Ali Jane Smith

Ali Jane Smith writes essays, reviews, poems and performance works. She lives in Wollongong on Wodi Wodi Dharwhal country.
All essays by Ali Jane Smith
Poems to Paint on a Wall
Borderless is not ‘Australian’ or even ‘Australian Feminist Poetry’ – it’s transnational. Not international. Transnational – borderless. Most of these poets live on this continent, but not all. I should probably relax and let myself be confused about definitions for now. Because a poetry anthology is full of poems, poems with their own confusions, pains and delights. Time to talk about the poems, and then return to what brings the poems together, hopefully I’ll be less confused.
A Break That Can Be Bridged
Since I started work on this review, I’ve resisted turning it into an essay about the kindness movement. Felicity Plunkett’s poetry deserves our full attention. But the book is called A Kinder Sea, and as I’ve been reading and re-reading these poems, I’ve found I can’t stop thinking about kindness, or rather, what I have begun to call, in my head, the problem of kindness.
Reading apparently
The pregunta’s cube sits in my imagination. It has begun to take on a meaning, a meaning that says, remember what you’re reading here Ali, it’s a poem by Joanne Burns, it can’t be translated, unlocked, puzzled out. It’s not for solving. It’s for reading.
A Book Is A Good Place To Think
It has at times been distressing to witness the media coverage of Kate and Rozanna Lilley’s story, as the intelligence, courage and nuance of their own accounts are temporarily obscured by blunt angles and agendas, by media interest driven in part by celebrity and the tropes of news, in part by various investments held in culture wars positions. But Kate Lilley writes poetry, and poetry offers a space for subjectivity that is not bound to the implied causality of narrative. Poetry can disrupt, evade, and effloresce.
Becoming Fay Zwicky
For most people, the great adventures of their lives are births, love affairs, illnesses, bereavements, starting businesses or changing jobs. Insights into our selves and our loved ones come through the difficult enough business of living together. Fay Zwicky writes about the way in which daily practices connect with deep struggles, the way culture lives, not in grand gestures and ritualised moments, but in commonplaces and taken for granted ways of thinking about things.
Hot Links: Hypertext and George P. Landow
‘It was probably late and we had certainly been drinking. The conversation turned to ‚Äì guest stars from M.A.S.H.? One-hit wonders of the 80s? The fictional biography of the Fonz? The actual biography of Henry Winkler? Something. This was the mid 1990s, and we could, in theory, have dialled up and posted a question on the Usenet, maybe even consulted the Internet Movie Database, a resource that came into being just a little before the first web browser was launched, but none of us even thought of that. ‘