Printed Shadows – 40 Years plus of Writing and Cultural Journalism

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  • ‘Gaanha-bula’ translated into Hindi

    Ganhabula

    Although it was published in 2019 I only just discovered that my prose poem ‘Gaanha-bula’ was translated into Hindi as part of the Spineless Wonders Shuffle Translation Project. The work first appeared in in Shuffle, An Anthology of Microlit, published by Spineless Wonders in 2019, so it was a pleasant to find it had been translated.

    Many thanks to the translators, Anindya Singh and Ishrat Parween, to Paulette Smythe who produced the video poem of the translation and to Anindya Singh who read the poem. And of course thanks to the Spineless Wonders team who pulled the project together.

  • ‘Skipping’ Long listed for the 2023 Liquid Amber Poetry Prize.

    I was a little surprised and very honoured to have had my poem ‘Skipping’ included in the long list for the 2023 Liquid Amber Poetry Prize. The poets nominated in the long list include many writers I respect and seek out so it is exciting to be included in the list with them. Congratulations to all nominated poets and a big thanks to the judges Anne M. Carson, Rose Lucas and Reneé Pettitt-Schipp.

    https://liquidamberpress.com.au/2023/07/14/2023-poetry-prize-long-list-announced/

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  • ‘The weather was perfect for making movies outside’ – Film Poem published in Sublunary Review

    ‘The weather was perfect for making movies outside’ – Film Poem published in Sublunary Review

    I haven’t sent much work out over the past 12 months, but I did try to find a home for one of my film poems and was excited when ‘The weather was perfect for making movies outside’ – a poem based on the Godard film Made in the USA – found a home in the excellent Sublunary Review. Many thanks to poetry editor Ruslan Garrey and the Sublunary Review team. You can read it here:

    https://www.sublunaryreview.com/home/weather-was-perfect-for-making-movies

  • Film Poems in Oz-Burp Eight

    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.

    ozburp8cover

  • ‘My mother’s room’ & ‘Learning to shoot’ in Live Encounters – Special Australian & New Zealand Edition

    Mark roberts live encounters

    I am excited and honoured to have two poems in the May 2021 issue of Live Encounters Poetry & Writing featuring writers from Australia & New Zealand. Many thanks to Live Encounters editor and publisher Mark Ulyseas and guest editor Denise O’Hagan for including my work in this amazing issue.

    You can read my two poems here: https://liveencounters.net/2021-le-p-w/05-le-pw-anz-2021/mark-roberts-my-mothers-room/

    And you can browse the entire issue here: https://liveencounters.net/2021/04/22/live-encounters-poetry-writing-australia-new-zealand-may-2021/

  • ‘Cadogan Place, Orange, 1992’ – published in ‘The Blue Nib’

    Almost 75% of the work in the Lacuna cycle has now found it’s way into magazines, journals and anthologies in Australia and around the world and I’m excited that one of the more personal memoir poems, Cadogan Place, Orange, 1992, has just appeared in the wonderful Blue Nib Literary Magazine. Many thanks to editor Denise O’Hagan for giving this poem such a wonderful home.

    If you want to read Cadogan Place, Orange, 1992 you can find it here: https://thebluenib.com/poetry-by-mark-roberts/

    A companion piece to ‘Cadogan Place, Orange, 1992, Place Burial, was published in Issue 3 of Pink Cover Zine back in May 2019 https://printedshadows.wordpress.com/2019/05/08/place-burial-appears-in-pink-cover-zine-issue-3/

  • The Lidster Poems appear in ‘No Placebos’

    Poems from the Lacuna cycle continue to find their way out into the world and it was exciting to see a selection of ‘The Lidster Poems 1961-1992’ appear in Pete Spence’s latest journal No Placebos. Many thanks to Pete for including my work alongside so many other brilliant writers. 

  • ‘feral green marketing’ – Plumwood Mountain Volume 7 Number 1


    There are some journals were there is that extra bit of excitement when you receive an acceptance. Plumwood Mountain is one of those journals. The journal is subtitled An Australian Journal of Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics and it is this clearly stated political stance that makes the journal and the work in it so important.

    My poem ‘feral green marketing’, which appears in issue 7:1, is the second poem I have written in a genre which I “invented” some time ago (the first ‘Written Under Duress was published in Australian Latino Press some years ago https://australianlatinopress.blogspot.com/2014/05/written-under-duress-mark-roberts.html). The genre, which doesn’t have a name, takes the form of three stanzas with each stanza having its own title. The overall poem title is a combination of all three stanza titles. Beyond that I guess I am still working on the rules.

     

     

    feral green marketing

     

    https://plumwoodmountain.com/feral-green-marketing/

     

  • ‘self evacuation’ and ‘charcoal drawing’ published in ‘From the Ashes: A poetry collection in support of the 2019-2020 Australian Bushfire relief effort’

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    The last few months have certainly been challenging. Fires, floods and now plague. Already we have seen the offers of support and funding made to those impacted by the Morrison fires of 2019/2020 forgotten and people and the environment abandoned as we are overtaken by the next crisis. In such an environment it is important to remember and to make our leaders remember the commitments they made. This is one of the reasons I am proud to have two poems in the anthology  From the Ashes: A poetry collection in support of the 2019-2020 Australian Bushfire relief effort edited by C.S. Hughes and published by Maximum Felix Media.

    My two poems in the anthology, ‘self evacuation’ and ‘charcoal drawing’, are raw poems, written with the memory of a summer of fire, smoke and danger in the Blue Mountains. My thanks to the editor, C.S. Hughes for including them in the collection.

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    As Hughes says in the introduction to the anthology:

    It has been a season of fire and flood. It is not that we are unfamiliar, in our dry and storm driven land, with such seasons, but these elements, perhaps through our ignorance and neglect, have burgeoned and magnified, returned on a scale that seems unimaginable.

    Hundreds of homes have been lost, nearly two score lives. Each given in defence of what we all value, home, family and thus each life lost in defence of us all. Before such an onslaught, it is only by fickle winds and fortunate rains that the destruction has not been more overwhelming.

    From the Ashes: A poetry collection in support of the 2019-2020 Australian Bushfire relief effort is available from https://fromtheashes.maximumfelixmedia.com/. Proceeds from the sale of the anthology will go to support the ongoing care of Australia’s native wildlife through selected charities and wildlife organisations.

  • ‘Read On 3’ in the quiet carriage

     

    It’s not often you get to read a journal which contains a poem you wrote about a train in the very train you wrote it about! But that was the unique experience I recently had while reading the Pete Spence edited Read On 3 on the way back up the mountains.

    There is an extraordinary amount of great work by amazing writers in this issue and it is an honour to be included among them: Mark Young, Francesca Jurate Sasnaitis, Tim Wright, Julia Knobloch, Sheila E. Murphy, Barbara Henning, Louis Armand, Don Yorty, Tom Weigel, John Jenkins, Gig Ryan, Douglas Messerli, Alan Jefferies, Joanna Walkden Harris, Pete Spence, Pam Brown, Jenn Knickerbocker & Jake St. John, Kris Hemensley and Greg Masters.

    In addition to my train poem ‘6.02pm to Mt Victoria’ Read On 3 contains another of my Blue Mountains poems ‘climbing’ together with 2 more of my film poems – one based on Le Redoutable directed by Michael Hazanavicius (2017) and the other on Le Gai Savoir, Jean-Luc Godard 1969.

    Read On 3 is published by Pete’s Press, Donnithorne Street Press and available directly from him – I believe he can be found on Facebook.

  • ‘Returns’ published in Rabbit 29.

    Rabbit is a journal for nonfiction poetry – a genre I find intriguing. The concept of “nonfiction poetry” makes me examine my creative process, where my poetry comes from, the illusion and reality as Christopher Cauldwell might say.  I realised that much of my work is grounded in my attempted understanding of my environment, of where I am, the history and politics that surrounds me and which has shaped me over the years – a history and politics that is sometimes hidden.

    The theme for Rabbit 29 was ‘Lineages’, a word that could be interpreted in many ways  – creative lineages, personal lineages, family lineages and so on. I had been working on a sequence of poems that grew out of two recent trips I had taken to Ireland and these poems seem to fit the lineage theme very well. The sequence was called ‘Returns’ and is based around the notion of returning to a heritage and country that my family left a number of generations ago. My mother’s side of my family is predominately Irish, most of them having left Ireland for Australia in the years between 1850 and 1880, driven out by famine and persecution by the English. I grew up with my grandparents stories of Ireland, though they had never left Australia they had a vivid memory of place handed down to them through their parents. The 1916 Uprising had a profound impact on my grandfather and even 50 years later he talked of it with a passion.

    ‘Returns’ captures fragments of that history, my personal journey, the remembered/imagined journey of my ancestors and visiting places strong in a family memory passed down through generation. It is one of my lineages.

    My thanks to editor Jessica L Wilkinson and guest editors for this issue Chi Tran and Matthew Hall. It is exciting to be included in such a strong collection of work.

    Rabbit 29 is available from http://rabbitpoetry.com/?product_cat=journals

  • December 31, 2019

    On this last day of 2019 (which many also believe to be the end of the decade) we also say goodbye to Project 366 (or Project 365+1). Project 366 was started by Kit Kelen and a number of colleagues 4 years ago with the intention to try and write and load a poem a day for a year. Many poets have passed through the project and it has obviously lasted more than a year. I managed to load a poem a day for a month and then added the occasional poem over the following months and years.

    To mark the passing of the project, and to mark the passing of a decade I decided to load one last poem. Taking Auden’s ‘September 1, 1939’ as my guide, I made a few changes to try and reflect the reality of living and surviving in an Australia which denies climate change and which is burning and burning and burning. You can find my attempt, ‘December 31, 2019’ at:

    https://project365plus.blogspot.com/2019/12/december-31-2019.html

  • ‘A new normal’ – a poem dedicated to the community in Blue Mountains published in Bluepepper.

    My poem, ‘A New Normal’, which is dedicated to the wonderful community in the Blue Mountains, has just been published in the Katoomba based journal Bluepepper. My thanks to editor Justin Lowe for accepting this poem.

    Over the last months I have been in awe of the efforts of all the RFS crews who have worked so hard to protect life and property across the mountains and across the state. I can’t thank you enough.

    https://bluepepper.blogspot.com/2019/12/new-poetry-by-mark-roberts.html

  • Blue Water Tank published in ‘Re-Side’ Issue 2

    ‘Blue Water Tank’ is a short prose piece from the Lacuna  manuscript which I am particularly fond of. It is a personal piece but one that I have always liked and I am so pleased that it has found a home in Re-Side Issue Two along with some other amazing work. ‘Blue Water Tank’ can, in some ways, be seen as a companion piece to ‘Place Burial’ which appeared in the  Ramon Loyola edited Issue 3 of Pink Cover Zine (https://printedshadows.wordpress.com /2019/05/08/place-burial-appears-in-pink-cover-zine-issue-3/).

    Re-Side is well worth a read. Have a look at issue two at https://www.re-sidezine.com/issue02

  • Poems on films – Le Quattro Volte: Cordite Issue 92

    I have recently been writing a series of poems about films. The first of these, ‘Poems on films – Weekend – Jean-Luc Godard’ was published in The Tundish Review Issue 9 earlier this year. The second poem to find a home is ‘Poems on films – Le Quattro Volte – Michelangelo Frammartino’. I am particularly please that the editor of Cordite Issue 92, Claire Gaskin, found a place for this poem as the film on which it is based is particularly poetic and beautiful – something which I hope I have captured in this poem.

    http://cordite.org.au/poetry/notheme8/poems-on-films-le-quattro-volte/

     

  • Cuplet #12: Martin Dolan, Kelly Norah Drukker, Mark Roberts & Anne Walsh

    A MONTHLY POETRY EVENT

    Looking forward to jumping in the car on Thursday and heading down the Mountains and then up to Newcastle to read at the monthly Cuplet Readings in Newcastle organised by Claire Albrecht.  It promises to be a great night of poetry and I am excited to be sharing the program with the following amazing poets:

    • MARTIN DOLAN is a Canberra-based poet. His second collection, Peripheral Vision, was published in 2018. His new collection is due for release in 2020. Martin is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Canberra. He is a co-convener of That Poetry Thing, a weekly poetry night in Canberra.
    • KELLY NORAH DRUKKER (CANADA) was born in Montreal, and grew up in the Laurentian region of Quebec. Her first collection of poems, Small Fires, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2016, won the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry, the Concordia University First Book Prize, and was a finalist for the Grand Prix du livre de Montréal. Kelly’s work has received a CBC Literary Award for Poetry (2006), and has appeared in journals in Canada, New Zealand, and Ireland. Petits feux, the French-language translation of Small Fires by Lori Saint-Martin and Paul Gagné, was published by Le lézard amoureux in 2018.
    • ANNE WALSH is a poet and a story writer whose work falls somewhere on the border of those two countries. Born in Philadelphia, she lives in Australia. Her poems have been shortlisted for the ACU Prize in Literature and twice for the Newcastle Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in Cordite, Mascara, Canberra Times, Verity La, Poem and Dish, FemAsia, Not So Quiet, and her short story, The Rickman Digression, in Glimmer Train Press (U.S.). Her first collection of poems, I Love Like a Drunk Does, was published by Ginninderra Press (Australia, 2009). Her second book of poems, Intact, was published by Flying Islands Books (Australia, 2017).

    Meanwhile I am dusting off a number of my Newcastle poems to read and might even throw in a few new ones.

    Cuplet #12 will take place on Thursday, July 11, 2019 from 7:00 PM  at The Beaumont Hamilton 70 Beaumont Street Hamilton. If you are in the area it would be great to see you!

     

    For further details go to https://www.cupletpoetry.com/events/2019/7/11/cuplet-12

     – Mark Roberts

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  • Reading in Canberra tonight with Marianne Boruch at That Poetry Thing That Is On At Smith’s Every Monday

    After travelling down from the Blue Mountains last night through the Oberon Plateau, I woke in Canberra this morning looking forward to reading with Marianne Boruch at That Poetry Thing That Is On At Smith’s Every Monday  (7pm at Smith’s Alternative, 76 Alinga Street, Canberra). I will be reading poems from Concrete Flamingos as well as work from my new manuscripts. If you are in Canberra I would love to see you tonight!

    For more details check out the Facebook event post: https://www.facebook.com/events/344106582956715/

  • ‘Place Burial’ appears in ‘Pink Cover Zine’ Issue 3.

    Last year I had the great pleasure of having my short prose piece ‘Place Burial’ appear in Issue 3 of Pink Cover Zine.  ‘Place Burial’ is from my manuscript Lacuna,  which is a collection based around the Central West of NSW. One of the bittersweet aspects of having this piece included in this issue was the interesting editorial discussion I had with the guest editor Ramon Loyola which resulted in an improved piece of writing appearing in the zine. Shortly after this discussion Ramon tragically died suddenly and, in many respects, my piece, and the issue as a whole, is a tribute to Ramon.

    Pink Cover Zine Issue 3 is available as a free download at https://pinkcoverzine.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/pink-cover-zine-issue-3-digital.pdf.

  • Memories of ‘The Friend in Hand’ and Rae Desmond Jones

    Last weekend Linda Adair and I attended a double book launch at the Friend in Hand pub in Glebe. Nothing too remarkable there, I have been to many book launches at the Friend in Hand, indeed my own book launch took place there (https://rochfordstreetreview.com/2016/03/16/decades-of-percolation-anna-couani-launches-concrete-flamingos-by-mark-roberts/). But, as I listened to Margaret Bradstock launch Les Wick’s Belief and Anna Couani launch Kit Kelen’s  Poor Man’s Coat: Hardanger Poems, I had what is commonly referred to a flashback to the first launch Linda and I had organised at the Friend in Hand.

    Back in late 2012 the launch of two Rochford Press books took place at the Friend in Hand, P76 Issue 6 (The Lost Issue) and The Selected Your Friendly Fascist edited by Rae Desmond Jones. Both these titles were nostalgic in their own right. Issue 6 of P76 had  been over 15 years in the making. Linda and I had created the original layout for the issue in the 1990s on an old Mac and then lost the disk in the confusion of babies and house moves, only to discover it years later in a box under the house. The Selected Your Friendly Fascist grew out of an article Rae Desmond Jones had written for Rochford Street Review on the magazine that he and John Edwards had edited and produced for many years “Lots of energy here, not much control”: Your Friendly Fascist – 1970 – 1984. Rae Desmond Jones remembers…... The article attracted much attention and reminiscing and a few months later I suggested to Rae that he might like to consider pulling together a “best of” YFF . At the time Rae was in hospital and I remember his initial response was “it would have to be called the Worst of”. Shortly after he returned home, however, I received a phone call “is 120 pages enough”.

    As a result in October 2012 there was a large gathering of those of us who had survived being published in Your Friendly Fascist and/or P76. In my memory of that day the figure of Rae looms large against the red curtains of the upstairs bar of the Friend in Hand and, as I watched Les and Kit read from their new books last Saturday, I looked across at the corner near the stage where Rae had sat just over 6 years ago.

    Of course the fact that I have spent the last 8 months or so working with Linda Adair, Narelle Adair, John Edwards and Ruth Saunders to bring Rae’s final collection of poetry into the world probably had a lot to do with that feeling. So I searched through some old photos and found Rae at the Friend in Hand, launching The Selected Your Friendly Fascist, back in October 2012. I suspect I will have the same feeling when we launch The End of the Line (Rae’s final collection) on Sunday 24 February at 1.30pm at the Exodus Foundation (The Burns Philip Hall) 180 Liverpool Road Ashfield.

    Rae Desmond Jones carefully considers Alan Wearne’s launch speech for The Selected Your Friendly Fascist at The Friend in Hand Hotel, October 2012

     

    Rae Desmond Jones in full flight at the launch of The Selected Your Friendly Fascist

    Joanne Burns, Rae Desmond Jones and Joseph Chetcuti at the launch of The Selected Your Friendly Fascist, Friend in Hand Hotel, October 2012

    The End of the Line by Rae Desmond Jones will be launched on Sunday 24 February at 1.30pm at the Exodus Foundation (The Burns Philip Hall) 180 Liverpool Road Ashfield. Facebook link https://www.facebook.com/events/242278270027993/

    Copies of The End of Line can be purchased at https://rochfordpress.com/rochford-press-book-shop/

  • ‘limestone’ published in ‘Communion Arts Journal’ Issue 8 December 2017

    Windjana Gorge, WA

    I haven’t sent much work out over the last 18 months or so but I was particularly pleased that one poem made it into print. Communion Arts Journal, edited and published by Ralph Wessman and Jane Williams out of Tasmania, has a long and proud history. As part of the Walleah Press stable it can trace it’s ancestry back to the wonderful Famous Reporter journal which was one of the important and long lived small press journals of the last 30 years (back in 2013 I reviewed the last issue of the Famous Reporter edited by Ralph Wessman for Rochford Street Review  https://rochfordstreetreview.com/2012/08/10/an-eclectic-tour-de-force-mark-roberts-reviews-famous-reporter-43/). Unlike The Famous Reporter Communion is an online journal but it shares with its forebear a commitment to powerful writing and a keen critical ear – something that makes being published by the journal doubly satisfying.

    ‘limestone’ is a very short poem but it took a long time to write. Over 25 years ago Linda Adair and I spent a few days in the Kimberley east of Broome. There was an ancient beauty to the landscape which spoke deeply of the history of country and, particularly at night when the Milky Way was almost bright enough to throw shadows,  it was easy to feel a connection stretching back eons. It was a feeling that demanded a poem, but it was one of those situations where the poetic strength of the moment swamped the ability of any words to record it. Gradually over two decades words came, Auden helped a little as did the threat posed to this ancient environment by the rise of the ugly right in Australia and around the world which would deny the value of such a link to country. Once you’ve read ‘limestone’ make sure you hang around and enjoy Communion – it is a valuable journal whihc deserves your support.

    https://walleahpress.com.au/communion8-Mark-Roberts.html

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  • Poetic Journal: 20 December 2017: ‘Ha’penny Bridge.’

    Day 4 of the journal – I observe the Christmas lights from one of the famous bridges across the Liffy.

     

     

    The Liffy reflects back the Christmas lights
    on Ha’penny Bridge forming an imperfect

    oval. The river is as still as a mirror
    yet the image is distorted slightly

    on the southern side – a grimace
    more than a smile. So perhaps

    the opposite of a Dublin frown
    is not complete happiness.

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  • Poetic Journal: 19 December 2017: ‘‘Easter 1916 – Dublin GPO’’

    Day three of my December/January poetic journal.  On our first full day in Dublin we visited the Dublin GPO.

     

    19 December 2017 ‘Easter 1916 – Dublin GPO’

    Along with the saints
    my grandfather taught me
    the name of the martyrs:

    ……….Patrick Pearse,
    ……….Thomas MacDonagh,
    ……….Thomas Clarke,
    ……….Joseph Plunkett,
    ……….William Pearse,
    ……….Edward Daly,
    ……….Michael O’Hanrahan,
    ……….John MacBride,
    ……….Éamonn Ceannt,
    ……….Michael Mallin,
    ……….Seán Heuston,
    ……….Con Colbert,
    ……….James Connolly
    ……….Sean MacDiarmada.

    He was just about to turn sixteen
    when the uprising took place
    on the other side of the world
    fifty years later he still held that anger.
    He told me that they had to rope Connolly
    to a chair in front of the firing squad
    because his ankle had been shattered
    by a bullet in the GPO.

    My grandfather never saw Ireland
    but today I silently tell him
    there is no union jack
    flying on Dublin GPO.

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    Over the coming few weeks I will be doing a bit of travelling on the other side of the world. I have decided to try and keep a small poetic journal to capture some of my observations and thoughts during this period. The poems aren’t complete or polished, please treat them more as observations or first drafts.

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  • Poetic Journal: 18 December 2017 ‘Yellow Sea Chest’

    Day two of my December/January poetic journal. I still have the sea chest that my great grandmother brought with her to Australia from Ireland in the mid 19th century. As we tried to meet the baggage restrictions for the flight to Dublin I reflected on the luggage restrictions she faced.

     

    Yellow Sea Chest 18/12/17

    A per airline instructions
    we have packed  two bags each
    to travel 30 hours to Ireland.
    We have left behind
    my great grandmother’s
    sea chest which contained
    all her possessions when she travelled
    from Cork to Sydney 150 years ago.
    She had luggage restrictions as well
    one sea chest for everything she wanted to keep
    for her new life away from hunger and the British
    (I have often wondered about the British
    in the colonies but my grandfather said
    it was a different oppression).

    The sea chest has secret compartments
    and pictures from the 1860s vanished onto boards
    the leather straps have rotted away
    and my grandfather painted it yellow
    during the depression
    “a bright colour to cheer things up”.
    I have recently found that the curve top
    meant that it had to be stacked on top
    of the pile of cases in the hold
    and indicated that my great grandmother
    had a little more money than most.

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    Over the coming few weeks I will be doing a bit of travelling on the other side of the world. I have decided to try and keep a small poetic journal to capture some of my observations and thoughts during this period. The poems aren’t complete or polished, please treat them more as observations or first drafts.

     

     

  • Poetic Journal: 17 December 2017 ‘hidden’

    Over the coming few weeks I will be doing a bit of travelling on the other side of the world. I have decided to try and keep a small poetic journal to capture some of my observations and thoughts during this period. The poems aren’t complete or polished, please treat them more as observations or first drafts. The first post is dated 17 December and covers the flight from Australia to Ireland.

     

    hidden

    leaving melbourne
    flying northwest
    across night desert
    below
    …………darkness scattered lights
    above
    …………a richness of stars
    stories are hidden here
    even in daylight
    but at night they call to us
    singing across country
    and reaching into the sky

    …………in this plane
    we eat
    watch a movie
    and try to sleep

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    Poetic Journal: 18 December 2017 ‘Yellow Sea Chest’

     

  • ‘Yaranigh’s Grave’ appears in ‘Landmarks: Microfiction and Prose Poems’ edited by Cassandra Atheron

    I haven’t sent much work out over the last 12 months but I have been fortunate to have a number of pieces appear in various magazines and anthologies. Many of these have been from the Lacuna manuscript which I am still working on 18 months after I originally thought it was completed. One of the pieces in Lacuna is a poem inspired by a visit to Yaranigh’s grave just outside of Molong NSW.

    Yaranigh was a Wiradjuri man caught up in the rapid dispossession of Aboriginal lands in the first half of the 19th century.  Yaranigh straddled both Aboriginal and European cultures and worked on expeditions with with early colonial ‘explorers’ through NSW and Queensland, acting as a guide and interpreter as the expedition moved through different Aboriginal nations. The most famous of these expeditions was with Sir Thomas Mitchell’s expedition to find the mythical inland sea. On  his death Major Mitchell gave him a formal European burial while his own people surrounded the graves with ceremonial carved trees. This combined tribute made me think of delicate situation Yaranigh must have found himself in and how he might have attempted to limit the impact of the Europeans by carefully negotiating passage away from scared sites and areas of importance to local people.

    Landmarks is described as an anthology which tackles the theme of Landmarks: critical or celebratory, watershed moments or turning points in history, culture or in relationships. It seemed to me that my poem about Yaranigh’s grave was a good fit for such an anthology. Unfortunately the anthology was looking for microlit and ‘Yaranigh’s Grave’ was a poem. So, not for the first time, I attempted to take a work in one genre and rework it into another. The version that appears in Landmarks is therefore a different work than the one that exists in the Lacuna manuscript. While I still think the poem is a more powerful piece I am still extremely proud that the micro prose version of ‘Yaranigh’s Grave’ has appeared in Landmarks.

     

    Landmarks: Microfiction and Prose Poems Edited by Cassandra Atherton. Spineless Wonders is available from https://shortaustralianstories.com.au/product/landmarks/

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

    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

  • “I can be tight and nervy as the top string on a violin” appears in ‘Tincture’ Issue 17

    I’m excited to find my short poem, “I can be tight and nervy as the top string on a violin”, which is based on a line from a Sylvia Plath short story, has found its way into the latest issue of Tincture (Issue 17).

    Tincture is an unusual journal as it is available in ebook formats (EPUB and kindle) only, no print or on-line versions. There are, a number of advantages to this strategy, Tincture can produce a journal which is available for sale to anyone with an internet connection and a device running freely available software. It is also able to sell the journal, something which is difficult for most online journals running on blogging platforms. Finally it can sell each issue at a fraction of the cost of a compatible print version. By establishing a income stream Tincture is also able to pay its contributors, something all writers should appreciate. There is, of course, on the other hand the issue of accessibility. One can’t simply click on a link, or order a hard copy, and start reading. But all in all Tincture is a innovative concept in the Australian literary scene, which has been running for seventeen issues now, and which deserves our support.

    If the fact that Issue Seventeen contains my poem isn’t enough to convince you to click on http://tincture-journal.com/buy-a-tincture/ and buy it, here is the table of contents for the issue:

     

    Editorial, by Daniel Young
    Some Days, by Rebecca Jessen
    Moederland: Part One: I’m Not From Around Here, by Johannes Klabbers
    Political Reflections: The Day Trump Won, by Alexandra O’Sullivan
    The Need for Poetry, by Mindy Gill
    Water Lily, by Douglas W. Milliken
    Ethanol, Eschar, by Charlotte Adderley
    WWJD? by Nathanael O’Reilly
    Compass, by SJ Finn
    Plum, Flower, by Eileen Chong
    Shoes That Go Krtz-Krtz, by Tamara Lazaroff
    Beach Road, by Thom Sullivan
    Great Expectations, by Denis Fitzpatrick
    Avid Reader, by Rosanna Licari
    Running Away from the Circus, by Philip Keenan
    Spider, by Ailsa Dunlop
    From ‘Autobiochemistry’, by Tricia Dearborn
    Our Mate, Cummo, by Dominic Carew
    “I can be tight and nervy as the top string on a violin”, by Mark Roberts
    Venus, by Grace Jervis
    Last Post, by Aidan Coleman
    Fighting for Breath, by Paul Threlfall
    Combination Soup, by Pam Brown
    You Are Cordially Invited, by Sean Gandert

    So click away and you could be reading the latest Tincture in a matter of minutes!

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  • Mark Roberts, Melinda Louise Smith and A Walk Through Gaza (Poetry From Palestine) At Don Banks North Sydney

    don-banks

    I’m looking forward to reading with Melinda Louise Smith and listening to A Walk through Gaza (Poetry from Palestine) this coming Wednesday night at the Don Banks Museum, 6 Napier Street North Sydney from 7.30 pm. I will be reading poems from my new manuscript Lacuna as well as some from my last collection Concrete Flamingos. Many thanks to Danny Gardner for inviting me.

     

  • Sarah St Vincent Welch, Anna Couani and Mark Roberts to read at Rhizomic Poetry Wednesday 30th November

    reading

    I’m particularly excited to be reading on Wednesday night in Glebe with two of my favourite writers and very good friends, Anna Couani and Sarah St Vincent Welch at Mr Falcon’s (92 Glebe Point Road) as part of the regular Rhizomic Poetry Reading.

     

     

  • ‘outcomes’ and ‘cutting the grass’ appear in the November 2016 issue of ‘The Basil O’ Flaherty’

    The Basil O’ Flaherty is an interesting newish on-line journal run out of the US by  J.K. Shawhan. In the best tradition of small literary journals it was established by a writer wanting to create outlets for the sort  of writing and artwork she was interested in – 30 years ago it would have been gestetnered or photocopied, these days it is a free online journal.

    Along with its normal editions The Basil O’ Flaherty is also devoting sections to feminist poetry and poems in translations. It will be interesting to see how these sections develop over the coming months.

    My two poems in the current edition can be found at http://thebasiloflaherty.weebly.com/mark-roberts.html. While you are there you can check the archives for my prose piece ‘red’ which was published in the first edition back in March 2016 http://thebasiloflaherty.weebly.com/archives5.html