At last….here it is and I love the cover. It’s been over three year years in the making: 37 poets from over 15 Asian countries. But the concept for this anthology can be traced back to 2008 when Kim Cheng Boey and I first started talking about ‘Asian Australian’ as a designation in Borders book shop café at Westfield Shopping Mall, Hornsby. I gave one or two academic papers to develop my thinking on the subject and we started to write essays about Asian writing: about the Vietnamese poet, Than Thao, for instance. By then we had co-founded the literary journal Mascara, and not long after that Adam Aitken joined us as reviews editor. The journal has since expanded and flourished in ways I had never anticipated; morphing in exciting, sometimes necessary directions: translations and hybrid sub-genres such as prose poetry, to name a few. Despite the funding we’ve received, and academic support from people like David Herd, Paul Sharrad, Keri Glastonbury and Shirely Lim, I have to acknowledge that it remains in a liminal zone, which is basically a nice way of saying ‘in crisis.’

Which is even more reason to celebrate this anthology. Many of the poets in Contemporary Asian Australian Poets have appeared in Mascara but it was also wonderful to be in conversation with poets like the Malaysian Chinese South Australian, Shen, whose collection City of My Skin was published back in 2001 by Five Islands Press; to discover the poetry of Ee Tiang Hong and Subhash Jaireth. There are also younger poets like Jessie Tu, Bella Li, Debbie Lim, Ken Chau and Mona Attamimi. There’s the performance poet Omar Musa, the self-translators Ouyang Yu and Merlinda Bobis, the novelist and prose poets Christopher Cyrill and Suneeta Peres da Costa, and there are poets who have previously not identified as Asian at all: Jaya Savige, Paul Dawson, Andy Carruthers.

How do these poets negotiate identity/(identities) across so many differences? Do they ventriloquise? Do they strategically essentialise? Do they appropriate or do they allegorise culture and language?

However challenging, there were always going to be limitations and unavoidable absences. But with seventeen female poets, and such a variety and richness of translocal interpretations we are quietly confident that this anthology will question the assumptions and hierarchies of previously established descriptors such as ‘local’, ‘migrant’, and ‘cosmopolitan’.

The book will be launched by Professor Nicholas Jose in conversation with the editors at the Sydney Writers’ Festival 24 May 2.30pm, the Richard Wherrett Studio.

We (that is: me and my multiple identities) have had a frantic few months when nothing could be more blissful than the promise of sleep. Last friday the gyprocker repaired a break in the ceiling that the plumber had made when he dropped a cylinder of gas. That strange ritual of drilling and cutting and plastering was mesmeric to watch and somehow the face lift ameliorated a psychic disturbance I’ve been feeling of late. So often the external heals the interior world; as skin is to soul. I want to put the doors back on their hinges as soon as possible, and have the render finished; but everything has come to a halt since I’ve been writing an essay on Australian poetry that demands all my focus for now.  (I had to press a pause button on the renovations and the tradies will just have to wait.) And almost suddenly, my daughter has bloomed, becoming ever more beautiful.

Among the most impressive books I’ve been reading, are less known gems such as Brenda Saunders’ Looking for Bullin Bullin, After Han Shan by Greg McLaren, Nguyễn Tiên Hoàng’s
Years, Elegy. Michael Heald’s The Moving World is a deep and skilful translation of the ’gentle intervention’ of Vipassana as spiritual practice. My essay on deconstructionism and Theravada meditation appears in a recent issue of JASAL, which is dedicated to Asian Australian writing so I feel very privileged to contribute. Nicholas Jose has written a wonderfully nuanced essay on the fiction of Michelle de Kretser, Nam Le and Aravind Adiga, in which he reads Australia as an aporetic site of transition and ethical possibility. His ideas are part of an emerging discourse that is shaping and translating Australian Literature in exciting directions. Nicholas will be launching a book that I’ve co-edited with Kim Cheng Boey and Adam Aitken; Contemporary Asian Australian Poets at the Sydney Writers’ Festival next month. More about that soon.

I’ve received some awesome news too, that thanks to the Copyright Agency Limited and the  University of  Wollongong I’ve been selected as a Fellow in Poetry at Kingston University, so I’m heading to London later this year to work with the poet/scholar Dr Vesna Goldsworthy and Professor David Rogers, and hopefully to write some new poems.

But todays news was that Chrissie Amphlett has died of breast cancer and multiple sclerois. In the café this morning I knew it was time to post an entry on my blog, if only to touch myself again when I think about you, wherever you are.

I adored her music, though she was an extreme performer to watch in concert; she gave us (women) permission to take possession of ourselves. RIP, Sleeping Beauty.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r71xajhDFUo

The townhouse I’ve moved to has the feel of a terrace in suburbia, and though there is a lot less storage than I’ve been accustomed to, I think it might be big enough to keep my library, though perhaps not all my journals. The renovations have kept me on my toes and distracted me from my writerly responsibilities and pleasures for a spell. I did amuse myself however penning a sonnet that Gig Ryan accepted for The Age yesterday. Appropriately it’s titled “Renovations” :

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/bookmarks-20130201-2dpnt.html

I’m also delighted to be included in the beautifully illustrated Transpacific issue of Cordite edited by Josephine Rowe and Michael Nardone. I recommend a fine essay by Bonny Cassidy in which she clarifies theoretical points of similarity and difference between archipelago poetics, transnationalist frameworks, ecocriticism and a more defining, (confining?) nationalist poetics. Place and locality is emphasised as outcrops or multiple zones. This anatomical approach is recognisable for its revisionary and imaginary capacity.

An interview by Ali Alizadeh with Paul Kane, a leading critic in Australian poetry, reminds us of an unfinished conversation with ‘our’ past, though this begs the question of whose past is being recorded or analysed in aesthetic terms and by whom. It is most interesting to consider what the terms “aesthetic and historical depth” might mean or what the concept of “homeostasis” might assume. Kane is always careful, rigourous, precise and provocative of thought. I really enjoyed reading his book Australian Poetry: Romanticism and Negativity for its theoretical reach and elegance, which is seductive as a beautifully researched idea of Australian poetry. Critical writing may engender within its larger framework of a master discourse a kind of architectural complacency or structural plasticity, a limitation which Kane acknowledges in part. An aspect of this is relevant to the critical/creative disjunction, which is also discussed in the interview.

My guess is that we need to keep talking and thinking about these ideas, theories, histories, narratives and possibly be open to a fluidity as they are shaped and reconfigured from varying perspectives. And those of us who may feel marginalised need to speak through the settlement cracks, renegotiate history and not be afraid to disrupt the waterproofing membrane that theory has a tendency to paint. It’s pleasing that Paul Kane, Bonny Cassidy and others like Adam Aitken and Peter Minter are doing just that.

…it leaves little time for anything else. This wry observation is by Emily Dickinson, whose poems I’ve been reading of late, along with living, of course, and threading together manuscripts of my own for packing away in a tea chest to keep safely under my bed. I am quite amiss in gardening however, and do not leave sweets for children, and have spent too many hours watching music videos of that astonishing diva Amy Winehouse, who traded her soul for the pill-popping crowd, addicted to her addictions to death, every performance a fresh sampling.

So it is unexpected, even to me, that I’ve found time for revisions and amendments of one or another kind: an essay to appear on Buddhism, Hinduism, deconstructionism and Poco that I just hope I’ve got right; a real life poem for Island; and a story that I’m rather fond of, especially for its nightclub scenes in Etchings. I googled nightclubs in this leafy suburb the other night, the search identifying a second-floor retro bar opposite the railway station. (Dive!)

In this seasonal heat wave I’ve had presents to dream, parcels to bubble wrap and one or two contracts to sign, which though not entirely, are mostly, favourable—leaving little time for poems, let alone festive blogging. I sometimes question why I blog. I guess the life of a writer is so alone it’s a way of re-connecting with myself, the writing voice, the imagined reader. The truth is I missed it—while it was snowing on screen and He fumbled at my soul, the ride to Judgement being partly, penultimately down hill.

Housebound, in her beloved, foreclosed home with handsewn fascicles and unconventional typography, (her exclamations excessive, her dashes being of varied lengths and directions), Emily may have suffered from agaraphobia, opiate addiction, temporal lobe epilepsy or visual OCD. Or she may have been extemporising tonally, emblematically/& enigmatically on the page, fragmenting clauses, self-harming the grammar to a psychological pitch as Winehouse does in song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1TQRJWLZ3s

Farewell (and kiss the Hills, for me, just once —), wrote Emily, in her little room in Amherst on scraps of grocery lists, beneath a portrait of Ms George Eliot and a portrait of Ms Barrett-Browning, for she was ready to go!

There were no bonfires in our street on Wednesday but it felt warm enough as the children swanned their way along avenues, past spooky houses with cobweb-covered gates. My daughter was among them, trick-or-treating. I drove past her on my way to a poetry reading. It was a joy to catch sight of her beaming, excited face. She was dressed as a vampire in red velvet dress and long black cape we bought earlier in the week from the $2 shop, which was crammed with school kids and their parents.

I drove on to Mr Falcon’s in Glebe to hear Heather Taylor-Johnson and Brook Emery read from their new collections. Taylor-Johnson’s narrative gift was apparent as she read from her Letters to my Lover from a Small Mountain Town. She wrote these celebratory poems during a year spent in Salida, Colarado, where her husband was on teacher’s exchange. They are performance poems in which domesticity flows into breath-taking ecologies and outdoor recreations. By contrast, Brook Emery delighted us reading from, and almost hesitantly describing thematic and textual processes, in poems about weather, water, & other ruminations, material and philosophical, addressed to a special ‘K’ from his latest collection, Collusion.

A small audience had gathered upstairs as the traffic rumbled past. I spotted a young boy dressed as a zombie with his mother, walking into the restaurants. Next morning Tegan told me about a neighbour’s house inhabited by zombies. Her purse was filled with lollies.

I spent part of the day reading the new Southerly: highlights being “The Roadside Bramble” by poet/flâneur Peter Minter, Fiona Morrison’s essay on Dorothy Hewitt’s ’tectonic shift’ from the political to the aesthetic, and Susan Sheridan’s essay on Jessica Annderson’s feminist interpretation of convict times in The Commandant. There are also fine poems by Jill Jones, Julie Chevalier, Brett Dionysius, and Felicity Plunkett’s tribute to the late Rosemary Dobson. “Central Mischief” by David Brooks outlines the twists of deception intersecting with a pursuit of the real, in the writings of Elizabeth Jolley, nee Monika Knight, and her long-abandoned step-daughter Susan (Hancock) Swingler. Brooks illuminates on the reasons why we write and the identities we assume, a fascination for me. For instance, what I write in my blog seems often to blur the boundaries of persona and confessional. For the character of the voice one creates is never entirely ‘me’, neither entirely surrogate, but placatory & inventive in that it renews who I am with layers and textures. And so it ruptures the present moment.

Brooks describes the spilling over of the hoax text into “peritext” as an ”act of defiance, a liberation from the restrictive obsession with identity…” and he explores the literary history of this further in his accomplished literary detective,The Sons of Clovis. In a review of this book, John Kinsella has more to say about the relativity of truth as a tangential, & a necessary part of mystery.

Enter a trick or treat: the hoaxing environment of the intruder.

I was just about to write the epilogue ….  when I found myself experimenting with WordPress again in backgrounds and fonts. Wish I could fully customise but I probably can’t spare the time. Chosing a theme is a dalliance: you find one you really quite like but then there’s something that doesn’t appeal and it’s time to change. Yawn.

Ah well… I’ve been reading some awesome poems and reviews for the journal I edit and enjoying collaborating with the very lovely and talented Dr Lucy Van: it’s fantastic to have her academic support and expertise. I really should go for a walk on this cool, drizzly day but I have this Christina Perri song running in my head and that video from a few years back. I love her dress, her eclectic grunge and the tatoos which apparently reinscribe designs from Michelangelo’s Sistine chapel, le Moulin Rouge and Audrey Jawasaki.

Also love the choreographed conflict suggesting bondage (very R.D Laing) and the way she walks over her man in the end, like it’s a given.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8v_4O44sfjM&feature=relmfu