Autumn Royal’s “[Regarding] The Pain of Others” takes its name from Susan Sontag’s book-length essay discussing the moral hazards involved in the photography of suffering—for both the taker and viewer of the photograph. In Royal’s poem, she makes clear that these same hazards can extend to any artform. Taking the form of a dramatic monologue, a celebrated playwright finds that life is imitating art: he is being visited upon by the themes he has “so realistically & poetically portrayed” within his works. Ironically, however, the playwright is reticent regarding his own suffering: “I’ve experienced a great loss, which I choose not to discuss / at this point in time.” Perhaps this inhibition is influenced by his belief in the necessary distance the artist requires from his or her subject to authentically represent it, but this seems an especially dubious position in the case of the playwright: if the artist has the right to keep private their own suffering, what right do they have to publicly portray someone else’s? Royal’s speaker is in turns fascinating and repulsive—his self-regard is complemented by a complete lack of introspection. When he is questioned at a dinner party regarding the ethics of a script based on a “widely reported and terribly violent incident,” he merely points out his interlocutor has passata sauce not only on the upper region of their lip, “but also the tip of their nose.” Autumn Royal’s second collection The Drama Student (Giramondo, 2023) was last month shortlisted for the 2024 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. The awards are the richest in Australia, and several friends and poets featured in this series were nominated alongside Royal in the poetry category, including Luke Beesely for In the Photograph, Ali Cobby Eckermann for She Is the Earth and Jennifer Maiden for Golden Bridge: New Poems. [Regarding] The Pain of Others Since many of the plotlines explored throughout my plays have started leaking into my current reality, I’m now publicly admitting to embracing other people’s anguishes for the sake of my own creative endeavours. Over the past decade, I’ve consistently been celebrated as a prophetic & iconic playwright — a trademark I still justifiably hold. However, since the themes I’ve so realistically & poetically portrayed throughout my works have tragically begun to impact upon my daily routines — my gratification with such accolades may not fully be appreciated without such a declaration. I’ve experienced a great loss, which I choose not to discuss at this point in time — but I’ll admit that until recently, I’ve always felt more comfortable writing about the lives of others — from a distance, but most especially while my subjects are inhabiting their own homes. It’s not unfitting to mention that after years of dinner invitations & appearances — I’ve been praised as not only being an exceptional conversationalist, but a much-desired guest. During such dinner parties, I’ve always offered to wash-up after each course, yet I’ve always been denied this pleasure — so I end up refilling my glass... Continue reading

We’re almost through with the Dog Days of Summer. Hopefully, for those of us who live in towns and cities where access to nature’s arrangement of cooling-stations: things like lakes and rivers, woodlands and oceans, are difficult to reach, temperatures will begin to come down soon. Since late May, the heat in New York City has been unrelenting. NBC’s “Storm Team 4” says it’s the city’s hottest summer on record. High temperatures have been accompanied by even higher levels of humidity, driven by La Nina’s southern oscillation. There is a cumulative quality to this kind of heat: it becomes seared into the fabric of our being, to be worn in uniforms of torpor. Meanjin (Brisbane) is a city that knows this kind of heat intimately. With its subtropical climate, Meanjin summers can span up to five months, arriving early in late November and not leaving in full until April. When the heat properly settles in, the city, as if by instinct, slows and slows and finally reaches a full stop. A camaraderie develops: expectations of efficiency are lowered, decisions of consequence are postponed. There is a collective hibernation, everyone bunkers down, sprawled out under ceiling fans or blankly staring into the middle distance in air conditioned bars and clubhouses, patiently waiting out the somnolence. This is no mean feat: Meanjin is a city of nearly 3 million people, which has produced some of Australia’s most important cultural moments and institutions. Two of Australia’s premier literary magazines, Meanjin and Overland were founded in Meanjin. Australia’s (and possibly the world’s) first and finest ever punk band, The Saints, formed in the inner-suburb of Petrie Terrace in 1974, contemporaneous to the Ramones in Queens, NY. More recently, Meanjin based artist and Kamilaroi/Bigambul man, Archie Moore, won the Golden Lion award for Best National Participation at this year’s Venice Biennale, with the Australian Pavilion being curated by Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) curator and Meanjin resident Ellie Buttrose. The win was a first ever for Australia at the Venice Biennale, and underscored Meanjin’s outsized importance to the nation’s arts scene. All this makes you wonder what else Meanjin might be able to produce if the city functioned at full capacity for more than seven months of the year. Or perhaps it is the enforced cessation, the embedded tolerance of idleness and the resigned acceptance of the suspension of normalcy during these months that allow for such impressive creative works to emerge. Rain or Sweat is a short film by the artists Charlie Hillhouse and Sebastian Moody which captures the lethargy of a Meanjin summer. It follows a Queensland man (the architect Dirk Yates) over the course of several summer weeks with long, considered frames that are memetic of the kind of melting and lengthening of time that sustained heat can produce. We are shown the glaring, sunstruck days, nights so thick and loud with insects they are palpable, the growing pressure of an approaching storm and the force of its release in... Continue reading

Alan Wearne’s poetic vehicle of choice is the dramatic monologue. He is a master of the form. Like those mid-Victorian poets Clough, Meredith and Browning, whose prowess in narrative verse Wearne cites as more or less challenging him to try his hand at the form (“We can do it… go on… can you?”), Wearne takes full advantage of the scope offered by the dramatic monologue: from compelling narrative plots (often topical) to psychological portraiture (always entangled) and everything in between. Take The Nightmarkets, Wearne’s epic verse novel that follows a year in the life of six characters and includes ten separate monologues totalling over 10,000 lines. Set in 1980s Melbourne and the city's surrounding suburbs, the poem involves the romantic relationship between Sue Dobson, a leftist-activist-journalist in her late 20s from the inner-city, and the noticeably older, inescapably patrician, politician Jack McTaggart. McTaggart is running for federal office and looking to start his own political party. To complicate things further, Dobson has been commissioned to write McTaggart’s biography. The poem not only surveys the political and social landscape of early 1980s Australia, which was still suffering from the hangover of “The Dismissal” (the removal of the progressive Labor Prime Minister Gough Whiltlam by the Governor General in 1975), but also the conflicted personal lives of those who strive to shape this landscape. In Wearne’s monologues we witness his characters' attempts to validate their contradictions, justify their compromises, explain themselves to themselves—that is, we witness the ways in which we navigate in our own minds the sharp collisions between our supposed convictions and how we ultimately choose (or are sometimes compelled) to act. Wearne achieves this effect through the energy of his language, in particular the tightness of its rhythm, which allows for a simultaneous propulsion of the narrative and for the rapidly oscillating nature of human introspection to be faithfully mirrored: the slightest change in cadence is significant enough to mark, discernibly, the slightest changes in mood or train of thought. The following passage is taken from Sue Dobson’s monologue “Climbing Up the Ladder of Love,” which is featured in full in Near Believing: Selected Monologues and Narratives 1967-2021. I think it is exemplary of Wearne’s energy and ear for the Australian vernacular—also for his comic effect. Chatting with dock worker Kev at a bar, Dobson imagines the morning to come if she takes the guy home, a morning filled with embarrassment, in main part created by the space between the ideals of her post-grad-educated socialism (what we would call in Australia “Champaign socialism" or "chardonnay socialism") and the realities of Kev's working class life. Having recently reread “The Masque of Anarchy,” it was hard not to compare the idealism of Shelley’s famous ending couplet with the irony of the final couplet of the passage below—Wearne's holds up pretty well. (Note: an “ocker” is similar to “white trash” or “hillbilly”; pronouncing the letter “h” with a hard h “haitch” was viewed in Australia as a signifier of poor education). From... Continue reading

Of all the major Australian poets, none have captured the Australian idiom as faithfully and expansively as Alan Wearne. A tacit member of the famed “Generation of ‘68”—the disputed label given to a group of poets who came to prominence at the end of the 1960s and reshaped the nation’s (then predominantly conservative) poetic landscape—Wearne has fashioned a truly original and idiosyncratic oeuvre, renowned for its narrative, character driven poetry. Often epic in their form and scale (his most successful published works are arguably the verse novels The Nightmarkets and The Lovemakers Part 1 & 2), Wearne's poems take tales of urban Australia and unfurl them simultaneously in two directions: outwards through the country's sprawling and scattered metropolises, and inwards towards their characters’s equally expansive and discordant internal lives. Lovesick suburban drug dealers caught in webs of international power, adulterous politicians, blue-collar workers with philosophical bents—Wearne’s characters, via a cacophony of monologues, sing of an often bizarre, banal, endearing, brutal modern Australia, with irony, wit, compassion and pathos. Near Believing (2022), gathers a selection of these monologues and narratives from Wearne’s nearly 60 years of writing, from 1967 up to 2021. The first poem in the selection, “Saint Bartholomew Remembers Jesus Christ as an Athlete,” was written on the 22nd of July, 1967, the day before the poet’s nineteenth birthday—an extraordinarily precocious feat. The poem comically sketches Jesus as a first class runner. His apostle Bartholomew, unimpressed with his master’s teachings (“Brilliant. Yes. Yet never near to God”), finds Christ’s true grace in the splendor of his athletic prowess: “often we came down the mountains / (jogging loosely, never with a cramp) / my running partner, heading for Jerusalem, / appeared as if his feet were next to God.” Wearne has said that his poems are “rather like autobiographies in which I don’t appear.” While “Saint Bartholomew Remembers Jesus Christ as an Athlete” is of course a comic poem, it is more complex than the farcical portrait of Jesus the jogger it at first glance appears to be. For me, with my Jesuit upbringing, the opening phrase, “Always in training”, makes me think not only of training in an athletic sense (although I do like the idea of Jesus as an annoying, obsessive fitness junky), but a religious one also: the human incompleteness that requires the constant training of the soul to bring it closer to God in order to be filled with His grace; a process which is never complete (always training), or to paraphrase another poet “created unfit, commanded to be sound.” Meanwhile, the distinction between Bartholomew’s disdain for Christ’s words (“even when I felt he’d gone too far, / think Here we go again out came the logic / smooth as a circle”), and his reverence for Jesus’ actions—or action, perhaps the most rudimentary action of all: running—might inverse the hypocrisy the poet (or reader) found in the Christian orders of his youth, whose actions often fell short of their words. Alan Wearne (photo by Kelly Pilgrim-Byrne)... Continue reading

You don’t need to be familiar with Heidegger’s opus “Being and Time” to appreciate Judith Bishop’s namesake poem “Sein und Zeit.” There is an opacity to the poem which is unsettling; opening with the line “We can walk into a room not knowing”, we are never told exactly what it is we do not know, only that our not knowing extends to “whether” (a choice or an inquiry into something), “or when,” (a period of time), “or even that” (something we know we can determine or identify). The totality of this ignorance, of this absence of knowledge, gives it a kind of presence—a phantom that haunts the whole of the poem. Bishop further obscures things by telling us that whatever it is we don’t know, “Only you will know.” One of Bishop’s achievements in "Sein und Zeit" is that she is able to create a near impenetrable obscurity from clear, precise language. The contrast seems to reinforce the significance and deepness of the unknowing—the overwhelming vagueness of existence which eclipses our lives even at their most particular. “Sein und Zeit” is taken from Circadia (UQP, 2024), Bishop’s third collection of poetry. She is the winner of the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, an Academy of American Poets University prize and a Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship. Her translations from French (Philippe Jaccottet, Gérard Macé) have been published in Australian and international journals. She holds a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Melbourne, an MFA in Writing from Washington University in St. Louis, and an MPhil in European Literature from the University of Cambridge. She lives with her family in Melbourne. Sein und Zeit We can walk into a room not knowing. It doesn’t happen every time. A white room can be painted to be pure. I mean, just to show us that it’s clean. But it doesn’t have to be. We can walk into a room not knowing whether, or when, or even that. That can be the hardest room. Only you will know. First there is the walking. The floor, a chair or two. The posters of visions of someone else’s visit to a room. Take a chair. Only then the talk begins, like a reckoning of beads, like the body measures sweat, words wrong as a rainbow that has paled to a shadow of itself. There is always an end. We can stand and walk again. We can leave the room in silence, carrying its moment in and out of days Continue reading

The mostly prose poems in Luke Beesley’s In the Photograph play within the landscape created by the divergences between our perception of the world and the world itself. Often dismissed or left unnoticed among the routine travails of daily life, In the Photograph places these divergences at life's very center. Found in dreams, distractions, mishearings, misunderstandings and false assumptions, these divergences are sometimes surreal and benign, other times banal and pernicious, but always they exert an influence over our lives, to shape (or misshape) our sense of reality. As the poet writes in “Time Piece”: “And who is we? When you drive in towards a valley town, morning, and the light is still settling itself, purple. When the sun is stretching to the chrome, acting on an orgin-yellow, or orange, is when you begin to know a collective. But then again, often, that frisson, cinematic, is not quite the location of the town anyway. Just a collection of trees by a river—a fleeting battery-powered elegance, but you have moved on by then and shaped your life around it.” In the Photograph (Giramondo, 2023) is Luke Beesley’s fourth collection of poems. You can read a previous post on his poetry here. In the Corner One evening in the corner of my eye reading in the lounge room on our newly upholstered chair there was a rat. It took some time, a second, for it to come into shape: mangy, artless. I trusted it was a discarded sock or even one of my son's shoes, before it twisted and flattened-all in one motion-and slipped under the door. First, I threw my thoughts against a broom leaning on a speaker, then I went into the kitchen for a dustpan, then bathroom for a toothbrush or eyelash curler, beard trimmer blade-brush, etc., but eventually I dabbed at the corner with the tip of my pinky finger. Sunscreen squeezed on a plate. Gerhard Richter walking his paint across the canvas. This all before I looked under the oven and found evidence torn variously and sourly; repugnant, the scent: hot inner-sole of a runner. While You Were Sleeping I can feel a thin-very thin-transparent chute billow at the centre of my chest. It's a webbed flutter, electric, and I put the blinker on, overtake a small Toyota. Continue reading

Here are a pair of romance poems that offer up some too-often unsung qualities of love: the comic, the sinister, the ridiculous. The gestures of courtship in “Billionaire Romance” grow from the mildly threatening to a pitch of absurdity—or do they? In the way the near impossible magnificence of the Taj Mahal was inspired by Shah Jahan’s love for his favorite wife, Mumtaz Mahal, is it really a stretch of the imagination to think that one of today’s egomaniacal tech-billionaires might adopt every child in an orphanage and name them after their beloved? or “have dragnets dredge every kind of treasure from the floor of the ocean”? In a 19th century version of "ghosting", “Regency Romance” turns the subject of the love letter into a justification of the letter’s absence. Like a child fabricating to her teacher great tales that explain her missing homework, "Regency Romance" speaks to the often unwanted but always unavoidable responsibilities imposed by the conventions of love. Chloe Wilson is the author of two poetry collections, The Mermaid Problem and Not Fox Nor Axe, which was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize and the Judith Wright Calanthe Award. She was joint winner of the 2016 Josephine Ulrick Poetry Prize, and has been awarded the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize, the Arts Queensland Val Vallis Award and the Fish Publishing Flash Fiction Prize. “Billionaire Romance” and “Regency Romance” first appeared in the Spring, 2018 edition of Western Humanities Review, an issue dedicated to contemporary Australian prose poetry. Billionaire Romance I will buy a ship and name it after you. I will buy a town and name it after you. I will buy an island and name it after you. I will adopt every child in an orphanage and name them after you. Everywhere you look: your name in lights, ten feet high, and everyone saying it back to you with a smile on their face. I will have couturiers dress you and afterwards I will cut off their hands. Your lipstick will be weapons grade, your shoes fashioned from the crash-landed engine of a Soviet rocket. I will have dragnets dredge every kind of treasure from the floor of the ocean, and if you want to eat the dolphins and turtles bound up in those nets I will have them turned into soup and fricassee and feed them to you from spoons fashioned out of their skeletons. But if you choose to spare them I will train them to eat from your hand. They will purr and rub their faces against you, drowsy with gratitude. Your fingers will be heavy with glittering rings. But still you’ll stroke those creatures in all the places they like: behind the ear, beneath the jaw, and right between the eyes. Regency Romance I would have written but I drank my ink in a fit of thirst. My signature went south on a ship swarmed by pirates; it has only just returned with a rooster and a pig tattooed on the arches of... Continue reading

In Australia, especially on the east coast, the color blue is inescapable. The sky is a deeper, wider blue than you will find almost anywhere else, mirrored by the blue of the ocean and harbors around which almost all life takes place. It’s a blue that’s used to sell the country to international tourists; a blue that facilitates our “sunny” national character. We have bluebottles, blue-tongue lizards, and the deadly blue-ringed octopus. The size and intensity of the blue sky can be overwhelming: I remember once returning home to Sydney from a lengthy visit to northern Europe and feeling both supercharged by the expanse of light and color, and also somehow claustrophobic by the sheer distances this blue suggested. “the sky’s huge blue hand pressed / against the windows” is how Ella Jeffery captures this paradox of feeling penned in by a vastness of sky. “A History of Blue” opens with the “Brainscan blue” of the pre-dawn sky, a slight nod to Eliot’s etherized evening, and goes on to offer a compendium of some of the most surprising and compelling ways one can describe a color. The “drowsy” blue of the grandfather’s tattoo is my favorite; you can almost see the old, fading blue-ink yawning and sliding down the skin as if slinking into bed. Ella Jeffery’s debut collection of poems, Dead Bolt (2020), won the Puncher & Wattmann Prize for a First Book of Poems and the Anne Elder Award. She is a recipient of the Queensland Premier’s Young Publishers and Writers Award and her poetry has appeared widely in journals and anthologies. A History of Blue Brainscan blue of the horizon’s edge before dawn. That is the blue of indecision. Five blue lights blinking the plane through metaldust sky while the Pacific lilts like aquarium-plastic around some humid or hypothermic blue latitude. Look closer. Here’s Stradbroke Island in shades of blue-ringed octopus, blackblue crabs on rocks like moving bruises. Drowsy blue of my teetotal grandfather’s tattoo and the blue book of his brain that remembers all birds by their Latin names. Blue guts of swimming pools, blue-tongues scrummed in one shady corner. First and last: the sky’s huge blue hand pressed against the windows. “The Blue” illustrates two of John Forbes’ greatest talents as a poet. The first is his ability to take the transcendent and reduce it down to the domestic and routine in an image that perfectly reflects back to us the banality of modern life. In this case, it is the blue of Sydney which is “built-in like / a modern appliance / at my fingertips” suggesting that the color’s sheer accessibility cheapens its effect. The second is the propulsion the poem gathers and where Forbes chooses to interrupt it. Reading the poem aloud, we are thrust irresistibly forward until an anticlimax arrives with the lines “I can’t mix up love / with the weather & / feel better,” wherein a pause occurs and we are allowed to gather our breath, only to be launched... Continue reading

Here are two poems, "Stendhal Syndrome" and "Fugal State," from Canberra based poet Melinda Smith, both taken from her most recent collection Man-Handled (2020). Smith won the 2014 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Drag Down to Unlock or Place an Emergency Call. Stendhal syndrome is a curious phenomenon in which a person suffers dysautonomic symptoms, such as tremors and fainting, in the presence of works of art. Reading about the condition reminded me of the great opening passage of Ben Lerner’s novel Leaving the Atocha Station, in which the narrator watches a man crying in front of Roger Van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross in the Prado, and wonders if the man is having a “profound experience of art.” The narrator, a poet, worries that he is incapable of having such an experience, and is deeply suspicious of anyone who claims they can: “Insofar as I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf; the closest I’d come to having a profound experience of art was probably the experience of this distance, the profound experience of the absence of profundity.” The speaker of Smith’s “Stendhal syndrome” takes this skepticism as the consensus position and, in disbelief of her own experience, claims an exception. The fact that she is arguing her case to a judge suggests there is a kind of failing in allowing oneself to be so affected by art, a slouching of our modern, permanently ironized, posture. It’s interesting to consider where the guilt arises from: is it too indulgent an act to submit so fully to an artwork? Or, perhaps, are such experiences only available to rubes and philistines, and to admit to one would be to admit to one’s own lack of sophistication? Stendhal syndrome Swooning is so 1817. But I can say truthfully, it happened, this century, in the Uffizi. It happened. Tears, even. I know. I thought I was past that. I thought we all were. Everyone cringes at words like transport, ecstasy. I was drunk, your honour, drunk on paint - no, drunk on charcoal and paper, those only. Or the echo of prayer. Struck dumb and ringing like a cuffed head, a bell, a gong, trembling, concussed, a pulsing tuning fork, thrumming the same note as all the others, overcome by the marks of the master's hand, this last sketch too much, the straw, just grey and black on yellowed paper, just perfect love, caught, still breathing, one radiant face among thousands, full-on felling me still The following are two definitions of Fugue taken from the Oxford dictionary: Music a contrapuntal composition in which a short melody or phrase (the subject) is introduced by one part and successively taken up by others and developed by interweaving the parts. Psychiatry a loss of awareness of one's identity, often coupled with flight from one's usual environment, associated with certain forms of hysteria and epilepsy. In “Fugal State,” Smith... Continue reading

Here’s some magic from Lionel Fogerty’s latest collection Harvest Lingo (Giramondo, 2022) which won the Judith Wright Calanthe Award for Poetry at the 2023 Queensland Literary Awards. Fogarty must be among the most unique voices writing in English language poetry today—his use of syntax and the way he disorders established lexical categories (“No hidden child backward growing up / gains my learned on the road sky”) compels us to concentrate on each line so thoroughly that they seem to exist in isolation of each other, like islands in an atoll which are only connected in the mind of the cartographer or reader of maps. Fogarty's syntax creates new compositions in English language, with previously unheard combinations of sounds and rhythms—a new music. John Kinsella, writing in Overland magazine, suggests there are at least three ways to a Fogarty poem: “One way is via lines of list-words in which words undo each other through juxtaposition and add up to an immensity. Another way through the staccato interrupting of English’s flow to make us concentrate on the impact of each word as colonial toxin. And yet another, and maybe most vitally, is reading with a flow, taking these other factors into consideration, and letting them sing their ghost tracks, samizdat, and cultural communiques that are not for all ears (to hear what you don’t hear and possibly can’t hear).” “Intruder Wants the Writer”, which opens Harvest Lingo, lends itself particularly well to all three of Kinsella’s suggested approaches. I will hopefully have more on Lionel Fogarty soon, so stay tuned. Intruder Wants the Writer To write as a child to be a man No boxes of childhood voice my present, writing details. No hidden child backward growing up gains my learned on the road sky. Future’s song dance lit pen friends for me in evenings Not one sort of personal fireworks voice, gave rise to the now existence dared. Reluctance response by these ages, Spare me not remorseful teenage pandemonium. Pare her tempest defiant with red yellow brown ochre. Breathe well inside the walls of rooms helplessly undecided. No baby’s cries touch my raiment saddest crutch lost of mum’s death. Those life survivals by childhood happenings are snapped by swine trample readership. Embellishing more than needed. Note: All posts by Thomas Moody are copyright (c) 2024 by Thomas Moody. All rights reserved Continue reading

Bruce Beaver (1928-2004) has been called one of Australia’s “least known great poets” by Dorothy Porter and a “poet’s poet” by Timothy Schapcott. The two epithets reference the same quality: that of a poet who was underappreciated by the wider reading public but whose importance to contemporary Australian poetry has never been questioned by those readers who, perhaps, matter most: poets themselves. Beaver published thirteen collections of poetry over the course of his life, winning almost every major Australian literary award. His fourth book of poems, Letters to Live Poets (1969), was a seminal collection, groundbreaking in both its form and style. Beaver’s conversational, epistolary voice, at once personal and worldly, was entirely new for Australian poetry. As Schapcott writes,”Nothing like this had been written in Australia before.” Beaver was central to Australian poetry’s development towards more expansive horizons as both a poet and mentor. He was one of the original board members in 1964 of the highly influential journal Poetry Australia, which, with its embrace of international movements and openness to experimentation, was at the vanguard of poetry in Australia for over a decade. Throughout his life, Beaver’s apartment in the beachside Sydney suburb of Manly, which he shared with his wife and was built on the ruins of his childhood home, was a welcoming meeting place for younger writers and poets. Despite his waning health in his later years, Beaver continued to publish his poetry, with his final collection, aptly titled The Long Game and Other Poems (2005), sent to his publisher, University of Queensland Press, just before his death. October 1999 Got my gal, got my Lord, got my song Gershwin, Gershwin, Heyward It’s come! Spring’s second month with hot and cold days and the last October in two thousand years. This time the fin de siecle’s crazier than even the frogs could imagine, even though they invented nutty ends of centuries. This time more bombs, earthquakes, floods, droughts, gun-murders as well as more pink and white blossoms in the perfectly sane streets, full of not-so-sane human beings. But most of them are in love, including me because we’re still alive enough and the weather’s warming up. It’s like the Old Testament: great poetry, lousy theology and a God – damned God – Still there’s the Lord to come in the New Millennium and this new Spring. Blossoms and bombs. Every Spring’s mad with love and wars, babies and murderers. And if you think I’m not going to keep on chanting about it, you’re nuttier than the century’s end. Continue reading

Part 1. of Jarad Bruinstroop’s triptych, “Pool Sweet, 2019”, is charged with risk and tempered by an understated bathos. Drawing associations between the Transfiguration of Jesus, one of the New Testament’s most important miracles and a major Christian feast day, and David Hockney’s Peter Getting out of Nick's Pool, is exciting, transgressive and, the poem proposes, suitably inadequate. Hockney’s painting is “less mesmerising” and “less glorious” than the Transfiguration, and this deficiency prevents us access to notions as sublime and aspirational as “heaven” and “the future." In Hockney's painting we are inescapably in the material present, but, the poem confirms, “This is how it should be.” The poem’s brilliance lies in its suggestive power; it is rich with potential allusions. When we consider Hockney’s nude Peter getting out of the pool as a substitute for the Transfiguration, we not only think about sexual desire as divine and the potential for the naked human figure to be holy, but also the Apostle Peter: in the lines “To get out of a pool / is to capitulate / to gravity”, Bruinstroop seems to invert the story of St. Peter, who, while walking on water in imitation of Christ, sinks because of his wavering faith. In the closing stanza, Bruinstroop calls to mind the ritual of Christian baptism. Jarad Bruinstroop is a writer who lives in Meanjin (Brisbane). His debut poetry collection, Reliefs, won the 2022 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize. As the 2022 University of Queensland Fryer Library Creative Writing Fellow, he is developing a novella cycle that draws on Brisbane’s Queer history and the Fryer Library special collections. In 2023, he won the Val Vallis Award. His work has appeared in Best of Australian Poetry, Meanjin, Overland, HEAT, Island, Westerly, TEXT, Cordite, Australian Poetry Journal, Rabbit and elsewhere. He holds a PhD in Creative Writing from QUT where he also teaches. From “Pool Sweet, 2019” After David Hockney’s Peter Getting out of Nick’s Pool (1966) 1. Peter Floating (1998). Watercolour on acetate. If instead of trudging after Jesus up the mountain, St James had sat in a dark art classroom and watched the procession of masterpieces until he saw Peter Getting out of Nick's Pool projected on the wall, the light would have been less mesmerising. No more a flash of lightning than a match struck. And the glory, oh the glory, would have been a good deal less glorious. They wouldn't call it the Transfiguration and nobody would speak about heaven or the future. This is as it should be. To get out of a pool is to capitulate to gravity. But to get in. To get into a pool Is to put your faith In the water Continue reading

Lucy Dougan’s “Leonie” speaks to the strange charisma that inanimate objects can assume over time when they share our space with us. A sculpture of an anonymous artist’s model, after living with the family for decades, suffering “endless room changes, / the tectonic jolts of whole-house moves”, becomes almost sacred to the speaker. Having borne witness to so much of the family’s life, the “many rows and unkind words” and “also good times, rafts of regrettable TV”, the speaker develops an intimacy with the figure that is itself familial, bordering on the erotic: “If I were rendered blind I would know / your lightly pitted cheekbones, / your brow line, your rough underside”. The sculpture is, of course, brought to life not by any innate animation it possesses, but by the memories the speaker and her family have imbued it with, and this artificial nature offers it a lifespan that is greater than their own, meaning that it can be a reservoir for these memories for longer than they themselves can. It is this dual character, at once familiar and extraordinary (the speaker's intimacy with the statue is interrupted by its headache-inducing epoxy resin), that inject these objects with their eerie presence. The figure, outliving the speaker’s parents, becomes uncannily totemic of them: “Stranger, stay with us, / watch over us, / never leave us.” “Leonie” is taken from Dougan’s most recent collection of poems, Monster Field (Giramondo, 2022). The title refers to “the mysterious zone surrealist artist Paul Nash’s called ‘Monster Field’: the place glimpsed from a car at speed, which opens up a space between the everyday and the occult as it ‘almost slides past our eyes’.” Monster Field is Dougan’s seventh book of poems. Her third collection, The Guardians (Giramondo, 2015) was shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry, and won the 2016 West Australian Premier’s Poetry Award. Dougan lives in Perth, where she is poetry editor of Westerly Magazine. Leonie Paid artists' model, your face has lived with the family for decades. You have suffered endless room changes, the tectonic jolts of whole-house moves yet you remain sanguine. Your hairstyle has weathered the years and the many rows and unkind words you have presided over, also good times, rafts of regrettable TV. If I were rendered blind I would know your lightly pitted cheekbones, your brow line, your rough underside and slight headache-inducing scent of epoxy resin in which a finger could snag a glassy splinter of what it is you keep inside the void of your cast. I cannot see you as empty for in your hollow head lives the clamour of us all. And something else, you still abide with us even though our mother and father are dead and gone. Stranger, stay with us, watch over us, never leave us. Continue reading

Kate Middelton’s recently published book length poem Television (Giramando) is an emotional survey of the poet’s tv watching history. Both in its form and compositional approach, the poem owes much to A.R. Ammons’s Garbage. As Middleton writes in the book’s notes, “Re-reading Garbage, I was struck by the fact that in taking garbage as his subject Ammons could include everything. As I began to write about television, I wondered if the same might be true of this subject.” Television, like garbage, does include everything, however, everything has to pass through the very specific medium of television to be included, with its unique peculiarities and predilections. Divided into thirty-three cantos (Inferno, Purgatorio or Paradiso?) of unrhymed couplets, Television embraces and investigates these peculiarities; at times the poem prosecutes tv’s preference for scandal and the sentimental, it’s (corrupting) influence and ability to distort (particularly in the poet’s teenage memories of watching Beverly Hills 90210 and Twin Peaks, “the autopsy / on Laura an autopsy on girlhood”), while at other moments extols it’s virtues, however flawed: “television, / you are spiritual: teach attention and inattention in equal measure”. Notice Middleton’s deft use of the colon, borrowed from Ammons, as a means of “linking the disparate but coexisting, and so staving off completion”, as Mark Ford wrote. Kate Middleton is a Melbourne based poet whose collections include Fire Season, which was awarded the Western Australian Premier’s Award for Poetry in 2009, Ephemeral Waters and Passage. In 2020 she was runner up for the Australian Book Review’s Calibre Essay Award. From "Television" 6. I want to celebrate Astro, the robot boy I loved, his Pinocchio ache, a moment's solace that time he found a robot girlfriend: incandescent eyes at last find eyes to beam right back: and him fallen in, into, unprogrammed love: but soon the complication revealed, its violence: his robot girlfriend not just another robot but, also, a bomb, the bomb, the one he needs to find, defuse, and his girlfriend sacrificed: a higher pathos: so: her body on a table, disassembled, redeemed, everyone but her saved, (a celebration,) except the robot boy and his lonely deathlessness: did he understand time's passage in a different way, its metronomic tick echoing in his ever-childish body?: did he understand the replaceable, Argonautic parts of himself as his own, as bodily integrity, autonomy?: for all his griefs, there's that final shot—a wink, a playful secret: Astro tells us, his audience, his only confidantes, he kept her legs, which, non-explosive, did not require sacrifice: and he caresses his own thighs, calves, and we understand it: her legs, shared legs, now his legs, no rejection of the transplant, no foreign tissue, instead a flawless interchangeability, the comfort of this particular inheritance incalculable: I recapped the scene to the boy at the video store counter, our own private form of payment for my late fee, as if it were just gross and not wondrous as well: and, to me this transplant only feels complete years later, its longing for... Continue reading

Congratulations to Grace Yee who last week won Australia’s richest literary prize, the Victorian Prize for Literature, for her debut collection Chinese Fish (Giramondo, 2023). The collection traces the story of an immigrant family from Hong Kong living in the South Island of Aotearoa New Zealand. The judges comments noted that Chinese Fish “focuses on women’s experience; particularly, how migration tests the relationship between a mother and her daughter. (Yee) tells this story with sparkling humour, wit, and stylistic verve, while paying sustained attention to historical circumstance – particularly everyday racism and the discriminatory government policies which affected Chinese migrants.” In “to paint like picasso before 1904”, first published in Overland in 2019, Yee’s “sparkling humour, wit, and stylistic verve” are on full display, along with a beguiling mix of registers switched so seamlessly and effectively, it is near impossible to get one's bearings within the poem. In "to paint like picasso before 1904", Yee takes from us our sealegs so she can more easily steer us through the urgent and the absurd until we arrive, implausibly, at the poem's title. to paint like picasso before 1904 there is a species of tavern where drinkers make disparaging remarks about chinese immigrants. it is patronised by a squadron of pirates of otherwise sweet temperament, who truck their goods with whomever they please. baring dog-yellow teeth, they sit in plastic fold-up chairs in cheap t-shirts designed by europeans unmolested in canton. each ship at the bar plays furiously, leaving a trail of wild colonial girls cruelly strangled after the first wash. in the wake of their missionary grandmothers, the risk these women take is calculated on trigonometrical principles. female players have the option of wearing cones so they don’t get kissed for no reason. everyone looks for their partners online these days, including an entire class of whining feminists for whom postpartum incontinence has never been a problem, but who nonetheless kegel jade eggs at every opportunity. it’s hard for these women not to feel violated by the knowledge that their dna is half-man, but the smarter chicks check their purses of emotional labour in (the taverns’) tiny grimy bathrooms and suspend intercourse by returning to campus via the victorian roads. in high pollen weather, with abscesses fit to burst, they heroically collaborate in their efforts to arrest the flames. after years of feckless liaisons, some of these women set sail for the orient. landing in the earl’s court, they feel secure in their portion of comparatively uncontaminated empire. with contempt in equal parts for men and aliens silently stoning their gallbladders, they manage to live peacefully, albeit corpulently, by a calendar of saints for years under a special licence to paint like picasso before 1904. Continue reading

This year, January 26 arrives in Australia with added resignation following the defeat of the “Voice” referendum late last year, which would have altered the Constitution to recognize the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to parliament. The Voice emerged from the Uluru Statement From the Heart, a petition written and endorsed by First Nations leaders calling for substantive constitutional and structural reform. The Uluru Statement was released on National Sorry Day (May 26) in 2017, a day that remembers and acknowledges the forcible removal of indigenous children from their families and communities, known as the Stolen Generations. The brutal policy was carried out by successive governments from the mid-1800s right up until the 1970s, but it was not until 2008 that a formal apology was given by then prime minister Kevin Rudd on behalf of the Australian government. For the speaker in Ali Cobby Eckermann’s “The Apology Day breakfast”, the apology and its accompanying function offer no substantive remedy to the intergenerational trauma inflicted upon her, rather it just adds another layer of intrusion (“how does one define the jigsaw / when the pieces are misshapen / by the constant hands of others?”) into the process of healing she has undertaken through her own conviction, “you offer breakfast and forget / I found my mother," and force of imagination, “and rebirthed my son/ Together we are the Banquet”. A conviction and imagination that will need to be more resilient than ever this coming Friday. Ali Cobby Eckermann is a Yankunytjatjara poet and artist from South Australia whose work has been published and celebrated around the world. Her poetry collections include little bit long time and the award-winning collection Inside My Mother. Her verse novels are His Father’s Eyes and Ruby Moonlight, which won the inaugural black&write! Indigenous fellowship, the Kenneth Slessor Prize, a Deadly Award and was named the NSW Premier’s Literary Award Book of the Year. In 2013 Ali toured Ireland as Australia’s Poetry Ambassador, and in 2017 she received the Windham-Campbell Prize from Yale University. The Apology Day breakfast my mother did not grow up with her mother I did not grow up with mine my son did not grow up with me how does one define the jigsaw when the pieces are misshapen by the constant hands of others? the gift of life is maternity and the removal of this is a reparation that has no price the picture is askew in the portrait you offer and rejection is the new graffiti to rewrite the script you offer breakfast and forget I found my mother and rebirthed my son Together we are the Banquet Continue reading

Petra White has published five collections of poetry, including her most recent Cities (Vagabond Press, 2021). Here debut collection, Incoming Tide (John Leonard Press, 2007) was shortlisted for both the Queensland Premier's Literary Awards and the ACT Poetry Prize, while in 2010 she was awarded the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry for The Simplified World (John Leonard Press, 2010). Passing Through Chicago Rivers of road, rivers of river, snow-clumped trees, the angel, flowering in moonlight. People would have muttered if they’d seen. What good is an angel now? His terrifying beauty, hidden beneath a wing. If we think we could be rescued, from the fate we’ve shored up, it is not an angel, it’s a person, rising out of flames. Perhaps the angel, fallen to earth as lightly as a feather from a falcon, has nothing to offer but himself, pale clawed feet in the dark street, his feeble torch on this avenue of twitching flags, threads of a great anxiety. He crawls into the attic of number 1813. In the space between home and state, the angel shudders, turns, cramped wings shake open – through the house a molten dream, through breakfast and dinner, through the silver sorrows of the city, its lumpy cracked streets, its America, soaring in the snow. Continue reading

"Stalin's Holidays" is the title poem of John Forbes' second collection. Happy holidays! Stalin's Holidays The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. Juniper berries bloom in the heat. My heart! ‘Bottoms up, Comrade.’ The nicotine-stained fingers of our latest defector shake as they reach for Sholokhov’s Lenin—the verandah is littered with copies—no, commies, the ones in comics like ‘Battle Action’ or ‘Sgt Fury & His Howling Commandos’. Does form follow function? Well, after lunch we hear a speech. It’s Stephen Fitzgerald back from ‘Red’ China. Then, you hear a postie whistle. I hear without understanding, two members of Wolverhampton Wanderers pissed out of their brains, trying to talk Russian. Try reading your telegram— ‘mes vacances sont finies: Stalin’. But we don’t speak French or play soccer in Australia, our vocabulary and games are lazier by far. Back in the USSR, we don’t know how lucky we are. Continue reading

Issue #114 of Hanging Loose is out now, and it's chock-full of great stuff, with new poems by Sherman Alexie, Joanna Fuhrman and David Lehman; art by Amy Masters; a supplement of poems curated by Hanging Loose author R. Zamora Linmark featuring Denise Duhamel, John Hennessy, Paulo Javier and a translation by Kimiko Hahn; and a remembrance of the poet and New York Times dance critic, Jack Anderson, plus Jack’s last poem. Issue #114 marks 57 continuous years of publishing for Hanging Loose. In that time, the press has championed the work of authors marginalized by mainstream publishing, whether because of gender, race, age, class or socioeconomic status. Many of the over 220 books Hanging Loose has put out have been first books, including the first full collections by Sherman Alexie, Kimiko Hahn, D. Nurkse, Jack Agüeros, Cathy Park Hong, Eula Biss, Hayan Charara, and Maggie Nelson. While the press has always gratefully relied upon the generosity of their friends and readers to ensure the enterprise continues, this fall a necessary move to a more expensive warehouse and storage space is increasing their financial need. In order to supplement these greater costs, Hanging Loose has set up an online auction which is running until early next January. Signed books by Charles North and Sherman Alexi are up for auction. There’s also a 10 week online class with Barbara Henning and a Dumpling Dinner with Hanging Loose editor Jiwon Choi! Click here to bid on one of the items, or alternatively, you can make a straight donation here to help this iconic independent press keep keeping on. Oh—and you can find Issue #114 here. Continue reading

In the introduction to her collection of short essays on Australian poets, “Fishing for Lightning: The Spark of Poetry”, Sarah Holland-Blatt writes “As a form, poetry is full of freedom and possibility. It asks the reader to be open to coincidence and association, to music and imagery, to chance and change. Poems are full of surprises: each line is a little detonation of language and imagery, each stanza a series of swift steps into the unknown.” Holland-Blatt’s “Night Flight” is a perfect demonstration of these detonations of language and imagery. From one line to the next throughout the poem, we are shepherded across continents and desires, to destinations known and unknown, physical, temporal, bodily, imaginative and personal, where everything is “defined / by distance: how close we were, how far from steel mills in Pittsburgh / and those killing Chicago winds”. Sarah Holland-Blatt is one of Australia’s leading poets, editors and literary critics. She has been published widely internationally, including in The New Yorker on several occasions. From 2014 to 2019 she was the poetry editor of Island magazine, and was also the editor of The Best Australian Poems 2016 and The Best Australian Poems 2017. Her three collections of poems to date have swept up nearly every major literary award Australian poetry has to offer, with her most recent title, Jaguar, winning the 2023 Stella Award. Night Flight As my plane drops down in turbulence I think of you and of Salt Lake City, I think of ice stealing over the Great Lakes and of Omaha and of adamant plains. I think of all the places I have never been: Caracas, La Paz, Kingston. I think of the way our bodies puzzled together in that room over pine woods where night deer passed in the snow, their lonesome inscrutable tracks sluicing in the morning’s melt, I think of your eyes that are almost the colour of mercury, of their unbearable weight, I think of the plateau of your chest rising, rising, and of your hand resting on my right thigh, of the slim glint of your wedding band in the dove predawn light. I think of how everything is defined by distance: how close we were, how far from steel mills in Pittsburgh and those killing Chicago winds and union towns near Detroit, Michigan where loyalty is the only religion. I think of the sound of your breathing, which is the sound of fields of blond Illinois wheat bent down, I think of those silver silos of harvest corn we saw in Schuylerville, barns blazing in all that silence as we drove through what we could not think or say. There is no grace in this kind of longing, there is only pain, pain which I have always preferred anyway – it is where I live, and called love by any other name. Continue reading

In 2019 Michael Farrell edited the anthology Ashbery Mode, a collection of over sixty Australian poets whose work has been inspired by John Ashbery. The anthology is as much a testament to Ashbery’s range (both form and tone) and durability as it is to his inimitability. Ashbery’s influence is noticeable in Farrell’s own poetry, the two poets share a penchant for playing with form. “Good Fortune” borrows much of its formal restrictions from a sestina: six, six-line stanzas followed by a tercet. But Farrell disrupts the traditional sestina: instead of repeating the end words of the first stanza in sequence throughout the poem, he repeats the opening words, while maintaining the traditional pattern. The shift in placement alters the dynamic of the poem, which assumes a “push” force, rather than the “pull” of a traditional sestina, in which we know where we will end up, we just don’t know how we are going to get there. The irony of Farrell’s adaptation of the sestina is that the opening up of the end words to variation does not alter the form’s overall effect. We still know where we are going to end up: right back at the beginning. Good Fortune Suddenly I was a banker with a magnificent desk Yet it seemed that after years of success and luck Everything I’d worked for was about to disappear Due to mismanagement or fraud or the economy Thanks to good fortune however, it turned around And I kept the desk with its four kangaroo legs Suddenly I was a farmer with a magnificent flock Yet it seemed that the good seasons and high yields Everything I’d taken for granted had now collapsed Due to climate change or bureaucratic guidelines Thanks to good fortune though, I was able to sell it And it became a sanctuary for sheep with wooden legs Suddenly I was a toymaker with a magnificent factory Yet it seemed after years of innovation and record sales Everything had become unpopular and old-fashioned Due to multinational pressure or the cheapness of plastic Thanks to good fortune or rep, I got a new commission And became a maker of robots with weaponised legs Suddenly I was a priest with a magnificent window Yet it seemed that the amount of joy and worshippers Everything that seemed right in the world, was dwindling Due to scandals and competing with Twitter and Satan Thanks to good fortune or God’s grace, or Coca-Cola And the thirst for promotion, I became a Coke on legs Suddenly I was a porn star with a magnificent action Yet it seemed that the decades of sex and recognition Everything that’d once been a stud’s due, was over Due to ageing or cams and the rise of amateurism Thanks to good fortune or surgery I literally became A donkey and could do so much more with four legs Suddenly I was a kangaroo with a magnificent head Yet it seemed that after years of a cushioned existence Everything in the building... Continue reading

Michael Farrell is one of Australian poetry’s great experimenters. Over his eight collections to date he has pushed at the limits of form, structure, syntax and more to interrogate, and indeed reshape, what “Australian poetry” actually means, particularly in its post-colonial paradigm. His seminal critical work Writing Australian Unsettlement: Modes of Poetic Invention 1796 - 1945 expanded on this project, and further established him as among the nation’s most adventurous and original intellects, along with being one of its foremost poets. “proust aboard a doomed corvette” is taken from Farrell’s second collection ode ode (2002), a collection marked by a talent for hyper-paced parataxis, reminiscent of Dean Young. Farrell’s early poems are laced with pop-culture and literary references, wit, irony and pathos. The imagery is surreal and their associations surprising, but they always remain rooted to an emotional truth, so that in Farrell’s poetry we are able to identify both the fractured external world around us and our equally incongruous internal lives. proust aboard a doomed corvette the blue car was too slow marcel insisted this was a virtue so we toured the galleries gave cats lifts painted bodies as we passed there were some whose souls we entered briefly & saddened like weevils in an opened cheese remained illdisposed to heroics haircutting ate nothing so this is the moon marcel remarked gloomily the life forms are disappointing i dont understand what god was getting at leave god out of it i said annoyed at last by his trilby twitching watch the road baron he replied there arent any moon roads anyway i thought you were driving out of petrol time to abandon vessel lay low hope a cattle farmer comes along we can steal his wife horizon his bitter expressions well the first figure to come along was an army deserter we were too sentimental to harm we lent him a cork shelter a phone that remembered princes number ned kelly shrieked mp we continued without holdups Continue reading

Last Saturday’s referendum to alter Australia’s constitution to recognize the First Peoples of Australia by establishing a body called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice failed to pass. It is, I feel, a devastating and profoundly sad outcome that cuts to the very soul of the nation. Indigenous leaders have called for a week of silence to mourn the result, a result that can only be viewed as Australia's latest rejection of our First Peoples’ rightful place within their country, and I want to honor this request by not posting an Australian poet today. Rather, I would like to pay my respects to the great Louise Glück. “Parable” is the opening poem of Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014), a favorite collection of mine. The poem captures the state of futility we too often experience in our shared existence, a condition that can be overwhelming at times like these, when shadows appear to be falling upon all corners of the world. Parable First divesting ourselves of worldly goods, as St. Francis teaches, in order that our souls not be distracted by gain and loss, and in order also that our bodies be free to move easily at the mountain passes, we had then to discuss whither or where we might travel, with the second question being should we have a purpose, against which many of us argued fiercely that such purpose corresponded to worldly goods, meaning a limitation or constriction, whereas others said it was by this word we were consecrated pilgrims rather than wanderers: in our minds, the word translated as a dream, a something-sought, so that by concentrating we might see it glimmering among the stones, and not pass blindly by; each further issue we debated equally fully, the arguments going back and forth, so that we grew, some said, less flexible and more resigned, like soldiers in a useless war. And snow fell upon us, and wind blew, which in time abated — where the snow had been, many flowers appeared, and where the stars had shone, the sun rose over the tree line so that we had shadows again; many times this happened. Also rain, also flooding sometimes, also avalanches, in which some of us were lost, and periodically we would seem to have achieved an agreement; our canteens hoisted upon our shoulders, but always that moment passed, so (after many years) we were still at that first stage, still preparing to begin a journey, but we were changed nevertheless; we could see this in one another; we had changed although we never moved, and one said, ah, behold how we have aged, traveling from day to night only, neither forward nor sideward, and this seemed in a strange way miraculous. And those who believed we should have a purpose believed this was the purpose, and those who felt we must remain free in order to encounter truth, felt it had been revealed. Continue reading

Sarah Rice is a Canberra based poet and visual artist who holds a PhD in Philosophy and has lectured in art-theory at the Australian National University's school of art. In 2011, she co-won the prestigious Gwen Harwood poetry prize. Her limited-edition, art-book of poetry Those Who Travel (Ampersand Duck, 2010), with prints by Patsy Payne, is held in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia. Self-reliance No one is going to come and save you. And because of this you must fold your clothes at day's end despite the urge to abandon them to the backs of chairs. You must shake the crumple of sleep from the sheet. You must clean your teeth. Wash the teaspoons. Fold your pyjamas too and lay the neat squares to rest under your pillow of a morning despite the fact that in a few hours all will be done again in reverse. All will be undone. And there will be no-one to see. No one will know the bed corners were tucked into triangles. No one will see the sleeves cross empty arms against flattened chests and wait quietly. No one will know if the spoon was licked before it re- entered the jam jar. And no one will call you to bed and to the relief of sleep. That midnight hour must be crossed alone. The curtains drawn and redrawn, drawn and erased. Be wary of sitting too long in a warm place, of holding cups of tea for too long, or lying in bed thinking in the morning. Be up and doing, up and at 'em. Be the bird that gets the worm before it eats the apple. Try to resist writing poetry. Continue reading