joanne burns | Custom/Made Editorial

The production line has not been idle at the Cordite Industrial Park on Bespoke Drive. Here are 44 poems that engage with the rubric of Custom/Made in a diverse range of texts/articulations – poems have been 'made' often employing quirky and sprightly strategies in response to the subject.

Bonny Cassidy shows how a student's use of a poetry book gives it some 'value-added' significance.

Bill Rush has the poem review the poet in his reversal poem of the same name.

Numerous poems make use of the ready made and the found in both subject and form. Poets have 'customised' the scapes/topoi in their poems according to individual specifications and perspectives, sometimes favouring the slant, cryptic, or surprising.

Sam Twyford-Moore offers an inventive and clever way of giving a lecture.

Ouyang Yu reveals a startling poesis in his use of a minimalist chart.

There are poems that shift focus with the speedy syntax of channel surfing. There are poems that remake/renovate perspectives and perceptions of received cultural icons.

Sarah K. Bell considers a rabbit atlas in reconstructing a rabbit.

You almost wonder if God has a hairdresser in Zoey Dawson's micro-poem What I thought.

And in this selection of poems are three prose poems. Publishers and editors of The Best Of Anthologies please take note. Since the introduction of these annual anthologies the average number of prose poems included in a single volume has been approximately 0-1 [I had intended to compile a more precise statistical analysis but an initial perusal of the anthologies' inclusion of prose poems became depressing].

Has this form been unconsciously – or consciously – suppressed in Australia?

Poems that have some individuality and distinctive particularities are, in a broad sense, customised by their maker. And the process continues as the reader of a poem interprets, responds to the text via their own subjectivities or 'customisings'.

Sydney
June 2009