Blog probs

If you are looking for the submissions link, rather than trawl through this pre-industrial plaint, just click on the post heading.

But for any budding Paul Hardacres out there....

I have suddenly lost my sidebar to the bottom of the page, so anyone searching for links or archives are out of luck as I followed Google's advice and deleted it all. Anyone out there with a tip on how to rectify this problem is welcome to contact me through the submission tab now situated way down below (or to the right, depending on whether you have heeded my advice re the HTML gorgon in me).

New Poetry by Stuart Barnes

For Sale on Swanston Street

Indian diamonds
a rock of hammer
men in orange and
their swarthy God

but I'm not
in the market
for another banner,
to kick another dog


- Start Barnes 2009



Compliant

sums me up programmed like
my mythical C-3PO

violin skinned
like a cat before breakfast Venn

circles
overlapping like slapping hands in a manic kids'

game a kiss
on a murderess's cheek by the bus teeth

brushed at recess after school
on the oval take a punch

in the guts Centre
For Excellence {hyaena-

boys smoke} short-back-and-sides
braces

suffering Messerschmitt-
jokes Pritikin

Program weekly mass "don't write!" not a friend
on my boy-Elektra back a criminal's

colours
in my hand


- Stuart Barnes 2009

Stuart Barnes's unpublished memoir, A Cold Decade, was shortlisted for the 2009 Olvar Wood Fellowship Award. Living in Melbourne, he's currently editing his first collection of poetry and writing his first novel, a fable-fantasy.

Poetry First

For reasons known only to themselves, the editors of Melbourne's Cordite Magazine decided to open a comment stream left happily dormant for the best part of six years, a mangy hydra to which yours truly contributed his set of gnashing yellow teeth. I was not at my best in the early years of this decade, and no doubt suffering one of my Swiftian "episodes", replete with tiny feet in the night, hog-tied mornings and perfumed winds always blowing the wrong way. Paul Hardacre and I, well.....there is a good deal to be said for silence in this game, the space between words. And Richard King was more than happy, I'm sure, to leave me where he found me, under that rock I will always call home.

In the midst of all this petulant wank, however, sprang a gentle and very pertinent question: where does poetry spring from? I had steamed off by then in search of a mirror that would tell me what I wanted to hear, so for me the question sank like a stone. Only the truly great question the origins of their craft, leaving the rest of us to needle over our "profession", last refuge of the vagrant.

At the risk of a lawsuit I will paste the original dialogue here..if I can....JUST WRESTLE.....this f@@cking LAWYER!!.....off....my...arm....


THERE!!!........


Monday, November 17th

Who invented poetry?

Can anybody help?

While not being able to answer ‘who, we may be able to find out ‘why. A certain ms. hummburger has this to say: poetry sucks crap. it was invented so that people had something to talk about.......


November 26th

I think it was a mail order firm in Michigan. [apologies to Douglas Adams]

And so trail off the usual stale breadcrumbs into that toy forest of Australian academia....the glib response of the vagrant, the true professional [apologies to Jean Genet]. I am history for I am now. Like Uncle Leo with his painted eyebrows, both aghast and eloquent in all the languages of mankind as the interlocutor in us all backs away......

this did not help me at all ill make sure i never come here again you guys should get more serious i have research paper due and no answers to my questions yet you guys should Fuck off

Well, fuck off, poetry at this blog at least is a linguistic fossil, but all the more immediate for that. I hope that cools your ardour a little. An appendix of the soul, if you like, the medium through which we trained our tongue to our clumsy ear all those crazy parties ago. Language and song and story all live here, my little fuck off friend. Cricket came later, but completed the puzzle to this blogger's satisfaction.

New Poetry by Brooke Linford

The Chant

I drift through time
rings of coffee on grey
the sleepless
can be so sinister
lips purple with cold
and hats pulled low
to hide eyes

it’s eerie
the chant
I don’t know what will happen after
when the plane leaves for paris
and the phone is quiet


- Brooke Linford 2009


Edges

we were in the city
a hotel with jagged edges
the room was a dark mahogany
dormitory-style
you watched me with appreciation
as I filled page after page
on the narrow bed
you didn’t have to touch me
but you did anyway
the 2am traffic a yellow hush
outside our window


- Brooke Linford 2009

Brooke Linford is co-editor of www.holland1945.net.au and was co-editor of egg(poetry) from 2002-2006. Her work has appeared in several Australian publications. She currently lives in Victoria where she works in administration and studies Italian.

New Poetry by Ashley Capes

before Italy

hair penned in

as an afterthought,

a woolly plate and

everything a second edge

yellow a dream

only –

caricature even,

and Pompeii

nothing but a fork

beneath cloth.

- Ashley Capes 2009

bukowski and a wide range of landlords

some struggles are truly epic

like bukowski

and a wide range of landlords

or the hopeless

but well-meaning sign, painted

officious red

no alcohol in the cbd

and beneath it a smashed

VB bottle

coloured like a rotting

SA uniform

and my brother

snickering as we walk by

tastes like piss

- Ashley Capes 2009

Ashley teaches Media and English in Australia, while co-editing www.holland1945.net.au , http://kipplepoetry.blogspot.com/ and administering interactive Renku site http://issassnail.wordpress.com/ His first collection of poetry pollen and the storm was published with the assistance of Small Change Press in 2008 and his second, Stepping over Seasons, will be published by Interactive Press in 2009.

New Poetry by Mark O'Flynn

ANNELIDS

(in September rain, for several days
a thousand earthworms,
clean and pink as intestines
rise out of the flooded ground
swimming in some mass saturation
on the concrete pathway
It’s not exactly a thousand,
I have not counted them, but many,
all with the same singular purpose.
How populated the soil is with living things,
for when the rain stops
and the path dries up
the worms shrivel and bake
like brackets, leaving not a footfall
of concrete on which to tread,
the earth hollow with their leaving,
the corpulent ducks too heavy to fly.)


- Mark O'Flynn 2009



EDGE

the knife edge dream
the cliff-top dream
the empty well
the windy skyscraper
it’s always the same
the paralysed view
the bottomless canyon
the rotten top-most branch
the crumbling edge about to topple
into the chasm
the racing pulse
the sweat so cold
the grace of flight
don’t get me started on flight.


- Mark O'Flynn 2009

Mark O'Flynn's most recent collection, What Can Be Proven, came out in 2007 through Interactive Press. He still has the great bounty of a dear and loving family, a very cute dog, and the good luck to have finally lost me as a neighbour. His poetry remains a compelling mixture of the tender and the sonorous, the hug and the bristle, even without my hairy visage propped on his fence.