John Tranter

 John Tranter is Australia’s most highly-awarded poet. His book Urban Myths: 210 Poems: New and Selected (2006) won four major state awards, and his latest book, Starlight: 150 Poems (2010), won the Melbourne Age Book of the Year poetry award and the Queensland Premier’s Award for Poetry. He received a Doctorate of Creative Arts from the University of Wollongong and is an Honorary Associate in the University of Sydney School of Letters, Arts and Media and an honorary fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He has given more than a hundred readings and talks in various cities around the world. He has published more than twenty collections of verse, and has edited six anthologies, including The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry (with Philip Mead) which was a standard text for twenty years. He founded the free Internet magazine Jacket in 1997 and granted it to the University of Pennsylvania in 2010, he is the founder of the Australian Poetry Library at http://poetrylibrary.edu.au/ which publishes over 40,000 Australian poems online, and he has a Journal at johntranter.net, a regular Commentary page at https://jacket2.org/commentary/john-tranter and a vast homepage at johntranter.com.

Photogaph: John Tranter, Cambridge, 2001, by Karlien van den Beukel

 

Poem Beginning with a Line by Kenneth Koch

This Connecticut landscape would have pleased Vermeer:
The pearly light that photographs the town,
The autumn blessing and the bitter cheer
of winter close behind, with frosty crown.
The weekender lies abandoned for the week,
the den and sunroom vacant. On a couch,
the New Yorker open at a page that speaks
of Aquascutum, Harris Tweed and scotch.   

O Aquascutum, shield me from the blast,
And Harris Tweed, protect me from the cold.
As for scotch, let’s leave it till the last
To warm my aching bones as I grow old.
     Vermeer, to please his mistress, heard her sighs,
     And painted pretty landscapes full of lies.

 

Another Poem Beginning with a Line by Kenneth Koch

This Connecticut landscape would have pleased Vermeer —
The trash, the pickup truck, the cans of beer —
If only Vermeer hadn’t been such a shit.
Oh well, it’s hard for an artist to paint a hit — 
To make the cut, to climb the greasy grade,
To make a real impression on the trade —
It’s really hard, when you’re totally pissed.
It isn’t easy, when you’ve slit your wrist. 

So fuck Connecticut and fuck Vermeer —
Who is this Dutchman with his can of cheer?
I’d rather look at Guston, or some Pollocks —
Who cares if the theory’s mostly bollocks?
     The landscape is really just a frame
     For something that just sat there all the same.

 

 

Ainslee Meredith

Ainslee Meredith is a poet, editor and student from Melbourne. Her poetry has been published in various places, including Going Down Swinging, Southerly, harvest, and Voiceworks. In 2011, she won the John Marden Prize for Young Australian Writers (Poetry). Her first collection will be published by Express Media and Australian Poetry in 2013.

 

 

Fallen Woman 

The clearest night is still unlit
when she calls, so closely,
on the telephone nobody watched;

saltwater and snow-water
fire-break the causeway, send
patina torches up

like false churches. The dream
is an antelope
hit to the side of the road

by a car going to swamp
for fuel. A way to ascension, this
hold on my head you have even as 

I walk from South Hero
to your hotel on the game
road, forging breaths 

solid as oncoming eyes.
Anna: a man followed me
because I was alone and lost 

my right to choose between men,
or to not choose at all.
But the tide is low:

I am clear to cross
with my hands in my pockets,
bent over under the full moon.

 

Mauvais livres

Once there was a girl and she
was a ladder
inside a grandfather clock.
On her spine
a bookplate read À L’INDEX
as in ‘Brother Léon forbids this one.’
She had a date in the grand library,
but walking down Saint-Denis
the sea shone through her
brass escapement, its words
of surety: Messrs      London      c.   

She could stand all night
on a graveyard shift 

outside the Cinéma ’quoise,
unfaithful letters in
dead-cold hands, defining
those spent images – a risen
mass, clockwise, a lost
war, 5 a.m. doorstep, a child
born to a woman and a bear,
cusped sleep. After all, the librarian 

won, hid her in the inner pocket
of his wooden overcoat. Like that,
a pillowcase for quiet hands.

 

Grace V.S. Chin

Grace V. S. Chin, a former Malaysian journalist, holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Hong Kong. She currently teaches English Literature and Drama Studies at the University of Brunei Darussalam. Her poems have been published in Hong Kong U Writing: An Anthology, Sweat & The City: Stories and Poems from the Hong Kong Workplace, and Cha: An Asian Literary Journal.

 

 

Patchwork

In History class, I sat with my eyes
closed, listening, to the drone
of the teacher’s voice, each word
losing its way in the drowsy
afternoon heat. A fu-
fuzzy-faced boy entered
my daymare, his disjointed arms
reached out, jarring me
into wakefulness. 

“Why,” he asked
in plaintive tones,
“you cannot speak
Mandarin-ah? It’s your
Mother Tongue.” 

Groggy and stunned, I groped
in wavering Cantonese, voice strained
with explanations, syllables leaking
with every translated English word. 

How
do I describe
my patchwork
self? I speak
Cantonese at
home, dream,
think and talk
English
with friends, learn
to read
and write Malay
at school. 

How
do I  sift      
these jumbled-up
tongues, as delicious
as rojak, separate one
from the other, and you lose
their precious taste. 

That afternoon, his question rang
in my head, and only the branch                                           
screeetch-scratching
the window pane outside
spoke for me.

 

Conversations with my dead mother

Conversations with my dead mother are rare
I should think
but she keeps coming to me
when I am quiet and pliant
in my sleep. It’s not fair,
I cry, hearing the slush
of heavy water in my bones.  

“You don’t eat enough,” she declares
each time we meet. As if stuffing face
would help ease my pangs, or take away
the silted memories. She sits
with legs crossed on the kitchen
stove, a fat female Buddha
with Mona Lisa’s smile, grandly waving
her spatula like a wand, granting me wishes
that never came true for her. 

She spent her life here,
boiling black bittersweet
medicinal herbs to chase away
our childhood demons, cooking 
all day long in her big black
steel wok, a thousand aromas hung
in the air, each defining her
in ways we never knew — her
longbeans stir fried in belachan,
chicken braised in soya sauce
and chopped red chilis, nasi lemak,
onde onde, pandan chiffon cakes,
curry chicken, square tofu topped
with minced pork — while little brother
and I played on the table, hands deep
in floury dough as she chopped
her way into our stomachs
and hearts, and scrubbed
her wok until fingers were raw
and wrinkled. She aged
before our eyes but we
did not know it, shutting
our eyes and ears to the smashing
of glasses thrown onto walls, the yelling
for us to leave her alone, the crying
when father failed
to come home, the crashing
of her body on the floor. 

All at once, I am
my mother’s daughter again,
chopper in hand, dicing small,
red onions at the sink, eyes blinded
by the sting of tears, they fall, one
after the other, flowing
like unspoken words
into the sinkhole.

 

Tim Grey

Tim Grey is a writer from Melbourne, who works a journalist, photographer and editor. He’s also part of The Red Room Company, where he helps create, publish and promote poetry in unusual ways.

 

 

Cave

“it bundles in the mangrove, caulked
on waterline. the etymology incomplete;
black and clear below. 

a second beer swims and fizzles
with repetition. sunrise panics and
spills like breath or my letter. 

hair like hair; my hand dripping out
like your hand or my hair. red quartz
lay like leaves everywhere. don’t 

american jets curl and wake
us, their hands the definite articles
that knit the map to land. 

wood unravels a proletarian scent,
water burns a bag in the earth,
underneath. we wait. 

hematite raft climb down and go
somewhere secret. busts in the ash-sand
peculiar grass waving a grid 

on the sea-bed, the half moon
on a gorge. say nothing but the sand-path, which
is all the word means: sister”

 

 Soon

flat sunlight transports its late sticks to that other, bees
plumb and phase     , meddle with transparency; the lip
of smell. sunlight palls, a bridge through substance   parted
              spring is mouth in her small privacy. she watches
girls float on the asphalt pause, pool between convent and
Brougham, imagine they’re unseen.  iron fencing clots and
weaves.                 a fairlane slows to boat. from the facility
above, the westerly fumbling at the window, grasslands
pressed against almost, municipal. the dryer wets the walls. 

                                                           small language of her
shopping closing on the bench. the elevator’s every zone

 

Dan Disney

 Dan Disney was born in 1970 in East Gippsland, where he grew up. He has worked in psychiatric institutions, paddocks, warehouses, and universities, and currently divides his time between Melbourne and Seoul, where he lectures in twentieth-century poetries at Sogang University. Articles and poems appear in Antithesis, ABR, Heat, Meanjin, New Writing, Overland, Orbis Litterarum, and TEXT, and poems have recently received awards in the Josephine Ulrick Poetry Prize (2nd) and the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize (USA). He is on the advisory board of Cordite scholarly. His first full collection of poems, and then when the, was published by John Leonard Press in 2011. 

 

 

‘only someone who already knows how to do something with it can significantly ask a name’                                                                         

 —— from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus

 

old buildings, falling out the sky

 

 

after the shriek of love leaves her body
                                     I’m still there, a peasant and ass
                   laboring through dark hills toward the small bright windows
                                                                        of infinity

 

 

meanwhile, afternoon seethes across           a mechanical sky
                         the tzzz-ing                             of aircon
                                                                         telling cicadas the rain

                         is a promised machine                                         falling in pieces

 

 

   ‘don’t go’, I tell
her eyes darkly flicking, a slow
                                                                           river in my shadow
                                                             listening to echoes deep in cold
                                                  mountains

 

 

(knee-high, green texta, weedy piss-stained carpark wall)

‘be the beauty you wish to see in the world’

 

 

I spent childhood in a hurricane. Hungry dogs wolved at the door.
                   Mother was an old television, father a fourth dimension. Had rain
fallen in downward lines, we’d have embraced and called it utopia
while deserts hurled themselves, sleeplessly, upon us

 

 

in the mind of the forest, the birds
             are dreams tweeting rhapsodic operas. Flowers crane
                                                                                                                            their necks, louche
and metaphorical, while history looks on and falls
             into place the way sunlight does. Morning is
                                                                         thumping overhead, quipping ‘quieten!’ to the hives
                                                 
                                                                         chorusing a mist.
                                                        Thus the forest darkens, brightly

 

 

amid a copse of trees, ‘it’s not the flesh, drooped
                                                              and unblooming, but
                                                                        our bones that groan so
                                                              beneath the slump of heaven’

 

 

the wooden temple amid hoarfrost. Her voice alone, is filled
            with centuries. And when she talks, memories crowd
            her bony feet and hop like chicks
                                                                         (each sentence made of sunlight)

 

 

headline: ‘Bird of Paradise Cloned in Underworld
                                                                           (Underworld Birds Not Happy)’

 

 

clutching the finger bones of dolls dreams
                     all the doors grinning
                                   while night storms in: she’s there
                                   in the corner of her lives
                                                                                     drinking the black

 

 

                                                I was not there. The bird did nothing.

I was there pointing and the bird lifted and was then held out by air and this was called reality.

 

 

morning was a rain-smudged lens
                   focused into millennia        
                   where strangers bent an early light
                   into shape

                                              trailing the gloop of history indoors

 

 

                   new buildings, falling into the sky

 

Ravi Shankar

Ravi Shankar is a poet and critic and the editor of Drunken Boat. His first full length book was Instrumentality (Word Press, 2004). Along with Tina Chang and Nathalie Handal, he edited Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from Asia, the Middle East & Beyond (W.W. Norton & Co.). His work has appeared in the New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education, and on the BBC and NPR. He teaches in Fairfield University’s MFA Program and in the first international MFA Program at City University of Hong Kong. Deepening Groove was winner of the 2010 National Poetry Review Press Prize.

 

Urban Pastoral

Swarming cities,
          gorged with dream,
                    opaque to the spectacle
                              of the spectral trace

left by bodies in motion,
          in medias res, like after
                    a magician has left a pinch
                              of magnesium shaving

in the air to ignite
          then vanished off-stage
                    in a wake of white
                              light. Not like

the Brobdingnagian
          moment of monstrosity,
                    but rather the subtle
                              uncanny pushing out

gradually further
          and further into
                    the mind until buds
                              burst into no blossom

ever before seen nor since.

 

Bop with a Refrain taken from Jonathan Safron Foer

Half-past on the 9:07 local to New Haven, the Bronx
tenements pent in vaguely post-apocalyptic paragraphs
rushing past too fast to cohere into prose, leaving loops
of graffiti, marred and boarded windows, a hoops game
glowing yellowish in the mercury vapor of street lights,
a Pontiac Bonneville, tireless, jacked up on cinder blocks. 

Time waving like a hand from a train I wanted to be on.

Riding a train embodies democracy. Not like cramped,
dank seats of a bus or on the highway where cars mark
the demographic by make and model, here everything
is equalized, time and space included. The post-punk 
pierced girl, ears plugged with music, sits next to a man,
silk cravat loosened, fixated on his snuff box, providing
the grand illusion of temporal continuity, the centuries
stacked one on top of the other, a set of encyclopedias. 

Time waving like a hand from a train I wanted to be on.

Slouched in the seat, westbound, my forehead pressed
to the scratched up window, rapidly being carried away
from the city, something important recedes, something 
else coheres, but I can’t seem to conjure a single word
as to what these might be, why I’m filled with such vast,
implacable sadness. I just want to get home, go to sleep.  

Time waving like a hand from a train I wanted to be on.

 

Mark Young

Mark Young has been publishing poetry for nearly fifty-five years. His work has been widely anthologized, & his essays & poetry translated into a number of languages. He is the author of more than twenty books, primarily poetry but also including speculative fiction & art history. He is the editor of the ezine Otoliths. He lives on the Tropic of Capricorn.

 

 

A line from Frantz Fanon

Leaving aside the
Gaelic for kiss my
ass, most Declarations
of Independence are

top heavy with awk-
ward or extremely
dated references.  Some-
times they present 

in the form of a
pure orange pocket
synthesizer with a
sound set restricted 

to industrial use
because of extremely
mixed reviews. At
other times as an 

holistic framework
that purports to look
at all aspects of life
as spiritual practice 

but then recommends
the confining of women
to the home & the use
of tanks to shell densely 

populated areas. Colon-
ialism begets patriarchal
systems. The methods
devour themselves.

 

A line from Fidel Castro 2

Winter is getting me
down. A unit of cult-
ural information has
put the Galactic Senate 

under attack, driving
it from crisis to crisis.
That slavery is inexorably
tied to the availability 

of oil is the standard
paradigm for most
crises; but now recent
breeding population

trends of farmland
birds need to be fact-
ored in. Please complete
the enquiry form below 

& I will provide you
with a list of exclusive
Havana Vacation Homes
available for weekly rent.

 

A line from Courtney Love

English newspapers
laced up their tennis
shoes, Real Madrid
went on another goal 

spree, the strife-prone
household insulation
program turned on
its heel & headed to 

a park; but not even
a change in appetite &
toilet habits can stop
the generally low inter- 

city mobility of urban
populations. So. We
drowned them all in
their swimming pools.

 

Judy Johnson

Judy Johnson has published three poetry collections, a verse novel and a novel.  In 2011 she spent a month at The Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland as part of the Varuna Alumni exchange program. A poetry collection is forthcoming in 2012.

 

 

The Right Fit

Always your thoughts
          too big,
                too small
for the world.

As though a seamstress
took your measure early on

with a cool yardstick

and what was kept for the record
was an outline

you immediately outgrew.

There is no cure
for not living in the moment

but it can’t hurt to ponder

the methodical dust
released by its action

instead
of the tailor’s chalk mark.

It can’t hurt to meditate
              with a mouthful of pins.

 

Words, after an absence

Tend the graves of photographs,
              love letters, dried daisies.

Finger the devotions
one by one
             like knots in a prayer rope.

Gather inklings and injuries
as kindling for fire.

Attune to textures
especially

the soft crystals of silence
in the air above old monasteries. 

Listen to which footsteps
placed

on the heart’s risers
produce a squeak 

and which treads
are noisless. 

Accept that the poem already exists
in no known language
          and in perfect order.

And now that your task
is impossible 

take the one tool you have.

          Try hard to find
a way back to the page

          with words.

                   Try harder to do no harm.