The poets in this special poetry issue of Southerly stand for what is now, what is exciting/experimental and what is quality. But did Kate Lilley hand pick most of these poets, ensuring the issue would be tight, stylistically, and adhere to a chosen dogma? She does say in her intro that ‘Of the many poems that turned up in my inbox, already pre-selected by their authors, these are the ones that struck me most’. I’m not going to fault her for being non-inclusive. I say job well done. Lilley is a great pick as editor; her sensibility gels with the type of poetry Southerly tends to promote, and in this book-length collection of only poetry and poetics, Southerly is as strong as it’s ever been.

Consider the issue’s first offering: Julie Chevalier’s ‘Corner of Glebe Point Road and Broadway’, one of my favourites. It’s grungy and bold. It pulses and sings with an addict’s voice while recalling Gwen Harwood’s more domesticated ‘Suburban Sonnet’. The links between the two sonnets are alluring. Chevalier’s is a great poem and a stellar opener for the issue. It sets a brave tone.

Lilley writes that ‘One of the pleasures of a special issue like this is the opportunity to showcase longer work ‘ and to include several parts of a group of poems’. As readers of literary journals, we don’t get much of that. Ken Bolton’s twelve-page ‘Luminous Hum’ and Michele Leggott’s dense ‘northland’ are gems which probably laid dormant, however radiant, waiting for a call to poetry such as this issue of Southerly. And how privileged we are to be able to sneak-peak an obvious collection-in-the-making (or nearing production) of a single poet as we read three poems thematically linked. Laurie Duggan’s European place poems are highly entertaining and informative (if you want to, as I did, be informed of Duggan’s take on Milan, Paphos and Oxenhope), and Michael Farrell has included four poems, all titled ‘lyric’.

There is a stark switch in deliverability near the end of the poetry section. Topics become less original. Stylistically, readers go slightly unchallenged. The poems are not bad; they’re simply underdone in comparison to what came before. In checking the bios I discovered (as I had projected) that these are the poems of the emerging artists. I question the obvious placement of them, and ask why didn’t Lilley sprinkle the less practiced poets throughout the collection, allowing them to stand solidly beside the likes of Gig Ryan and Geoff Page, rather than be singled out as a group holding one another up by their promising attributes.

I wish I could say one of the emerging poets wrote a stand-out poem for me, but I have to stick to the stalwarts of the scene. Ken Bolton is naturally, brilliantly his Ken-Bolton best, evoking the jazz greats of old and finding his way to the late, great John Forbes. Then back again and forth again, ‘Luminous Hum’ is a rambling but focused poem:

                                                             Last week
they celebrated the anniversary of your death
commemorated the death /
                                               celebrated the poems, you.
                           Predictable?
                                                                  A good
turnout -
                 the young were there in force, the old
(people your age if you’d hung on

John Forbes at 58
                                No doubt you d have carried it
off)
           all there.
                          Some Japanese people down the front
                                                          “curiously” .
          – the kind of  ”curious”  you’d have
                                                    applauded
                                                 as a detail -
a further guarantee of your future
                                                you who have none
                                                                who
don t exist.
                        I cling on
                                               – and remember you
tenaciously
                      – what,  ”cling” ?  ”remember ”?

Bolton’s deliberations are so rooted in the background of his point, yet so omnipresent, that they become foregrounding. In the most roundabout way (but again, strangely focused), he is thinking about friendship: not Forbes, but another old friend, ‘Crabby’, one who he has just decided to call because life is surprisingly way too short. I love to hear the cogs working in Bolton’s brain, see how his thoughts are transcribed onto page. I’m happy to compare the process to the music of Charlie Parker (and he can thank me later for this): immediate, tousled and (astoundingly!) focused.

There is also the poetry of Rae Desmond Jones, who I don’t at all consider experimental but who slides perfectly between the pages of this collection because he is also not mainstream: his run-on, rounded-out style is signature Rae Desmond Jones. ‘The Massage’ is a humanistic rumination of the impending execution of his masseuse’s son in Indonesia. It is the most compassionate offering in the book. He writes of the hapless boy:

I hope that he will see the moon as the bullets strike him
so then he may enter that globe of light & it will spread
white & perfect into a beautiful hit of heroin
& he will rise as his body drops into a hole

Jones’s style can be likened to a moving camera. We progress effortlessly from the image of the narrator getting the massage, to the boy in the backdrop with the cheap cap, to the vision of his imagined execution in just two short stanzas. I have to applaud the poet for making the complex changes in person, time and place seem so simple. Classic Rae Desmond Jones. The very reason why readers get so caught up in his emotion.

The last quarter of Southerly 69.3: The Poetry Issue is comprised of essays on poetry by prominent poets and reviews of books by prominent poets, written by prominent poets. Do I detect a certain emphasis on ‘quality’? In ‘Dream-work’ John Tranter takes on John Tranter, and it is nothing less than what we’d expect from Tranter. In his self-analysis, Tranter speaks of himself in the third person, aiming

to achieve some critical distance from the iconoclastic young man who begins his poetic career half a century ago, as well as from the older and ‘ one hopes ‘ wiser poet who quarrels and sometimes agrees with him in these pages.

How fortunate we are to get this inside glimpse into Tranter’s thoughts on his mentors and influences. The piece is taken from his doctoral exegesis ‘ a body of work I cannot imagine critiquing as his academic supervisor.

Kerry Leves’s considered review of Martin Harrison’s Wild Bees is highly textured. His alignment of the poet with Wallace Stevens, the Indigenous painter Lilly Kelly Napangardi, and even some spiritual practices of Buddhism, takes us on a journey of Harrison as mapped out in his book, rather than lists off a stream of poems and discusses each one as separate entities (as in Michelle Borzi’s review of Judith Beveridge’s Storm and Honey). If I didn’t already own Wild Bees, Leves’s review would encourage me to do so.

Basically, this bumper poetry issue of Southerly is worth the money, and it’s worth the read. For me and my bookshelf, it’s a collectors’ item. Good Aussie stuff.

Heather Taylor Johnson holds a PhD in Creative Writing and is a poetry editor of Wet Ink.

After all, if there was one Ern Malley there could be hundreds.

Surely, we reasoned, there were other insurance salesmen, form fillers and hole punchers out there who had turned their attention to all things literary only to perish from some grave condition prior to the financial riches and adulation that accompany publication?

And, in turn, the poems flowed in. The progeny of Malley our readers uncovered were many and various.

There was Warne Malley, a Spanish-speaking leg spinner who materialised on the plains outside Toledo. There was Fleur du Malley, scion of aristocrats and a refugee of Jacobin Terror.

Ern’s cat also got in on the act with some feline rhymes. Surprisingly, or perhaps not, some poets even managed to turn up some poems by Ern himself that Ethel must have overlooked.

So poets, it’s time to put down the pens and pick up the feather dusters. Cordite wants to see what you can find in the back cupboard under that pile of Thor comics, Boney-M records, fondue sets and galley proofs of Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class.

Send us up to five poems on any theme, as long as that theme has something to do with the children of Ern Malley. You’ll need to submit using our untold online submission form, wherein you’ll be asked to provide a nom de Malley as well. And if you can make up a biography explaining the provenance of your poems, all the better.

But you’d better be quick, as submissions close at midnight on 15 October, 2010.

As part of our thirty-third issue, Creative Commons, we made all the poems in the issue available for download, and asked our readers and contributors to remix the poems, in any way they saw fit (read the original submission guidelines here).

Now that the deadline for submissions has passed, we’re really pleased with the response, as well as with the range of approaches to the idea of remixing evident in the submissions. We’ll now send on the remixes to Alison Croggon, our guest editor for Creative Commons. We hope to start publishing the remixes on the site later this month.

Stay tuned.

So it should come as no surprise that I’m feeling a bit ambiguous about this blog post calling Australian poet David Musgrave for his one-line demolition of Mr Sumner in a poem published in The New Yorker.

Musgrave’s poem, which consists of a very long title followed by the afore-mentioned single line, seems to have earned the wrath of We Who Are About To Die’s Richard D. Allen:

Appropriation and originality in poetry and in fiction have been hot topics on this weblog of late. What are we to make of a poem that, setting aside the fact that Sting jokes were old hat before the Berlin Wall fell, consists entirely of a joke that was used as a headline in the Washington City Paper in 2007, the Guardian in 2006 and New York Magazine in 1999?

Personally, I suspect that if this poem hadn’t appeared in The New Yorker, no one would be giving it a second thought.

On the other hand, being one of the legions of writers who’ve sent ‘serious’ poems to said magazine, its publication of “On the Inevitable Decline into Mediocrity of the Popular Musician Who Attains a Comfortable Middle Age” suggests that maybe I’ve been setting my submission standards too high.

What I find most hilarious is that The New Yorker categorises its poetry under ‘fiction’.

If you’d like to read a poem by David Musgrave that doesn’t mention Sting, check out Snow, from our Pastoral issue.

Richard Hillman’s new book has a compelling red cover. A giant black semi-colon portrays a synapse letting through the electrical signal of the poet and book to its readers. A brilliant design, but one hard to live up to. The poems in The Raw Nerve are, for the most part, of ordinary domestic life; a kind of poetry no easier than any other to realise. The trap that Hillman falls into occasionally is presenting, for example, the subject of parenting, rather than using that subject sufficiently to make a poem.

In ‘Was Yesterday A Dream’, a comedy of errors, Hillman writes, ‘I went straight when I should have veered left’. There seems to be a metaphorical point here, one I disagree with. I think he turned when he should have gone straight. The poem seems to lose itself in the turn of the page, veering into the vague, and the sentimental: ‘any moment now the kids / will find a street sign deep / in their hearts …’ A father may well speculate what’s ‘deep’ in his kids’ ‘hearts’, but for me this projection is a stretch.

Sometimes Hillman seems to lack faith in his material, though there’s plenty of poetry to be had here. I don’t need generalities about ‘the heart’ but things that bring Hillman to his observations and feelings. I think ‘Renewing the Vows’ has a similar problem. Can vows be repeated ‘from the heart’? Is this ‘simple love’? It’s a clichéd turn that this otherwise quite excellent poem takes when we continue over the page. It ends:

its gestures as ordinary as a rented house
waiting to be furnished in our newness
by the lightest touch.

I like the idea of love ‘as a rented house’, but why ‘in our newness’? The light touch has already been compromised I think: something more examined is required, perhaps regarding memory. Or, alternatively, something more in keeping with the matter-of-fact epigraph: ‘”Why would we do that?”/ “To be closer.” / “Closer to what?”‘

Hillman writes a dab epigraph. The risk is that title and epigraph can seem sufficient: like that of ‘The Car Park’: ‘We can always tell who’s working / by the cars parked outside the store.’ This seems like a novel or low-budget movie in itself.

At his near-best, Hillman keeps the contingency promised by the cover’s semi-colon alive. For example, the delightful trio of ‘Interruptions’, ‘Interventions’, and ‘The End’. Here we get the payoff of kid-observation and the humour of the tension between adult-reality and child-reality, both somewhat melodramatic. These poems are dynamic, and in a sense more lyrical – closer to song – than those that ponder feelings.

I say near-best, because any book worth publishing should have one knockout poem: one that you want to read to other people. That poem in The Raw Nerve is ‘When It’s Too Hot To Play’, a quasi Snugglepot and Cuddlepie delirium where the girls’ metaphor of being alive coincides perfectly with the narrator’s description. The poem tests syntax as if the heat affects grammatical order. A new stickiness reigns:

‘tease slow air current’ (where ‘tease slow’ is an adjective)
‘swirl lifeline and freehand’
‘language of ants crawling in toe space or behind naked knee’.

It’s not perfect, has an alliteration too far in ‘stealing shade from / sunset trees in the sticky swelter of summer’, but here Hillman shows that clipping language need not result in a clipping of (or a clip-clop) rhythm.

In a long poem, ‘The Story Place’, Hillman takes the trope of citing Australian towns without being ironic, contrived or overdoing it. It’s what seems to me to be a rare thing: a sincere catalogue. Hillman builds into it. The first place (‘North Adelaide’) is on page two of the four and a half page poem; the naming as a continuing of an anaphoral device begins at the bottom of the second page:

from a hotel suite
                    in Thredbo
from the playground
                    in Warrnambool
from the vacant block
                   behind my old home
                   in Seven Hills

Each instance refers to a different goodbye from children to the narrator. The goodbyes and the places themselves are the subject, not the names. It’s a delicate, contemporary, sadder version of Bruce Dawe’s ‘The Drifters’, a poem that seemed to hover behind this book. It’s not that Hillman’s sensibility is like Dawe that much ‘ Dawe is wryer, and more (productively) repressed ‘ but there’s a similar characterisation at work.

‘The Story Place’ reminded me of an earlier poem in the book, ‘The Party Plan’, which begins, ‘My wife has moved all the chairs outside / as if she is charting a new sitting-down place’. It’s the ‘as if’ that’s the killer. It’s more desolate than delicate. It’s not restraint that makes this poem effective exactly; it’s as if a poem was the only way of saying anything at all; that if the narrator has any feelings left, they’re floating above him with the poem’s helium balloons. When he attempts a stronger expression of feeling in ‘The Fridge’ the result is predictable and melodramatic. Without the final stanza it could have been a companion piece to Carol Jenkins’ ‘A Life in Fridges’ (see her Fishing in the Devonian, 2008).

A poem that really takes Hillman out of Dawe territory is the daring ‘Incest Negotiated’ (though it does sound like a parody of a Dawe title). The narrator is, as throughout The Raw Nerve, a father – of, in this case, a boy and girl having an interaction that’s sexual, yet still on the verge of play (the father shows no sign of interrupting or intervening). It begins:

He’s worried his little sister is going to pinch his arse
or grab his balls, and she thinks it funny
when he covers his penis with his hands.

This innocent harassment continues. I began to wonder why the boy was naked, why he didn’t just get dressed. The poem strays from the territory of the playful, when there’s a sense of the narrator’s identification with the boy, and a projection of a feeling and situation that is the narrator’s problem. The poem ends:

There’s too much unwanted attention.
Too many demands.

She wants some part of him he can’t give.
She wants some part of him that isn’t trash.

She wants some part of him that’s still innocent.
She wants and she wants and she wants.

Children can be demanding, but this description seems to be going elsewhere. The ‘and’ repetition alone is an indicator the poem has run out, that what’s left is typing and negativity.

A wonderful poem by contrast is ‘All Fucked Up’, that gets a second rhythmic wind with the anaphora of ‘that’: ‘that the poet sat reading from a piece of paper for an hour / that he got no eye contact for his five dollars’, etc. Yet there is the similar ending: ‘she smiled and she smiled and she smiled’. The repetition gives us less rather than more. In the very next poem, Hillman shows what he can do with a similar ending. ‘A Boy Called Horizon’ ends with the striking ‘as happy as ten cynical toes beside a fire’. It has a lovely companion poem in ‘Thoughts in a Rearview Mirror’, another boy portrait.

There’s plenty of variety in The Raw Nerve, but the variation is in the quality as well (‘The Plea’, a prosaic complaint, is just one that shouldn’t have made the grade). The book is in four sections, but I didn’t get a sense of the logic behind the division. It felt like everything rather than a judicious selection of poems. Hillman worked a profitable vein in Raw Nerve, but I felt it gave me too much of the work, along with the profit.

Michael Farrell’s most recent book is a raiders guide.

Entitled “play! fantasy cricket poem”, the object of the game is as follows:

to play fantasy cricket poem simply select your fantasy poem from the lines provided. each poemselecta will select a total of 11 lines. these 11 lines must be made up of 4 batting lines, 4 bowling lines, 2 allrounder lines and a wktkeeping line. there are few rules governing the order in which the lines should appear. no batting line can appear below line 7; no bowling line should appear above line 6; allrounder lines should not appear below line 8.

Did you get all that? If you’re still confused, check out the comments section of the post where four poem/cricket tragics have already posted their ‘elevens’.

midnight, the train departs
for death camps

all by itself
a hand creeps
through the moonlight

whose coat of arms
on this signet ring?

nicotine sky
dulling the smell
of bodies

suffocated by
datura’s tubular bells

And this cheerful little passage from Part II:

here in the garden
worms outnumber
the dead

reincarnations
wriggling to escape

Cowards!
I cannot believe
they’re gone

‘scuse me, friend
this spot taken?

our breathing stilled
a city crumbles beyond
the north window

Gaaaaah! Of course, with just over ten rounds to go, we still welcome your ku, so pop on over to the ZHR II page and have a look at how it’s unfolding. Now comes with quite neat threaded comments feature, too!

Zomtold!

The first part of the bridge was ‘built’ in May 2010, with a ‘Home and Away’ conference in Auckland (check out some audio from the speakers here) and an excellent collection of works by poets including Adam Aitken, Ken Bolton, Iain Britton, Pam Brown, Michelle Cahill, Janet Charman, Jen Crawford, Martin Edmond, David Howard, Hanna Huia, Jill Jones, Cath Kenneally, Michele Leggott, Kate Lilley, Bill Manhire, Cyril Wong and Mark Young.

The next part of the bridge will be ‘constructed’ in Sydney from 1-2 September 2010, at a second Home and Away conference hosted by the University of Technology, Sydney. The list of speakers at the conference includes many of the names mentioned above, plus some cool extras. Two readings (one at UTS and the other at the University of Sydney) will also be held. We look forward to seeing how the second half of the digital bridge comes together.

The Unhaunting is Andrew Taylor’s seventeenth book of poetry and comprises work written between 2003 and 2008. The collection is divided into five parts. The first, ‘The Importance of Waiting’, acts as a tidy introduction to the book’s themes of mortality, elusive truths and the environment, both as interior and exterior. Taylor begins with a vivid portrait of Perth’s suburban landscape where quiet concern spills over into the everyday. Poems become touched by apparition and by the possible threat of cancer returning to the poet after a period in remission. Even the landscape seems predisposed to such ambiguity and to its own threat of extinction. Death, dying and ghosts from the past actively haunt the pages of this book. These ghosts are not necessarily always human, often they materialise as concern, emotion and memory. They linger in a bold light and do not fade easily.

‘Maybe One Morning’ follows. It is a concise collection of translations of Italian poet and Nobel Prize winner, Eugenio Montale. These eleven translations were developed by Taylor during an Australia Council for the Arts residency at the BR Whiting Library in Rome, and Montale’s disharmony ruffles up the reader fittingly. These are poems of troubled waters, metaphorical lighthouses and coastguards, of a sea wind that rages. Again, departures and the dead, as well as general unease, spread wide across the pages like a sail.

The third part, ‘The Vanishing’ returns to Taylor’s original work and discusses recent travel and domesticity. But it is the fourth section, ‘Unhaunting’ that is the most rewarding part of this collection. It continues with the poet on his travels, firstly as a visiting academic at the Shanghai University for Science and Technology, and then on to Europe. The first three poems – ‘Shanghai High-Rise’, ‘Dust’ and ‘Roadworks, Shanghai’ – have common themes. They discuss the lonely disjointedness of someone travelling alone on business, the urban landscape of high-rise living and of the frantic redevelopment going on outside of the poet’s apartment building with an expressway below him. Such detached busyness escalates loneliness during Taylor’s ‘two months of the kindness of strangers’ (‘Dust’). He further explains that ‘it’s the stuff / of my song, of your not being here’ (‘Shanghai High-Rise’).

The remaining Shanghai poems continue with often intimate interactions with strangers. In particular a conversation that is full of words not uttered to family or friends. The poet contemplates the peculiar closeness of discussing personal matters with complete strangers. Of how two people can connect so deeply, even if they were never to meet again. Such things are intrinsically linked to the human condition, which Andrew Taylor continues to explore when he takes the reader to Poland.

Whilst the Shanghai poems are very much in the present, the European poems return to ghosts and an unsettling, mostly to do with those living scars of modern history. Taylor explores Auschwitz, a troubled underworld, of how death is often close to the skin. This theme is extended to Germany where he writes of the country’s cemeteries or friedhöfe, most notably in the town of Biebrich where the poet stands alongside his partner who interns the ashes of her mother. In ‘Friedhöfe’ Taylor explains that this was ‘a complex life / finally peaceful after her / hardest but inevitable journey.’

This subject then continues on into the title poem of the collection, which explains this woman’s past and contemplates the cause of her nocturnal restlessness while she was alive:

her failure to sleep
tormented the stairways and corridors,
rattled doors…

Was it those months of fleeing
the Russian advance across Germany
on foot, hiding from German soldiers
who would have shot her on sight
that set her prowling until her wits
finally calmed her fears?

The final part of this collection, ‘The Impossible Poem’, delves into culture, reflections on long ago childhood and the discarded objects that go with it, frivolity, time passing, music and charades. As well as surf and swimming, and what these two things mean to the poet both physically and spiritually. In many ways these watery poems loop to return to the pieces from the beginning of the book, providing a nice conclusion. Taylor ends the collection with a statement about writing and that endless search for perfection in ‘The Impossible Poem’. He explains:

There are only two poems –
the one you write
and the one always undoing
your words

Although the title of this book and the title poem suggest an unhaunting is occurring, I feel that this collection reinstates the idea that as humans we are perhaps haunted by a myriad of things – by events from the past or past behaviours, by the threat of illness returning, by those small and everyday moments that become so much larger than life when a person close to you dies and all we are left with are Technicolour, surround-sound memories. Such things are a response to experience and to the very idea of how we live. While Taylor lacks the public profile of some of his contemporaries, he has quietly built up a strong body of work and The Unhaunting is testament to this.

Libby Hart’s first collection Fresh News from the Arctic received the Anne Elder Award in 2006. Her poem This Floating World was performed at the Salt on the Tongue Goolwa Poetry Festival 2010.

POST-EPIC was a collaborative exercise, where we posted one line from each of the poems in EPIC, and then invited readers to contribute further lines via the comments feature. We also laid down a challenge for our readers: get to 1,000 lines, or else. All right, so I’m making up the “or else” bit.

Eight months later, how did we fare? Did we actually reach our elusive and completely arbitrary target? Or did we in fact chalk up a Post-Epic FAIL?

A total of 880 comments have now been left on all POST-EPIC posts, which is pretty unbelievable, but then we did give people a long time to participate in the dialogue. But 880 still leaves us well short of 1,000, doesn’t it? That’s why we need to add 34 to that total, to count for each of the 34 opening lines in the issue. Okay, so that’s 914. Still nowhere near 1,000.

Except for the fact that in our initial challenge we set a target of 1,000 lines, not comments! Yes, and we humans being creatures who tend not to follow the rules, a significant number of comments were composed of not one line but two, three, four and sometimes five lines! So if you count them all up, and add them to our total, you can see just how we reached our target, without even trying!

To celebrate this rather ephemeral victory, we’ve now updated the poems in POST-EPIC to include all of the lines submitted by our readers in the main body of the text. Now, for the first time, you will be able to judge whether the Cordite hive-mind is actually capable of making sense, or whether the whole thing was just a horrible waste of time.

And what better way to start our analysis than with Bev Braune’s opening poem, So the story goes: Glámis, the Bride!

We trust you will enjoy this post-POST-EPIC intervention of ours, and welcome your comments – one line at a time, of course!