Banjo Paterson

Jacket 39: Rewriting Australia feature

40 printed pages: edited by Pam Brown

John Tranter

Pam Brown's recent gigantic feature for Jacket2 titled "51 Contemporary Poets from Australia" had a ghostly foreshadowing a year or so ago, in Pam's "Rewriting Australia" feature in Jacket 39, where some Australian poets wrestle with their poetic forebears. Banjo Paterson shows up as a punching bag several times, perhaps because he is an old, dead, conservative white male with his portrait on the Australian ten dollar bill.

[»»] Pam Brown: Rewriting Canonical Australian Poems: Introduction
[»»] David Brooks: Cracks in the Fray: Re-reading ‘The Man From Snowy River’
[»»] Justin Clemens: Dürer: Innsbruck 1495
[»»] Michael Farrell: the king
[»»] Michael Farrell: Anti-Clockwise Judith Wright: A ‘Widdershins’ Reading of ‘Bullocky’
[»»] Duncan Hose: Blue Hill 404
[»»] Banjo Paterson: The Man From Snowy River; John Tranter: Snowy
[»»] David Prater: Three poems: Red Dawn Ward / Oz / “The Campfires of the Lost”

Clubs and Societies Project

Red Room at MWF

Michael Farrell

Clubs and Societies is the latest project of Sydney-based poetry organisation The Red Room Company. Last weekend I saw some results from this project at the Melbourne Writer's Festival. The concept is to link a poet with a club or society, and to commission them to write a poem about this contact. The two examples on display were poets Ali Alizadeh (assigned the Existentialist Society) and Omar Musa (Motor Gliding Club), who performed their poems at the event. The brains behind such Red Room schemes is Johanna Featherstone, who MC'd.

Recently in Jacket2

Every flower a reminder (PoemTalk #202)

Harryette Mullen, "Chasing Dirt"

PoemTalk

From left: Laynie Browne, Harryette Mullen, Simone White

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Simone White, Harryette Mullen, and Laynie Browne joined Al Filreis to talk a six-page section of Harryette’s new book Open Leaves. The book, subtitled “poems from earth,” was published by Black Sunflowers Poetry Press of London in 2023. The section discussed by the group is titled “Chasing Dirt” and consists of two epigraphs, a prose-poem paragraph, a mixed media artwork titled Silent Talks by Tiffanie Delune, and a sequence of three-line poems across four pages of four poems each. Since PennSound’s Harryette Mullen author page did not yet include a recording of Harryette performing poems from Open Leaves, we asked her to read “Chasing Dirt” at the start of the recorded session. The pages from Open Leaves are available HERE.

November 20, 2024

The &vs. (andverse) of the Gurlesque

Becca Klaver

Electric Gurlesque, like the first edition of the anthology, is centered on an idea of the Gurlesque as a feminist aesthetic that emerges most prominently in American women’s poetry at the turn of the 21st century. The braided strands of the Gurlesque — which the subtitle of the first edition identified as “grrly,” “grotesque,” and “burlesque”— come together to form one complex aesthetic strategy, and also suggest the diverse avenues of inquiry pursued by the essayists in this section.

The following is the Preface to the Essays from the new anthology Electric Gurlesque published by Saturnalia Books in 2024. The complete anthology can be found here.

November 19, 2024

Anna de Noailles, translated by Chris Mustazza

Charles Bernstein

Anna de Noailles (1876-1933) was one of the most famous French poets of her day. While her work has mostly fallen out of fashion, I’ve opted to translate this poem because it was one of (if not the) first poems ever recorded to sound by a female poet. Her recording at the Sorbonne, made in the early 1920s, causes this ars poetica to realign itself with the performance of the poem rather than the written text. It speaks to pertinent questions of posthumous reception and the archive, through a light, playful, sexual mode: the nachlass as seduction. --Chris Mustazza