The Best American Poetry

"Leonie" by Lucy Dougan [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Lucy Dougan’s “Leonie” speaks to the strange charisma that inanimate objects can assume over time when they share our space with us. A sculpture of an anonymous artist’s model, after living with the family for decades, suffering “endless room changes, / the tectonic jolts of whole-house moves”, becomes almost sacred to the speaker. Having borne witness to so much of the family’s life, the “many rows and unkind words” and “also good times, rafts of regrettable TV”, the speaker develops an intimacy with the figure that is itself familial, bordering on the erotic: “If I were rendered blind I would know / your lightly pitted cheekbones, / your brow line, your rough underside”. 

The sculpture is, of course, brought to life not by any innate animation it possesses, but by the memories the speaker and her family have imbued it with, and this artificial nature offers it a lifespan that is greater than their own, meaning that it can be a reservoir for these memories for longer than they themselves can. It is this dual character, at once familiar and extraordinary (the speaker's intimacy with the statue is interrupted by its headache-inducing epoxy resin), that inject these objects with their eerie presence. The figure, outliving the speaker’s parents, becomes uncannily totemic of them: “Stranger, stay with us, / watch over us, / never leave us.”

 

 

“Leonie” is taken from Dougan’s most recent collection of poems, Monster Field (Giramondo, 2022). The title refers to “the mysterious zone surrealist artist Paul Nash’s called ‘Monster Field’: the place glimpsed from a car at speed, which opens up a space between the everyday and the occult as it ‘almost slides past our eyes’.” Monster Field is Dougan’s seventh book of poems. Her third collection, The Guardians (Giramondo, 2015) was shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry, and won the 2016 West Australian Premier’s Poetry Award. Dougan lives in Perth, where she is poetry editor of Westerly Magazine.

Leonie

 

Paid artists' model,

your face has lived with the family for decades.

You have suffered endless room changes, 

the tectonic jolts of whole-house moves 

yet you remain sanguine.

Your hairstyle has weathered the years

and the many rows and unkind words you have presided over, 

also good times, rafts of regrettable TV.

If I were rendered blind I would know 

your lightly pitted cheekbones,

your brow line, your rough underside and slight headache-inducing 

scent of epoxy resin in which a finger could snag a glassy splinter 

of what it is you keep inside the void of your cast.

I cannot see you as empty for in your hollow head lives the clamour of us all.

And something else, you still abide with us 

even though our mother and father are dead and gone.

Stranger, stay with us, 

watch over us, 

never leave us.

 

From "Television" by Kate Middleton [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Kate Middelton’s recently published book length poem Television (Giramando) is an emotional survey of the poet’s tv watching history. Both in its form and compositional approach, the poem owes much to A.R. Ammons’s Garbage. As Middleton writes in the book’s notes, “Re-reading Garbage, I was struck by the fact that in taking garbage as his subject Ammons could include everything. As I began to write about television, I wondered if the same might be true of this subject.” 

Television, like garbage, does include everything, however, everything has to pass through the very specific medium of television to be included, with its unique peculiarities and predilections. Divided into thirty-three cantos (Inferno,  Purgatorio or Paradiso?) of unrhymed couplets, Television embraces and investigates these peculiarities; at times the poem prosecutes tv’s preference for scandal and the sentimental, it’s (corrupting) influence and ability to distort (particularly in the poet’s teenage memories of watching Beverly Hills 90210 and Twin Peaks, “the autopsy / on Laura an autopsy on girlhood”), while at other moments extols it’s virtues, however flawed: “television, / you are spiritual: teach attention and inattention in equal measure”. Notice Middleton’s deft use of the colon, borrowed from Ammons, as a means of “linking the disparate but coexisting, and so staving off completion”, as Mark Ford wrote.

 

Kate Middleton is a Melbourne based poet whose collections include Fire Season, which was awarded the Western Australian Premier’s Award for Poetry in 2009, Ephemeral Waters and Passage. In 2020 she was runner up for the Australian Book Review’s Calibre Essay Award.

From "Television"

 

6. 

 

I want to celebrate Astro, the robot boy I loved, his Pinocchio 

ache, a moment's solace that time he found a robot girlfriend:

 

incandescent eyes at last find eyes to beam right back: and him 

fallen in, into, unprogrammed love: but soon the complication

 

revealed, its violence: his robot girlfriend not just another robot but, 

also, a bomb, the bomb, the one he needs to find, defuse, and his

 

girlfriend sacrificed: a higher pathos: so: her body on a table, 

disassembled, redeemed, everyone but her saved, (a celebration,)

 

except the robot boy and his lonely deathlessness: did he understand 

time's passage in a different way, its metronomic tick echoing

 

in his ever-childish body?: did he understand the replaceable, 

Argonautic parts of himself as his own, as bodily integrity,

 

autonomy?: for all his griefs, there's that final shot—a wink, 

a playful secret: Astro tells us, his audience, his only confidantes,

 

he kept her legs, which, non-explosive, did not require 

sacrifice: and he caresses his own thighs, calves, and we

 

understand it: her legs, shared legs, now his legs, no rejection 

of the transplant, no foreign tissue, instead a flawless

 

interchangeability, the comfort of this particular

inheritance incalculable: I recapped the scene to the boy

 

at the video store counter, our own private form of payment

for my late fee, as if it were just gross and not wondrous

 

as well: and, to me this transplant only feels complete

years later, its longing for closeness, the intimate fact of being,

 

at last, one being, like me once telling my lover I want to feel with

your skin: Astro usurping this longing, Astro the only one

 

who ever really felt it

“to paint like picasso before 1904” by Grace Yee [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Congratulations to Grace Yee who last week won Australia’s richest literary prize, the Victorian Prize for Literature, for her debut collection Chinese Fish (Giramondo, 2023). The collection traces the story of an immigrant family from Hong Kong living in the South Island of Aotearoa New Zealand. The judges comments noted that Chinese Fish “focuses on women’s experience; particularly, how migration tests the relationship between a mother and her daughter. (Yee) tells this story with sparkling humour, wit, and stylistic verve, while paying sustained attention to historical circumstance – particularly everyday racism and the discriminatory government policies which affected Chinese migrants.”

 

In “to paint like picasso before 1904”, first published in Overland in 2019, Yee’s “sparkling humour, wit, and stylistic verve” are on full display, along with a beguiling mix of registers switched so seamlessly and effectively, it is near impossible to get one's bearings within the poem. In "to paint like picasso before 1904", Yee takes from us our sealegs so she can more easily steer us through the urgent and the absurd until we arrive, implausibly, at the poem's title.

 

 

to paint like picasso before 1904

 

        there is a species of tavern where drinkers make disparaging remarks about chinese

immigrants. it is patronised by a squadron of pirates of otherwise sweet temperament, who

truck their goods with whomever they please.

        baring dog-yellow teeth, they sit in plastic fold-up chairs in cheap t-shirts designed

by europeans unmolested in canton.

        each ship at the bar plays furiously, leaving a trail of wild colonial girls cruelly

strangled after the first wash.

        in the wake of their missionary grandmothers, the risk these women take is

calculated on trigonometrical principles. female players have the option of wearing cones so

they don’t get kissed for no reason.

        everyone looks for their partners online these days, including an entire class of

whining feminists for whom postpartum incontinence has never been a problem, but who

nonetheless kegel jade eggs at every opportunity.

    it’s hard for these women not to feel violated by the knowledge that their dna is

half-man, but the smarter chicks check their purses of emotional labour in (the taverns’) tiny

grimy bathrooms and suspend intercourse by returning to campus via the victorian roads.

        in high pollen weather, with abscesses fit to burst, they heroically collaborate in their

efforts to arrest the flames.

        after years of feckless liaisons, some of these women set sail for the orient. landing

in the earl’s court, they feel secure in their portion of comparatively uncontaminated

empire.

        with contempt in equal parts for men and aliens silently stoning their gallbladders,

they manage to live peacefully, albeit corpulently, by a calendar of saints for years under a

special licence to paint like picasso before 1904.

“The Apology Day breakfast” by Ali Cobby Eckermann [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

This year, January 26 arrives in Australia with added resignation following the defeat of the  “Voice” referendum late last year, which would have altered the Constitution to recognize the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to parliament. The Voice emerged from the Uluru Statement From the Heart, a petition written and endorsed by First Nations leaders calling for substantive constitutional and structural reform. 

The Uluru Statement was released on National Sorry Day (May 26) in 2017, a day that remembers and acknowledges the forcible removal of indigenous children from their families and communities, known as the Stolen Generations. The brutal policy was carried out by successive governments from the mid-1800s right up until the 1970s, but it was not until 2008 that a formal apology was given by then prime minister Kevin Rudd on behalf of the Australian government.

 

For the speaker in Ali Cobby Eckermann’s “The Apology Day breakfast”, the apology and its accompanying function offer no substantive remedy to the intergenerational trauma inflicted upon her, rather it just adds another layer of intrusion (“how does one define the jigsaw / when the pieces are misshapen / by the constant hands of others?”) into the process of healing she has undertaken through her own conviction, “you offer breakfast and forget / I found my mother," and force of imagination, “and rebirthed my son/ Together we are the Banquet”. A conviction and imagination that will need to be more resilient than ever this coming Friday.

Ali Cobby Eckermann is a Yankunytjatjara poet and artist from South Australia whose work has been published and celebrated around the world. Her poetry collections include little bit long time and the award-winning collection Inside My Mother. Her verse novels are His Father’s Eyes and Ruby Moonlight, which won the inaugural black&write! Indigenous fellowship, the Kenneth Slessor Prize, a Deadly Award and was named the NSW Premier’s Literary Award Book of the Year. In 2013 Ali toured Ireland as Australia’s Poetry Ambassador, and in 2017 she received the Windham-Campbell Prize from Yale University.

 

The Apology Day breakfast

 

my mother did not grow up

with her mother I did not

grow up with mine my son

did not grow up with me

 

how does one define the jigsaw

when the pieces are misshapen

by the constant hands of others?

 

the gift of life is maternity

and the removal of this is

a reparation that has no price

 

the picture is askew in the portrait

you offer and rejection is the new

graffiti to rewrite the script

 

you offer breakfast and forget

I found my mother

and rebirthed my son

Together we are the Banquet

"Passing Through Chicago" by Petra White [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Petra White has published five collections of poetry, including her most recent Cities (Vagabond Press, 2021). Here debut collection, Incoming Tide (John Leonard Press, 2007) was shortlisted for both the Queensland Premier's Literary Awards and the ACT Poetry Prize, while in 2010 she was awarded the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry for The Simplified World (John Leonard Press, 2010).

 

 

 

Passing Through Chicago

 

Rivers of road, rivers of river, snow-clumped trees,
the angel, flowering in moonlight.
People would have muttered if they’d seen.
What good is an angel now?
His terrifying beauty, hidden beneath a wing.
If we think we could be rescued, from the fate we’ve shored up,
it is not an angel, it’s a person, rising out of flames.
Perhaps the angel, fallen to earth as lightly
as a feather from a falcon, has nothing to offer but himself,
pale clawed feet in the dark street, his feeble torch
on this avenue of twitching flags, threads of a great anxiety.
He crawls into the attic of number 1813.
In the space between home and state,
the angel shudders, turns, cramped wings shake open –
through the house a molten dream, through breakfast and dinner,

through the silver sorrows of the city,

its lumpy cracked streets, its America, soaring in the snow.

"Stalin's Holidays" by John Forbes [Thomas Moody]

"Stalin's Holidays" is the title poem of John Forbes' second collection. Happy holidays!

 

 

Stalin's Holidays

 

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
Juniper berries bloom in the heat. My heart!
‘Bottoms up, Comrade.’ The nicotine-stained
fingers of our latest defector shake as they
reach for Sholokhov’s Lenin—the verandah is
littered with copies—no, commies, the ones
in comics like ‘Battle Action’ or ‘Sgt Fury
& His Howling Commandos’. Does form follow
function? Well, after lunch we hear a speech.
It’s Stephen Fitzgerald back from ‘Red’ China.
Then, you hear a postie whistle. I hear without
understanding, two members of Wolverhampton
Wanderers pissed out of their brains, trying
to talk Russian. Try reading your telegram—
‘mes vacances sont finies: Stalin’. But we don’t
speak French or play soccer in Australia, our
vocabulary and games are lazier by far. Back
in the USSR, we don’t know how lucky we are.

 

Hanging Loose Auction [by Thomas Moody]

 

Issue #114 of Hanging Loose is out now, and it's chock-full of great stuff, with new poems by Sherman Alexie, Joanna Fuhrman and David Lehman; art by Amy Masters; a supplement of poems curated by Hanging Loose author R. Zamora Linmark featuring Denise Duhamel, John Hennessy, Paulo Javier and a translation by Kimiko Hahn; and a remembrance of the poet and New York Times dance critic, Jack Anderson, plus Jack’s last poem.

Issue #114 marks 57 continuous years of publishing for Hanging Loose. In that time, the press has championed the work of authors marginalized by mainstream publishing, whether because of gender, race, age, class or socioeconomic status. Many of the over 220 books Hanging Loose has put out have been first books, including the first full collections by Sherman Alexie, Kimiko Hahn, D. Nurkse, Jack Agüeros, Cathy Park Hong, Eula Biss, Hayan Charara, and Maggie Nelson. 

While the press has always gratefully relied upon the generosity of their friends and readers to ensure the enterprise continues, this fall a necessary move to a more expensive warehouse and storage space is increasing their financial need. 

In order to supplement these greater costs, Hanging Loose has set up an online auction which is running until early next January. Signed books by Charles North and Sherman Alexi are up for auction. There’s also a 10 week online class with Barbara Henning and a Dumpling Dinner with Hanging Loose editor Jiwon Choi!

Click here to bid on one of the items, or alternatively, you can make a straight donation here to help this iconic independent press keep keeping on.

Oh—and you can find Issue #114 here.

"Night Flight" by Sarah Holland-Batt [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

In the introduction to her collection of short essays on Australian poets, “Fishing for Lightning: The Spark of Poetry”, Sarah Holland-Blatt writes “As a form, poetry is full of freedom and possibility. It asks the reader to be open to coincidence and association, to music and imagery, to chance and change. Poems are full of surprises: each line is a little detonation of language and imagery, each stanza a series of swift steps into the unknown.” Holland-Blatt’s “Night Flight” is a perfect demonstration of these detonations of language and imagery. From one line to the next throughout the poem, we are shepherded across continents and desires, to destinations known and unknown, physical, temporal, bodily, imaginative and personal, where everything is “defined / by distance: how close we were, how far from steel mills in Pittsburgh / and those killing Chicago winds”.

 

Sarah Holland-Blatt is one of Australia’s leading poets, editors and literary critics. She has been published widely internationally, including in The New Yorker on several occasions. From 2014 to 2019 she was the poetry editor of Island magazine, and was also the editor of The Best Australian Poems 2016 and The Best Australian Poems 2017. Her three collections of poems to date have swept up nearly every major literary award Australian poetry has to offer, with her most recent title, Jaguar, winning the 2023 Stella Award.

Night Flight

 

As my plane drops down in turbulence

I think of you and of Salt Lake City,

I think of ice stealing over the Great Lakes

and of Omaha and of adamant plains.

I think of all the places

I have never been: Caracas,

La Paz, Kingston. I think of the way

our bodies puzzled together in that room

over pine woods where night deer

passed in the snow, their lonesome

inscrutable tracks sluicing

in the morning’s melt, I think of

your eyes that are almost the colour

of mercury, of their unbearable weight,

I think of the plateau of your chest

rising, rising, and of your hand

resting on my right thigh,

of the slim glint of your wedding

band in the dove predawn light.

I think of how everything is defined

by distance: how close we were,

how far from steel mills in Pittsburgh

and those killing Chicago winds

and union towns near Detroit, Michigan

where loyalty is the only religion.

I think of the sound of your breathing,

which is the sound of fields

of blond Illinois wheat bent down,

I think of those silver silos

of harvest corn we saw in Schuylerville,

barns blazing in all that silence

as we drove through what we could

not think or say. There is no grace

in this kind of longing, there is only pain,

pain which I have always preferred

anyway – it is where I live,

and called love by any other name.

Introduction to Michael Farrell (Part 2) [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

In 2019 Michael Farrell edited the anthology Ashbery Mode, a collection of over sixty Australian poets whose work has been inspired by John Ashbery. The anthology is as much a testament to Ashbery’s range (both form and tone) and durability as it is to his inimitability. Ashbery’s influence is noticeable in Farrell’s own poetry, the two poets share a penchant for playing with form. 

“Good Fortune” borrows much of its formal restrictions from a sestina: six, six-line stanzas followed by a tercet. But Farrell disrupts the traditional sestina: instead of repeating the end words of the first stanza in sequence throughout the poem, he repeats the opening words, while maintaining the traditional pattern. The shift in placement alters the dynamic of the poem, which assumes a “push” force, rather than the “pull” of a traditional sestina, in which we know where we will end up, we just don’t know how we are going to get there. The irony of Farrell’s adaptation of the sestina is that the opening up of the end words to variation does not alter the form’s overall effect. We still know where we are going to end up: right back at the beginning.

Good Fortune

Suddenly I was a banker with a magnificent desk

Yet it seemed that after years of success and luck

Everything I’d worked for was about to disappear

Due to mismanagement or fraud or the economy

Thanks to good fortune however, it turned around

And I kept the desk with its four kangaroo legs

 

Suddenly I was a farmer with a magnificent flock

Yet it seemed that the good seasons and high yields

Everything I’d taken for granted had now collapsed

Due to climate change or bureaucratic guidelines

Thanks to good fortune though, I was able to sell it

And it became a sanctuary for sheep with wooden legs

 

Suddenly I was a toymaker with a magnificent factory

Yet it seemed after years of innovation and record sales

Everything had become unpopular and old-fashioned

Due to multinational pressure or the cheapness of plastic

Thanks to good fortune or rep, I got a new commission

And became a maker of robots with weaponised legs

 

Suddenly I was a priest with a magnificent window

Yet it seemed that the amount of joy and worshippers

Everything that seemed right in the world, was dwindling

Due to scandals and competing with Twitter and Satan

Thanks to good fortune or God’s grace, or Coca-Cola

And the thirst for promotion, I became a Coke on legs

 

Suddenly I was a porn star with a magnificent action

Yet it seemed that the decades of sex and recognition

Everything that’d once been a stud’s due, was over

Due to ageing or cams and the rise of amateurism

Thanks to good fortune or surgery I literally became

A donkey and could do so much more with four legs

 

Suddenly I was a kangaroo with a magnificent head

Yet it seemed that after years of a cushioned existence

Everything in the building including me was obsolete

Due to mismanagement or asbestos or the economy

Thanks to good fortune I was reprieved (and relieved)

And went to the home of a creature with two legs

 

Suddenly no-one believed in magnificence any more

Yet everything that once had legs was due to return

Thanks to good fortune and the decline of the circle

Introduction to Michael Farrell (Part 1) [by Thomas Moody]

Michael Farrell is one of Australian poetry’s great experimenters. Over his eight collections to date he has pushed at the limits of form, structure, syntax and more to interrogate, and indeed reshape, what “Australian poetry” actually means, particularly in its post-colonial paradigm. His seminal critical work Writing Australian Unsettlement: Modes of Poetic Invention 1796 - 1945 expanded on this project, and further established him as among the nation’s most adventurous and original intellects, along with being one of its foremost poets. 

 

 

“proust aboard a doomed corvette” is taken from Farrell’s second collection ode ode (2002), a collection marked by a talent for hyper-paced parataxis, reminiscent of Dean Young. Farrell’s early poems are laced with pop-culture and literary references, wit, irony and pathos. The imagery is surreal and their associations surprising, but they always remain rooted to an emotional truth, so that in Farrell’s poetry we are able to identify both the fractured external world around us and our equally incongruous internal lives.

 

proust aboard a doomed corvette

the blue car was too slow marcel

insisted this was a virtue so we

toured the galleries gave cats lifts

painted bodies as we passed there

were some whose souls we entered

briefly & saddened like weevils

in an opened cheese remained

illdisposed to heroics haircutting

ate nothing so this is the moon

marcel remarked gloomily the life

forms are disappointing i dont

understand what god was getting at

leave god out of it i said

annoyed at last by his trilby

twitching watch the road baron

he replied there arent any moon

roads anyway i thought you

were driving out of petrol time

to abandon vessel lay low hope

a cattle farmer comes along we

can steal his wife horizon his

bitter expressions well the first

figure to come along was an army

deserter we were too sentimental

to harm we lent him a cork

shelter a phone that remembered

princes number ned kelly shrieked

mp we continued without holdups

 

"Parable" by Louise Glück [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Last Saturday’s referendum to alter Australia’s constitution to recognize the First Peoples of Australia by establishing a body called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice failed to pass. It is, I feel, a devastating and profoundly sad outcome that cuts to the very soul of the nation. Indigenous leaders have called for a week of silence to mourn the result, a result that can only be viewed as Australia's latest rejection of our First Peoples’ rightful place within their country, and I want to honor this request by not posting an Australian poet today. 

Rather, I would like to pay my respects to the great Louise Glück. “Parable” is the opening poem of Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014), a favorite collection of mine. The poem captures the state of futility we too often experience in our shared existence, a condition that can be overwhelming at times like these, when shadows appear to be falling upon all corners of the world.

 

Parable

 

First divesting ourselves of worldly goods, as St. Francis teaches,

in order that our souls not be distracted

by gain and loss, and in order also

that our bodies be free to move

easily at the mountain passes, we had then to discuss

whither or where we might travel, with the second question being

should we have a purpose, against which

many of us argued fiercely that such purpose

corresponded to worldly goods, meaning a limitation or constriction,

whereas others said it was by this word we were consecrated

pilgrims rather than wanderers: in our minds, the word translated as

a dream, a something-sought, so that by concentrating we might see it

glimmering among the stones, and not

pass blindly by; each

further issue we debated equally fully, the arguments going back and forth,

so that we grew, some said, less flexible and more resigned,

like soldiers in a useless war. And snow fell upon us, and wind blew,

which in time abated — where the snow had been, many flowers appeared,

and where the stars had shone, the sun rose over the tree line

so that we had shadows again; many times this happened.

Also rain, also flooding sometimes, also avalanches, in which

some of us were lost, and periodically we would seem

to have achieved an agreement; our canteens

hoisted upon our shoulders, but always that moment passed, so

(after many years) we were still at that first stage, still

preparing to begin a journey, but we were changed nevertheless;

we could see this in one another; we had changed although

we never moved, and one said, ah, behold how we have aged, traveling

from day to night only, neither forward nor sideward, and this seemed

in a strange way miraculous. And those who believed we should have a purpose

believed this was the purpose, and those who felt we must remain free

in order to encounter truth, felt it had been revealed.

"Self-reliance" by Sarah Rice [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Sarah Rice is a Canberra based poet and visual artist who holds a PhD in Philosophy and has lectured in art-theory  at the Australian National University's school of art. In 2011, she co-won the prestigious Gwen Harwood poetry prize. Her limited-edition, art-book of poetry Those Who Travel (Ampersand Duck, 2010), with prints by Patsy Payne, is held in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia.

 

 

Self-reliance

 

No one is going to come and save you.
And because of this you must fold
your clothes at day's end

despite the urge to abandon them
to the backs of chairs. You must shake
the crumple of sleep from the sheet.

You must clean your teeth. Wash the teaspoons.
Fold your pyjamas too and lay the neat squares
to rest under your pillow of a morning

despite the fact that in a few hours all
will be done again in reverse. All will be undone.
And there will be no-one to see.

No one will know the bed corners were tucked
into triangles. No one will see the sleeves cross
empty arms against flattened chests and wait quietly.

No one will know if the spoon was licked before it re-
entered the jam jar. And no one will call you to bed
and to the relief of sleep. That midnight hour must be

crossed alone.

The curtains drawn and redrawn, drawn and erased.
Be wary of sitting too long in a warm place, of holding
cups of tea for too long, or lying in bed thinking in the morning.

Be up and doing, up and at 'em. Be the bird
that gets the worm before it eats the apple.
Try to resist writing poetry.

"Tenebrae" by Theodore Ell [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Theodore Ell’s first collection of poems Beginning in Sight won the 2022 Anne Elder Award, judged by Gig Ryan, Ella Jeffery and Marjan Mossammaparast. As the book’s title suggests, Ell’s poems are conceived through a gathering of visual details, their accumulation developing atmospheres and meanings that are often vague and indefinite. Part of the appeal of Ell’s poetry is the contrast between the precision of these details and the shadowy effects they create. In “Tenebrae”  the arrival of nighttime into a city apartment is presented with rigorous particularity: “Sky /  in the gaps of a broken comb - the medley / of towers, antennae.” The way the night seems to enter the apartment, to break the distinction between the inside and outside worlds, generates a vulnerability, ominous, that transforms solitude into isolation, reminiscent of some of Pierre Reverdy’s poems. Tenebrae is of course a Catholic service held during Holy Week in the days leading up to Easter, and a tension exists in the poem between “the cold communion” of maintaining this solitude by watching the night pass by from the windowsill and the desire to enter into the world: “Thoughts of not doing an evening by halves – / not dress circles”.

 

 

Tenebrae

 

Nightfall on the sill. Trinkets, hardened dust. Sky
in the gaps of a broken comb – the medley

of towers, antennae. The city: a queue
for dinner at a swish place, or a catwalk.

Thoughts of not doing an evening by halves –
not dress circles or crystal filled in series,

only forgetting the rule of doubt for hours,
leaving morning till morning, whole vacancies. 

This sill, monogrammed by wine rims. A living.
Rest from studying the pavement in silent lines,

from the cold communion, aid. Frail-voiced
nuns chant responses from behind gilt fences

through the workless days. They reach some in the street,
who look in, down a ribcage of coloured light,

high rafters, canopy – a keyhole vision
of dusk between towers, that toothed horizon,

a light that breaks our outline, hides our numbers.

 

"Intimacy" by Dominic Symes [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Dominic Symes’ “Intimacy” was first published in the bi-annual journal Meniscus in 2021, an issue of the magazine in which the specter of Australia’s covid-lockdowns understandably hangs over many of the poems and short-stories included. It is difficult not to read Symes’ poem in this context: for many of us, the lockdowns transformed intimacy into a state of near claustrophobia. But Symes instantly turns this association on its head: the intimacy he is speaking of is gained in solitude, finding the quietude offered by reading and the small gestures of the natural world. The impersonal torpor of the lockdowns is brought back to us in the brilliantly depressing couplet “how we both sleep better after sex / but we’re both too tired to initiate”. The poem then shifts again to that liminal space we are taken to whilst reading, at once a lonely and intensely sociable act, in which we often develop a deep intimacy with the writers we read, noticing the most subtle shifts in their style, like a borrowed reference, as clearly as “ the haircut changes the shape of your face”.

Dominic Symes’ first book, I Saw the Best Memes of My Generation, was published by Recent Works Press in 2022. 

 

 

Intimacy

sometimes you get it reading Rilke

 

the small glimmer of sunlight

from the window

which rests

between your neck and the pillow

 

how our fault-ridden bodies

are supposed to shed, regrow and forget

 

how we both sleep better after sex

but we’re both too tired to initiate

 

you can tell when a reference is second hand

in a personal essay

I read it when I was reading such & such

 

like the haircut changes the shape of your face

the humidity the quality of your skin

 

now soft to touch

but strong, firm, young

 

some letters he wrote just to say

sorry for not writing sooner

there was this war I got held up in

 

 

"Refugee" by Francis Geyer [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Francis Geyer’s “Refugee” first appeared in the Summer 1962 issue of Meajin, one of Australia's premier literary magazines. Geyer was Gwen Harwood’s second published heteronym, whose creation freed a multitude of Harwood’s most notable poetic strengths (read more about Harwood’s heteronyms here). Harwood styled Guyer as a European romantic, a Hungarian refugee who most likely migrated to Australia following the 1956 revolution, and afforded him a rich lyricism and sentimentality missing from the poetry Harwood was writing under her own name and that of Walter Lehmann, her other heteronym at the time.

Harwood’s heteronyms caused much embarrassment to editors across Australia. Meajin’s then editor, Clem Christesen, who was the inspiration behind Harwood’s famous poem ‘Abelard to Eloise’ (which reads acrostically “FUCK ALL EDITORS”) for his alleged plagiarism of one of Harwood’s lines, appears to have identified Geyer as one of Harwood’s heteronyms (see below) but printed the poem none the less. Sifting through Meajin’s digital archive, I was pleased to see Geyer still named as the poet of “Refugee.”

 

Refugee

 

I remember the rough-spoken landscape frayed

by years of upheaval, the towns

unimaginably old, and the thoughtful passion

of the Christ in a church where we prayed.

 

I remember locked figures in the streets:

duel or embrace, I did not know;

the impetuous gestures of our guide

as we came to those gates where the river meets

 

rock, the savage boldness of the flood.

A voice saying ‘Freedom’ in a tongue

I have forgotten, the wet red sandstone,

my life-long terror of blood.

 

I remember the ocean licking at lonely piers,

and the scavenged food. I cannot remember the faces

of father, mother, my sister; only the places

that were not home, and the tears.

"Marrickville" by Louise Carter [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

With the directness of paint-thinner, Louise Carter’s “Marrickville” strips away at the euphemisms and self-told fictions a young poet must decorate her life with to sustain her vocation. A share house is “a glorified squat for people / who don’t want to pay full rent”. The poem takes its name from a historically working-class neighborhood in Sydney’s inner-west, and Carter’s sharp eye and the precision of her phrasing, in turns frank and humorous, brilliantly capture the ridiculous circumstances (if all too common) that early-stage gentrification can present: “We’re a generation of ideological orphans / building Zion in Marrickville, our dyed hair a symbol / of our kinship – while the original residents, the old-school / Greek immigrants, gaze bewildered from their porches / as hordes of us jog past them of a morning, / farting smugness.” The poem then turns inwards, the speaker, like many poets at various stages of their lives, unable to mount a defense for continuing to pursue her vocation, instead, she wonders if it might be more judicious to “swallow your insolence, move back to the suburbs and give birth / in front of the TV.” It is this balance Carter finds in her candidness, never excessive, sometimes enlivened with a splash of irony, that gives “Marrickville” its power.

 

Louise Carter lives on Gadigal land (Sydney). Her poetry has appeared in Meanjin, Best Australian Poems, Westerly, Cordite and other publications. Her first collection of poems, Golden Repair (2023) was published this month by Giramando.

 

Marrickville

 

It’s been three weeks since I cleaned the bathroom

and it hasn’t been cleaned since. But that’s what you get

in a share house – a glorified squat for people

who don’t want to pay full rent but dress it up

as ‘community minded’ – a place where conversations

about the fairest division of the gas bill take place

over the compost bin. You could say, hopeful of heart,

that it’s a family, which it is – dysfunctional –

the air seething with PMT, all of us rolling

out yoga mats to the sound of the kettle boiling,

the fridge stocked with kale and coconut water

but never meat. We’re a generation of ideological orphans

building Zion in Marrickville, our dyed hair a symbol

of our kinship – while the original residents, the old-school

Greek immigrants, gaze bewildered from their porches

as hordes of us jog past them of a morning,

farting smugness. I’m so far from home,

from the buzz-cut lawns and yipping dogs, from kitchens

with microwaves and African violets softly dying

beside disinfected sinks. These days I take comfort

in YouTube and weed on nights where the urge

to give up on this poetry caper becomes overwhelming –

the fear that there’s nothing you can do to avoid

becoming your mother so you might as well swallow

your insolence, move back to the suburbs and give birth

in front of the TV. These days I force my focus

onto whatever the present moment happens to reveal –

organic toothpaste, bowls caked with chia seeds,

my own face glimpsed in the mirror like seeing

a celebrity in a cafe – the intimate recognition

of a stranger in this, the mediocre immediate.

"alkaway" by Ella O'Keefe [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

The Judith Wright Poetry Prize was established in 2007 by Overland magazine, one of Australia’s more inspired quarterlies and among the nation’s best homes for poetry, as an annual award recognizing new and emerging poets. In 2021, Overland published Groundswell: The Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize 2007-2020, an anthology which collected not only the winning poems (including the runners up), but also a selection of poems written by the winning poets since they were honored by the prize. Edited by Overland’s poetry editor, Toby Fitch, Groundswell is perhaps the best chronicle of the state of Australian poetry over the past 14 years you’re likely to find, mapping its fashions and trajectory through the work of a number of innovative voices.

 

2015’s winning poem “alkaway” by Ella O’Keefe grabs you with the sheer charisma of its opening line “a punchline flies business class”—how could anyone resist reading what comes next? But there is more than mere surface charm to the line: when it comes to jokes and their punchlines, we speak of their success in terms of “landing.” This joke, still in flight, remains hanging in the balance. It also occupies a place of privilege, flying not in coach but  “business class,” which brings up the question of the role of humor in our society more generally, and comedians in particular, many of whom feel they are entitled to say the un-sayable, that their punchlines, no matter where they land, deserve to travel in a certain amount of comfort and be received with immunity.

What follows is a series of surprising images and phrases juxtaposed against one another, which, as the award judges note, address a range of themes “from high capitalism, health fads, technology and the law, to the domestic, cohabitation, indifference and the refuse of human consumption”, but throughout the poem the privilege of distance (how we can remove ourselves, or be removed, from what we say, see or do) seems to lurk disturbingly in the background.

 

 

Ella O’Keefe’s first collection of poems Slowlier was published by Cordite in 2020. She currently teaches at Deakin University, where she was awarded her thesis which discussed the poetry and critical writing of Veronica Forrest-Thomson and Barbara Guest.

alkaway

a punchline flies business class

towards vague archipelagos

   in the deepening Pacific

I find glassy petrol spots the size of 5-cent pieces

refracting intervals of the day

 

thrushy embers in mornings overturn

      woken by shapeless violence

your body returned

   from sleep’s legal trip

 

quilling into the afternoon

discovering ‘the therapeutic power of water’

   while wasp-shaped helicopters

   spotlight the oval – but when?

 

(in violet enamel

when bees were discovered)

 

after filtering the whole house

cohabited refuse goes archaeological

turncoat, Georgic pink

      bread bag (garment)

      elastic calendar as in

      day-shaped moments between yawns

time-check:

pearling three o’clock clicks to

night without dusk

   floating floor

   live improv set in the big suburb

 

   replica village reality effect

the bodice sits over the body

know this well already, cf. ‘it mimics nature to filter’

old-sponge chunks of wattle

   slumping on your cheek

gathering a full body testimonial

 

 

"30.11.12" by Ken Bolton [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Since the 1970s, Ken Bolton has summoned the spirit of the New York School in his life and poetry: erudite, conversational, playful, modern (as he writes in “Horizon”: “I never wanted to be postcolonial / or colonial just modern which is / the joke on me—but who wants to be a category?”) to fashion one of the most distinctive styles in Australian poetry.

Born in Sydney in 1949, Bolton moved to Adelaide (the capital city of South Australia) in 1982, where he has become a central figure in the city’s cultural scene through his association with the iconic Experimental Art Foundation, his art and literary criticism and his poetry, in which the city often acts as the guiding motif. (Bolton is also a publisher of note, founding the magazine Otis Rush and operating the press Little Esther Books.)

 

In “30.11.12” the speaker, sitting in an Adelaide cafe, takes the dreaded question all writers ask themselves when they face a blank page, “What am I going to write here?” as an entry point into the poem, answering the call with typical understatement and insouciance,  “Something, I hope.” 

We then discover the significance of the poem’s title: the date is an event, a return to the page after a year's absence, exacerbating the anxiety of the question just posed, an anxiety which is just as quickly diffused by the speaker's casual self-deprication:

A year
or so since I last launched out

in my usual spot

and stopped, because I didn’t
want the usual– which
after all this time with
nothing else happening
I miss.

 

So what is “the usual” Ken Bolton poem? 

1. Often his best poems are loquacious, sweeping and inclusive, but never “long” (take “Kirkman Guide to the Bars of Europe, their music, their service, views etcetera” or “August 6th”). 
2. They are frequently, as Bolton describes Elvin Bishop’s guitar in “poem, the terrific days of summer”: “ex- / pansive, & rolling, / with a fabulous 'well-being' type of swagger” in the way they space themselves over the page (his use of single word lines can be especially powerful). 
3. They are O’Hara-like in their celebration of interests: musicians, painters, poets, friends. John Forbes is a frequent guest. So is Pam Brown and John Jenkins. Laurie Duggan, John Tranter, Gig Ryan, Lou Reed, Manet, James Schuyler, Tony Towle and Paul Violi ("So much of what / I write is an open letter to someone" from "Home Town").
4. They wander through observation and thought, and the profound enjoyment of taking time to truly appreciate one’s surroundings, such as in “30.11.12”, when the speaker, rather than taking umbrage with the distractions the cafe presents, uses them as platforms to propel the poem forward, as when he notices the lady at the register: ” I think she is enjoying / the air conditioning, the / sudden sense of choice. Her relief – / at the prospect of rest.”

 

30.11.12

 

What am I going to write here?
Something, I hope. A year
or so since I last launched out

in my usual spot

and stopped, because I didn’t
want the usual– which
after all this time with
nothing else happening
I miss.  I hear
a high-pitched scattered voice,
look up,
& see an image that makes me think
‘I wonder how X
is going?’ – someone
I haven’t seen for a while –
a blonde woman sways
distractedly, near the till,
asking a question. But not
of me. I think she is enjoying
the air conditioning, the
sudden sense of choice. Her relief –
at the prospect of rest.
My walk here
blocked for a moment
by a girl – ex-
pensive shopping bags in
one hand mobile phone to ear
in the other – so that I thought briefly
How can anyone bear
to appear so girly?Realising
by reflex, that How can anyone bear
to walk out like him(say)?
is a question
some woman might ask
with regard to me –
dressed, after all,
‘like a styleless yak’,
to quote Paul Keating
(not a woman, tho women
liked him. I liked him). 
Maybe she has something
great in that bag,
the girl,
that on another day
I will applaud,
registering a kind of intelligence
I don’t have or
rarely access. Lunch hour –
& Temposeems filled, nearly,
with women, mostly older than me.
A free concert, maybe, in the offing.
The Adelaide String Quartet
resides out back.
Soon I will hear a bell tinkling,
announcing the doors’ having opened.
I look about briefly –
too blind, in this light,
to read the paper – too blind
with these eyes, is more the case:
an eye operation in
10 days time.
 ____After which –
all will be revealed, maybe. 
I hope I am not plunged-in-darkness –
never to see that girl again,
for example, in her
short summer frock
of dove grey, telephone
to her ear, moving dreamily,
an image, now, I love –
or the delightfully styleless yak
I see amble past … 

& whom I join, my lunch
(half) hour up – (gone?)  ((done?))

II

‘X’ was someone smarter than me
– in most respects
that count – thin,
drank a little too much,
coped, made a difference, as they say.

 

 

Two Poems by M.T.C. Cronin [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

M.T.C. Cronin has been among the most prolific Australian poets over the course of the last three decades, having published more than twenty volumes of poetry since her debut collection Zoetrope: We See Us Moving in 1995. Her poetry has won a number of Australia’s major literary awards, including the prestigious Gwen Harwood Memorial Poetry Prize.

 

Cronin has a background in law, and while she rarely, if ever, refers directly to her legal work, her poetry often draws parallels and incongruities between law and poetry, their distinct styles, languages and processes. In a 2009 lecture, Cronin asked if, as a test of poetry’s worth, we should apply to the poem Ann Scales’ statement on law as a social tool: “It is only extrinsically important, its actual value depends on its success in promoting that which is intrinsically valuable.” Cronin’s answer was an emphatic no: “Poetry’s purpose is not to provide solatium. Poetry’s purpose is not to get there, and poetry is neither extrinsically nor intrinsically important. Poetry is not a tool… its purpose is unintended and its purpose is undesigned… All that is undecided lives in poetry, and this aids decision.”

The Audited Heart

 

Words went up to the front and fought and were wounded

And died and returned home and were paralyzed -

The slippery survivors parsed together so that we may listen

To their swords

 

The clatter

 

That's where the teeth are, not in the mouth

But in the hand, stretching out for the heart behind it

This cage of holy acceptance

 

The race to the bottom of that red place

Snake, that thing, that turns there

Settled under the chest because there is only war here

 

Violence on the coast

In the corridors

The country designing itself, vacant and threatening

Without need to measure the space between this word

And my last

 

The present grows smaller and smaller

As the future grows larger and larger

The Australian's book was written

Following an oath taken never to write

Again. Everything

Had too much importance,

Too little

 

I do not want to rest my fate on the ordinary,

On security - I want to talk to everyone!

 

But God is not a parent

Not a mother or a father

And you must also look beyond my voice

To hear my voice authentically

 

Even I, who did it, must search for evidence of what I did -

So tired that there is no occasion I will rise to

Nothing intimate in my movements towards the world

I cannot rest on my own hand

 

Beauty, even of clouds, alerts me

To the partiality of the flower

I have held the smallest man's hands

The strength still in them, of a giant

 

And

Raising my laugh to the level of a physical characteristic

Say: Don't be restless with others' love

For these organs, these unreliable means of detection

Are the very ones which find the major violations

 

Like that three-eyed fish running

In the river behind our homes

 

 

The Story Of Someone Who Knows Nothing

 

Betraying no journeys, what might be is visible from here

The colours as new as the ones you see all the time

 

I am horrified by the fact that I am not in a war

(and there are wars)

 

Do I want an epoch to happen

So that my poetry may have some place to suffer

 

And become golden?

 

These poems first appeared in issue #8 of Jacket

"the hate i ate had a nice day" by Gareth Morgan [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Gareth Morgan is a Melbourne poet whose collection When a Punk Becomes a Spunk was published last year and received an admiring and perceptive review in Overland magazine by Elese Dowden, absorbingly titled "The moral risk of taking things too seriously." Morgan, an astute critic himself, has also published a chapbook of epistolary poems addressed to Eileen Myles, Dear Eileen, and his poem "the national debt" placed second in the 2021 Judith Wright Poetry Prize, among the most prestigious poetry awards in Australia. 

 

the hate i ate had a nice day

i can see outside my window there are lights on
like a tomazs salamun poem, squares
drifting thru a square portion of the city

yellow squares and a lyrical mattress where i now sleep
it seems everything comes in the post these days
yet the post is so fucked up?

me and eileen myles both wrote books about this
i wrote eileen a letter but they didn’t write back
this is part of the problem…. oh well

if you wanted to read up on the fate of the
global postal service, you should seek out my
chapbook Dear Eileen, but if you’re pressed for time

i’ll tell you here— it’s not looking good! still i saw
a mailman out my window, beautiful cold blue day
chamomile blue, i felt calm and new

she pushed her cart like a horizon