The guest poetry editor for this issue is Stuart Cooke. Submissions will close 30 September. More details at Cordite.
Challenging Pacific perceptions
[Katherine Feeney, Brisbane Times, August 20th 208]:
Think of the Pacific and chances are images of palm trees, tropical resorts and white beaches spring to mind.
Ask Samoan poet, writer and performer Tusiata Avia how she feels about this perception and her voice rings clear and strong.
“We’ve laboured for a very long time under the stereotype of happy, smiling natives,” she says. “That is a part of Pacific culture but there are a lot of other things going on under the surface - things that are often overlooked.”
She is referring to the realities faced by the people of the Pacific, and it is those collective and individual experiences which provide the inspiration behind her lyrical art.
Write at the centre
[Katherine Kizilos, The Age, August 21st 2008]:
Melbourne has been named a City of Literature by UNESCO. But what does that mean for the city’s writers and readers - and its library?
BOOKSELLER Mark Rubbo describes the development as “quite exciting really”. Children’s author Kirsty Murray says it will “draw attention to the culture of the city and the culture of books and reading here”. And author Carrie Tiffany says it will “increase the profile and value of this thing called writing … it’s one of the rare things left in the world that isn’t about money”.
Melbourne announced as City of Literature by United Nations
[Patrick Horan, Herald-Sun, August 20th 2008]:
Melbourne has received the honour of being named a City of Literature by the United Nations, right on the eve of the city’s Writers Festival.
Poet pays price of naivety
[Asher Moses, Sydney Morning Herald, August 20th 2008]:
Award-winning poet Anne Fairbairn - the only granddaughter of Australia’s fourth Prime Minister, Sir George Reid - has fallen prey to a different version of the Nigerian scam.
Poets Union seminar this Saturday 23rd July 08
A reminder:
The Poets Union full-day seminar
“Creative Reading -
Poetry and Poetic Literacy in contemporary Australia”
with poets, editors and publishers
is on this Saturday, 23rd August
registration from 9.30am
papers, forum, workshop 10am to 5pm
at the Sydney Mechanics School of Arts
280 Pitt St, Sydney (first floor)
(between Park and Bathurst Sts).
Cost: $40 Full Price; $30 Poets Union members and concession
- includes lunch, and morning and afternoon tea.
(If you haven’t yet booked, it’s still possible
to pay at registration.)
For further information:
please email rosemary.huisman@usyd.edu.au
Tel. (02) 9437 4700
or
martinlangford@bigpond.com
Tel. (02) 9482 7110.
The art of selling a magazine
[Lindsay Foyle, The Australian, August 16th 2008]:
When addressing cartoonists, politicians like to tell them Australia has the best cartoonists in the world. Not surprisingly, cartoonists like hearing this and nod in agreement.
That people can say this is due in no small way to The Bulletin, the news magazine that was closed in January by ACP Magazines. Rumours of its revival by a masthead buyer surface now and then, but so far its former market has been left to foreign magazines. As a publication it made a bigger contribution to Australian literature than any other during its many decades, but it is best remembered for the cartoons that became synonymous with it.
Tinfish 18 is imminent
[from Susan M. Schultz]
Subject: Tinfish 18 out next week!
Tinfish 18 airs it out, offering an issue devoted to the Long Poem. Contributors include Mani Rao, Alysha Wood, Lynn Xu, David Perry, Stephen Collis, Endi Bogue Hartigan, and Norman Fischer, engaging issues of translation, form (including collage, the sonnet sequence, and the elegy), contemporary politics, and more.
Covers by Alan Konishi, Interior Art by Sara Hertenstein, centerfold by Gaye Chan.
Design by Chae Ho Lee
Order through our website or by check to Tinfish Press, 47-728 Hui Kelu Street #9,
Kaneohe, HI 96744.
aloha, Susan M. Schultz
Crossing the final frontier
[Simon Caterson, The Age, August 9th 2008]:
Wheatley’s two subsequent collections are Misery Hill and Mocker, and he teaches at the University of Hull in England, old stomping ground of celebrated misery guts Philip Larkin. What is it like living in the shadow of such an eminence grise?
“Dublin, where I used to live, and Hull could not be more dissimilar,” he says. “In Dublin there are posters of famous Irish writers on every pub wall and postcards of them in every corner shop, whereas in Hull Larkin felt able to do his own thing without anyone bothering him. There can be something very liberating about that.”
In the 1970s Irish poet Derek Mahon suggested that the time had almost arrived when the question “Is so-and-so an Irish writer?” would empty a room in seconds.
Has that time finally arrived or does Irish poetry remain as obsessed as ever with national identity?
The hungry eye
[Elizabeth Zimmer, The Australian, August 16th 2008]:
The conversation migrates to what we know and do in common. We trade poems we cherish and have learned by heart: his are by Kenneth Koch. By the time I leave his apartment I have a piece of silver leaf, a list of movies to rent and the disturbing sensation — he is, after all, gay and I’m old enough to be his mother — that I’m falling in love. A few days later, I stuff Rakoff’s books into my backpack and head out to do some errands. Lo and behold, who should appear at my bus stop, easily a kilometre or two from his place, but the man himself. As he did in his flat, he averts his eyes but goes on talking; he’s basically shy and I can be overwhelming. Australia will have him for a week or so, but if I am careful and quiet and don’t alarm him, he’ll be in my orbit for the rest of my life.
Publisher accused of ‘grave robbing’ for printing last two novels marred by Sir Walter Scott’s ill-health
[Marc Horne, The Scotsman, August 17th 2008]:
They are the Scott monuments that looked set to be kept under wraps forever.
But now Sir Walter Scott’s “lost” works have controversially been published, almost two hundred years after his death.
His final two tomes, The Siege Of Malta and the incomplete Bizarro, were never printed in full as his family and close associates felt their poor content would sully the reputation of one of the greatest writers that Scotland has ever produced.
And the decision of Edinburgh University Press to publish both works – corrected, and in a combined volume – led last night to a claim of “literary grave robbing”.
Top award for kids’ book with foul words, violence
[The West Australian, August 16th 2008]:
A former Children’s Book Council president has attacked awarding one of Australia’s most prestigious children’s literary prizes to a book with crude language and violent images.
Requiem for a Beast won the Children’s Book Council of Australia Picture Book of the Year gong yesterday.
Targeted at mature readers, Matt Ottley’s book uses the f-word numerous times and has illustrations of a bloody axe and violent images of a man turning into a beast.
Former council president Kate Colley said she was disgusted with the award. “I really have a problem with this book,” she said. “It shouldn’t be on the shortlist, let alone win.”
[Tracee Hutchison, The Age, August 16th 2008]:
Increasingly, Greer’s commentary on life in the colonies is done at arm’s length from the comfort of her English garden.
And even when she does have an opportunity to form an informed view of something emanating from the antipodes, she opts out. Her recent spat with Melbourne playwright Joanna Murray-Smith over the latter’s parody of feminism — and Greer’s role in it — in her play The Female of the Species is another case in point.
Having not read the script or seen the play — despite being invited to — Greer thundered that Murray-Smith was an insane reactionary who held feminism in contempt. Ah, wrong again, Germaine. It’s a recurring theme in Murray-Smith’s work and she comes from a family of leftist intellectuals. (Surely you know that, Germaine?) I know because her mother, Nita, taught me English at high school. And her late father, Stephen, is revered in literary intellectual circles.
Two Writers-in-Residence selected
[Scoop, August 12th, 2008]:
Two writers have been selected for residencies at the Michael King Writers’ Centre in Devonport, Auckland, over the next five months.
One of the authors, Professor Richard Corballis from Palmerston North, will be researching and writing a major biography of leading New Zealand playwright, Bruce Mason.
The second author, Sarah Laing from Auckland, will use her residency to complete her latest work, a novel which explores aspects of New Zealand’s cultural identity.
Drawn to trouble
[Matthew Ricketson, The Age, August 16th, 2008]:
The journalist Philip Gourevitch’s new book Standard Operating Procedure, about the shocking events at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison, is broken into three parts - Before, During and After. The last part is framed by an epigraph from 20th century French writer Jean-Paul Sartre, that reads:
“Happy are those who died without ever having had to ask themselves: ‘If they tear out my fingernails, will I talk?”‘
But even happier are others, barely out of their childhood, who have not had to ask themselves that other question: “If my friends, fellow soldiers and leaders tear out an enemy’s fingernails in my presence, what will I do?”
Personal stories main theme of writers’ festival
[Rosemary Sorenson, The Australian, August 16th, 2008]:
The key to a writers’ festival is to get your headliners in place, then allow the books to guide which themes emerge.
“I don’t come up with an idea and try to fit the writers and their work into it,” Brisbane Writers Festival director Michael Campbell said. “In 2006, there was an awful lot of publishing about the clash of civilisations. In 2007, it dropped down a level to talk about the individual in relation to the society, about values and ethical structures.
“This year, it’s dropped another level to come down to two things: mortality and personal stories, how our life experiences make us what we are.”
[Lauren Wilson, The Australian August 15th 2008]:
Former NSW premier Bob Carr last night endorsed polemicist Germaine Greer’s essay On Rage as “one of the most powerful pamphlets ever written in Australia”.
Launching Melbourne University Press’s Little Books on Big Themes series at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, Mr Carr defended Greer’s essay on the widespread rage of indigenous men for its “ferocious logic”. However, he lamented, “I had hoped there would be some hope at the end of Germaine Greer’s essay”.
The expatriate writer and activist stole the show at the launch, remaining tight-lipped with media but speaking passionately to a crowd of more than 100 literary enthusiasts about how the subject “acquired” her.
She said she felt compelled to write about what she deemed the obvious root of the problem in Aboriginal Australia - rage - knowing her essay would meet sharp criticism.
“The Aboriginal establishment will fall all over me for sexualising the problem,” she said. “They’ll all fall on me like a tonne of bricks.”
Launceston poetry reading
[from Marilyn]
Hi Poetry Lovers: Just to keep you all alert……
The next Poetry Pedlars is on the third monday in august - coming up soon - at THE
ROYAL OAK, upstairs, at 7.30 p.m. The competition is to write a political poem
- EASY, yes?
Our MC will be the illustrious Steve D’Avis.
Look forward to seeing you there! Please pass the word around.
Reading in Hobart, Friday 15th August
Friday 15 August 6pm
Upstairs Republic Bar & Cafe
Morris Gleitzman in conversation with Tim Cox (6-7pm)
7:00 pm, The Tasmanian Writers’ Centre and Arts @ Work present
Readings with Geoff Dean, Karen Knight, Philomena van Rijswijk, Anne Kellas, Louise Oxley, John Biggs.
Followed by Open Section
Hearing is believing
[Terry Teachout, Wall Street Journal, August 2nd, 2008]:
Today’s literary critics have fallen into the unfortunate habit of using the word “voice” when they mean “style.” It’s easy to see why that metaphorical usage has become popular — a writer with a strongly individual style often seems to be speaking directly to the reader — but appearances can be deceiving, at times cruelly so. Take Raymond Chandler, the creator of Philip Marlowe, the hard-boiled private eye with a heart of mush. On paper Marlowe was forever tossing off snappy side-of-the-mouth wisecracks (”He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food”). Humphrey Bogart played him in “The Big Sleep,” and you know what he sounded like. But what about the real-life author who put the words in Bogie’s mouth? Brace yourself: Chandler’s mild-mannered speaking voice bore an uncanny resemblance to the milksop whine of Elmer Fudd.