tried to work through, making the personal even more personal as well as historical (more on this later), in a new manuscript that’s in deve...

There are many ways to lose your nerve. Let's not count them. If you can accept working the flux, and not being branded. Disregard may save you. If you have the nerve.

There's a couple of newish poems of mine that have been up for a little while at the OzKo edition of Cordite . Both are, essentially, untitled, but a 'title' was needed for publication. Oh, the limitations of coding. They are part of a longer series of untitled poems I've been working. It's odd, as I've always championed poets paying close attention to their titles but for this series I have simply capitalised the first three words of each poem. Magazine editors, either online or in print, really don't like it. Interesting.

it is the centre of a word that is unimaginable, almost as it flutters out with the birds indifferent over the lake (from ‘Winged’ in Broken/Open )

Poems are composed in doubt. The making is not just about choices but about fear, anxiety, resistance, about what is not done as much as about what is done or made.

under-done, undetermined, or under-determined oversighted, or over-shot mission, or misinterpreted shadowing, or shadowy attention, or attentive gratify, or grace regard, or regardless refuge, refuse, refute, re-fuse

What are the other intimacies?

Prepositions and position : Placing in place. Writing about placing, not place. Is here a place? Pronouns and position . " ... certain words of a sentence - prepositions, connectives, pronouns - belong up toward full consciousness, while strange and unused words appear only in subconscious. ... in dream the simple and familiar words like prepositions, connectives, etc. are not absent, in fact, noticeably present to show illogical absurdity, discontinuity, parody of sanity." Lorine Niedecker to Harriet Monroe

No-one knows the future, of poetry.

Some hot discussion on the 'new lyric' in Australian poetry over at Pam Brown 's new place for talkin' about poetry. Questions Pam put up for discussion: How much does the concept of the new Aussie lyric have to do with formalism? How different is this new Aussie lyric from the earlier notion of lyric as an instrument of personal expression? Is the new Aussie lyric consciously engaged in thought and its processes in language? Is this re-emergence of the lyrical a trend against/an escape from recent movements and influences in poetry? Could the new lyrical engage with notions of authenticity (originality/faking), appropriation (copying) involving the persona of the poet? Someone added an extra question backchannel which Pam placed upfront: "I wondered if an extra question could be added (which you imply up front), about the gendering of this new eruption." and Pam proposed a further question in the comments: "I wonder why there is never any wit, anything f...

Non-compliant. Disloyal. Not making exclusive claims. Non-singular vision. Inconsistent. Non-hierarchical. Non-categorical. To make meaning work - not tied up, and definitely living in the world (not a closed loop): ‘A composition of the prolonged present is a natural composition in the world’ - Gertrude Stein. [The ‘prolonged’ is as much the point as the present, to me. As is ‘in the world’.]

What if there were no signs, and you took a wrong turning and made a mistake? What if signs were no longer important?

senses more than one

Andrew Burke has been encouraging poets to post some comment on the composition of one of their poems. So, finally, I got around to doing something on my prose poem While All This is Going On .

The map of the city almost means itself, flattened in my hand, almost but never flat. Ridges of cartographic data made by folding. How will the line fold here?

I've been sifting all my life. Who knows what you're looking for: pageants of failures staged on memory television. That may be reality or an exit strategy (by you or whose army). That's it: a list, warnings, a series of dreams.

The real becomes part of the words. They are said, they are written. What becomes history is one lead. Emotion is another. What is more unreliable?

"... an empty drawer is unimaginable. It can only be thought of." Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space , Beacon Press, Boston, 1964, p. xxxiii.

And just some bits and pieces before the year ends, mainly a bit of skiting. 4W 18 , which was published in November, featured the winner of the Booranga Prize for best poem in the issue , which was none other than me, myself, I. To read the winning poem, The Beautiful Anxiety , you'll have to buy the mag for the moment. But here's a taste: ... and distinguish the cold of it, dropt on sun shadows within the petrochemical hum it’s erotic scent, a ghost of ash passing stars, and a kind of subliminal speech among legends of flowers and birds, roses ... - from 'The Beautiful Anxiety', Jill Jones *** Also, the annual Newcastle Poetry Prize was announced in December. No, I did not win that one - the winner was Mark Treddinick for his poem Eclogues - but two of my poems were included in the anthology. Again, you should get the anthology for the whole nine metres, but here's a line or nine from mine: ... The birds do not care which is why we watch them. Rather than knot u...