Ruby Street

Best Australian Poems 2009 is fresh. See Robert Adamson's take on what is happening here and now.

under-done, undetermined, or under-determined oversighted, or over-shot mission, or misinterpreted shadowing, or shadowy attention, or attentive gratify, or grace regard, or regardless refuge, refuse, refute, re-fuse

What are the other intimacies?

Prepositions and position : Placing in place. Writing about placing, not place. Is here a place? Pronouns and position . " ... certain words of a sentence - prepositions, connectives, pronouns - belong up toward full consciousness, while strange and unused words appear only in subconscious. ... in dream the simple and familiar words like prepositions, connectives, etc. are not absent, in fact, noticeably present to show illogical absurdity, discontinuity, parody of sanity." Lorine Niedecker to Harriet Monroe

No-one knows the future, of poetry.

The parrot hangs down from the bottlebrush, everywhere there’s leftovers from storm. The rain needs no actual photo, you smell its rare, pleasant odour on the town’s skin. There’s the awkward bow to music you must not make. There’s no midpoint, only angles between streets, sightlines along garden paths to hidden yards where citizens have no need today to sneak water from the failing wells.

Sometimes you feel like hedging bets. Sometimes you want to get things out of the unfinished. But what keel is ever true or even, flexing at horizons? At least a vote of confidence, to be shipping seeds without contracts. Let us anticipate our emergency release.

Too many things are bad, you can only transgress your own unpopular culture. What is missing shines, lovely allure, a partly-closed door, chasing window, half-tongues of music budding ear, green wire, grass. Each awning offers branding, water beads on Segafredo, and you smell it or a body’s brief cerise.

I am known mainly by my breathing even among all the other signals I steer my time in a part of the air the tolerant collaborative air is it possible rather than corrosive everything drops down eventually then flies smaller and smaller the huge receding sound so long ago if you knew me in, around, then out speech and then the signing of the sound written, traced on the wall my crystal spit and the breath to get there

Some hot discussion on the 'new lyric' in Australian poetry over at Pam Brown 's new place for talkin' about poetry. Questions Pam put up for discussion: How much does the concept of the new Aussie lyric have to do with formalism? How different is this new Aussie lyric from the earlier notion of lyric as an instrument of personal expression? Is the new Aussie lyric consciously engaged in thought and its processes in language? Is this re-emergence of the lyrical a trend against/an escape from recent movements and influences in poetry? Could the new lyrical engage with notions of authenticity (originality/faking), appropriation (copying) involving the persona of the poet? Someone added an extra question backchannel which Pam placed upfront: "I wondered if an extra question could be added (which you imply up front), about the gendering of this new eruption." and Pam proposed a further question in the comments: "I wonder why there is never any wit, anything f...

The latest issue of ecopoetics has appeared. It includes a selection of Australian poets, edited by Michael Farrell. ecopoetics 06/07 2006-2009 Emily Abendroth, Fatho Amoy, mIEKAL aND, Kristen Andersen, Karen Leona Anderson, Stan Apps, Robert Ashton, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Christine Boileau, Timothy Bradford, Pam Brown, Julieann Brownton, James Bunn, Andrew Burke, Bonny Cassidy, Louise Crisp, Justin Clemens, Jon Cone, Jack Collom, Matthew Cooperman, Gregory Day, Tyler Doherty, Thom Donovan, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Theodore Enslin, John Estes, Kate Fagan, Michael Farrell, Alec Finlay, Lisa Fishman, Benjamin Friedlander, Forrest Gander, Jody Gladding, Liberty Heise, Krista Ingebretson, Jill Jones, Patrick Jones, Michael Kelleher, John Kinsella, Kyhl Lyndgaard, James Koller, José Martí, John McBain, Ray Meeks, Graeme Miles, Stuart Mills, Peter Minter, Luis-Aguilar Moreno, Derek Motion, Jesse Nissim, Alistair Noon, Lucas North, Antonio Ochoa, Peter O’Mara, Isabelle Pelissier, Carol Quinn...

Non-compliant. Disloyal. Not making exclusive claims. Non-singular vision. Inconsistent. Non-hierarchical. Non-categorical. To make meaning work - not tied up, and definitely living in the world (not a closed loop): ‘A composition of the prolonged present is a natural composition in the world’ - Gertrude Stein. [The ‘prolonged’ is as much the point as the present, to me. As is ‘in the world’.]