AustLit

'The cover of Melody Paloma’s first poetry collection, In Some Ways Dingo, is a work by the artist Emma Finneran called ‘Into Stella.’ It’s formed from acrylic, ink and pastel on cotton drop cloth. Finneran’s work is interested in the material possibilities of drop-cloths: cloths typically instrumentalised into catching ‘the excess paint from Mum’s feature wall’ (in Finneran’s words) and to be eventually ‘rendered forgotten, formless, shapeless, degraded – to be dropped.’ Finneran’s practice reanimates and repurposes drop sheets into paintings, embellishing aleatory markings. The green and purple brush stripe near the centre of the cover art of Paloma’s book, for instance, elaborates on accidental strokes to create a marking that gestures towards a street strip, evoking the way In Some Ways Dingodrives its reader across the page. This is a poetry collection that Sian Vate suggests doubles as a ‘road movie’ (Melbourne launch speech, 2017). In any case, this cover displays discarded detritus as productive of making, meaning and abstraction. Finneran’s practice is both procedural and unruly freeform. Thick with the textures and the robust practicalities of art making, Finneran’s work mirrors as much as it frames In Some Ways Dingo.' (Introduction)

'This interview was conducted with an awareness of the many rich dialogues with Ouyang Yu that have come before it, such as the recent conversation with Melinda Smith at the National Library of Australia, and the four interviews conducted between 2003 and 2008 which close his essay collection Beyond the Yellow Pale: Essays and Criticism, the conversations with Prem Poddar and Steve Brock particular highlights here. Ouyang has also written poetry that describes disastrous interviews. The abundance of interviews means it makes sense to not begin (again) with the basics. By now it should be taken as a given – along with Ouyang’s importance as a literary figure in both Australia and China – his longstanding commitment to bilingual poetry, the importance of translation and self-translation to his practice, his complex drawing out of a poetics from, and between two different literary, linguistic and national cultures.3I took this interview as an opportunity to talk about his most recent and most experimental poetic activities. Given the way Ouyang’s work persistently engages with temporality and the material text, it is fitting to note that this interview took place over Microsoft Word email attachments between Wednesday, 20 December, and Friday 22 December, with us both located in Shanghai. One of the many joys of moving to Shanghai has been getting to know Ouyang, and participating in the intensive online discussions around poetry and poetics that he facilitates through the WeChat poetry group ‘Otherland原乡砸诗群’.' (From introduction)