Chittagong A kennings poem for Bellevue Hill Public School Rusted whales beached in the Bay of Bengal. Ribs dismantled, returned to metalled mud. Ships splinter, brittle as bone. No time to carve tombstones in sand. Blueprints don’t detail these distances or depths, boys hide and seek in hulls. Debris blazes on scrapyard shores. Fractured shifts of salvaged sleep, dreams set adrift with tomorrow’s satellites. Below, there is a broken city, the ocean can’t recall all it has kept. __________________________________________________________ Tamryn Bennett is an Australian writer and visual artist currently living in Mexico. Since 2004 she has exhibited artists books (Showers and Clearing and Polaroids and Postcards) illustrations and comics in Sydney, Melbourne and Mexico. Her poetry, illustrations and articles have appeared in Five Bells, Nth Degree, Mascara Literary Review and various academic publications. She has a PhD in ‘Comics Poetry’ from The University of New South Wales and when in [...]

HOW A THING TURNS WRETCHED It is errant. It errs around the town to which it belongs and errs like a word constantly misspoken. It is taken out of its regular place and placed in exile. Exile is an outside of the kind strange animals inhabit. A sharing of skins occurs. On a branch above all this a species of bird watches: a sparrow. The thing driven out like a screw from its wall lies open to rust until it errs again in the strange place outside animals inhabit. It wanders around and returns, a cur. It hungers and spits. It takes off one skin and puts on another. Its new skin is inside out and like a net cast to the sea it collects more and more of itself, wreaking. A wretched thing is alone until it is not. Among others of its kind a wretched thing is still [...]

ISBN: 9780984885749 $15.00 Weapons catalog descriptions: cyberpunk, academic prose, fables, and a Tyrannosaurus Rex stopping a suicide bomber. From these disparate sources Josef Kaplan creates Democracy is not for the People, his newest volume of poetry. Divided into four parts, the book confronts the unholy terrors of globalization, globalized terror, and mass-market homogeneity. These confrontations utilize high and low culture, genre imitation, and the political broadside. It is easy to see this as agitprop or a gimmick. At first blush, Democracy would appear as more preaching to the converted for the ranks of the Occupy movement. Kaplan’s politicized confrontations, constructed with a cunning ferocity, aspire to become more, since the lifespan of literature outlives flash-in-the-pan political movements, nation-states, and entire civilizations. The cunning comes from the technique of pastiche. Democracy’s first section, entitled Tilt-Shift, is an extended pastiche culled from numerous sources. Varieties of prose styles come one after another. [...]

This entry is part of a series, Papercuts» The Ventriloquist’s Lament Let me tell you: in strangers’ houses all roads lead to rooms mirrors turn a blind eye to undone hair and buttons the swoop of lambent moths and other accidental creatures kitchen tables float like coral pomegranates stain your hands blood red for days space is reserved for long eyes and afternoons glancing in windowsills every day a new photograph in the thraldom of debt I grew out of all that dust. __________________________________________________________ Lindsay Tuggle grew up in Alabama, Kentucky, and Kansas. She moved to Australia ten years ago, and now lives in Austinmer. She has written poetry for most of her life, though she only began writing for publication a few years ago. Lindsay is interested in the relationship between language and place, especially vanished or vanishing places: those that exist now only in the memories of the [...]

When I was young, I wanted to stain the world with my permanence which is why, I suppose, I became a poet. This is no longer the case. Old Four seasons songs from the early Sixties are more canonical than the vast majority of poems. In point of fact, a good poetry trivia question would be “name four poems from the 1960′s not written by Ginsberg, Bly, Merwin, Plath, Sexton, or Creeley.” Hell, most students could not name four poets prominent in the sixties other than these poets, much less poems. They probably could name five or six rock bands. I am as guilty as anyone. Although I can name perhaps thirty poets who became well-known in the sixties, and perhaps 20 poems (I know more, but have a terrible memory for titles). But I can name at least two hundred pop songs, dozens of televisions shows, and movies. Poetry [...]

Whether as a gadfly to the bigger kids in communist Romania or as a teenager in Chicago, part of me always wanted to be hip, but another part always knew that it was too much work. What does it mean to be hip? It means to be urban, wired, social, to occupy the latest spaces, to perform the most contemporary habits according to a precise code. If being hip means being urban, multinational, vanguard, does being unhip end up meaning that one has to be rural, nationalistic, or even parochial? Speaking about downtown Los Angeles on BBC2 in the early 1990s, Dr. Edward Soja mentions how postmodern architecture can manifest as the feeling of de-centeredness quickly followed by a desire to submit to authority, any authority. How does this desire to find a center relate to the desire to lose a center? More precisely, as a first-generation immigrant American poet [...]

The Master of Ceremonies Laydes and Gentilemen, welcome _____to a world made strange _____for us. ___________Allow this introduction: Rudolf is my name, on earth _______________________I was called Ruddy Bumpkin by my wife, also I was a train conductor, fancy that _______________________we’re being held here for a moment. ___________Look around— low ceiling, unnatural light like a dentist’s office, everyone puffy and unequal to their day. Smile at me neighbor, I’m your neighbor. HiHello. _______________________So. An extended allegory, everyone turn to the Gentileman or laydie to your right. This is the face for whom you are _____________________________responsible should the ship of god sink which it won’t. _____________________________Say Hihello. _______________________So. Imagine you are turned to the person on your right, Who says, “what the bloody fuck I’m late for work five times this week they’ve stopped believing it’s _______________________the train,” you can either acquiesce without committing _______________________to your saucy friend, or scold him [...]

This entry is part of a series, Papercuts» , Papercuts» Attempts to Get Oats Into this Poem For Bishop Druitt College, 2012 It was no reflection on my fondness for you, the throwing of the sour milk. The sound of the silver bucket spread out like a town at the beginning of a Kurosawa. The milk was hula. The day: ultra marine. You stepped in the mood. Do you still follow bees? I found four in a tea pot … On the cover of your book is an open locket and within it your relatives? Cousins? Their faces are small but I can recognise your eyes. With what poems will you describe them this Christmas? Christmas like the name Tony Tuckson. I guess I see spilled paint across the canvas like a pulled muscle. We could get a towel, or sit in the sun? There’s a bus! And our reflection [...]

Animal Collection is a new book of stories by Colin Winnette (author of Revelation, discussed here at THEthe). Like his previous book, it is a subtle blend of experimentation and dramaturgy. The concept: each story contains some kind of animal behaving in unusual and, in some cases, very human ways. From being cuckolded by a beaver, to falling in love with a hummingbird, to being impregnated by an iguana, human characters interact with animals in intimate and occasionally visceral ways. The result is a commentary on the strangeness of our own behavior, and the collection is proof of the power of certain art forms to defamiliarize ourselves to ourselves. This, to me, is the potent achievement of Animal Collection. Here is the interview: Brian: When we spoke about Revelation, a major theme of the conversation was the happy constraints of a framing concept. Here we have a collection of stories, [...]

This entry is part of a series, Papercuts» Cranbrook, Mid-June After Martin Harrison The inarguable harbour proves the point hit by the low winter sun, we squint fishing for cutlery, facing the mirrors in a high-ceilinged room. We discuss pies and north coast water, pale meat, dark gravy, Broken Head. Each beach orchestrates a meeting of sand and water, a certain mood or consistency, according to sandbars, light, temperature, rock outcrop—and what to call the way we gauge the feeling of surrounding water, its pressures, its tastes and density on our faces, in our thinking and remembering mouths, summing up this place and the last, this place and the possible next. The feeling of a wet face in the open air. These summer memories persist in their fading. I watch the unpainted, unphotographed scenes, where two shadows stand in the shallows hurling a ball back and forth for eternity. Knowing, [...]

LOST COLONY Laconic (but not lazy), this time the lights stay on. __The formal fields have their wanton way; cherubs ____go drooling in posterior exterior, dimpled afresh. ____Generously, music unzips, points square to path __token by no occasion; in need of jetties and sweeties on some barren arm, a strap for each remembrance. Gradually recipes and petite orders trade hands. __Waking ones prepared for in urban-most fashion ____come with speeches: momentary political unrest ____faced as it is fraught without irony or earnestness __to keep it aside from lurid delicacy where waterfalls continually re-brush themselves, perennially silent. As so much can go wrong, a frontier of possibilities __comes as resultant factor. Chances preen themselves ____on the abstract aftermath of carrying on: slowly ____the scene of one man in his own mental house __opens onto juicy lawns, each memory perfidious as the malodorous color green, sharp and stable. In order for this [...]

This entry is part of a series, In a Dark Room» , In a Dark Room» It was late in the smoke-painted bar, a quarter past the blue hour, when The Interviewer pulled The Poet into an even darker room. And in the dark of that darkness, came the first question. Tell me, said the Interviewer, where do your poems live? Maybe where all poems live: in doubt, shame, fear, prayer and ecstasy. Maybe they live in the part of me that still sees the Rickey, pubescent, gap-toothed, shy to smile, shy to speak, not man-enough, not black-enough, desiring, but who thought to be desired was outside him. Or that they live in this Rickey, older, who smiles, speaks, is man-enough, whatever “man” means, is black-enough, whatever “black” means, desires, apparently is desired, is desired. Wherever the overlap is is where Rickey (his poems) lives. But poems also move. The [...]

This entry is part of a series, Papercuts» If you force the sea through a sieve For Year 8, Frankston High School If you force the sea _____through a sieve __________stand back. Oceans will run clear and thin. __________You’ll grow bright over your dull catch – __________eat like Neptune, then sleep __________hardly feeling the neap and king __________movements of your mind’s floor. __________Light will pass, __________and the sea things douse and drawl __________through your dreams. ____________________At last their drip- __________ping will seem to have sunk in silence. __________Only then will you find yourself stir, __________slowly ascend through the levels __________to surface, hauled out __________into blue avenues of spreading mass and murmur. Papercuts Poet at Frankston High School VIC, 2011 ____________________________________________ Dr. Bonny Cassidy is a poet and writer based in Melbourne. In 2008 she undertook an Asialink/Malcolm Robertson Foundation literature fellowship in Japan, and she is currently the recipient of [...]

The Age A jar of broken pens and some thoughts on some obscene rhetoric. Something eclectic and historical. My grandmother knit me a scarf, and she couldn’t stop knitting. It extends to my ankles. The air outside is so dark, that the eye cannot gauge the distance of its vision. I imagine a season, when the harvest is the fullest, most lush and subsisting. A busy street in the rain: the flux of radio static. Something rising, emerging, something early and unmarred. Nothing imposes itself upon it. Tap dancing, as art, as sport, as metaphor. A neighborhood, or a philosophy: vastly inconsistent. Reactive impulse: a fetus, its little foot twisting. The dark ages in a dream: something like a trend from 1983. A home. A sudden hovering of deep blue in the sky. Yesterday is today is tomorrow is today. The difference: a deception, what the mind wills. There was [...]

This entry is part of a series, Papercuts» Papercuts is Australia’s only national poetry education program. Papercuts promotes the living practice of poetry through a series of workshops with contemporary Australian poets. Through Papercuts, students and educators in primary and secondary schools, correctional centres, community organisations, professional associations and universities, undertake workshops to develop their own poems, poetry collections and exhibitions. Created by The Red Room Company in 2007, Papercuts is now programmed in over 50 schools across Australia. Originally designed for High School Students, the learning kits have since been expanded to cater to primary students from years 1-6. A diverse range of students have so far benefitted from the Papercuts learning experience, from students with special needs to gifted and talented groups. We have also run a project at Sunning Hill School in the Juniperina Juvenile Justice Centre. . Entries in this series: Papercuts: Introduction Papercuts: Bonny Cassidy [...]