AustLit

(Introduction)

'We are on Ulleungdo, famed for its wild mountains that jut from the Eastern Sea more than one hundred kilometres from the Korean east coast, shockingly, like a stone fist smashing wetly into the echelons. This is the closest sovereign territory to the contested landmass, 독도 (Dokdo), some ninety kilometres further east and otherwise known as ‘the Liancourt Rocks’ (this moniker derived from a French whaling ship, Le Liancourt, which foundered on the islands in 1849), or ‘Takeshima’ (Japan). I am here with more than a dozen Korean artists – painters, composers, art directors, musicians – awaiting tomorrow’s ferry to 독도. This year’s group assembles, as groups of creative producers have done so annually under the auspices of the para-political lobby group, La Mer et l’Île, to make pilgrimage to 독도 and refocus a global conversation: our brief is to simply sit on the islands, reflectively, and allow art to materialise. Perhaps this is partly how soft power can operate, non-dogmatically, through casting into representational modes (language, etc.) in order to explore for something beyond the merely descriptive but perhaps, even, essential: a newer way of seeing, arising through coming to terms with newer ways of saying and stating. The historical documents do not need to be reframed, and have long referred to these islands. One of the earliest, the 세종실록 (or ‘Chronicle of King Sejong’ [1432]), mentions a sole rocky outcrop being visible from the top of Ulleungdo’s mountains ‘only during fine weather’. Despite the existence of this and a great many other documents that form the canon of Korean sovereignty, neighbouring states continue to contest and claim 독도 as their own, for their own politically complex reasons. How to act as a poet, then, and make a non-propagandistic suite that will speak clearly and without bias.' (Introduction)

''Dan Disney's accelerations & inertias is a remarkable work of self-critiquing, inverting hybridity. This is a restive book in which new skyscrapers and museums, temples and consumer fetishism are complementary, and not necessarily in tension. In these ‘distillations’ there is no quietism, and the ‘museum of the future’ is a question with fear and doubt in the air about it. The key to this work – the best of Disney’s, I think – remains the critique of a crisis of capital, a deep respect for environment, a deep respect for culture and its complexities, a wonder mixed with a toughness of observation and understanding of what being an observer means.'' (Publication summary)

'John Kinsella remains Australia’s most militant, morally cognizant naysayer, and his oeuvre is an archive of precepts running counter to master narratives of place. This essay re-reads Benjamin’s notion of the artist as cultural producer against the grain of Esposito’s etymological excavations of “community,” and frames Kinsella’s steady output of co-authored books as not only a mode of nomadic munificence but no less than a kind of formative guerrilla poetics. Pairing with poets, rock stars, others to extend his anti-capitalist project, Kinsella’s co-authored works perform a suite of interventions, gifting readers a means by which we too might fathom the generative effects of banding together in a munus speaking its own laws (and lore) to reconfigure notions of co-empowerment, equity, and indeed comradeship. Each of Kinsella’s co-authored books constitutes an intentional community of two and, as if dwelling in compositional possibilities, each text remains steadfastly optimistic. Refusing to be locked into despair by regressively instrumentalist political non-visionaries, from within an Antipodean milieu Kinsella and his many co-authors materialize gestures demonstrating how we might struggle for control of who gets to produce ideas, by which decentralized means, and to which generative ends.' (Publication abstract)

'THE VILLANELLE OCCUPIES an unstable canonical history. Jean Passerat’s “J’ay perdu ma Tourterelle” (written in 1574, published in 1606) is the only example of the form dating from t he Renaissance, though as The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (4th ed.) notes, it was Théodore de Banville’s “popular handbook Petit traité de poésie française, [that gave rise to] the mistaken belief that the villanelle was an antique form,” a belief that “persisted tenaciously throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.” In some contexts, the misapprehension persists: see, for example, the claims made on Poetica, aired regularly until somewhat recently on Australia’s national broadcast network: “The villanelle was embraced by the musician-poets of twelfth-century France; the troubadours of Provençal and the trouvères of the north, but its origin is Italian.”' (Introduction)

'Laurie Duggan has long been a star within the light-filled firmaments of Australian poetry that first burst into prominence around five decades ago. A so-called ‘Monash poet’, Duggan’s recently published Selected Poems is suffused with images in which he trains an unrelentingly quizzical, reverent eye across apparently mundane terrains...' (Introduction)

'In this ever-necessary fight, here is a poet showing how the discourse of indigeneity must never be brought into the ideological service of epistemic whitework, nor simply subsumed by politically expedient gestures (a clear reference to then-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's generations-late apology to indigenous peoples, made in 2008). [...]this book asserts a fastidious impulse and in that invaded, sheep-infested, bleating antipodean place of "nullius men" calling "oi there / boong-y slut-bra line legging line spaghetti strap / oi there!", the tone remains aggressively elegiac, the styles always experimentally transgressive. Perhaps this book is a key to portals opening onto precolonial symbolic orders; or perhaps, in that land of traumascapes, Whittaker's syntactical interventions seek to commune with genocidal pasts and beyond while simultaneously calling ahead into the future.'  (Introduction)