Poetry

It has only been four years since Mununjali Yugambeh poet Ellen van Neerven’s first volume, Comfort Food, appeared. While central to both collections are the experiences of young queer First Nations identity in settler Australia, Throat extends the work of Comfort Food from the retrospective of the four years that have passed since its writing. And, certainly much has happened.

Jill Jones’s oeuvre is difficult to place in the landscape of Australian poetry. Her urban settings, her skepticism regarding language’s mimetic function, and her open poetics, sit comfortably with the legacies of the Generation of ’68. But while she shares some of their tastes and concerns, her writing differs markedly from anyone in that group, and her poetry doesn’t seem profoundly influenced by these poets – or by any other Australian writer. Her work rather shows traces of the Objectivists, the New York School and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, and European poets such as Tomas Tranströmer and Inger Christensen. Beyond this, are three abiding influences: Sappho, Dickinson and Gertrude Stein, all of whom were prolific experimentalists.

Fish Song is essayistic in its purpose, returning to questions about human existence in the world, adding and taking away from its answers, shaping and reshaping a response.

Poetry, I had surmised, could do so many amazing things for nonfiction – technically, stylistically, spatially. Why couldn’t it be recognised as a valuable mode to challenge and expand nonfiction?

We are the wordsmiths of the world; we spoke seven to ten languages and used long and complex words in all of them to explain long and complex philosophical statements. We should not apologise for being good with words and their use – it is our heritage.

This, Clive James’s final book, is a collection of his writings on Larkin and his work. James takes his title from the final words of Larkin’s ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ (1959). The ninety four pages, which include copies of one manuscript letter and two typed letters from Larkin to James, don’t offer very much book for your money, but you do get Clive James, who’s always good value. His explanation of why Jack Nicholson is the only Hollywood actor appropriate to play Larkin onscreen justifies the price of admission.

Reading and writing are bodies within bodies and rooms within each other. Fitch’s poetry is exemplary in terms of showing us the possibilities – and impossibilities (like reading in a dark room, like being in spaces we aren’t) – of the reading/writing (or pretext/text) relation. But there is no separate room or compartment where we house our reading: writing brings back all kinds of memories of mental and affective experience, including those involving digital forms, and material art.

The lyric’s charge always catalyses new arrangements: it crackles not only through the recording, but across forms and bodies in elaborate, improvised, staged and/or filmic choreographies. Similarly, I tend to think not only of the charge of my language, but about how this charge might propel the poem into distributions across an open field, or how it might slip through the crevices between words into arrays of diacritical marks—dashes, brackets, loops, shapes, even photographs.

Most critics are aware that they work within the endlessly relative landscape of literary history. Once a writer’s place in the landscape is secured, it is not easy to budge and this shapes future literary judgements.

In October 2017 I led twenty people around the inner-Melbourne suburb of Brunswick. It was a guided walk, but unlike any most in the group had experienced before. Mine was one of five walks in a public arts project aimed to facilitate aural attentiveness to our environment