Tag Archives: Kate Middleton

Journal Catch-up 17

Posted on 28 February 2023 | 4 comments

Sadly or otherwise, reading in the sauna turns out to be a prompt for excellent conversations, and I’m tending to walk rather than take public transport. So my standard time slots for reading journals have shrunk, and I’m as far behind as ever.

Alexandra Christie (editor), Heat Series 3 Nº 5 (Giramondo 2022)

Each issue of the current series of Heat gives us a slender collection of excellent writing from Australia and elsewhere, including work in translation and work from Australian writers of non-Anglo background.

The stand-out feature in this issue is Kate Middleton’s three ‘Television Poems’. As someone who watches an awful lot of TV, I enjoyed these a lot. They deal with Dickinson (‘the one they always / had to label spinster, recluse, or else just too intense‘); the revelations about sexual abuse on the sets of TV shows, especially Hey Dad! (‘in suburban Sydney / the sitcom architect turned sinister’); and The Crown, with passing references to The Cosby Show, SVU, Scooby Doo, among others. Plus there are endnotes that are both helpful and funny (‘It’s hard being Kate Middleton and being uninterested in the royals’).

Of the rest, I most enjoyed Jenny Erpenbeck’s ‘Things That Disappear’, translated from German by Kurt Beals of the USA; and Oliver Driscoll’s ‘Two Simple Stories About Friendship’.

I had a vague unease reading this journal, which came into focus with the final piece, ‘Still Life With Cheese’ by playwright, poet and essayist Noëlle Janascweska. (You can read it for yourself on the Giramondo website at this link.) It’s a nicely written essay that interweaves the author’s personal dealings with various cheeses; a smattering of facts about the history of cheese manufacture; quotes from Zola, Auden, and Wallis & Gromit; and reflections on 16th century Flemish still lifes. There’s a reproduction of Still Life with Cheese, Artichoke and Cherries by Clara Peeters, 1625, which is stunning even in black and white. But I found myself wondering why I was reading it. I’m not particularly interested in cheese, and the essay didn’t make me interested. It feels like something written because the writer is a writer looking for a subject, rather than arising from any inner necessity.

At that point, something crystallised in my mind. It feels as if the new series hasn’t yet found its feet, hasn’t yet established a coherent purpose for existing. I already have two more issues on my TBR shelf. I’m hopeful.

Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk (editors), Overland 247 (Winter 2022)
(Much of the content is online at overland.org.au, and I’ve included links)

By contrast, Overland is suffused with a sense of purpose.

The lead article, ‘That’s not us!’ Wake in Fright and the Australian nightmare by Gregory Marks, is an excellent account of Ted Kotcheff’s film and Ken Cook’s novel it was taken from. It’s odd, though, to argue that the film, directed by a Canadian and starring an Englishman, exemplifies Australia’s ‘cultural cringe’. One moment that stands out in my memory from when I saw the film in 1971 is the alarming first appearance, complete with huge cigarette-lighter flame, of Chips Rafferty’s character (who isn’t mentioned in the article), which is the opposite of any kind of cringe.

‘Serving up colonialism instead of care‘ by Caitlin Prince tackles the pressing issue of how her fellow settler Australians can face and change attitudes that keep colonialist oppression in place. It’s a long article. Here’s a taste of the main argument:

Telling white Australians to ‘get over it’ would be consistent with our colonial stiff-upper-lip inheritance and Australia’s general trend of having the emotional intelligence of a brick, but it would also grossly misunderstand the problem. … People need space to unpack problematic racial views, otherwise they remain repressed, packed in tight, impossible to understand and shift. …

It is radical. and uncomfortable, to imagine meeting racist views with care – uncomfortable for everyone, but impossibly unfair to ask of Aboriginal people, whose lives (and deaths) are impacted by racism. Doing so, however, is sensible if we consider how human beings learn to regulate emotion.

Among the other articles, I particularly responded to ‘An almanac of immeasurable things‘ by Lachlan Summers, which sheds light on the naming conventions of cyclones and other phenomena, and the way the names can mislead. An example:

After the Black Summer [of 2019–2020], calls have been made for a category beyond catastrophic. Far outside the nomenclature of disaster, and generating new conditions of terror, this was a catastrophe that threatened not to end. In fact, ‘Black Summer’ refers to eleven months of waiting for fires to stop reproducing themselves.

The substantial array of poetry includes ‘log‘, a welcome new poem from joanne burns, which begins with this striking image:

dream’s letterhead lies exhausted
in the recycling bin

Among the healthy selection of short fiction, there were some effectively weird, surreal/uncanny pieces. My favourite, however, was a realistic story about a young person living in a share house in a southern city feeling for their home in Far North Queensland as it’s lashed by a cyclone. It’s ‘Sweet Anticipation’ by Jasmin McGaughey, winner of the 2021 Nakata Brophy Prize for young Indigenous writers. Interestingly, only an incidental word or two indicate that the protagonist is First Nations. At least, it’s interesting to me as a Far North Queenslander who was living in Sydney when Cyclone Larry took the roof off my childhood home.

The next issue of Heat kicks off with an essay by Fiona wright. And a quick look at Overland 248 reveals the presence of an old friend from English Hons at Sydney Uni in the 1970s. Much to look forward to.

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Kate Middleton, Passage

Posted on 5 February 2018 | Leave a comment

Kate Middleton, Passage (Giramondo 2017)

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Most of the poems in Passage are either erasures or centos.

/Explanatory note for the benefit of readers who know even less than I do:/
Cento is defined in my excellent Gepp & Haigh Latin–English dictionary (1888) as ‘a poem or composition made up of scraps from various authors or parts of an author’. A basic, nonsensical nursery-rhyme cento, for example, might be:

The mouse ran up the clock
to fetch a pail of water.
He put in his thumb,
see how they run,
How does your garden grow?

An erasure is created by erasing some or most of another piece of writing. I enjoy making them from newspaper columns that annoy me.  Here’s one based on a recent attack on the #changethedate movement:

erasure005-e1517140699925.jpg

/End explanatory note/

Both forms can be fun, but when, as in Kate Middleton’s work, the source material isn’t well known or readily available, and the poem is longer and more than a fun game, questions arise that I don’t know the answers to.

Given my new policy of just talking about a single poem when blogging about poetry books, I was tempted to choose one of Kate Middleton’s fine poems that aren’t centos or erasures or in some other way symbiotic with another text (such as the handful that are responses to episodes of a TV show I’ve never heard of). There are plenty of such fine poems –  but to choose one of them would feel craven. So here’s the cento ‘Elegance’, which I’ve singled out because I’ve read its source text, Luke Carman’s An Elegant Young Man.

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It’s possible to read this without any attention to its cento-ness. The opening couplet announces an emotional tone and names a locality. The next two stanzas sketch an unprepossessing urban landscape – this is not the West of movies but western Sydney. Then the poem turns to address the person looking at this landscape, and becomes a portrait of a writer as one who conceals his metaphorical knife in public, is loud alone at home, and struggles to avoid clichés (‘ordinary answers’).

It’s a cento not only from Luke Carman but for him. Writing cover letters to nowhere is a pretty nice description of a writer’s job, and the references to chance and repeated falls are extraordinarily apposite to the way Carman’s writing often mimics an intense distractibility, and so much of it is about his own social awkwardness and other struggles.

It’s a sweet tribute. By the end, one wants to revisit the capitalised ‘West’ from the second line. Carman is a kind of Western hero after all, even though his West is not Monument Valley, but Western Sydney.

So what does it mean that the poem is a cento?

Being by profession a proofread type editor, and by inclination a bit pernickety, I got out my copy of An Elegant Young Man. I didn’t have time to reread it all, but I read enough to find some of the poem’s source text. ‘Barred shopfronts flicker phantasmic blue’ is distilled from ‘shuttered-up Asian supermarkets and squash centres and brick unit blocks with TV flickering a phantasmic blue through the windows’. ‘I guess you’re like a minor Aussie character / in movies’ comes from this: ‘I mostly stood still and tried to seem happy-go-lucky, like those minor Aussie characters in movies like Chopper and  Getting Square’.

So Kate Middleton hasn’t been rigid in quoting the original. As the Emerging Artist said, she’s referencing the text rather than quoting it. In these examples, she leaves out the detail of the shopfronts and the TV, and the happy-go-lucky appearance (which is ironic in its original context anyhow). It’s not just referencing, but also repurposing. She finds in Carman’s text words that describe him in relationship to the milieu that is his subject in ways that he (presumably) wouldn’t think to describe himself. It’s a kind of alchemy.

I still don’t know how the longer centos work, from writers including Siri Hustvedt, Eliot Weinberger and Sir John Mandeville; or erasures that run to several pages. I’m happy to leave that question to better informed readers than I am.

Passage is the third book I’ve read for the 2018 Australian Women Writers Challenge. I was given a complimentary copy by Giramondo, for which horizon-expanding gift I am grateful.

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Sydney Writers’ Festival: My Day 5

Posted on 26 May 2014 | 3 comments

Sunday morning gestured vaguely in the direction of imminent winter. The sky was overcast and the breeze was making a stab at being chill. By the middle of the day, we were back in balm once more, but don’t anyone mention climate change. If I was  a truly conscientious blogger I would have managed at least three events, but non-SWF life called, so I’m reporting on only one:

10 am: Real Worlds / Imagined Worlds
This poetry session was chaired by Ivor Indyk, whose Giramondo Press publishes all four poets on the panel. (It also publishes at least two of the #threejerks from yesterday, which says a lot about the diversity of its list.)

Having acknowledged the traditional custodians, Ivor also acknowledged the slipperiness of themes at the SWF. The title and description of the session were what he had come up with for the program, he said, but the poets might well decide  to read something else altogether. The theme, which might or might not hold, was to be travel – either to other places or to other realities. Actually, it’s hard to imagine a poem that can’t be tied to that theme somehow so it was fairly safe.

Judith Beveridge took us to ancient India in readings from her new book, Devadatta’s Poems, written from the point of view of the Buddha’s cousin who tried to kill him three times, and in his voice: many intensely physical images of unpleasant things, delivered in Judith’s cool, self-effacing manner.

Ali Alizadeh ruminated a little about whether the whole idea of travel poem amounted to some kind of commodification, then read a number of what I think were unpublished works, plus ‘Robespierre’ from Ashes in the Air (my blog on which is here).

Kate Middleton’s most recent book, Ephemeral Waters, is a trip down the Colorado River, so she fitted the theme exactly. I especially liked a poem about Monument Valley, bristling with movie references (the Valley and the poem both). My sense is that we got the barest hint of the richness of this book.

Ivor Indyk introduced John Mateer as Australia’s main traveller poet. He read from his most recent book, Unbelievers, or ‘The Moor’ and other places, taking us to mediaeval Spain and Portugal, and then to those modern places.

There was time for questions. Poetry readings always seem to provoke questions that are either profound or silly, or both. Here the first question, something like, ‘What use does poetry have in the West, for us … for me?’ provoked interesting responses. Ali Alizadeh took it as a challenge – ‘You obviously think it doesn’t have any use, from the way you asked the question’ – and went on to argue that poetry is useless: it doesn’t make any money in the novels do, and it doesn’t give information like non-fiction. He then ruined his own argument by telling us he was working on a poem called ‘The Wink’, so that people would never forget what kind of man we have as Prime Minister right now.

The other question was even more profound/silly. ‘How do you work out what words to use when you write poetry?’ As the questioner explained what she meant, it emerged that as someone from a complex cultural background, she was wrestling with how to write when it felt as if she had to choose between languages and cultures. Again, Ali Alizadeh played the enfant terrible: ‘I disagree with you about cultural difference. If someone came here from Mars and looked at us, they’d say, “You all look the same to me. Get over it.”‘

And my Festival was over: three poetry sessions, two movies, one evening of stand-up, no rain; the world as a battlefield, the heart and mind as tools for liberation; a lot of laughter, a quantity of rage, some tears, and one or two gasps of delight. I got to see a fraction of it, but I intend to see more by way of the blogosphere and podcasts as I seek them out or stumble across them. Plus, I’ve got a swag of books either already bought or on my list to buy.

I love this Festival.

 

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Southerly 72/2: True Crime

Posted on 18 April 2013 | Leave a comment

Melissa Jane Hardie (guest editor), David Brooks and Elizabeth McMahon (editors), Southerly Vol 72 No 2 2012: True Crime – Every Contact Leaves a Trace

Southerly 72-2 cover_Layout 1

The Southerly of my youth, whatever its contents, always had the same staid, non-committal design: a single colour cover with a small blowing-wind logo the only decoration. (For non-NSW readers, the southerly is a cool and often rain-bearing wind from the south-east, famously welcome for its sudden arrival on stinking hot summer days.) Those days are long past, though the little wind is still there above the title. This issue’s cover, featuring an enigmatic photo from the NSW Police Forensic Photography Archive, is a perfect teaser for an issue built around true crime stories, more than one of them drawing on that same archive.

The archive, consisting of 130 000 photographs taken in the first half of last century, found without any accompanying documentation and now held at the Justice and Police Museum in Sydney,  is an Aladdin’s cave for researchers into Sydney’s criminal history. Peter Doyle’s ‘Detective writing: mapping the Sydney pre-War underworld’ is a fascinating dip into it, complemented with an account of a couple of relatively long-lived publications, which he describes as ‘kind of ‘ trade papers for cops, full of vivid and sometimes lurid portraits and narratives from the criminal scene. In Southerly‘s online section, The Long Paddock, Ross Gibson’s ‘Collision Course‘ plays with the narrative possibilities of a selection of images – though none of them are as queerly suggestive as the one on the cover – and refers the reader to his ongoing project with Kate Richards, Life After Wartime. Marise Williams, in ‘Women’s Work’, explores the same milieu, though without drawing on that archive: the women of her title are Kate Leigh and Tilley Devine,who ran organised crime networks in Darlinghurst in the 1920s and 1930s. It’s not just the covers that have come a long way since the staid 1960s.

My favourite single prose piece in this issue is Cassandra Atherton’s ‘Raining Blood and Money’. Classified as fiction, it’s a graphic imagining of New York’s terrible 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire, in which 146 people, most of them women workers, died in 18 minutes. The fire was hugely significant in the history of women and labour in the USA, and in the century since it happened it has given rise to innumerable songs, stories, monographs, rallies, and organising activities, as the links on its Wikipedia page demonstrate. Some stories need to be told and retold, and Atherton’s telling feels as fresh and visceral as if it happened yesterday.

Of course, Southerly is still a scholarly journal, so: there’s a theoretical consideration of sensationalist 19th century crime writing; the formidable thinking of Deleuze and Guattari is brought to bear on Ned Kelly’s Jerilderie letter; a Black Saturday arsonist is considered in the light of the different understandings of the notion of  ‘abjection’ in the writings of Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler; Schapelle Corby is the subject of abstruse reflections that include such highly technical language as: ‘To be where you are … requires a sense of affective difference, understood as either the Spinozan–Deleuzian mapping of co-ordinates of intensities or as the forms of projective identification required in nominating and refining the arbitrary and violent constitution of the nation-state.’ Lit crit has moved on since my day.

There’s forty pages of reviews, including Kate Middleton in elegiac mode about the late Peter Steele’s Braiding the Voices, and a swag of poetry, of which Adam Aitken’s ‘The plein-air effect (after John Clare)’, Michael Farrell’s ‘Disapproval’ and Hazel Smith’s ‘Experimentalism’ stand out for me.

A dip into the Long Paddock  came up with not only Ross Gibson’s piece, but also Melissa Jane Hardie’s review of A Tragedy in Two Acts: Marcus Einfeld & Teresa Brennan by Fiona Harari. I met Teresa Brennan once, and am glad to see that this book makes more of her than a name in a false alibi: it doesn’t mention that she was at one time a writer for Barry Humphries/Edna Everage.

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Heat 22: The Persistent Rabbit

Posted on 19 May 2010 | Leave a comment

Ivor Indyk (Ed), Heat 22: The persistent rabbit (Giramondo May 2010)

This issue of Heat has much that is wonderful. The title, following tradition, is a phrase chosen apparently at random from the contents, in this case from πO’s exuberant nonsense poem ‘Rabbit Proof Fence’:

The average person blinksoooo22 rabbits a minute.
Burke & Wills went into the desertoooowith a dozen rabbits
Obsession isooooa persistent rabbit.
The causes of a rabbitooooaren't clear.

Perhaps Ivor Indyk, the editor, is quietly suggesting that the seemingly  miraculous persistence of Heat owes not a little to obsession.

I understand Heat to be about diversity, about presenting a version of literary Australia that is open to the whole planet. It often includes, for instance, travel writing, translated pieces, news from abroad, and fiction, essays or images that grow from places where cultures intersect. In this issue there are examples of each of these – respectively, Barbara Brooks’s self-styled fictional memoir ‘Lost in the House’ (which powerfully combines tales of travel, dementia, memory and intergenerational relationships); Stuart Cooke’s ‘Two Mapuche Poets’ (the Mapuche people are indigenous to parts of Chile and Argentina); Priya Basil’s ‘My Home is Our Castle’ (about a communal housing project that won a major architecture prize in Berlin last year); Michelle Moo’s colonial historical fiction, ‘New Gold Mountain’ (white women and Chinese men on the Australian goldfields); Barry Hill’s ‘Ezra Pound: The tragic orientalist’; and the centre section of art by Guan Wei, ‘Longevity for Beginners’. (The last three provide a nice example of the kind of counterpoint that Edward Said recommended.)

Apart from Barbara Brooks’s memoir three pieces stood out for me.

Brendan Ryan (whose book of poetry, Why I Am Not a Farmer, I am now actively seeking) has a gripping personal essay on the 1983 Ash Wednesday fires in western Victoria, which is enough by itself to justify the price of the journal. Sadly, not even part of it is up on the Heat website.

Lee Kofman’s essay, ‘Revisiting the Geography of My Body’, just as gripping and as intensely personal, includes incidental elements of a migration story, but is mainly about scars, particularly scars on a woman’s body, and their almost complete absence from literature and visual arts: wounds, scars as something to be healed, scars on men (she doesn’t have to mention Coriolanus), but scars as such, particularly on a woman’s body, reside ‘outside the linguistic and public realm’. By sheer chance, I happened to walk past this piece of graffiti in Newtown just as I finished reading the essay. I hope Ms Kofman would enjoy it:

I said I wouldn’t whinge any more about proofing errors in this Heat, but there is one good old-fashioned belly laugh in this essay. The pursuit of bodily perfection, it tells us, ‘can be traced back to Pluto’s ideal of human beauty as the “natural”, unmarked body’. Roman myth, presumably, rather than Disney.

Of the poetry, Kate Middleton’s poems on a Hansel and Gretel theme stand out for me. They are billed as excerpts from Where Dingoes Tread. I look forward to seeing the whole thing:

Remember when hunger
 was simple?
 ooooooooooooThere was nothing
 and we ate nothing. Then plenty returned
 and I turned
 to austerity.

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