The night before Good Friday, in Ballarat: Jess opens her laptop, clicks on the Wiki page for Dante’s Divine Comedy, and that heats the blood, sets her in motion, those tricky hyperlinks that send a poet down rabbit holes. [If only she’d spent less time with TV and more time tuning literary habits she would have traversed this classic text by now and wouldn’t need to pursue elaborate synopses.] Nevertheless, she strokes her brow— the one that’s nearly bald from boredom and stress— and carries on, hopes the Comedy will show ennui who’s boss. [Covid’s fault, […]
Salvador Dalí Engraves Fire and it is Invisible
T. S. Eliot’s second-favourite poem is an office seating chart, and proximity to the boss corresponds to your salary’s hellish band, and every day I put in for more personal calls to Beatrice, who never picks up, And, anyway, what’s a history of poetry without Dante at the photocopier, sending out Florentine memoranda, subject line RE: naissance of the world in exile, waiting for God’s election. Tell the Pope to go to hell. From my office window I can see that the trees I was supposed to write about have only just been born and that […]
I hear the same things when you speak
It seems in Hell our limbs begin the process of devastation. I don’t know if I’m looking at an arm or a dead tree. I don’t know if the tail of the Devil is the curled end of a carrot or a rich man’s head before it dives. In this place the ground is not soil nor dirt but the skull of a bird pecked by the beach. It reminds me of the scene in ‘The Lighthouse’ where the seagulls swoop & Robert Pattinson’s eyes take on the haunted look of symmetry. His eyes will never find rest, Waldemar Januszczak […]
Portrait of an Infernal Lady, or an Anagram, or a New Translation of Dante’s Inferno, Canto I, Lines I-III
Here a wind erodes the dead rib of a forsaken woman, mired in the mud of toil. A cleft path sways my will. But fault us yet – About the middle of life’s onward way, I found myself within a darksome dell, Because from the true path I went astray. —Claudia Hamilton Ramsay, 1862 we, led by fiendish wiles, work – plod – to awaken from this dim wood of wronging. Way ahead, on a hill, the sun rowdy at your feet, Midway this way of life we’re bound upon, I woke to find myself in a dark wood, Where […]
Meanjin Subscriberthon: What You Can Win
Stacks of books for one thing: an extraordinary library of contemporary Australian writing, and we’re giving away one each day, books by the shelf-full. Every day of the Meanjin Subscriberthon week, December 7 to 11, new and renewing subscribers to the Meanjin print edition have a daily chance to win: A library of 50 books, including some of the best Australian writing from the past 18 months, valued at $1500. One of 10 subscriptions to Crikey, valued at $199 each. One of five free subscriptions to ArtsHub, valued at $149 each. Plus EVERY new or renewing print subscriber in the […]
Challenge and Opportunity
At 80, I’m just a bit older than Meanjin. Born into the British Empire, we both started out in Brisbane where, in December 1940, journalist Clem Christesen AM OBE published the first Meanjin Papers. Days later (3 January 1941) the 6th Division of the 2nd AIF, which, like the 1st Australian Imperial Force of 1914–18, had been training in Palestine, engaged with Italian forces at Bardia, the first occasion where our ground troops were seriously committed in World War II. I’d arrived in the preceding October, the month in which the Battle of Britain ended. Some 35 Australian pilots (ten […]
What I’m Reading
Not long before work stopped and I found I was spending most days at home, I had been reacquainting myself with the questionable habit of reading a book while sitting in peak hour traffic. It was something I used to do when I lived on the other side of town, when traffic meant crawling westwards from Kew to Brunswick directly into the blinding afternoon sun. Before podcasts became a way to focus one’s mind and relieve the monotony of the waiting and wanting to be home I would read a book, quickly flipping […]
A-Biden With Me, Fast Falls The Eventide …
Fake wood panelling, a few balloons, about 40 people scattered across a half dozen tables, a big screen booming MSNBC, the bright white of kleig lights, half a dozen TV camera setups, and down the hallway, the clucluburrburugguggh of bowling balls hitting pins. Yes, the Joe Biden for Minnesota team went all out on Super Tuesday night, renting the ‘conference room’ of a Northeast Minneapolis bowling alley named Elsie’s for their gathering. It was a very Minnesota night, half-American, half-Swedish, a rack of thick coats and scarves in one corner, a table of steaming trays of ‘hot dish’ (casserole) in […]
What I’m Reading
It’s three weeks after Christmas and rain is falling softly at the Sumac Blockade, a small circus of tarpaulin pitched on a logging road in the Tarkine wilderness. Located in the north-west of lutruwita/Tasmania, about three hours’ drive from Launceston, the blockade was established in September 2018 to halt deforestation by Forestry Tasmania for the international timber company, Ta Ann. The Tarkine’s first name is takayna; many areas within it are heritage-listed as Western Tasmanian Aboriginal Cultural Landscapes. The rainforest is vulnerable, immense, elusive. We sit in a circle around the fire, eating bin-dived mince pies while giant trees sway […]
#6: James Curran — The Unknown Solider
In the latest episode of the Meanjin Narratives podcast, James Curran reads his triptych ‘The Unknown Soldier’, three poignant poems that muse on the Anzacs, distant sacrifice and remembrance.
Was Sir Mark Oliphant Australia’s—and Britain’s—J. Robert Oppenheimer?
At primary school in Melbourne in the mid 1950s I used to get annoyed when we were told to pour our third pints of morning recess milk down the gully trap. When I went home for lunch the ABC Country Hour was usually on the radio and on those no-milk days farmers would be warned that radioactive clouds were drifting eastward from the atomic test sites in Monte Bello and then Emu Field and then Maralinga. My dad—an ex US Navy officer—would be in to lunch too and, although the mildest of men most of the time, would swear (he had […]
The Stickiness of Truthiness
When the lights came up on the evening performance of The Lifespan of a Fact at Studio 54 in Manhattan’s manic theatre district on Tuesday January 8, 2019, it was 8.53pm (I checked my phone as we shuffled out of the theatre and back onto the frigid street). The play is in its final week on Broadway, stuffed with talented magnetic performers (Daniel Radcliffe is as different to Harry Potter or Alan Strang as a man so famous for the parts he played as a teen could hope to be, a comfortable Cherry Jones, and a consistently delightful Bobby Cannavale), […]