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Film Poems in Oz-Burp Eight

6 Nov

I haven’t sent much work out over the last 12 months or so, something to do with the pandemic (don’t ask me what), but some of my film poems continue to appear in Pete Spence’s wonderful journals. The latest, Oz-Burp Eight, contains ‘film festival’, ‘The Game of Angels’ and ‘O Lucky Man’.

Pete has produced some wonderful work and publications over the years and he continues to bring together some amazing writing from around Australia and around the world. This issue, for example, contains work by: Tom Weigel, George Trakl (translated by Tom Weigel), Joel Dailey, Jake St John, John McConnochie, Joahha Walkden Harris & Pete Spence, Francesca Jurate Sasnaitis, Elinor Nauen, Annabel Lee, Pete Spence, Mark Young, Richard Martin, Linda Adair, Joahha Walkden Harris, Douglas Messarli, Pam Brown, Chris Mason, Kris Hemensley, Phyllis Rosenzwig, John Jenkins, Cam Lowe, Jim Cory, Mitch Highfill, Dan Raphael, Martin Edmond, Glen Cooper, Chris Barron and Jill Jones.

Oz-Burp may fly under the radar of many who sail in the good ship Australian Poetry, but it is exciting to have some poems included among the amazing work in this issue of the journal.

Oz Burp is a hard journal to track down but Rochford Cottage Bookshop has a handful of copies available for sale at $12.95 (plus postage and handling). Click here to order.

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‘The Office of Literary Endeavours: Maree’ appears in Postcolonial Text Vol 12, No1 (2017)

11 Jul

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee; Dictee Takes the Stage. Photograph by Soomi Kim. The cover of Postcolonial Text Issue 12: No.1

I am very pleased to have had ‘The Office of Literary Endeavours: Maree’ published in the on-line journal Postcolonial Text. This poem is an interesting one for me as it grew out of a novel I’m attempting to write. As part of my research I was reading a lot of poetry in translation. I found myself increasingly wanting to get ‘behind’ the translation to the poem – to read different translations of the same poem and to use online translation tools and dictionaries to create my own literal translations.

One of the poets who caught my attention during this time was the Spanish poet Luis Cernuda. Cernuda was born in Seville in 1902 and during the Spanish Civil War he found himself forced into exile when he was unable to return from giving a series of lectures in England. Openly homosexual and antifascist Cernuda spent the rest of his life in exile, dying in Mexico in 1961. It was while reading and playing around with Cernuda’s work in translation that I started writing some poems in a style that seemed to me to have a feeling of being translated. This is a hard thing to describe but I guess it is where you look at the multiple meanings behind each word and try and understand different ways of capturing the same idea or image.

One of the results of this exercise was ‘The Office of Literary Endeavours: Maree’  and you can read it here:

http://postcolonial.org/index.php/pct/article/view/2204/2039

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‘Forgetting is So Long’ – Love Poetry by Australian Men

14 Oct

Forgetting is so Long: An Anthology of Australian Love Poetry edited by Robbie Coburn & Valli Poole. Blank Rune Press 2016

 

Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
………………………… – Pablo Neruda

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When we think of anthologies were generally think of larger books with lots of pages so it was exciting to be asked to contribute to a chapbook anthology of Australian love poems. Some years ago I had some poems in the Inkerman & Blunt Australian Love Poetry anthology. That was a huge, diverse and ultimately uneven anthology (as anthologies of that size tend to be). Forgetting is so Long is the opposite – it is a small, beautifully constructed chapbook and it features love poems by men. When I was submitted my poems to Robbie Coburn I was unaware that the anthology would be purely love poems by men but I have been pleasantly surprised by the result and the company in which my two poems have landed. There is a hint here of a different masculinity, something that deserves to be explored in greater depth.

Along with my work Forgetting is so Long contains poetry by Ashley Capes, Robbie Coburn, Glenn Cooper, Phillip Hall, Ramon Loyola, Pete Spence, David Ellison, Andy Jackson, Ariel Riveros Pavez, Kenneth Smeaton and Les Wicks. It is available from Collected Works Bookshop in Melbourne or you can contact the publisher for details on how to acquire a copy blankrunepress@gmail.com

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