The Astronomer Just stars, and grassland – ___to stand on the limit of the world ___and then climb upwards. Here is his tower, ______his staircase curled and vagrant as any dream: It is pictured next to the cow. How constant the constellations, this city now wheeling beneath them. Here is his quiet heartbeat. He must have heard the cries of children in his sleep, their lowing. In his tower, you breathe lungfuls of sky. _______________________________________________________ Fiona Wright is a Sydney poet, whose work has been published journals and anthologies in Australia, Asia and the USA. Her work was included in Best Australian Poems 2008, 2009, 2010 (Black Ink) and The Red Room Company’s Toilet Doors Project (2004). Fiona was runner-up in the 2008 John Marsden National Young Writers Award. In 2007, she was awarded an Island of Residencies placement at the Tasmania Writers’ Centre, developing a sequence of poems about [...]
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This entry is part of a series, The Disappearing» Rouse Hill Time travelling on the motorways we watch the landscape change as cramped steel and concrete give way to open space Somehow bare and more exposed Billboards tout BRAND NEW LUXURY HOMES carbon copies of a pre-packaged urban dream past the outback steakhouse past the golden arches Flying high in this distant corner of the empire At our destination vivid white and yellow in the trees A row of cockatoos observes what’s on offer making selections from a drive through menu of their own On the old Windsor Turnpike I look across at Bunnings and realise I’m standing on the front line a battle between past and present History holding the line as the machine of progress threatens to swallow it whole The smell of death lingers on the property rabbits drowned in the heavy rain mosquitoes buzzing Life and [...]
This entry is part of a series, The Disappearing» Charlotte Street The pavement is a narrow procession of footsteps returning home in darkness. There is a raw gas-smell past Island Street, the rancidness of lamb-fat that clings to plum-coloured brickwork. A palm tree rustles perpetually through the windless night with percussion of heavy plastic. There is a crumbling border a child might walk tentatively, giddy with the danger of falling into fathoms of lantana. As you follow in sequence, muffling your pursuing steps, you notice the graded curvature of hairstyle against the nape, the way jeans shape and angle the leg, the sculpting of muscle by the tilt of heels. You pass the private hotel with all its yellow windows lit, Victorian and ornate, transient figures flitting within its walls, a church illuminated by orange spotlights, the fluorescence of a shop you have never entered - then turn from the [...]
This entry is part of a series, The Disappearing» 58, black-most lot, collapsible ceiling and underground lung ward My dear RG. Crates are melting under enamel and asbestos; whalers are jumping ship for a slant of this rummy sham. Open the archive to check the mobility, there’s a rotten panorama of a hundred years of surplus. First the compositers, bakers, and small-time boiled sweet bankers stocked the clout; second, the house trapped the labour ‘til it moulded the beams. Bad advice suggests that if you grant small debts to your neighbours—tins of beef, tins of milk, tins of tabacco, tins of paraffin—you will keep their loyalty and gratitude. My advice: follow the neighbourhood kids. Born in robbery, tucked into their dance gear you’ll find notes from the ocean, shanties for mutiny, or else wetted and folded pamphlets of every non-rum language, calling for nutmeg, vinegary kippers, split peas and rabbit [...]
This entry is part of a series, The Disappearing» The Disappearing is a new app for , and that (literally) explores poetry and place. Beginning with a collection of over 100 poems about Sydney, the app creates a poetic map charting traces, fragmentary histories, impressions and memories. Along with previously unpublished poetry, The Disappearing features exclusive videos of readings and interviews with poets. Users can upload their own poems to The Disappearing, preserving ideas, emotions and experiences about their own environment that vanish over time. Explore Sydney streets or upload your own memories of place – Download The Disappearing – The Red Room Company’s free poetry app for iPhone and iPad or for Android. Entries in this series: The Disappearing: Introduction The Disappearing: Astrid Lorange The Disappearing: John Hawke The Disappearing: Nick Bryant-Smith The Disappearing: Fiona Wright The Disappearing: David Prater The Disappearing: Bronwyn Emily Lang The Disappearing: Kim Cheng [...]
I guess poets are all trying to swim in the same stream – the same stream as Shakespeare and Yeats and Sappho and Hughes and Carson – and whatever strokes we make, large or small, are a striving to be part of that same vast human conversation. - Candy Royalle Some images from the original archive are unavailable. The Scrimmage There is violence here an abundance of it fists and elbows and tongues that lash out ankles and knees that fight to keep balance ________this is violence. There are gestures of thrusting hips arms extended anger exposed speed enticed by wheels of rubber and steel sounds of strained voices ________this is violence. Apparently there is no fresh meat here. These skates are worn by bearers of flesh experienced to the feel of burning skin red raw from fishnets rubbing surfaces exposed to the elements of an unforgiving floor ________this is [...]
J and I get to talking, I ask her how long she’s been an astronomer. It doesn’t seem to me like something you just stumble into. There is a moment, she tells me, for all astronomers, a moment of realisation, or epiphany, I suppose. The moment when you first notice – really notice – the vast night sky above in all its wonder and mystery. How it hangs there like a question, an invitation, a vast, glittering sphinx’s mask. They call the moment “First Light.” - Kit Brookman The Theory Of Everything 1. Stars hang there like broken glass in night’s gut. They are slick along the sky, the night is choked with them as a city is with light. The dead grass is made metal by starlight, my shadow batters the earth when I had been ready to put it in my back pocket for the night, but the [...]
This entry is part of a series, Clubs and Societies» i’ve been inspired by pia’s practice and the conversations that i’ve been having with pia about tekhne ghosts huanted media and the strange things that she does with electrictiy and i’m particularly taken by this phrase she has of letting the non-human life live so letting something which might not meet human definitions of living or which might not fit into a rigid binary of non-living and living but nevertheless to let those things live to let the ghosts of electricity live i do have an interest in what you might call the art of ghosts which is another way to say what the activity of the dorks at dorkbot is is that it’s the art of letting the ghosts speak for themselves - Nick Keys Ghosts of Technology - an excerpt dance is a skill speaking is a skill [...]
This entry is part of a series, Clubs and Societies» I’ve never really known how to write about other people without imposing some kind of “treatment” on them. And I guess it’s not possible to completely avoid imposing a “treatment” – but there are “treatments”, and then there are treatments. I discovered a poem called ‘Holocaust’ by an Objectivist poet called Reznikoff which was composed entirely out of cut-and-pasted transcripts from Holocaust survivors. Reznikoff’s artistic practice is one of selection – not invention. Or rather, invention through various selective combinations – sans commentary or explanation. And really, even when I’m writing from my own life, that’s what I’m doing. Transcribing the way I see the world is easy – what’s hard is knowing what shape what I see should take. So I’ve been building my Wayside Renga by transcribing conversations I’ve been having with five different regulars at Wayside from [...]
This entry is part of a series, Clubs and Societies» NOTE: Read about THEthe’s collaboration with the Red Room Company here. Across Australia, each state, city, suburb and street autonomously divides itself into thousands of clubs and societies. Sport, politics, art, craft, collectors: people gather voluntarily, outside the confines of their immediate geography, social class or profession. They gather around a shared passion. As such, clubs and societies are sites of sharing: sharing of knowledge, stories, skills and resources. Within these shared circles, language takes on a special role. Since members don’t have to articulate themselves for a general audience, vernacular becomes increasingly specialised. Often the assumed knowledge that lies within any given statement is so huge that, to an outsider, conversation at a club meeting would seem like a foreign language. For poetry, these distinctive argots provide fertile fields for experimentation, since every unique language has the potential to [...]
THEthe Poetry and are teaming up to share poems across the oceans. This collaboration introduces new audiences to the works of emerging and established poets from America and Australia. Weekly installments of poems, interviews and artworks will celebrate poetic observations from Brooklyn to Sydney and places between. The Red Room Company is a not-for-profit poetry organisation founded in 2003 and based in Sydney. Their mission is to provide professional commission opportunities to contemporary Australian poets, particularly emerging voices. They present poetry to the wider community in engaging, unusual ways involving film, audio and installation. Since 2007, The Red Room Company has delivered Papercuts, their national poetry education program for primary and secondary schools. In 2010 the poetry education program was extended to Correctional Centres. Related Posts On Gene Tanta’s “Critical Introduction to Unusual Woods.” Why Poetic Collaboration Matters And the James Patterson of Contemporary Poetry is… THEthe Poetry: 2010 Year [...]
Alfred Corn’s new play Lowell’s Bedlam will be opening at Pentameters Theater in London, April 7th. The play runs until the Saturday before Easter. Set in the Autumn of 1949, during a period when Robert Lowell was being treated for bipolar illness, the play also features Elizabeth Bishop and Elizabeth Hardwick. It’s worth noting that Corn met all of these writers several times. Telephone: 02074353648 Related Posts Insomnia Hamlet and his (Public) Problems Seventeen Years Ago Last March: Elizabeth Bishop’s Grand Finale Poem of the Week: Mark Wunderlich Breaking Back into PoetryMarch 16, 2010
If you haven’t heard yet, Mark Strand has released a new book with called . In honor of this beautiful new book, THEthe will be giving away a signed copy of this limited edition chapbook. All you have to do to “enter” the drawing for this book is make a comment on any THEthe post (past, present, or future). Each comment is an entry to win, so feel free to go crazy (we like your comments anyhow!). Please observe the commenting guidelines; no spam or blatantly vapid comments, please. Please sign in with some form of contact information (via Facebook, Twitter, etc.) so that we can contact you if your name is drawn. Related Posts More Construction NotesOctober 14, 2010 Scattered Rhymes Podcast is Coming to THEthe! Scattered Rhymes is Coming: Joseph Spece What’s Your Style Book of Choice? The Silver Book
Michael Klein’s book has been nominated for a Lambda Literary Award! Buy the book at and read THEthe’s review by Genevieve Burger-Weiser here.
A song cycle of David Shapiro’s sonnets called Unwritten has been written by the great young composer Mohammed Fairouz and will be played at Carnegie at Recital Hall on March 21st. Word on the street is that David Shapiro himself may play the coda. Related Posts Poem of the Week: David Lehman Ur Poems: David Shapiro A Preface to a Blog: Auguries of Experience As If She Were a Symbol of Something Some David Schubert Poems You May Not Know
Last week we made the exciting announcement that Ben Pease’s Scattered Rhymes podcast was making itself a home at THEthe. In anticipation of the coming podcast, we are reposting the old episodes from the . Today we’re reposting , which features an interview with Joseph Spece. Joseph Spece, Part 1 Joseph Spece, Part 2 Note: The interview takes place at JC’s apt., so here and there you may hear mention of a picture of the Winged Victory in the living room or various trinkets on a counter in his bedroom.