AustLit

'A.J. Carruthers has been admirably busy — academic monograph, blog posts for Southerly, a new index of experimental poets on Jacket2, job in Shanghai, daily Tweets. And there is a lot in his project of promoting ‘the Australian avant-garde’ to be sympathetic towards, particularly as a project after his Stave Sightings. But can we make a distinction between his formulation of ‘the Australian avant-garde’ (or its variations such as ‘neo’ and ‘experimental’) and ‘the avant-garde in ‘Australia’’? And how might that matter for suburbanism?'  (Introduction)

'Eddie Paterson’s Redactor, a collection of poet-censored poems, compels the reader to creatively interact with the text in search of meanings. With its blacked-out words (mostly names but also other identifiers), the poetry forms an act of resistance against contemporary consumer capitalism. Witty, memorable, and offbeat, Paterson’s poetry makes the banal seem beautiful and the mundane magnificent even as our physical and virtual existences are subject to ever-increasing surveillance. ' (Introduction)

'Sometimes poetry is made of words thought up and strung together. Sometimes it’s made of words found and rearranged: words from other poems, from signage or advertising, from overheard conversation, from novels, magazine articles, from Twitter, from the newspaper. Every kind of literary art and verbal detritus can be reused by poets.' (Introduction)

Two recent collections by two very different voices have both been ‘blurbed’ as works of fragmentation. In her début collection, Cassie Lewis is described as speaking for ‘a generation whose ambitions and emotions have become very fractured and fragmented’. Eddie Paterson’s new book is full of redacted texts of digital trash and treasure; it is a blacked-out, cut-up collage of the textual chatter of our ‘post-digital existence’. The lyric voice of The Blue Decodes, however, is less fracture and fragment, and more a compelling portrait of an alert mind in tension with itself. redactor is composed of censored, dismembered, remembered emails, memos, text messages, and webfeeds. While this might qualify as ‘uncreative writing’, in that its conceit is seemingly the inverse of the personal lyric, it, too, is a portrait of the artist reading, absorbing, repelling, mocking, and finding delight in a weird, flat, bewildering multiverse of screens where poems are being written all the time. (Introduction)