Jacinta Le Plastrier

Jacinta Le Plastrier reviews 'The Weekly Poem' by Jordie Albiston

noreply@blogger.com (Jacinta Le Plastrier) — Thu, 02 Jul 2015 05:01:00 +0000

From 'Australian Book Review', May issue

Jacinta Le Plastrier reviews 'The Weekly Poem' edited by Jordie Albiston

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JACINTA LE PLASTRIER

Published in May 2015, no. 371

THE WEEKLY POEM: 52 EXERCISES IN CLOSED AND OPEN FORMS

edited by Jordie Albiston

Puncher & Wattman, $29.95 pb, 183 pp, 9781922186577

Jacinta Le Plastrier

Jacinta Le Plastrier is a Melbourne-based poet, writer, editor, and publisher. Her poetry collection, The Book of Skins, will be...

By this contributor

Flair

Discussing the genesis of a poem, W.H. Auden told Paris Review that at any given time he had two things on his mind: ‘a theme that interests me and a problem of verbal form, meter, diction, etc. The theme looks for the right form; the form looks for the right theme. When the two come together, I am able to start writing.’ Australian poet Jordie Albiston’s The Weekly Poem, comprising fifty-two one-poem-per-week exercises, is a guide designed around such a synthesis. Able to be used by individual poets or set by teachers for creative writing students, each exercise marries a theme with the task of adhering to Albiston’s instructions and the formal concerns for that week.

One theme of ‘a swim or dive’ is to be explored through blank verse (in iambic pentameter), written as a single stanza which is also ‘a sustained piece of poetic description’, to a maximum length of twenty-four lines. Alongside weeks devoted to subjects such as ‘Sonnet (Petrarchan)’ or ‘Sonnet (Shakespearean)’, there are looser, more ‘open’ investigations. Each exercise is supported by selections of existing poems for recommended reading; one or more of these are reproduced. This curating is a reflection of Albiston’s formidable command of poetic technique, both in her theoretical understanding of it, and in the way it can be employed in the actual creation of a poem, as attested to across her own oeuvre of eight poetry collections to date.

While the focus in these selections is on poems by Australian poets, there are also selections from overseas poets and seminal masters of poetry in English. In this regard, The Weekly Poem can also be enjoyed as a wonderful anthology, thrumming with poems that are alive to this diverse art. There is a highly useful glossary of essential poetic terms.

NEW JOHN LEONARD PRESS TITLES AND UPDATE

noreply@blogger.com (Jacinta Le Plastrier) — Fri, 14 Nov 2014 02:35:00 +0000

It's been a wonderful few months At John Leonard Press. Two new titles, created as three-books bound into one (following the US style), have been published, 'A Hunger' by Petra White in August, and 'Keeps' by LK Holt in October. Both were supported by Australia Council Literature Board funding, as our last 12 titles have been in the past four years. 'A Hunger' has been reviewed well by 'Australian Poetry Review' and the 'Sydney Morning Herald' and more are to come. 'Keeps' has just now been sent to reviewers. Both books are produced to JLP's abiding standards of excellence, design and tactile beauty, designed by Sophie Gaur. For more info, go to www.johnleonardpress.com In terms of sales and increased profile for the Press, it was important news in 2015 with the listing of two titles for VCE Literature 2015-2020. Sales have been strong for the two books, Robert Gray's Collected, 'Cumulus', and the anthology of younger Australian poets, ed. John Leonard, 'Young Poets: An Australian Anthology', with numerous schools already having ordered them for the first year. Poets and I will be going into schools to talk about both the Anthology and the writing and publishing of poetry generally. Part of the inspiration here is to ignite the spark in younger writers and readers. These orders followan event the Press organised in early August at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne, with Australian Poetry, to promote the book and readings to teachers at large. The free event was also open to the public. Kevin Brophy's New & Selected, 'Walking,', published late last year has also sold well and we have just put it into reprint. It was also shortlisted for the 2014 WA Premier's Prize. Both 'Cumulus' and 'Young Poets' have also been reprinted due to their sales. Reviews on Paul Magee's 'Stone Postcard' have also been numerous and positive, including in 'Australian Book Review' and 'Mascara Literary Review'. Links to all reviews are on the Press' website - which has also been recently relaunched. On a personal front, I have also returned to book reviewing, with articles this year for 'Australian Book Review', 'Australian Poetry Journal' and 'Mascara Literary Review', along with having had the opportunity to have written and published a number of articles on poetry, writers and poets for Managing Editor Kent MacCarter at Cordite Poetry Review's 'Guncotton' blog.

THE WRITING 2: SARAH HOLLAND-BATT

noreply@blogger.com (Jacinta Le Plastrier) — Tue, 07 Oct 2014 04:49:00 +0000

Jacinta Le Plastrier and Sarah Holland-Batt
The Writing: Sarah Holland-Batt

10 September 2014

Australian poet Sarah Holland-Batt, b. 1982 in Queensland, grew up in Australia and America and also writes fiction and criticism. She was a Fulbright Scholar at New York University where she attained an M.F.A, and is currently a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literary Studies at the Queensland University of Technology and the new poetry editor of Island. Her 2008 book Aria (UQP) won multiple major awards, including the Arts ACT Judith Wright Prize, and was also shortlisted and in the NSW Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry. She has also been a MacDowell Fellow and an Australia Council Literature Resident at the B.R. Whiting Studio in Rome. Her next collection, The Hazards, will be published by UQP in June 2015.

Jacinta Le Plastrier: What is your current poetry project?

Sarah Holland-Batt: I don’t really have poetic projects, per se; my poems come to me one by one, often on fairly unrelated subjects. Lately I’ve been writing a fair bit about visual art; I’ve been particularly interested in works that engage with acts of violence by women, from Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes to contemporary works. Truly clever ekphrastic poems are difficult to do well, although when they do work, they can tilt the axis on which we view the original slightly. I like that challenge. I also like that they demand a long engagement with the canvas or work; I find that sustained act of looking, and of translating the visual into language, pleasurable. I’m also in the early stages of working on a novel, which is a different affair entirely—one I am, for the moment, enjoying. It initially felt like a relief to escape into prose, although its demands are catching up with me now.

JLP: I read that you worked and studied with Sharon Olds on this MS at NYU. Can you tell us a little about that experience? Which also leads to a general question about how much you revise and edit your work with the assistance or feedback of others?

SHB: I studied with several poets I admire enormously at NYU—among them Charles Simic, James Fenton and Yusef Komunyakaa—and I was very lucky to work on the manuscript of my forthcoming book, The Hazards, with Sharon Olds. Sharon is both a stupendous poet and a generous and attentive reader, the rare kind that is able to focus on the poem and poet at hand. I feel very lucky to have spent time with a poet I admire so much. We’re very different kinds of writers, and we didn’t always see eye to eye aesthetically, but I have always loved the kind of intellectual frisson that comes from those disagreements. In general, though, I revise and edit my work almost wholly by myself; I’m not part of any writer’s groups, and I don’t feel the need for much assistance or feedback. My poems go through many, many drafts, and I discard and abandon far more than I publish. It helps that I’m incredibly hard on myself, that I’m essentially animated by doubt. You have to be.

JLP: Why do you think you write poetry? Were there early formative moments which influenced this choice?

SHB: I knew from when I was quite young that I would become an artist of one sort or another. There is a strong artistic bent on the English side of my family; my grandfather was a watercolourist, my father an amateur composer, and our house when I was young was always full of music and my grandfather’s paintings. My early ambition was to be a classical pianist, and I studied that intensively for many years; I do miss the discipline of that now that I’ve given it up. I came to poetry and poetics as a teenager, when I read Wallace Stevens, Eliot and Whitman at high school in Colorado. I understood the music of their poems before I understood the poems themselves, and I responded to it viscerally. Poetry for me has always consequently been a musical undertaking; there’s a mathematical pleasure in the patterns of language for me, just as there is in listening to, or playing, Bach. Intellectually, too, I love the challenge of distilling complex ideas into the small machine of the poem.

JLP: What is your rhythm for writing? I mean, do you work at set times, on set days? Or is it more organic than that for you? And … where do you work?

SHB: I like writing at night while drinking a gin martini. Unfortunately, life isn’t always like a Fitzgerald novel, so sometimes I have to make do with less than perfect circumstances. I prefer writing away from home, in cafes, bars, hotel rooms—there’s something about the anonymity of those public spaces that makes it easier for me to hear myself think. As far as routines go, I don’t believe those people who say that poetry is a job like any other job, and you have to be disciplined: write for four hours in the morning, that sort of thing. That’s absurd. Poetry is art, and art is mercurial, uncooperative and testing. Some days you can do it and others you can’t. I’m not terribly prolific and I prefer it that way. I know that I really mean it when I turn to write a poem.

JLP: How do you personally keep alert for writing poetry?

SHB: I don’t know that I do. I have long fallow periods. Sometimes the best way of writing a poem is to do things that are thoroughly unrelated to writing. I get ideas when I’m reading the morning paper, running, at an art gallery, etc. I never get good ideas when I think, I really ought to sit down and write a poem.

JLP: How consciously do you set out to create and work on a poem? How do they arise for you? And how conscious might be your intentions around technique, form and rhythm, for instance?

SHB: The act of writing a poem is painful and slow for me. I don’t dash off a draft; I eke the poem out line by line, often leaving it unfinished for a few days as I whittle the basic shape of it. My poems are acts of thinking; in them I am often advancing an idea or an argument, and it often takes me days to reach my conclusion. I know that this is different for other poets, who are perhaps more impressionistic and have a more Romantic conception of their own poiesis. For me, writing poetry is a wholly conscious process and my intentions are fairly transparent to me, although they often alter considerably during the writing of the poem. I rarely end up with the poem I set out to write.

JLP: What do you use to write (ie. what tools) and how do think this might influence what is written? For example, do you hand-write drafts and then type them up, or do you work from a computer from a poem’s beginning?

SHB: I like drafting in Moleskine notebooks with a Lamy rollerball pen. I’m a creature of habit about that; I use the same notebooks and pens year in and year out. I prefer to initially write by hand because it forces my thoughts to be more considered; I can only write so fast. By contrast, when I type, my fingers can move at the speed of my brain, which produces a lot of ‘first thought, best thought’ poetry—which, for me, is not particularly considered or interesting. Once I have a rough draft in my notebook, I assemble that on my MacBook. For one, I like to see how long the lines are visually, where the spaces are, etcetera, and I also find I see the poem more objectively if it isn’t in my own hand.

JLP: Can you talk about the role of ‘poetry editor’ and how you find that to be – in context of your new role at Island?

SHB: I’ve only been in the role since May, so it’s still very new. So far, though, it’s been incredibly enjoyable. It’s amazing to be able to put brilliant new poems into print. I love reading submissions and curating an issue, seeing how different poems speak to each other. Of course, it’s also difficult at times, as there are lots of good poems out there and only so much space to work with in each issue; I’m continually confronted with an embarrassment of riches.

JLP: Can you name two or three poets (or particular poems) whose work is important to you, and why?

SHB: Elizabeth Bishop is tremendously important to me. The more I reread her poems, the more moving I find them, despite their surface coolness and control. They skirt and codify the enormous losses Bishop suffered in her life so poignantly. Bishop was unable, or unwilling, to write frankly about Lota (de Macedo Soares) in both life and death, and that devastation comes through in odd and beautiful ways. She’s also a wonderful poet of place. Her Brazil poems have certain postcard-like qualities, immensely visual and painterly, outwardly-focused, supremely clear-eyed.

Another poet who is the inverse of Bishop but who was and is formative for me is Louise Gluck. Gluck is direct where Bishop is elliptical, plain-spoken where Bishop is filigreed, forcefully declarative where Bishop is reticent, but her poems are equally intelligent and controlled. I love her entire oeuvre, but particularly the poems of her middle period (in Ararat and The Wild Iris), where she writes about the death of her father and mortality, respectively. Gluck’s poems are like pieces of Socratic reasoning; unceasingly questioning and anchored in scepticism, they eventually find a through line and snap closed with mousetrap-like logic. She has a fantastic knack of making you feel as though the incontestable truths she articulates are both wholly new and entirely familiar.

* This Q&A commissioned by and produced for Cordite Poetry Review's GUNCOTTON BLOG.

THE WRITING: BENJAMIN LAIRD

noreply@blogger.com (Jacinta Le Plastrier) — Mon, 09 Jun 2014 04:13:00 +0000

First in a new, occasional series of Q&A interviews at Cordite's GUNCOTTON blog with Australian poets on their writing practice, rhythms and inspirations.

Jacinta Le Plastrier and Benjamin Laird
The Writing: Benjamin Laird

16 May 2014

Melbourne-based Benjamin Laird writes computer programs and electronic poetry, which he discusses here in the first of a new, occasional blog series looking at the writing practice of contemporary Australian poets. Laird is also undertaking his PhD at RMIT, researching biographical and documentary poetry in programmable media. He is Site Producer for Overland and Cordite Poetry Review. One of his in progress-works is called ‘They have large eyes and can see in all directions’. The reader enters a digital space which appears like a curved diorama, then enlarges to show itself to be like a virtual circular room. The floor and walls are mosaics of text and archived newspaper articles on William Denton, a 19^th-century geologist, spiritualist and explorer, whose writing and biography inspires Laird’s poetry here. Some of it hangs and can rotate, in 3-D space, like an Alexander Calder mobile. The reader can zoom in on the many sections to read it. The title comes from a description by Denton’s sons, 19^th-century naturalists and collectors, who described lyrebrids (which they were hunting in Victoria) in these terms. The work will be viewable soon at a new website currently being built by Laird.

How do you define electronic poetry? And how did you come to work in this form?

The extremely short answer is where a computer is intrinsic to the material properties of the poem, either where a computer is used to generate poetry, or where a computer needs to be used in order to present the poetry. Even though a lot of poetry is published online and so is digital, it’s not useful to see that poetry as electronic, because it could be just as easily printed out. The definition of electronic poetry also folds out to the culture of those things related to computers.

If we look at Australian-based poets that have worked the area, there is John Tranter with Different Hands (FACP, 1998) where he used software to generate experimental, poetic fiction. There’s Mez Breeze, she writes codework. She has her own form of poetic language, called Mezangelle. And then there is earlier web-based work which began in the 1990s, ‘geniwate’ (Jenny Weight) and, at that time, Komninos, and, currently, Queensland-based Jason Nelson who is very well established internationally. This isn’t a complete list – there are many other Australian poets experimenting with what computers have to offer them. And in a lot of ways the history of the computer also has a parallel history of poets who used computers to write poetry.

It is interesting to see how even the most seemingly benign elements affect how poetry is written now. We are all constraint bound by the media we work in, so the Microsoft Word document – and in Australia its A4 page – that a number of poets are confronted with suddenly becomes a constraint. So people will think about starting to work to margins, expanding what gets printed out. If a journal size is a bit smaller than usual, the poem has to find some compromise on the actual page. When you are working in computational forms, you don’t have the A4 page as a constraint any more, but you have it in the constraints of what comes with the programming language, how you can exploit what a browser can do, or what a desktop machine can do if you are making an app. Phone app poems have constraints of the phone itself. So the actual writing of poetry becomes ‘what can I do within this media?’ – whether it’s in print or whether it is in an electronic form.

A shift in technology drives changes in poetry. The typewriter, for instance, changed poetry, let alone technologies previous to that.

I think it is a very strange thing – there are a number of programmers who are also poets who don’t, say, make digital work and who I think are exceptional … poets like Maged Zaher, an American-based Egyptian poet. He encapsulates the three things I am most interested in: politics, programming as white-collar work and poetry.

These are skills that are meant to be economically productive, and then you turn them into poetry. I started writing electronic poetry five years ago after a long break. It’s been an oscillation between technology and then literature, and then trying to synthesise them.

What is your current poetry project?

I’m writing a collection of biographical electronic poetry works on William Denton, who was a 19^th-century geologist, who travelled internationally giving public lectures on evolution and the formation of the world. He was a spiritualist, so he also toured the spiritualist circuits addressing those audiences. He was also a political radical and advocated for women’s rights and the abolition of slavery.

One of the main things he was known for was producing, with his wife, a three-volume work called The Soul of Things. (My project is called on The Code of Things.) It was on psychometry; the idea that objects have memories, so if you hold an object, you can see what it has experienced. The project will be a website, progressively developed as part of my PhD with all the works housed here.

He was English-born but lived most of his life in the US. He toured Australia and New Zealand from 1881 and died during a Melbourne Argus expedition to New Guinea.

His sons were collectors of skins and fossils. They had a 19^th-century attitude to the environment, which is to collect it. They hunted lyrebirds in Victoria, for example, which triggers subject-matter for one of the work.

The whole project is an attempt, within the six works, to represent William Denton, including his relationship with his eldest sons, and to use poetry in programmable media to create a biography.

Do you think electronic poetry is misunderstood in the literary community by both other poets and readers?

No, I don’t think so. The biggest problem is that there is not a lot of work out there. Ideally, there would be a lot more people writing this kind of poetry so it would be more natural to see it in literary journals. Last year when Overland published an electronic poetry issue it got really great responses by people who read the work and by others inspired by it. One of the challenges of creating this work is, because it’s not seen as frequently, then people who would otherwise like it are not so sure of how technically feasible it is to publish. Likewise, poets inspired to write electronic works find it difficult to know where to start.

Were there early, formative moments which influenced your writing of poetry?

I think it’s a really interesting question for poets to consider. There are many ways to work with language … so the fact that people choose poetry fascinates me because I think it is the most intimate relationship you can have with language. When I was three, I lived with my grandparents for a year. They spoke Tamil, but also spoke English (my family background is Sri Lankan). I went to a local school there (in Malaysia) and nobody spoke English. At least that is how I remember it. Only having one language in order to access the world, where that was no longer useful to me in relation to other people, was a foundational experience in terms of clarifying my idea of what language was.

So it created a sense for me that language was a thing, a material thing, and I guess the next step, beyond-using-language-naturally, was when I began to program. I had a computer quite young and programmed in high school enough to know that we had other forms of language which actually did things to machines. So there’s a sense that poems are like machines, they’re sculptured language, they’re assembled language.

What is your rhythm for writing? Do you work at set times, on set days? Or is it more organic for you? Where do you write?

I don’t have set times or rhythms in terms of working on poetry. I start with a notebook, starting with the initial poem, even if it’s an electronic work, then I will oscillate between writing and designing, assembling and programming across a work. I might also go back to the notebook.

For me, I find creation really interesting when writing a poem – you write the words, then you write it into the space, then you write the time around it. Everything needs to be meaningful in that relationship, the movement, the temporal qualities, the kinetics of the work, the spatial (where it actually occurs on the screen or within the digital space of the poem), and the semantics of the actual language involved. I mostly work at (pointing to) this desk (in doctoral offices at RMIT).

How do you keep alert for writing poetry?

I read poetry, print and electronic, as much as possible. And reading other things too: computer books, literary criticism, computer code, newspapers and corporate copy.

Can you name two or three poets (or particular poems) whose work is important to you?

In three poets I’m not even sure I could cover all the kinds of poetry. So I send instead this photo of the current collection of books on my desk. More specifically, though, I’m not sure where I’d be (in terms of poetry) if I hadn’t read Ania Walwicz, TT.O or Pam Brown.

At the moment I’m looking at quite a lot of documentary poetry and so recently read Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead, which is an incredible long poem in so many ways. And Jessica Wilkinson’s Marionette is a fantastic book that intersects the experimental with the biographical.

On the electronic poetry front, the works Nick Montfort and JR Carpenter were very significant when I started mixing code and poetry.

WHEN THEY COME FOR YOU: POETRY THAT RESISTS

noreply@blogger.com (Jacinta Le Plastrier) — Mon, 31 Mar 2014 05:22:00 +0000

Posted 11 March, at Guncotton blog for CORDITE POETRY REVIEW

Jacinta Le Plastrier
When they Come for You: Poetry that Resists

11 March 2014

Pages: 1 2

‘This machine surrounds hatred and forces it to surrender’ were the words inscribed on the banjo of American folk legend and activist Pete Seeger, who died at 94 in late January 2014. Reading the tributes to Seeger, I was struck by a recurrent theme: his moral courage, which he lived out unrelentingly across a lifetime. Commenting on the ‘not common behaviours’ which made his life exemplary, a New Yorker post by biographer Alec Wilkinson wrote of ‘his insistence on his right to entertain his own conscience’.

That ‘insistence’ began early; Seeger preferring to face jail rather than invoke the Fifth Amendment defense when called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955, and refusing to name personal and political associations. He avoided jail only on appeal in 1962. In October 2011 he was among the leaders of the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ march.

The tributes also led me to think of the ways in which other high-profile figures in popular music – Bob Marley and Bob Dylan – have in the past century harnessed, insisting on their same right, the active, lyrical power of poetic language to express moral and political dissent.

This is one of the reasons for the diminished audience for poetry in the 21st century; its audience, lean as it has often been, has been further subsumed by other arts. Of course, at the same time, the meld of lyric and instrument harks to the days of the lyre, the bard and troubadour, lyric’s origins and tradition.

Yet there is an essence in poetry, where a poem can be a pure or unique instance of language (to use Paul Celan’s thinking), giving it the capability to be a stand-alone language of resistance. It has been often, in the works of accomplished poets, a language of essence, able to name what is essential to the fully lived human experience, and what depraves it.

There are abundant examples. Celan himself – in the words of translator Katherine Washburn, after being earlier a ‘pure poet of the intoxicating line’, and in the steep of the Surrealists – became ‘heir and hostage to the most lacerating of human memories.’ As a Romanian-born Jew, Celan worked in a forced labour camp for 18 months from 1942-1944. Both his parents died in Nazi camps. Just one excerpt here, from his 1952 book, Poppy and Memory:

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at noon death is a master from Germany
we drink you at sundown and in the morning we drink and we drink you
death is a master from Germany his eyes are blue
(trans. Michael Hamburger)

And another, from the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, from ‘Victim No. 48’:

He was lying dead on a stone.
They found in his chest the moon and a rose lantern.
They found in his pockets a few coins,
A box of matches and a travel permit.
            He had tattoos on his arms.

His mother kissed him
and cried for a year.
Boxthorn tangled in his eyes.
 And it was dark…

(trans. Abdullah al-Udhari)

Both poets wrote other poems with dissenting force rising from more opaque and abstracted language. This is a cardinal point: the poetic force is not reliant on a singular poetic or only poetry that has an immediacy or transparency of meaning. It can be present in all kinds of poetry, including those whose language is complex, or difficult to access and decode. In fact, a capacity for ambiguity and subtlety – and an interrogation of the ability to speak at all – might be exactly what is required in such a poem.

This force is pressured by the complexities of linguistic play; pressured by the porous intricacies between poet, poetic voice and subject; and between the poem and the reader. Where it is calculable about political dissent, it can be pressured by multiple, insidious forces which need to be traced. A lucid and intelligent essay on this subject, ‘Poems from Guantanamo: Testimonal Literature and The Politics of Genre’, by Nina Philadelphoff-Puren, is part of the selection by editors Ann Vickery and John Hawke in their 2014 Poetry and the Trace (Puncher & Wattmann). It is worth reading.

The audience for poetry of moral witnessing has not always been, as it is usually today, small. During many socially traumatised times in history, in fact, the ability of poetry to express human conscience has seen it embraced as significant to a massed community.

The poets of these territories and events have also been embraced as public figures whose poetry and project is important to their community of origin: Yannis Ritsos, Pablo Neruda, Anna Akhmatova, Federico Lorca, Nazim Hizmet, Darwish and Miroslav Holub are 20^th-century examples. Poets such as W.H. Auden (in poems which include ‘Epitaph on a Tyrant’ and ‘Refugee Blues’) or Wislawa Szymborska (‘Reality Demands’, ‘The End and the Beginning’) exemplify the duty and capacity of a poet to respond to their world, as human community, at large.

Also important about these poets’ contributions is their works’ reinforcement of humanitarian values – their insistence on nobler attributes against a certain era’s atrocities is distilled for the record. The poems are not only for their times. In these cases, the poet is not just a poet, but also an auditor of communal memory. The hook of poetry into the greater communal, in times where a society is embattled and pervaded by the injustices, remains alive.

The communal uptake in recent years of a traditional folk-couplet form, the landay, by Pashtun women in Afghanistan, demonstrates this. An extensive 2013 article inPoetry Magazine relays the story behind the contemporary adoption of this short, oral poetic form –its only rule is syllabic count, a first line of nine, 13 for the second – among Pashtun women living in Taliban strongholds in Afghanistan.

The author, New York poet and Guggenheim Fellow Eliza Grizwold, in her research collected examples of these modern landays on trips beginning in 2012 and interviewed their disseminators. These women create new landays or re-write existing ones, and go on to share them, at the highest personal risk.
Translated by Grizwold, with the assistance of Pashtun speakers and translators, some examples:

You sold me to an old man, father.
May God destroy your home, I was your daughter.
*
I dream I am the president.
When I awake, I am the beggar of the world.
*
The drones have come to the Afghan sky.
The mouths of our rockets will answer in reply.

Importantly, the poems are understood to be anonymous and collectively owned; usually, and as a form of protection against retribution, no woman can be held directly responsible for their creation. Many are a condemnation of and resistance to the country’s absorption of an American presence, or a rallying against gendered oppressions. If shared in person, it must be in secret, with landays recited (usually sung, a proscribed practice) privately, woman to woman, or among gatherings of women, including in refugee camps. Grizwold also reported on a secret literary circle, with a telephone hotline, which could be used for the sharing of the poems with those who were unable to attend in person; and to mentor younger women in the form. The landays can also be ribald:

Unlucky you who didn’t come last night,
I took the bed’s hard wood post for a man.

Certainly, as Grizwold comments, the women’s landays ‘frustrate any facile image of a Pashtun woman as nothing but a mute ghost beneath a blue burqa.’

Turning to Australia, there can be no doubt that travesties of human rights prevail here at this time. Topically, there has been the descent into atrocity again with the violent death of Reza Barati and the severe injuries suffered by other asylum-seekers during events on Manus Island this past month.

‘A sheet of paper is to me what the forest is to a man on the run,’ wrote Russian poet, political dissident and labour-camp internee, Andrei Sinyavsky, in his collection of writings, A Voice from the Chorus, made during his imprisonment of nearly seven years. Almost incredibly, it is an observation which might hold acute relevance to the experiences of asylum-seekers detained at this time under Australian Government auspices.

Aside from the refugee-rights issues, there are the indictable inequalities and histories experienced by Australia’s indigenous, poor and marginalised. For the Australian poets who might want to take them up, these ills inevitably mix with the world’s horrors, reminding us that the public resistance of poetry is not bound by a poet’s nationality and place.

Yet there is a troubling issue to be thought through by poets wanting to address the institutional travesties around human rights which prevail in this country. If the poet does not have at least indirect personal association with the impact of an atrocity, then in writing poetry of it, they assume instead the place of the bearing of witness. This can easily come across as helpless (if heartfelt), at least even a little indulgent, hand-wringing. And yet a poem will be a good poem, not because the reader can read the poet’s own experience in it, necessarily, but because of the new ‘thing’ that it makes, or colludes to make, of our immediate world.

This has made me think of what examples there might be of Australian poetry which faces up to the task of addressing such injustices – and of those poems which fail in this.

This species of inferior poem, executed glibly, inanely or just palely, falters for a number of reasons. Often, its inadequacy is due to a blatancy of emotional response that doesn’t impel the reader to a deeper comprehension of what is at stake. Or the poems fail because the poet has begun the task without an insight into why they are writing them, without thinking through why they might have the right to do so – and the densities of that right. Where there is a simplistic conflation between an event of horror and the poet’s assumption of the right – and ability – to speak of it, there goes much of this poetry. This can be the case, whether the horror has been directly/indirectly experienced, or is being ‘witnessed’.

On the other hand, where poems of moral conscience succeed, what they essentially do is remind us, intelligently and movingly, of our own humanity – and potentially too, of whatever obligations (whether civic or private) might subsist for us. Strangely, the test for the worth of such a poem might be that it speaks to our own individuality, not to agendas.

There is a strong precedent of poetry by Australian poets which has been able to ‘bear witness’ and distill communal and emotive undertows of dissent and resistance: A.D. Hope’s ‘Inscription for a War’, Robert Adamson’s ‘Canticle for the Bicentennial Dead’, Robert Harris’s ‘dolekeeping rag’, Bruce Dawe’s ‘Homecoming’, much of Oodjeroo’s oeuvre (including ‘Municipal Gum’) and Kevin Gilbert’s (‘The Soldier’s Reward’); also in a range of subjects in the poetry of Judith Wright.

I also thought of poems whose achievement and timing was endowed by a more solitary, arguably more disturbing, stance: Francis Webb’s ‘End of the Picnic’, with its unsettling and unsettled ending; Dorothy Hewett’s ‘The Hidden Journey’; Vincent Buckley’s ‘Hunger Strike’, on the IRA hunger-strikers, including Bobby Sands (and which was written at a time of vehement anti-IRA sentiment here and abroad); the destabilising tumult of Gwen Harwood’s ‘Night Thoughts: Baby & Demon’.

Poetry of ‘resistance’ cannot always be a galvanisation of communal trending, the audience already captured. In this, poetry at nub is the resisting force – to clichéd thoughts and values (of whatever political bent), to unexamined perceptions of events, histories and the self’s relations to them. Even the concepts of ‘resistance’ and ‘dissent’ cannot be colonised, but remain open to disruption and unpredictability.

Among examples of a conscious nature in more contemporary Australian poems – again, some of these speak in the light of a communal dissent – is Kevin Brophy’s ‘Salt’. From his 2013 volume, Walking,: New & Selected Poems., he addresses here, humanely yet sharply, the boat-refugee issue, and without the flaws of either false conflation or sentiment. Last year’s extended Mundiad collection by Justin Clemens, for all its satirical reflexions and at times uproarious wit, can also be seen, as a commentary on contemporary values, as politically savage. And the poetry of Lionel Fogarty remains idiosyncratic, un-pinnable, disruptive – in its agitating subject matter and its defiance of usual syntactical and grammatical ‘law’.

Tangentially, I also think of Michael Farrell’s 2011 ‘Motherlogue’, with its strange, unhinging enunciation of an apparently indigenous woman’s urban existence and her adaptions, some perverse, some subversively authoritative, to displacement. The poem appears, simultaneously, to be inlaid with inherent and anxious questions about the politic of language and voice, about their ownership, appropriation and disenfranchisements.

Different but still curious questions are also raised in poems such as Emma Lew’s ‘Lesson’ and Iraqi-Australian poet Adeeb Kamal Ad-Deen’s ‘Something Wrong’.

A poem by Alison Croggon, part 3 of a cycle titled ‘Possible Elegies’, is compacted in 47 longish-lines with no stanza breaks. Croggon’s poetry often combines subject matter of an ambitious scale with an ability to reveal its intimate and visceral nature. Her poetic intention, its wreaking of language, is highly conscientious. It addresses love, its imperative co-existent with its frailties and complexity, and the atrocities that would erase it. It also, in a meta-sense for me, offers a possible framework of comprehension to approach other poems that insist on the right to ‘entertain’ one’s conscience, as poet or reader.

The poem is also an inheritor, to my mind, of the injunction that Auden’s ‘The Cave of Making’ set on poetry:
but we shan’t, not since Stalin or Hitler,
trust ourselves ever again: we know that, subjectively,
all is possible.

On Anthony Lawrence's SIGNAL FLARE

noreply@blogger.com (Jacinta Le Plastrier) — Mon, 31 Mar 2014 05:16:00 +0000

Appearing in February 2014 issue of AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW, a review of Anthony Lawrence's masterful latest volume, SIGNAL FLARE. Lead-in paragraph here, follow link at ABR Online to read full article.

https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/111-february-2014-no-358/1847-flair

Flair

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JACINTA LE PLASTRIER

Published in February 2014

SIGNAL FLARE

by Anthony Lawrence

Puncher & Wattmann, $25 pb, 100 pp, 9781922186232

Jacinta Le Plastrier

Jacinta Le Plastrier is a Melbourne-based poet, writer, editor, and publisher. Her poetry collection, The Book of Skins, will be...

Asignal flare, known mostly for its use as a maritime distress signal, has the ability to illuminate a disproportionately large area for what can also seem, given its intimate, hand-held origin, an unnaturally sustained time of several minutes. It is also the title of Anthony Lawrence’s fourteenth collection of poetry. While the phrase itself is not to be found in any of the poems, the poetic idea offered by ‘signal flare’ is powerful and lights its terrain.

SHINING WORLDS

noreply@blogger.com (Jacinta Le Plastrier) — Sun, 22 Dec 2013 23:21:00 +0000

Final post for 2013, on Cordite's Guncotton blog - on the artist's book collaboration of Robert Adamson and artist Peter Kingston.

http://cordite.org.au/guncotton/shining-worlds-adamson-kingston/

Jacinta Le Plastrier
Shining Worlds: On the Artist’s Book of Robert Adamson and Peter Kingston

23 December 2013

I’m sitting in the Rare Books room of the State Library of Victoria, lost in time and strangely joyous as I encounter one of its new acquisitions, the late 2012 ‘artist’s book’ and collaboration between poet Robert Adamson and well-known Australian artist Peter Kingston, Shark-net Seahorses of Balmoral: A Harbour Memoir.

It is a privilege to read, in this vault of deep, clear silence and rarified air, the fourteen poems Adamson created for the book, and to sift my responses to these sensitive, memorialising poems through the light of their twinning, linocut images (21 in all), created by Kingston in response to the poetry. The poems are hand-printed en face to the images.

Central to the book’s genesis was the fact that both poet and artist grew up on Sydney Harbour, though in different parts of it, and their adolescent and adult lives diverged strongly. While the poems are autobiographical, they also assimilate experiences of Kingston.

A limited-edition production of 26 – marked A-Z – the work was initially priced by Australian Galleries, the Australian dealer for the book, at $7,500 each. The book was published – also in character of collaboration – by rare-book dealer Nicholas Pounder. It includes a photographic portrait of Kingston and Adamson by Juno Gemes, Adamson’s partner.

Image courtesy of the artist and Australian Galleries, Sydney & Melbourne

Alongside being responsible for design, printing and assemblage, Pounder created the light-sensitive circuitry necessary for another eccentricity of this artwork: when one opens the hand-made, large wooden box which houses the book, a song entitled ‘without words’ is played, composed by Kingston in homage to Australian poet-magnus, Francis Webb. A poem late in Adamson’s suite, ‘Francis Webb at Ball’s Head’, is for that poet too, one on whom Adamson has previously delivered a lecture as Chair in Poetry at the University of Technology.

As is common to the rarity of these objects, Shark-net Seahorses of Balmoral: A Harbour Memoir can be appreciated as equally produced by writer, artist and publisher. This tradition of artists’ books, also sometimes known as livres d’artistes, has modern precedence in the decisions by the likes of Parisian art dealers Ambroise Vollard and Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler to also become publishers.

Exploring the potential of the book to be a de luxe art object are 20th-Century collaborations of enduring brilliance by artists and writers such as Bonnard with Verlaine, Picasso with Reverdy, and Miro with Eluard. A facsimile of this last book, À toute épreuve, is also in the library’s collection.

The history of the artist’s book, where it has directly related to the publication of poems and literature, is long-standing. As discussed in an essay accompanying a 2008 exhibition on artists’ books at London’s V&A, curator Dr Rowan Watson cites the creation of title pages by Rubens, the illustrations by Delacroix for Goethe’s Faust in 1828, and Manet’s images for Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven in 1875 as other precedents. And you could think of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience – the first copies of the forerunning Songs of Experience were illuminated and printed by Blake himself.

However, as Watson points out, it is ‘facile’ to consider a literary book to be an artist’s book just because an artist has been involved in producing images to be used with it.

Instead, he and others such as the SLV’s Rare Printed Collections Manager, Des Cowley, consider the intention in an artist’s book to be focused. An artist’s book is any book or book-like work created by an artist with the intention that it is an artwork or art object in its own right.

In many cases, an artist’s book need not involve language in any form or collaboration, and it is a form explored by numerous contemporary and modern artists, including Rauschenberg and Kiefer.

Cowley, responsible for artist’s book acquisitions at the SLV, has charted a sharp increase in the production of them in the past 20 years, both locally and globally.

Cowley continues:

‘I think it is arguable that the electronic environment we live in is making us more appreciative of the handmade and tactile. In a world where most information is electronic, it is the physical properties of a book that make it special – paper, ink, design, binding. We experience artists’ books rather than read them in the traditional sense, and in this way they provide us with something beyond the digital book.’

The trend can also be seen as a kind of extreme version of fetishisation of the bookas a valuable, even venerable object … a direction inversely related to the predicted death of the physical (as opposed to digital) book of mainstream publishing.

The form of the artist’s book is also plural, says Cowley: ‘It may be a unique one-off book, it may include etchings and lithographs and be produced in a limited edition, it may be a conceptual book printed offset in an unlimited edition.’

Using the National Library of Australia’s Trove allows the holdings of artist’s books such as Shark-net to be displayed. Usually a copy of an artist’s book is accessible to members of the public if you make an appointment.

Other important acquisitions of this kind at the SLV include collaborative or mixed-mode editions such as Chris Wallace-Crabbe and artist Bruno Leti’s projects; Australian artist Lyn Ashby exploring poetic language as a visual field in works such as On Particle Physics and Ideo(t) gram[infinity symbol]atica; and Faded World by Melbourne writer and artist Antoni Jach whose 78 images are accompanied by a 10,000 word lyric essay written to a poetic constraint; every paragraph is four lines long.

So it is that I find myself, absorbed in a quiet joy, with Shark-net. This makes sense: while the emotional barometer of the poetry shifts across a number of registers in the book, its life-force comes from the memories of a boy whose experiences of the sea and harbour shimmer with edenic origin.

Some of the poetry produces mirth, not an easy achievement – and, initially, they appear to do so innocently. Such is the case of the poem, ‘The River Caves’, where Adamson and a cohort of tween sea-scouts jump boat in the middle of a scenic ride. However, there is a darker dart residing here when one remembers that the poet grew up to spend time in juvenile detention centres.

A poem later in the book, ‘The Long Bay Debating Society’, has a similar edge; some of the prisoners, who form a debating team, want to hold a debate with others visiting from the outside. Their request is acceded to, but on a condition: ‘The Governor would choose the topic’. The group is eventually handed ‘the Governor’s note/ (it was the summer of 1964) our topic/ ‘Is the Sydney Opera House really necessary?’

This essay’s title, ‘shining world’, comes from the book’s title-poem, composed in 10-line stanzas, with phrases such as ‘The beach was the boy’s shining world … ‘ and ‘sepia kelp with its drifting shark-skin leaves’. Adamson and Kingston’s profound attachment to the Harbour foreshore resonates throughout Shark-net – where its waters, nearby landmarks and cultural experiences also abide. This is the grounded and, via the sparks of memory, luminary ‘shining world’, a reader is presented here in words and images.

This entry was posted in GUNCOTTON and tagged Des Cowley, Jacinta Le Plastrier, Nicholas Pounder, Peter Kingston, robert adamson. Bookmark the permalink.

Where Poets Write, Guncotton Blog

noreply@blogger.com (Jacinta Le Plastrier) — Mon, 21 Oct 2013 06:53:00 +0000

Jacinta Le Plastrier
Silence Turned into Objects: Looking at where Poets Write

9 October 2013

Among the most extreme, in the sense of horrific, writing places for poems bequeathed to us would be the conditions in which Ezra Pound produced The Pisan Cantos.

There is some speculation as to the exact number of those Cantos (or which versions) Pound wrote while incarcerated in 1945 by the American military in their Disciplinary Training Centre near Pisa, Italy. However, Pound certainly communicated via letter that almost all of the work was produced during his containment.

Pound was initially held outside in a reinforced cage, open to the elements, and is reputed to have slept on the ground. After three weeks – and in a state of mental and physical breakdown – the authorities gave him a cot and pup-tent in the medical compound. He had access to a typewriter, but only three texts were initially allowed to him – resulting in the in-turning into his own memory bank within the poems. The cage and Centre provided glimpses of the exterior world which are rooted throughout the poem. These progenitating vantages include the image which opens the work: ‘The enormous tragedy of the dream in the peasant’s/ bent shoulders’.

The fractured yet minutely and consciously controlled themes and language rhythms, and their recurrences – what the Times Literary Supplement called ‘a system of echoes’ – across the Pisan poems are powerfully linked to the place of their genesis: its madness-making, the content and metrical devices used by Pound to ‘ground’ or ‘peg’ the work.

Another series of famous poems whose making is linked to place is Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies, begun in 1912, a decade before their completion. He says he heard the first line as if from an external voice while walking along a cliff-top over the Adriatic Sea, near the Duino Castle, where he was staying on the invitation of a patron. The poems were completed in a Swiss chateau especially purchased for Rilke by yet another patron so the poet could concentrate again on his work – this after an interim decade of war and the poet’s traumatised ‘writing’ silence. (If place can be critical to the writing of certain poems, so too is such generous patronage, surely.)

Where dedicated writers write, when they write (their daily rhythms), how they seek and sustain inspiration and motivation … how they clock off the concentrated time given to deepening their craft … this is intensively chronicled. What is the passion, among both writers and readers, for knowing this stuff of a writer’s life? I think it’s a desire to clue in to the magic – in the arcane sense of the word – of the creative act, via the pragmatic rituals writers often use to do so.

We are interested in these histories, perhaps, because it educates us around certain clues that other writers can provide us in bolstering our own commitment to the structures we create in. Committing to a daily timetable, or a certain word-limit to be produced daily (in the case of prose), and choosing a particular place or set of places to write in or at: these are definitely commonalities among many esteemed writers. Of course, given the crankiness of the writing art, some writers will have no need of a regular place, routine or touch-stone.

The examples of Pound and Rilke demonstrate another aspect to the issue of place; the sense of labour which is compulsive and imperative – like that of a human birth – gestating the creation, then ‘birth’ of some poems. Many poets have experienced the power of creative force unleashed in this way. Where, exactly, a poet is writing them can become irrelevant: the poem will be written, regardless.

However, having a particular place that serves poets’ writing on an ongoing basis – and one which, for poets, assists them in being ‘ready’ to write poems – is important to many.

Numerous Australian and overseas poets have been interviewed at length about their poetry-writing habits, including place, in a long-term project currently under way by poets and academics Kevin Brophy and Paul Magee.

Alison Croggon told Magee on the subject of research:

‘I don’t intend as such, to write a poem. I wait for the poem to intend itself. I think most poets work that way. While I’m actually writing it, I usually have no idea what it will be and what shape it will have until I get to the end.’

Croggon considers it important to have your ways of ‘keeping fit’ or ‘supple’ in order to write poems, which involve, among other things for her, reading criticism and seeing art. ‘I think about language a lot, consciously as well as unconsciously’, she says. ‘A lot of the work I do is about keeping myself occupied and mentally alert.’ Croggon virtually always writes (and not just her poems) at her desk at home.

Alex Skovron, at times prompted to write poems when travelling, also described his study at home to Magee as ‘a great environment for writing. It’s peaceful, it’s well-lit and it’s quiet. I have an outlook on trees and an open space. In that sense, it’s conducive. Yes, it’s an excellent environment.’

In a recent exchange, Skovron told me that he has adapted this habit – over the past few years, ‘most of my first drafts (though not all) seem to have been written away from my study, in a variety of cafés and similar establishments. After bringing home a new draft, I type it up as a fresh poem-document and simultaneously commence the editing process – on-screen in the first instance, until I’ve produced a first typed draft, and then in subsequent sessions both at my study desk and at the computer.’

With Jan Owen, talking to Magee, the focus in her interview became what she called, ‘places in the mind’ … the ‘places’ she cultivated in order to write poems from.

So: poets write in locations where they can inhabit the inner ‘place’ – including the visual, external inspiration of a certain landscape or environment – that underpins their poetry.

Owen, in an email about this article, says that she ‘often finds ideas when wandering along the beach or in the local scrub (she lives in South Australia). I write early drafts longhand and usually revise and edit in the evening at my desk with classical music as a sort of white thought background. Occasionally, when I have a few hours to spare, I sit on the verandah of the old homestead type café at the little local airfield with a pen and blank pad: good coffee, bright little biplanes landing and taking off, 1930s’ mementos – another time and place that sparks the imagination.’

So polarities exist regarding distractions or noise. In Auden’s highly mastered and long meditation on his home, Weland’s Stithy, in ‘Thanksgiving for a Habitat’, the third section, ‘The Cave of Making (In Memoriam Louis MacNeice)’, is about his writing study. Earlier in the cycle, Auden reminds us – he did not own his own home until into his fifties, due to finances – that ‘what I dared not hope or fight for/ is, in my fifties, mine, a toft-and-croft’.

For W. H., absolute silence and freedom from any distraction was imperative:

For this and for all enclosures like it the archetype
     is Weland’s Stithy, an antre
more private than a bedroom even, for neither lovers nor
     maids are welcome, but without a
bedroom’s secrets: from the Olivetti’s Portable,
     the dictionaries (the very
best money can buy), the heaps of paper, it is evident
     what must go on. Devoid of
flowers and family photographs, all is subordinate
     here to a function, designed to
discourage day-dreams—hence windows averted from plausible
     vivenda but admitting a light one
could mend a watch by—and to sharpen hearing: reached by an
     outside staircase, domestic
noises and odors, the vast background of natural
     life are shut off. Here silence
is turned into objects.

Ted Hughes, in a Paris Review interview, talked about the multiplicity of places in which he had written, and how place definitely affected what was produced in it:

‘Hotel rooms are good. Railway compartments are good. I’ve had several huts of one sort or another. Ever since I began to write with a purpose I’ve been looking for the ideal place. I think most writers go through it … Didn’t Somerset Maugham also write facing a blank wall? Subtle distraction is the enemy—a big beautiful view, the tide going in and out. Of course, you think it oughtn’t to matter, and sometimes it doesn’t. Several of my favorite pieces in my book Crow I wrote traveling up and down Germany with a woman and small child—I just went on writing wherever we were. Enoch Powell claims that noise and bustle help him to concentrate. Then again, Goethe couldn’t write a line if there was another person anywhere in the same house, or so he said at some point. I’ve tried to test it on myself, and my feeling is that your sense of being concentrated can deceive you. Writing in what seems to be a happy concentrated way, in a room in your own house with books and everything necessary to your life around you, produces something noticeably different, I think, from writing in some empty silent place far away from all that … But for me successful writing has usually been a case of having found good conditions for real, effortless concentration.

Elsewhere, when asked to nominate the tools he required in order to write, Hughes’ answer was simple: ‘A pen.’

Poet Petra White tells me she will also often write her poems in a busy café environment. Lately, she has been writing them ‘on the go’ on her iPhone, she says.

But White also undertook a deliberate self-apprenticeship in poetry in the Domed Room at the State Library of Victoria (where I am, coincidentally, writing this piece today) in her early twenties. Here she read all the poetry in English that she desired to; and began to teach herself German in order to be able to read poets such as Rainer Maria Rilke in their original tongue. Other well-known writers who have worked in this room include Chris Wallace-Crabbe (as a ‘young poet’, in the 1950s), and novelists Peter Carey and Helen Garner – she wrote Monkey Grip here to escape the clatter of a communal household.

So, among so many places to choose to write, ‘the Dome’, as it is known colloquially, is a place that is creatively haunted and resonates with a remnant aura of a century of thoughtfulness. Particular public writing and research places have this sheen, bestowing upon a writer, poet or not, a place in which to establish habits away from home. A daily ‘seat’, of sorts, in which to write – which can also grow itself, I feel, into a kind of ‘portal’. You step into it, deliberately, and become absorbed by what you are there to do. (I am struck, after writing for a number of hours into the early evening, when the room’s antique-green desk lights glow dimly in the nocturnal cavernousness of this space, that only a handful of people remain of an earlier crowd. I had not noticed a single person leaving.)

What is also true: we grow to love a place where we have written what we wanted to write, which has housed us in what we might call … kindness.

We can return to Rilke on this point for the habitat (the Château Muzot in the Rhone Valley) in which he completed the ten Duino Elegies – and then the entire, extensive sonnet suite of Sonnets to Orpheus immediately afterwards (in three weeks of February 1922) – within what he described as ‘a hurricane of the spirit’, was one he described with tenderness. Rilke moved there with Baladine Klossowska, with whom he was in relationship. His thoughts about the chateau during this period of gargantuan writing are important, as noted in a letter to Klossowska: ‘what weighed me down and caused my anguish most is done … I am still trembling from it … and I went out to caress old Muzot, just now, in the moonlight.’ And in another letter at the time, to previous lover Lou Andrea-Salomé, he wrote that, ‘I went out and stroked the little Muzot, which protected it [the writing] and me and finally granted it, like a large old animal’.

These words were to inspire Auden’s own reference to Rilke’s composition of the Elegies, in Sonnet XIX from his 1936 21-sonnet cycle, ‘Sonnets from China’. I quote this work, along with the ‘Thanksgiving’ poem, from a collected edition of Auden’s titled W. H. Auden Collected Poems – The Centennial Edition. Here, from Auden:

Who for ten years of drought and silence waited,
Until in Muzot all his being spoke,
And everything was given once for all.

Awed, grateful, tired, content to die, completed,
He went out in the winter night to stroke
That tower as one pets an animal.

This entry was posted in GUNCOTTON and tagged Alex Skovron, Alison Croggon, Ezra Pound, Jacinta Le Plastrier,Rainer Maria Rilke, Virginia Woolf. Bookmark the permalink.

About Jacinta Le Plastrier

Jacinta Le Plastrier is a Melbourne-based writer, poet and editor. She is Guncotton blog editor of at Cordite Poetry Review, publisher at John Leonard Press, curator of the Gilgamesh Modern Salon and recently completed a Hot Desk Fellowship at the Wheeler Centre. Her new book of poems, The Book of Skins, will be published early 2014.

ON GIFT AND GUTS

noreply@blogger.com (Jacinta Le Plastrier) — Fri, 04 Oct 2013 02:27:00 +0000

Here I wrote a Q&A with The Wheeler Centre on writing and my ideas about it - interestingly, the parallels between elite athletes and dedicated writers emerged in my thinking for the piece. Thanks also to Jo Case, ed. of the Centre's 'Dailies' webpage, for the interview.

Jacinta Le Plastrier is a Melbourne-based writer, poet and editor. She is blog editor atCordite Poetry Review, publisher at John Leonard Press, curator of the Gilgamesh Modern Salon, and recently completed a Hot Desk Fellowship at the Wheeler Centre. Her new book of poems, The Book of Skins, will be published early 2014.

We spoke to her about dealing with writerly doubt, remaining open to helpful advice about your writing (and immune to praise or criticism), and why writers are like athletes.

What was the first piece of writing you had published?

My first pieces of journalism were on music when I was 17 at theMelbourne Herald where I was a cadet – it was Melbourne’s former evening broadsheet, later subsumed into the Herald Sun under Murdoch. My first published poems (paid) were in Meanjin in the early 1990s.

What’s the best part of your job?

Being able to say what I want to say, through writing. I consider it a privilege. I also write across genres – essays, poetry, feature articles, and on activist issues – so I feel, nearly always, personally, diversely and mentally engaged with what interests me, and usually, passionately.

What’s the worst part of your job?

At times I have suffered a terrific, disabling, inner experience of doubt about being a writer, especially of poetry. Now I am steely with myself about this. I’ve developed – as I think most writers and artists need to – what I call a psychic toughness towards this nervous energy. Doubt is useful, it keeps you open to always attempting new ways of using language. I also think you can approach the writing act like a dedicated athlete trains for competing or a dancer trains for performing. You train, psychically, to be ready to write, and then do it, no matter what, little by little – or sometimes via an unexpected leap – to new levels.

What’s been the most significant moment in your writing and publishing career so far?

It would be a series of moments – a particular publication, getting a fellowship, writing a new kind of piece – a growing clarification about what I want to do with writing. As part of this, I have become intent with myself in making writing (alongside caring for the ones and issues close to me, obviously) the priority in all that I choose to do.

What’s the best (or worst) advice you’ve received about writing?

‘Bum on seat’ – William Burrough’s advice on writing. To ‘turn up’ at the desk (or where it is you write) – and write. Balancing that, you also develop a sense of a piece’s energy flow; if it ebbs, it’s good to turn away for some time, even a few hours. I often go to bed then. The painter Renoir was very attuned to this creative energetic flow. He said you also have to ‘loaf around’ a bit. But stamina, being able to sustain and remain with the flow of a piece of work when it is present, is also very important.

What’s the most surprising thing you’ve ever heard or read about yourself or your work?

I have never really been surprised by anything. I think it’s optimal to remain open to helpful advice or editing about a piece of writing, to accept what might assist it – while also being aware that people’s ‘advice’ can sometimes be masking an unconscious rivalry or intention to undermine your writing. So I try to be immune to praise or criticism, while remaining open, as I said, to what others do genuinely offer as positive assistance.

If you weren’t working in writing and publishing, what do you think you’d be doing instead?

Writing is my passion, it’s a life-force for me. So I don’t think about an alternative.

There’s much debate on whether creative writing can be taught – what’s your view?

Writing, in my view, is a co-creation between the writer and the force and energy of language. Writers love words, tenderly, I believe. For me, this relationship approaches an intimacy, with patterns of change, maturation and challenges, which mirror the relationship with your human beloved. The act of writing, like an intimate relationship, is a co-creation. Can this be taught? Absolutely – but the seed of that kind of passion for language has to be present in both the student and the teacher.

What’s your advice for someone wanting to be a writer?

Find your own way, find your words to express what you want to say. That way you have the opportunity to write uniquely. Above all, become crystal clear – I would say, even, ruthless – that you will do nothing else, no matter what the challenges are.

Do you buy your books online, in a physical bookshop, or both?

I am terribly old-school in my support for physical bookshops; I know the wonders of e-technology and online ordering, but I still am able to make do with ordering books into favorite bookshops, precious to me, such as Melbourne’s Collected Works. I also read books at the State Library of Victoria; for example, you can source multiple translations for the same book, if that interests you.

If you could go out to dinner with any fictional character, who would it be and why? And what would you talk about?

I’m not very good with the fictional. I read poetry and non-fiction almost exclusively. To be honest, I am blessed by relationships with some extraordinary ‘real’ people. I would always prefer to have dinner with them – and we would talk, as usual, about writing, art, love, things that matter, I believe. Oh, and AFL, athletics, and sport too. I am passionate about sport – and see many parallels between elite athletes and writers. You can have the gift to write, but you also have to have guts – and do the long hard yards of training.

What’s the book that’s had the most significant impact on your life or work – and why?

There’s not a particular one. I think we are constantly choosing to read books that are apt for a particular time – that we are being significantly impacted all the time, hopefully. I tend to have a handful of books that sit near my bed, or which I cart around, that infuse what I am trying to learn at that time. They are like talismans, too.

This year, that would have included Albert Camus’ book on Algeria (The Algerian Chronicles), Rilke’s Duino Elegies (Leishman translation), Francis Webb’s Collected Poems, Tolkien’s Return of the King, Sylvia Plath’s Ariel collection. The through-line would be an interrogation about how humans have the potential to reach into and integrate higher principles of character, endeavour and love.

Jacinta Le Plastrier’s new book of poems, The Book of Skins, will be published early 2014. She blogs atwww.jacintaleplastrierofficial.blogspot.com.

noreply@blogger.com (Jacinta Le Plastrier) — Mon, 23 Sep 2013 02:40:00 +0000

In the latest Guncotton blog piece (ed. Jacinta Le P), for Cordite Poetry Review, Jen Jewel Brown discusses Paul Kelly's most recent musical endeavour, the 'Conversations with Ghosts' CD, built around powerful, iconic poetic texts such as Kenneth Slessor's 'Five Bells', Judith Wright's 'Woman to Man' and poems by Dickinson, Yeats and Les Murray.
http://cordite.org.au/guncotton/collaborative-kelly-stalks-arcane-new-ground/

Jen Jewel Brown
Collaborative Kelly Stalks Arcane New Ground

15 September 2013

And to the bottom I will follow

Conversations with Ghosts (CD) by Paul Kelly
Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2013

While a long-time voracious song-writer and performer in his own right, Australian musician Paul Kelly has also been a collaborative nomad, drawn to criss-cross with others during his career. And Kelly’s collaboration most likely to grip poets is also his most recent – Conversations with Ghosts – an ambitious song-cycle of twelve haunting poetic texts.

First performed in 2012 and reprised live this September with concerts in three states, Conversations with Ghosts began in 2010 when the South Melbourne-based Australian National Academy of Music (ANAM) proposed to Kelly that he collaborate with the school on a modern classical song cycle. In the CD liner notes, his co-composer and conductor James Ledger (then resident at ANAM) recalls two of the works – the musical re-imagining of W.B. Yeats’ poem, ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ and Kelly’s own lyric, ‘The Chimes at Midnight’ – came as a quick birth, in a couple of hours, Ledger at the piano, Kelly singing alongside.

Live, the Melbourne Recital Centre performance I saw in October last year felt like a grand strike for poetry, with the centrepiece, Kenneth Slessor’s mighty ‘Five Bells’, sombrely and conversationally rolled out by Kelly, whose poetic memory through a long night of mostly spoken, part-sung word was notable.

So dark you bore no body, had no face, 
But a sheer voice that rattled out of air ...

That such a wild and sustained poem – Slessor’s mourning of his mate’s drowning – should be re-imagined within a modern classical and slightly rock setting is something to celebrate.

And ‘Five Bells’, given this kiss of life, still seems so quintessentially Australian, and, of its time (1930s), bohemian:

In Sydney, by the spent aquarium-flare
Of penny gaslight on pink wallpaper,
We argued about blowing up the world,
But you were living backward ...

The sounds of ANAM’s young post-graduate ensemble vaunted high and crisp into the ribs of the Elizabeth Murdoch Hall in the Melbourne Recital Centre, in complex classical arrangements for the likes of Emily Dickinson’s ‘One Need Not Be a Chamber To Be Haunted’, Scottish poet Norman MacCaig’s ‘Basking Shark’, and more from Australia’s canon with Les Murray’s ‘Once in a Lifetime, Snow’ and Judith Wright’s ‘Woman to Man’.

The other-worldly, apocalyptic and cryptic Yeats is given a second jolt to the heart with a sophisticated orchestration for his ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, whose opening sally, ‘That is no country for old men’ is familiar to many, not least as inspiration for the title of the Oscar-winning film of 2007, directed by the Coen brothers. The ongoing melancholic – and salutary – ringing of bells in Conversations with Ghostscontinues with ‘Ring Out, Wild Bells’ (from ‘In Memoriam A.H.H.’) by Tennyson:

The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Viola and harp work were highlights live, and violins, keyboards, double bass, clarinet, saxophones, French and other horns, percussion and frequent lead lines from the variegated recorders of soloist Genevieve Lacey unfolded compositions, by turns, experimental and occasionally (although not uncomfortably) traditional, with the Celtic tang often expected from Kelly. Ledger’s work with the baton brought the disparate elements together with authority.

The performances of ANAM’s players, among the best post-graduate musicians in the country, and Kelly’s casual, yet spine-tingling narrations – his brassy voice often soaring above the ensemble like a cornet – are sharply arranged and recorded on disc. Lacey’s recorder takes a rather clichéd ‘ghostly’ approach in the overture ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, but this could have been a rare failing in arrangement. Kelly’s ‘captain’s pick’ of most of the poetry, his occasional acoustic guitar and his own four lyrical contributions set an unpretentious tone, while Ledger’s complexities of orchestration, including dissonant passages, were strongly played by the young virtuosos.

The closest thing, for Kelly fans, to this collaboration would be the filmic light operaOne Night the Moon (2001, directed by Rachel Perkins) where the more than worthy soundtrack was co-written by Kelly, Kev Carmody and Mairead Hannan; while his crackling, part-improvised (with Professor Ratbaggy) soundtrack to Lantana (Ray Lawrence – also 2001) is another genre-stretching and unsettling long-player.Conversations with Ghosts stands well alongside these two as yet another powerful Paul Kelly collaboration.

Disclaimer: Jen Jewel Brown is is an ex-sister-in-law of Paul Kelly.

This entry was posted in GUNCOTTON and tagged Jen Jewel Brown. Bookmark the permalink.

About Jen Jewel Brown

Jen Jewel Brown works for the National Film & Sound Archive and is doing a Ph.D. at Monash. She is an award-winning poet, twice featured in Best Australian Poems (Black Inc.). Brown has worked as a journalist and reviewer since the 70s and authored four books.

noreply@blogger.com (Jacinta Le Plastrier) — Tue, 17 Sep 2013 02:51:00 +0000

In the renewed, regular series of 'Notes From' at Cordite Journal's blogsite, Guncotton, we commission pieces by travelling poets and writers where they reflect on current or recent journeys. Korean-based Australian poet, writer and scholar Dan Disney writes a fascinating piece here on Armenia's capital city Yerevan - and the terrific struggles and courageous faith of writers and artists working there. Proposals to the series are welcome - I am the blog editor - E: jlep@netspace.net.au

http://cordite.org.au/guncotton/yerevan-dan/

Dan Disney
Notes from Yerevan, Armenia

1 September 2013

First impression: Yerevan undulates out the semi-desert, ringed with what look suspiciously like nuclear reactors. Flight SU1860 jolts down at (the recently privatised) Zvartnots airport, and we pass a dis-assemblage of passenger jets in various states of stripped-down decay. In the snow-capped distance, and just over the border with Turkey, Mount Ararat landmarks the otherwise small-hilled afternoon, a daily taunt here to national pride. In 1921, Stalin, Atatürk, and others sat down to reset national boundaries (during the Treaty of Kars): from uptown and dropping into Yerevan’s city centre, it feels like a bay should establish the city’s fringe. Instead, there’s that distant tidal wave of the now-Turkish mountain, where mythology tells us Noah parked his improbable floating zoo.

This stone city is built on the ruins of ancient Erebouni (782BCE), and has been criss-crossed by successive marauders (including Assyrians, Persians, Arabs, Byzantines, Mongols, Turks). It is one of the world’s oldest, continually inhabited cities. The currency is adorned with poets: Hovannes Toumanian (1869-1923) is commonly regarded as the father of modern Armenian letters, while the brilliant Yeghishe Charents (1897-1937) died a counter-revolutionary during the Soviet purges. When I hand over a few notes of Armenian dram in exchange for a visa, the border guard hands back a ‘shnorhakalut’yun’ (thank you), and then ‘welcome you, mister’.

Visiting in 1990, the renowned Polish writer Ryszard Kapuściński writes thus of Armenia:

The history of Armenians is measured in millennia. We are in that part of the world that is customarily called the cradle of civilization. We are moving among the oldest traces of man’s existence … The fate of Armenians: centuries of persecutions, centuries of exile, diaspora, homeless wandering, pogroms. (Kapuściński 1995: 46; 231)

This wind-bitten place was a dormant village until 1918, when the Soviets turned Yerevan into Armenia’s capital (the country’s thirteenth). Today it is full of young families and bent police and huge, brutal, upright statues and unkempt parks and public squares bustling with flea markets and sun and overcrowded, dustymashutkas (mini-buses) which jostle across town at 27¢ per ride. I am here as a guest of Mkrtich Tonoyan, director of the Armenian-based arts residency program ACOSS. This monolithic 37 year old is a former teen paramilitary, and carries books likeEducation for Socially Engaged Art with him everywhere. Tonoyan lives by his ethics like few other artists I know: any money generated by ACOSS is channelled directly into projects for children and socially-disadvantaged groups.

During my month-long stay as an ACOSS writer-in-residence, he delivers a new turbo charger to a rehabilitation centre’s inert bus and, when he visits an association for blind veterans in Stepanakert (the de facto capital of Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, which remains disputed territory), he promises to fund twenty new handheld laser guidance devices. Tonoyan lives in a tiny apartment on the outskirts of Yerevan, together with his mother and grandmother, wife and three kids. We can’t walk 20 metres in this part of town without somebody clutching him in a bear hug. And anything growing on trees in his garden is prima materia: the aim is for home-made vodka which is 96% proof, a liquid corrosive for the psyche. The parties in his studio attract artists from across the Caucasus.

Firmly hand-in-hand into the future with Russia, Armenia remains at loggerheads with pro-American, neighboring Georgia. To talk of some of the other neighbours only raises eyebrows and blood pressure: the war with Azerbaijan is ongoing (at best, a ceasefire), and everyone has an evenings’-worth of outcry over the Turkish-led genocide, which started in 1915 and ended up in one and a half million Armenian deaths later. And though the Soviets left in 1991, they left a culture of censorship behind – as Armenia’s foremost avant-garde poet, Violet Grigoryan, based in Yerevan, knows only too well. Cultural commentator and raconteur par excellence, Grigoryan once hosted her own TV show … which the state closed overnight for its ‘inappropriate’ political content. In her introduction to Deviation: Anthology of Contemporary Armenian Literature (2008), she contests that:

The concept of ‘drawer’ literature first emerged during perestroika, referring to works that authors hid in drawers … A long time has passed since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the disappearance of state-mandated censorship. Nevertheless, the censorship survived in the people’s spirit and in those who continued to govern the literary world. (Grigoryan 2008: 7)

So what to do when confronted (as she perceives it) with a cultural economy regulated by reactionary bean-counters? Grigoryan persists with making space to escape institutionalised censorship; she purposefully antagonises any valorised group (‘Academia, the Literature Departments, the publishers and the Stalin-styled creative unions’: Grigoryan 2008: 7), through fostering writing which employs non-normative styles. She is part of a raucous group – the Inknagir Literary Club, based in the city – that demands freedom, plurality, and empowerment. Members are frequently blacklisted, despised for themes which include homosexuality (still largely unmentionable in Armenia), sexual violence, suicide, necrophilia. One academic states that Grigoryan’s cohort are:

Demolishing all the moral, ideological, and spiritual standards in their wake. Preaching their message of verbal freedom, they dragged into literature the stratum of language that has no place in the dictionaries and … literally exudes the stench of decay. (Zhenia Kalantaryan, cited in Grigoryan 2008: 9).

For the Inknagirs, reactions like this means their impact on contemporary Armenia literature is already a fait accompli.

And so, in this small and landlocked country where 80% of the borders are closed and the threat of missiles dropping over Yerevan looms (to almost every Armenian’s dismay, Russia recently sold US$4 billion of arms to oil-rich Azerbaijan), creative producers are struggling to make sense of their role after the death of the Marxist drive toward utopia: are they social workers or social misfits? Is an artist an activist rebuilding communities through art, or a destinateur of programmatic bad taste, smashing everything so as to start again? Either impulse speaks to ideas of engagement and idealism. Tonoyan and Grigoryan embody competing impulses in a dynamic scene populated by artists living each to authentic visions of aesthetic function: in a place where there is almost no opportunity for creative producers to receive support for their work, the Armenian artists I met would welcome visits from funded, comparatively wealthy First World poets. Next time you receive funding or win a prize, consider visiting.

Works cited

Violet Grigoryan and Vahan Ishkhanyan (eds) 2008 Deviation: Anthology of Contemporary Armenian Literature. Yerevan: Inknagir Literary Club, 2008.

Ryszard Kapuściński (trans Klara Glowzewska). Imperium New York: Vintage Books, 1995.

This entry was posted in GUNCOTTON and tagged ACOSS, Dan Disney, Mkrtich Tonoyan, Violet Grigoryan. Bookmark the permalink.

About Dan Disney

Dan Disney’s collection, And then when the, was published in 2011. He is currently working on a new collection of poems and a collection of essays on the sublime. He teaches twentieth century poetries and poetics at Sogang University, and divides his time between Seoul, Turin, and Melbourne.

INTERNATIONAL POETRY FESTIVAL MEDELLIN 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Jacinta Le Plastrier) — Fri, 09 Aug 2013 05:37:00 +0000

Les Wicks and Jacinta Le Plastrier
Notes from Medellín, Colombia

1 August 2013

Since it began 23 years ago, the Internacional de Poesía de Medellín has grown to become a major poetry festival in the world, in a country riven by 50 years of civil war. This year’s Festival (6-13 July) coincided with a new round of peace talks in Havana between the Colombian Government and FARC, and FARC rebels reportedly fighting security forces in the mountains. The Festival featured Australian poet Les Wicks, who reports on his experience below. The Festival has also ‘grown’ up alongside seismic changes for the city of Medellín, Colombian’s second-largest and once described as the ‘most violent city in the world’ (Time, 1988), due to its brutal cocaine drug-cartel culture. This year, in February, it was nominated instead as the ‘World Capital’ of innovation, by the Wall Street Journal and the Urban Life Institute, following civic projects aimed at radically improving life and security for its citizens – and its reputation.

At the same time, a UN report condemned the city for being among the most unequal in the world, due to ongoing murders, ‘disappearances’, unemployment and criminal gang warfare. The Festival was started two years before the killing of drug-cartel kingpin Pablo Escobar in 1993 by Colombian National Police, and three years before the publication of Colombian-born author and film-maker Fernando Vallejo’s well-known novel, La virgen de los sicarios (Our Lady of the Assassins) – which spawned a new genre of novel known as narcorrealismo, narcotrendismo or la novella sicaresca, fiction drawing on the violent themes of the drug trade. Vallejo was born in Medellín but has lived in Mexico since 1971, and renounced his Colombian nationality in 2007 (becoming Mexican), citing his political dissent in a public letter. The Festival, which this year expressly endorsed support for the current Havana talks, was conceived by its founders to be an initiative of peace, a form of cultural resistance, and in 2006 was awarded the prestigious ‘Right Livelihood Award’, a prelude and alternative to the Nobel Peace Prize. (JLP)

Norwegian poet Jan Erik Vold at the Teatro Carlos Vieco | image by Sara Marín

Daz(zl)ed

Okay. Around 5000 people were gathered in the generous heat of this amphitheatre, holding events from the 23rd Festival Internacional de Poesía de Medellín. A diverse crowd from children to seniors chattered animatedly amongst themselves as vendors moved along the rows selling popcorn and Coca-Cola. Television cameras fidgeted at the hem of the stage, broadcast lighting came on as sound techs stroked their dials. For an Australian poet, the crowd and attention seemed inexplicable – this was a poetry reading.

Colombia has been a nation at war with itself for 50 years. The toll of death and displacement is staggering. There are currently talks ‘underway’, there always seems to be talks underway. Twenty-three years ago some poets got the idea of responding to a culture of violence with poetry. The Festival was born. For an Australian – with our marginalised poetics – this notion might seem something like fighting fire with feathers. But in Latin America, as has been the case with other territories with long histories of war and civil dissent, political foment has often seen poetry and poets championed – and read – by the masses. Poetry considered relevant, and powerful, as a tool of revolution.

Early on, expecting perhaps only hundreds to attend, the organisers found public interest overwhelming and the nine-day event has grown to become a major fixture in the city’s calendar and the largest poetry festival in the world. It is attended by fervent audiences, and has inspired and supported a number of other new poetry festivals around the world. This year there were to be a total of 220 readings involving 66 poets from 41 countries. Venues are mostly in Medellín but there was a solid program of forays into other centres. I am this year’s Australian guest. It’s fundamentally important that we have a presence at gatherings like these. The Australia Council Literature Board covered the airfare while Macquarie University organised my Spanish translation with Judith Mendoza–White. Vastly appreciated further translation came from Raphael Patiño Góez and George Leogena. I have always argued that for our poetry in Australia to ‘work’, we need commitment, clear planning and sustained effort/support over time. This Colombian festival took off from its first year. Does this mean we have to change, back home, a people?

That amphitheatre – Teatro Al Aire Libre Carlos Vieco – was the site of the opening reading. The range of voices reading from the stage were astonishing; Lorna Shaughnessy (Northern Ireland) quietly shared the pain of internal conflict with Vietnamese-born Nguyen Phan Que Mai. Sainkho Namtchylak (Tuva) performed her famous throat-based work. Thiago de Mello, a grandfather of Colombian poetry, had the crowd screaming for more. It amiably forgave my woeful Spanish, seemed to enjoy the English versions of my poems, and loved the Spanish ones read by theatre director Wilson Zapata, who was to be my reader throughout the Festival. Later, as I was exiting the toilets, I was bailed up by an eager Colombian who wanted to show off his skills on the didgeridoo he had purchased in Ecuador. The tunnels under the stage became tunnels within my head as fellow urinators quietly smiled.

The days that followed were a crazy blend of intense multicultural dialogue, hugs and photos. Around 100 people came to the reading the next day in the working-class suburb of Carrera. That was the hall’s capacity. People were turned away. The workshop group hosting this event was celebrating its 20th year, and we all know how hard it is to sustain voluntary organisations over time.

Monday, a group of us flew to Apartado, a smaller city of around 180,000, for another capacity audience of 200 with my translations read by Mark Vender, an Australian living there, who is the convener of the city’s writers’ group. Tuesday saw a ‘disappointment’ with our first non-full house, a mere 65 people. Wednesday saw a mildly hair-raising 3 ½-hour trip across the mountains to Ciudad Bolivar. Thursday, Friday, reading, reading – the level of engagement with art across society in Colombia is simply remarkable. Vender told me he’d travelled the world and everywhere else seems to be sinking into a sediment of monocultural, consumerist tepidity. To him, only the people of Colombia (and maybe Brazil) appear content to be going their own way. That way is a long stretch short of perfect – there were gunshots last night outside the hotel. Colombia has critical problems. But it is definitely special.

It was also deeply energising to immerse myself further in the poetics of South and Latin America, which were obviously numerically dominant in the line-up. With the expected influence of Pablo Neruda and Octavio Paz, the New Baroque still exploring new territories – here was a body of work that was mostly vigorous, linguistically and emotionally robust, whilst profoundly engaging with their readers.

Other impressive poets: Tanure Ojaide, Josaphat-Robert Large, Javier Bello, Marra PL Lanot, K Satchidanandan, Maram Al-Masri, Moya Cannon, Ingrid Fichtner, Magnus William-Olsson, Gedour Kristny, Lidija Dimkovska and Tiziana Cera Rosco.

An Australian is invited most years to this festival. It is a pinnacle of a poetic life, professionally demanding and wholly satisfying. Today, as I write, is the closing ceremony (4pm-midnight) where all poetry guests will read one piece. The usual attendance for this final day is around 15,000. Breakfast was laconic – a lack of sleep and a regime of daily appearances has left us wrecked’n’ready. So … (LW)

ON ALBERT CAMUS, ALGERIA AND POLITICS

noreply@blogger.com (Jacinta Le Plastrier) — Fri, 02 Aug 2013 06:17:00 +0000

By Jacinta Le Plastrier

When Albert Camus died, he had been sidelined by his fellow left-wing intellectuals for his opposition to Algerian independence and his condemnation of Stalin’s gulags. Fifty-five years later, writes Jacinta Le Plastrier, his stance on both issues has withstood the assault of time far better than his contemporaries.

And the long overdue release of his final book, Algerian Chronicles, translated into English for the first time, reveals the fault-lines of Camus’s approach to his birth-country, in passionate reportage that spans the 1930s through to the 1950s.

Albert Camus published the final book of his lifetime, Algerian Chronicles, in Paris in 1958. The great writer’s final work – his own selection of his deeply haunted articles on his birth-country Algeria and the question of its independence − was met by an almost complete critical silence. That silence continued to reverberate following his early death two years later.

The reason for this public disdain was twofold. Camus had been traumatically sidelined by other European-based left-wing hommes engages such as Jean-Paul Sartre, not just for his opposition to Algerian independence, but for his condemnation of Stalin’s gulags.

Fifty-five years later, Camus’s passionate discourse − and his almost solitary intellectual and activist stance, on both issues − has withstood the assault of time far better than his contemporaries. In the light of this, the long-overdue, full English translation of Algerian Chronicles is presciently relevant.

‘Dismissed or disdained in 1958, Algerian Chronicles has a new life in 2013, a half-century after the independence Camus so feared,’ writes editor Alice Kaplan in her introduction to this new edition. ‘The book’s critique of the dead end of terrorism − the word appears repeatedly, with respect to both sides of the conflict − its insistence on a multiplicity of cultures; its resistance to fundamentalisms, are as meaningful in contemporary Algeria as in London or New York. Camus’s refusal of violence speaks to Algerians still recovering from the civil war of the 1990s – “the dirty wars”, or “black decade” that resulted in an estimated 100,000 civilian deaths.’

In Algerian Chronicles, which gathers his reportage on his birth-country from the 1930s to the 1950s, Camus meshes the machinery of journalistic ‘on-the-grounds’ reportage with what would become his literary hallmark: an austere styling of language whose results are both exquisite and intensely humane.

In the book’s first series, Camus describes the ‘misery’ of the mountain-based Kabyle community, which had suffered a cruel famine in 1939. He writes, ‘The reader will have seen, at least, that misery here is not just a word or a theme for meditation. It exists. It cries out in desperation. What have we done about it, and do we have the right to avert our eyes? I am not sure that anyone will understand.’

Eighteen months after Algerian Chronicles was published – breaking Camus’s self-imposed, almost-complete public silence of 29 months on Algeria – the writer was dead. He died, aged 46, in an auto accident, alongside his publisher Michel Gallimard, who was driving the car.

The final words of his preface to Chronicles, characterised by his customary astringent order, would become valedictory: ‘This is my testimony, and I shall have nothing more to say.’

The absence of the book’s English publication until now speaks to the terrible sentence of silence that was then imposed on this work. This may surprise those who have grown up familiar with his famous writings, such as The Stranger and The Plague.

Camus’s final few years were lived in a form of exile, from both the country of his birth and his Paris-based community of writer-activists. This was despite his being awarded the Nobel Prize laureateship in 1957 − the second-youngest writer after Kipling to have received it.

Camus was denounced within the Algerian milieu, by both colonialists and members of the independence movement. When he last visited Algiers, in 1956, to helm talks discussing a possible French−Algerian solution to the country’s civil conflict, ultracolonialists in the crowd called for his death.

In Chronicles, Camus writes: ‘I know from experience that to say these things today is to venture into a no-man’s-land between hostile armies. It is to preach the folly of war as bullets fly. Bloodshed may sometimes lead to progress, but more often it brings only greater barbarity and misery.’

For 20 years, Camus maintained a consistent approach to Algeria, supporting full reparation for the Algerians and formal reforms that granted equality to both Algerians and French-Algerians (while maintaining a French-based government). His views had led to a virtual ‘exile’ when, following his articles on the ‘misery’ of Kabyle for a left-wing Algerian newspaper, Camus was blacklisted by the French government. He was forced to move to Paris in order to earn a livelihood. Camus’s stance on Algeria, then, was a long and chronically solitary one.

While waging that public silence, broken only by his Nobel speech and a single published letter to Encounter magazine, Camus is estimated to have personally intervened, via private letters of plea to French President René Coty, in 150 cases where Algerians were condemned to die after being charged for participation in pro-independence activities. He did not save all their lives, but he did save a number. Camus intimated, in press interviews around the Nobel Prize, that he had acted on behalf of the Algerian cause in ways that were not known. He did not reveal explicit details of his actions though. His silence, says Kaplan, was being read as ‘a metonymy for cowardice’.

Kaplan is clear about the fault-lines of Camus’s approach to the Algerian issue. When he returned to the country in 1956, the place was unfamiliar after his long ‘exile’. The post-colonial academe attacked his representation of Arab characters. I read Chronicles close on the heels of Camus’s final, incomplete, semi-autobiographical novel, The First Man (published in English in 1995, one year after France). The novel, which narrates his impoverished yet sunlit childhood in Algiers, is evidence that Camus’s own blood, and its Algerian spawning, pulses intimately within the lines of his reportage. Camus also came from the disentitled: he was born into the dirt-poorest pied noir community of Algiers. His father died in the first year of Camus’s life, in World War I and on French soil. This was the household of Camus’s childhood and adolescence: a mother, deaf, almost mute, and illiterate; an uncle, intellectually disabled; and his grandmother, domineering, tyrannical.

Camus described his motivation on the Algerian issue during the presentation in Algiers in 1956. ‘I thought it possible, and even considered it my duty, to come before you to issue a simple appeal to your humanity, which in one respect at least might be able to calm tempers and bring together a majority of Algerians, both French and Arab, without asking them to relinquish any of their convictions … Let me say first − and I cannot emphasize this enough − that by its nature the appeal falls outside the realm of politics …’

‘I am only here under the pressure of the situation and the way I sometimes conceive of my profession as a writer.’

Algerian Chronicles, ed. Alice Kaplan, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, is published by The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (2013).

Jacinta Le Plastrier is a Melbourne-based writer, poet and editor. She is blog editor at Cordite Poetry Review, publisher at John Leonard Press, and is presently a Hot Desk Fellow at the Wheeler Centre. She blogs at www.jacintaleplastrierofficial.blogspot.com.

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31 July 2013

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WHEELER CENTRE FELLOWSHIPS

noreply@blogger.com (Jacinta Le Plastrier) — Sat, 20 Jul 2013 01:35:00 +0000

With gratitude to the Wheeler Centre and Readings Foundation, I'm here at the Centre for the next 10 weeks writing and revising a long cycle of poems, 'The Book of Skins' - and other writing - and in the company of four other exceptional projects and writers.

A new round of Hot Desk Fellows takes residence at the Wheeler Centre today – and their projects range from a non-fiction investigation of illegal drugs and the dark zones of the internet, to an in-depth essay on Indigenous theatre and a bilingual play that explores migration.

Meet the fellows – and their projects.

Justin Heazlewood

Funemployed (non-fiction)

Justin Heazlewood is best known by his musical/comic persona as The Bedroom Philosopher. He has self-funded and released four albums, staged five festival shows, and toured Australia extensively. He was a senior contributor to Frankie magazine for several years, and has appeared at Women of Letters.

Justin is currently writing the book Funemployed, which will be published by Affirm Press – he’s about to embark on his third draft, and has ‘several structural changes to make’. His book focuses on ‘the grittiness of life as an artist in Australia, from surviving financially and emotionally, to sustaining a career in a country with a notoriously small population and conservative market’.

Justin is looking forward to meeting fellow writers during his fellowship, and hopes to gain extra insight and perspective that could help the book – and to build his literary networks.

‘There has been a groundswell of debate recently about how much writers should be getting paid. I am hoping this book will be an important contribution to the subject,’ he says.

Dione Joseph

Indigenous Poetics of Performance (essay)

Director and performer Dione Joseph has been moving into writing about the theatre world in which she is an active participant. Over the past four years, she has published several reviews of performing arts, with a focus on Indigenous artists.

She is working on an essay that she hopes will later form a chapter in a book on Indigenous theatre, sharing her insights from her various roles, and from the close relationships she has formed with several Indigenous artists.

The essay will argue for the need to reconsider aesthetics (and the weighty history of its Eurocentric aphorisms) in the context of developing a new critical vocabulary for Australian theatre. As part of her work, she will examine three theatre companies and their recent work: Of Earth and Sky by Bangarra dance theatre, Jack Charles vs. the Crown by Ilbijerri and Namatjira by Big hART.

‘This project is very personal to me,’ says Dione. ‘I have invested the past few years into exploring how Indigenous theatre is received here in Australia and I believe the conversation does need new voices who are able to speak both from an artistic perspective and do so with academic rigour and creative expression.’

Jacinta Le Plastrier

The Book of Skins (poetry)

Jacinta Le Plastier is working on ‘The Book of Skins’, a 20-part poem-cycle, centrepiece of a new poetry volume, also to be called The Book of Skins, to be published by John Leonard Press in late 2013.

The volume will collect individual poems, cycles, prose poetry and prose written and published over the past two decades, as well as several new, unpublished poems.

‘The Book of Skins’ cycle is conceived ‘after’ the lifetime work and oeuvre of French-Jewish poet Edmond Jabès (1912-1991), whose endeavours concentrated on multiple volumes revolving around ‘the book’. His work is usually interlocutory and often features a ‘sage’ identity who is in dialogue with the poet.

But while Jabès provides the ‘diving board’ from which ‘The Book of Skins’ cycle launches, the in-progress poems immediately track off into their own presence. They explore the relationship between the writer/poet and poetic language/the book and how this mirrors (or does not mirror) the relationship between a lover and their ‘beloved’.

Jacinta publishes monthly essays on poetry, literature, culture and politics on Cordite’s Guncotton blog. Her poems have been published in Meanjin, Masthead, Overland and Blast and anthologised in collections for Penguin, Picador and Oxford.

Dan Giovannoni

Jurrasica (play)

Dan Giovannoni is a multi-award-winning playwright whose accolades include Best Emerging Writer at the Melbourne Fringe (2011). He is currently working on a bilingual play, Jurassica, which uses two languages to speak of the gaping chasm between two generations – a place where stories and connection have been lost.

It tells the parallel stories of two migrants: Ralph, an Italian who came to Australia in the 1950s as part of the ‘populate or perish’ scheme (and the generations that follow him) and Katja, a Serbian interpreter who fled war-torn Belgrade in the mid-90s. Set in a village deep in the Tuscan countryside, and in the Alfred Hospital in metropolitan Melbourne, Jurassica interweaves the past and the present to explore what it is to migrate, to be displaced, and to spend the rest of your life searching for home.

‘Conceptually, Jurassica is primarily an attempt to locate my grief in regards to my family’s migration, and the disconnect that I experience between my own Australian identity and my Italian heritage,’ says Dan. ‘It taps into my desire to establish some connection with a past that isn’t mine, that I only know through stories, and a present with which I do not fully identify – I am not an Italian, I am not an Australian.’

Dan says the Wheeler Centre fellowship, with its CBD location, will allow ready access to the archives of the State Library of Victoria and the Immigration Museum, time to transcribe family interviews, and the opportunity to talk about the project with others, which he calls ‘a great benefit’.

Eileen Ormsby

Silk Road: the beginning of the end of prohibition? (non-fiction)

A literary speed dating event hosted at the Wheeler Centre was the beginning of ‘every writer’s dream’ for Eileen Ormsby – a book contract, with Pan Macmillan.

Eileen’s passion for drug reform and interest in cybercrime has driven her journalism, with several feature articles published in the Age, two features in Kill Your Darlings.

Here’s a sample of what the book’s about:

The so-called War on Drugs has been an abject failure. Zero tolerance policies have led to untold deaths, from the bloodshed of the drug cartels in Central and South America, to the user on the street who has no way of determining the purity of what he has bought.

Against this backdrop of prohibition rises Silk Road, a website that provides a marketplace for illicit drugs, bringing together end users and sellers. Users have the protection of an eBay-like feedback system and independent reports on the quality of the drugs, while sellers have the protection of absolute anonymity.

Led by the articulate and charismatic Dread Pirate Roberts (real name, gender, location a mystery, a veritable Banksy of the black markets), in its two-year existence, Silk Road has grown from an obscure site on the darknet accessible by few, to a thriving business, with a turnover of $22 million and growing.

Although making up a minuscule part of international drug trade, the solidity of the model, the inability of authorities to shut it down and it’s ever-growing, mainly white-collar customer base is cause for a rethink on drug policy.

‘I have until 16 December 2013 to write an 80,000-word non-fiction book,’ says Eileen. ‘Having only commenced my writing career last year, this is both thrilling and terrifying.’

WORLD STANDS UP FOR WOMEN'S RIGHTS

noreply@blogger.com (Jacinta Le Plastrier) — Thu, 11 Jul 2013 04:14:00 +0000

World stands up for women's rights

Date: March 4, 2013

Jacinta Le Plastrier

The global upsurge in protest against violence and misogyny is potentially revolutionary.

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A women marches during the Reclaim the Night rally in Melbourne. Photo: Sandy Scheltema

As this year's International Women's Day approaches (March 8), it's astonishing to reflect on the seismic shift around women's rights that has occurred in the past 12 months.

It has been a colossal past year, with global and local attention on a range of horrific individual tragedies and broader issues, including sexual assault and violence against women, the ongoing gendered disparity in income, and the debate on misogyny.

In Melbourne, Jill Meagher's abduction and murder led to 30,000 people rallying in Brunswick streets, while the 2012 Reclaim the Night march drew a crowd of 5000 to Sydney Road in a public declaration of "enough is enough" regarding women's vulnerability to sexual violence and abuse.

In India, the gang rape and murder of a student on a bus provoked outrage and protests across the country, which spilled over into Nepal, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Last month in South Africa, there was the brutal gang rape and murder of 17-year-old Anene Booysen, whose case forced a spotlight on what commentators have described as the country's "rape crisis".

The Medical Research Council of South Africa has estimated that up to 3600 rapes happen daily in the nation of close to 52 million people.

Other events also brought women's rights to the fore. There was the death in Ireland in October of Savita Halappanavar, after she was denied a termination, which led to protests against the country's anti-abortion laws. It was part of a wider strengthening in international abortion rights campaigning.

There was also Prime Minister Julia Gillard's condemnation of Opposition Leader Tony Abbott as a misogynist – a speech that reverberated across the world – and the creation of the powerful Destroy the Joint collective, a response to sexist remarks by Sydney radio host Alan Jones.

In the past week, US Republicans made way for the Senate re-authorisation of the controversial Violence Against Women Act (VAWA).

Put together, this new uprising in public expression advocating concrete, improved women's rights – and a definitive, globalised opposition to sexualised and other violence against women – is potentially revolutionary.

Is it too early to call it a radical third wave of feminism? Perhaps, but it doesn't necessarily have to be identified as that.

The internet and online media has changed the way this potentially tectonic shift in gender relations and women's expectations can be disseminated, debated and accepted into society systemically – at the "water table" level.

In an online article on February 21 detailing the achievements of the feminist movement in recent decades, and the critical issues to be resolved, eminent American journalist, author and gender historian Ruth Rosen said the demand for “the ending of violence against women” was “astonishingly” not included on that dramatic day of August 27, 1970, when 50,000 women marched down New York's Fifth Avenue, “announcing the birth of a new movement”. The march's three demands were legal abortion, universal childcare and equal pay.

Rosen argues the reason for the absence of demands against violence was that “though the experience and fear of male violence was widespread ... women still suffered these crimes in silence”.

The past year's increase of attention on such crimes – and the public outcry following certain cases – shows how the ensuing period has changed that. The fact we are debating these issues anew, publicly and often in incendiary voices, demonstrates the collapse of that silence.

Of course, women's rights issues remain charged and in need of constant redress. Accessing legal abortion, even in Australia, remains an issue, and in many countries it is impossible to do so. In Australia, the ratios of women who have experienced sexual violence and women who have experienced domestic violence remain the same: one in five.

The financial inequality experienced by many women is also a form of discriminatory violence. Based on 2012 Australian Bureau of Statistics figures, in Australia women earned an average of 17.4 per cent less than men across all sectors, with much wider disparities in some spheres.

Of grave concern also is the extreme poverty induced for many women by the recent, brutal changes by the Gillard government to the sole-parent payment.

These cuts have reduced payments by up to $110 a week and forced parents with youngest children aged eight and over to shift to the Newstart program. The cuts are causing financial havoc for about 84,000 Australians who qualify for this support – mainly, poor and vulnerable women, and their children.

These cuts were – cannily? - introduced by Gillard's government on the same day that she presented her anti-misogyny speech.

The cuts are misogynistic and the very public opposition to them is becoming a real thorn for Gillard and associated ministers such as Jennifer Macklin in the lead-up to the election.

It has become clear that when faced by such injustices, women just aren't going to suffer in silence any more. And that has the potential to change the world as we know it.

Jacinta Le Plastrier is a Melbourne-based writer and poet. She is part of Melbourne Feminist Action, which is organising the 2013 International Women's Day mass rally – opposing violence against women - on Saturday, March 9, 1pm, at the State Library, Melbourne.

PLATH AND THE 'ARIEL' POEMS 5O YEARS ON

noreply@blogger.com (Jacinta Le Plastrier) — Wed, 10 Jul 2013 04:59:00 +0000

In the latest blog article for Cordite Poetry Review's Guncotton, I spent a month intensively re-reading the great, final poems written during Sylvia Plath's last year (1962-'63). Here's the piece:

‘It was a place of force—’ Re-reading the Poems of ‘Ariel’

12 June 2013

So much has happened to poetry since Sylvia Plath completed her last poems fifty years ago in 1963 that it might seem weird or regressively sentimental to focus back on them. But, encouraged to do so by a number of anniversary events around the globe this year, what strikes is the endurance of these final poems’ brutal clarity.

Having closely re-read, aloud, the poems of Ariel by Plath – whether in Ted Hughes’ Faber & Faber 1965 selection (cover image at left) and re-ordering, or according to her own earlier (December ’62) version, which excluded some of the great, later ‘last poems’ included by Hughes – I appreciated anew their authentic place in the canon, their vitality as a masterpiece work. In them, Plath put a stamp upon a century of poetic genius which experimented and developed the possibilities of free verse in English. She did this by fusing almost-perfected, virtuosic technical skills, groomed and grittily disciplined over her lifetime’s writing, with a new plumbing of free-verse innovation. This innovation included, but not only, her subject material. From ‘Paralytic’:

It happens.  Will it go on?—
My mind a rock,
No fingers to grip, no tongue,
My god the iron lung

That loves me, pumps
My two
Dust bags in and out,
Will not

Let me relapse
While the day outside glides by like ticker tape.
The night brings violets,
Tapestries of eyes,

In these poems – including the later ‘Years’, ‘Balloons’, ‘Edge’ and Words’, added by Hughes, and some poems already in her version of the manuscript, ‘Daddy’, ‘Ariel’, ‘Getting There’, ‘Medusa’, ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’ – Plath tells us: this is what free verse is able to do.

From the beginning of ‘Words’, the final poem of Hughes’ Ariel selection:

Axes
After whose stroke the wood rings,
And the echoes!
Echoes travelling
Off from the centre like horses.

It is not tentative, reckless or haphazard ‘improvisation’, but a thing of deliberated, tensile and sustained syntactical nerve.

Plath would rise to write around 4 am – composing the ‘last poems’ – in the final few months before her death on 11 February 1963. From a note to the BBC by her in 1963, she describes the pristine air and plenitude of this space as ‘—that still blue, almost eternal hour before the baby’s cry, before the glassy music of the milkman, settling his bottles’.

Plath tells us herself that she felt compelled to ‘read them aloud to myself’. We know this from an interview and reading of poems made by her for the British Council. She continues, ‘Now this is something I didn’t [previously] do. For example, my first book, The Colossus – I can’t read any of the poems aloud now. I didn’t write them to be read aloud. In fact, they quite privately bore me. Now these very recent ones – I’ve got to say them. I speak them to myself.’ Finally, ‘Whatever lucidity they have comes from the fact that I say them aloud.’

Reading Plath’s poem ‘Daddy’ recently at an event, I was shaken by the experience of the poem’s physicalised, internal reverberation. Its language’s tonality, and the gale-force drive of that language as it mounts through the poem, was as resonant as if I was playing a cello, held to my body – proof of Plath’s vocalisation of the poems as they were being written. Craft-power, that.

On the innovation of subject matter in the Ariel poems, there is the common derision of Plath as a self-indulgent ‘confessional’ narcissist, likening the horror of Auschwitz and Dacau to her private terrors in ‘Daddy’. Simultaneously, we have commentators such as George Steiner arguing, ‘In ‘Daddy’ she wrote one of the very few poems I know of in any language to come near the last horror. It achieves the classic act of generalization, translating a private, obviously intolerable hurt into a code of plain statement, of instantaneously public images which concern us all.’

This double-take on an intensified ‘I’ and the transpersonal ‘I’ which, together, touch the authentic trauma of external events, is mastered in poems such as ‘Daddy’ and ‘Getting There’. It also allows them to be still, dismissively and simplistically, misread.

When we reassess Plath’s free-verse achievements, there is another motif that emerges strongly; her ability, in line after line, to capture image in language to the point of making image symbolic. This presents another paradox: we may read those images as personal, but they are also engraved beyond that. From ‘Getting There’:

Here there is such mud.
It is a trainstop, the nurses
Undergoing the faucet water, its veils, veils in a nunnery,
Touching their wounded,
The men the blood still pumps forward,
Legs, arms piled outside
The tent of unending cries—
A hospital of dolls.
And the men, what is left of the men
Pumped ahead by these pistons, this blood
In the next mile,
The next hour—
Dynasty of broken arrows!

The title of this essay, ‘It was a place of force—’, comes from ‘The Rabbit Catcher’, one of the dozen poems Hughes omitted from the Plath version of Ariel. To me, it closely describes the aura Plath wrote within during her last year. Much can be said about the voltage of these final poems where only a few words relent. Yet, in her control of the language, there is a governing, self-mastered sobriety, a sanity which acts to contain the poetry’s storming.

In the toxic mythologising of Plath as a young and tragic suicide, this sanity has often been obscured. In February 1962, Plath is quoted in the London Magazine’s ‘Context’;

‘the issues of our time which preoccupy me at the moment are the incalculable genetic effects of fallout [post-Hiroshima] and … the terrifying, mad, omnipotent marriage of big business and the military in America— … Does this influence the kind of poetry I write? Yes, but in a sidelong fashion.’

She continues:

‘My poems do not turn out to be about Hiroshima, but about a child forming itself finger by finger in the dark. They are not about the terrors of mass extinction, but about the bleakness of the moon over a yew tree in a neighbouring graveyard … In a sense, these poems are deflections. I do not think they are an escape.’

I contend that Plath set out to conceal such an ambition in the poems of Ariel – to tattoo into her poems, while referring to the personal self, the existential and verifiable hells and heavens of this world. Reading, or re-reading, this collection is a project, for those writers who wish to take it up, that remains utterly contemporaneous to these times.

This entry was posted in GUNCOTTON and tagged Jacinta Le Plastrier, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes. Bookmark thepermalink.

About Jacinta Le Plastrier

Jacinta Le Plastrier is a Melbourne-based writer, poet, editor, publisher and journalist. With the mainstream news media from a young age, she has worked as a news journalist, feature writer and contributing editor for The Age, The Sunday Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, Good Weekend and other magazines. She is presently Publisher at John Leonard Press and runs an independent monthly salon, the Gilgamesh Modern Salon, featuring prominent and emerging Australian writers and thinkers. Her volume of poetry, The Book of Skins, is due out mid-2013. Alongside being included in anthologies by Oxford University Press, Penguin Books and Pan Picador, she has collaborated with multimedia artists such as Moira Corby and composers Michael Smetanin in Skinless Kiss of Angels and Mary Finsterer Omaggio Alla Pieta.

Website:
http://jacintaleplastrierofficial.blogspot.com.au/

Further reading:

View all posts by Jacinta Le Plastrier on Cordite →

New post, Cordite Guncotton

noreply@blogger.com (Jacinta Le Plastrier) — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 03:54:00 +0000

Recent post at Cordite's Guncotton blog http://cordite.org.au/content/guncotton/ which I am now editing for Cordite Managing Editor Kent MacCarter:

Kent MacCarter
Beveridge, Le Plastrier and Glastonbury

28 May 2013

Cordite Poetry Review has three new names to welcome into the fold – Jacinta Le Plastrier, Judith Beveridge and Keri Glastonbury.

Jacinta Le Plastrier is a Melbourne-based writer, poet, editor, publisher and journalist. She is now Cordite’s blog editor as well. She has worked as a news journalist, feature writer and contributing editor for The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, Good Weekend and other magazines. She is presently Publisher at John Leonard Press and runs an independent monthly salon, the Gilgamesh Modern Salon, featuring prominent and emerging Australian writers and thinkers. Her volume of poetry, The Book of Skins, is due out mid-2013.

Keri Glastonbury has joined the Academic Advisory Board for Cordite Scholarly. She is currently Senior Lecturer, Creative Writing at The University of Newcastle, Australia. Her research interests are Contemporary Australian literary sociability, re-figuring the ‘regional’ (both within Australia and in the Asia-Pacific), practitioner critical communities and generationalism. We’re delighted to have her expertise and eagerness on board (literally) here.

Beginning in 2014, Cordite Poetry Review will appoint an annual Feature Poem Editor who, once a month, will select a new work from Australia or overseas to get the online spotlight and with notes. I am pleased to announce that our inaugural editor will be Judith Beveridge.

NEW WRITINGS & AT THE GILGAMESH SALON

noreply@blogger.com (Jacinta Le Plastrier) — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 03:08:00 +0000

IT'S BEEN a tremendous few months - and I am struck so deeply again by the power and meaning of community. We writers are often thought of as solitary creatures, housing ourselves within - and there is definitely a truth in the need to be able to burrow out of the world to find the words that make our creative life and work what it is. But so much of what I do, and want to do, is fundamentally linked to others and the idea of contributing to creating and supporting an enriched cultural and political community. THE SALON The new monthly Port Phillip Gilgamesh Salon at Evening Star, which I co-host with owner Renan Goskin, has just completed its third event and the next six months' line-up of stellar Australian writers, poets and thinkers is organised. Join Port Phillip Gilgamesh Readings FB page to review what has been and to stay updated on upcoming events. Next up, 6 May, are poets Homer Rieth and, presenting his digital poems, Benjamin Laird. Celebrated book artist Nicholas Jones, in fellowship presently at the State Library of Victoria, will be showing and discussing some of his precious objects: books regenerated into new forms and being. MC is Matt Hetherington. June 3 features are Gig Ryan and Kent MacCarter. June 16 is a Bloomsday event. One of the core pleasures of the Salon is its Open Mic section to which I am consciously committed: it allows new younger, and older, writers to come forward and to experience and mature themselves in reading and performance. It allows the Salon to 'guest' well-known writers, outside the features, who are attending that month's event. The idea of the salon is to create a space for the generation and discussion of ideas and progressive, current literature. On 15 April, my brother and colleague Dr Kieran Le Plastrier presented a moving paper on the interconnectivity of New Physics, creativity, psychosis and language - and his faith in humans' ability to create alternative pathways to resolve complex issues.The paper and filmclip will be posted to the Port Phillip Gilgamesh Readings FB page soon. CORDITE GUNGOTTON BLOG The two links below go to the first two posts I have made as the new blog editor at online poetry and literary journal CORDITE (www.cordite.org.au). Along with monthly personal posts on writing and literature, there will be guest-posts from Australian writers living in or visiting fascinating places across the globe (a continuation of the NOTES FROM series last year) and other guest-posts as they arise. The first two posts are an interlinked review on Finola Moorhead's reissued A HANDWRITTEN MODERN CLASSIC (Spinifex) and an anthology of Australian female poets WOMEN'S WORK, compiled by Libby Hathorn and Rachael Bailey (Pax Press) - http://cordite.org.au/guncotton/iwd-murder-she-wrote/ - and a kind of literary journalism review of The Real Through Line Poetry Symposium (Monash University/RMIT) on 5 April, convened by Ali Alizadeh and Jessica Wilkinson. The conference, featuring 11 poets, was a brilliant pressurisation around the power of poetic language in relation to 'reality'. Link: http://cordite.org.au/guncotton/suspensions-of-the-real/ POLITICAL COMMENT For this year's International Women's Day, The Age published an opinion column I wrote in response to what I see as a tremendous upswell in the attention being given to women's rights in the past 12 months. Link: http://www.theage.com.au/comment/world-stands-up-for-womens-rights The piece was also written ahead of the rally by the new action-based collective, MELBOURNE FEMINIST ACTION, on 9 March, opposing violence against women. MFA is another example of the potency of community; six months on from its founding by writers and activists, Jacinda Woodhead and Stephanie Convery, it's a privilege to be one of this group, comprising passionate and compassionate, issues-knowledgeable and courageous women and men who still believe in the good fight on behalf of oppressed others - and doing something about it. Next action will be around opposing mandatory detention. Join the Melbourne Feminist Action FB page for updates.

NEW LITERARY SALON MELBOURNE

noreply@blogger.com (Jacinta Le Plastrier) — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 00:12:00 +0000

I'm organising a new monthly salon in Melbourne featuring only the best Oz writers, poets, artists and thinkers. Info for 4 Feb Debut Night here. Have been no recent postings on blog as I'm engrossed in finishing the new book of poems THE BOOK OF SKINS, to be published by John Leonard Press early 2013, and ruminating on a couple of challenging book reviews which are worthy truly of the rumination. Will be posting them soon -

NEW MONTHLY LITERARY SALON STARTS 4 FEB 2013

A new monthly literary salon starts this Monday 4 February in South Melbourne, featuring Melbourne-based writers Alison Croggon and Stephanie Honor Convery. A well-known novelist, poet and critic, Croggon will be reading poetry. A novelist, blogger and activist, Convery will be reading work based on her in-progress book on the politics of exercise and the body. The event will be MCd by writer and performer, Bo Svoronos, with an open session for writers following the features. The event is on Monday, 4 February, at Evening Star, corner Cecil and York streets, South Melbourne, 7.30 pm for 8 pm. There is no admission fee. Organised by writer Jacinta Le Plastrier and Evening Star restaurateur and writer Renan Goskin, the salon is part of the venue’s Port Phillip Gilgamesh Readings. Upcoming writers at the salon, to be held the first Monday of each month, include Petra White, Steve Smart, Gig Ryan, Kent MacCarter, Ali Alizadeh, Matt Hetherington, Elizabeth Campbell, Cheryl Overs, Kevin Brophy, Elizabeth Campbell and Jacinda Woodhead. The idea of the salon, says Le Plastrier, is to create a serious but enjoyable forum for literature, politics and culture. (For more information, the Port Phillip Gilgamesh Readings FB page.)

BIOS

Alison Croggon has published several collections of poetry, which won the Anne Elder and Dame Mary Gilmore Prizes and were shortlisted for the Victorian (twice) and NSW Premier's Literary Awards. Her most recent collection is THEATRE (Salt Publishing 2008). She is the author of the best-selling fantasy quartet THE BOOKS OF PELLINOR, which has been published worldwide, shortlisted for two Aurealis Awards and named one of the Notable Books of 2003 by the Children's Book Council of Australia. The US edition of THE NAMING, was judged a Top Ten Teen Read by Amazon.com. Her new novel BLACK SPRING has just been released in Australia and the UK. From 2004-2012 she ran the review blog THEATRE NOTES for which she won the 2009 Geraldine Pascall Prize for Critic of the Year, and was formerly Melbourne theatre critic for The Australian and The Bulletin. She has written several works for theatre, including the operas THE BURROW and GAUGUIN with the composer Michael Smetanin, and MAYAKOVSKY, commissioned by Victorian Opera in 2013.

Stephanie Honor Convery is a writer of fiction, non-fiction, criticism and commentary in the fields of feminism, politics, Indigenous Australia, literature, art and travel. Her work has been published by Meanjin, the ABC Drum, Overland Literary Journal, the Melbourne Writers’ Festival blog, harvest, Voiceworks, The Wheeler Centre and The Big Issue. She has completed a first novel, BIG RIVER, a magical realist drama set in the Australian tropics. She is presently writing a non-fiction book on the politics of exercise and the body. Stephanie is also an activist and academic. She blogs regularly at www.gingerandhoney.com

MC: Bo Svoronos recently completed his doctorate in Indigenous Festivals and Reciprocity. He has been an independent producer and tour manager for the Global Poetics Tour and chairperson of WELL Productions inc. In his role as Indigenous Arts Officer for the City of Port Phillip, he founded, produced and programmed five Indigenous multi-disciplinary festivals, curated visual art exhibitions and established significant cultural programs. Bo re-founded, produced and co-directed two St Kilda Writers’ Festivals. He also writes and performs his own works across various disciplines and genres.

PRO CHOICE ABORTION RIGHTS MASS RALLY MELBOURNE

noreply@blogger.com (Jacinta Le Plastrier) — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 00:59:00 +0000

The first Action by the new open-to-all women’s collective Melbourne Feminist Action is THIS Saturday, 24 November, 10 am – a mass prochoice rally at Australia’s first clinic to offer safe, legal abortions, the East Melbourne Fertility Clinic. The action is timely and essential – coinciding with the news reports of the death of Savita Halappanavar in Ireland last month after being denied an abortion, and other prochoice initiatives including in Chile, where abortion is criminalized. Information below comes thanks to spokespeople for the MFA rally Jacinda Woodhead and Stephanie Convery.

The rally will DEMONSTRATE that the ongoing harassment, on a daily basis, of women patients accessing a legal health service will not be tolerated; also to point out that even in Australia, abortion is legal in only Victoria, WA and ACT. It remains criminalized in some areas of Australia. The clinic, on Wellington Street, East Melbourne, has been targeted by anti-abortionists since its creation 40 years ago but there has been an escalation by the anti-choice lobby in recent months. Women patients and partners are harassed on a daily basis – even filmed and photographed. All this in the media release prepared for the event below. Please share the invitation to join this event: OUR CLINIC. OUR BODIES. OUR CHOICE. The rally will be followed by a march to City Square. (Join / share at MFA Facebook.)

MASS RALLY THIS SATURDAY EAST MELBOURNE FERTILITY CONTROL CLINIC

‘OUR CLINIC, OUR BODIES, OUR CHOICE’

MEDIA RELEASE 19 10 12

A mass abortion rights rally and march has been called for this Saturday, 24 November (10 am), to show support for the East Melbourne Fertility Control Clinic. The rally at the clinic will be followed by a march to City Square.

Established 40 years ago as the first clinic of its kind in Australia to provide safe and affordable abortion, as well as other reproductive health services, the clinic has been picketed almost daily across its history by anti-abortionists. In 2001, security guard Steve Rogers was murdered at the clinic by an anti-abortion protester.

The anti-abortionists harass and bully patients and staff through their picketing, posters (showing anatomically incorrect dismembered fetuses), pamphlets, and physically and verbally intimidating patients, as well as filming them. The anti-choice lobby has in recent months escalated its focus on the clinic. The clinic sees thousands of women every year and anti-abortionists continue to target patients on a daily basis.

The pro-choice rally organisers are hoping for a strong turn-out at the rally. Spokesperson for the rally, Jacinda Woodhead, said the action had been called “to show very clearly that we think the harassment of women trying to access a health clinic is unacceptable – and we oppose it. Abortion in Victoria is both legal and safe, and we trust women to make informed decisions about their own bodies and lives.” The rally had the consent of the clinic, she said.

The East Melbourne Fertility Control Clinic was founded by abortion law reformers Dr Bertram Wainer, Professor Jo Wainer and Dr Peter Bayliss in 1972.

Woodhead said a recent study by Alexandra Humphries, a research student at the University of Melbourne, of 158 women attending the clinic found that 77.8 per cent felt stigmatised by the picketers. In her assessment of the study, head psychologist at the clinic, Dr Susie Allanson, described the harassment as “unwanted, demeaning and harmful attention” toward patients attempting to access a health service.

The Victorian Abortion Law Reform Act of 2008 saw abortion available when requested by a qualified medical practitioner until 24 weeks.

“While abortion in Victoria is legal and safe”, says Woodhead, “this is also a national health issue. Even now, more than 40 years after the Clinic’s founding, abortion is only legal in Victoria, WA and ACT – and has various restrictions placed on it by these states and territories.

“Abortion sits under the Crimes Act in most states, and women can still be prosecuted and publicly shamed for procuring abortion, as we saw in Cairns in 2010. In many parts of Australia, such as Queensland and the Northern Territory, it remains difficult for women to access abortion and other reproductive health services. The reality is we still have places in this country where women can’t access abortion.

“As we saw with the heartbreaking case of Savita Halappanavar in Ireland last month, who died after being denied an abortion, these are the consequences of having laws that restrict women’s reproductive rights.”

The rally is being organised by a new open-to-all Melbourne-based women’s rights organisation, Melbourne Feminist Action, whose first meeting in October decided on the rally. MFA plans a series of actions around a range of women’s rights issues. The slogan for this rally is Our Clinic, Our Bodies, Our Choice.

The rally Facebook event page is: http://www.facebook.com/events/434217766626549/

Melbourne Feminist Action On Facebook: facebook.com/MelbFemAction On Twitter: @MelbFemAction By Email: melbfeministaction@gmail.com

For more information or interviews, these spokespeople can be contacted directly: Jacinda Woodhead (0433 630 643) or Stephanie Convery (0418 100 737).

WHAT I AM UP TO PART 2:

noreply@blogger.com (Jacinta Le Plastrier) — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 23:00:00 +0000

Attending THIS THURSDAY NIGHT ‘Melbourne Feminist Action: an open meeting’, Meeting Room 1, Trades Hall, 54 Victoria Street, Carlton, 1 November, 6.30 pm. This is a new location due to the hike in expected numbers. Enter Victoria Street. Follow Facebook event– convened by Jacinda Woodhead and Stephanie Honor Convery

Posted today under Poetry (above), Part 1 of a long poem on Love and also the Word – in the writing for the past year - titled overall ‘The Book of Assassination’. Sections to be posted sequentially in coming weeks. Also here is a poem by Fernando Pessoa (trans. David Butler), the enigmatic Portugese great (1888-1935), not only one of the major poets of the 20^th-C but also with acute, disquietening relevance into the 21^st. From ‘Selected Poems – Fernando Pessoa’ (Dedalus Press, Dublin, 2009). For locals who want to support the great Collected Works bookstore in Melbourne, buy it there. Both posted poems read this week at what was a truly excellent Gilgamesh Readings (Evening Star, South Melbourne, Mondays, 7.30 pm for 8 pm).

Meditating this Friday evening: I am running the meditation segment at the end of a new FREESTYLE ECSTATIC DANCE evening 2 November, evening start 7.30 pm (meditation approx 9.15-9.45); $15 entry. All welcome. At St. Columba’s Hall, 24 Glenhuntly Rd, Elwood (entrance via Normandy Rd.) Facebook META(morphosis)Dance.

Still reading to review ‘Money Shot – A Journey into Porn and Censorship’, Jeff Sparrow (Scribe). A truly outstanding must-read for anyone who wants to think about the phenomena of pornography in our lifetime.

What I have been up to

noreply@blogger.com (Jacinta Le Plastrier) — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 05:05:00 +0000

Launching this blog now: which has been some time in the gestation and making. Go to ‘About’ above to see what I will be posting on. You can subscribe at right…Robust Debate Welcome. You can also cross to new, related Facebook page. Publishing and editing as Publisher at John Leonard Press a range of exceptional and eminent writers and poets. 2012 Releases: Robert Gray’s landmark Collected Poems - ‘Cumulus’; the late great Peter Steele’s Selected Essays - ‘Braiding the Voices’; Brook Emery’s poetry volume, ‘Collusion’; and Graeme Miles’ ‘Recurrence’. Writing a prose speculative-non-fiction book on spiritual perspectives on the feminine – just released – ‘The Divine Woman and the Twin Flame’. An article on the book – why I wrote it - is also posted here. Writing new poems and in final editing of a poetry volume for early 2013 publication, ‘The Book of Assassination’. The title follows the book’s long, long-line poem on love and the word. Poetry – others and mine, archival and new, Australian and international – will be posted regularly. Hosting this Monday, 15 October, 7.30 for 8 pm, a new reading/salon, Gilgamesh Readings. Featured writer is one of Australia’s finest poets Petra White. Free. At Evening Star, corner York and Cecil Sts, South Melbourne. Reading two extraordinary new releases, both world-class and both by Melbourne-based authors: the luminary literary prose of Alison Croggon in her new novel, ‘Black Spring’ (Walker Books), a rewrite on ‘Wuthering Heights’ among other things; and Jeff Sparrow’s narrative-journalistic ‘Money Shot – A Journey into Porn and Censorship’ (Scribe). Will also be posting on both. The blog has an ‘Inspire’ tag – about the work of others. Check a brilliant Australian-based initiative to provide tech-savvy downloadable apps which provide teenagers (and younger ones and adults if interested) with accessible, intelligent and practical short meditations about mindfulness. I’ve been practising the first one – highly commend the site and not for profit project: go to: smiling mind

VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN WOMEN AGAINST VIOLENCE

noreply@blogger.com (Jacinta Le Plastrier) — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 04:53:00 +0000

WHY I WROTE ‘THE DIVINE WOMAN AND THE TWIN FLAME’

“The roots of violence against women lie in persistent discrimination against women and girls.” - UN

My new book, released this year, offers a spiritual template for individual women to explore living their full potential. But I also want to make it very clear that for me this feminine spirituality can be politically active and potent. By acknowledging the horrific circumstances faced by millions of women and girls politically, we can begin to contribute to the momentum and advocacy for positive change. Consider:

Among the poor, women are usually the poorest.

According to a UN briefing paper: “Violence against women and girls is not confined to a specific culture, region or country, or to particular groups of women within a society. The roots of violence against women lie in persistent discrimination against women and girls.

Up to 70 per cent of women experience violence in their lifetime, according to country data available.

Women aged 15-44 are more at risk from rape and domestic violence than from cancer, car accidents, war and malaria, according to World Bank data.” (www.un.org/en/globalissues/briefingpapers)

The UN research reports that half of women who are murdered are murdered by intimate partners or ex-partners. According to the World Health Organisation, in Australia, Canada, Israel, South Africa and the US, this figure is 40-70 per cent.

Millions of women globally are paying money for, and enjoying, a book that eroticises contracted female submission (’Fifty Shades of Grey’).

Many women now believe it is compulsory that their ‘pussies’ be hair-free (resembling a child’s), and that a woman’s natural body state is socially and individually unacceptable, even ‘disgusting’.

There is considerable evidence that younger women now feel compelled to have sex according to pornographic paradigms.

The UN estimates that, worldwide, one in five women will become a victim of rape or attempted rape in her lifetime. Women and girls are systematically raped in almost every warzone in the world. Angelina Jolie expressly confronts this in her film, ‘The Land of Blood and Honey’.

Boardrooms remain filled with men and professionally powerful women often have to negotiate periods of discrimination to advance to higher levels.

As of February 2012 in Australia, women earned an average of 17.4 per cent less than men across all sectors (average fulltime weekly wage of $1186.90 cf. to $1437.40). In some sectors, the gap was much wider – eg. Health, 32.6 per cent. (Australian Bureau of Statistics)

Of 500 young people who contacted the Australian Kids Helpline counselling service (Jan-March 2012) about concerns about ‘sexting’, 75 per cent of them were female and most under 19. One in three were aged 10-14. (Wendy Squires, ‘The Age’).

Three million women and girls will face Female Genital Mutilation between February 2012 and 2013 (WHO, ‘The Guardian’). Simultaneously, the number of women choosing voluntary plastic surgery to alter the appearance of their genitals (labiaplasty) is ‘sky-rocketing’. (Deborah Bateson, Medical Director of Family Planning NSW, ‘The Age’)

As the author of ‘The Divine Woman and the Twin Flame’, I believe that, woman by woman, the lot of women worldwide can be changed for the better. ‘The Divine Woman and the Twin Flame’ offers every woman a spiritual template for connecting with her authentic power, as a woman, in all aspects of her life. When a woman integrates this power, she becomes self-directed (what I call self-sovereign) and if she chooses to, she takes this power out into the world for the betterment of all. This power is essentially humane and will also alter for the better a woman’s relations with men and the masculine.

The book explores the most important issues in women’s lives: vocation, intimacy, love, sexuality, health and vitality, mothering and family life, creativity, spirituality and men.

The ‘Twin Flame’ aspect of the book explores the potential for women to form intimate relationships of the highest potency – whether they are heterosexual or not, and whatever their relationship orientation.

Early readers have described the book as life-changing. It is available from bookshops or can be bought online at: Facebook, The Divine Woman and the Twin Flame. Publicity enquiries or for images: twinflamepublicity@gmail.com or call Rowena Fitzgerald on 0413 210 940.

Jacinta’s blogspot, which addresses related themes of the book and other issues, is: http://www.jacintaleplastrierofficial.blogspot.com

The Power of Vulnerability

noreply@blogger.com (Jacinta Le Plastrier) — Wed, 22 Aug 2012 08:17:00 +0000

To love another person passionately is to make oneself vulnerable. What is the power of being vulnerable? It is essential to the deepening of our intimate relationships, writes author and journalist Jacinta Le Plastrier.

Blog followers: I recently posted a comment piece on vulnerability and intimacy which I am substantially revising. I will post a finalised piece on the subject when completed.

Image: Cynthia Zordich, ‘Vulnerability’, Canfield, OH, USA, 2005

Book Launch

noreply@blogger.com (Jacinta Le Plastrier) — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 05:16:00 +0000

Dear All, The book is now officially launched and released, in Melbourne; Sydney launch to follow in a month with other author events and talks planned along the East Coast over 2012. I am now in the process of writing blog articles to post on issues and themes related to the radical rebalancing I see between the feminine and masculine occurring across the planet - in individual and collective senses, in spiritual and concrete political instances - along with reviewing outstanding artistic experiences I have been privileged to share. I will email out links as stories are posted. Upcoming: Becoming Your own Heroine and Living Life as an Adventure // Talking about Pornography // Jacqui Stockdale - artist and imaginaire.

Jacinta Le Plastrier

Jacinta Le Plastrier reviews 'The Weekly Poem' by Jordie Albiston

Jacinta Le Plastrier reviews 'The Weekly Poem' edited by Jordie Albiston

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