AustLit

'In 1985, when the bulky anthology Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia, Europe and Oceania (first published in 1968) was printed in a new edition, it was advertised with the curious dust jacket recommendation: ‘hailed by the Los Angeles Times Book Review as one of the hundred most recommended American books of the last thirty-five years’. The volume’s inclusion on this list is remarkable, for, as an anthology of world poetry, it is not in any simple or traditional sense an ‘American book.’ Its opening sequence, titled ‘Origins and Namings,’ includes selections drawn from Central Australian Arrernte song cycles, passages of the Chinese I Ching and text from a shrine to Tutankhamun, all carefully organised to mirror the narrative and themes of the Biblical genesis myth (5-45). But for the Los Angeles Times Book Review, the anthology’s status as an ‘American book’ rests on the credentials of collection’s poet-editor, Jerome Rothenberg, who not only selected and arranged these foreign texts, but appended each with his own copious annotations and explanatory notes. Indeed, as Rothenberg contends in a Foreword to the collection, it is from his position as an anthologist that he rescues various religious or anthropological works, claiming them for genre of poetry. His insight, as one reviewer puts it, was twofold: that ‘poetry could be drawn from ritualistic experiences, chants, incantations, and shamanic visions that originated in Africa, Asia, Oceania, or within Native American groups’ and that ‘cutting-edge (American) avant-garde poetic advances (find) unexpected resonances in these ancient texts’ (Marmer). John Vernon concurs, describing Rothenberg’s anthology as having ‘all the earmarks (…) of a search for land, that is, a search for America, for an American tradition’ (825). For Rothenberg, contemporary American poetry must act as a creative archaeology of geography and origins: U.S. poets, he suggested, were not only reckoning with their present or future, but also re-staging their relation to the history of world poetry.'  (Introduction)

'On 26 March 2021, in a window between lockdowns, author and filmmaker Miro Bilbrough and I met to discuss her free-wheeling memoir, In the Time of the Manaroans (Ultimo Press, 2021). The conversation transcribed here was shared with a wide audience via Zoom as part of the online ‘Room to Listen’ seminar series, hosted in Parramatta by the Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University. I now invite you to read, listen and absorb Miro’s flair for poetic storying.'  (Introduction)

'In an incisive review of Hazel Smith’s fifth book of poetry, ecliptical, Chris Arnold gestures to Smith’s reputation as a ‘relentlessly experimental’ poet. He notes the book title’s uncanny – because unintended but entirely logical – connection with Ern Malley’s iconoclastic The Darkening Ecliptic, to draw out some intriguing comparisons between these two books. Since her first volume, Abstractly Represented, Smith has been an innovator in Australia, in linguistic and generic experimentation. She has also been a pioneer in performance writing, intermedia work and electronic writing and her work has continued to break new ground over an impressive career spanning four decades. Nevertheless, Smith loses no time in problematising the descriptor ‘experimental’ in this interview. During our interview, Smith reflects on her commitment to expanding her own flamboyantly eclectic repertoire, discussing her interest in enigma, immersion, the alignment of the satirical and the surreal, the discomfort that humour in poetry often produces and computer-generated text. Smith had formerly been a professional musician and examines music’s formative impact on her poetry. She excavates her complex relationship with her Jewish heritage and talks frankly about the strictures of proscribed ethnic identities. Smith’s critical cosmopolitanism is evident in tropes of migration, displacement and transgenerational trauma, and in her attention, throughout these poems, to the precarity of many diasporic peoples.' (Introduction)

'In this fifth book of poetry, Pooja Mittal Biswas’s voice achieves musicality. While strong themes lend coherence to the whole, the language cascades and moves forward with an inner force.' (Introduction)