Foreword: australian poetry journal 3.1 #animal
Humans may prefer to distinguish themselves from all other multiccellular, eukaryotic organisms but ‘humans’ live only in the philosopher’s imagination. In the minds of biologists we are Homo sapiens of Kingdom Animalia. Questions of nomenclature notwithstanding, the human relationship to animals is under the microscope in the #animal issue of Australian Poetry Journal. In addition to the myriad roles animals […]
Prime Minister’s Literary Awards 2013
While Kevin Rudd was in Darwin proclaiming the need for “a national imagination” to grasp the economic potential of northern Australia, his Arts Minister, Tony Burke, was in Brisbane to celebrate the nation’s top imagination-makers at the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, announced on the terrace of the State Library last night. Burke no doubt won […]
Poetry publishing in australia
The 1990s heralded a new ethos in Australian book publishing: poetry was no longer presumed to be a prestigious staple on the list of a serious publishing house. With mergers and takeovers happening left and right in the commercial publishing sector, poetry for all its ‘cultural worth’ was told to pay its way in dollars […]
Foreword: australian poetry journal 2.1 #technology
There are two types of people, I once wrote in a poem that riffed on the classic binary: those who are turned on by cutting-edge technology; and those who warm to it only after it is obsolete. The latter, the poem continues, ‘often exhibit great affection for manual typewriters and vinyl records’. Of course, the human relationship to technology is infinitely more varied than this construction would allow, yet it is not unreasonable to speculate that Luddism, as a viable response to our machine-mad world, is in dramatic decline.
Technology (from the Greek tekhnē, meaning ‘art, skill, or craft’) refers to both the tools by which we live – computers, televisions, cars, pianos, pens, heart monitors, fertilizers, machine guns – and the thinking behind them.
Foreword: The Best Australian Poetry 2008
The editor of this volume, David Brooks, has included work from many poets who have not appeared before and his distinctive “take” on contemporary poetry (he has been an editor of the venerable journal, Southerly, since 2000) has resulted in a deeply satisfying collection. Brooks’s most recent poetry has been a poetry of experience, passion and momentary distillations into meaning or action, and one senses something of this in his selection.
Foreword: The Best Australian Poetry 2005
One matter worth celebrating is the fact that the editor of this third anthology is one of the most distinguished poets writing in English. Peter Porter was born in Toowoomba, settled early in England, and over the last thirty years or so has renewed poetic contact with Australia to the point where he edited an important anthology of Australian poetry, The Oxford Book of Modern Australian Verse, in 1996.
