Published in 2013, Contemporary Asian Australian Poets is culturally significant as the first-ever anthology of Asian Australian poetry. It spans over three decades of writing by 37 Australian poets of Asian heritage, and includes a very diverse range of voices, themes and styles. • The poems deal with subjects such as exile and loss, cultural identity, migrant experiences, generational differences and multicultural relationships, and they employ a wide variety of poetic forms from traditional to experimental.
The selection of poems focuses on a range of familiar contexts and settings that relate to living in or between two cultures.
The poems present perspectives on family relationships and heritages, and on the struggle to achieve a secure sense of selfhood within changed circumstances. The poems selected represent different experiences, relationships and situations and explore emotions and attitudes relating to personal, social and cultural identities
The selection of poems focuses on a range of familiar contexts and settings that relate to living in or between two cultures.
The poems present perspectives on family relationships and heritages, and on the struggle to achieve a secure sense of selfhood within changed circumstances. The poems selected represent different experiences, relationships and situations and explore emotions and attitudes relating to personal, social and cultural identities
REVIEWS
https://peril.com.au/topics/review-contemporary-asian-australian-poets/
https://cordite.org.au/reviews/contemporary-a-a-poets/
https://cordite.org.au/reviews/gilbey-aitken-allen/
https://peril.com.au/topics/review-contemporary-asian-australian-poets/
https://cordite.org.au/reviews/contemporary-a-a-poets/
https://cordite.org.au/reviews/gilbey-aitken-allen/
THE LINK BELOW IS PARTICULARLY USEFUL AS A GOOD INTRODUCTION TO THIS MODULE. IT IS ADVISED TO VIEW THIS BEFORE MOVING ON TO READING THE ARTICLES BELOW. ONCE OPENED SCROLL THROUGH THE TOPIC CIRCLES FOR MORE INFORMATION.
https://prezi.com/p/hiyiqmu8nm7d/language-culture-identity/
https://prezi.com/p/hiyiqmu8nm7d/language-culture-identity/
Contemporary Asian Australian Poets
Me Fail? I Fly! Posted on 6 October 2013 | Adam Aitken, Kim Cheng Boey & Michelle Cahill, Contemporary Asian Australian Poets (Puncher & Wattmann 2013)
This book seems to be part of a current efflorescence of attention to Asian Australian writing, and of Australian attention to Asian writing. The current Southerly focuses on ‘Contemporary Diasporic and Postcolonial Poetries’, with particular attention to Asian Australian (or Asian-Australian, or Asian/Australian etc) work. The recent OzAsia Festival in Adelaide included a two-day OzAsia on Page component which featured ‘significant and contemporary Asian and Australian voices’. Vagabond Press’s Asia Pacific Writing Series is looking formidably good.
It’s hard to imagine a more disparate gathering of poets than those collected between these covers, not just in nationality or ethnicity (‘Asia’ is a big and varied place, and there seems to be someone here from just about every part of it except, interestingly, Japan), but in just about every other conceivable way as well. The poetry ranges from work with the exuberance and directness of Spoken Word to compressed, elliptical, allusive capital-L Literary offerings. It’s the poets who are Asian Australian, not necessarily the poetry, so though there are poems of the pain of loss of home and culture (I was going to say ‘nostalgia’, but that’s a word that no longer conveys any sense of real pain), poems that explicitly deal with or enact cultural duality or hybridity, poems about multicultural relationships, poems that tackle white racism head-on, and poems exploring questions of cultural identity, there are also poems that don’t do any of those things.
There is a brief introductory essay from each of the three editors. Adam Aitken outlines and celebrates the extraordinary range of voices and attitudes in the anthology, and the range of possibilities in the term ‘Asian Australian’ itself. Kim Cheng Boey focuses on the experience of migration:
Home is never a given, for first-generation migrants, and continues to be a complex issue for subsequent generations. Being beneficiaries of two or more cultures, and entangled in a complex web of affiliations and attachments, they are wary of identity politics and monolithic formations.
Michelle Cahill points out the anthology’s significance in bringing greater visibility to Asian Australian women poets, who experience ‘the double exile of migration and mediation of patriarchal terrain, so inimical to the female psyche’. Seventeen of the 37 poets in this collection are women, and very few Asian Australian women have been included in any previous anthologies.
All three introductory essays are worth reading, and they give invaluable guidance to the poetry. But in the end, it’s the poetry you pay for – and I’m happy to report that I was immersed in this book for days, being dragged from one engaged mind to another. Christopher Cyrill, whom I have previously known as the events organiser at Gleebooks who always spoke too softly when introducing people, here turns out to have a clear, strong, brilliantly modulated voice in the extract from his prose poem novella Quaternion (and that’s me saying it who hates extracts and doesn’t much care for prose poems). Andy Quan’s ‘Is This?’ is a brilliant abstraction of the moment of anticipation on meeting a new person. Omar Musa contemplates buying a pair of shoes and redefines the notion of choice. I finally get to read Kim Cheng Boey’s ‘Stamp Collecting’, which I’ve heard him read at festivals and loved, and his ‘Plum Blossom or Quong Tart at the QVB’ – what can I say? Eileen Chong is here, with some of the finest poems from ‘Burning Rice’. I was about to read Debbie Lim’s ‘How to Grow Feet of Golden Lotus’ aloud to a friend and then realised I wouldn’t want to inflict it on anyone who didn’t have plenty of time to recover. Merlinda Bobis’s ‘Covenant’ (‘after you bomb my town / I’ll take you fishing / or kite-flying or both’) conveys the poignancy (another word that has lost its hard meaning) of peace for a defeated people. Jaya Savige’s ‘Circular Breathing’ could hardly be more mainstream Australian, a kind of version of Les Murray’s ‘Perfectly Ordinary Rainbow’ set it in Europe and acknowledging Indigenous Australia (with only the barest allusion to Asia, but who’s counting?). Louise Ho’s ‘A Veteran Talking’ is a killer poem, a chilling, hard, dry killer. I’m glad Adam Aitken included a decent, brilliantly varied selection of his own work.
Please don’t let this book be seen as a marginal anthology of poems by the marginalised. It’s a fabulous collection and belongs at the centre of our culture.
Me Fail? I Fly! Posted on 6 October 2013 | Adam Aitken, Kim Cheng Boey & Michelle Cahill, Contemporary Asian Australian Poets (Puncher & Wattmann 2013)
This book seems to be part of a current efflorescence of attention to Asian Australian writing, and of Australian attention to Asian writing. The current Southerly focuses on ‘Contemporary Diasporic and Postcolonial Poetries’, with particular attention to Asian Australian (or Asian-Australian, or Asian/Australian etc) work. The recent OzAsia Festival in Adelaide included a two-day OzAsia on Page component which featured ‘significant and contemporary Asian and Australian voices’. Vagabond Press’s Asia Pacific Writing Series is looking formidably good.
It’s hard to imagine a more disparate gathering of poets than those collected between these covers, not just in nationality or ethnicity (‘Asia’ is a big and varied place, and there seems to be someone here from just about every part of it except, interestingly, Japan), but in just about every other conceivable way as well. The poetry ranges from work with the exuberance and directness of Spoken Word to compressed, elliptical, allusive capital-L Literary offerings. It’s the poets who are Asian Australian, not necessarily the poetry, so though there are poems of the pain of loss of home and culture (I was going to say ‘nostalgia’, but that’s a word that no longer conveys any sense of real pain), poems that explicitly deal with or enact cultural duality or hybridity, poems about multicultural relationships, poems that tackle white racism head-on, and poems exploring questions of cultural identity, there are also poems that don’t do any of those things.
There is a brief introductory essay from each of the three editors. Adam Aitken outlines and celebrates the extraordinary range of voices and attitudes in the anthology, and the range of possibilities in the term ‘Asian Australian’ itself. Kim Cheng Boey focuses on the experience of migration:
Home is never a given, for first-generation migrants, and continues to be a complex issue for subsequent generations. Being beneficiaries of two or more cultures, and entangled in a complex web of affiliations and attachments, they are wary of identity politics and monolithic formations.
Michelle Cahill points out the anthology’s significance in bringing greater visibility to Asian Australian women poets, who experience ‘the double exile of migration and mediation of patriarchal terrain, so inimical to the female psyche’. Seventeen of the 37 poets in this collection are women, and very few Asian Australian women have been included in any previous anthologies.
All three introductory essays are worth reading, and they give invaluable guidance to the poetry. But in the end, it’s the poetry you pay for – and I’m happy to report that I was immersed in this book for days, being dragged from one engaged mind to another. Christopher Cyrill, whom I have previously known as the events organiser at Gleebooks who always spoke too softly when introducing people, here turns out to have a clear, strong, brilliantly modulated voice in the extract from his prose poem novella Quaternion (and that’s me saying it who hates extracts and doesn’t much care for prose poems). Andy Quan’s ‘Is This?’ is a brilliant abstraction of the moment of anticipation on meeting a new person. Omar Musa contemplates buying a pair of shoes and redefines the notion of choice. I finally get to read Kim Cheng Boey’s ‘Stamp Collecting’, which I’ve heard him read at festivals and loved, and his ‘Plum Blossom or Quong Tart at the QVB’ – what can I say? Eileen Chong is here, with some of the finest poems from ‘Burning Rice’. I was about to read Debbie Lim’s ‘How to Grow Feet of Golden Lotus’ aloud to a friend and then realised I wouldn’t want to inflict it on anyone who didn’t have plenty of time to recover. Merlinda Bobis’s ‘Covenant’ (‘after you bomb my town / I’ll take you fishing / or kite-flying or both’) conveys the poignancy (another word that has lost its hard meaning) of peace for a defeated people. Jaya Savige’s ‘Circular Breathing’ could hardly be more mainstream Australian, a kind of version of Les Murray’s ‘Perfectly Ordinary Rainbow’ set it in Europe and acknowledging Indigenous Australia (with only the barest allusion to Asia, but who’s counting?). Louise Ho’s ‘A Veteran Talking’ is a killer poem, a chilling, hard, dry killer. I’m glad Adam Aitken included a decent, brilliantly varied selection of his own work.
Please don’t let this book be seen as a marginal anthology of poems by the marginalised. It’s a fabulous collection and belongs at the centre of our culture.
JAYA SAVIGE
BA, MPhil (UQ), PhD (Cantab - pending)
Lecturer in English and Head of Creative Writing
New College of the Humanities
London England.
Jaya Savige was born in Sydney, grew up in Moreton Bay and Brisbane, and lives in London, where he lectures at the New College of the Humanities at Northeastern. He is the author of Latecomers (UQP, 2005), which won the New South Wales Premier’s Kenneth Slessor Prize, and Surface to Air (UQP, 2011), shortlisted for The Age Poetry Book of the Year. His next collection, Change Machine, is forthcoming from UQP in 2020.
LATE BUT CLOSING FAST
By Susan Wyndham October 14, 2006 — 10.00am Sydney Morning Herald
Anyone who was at the NSW Premier's Literary Awards dinner in May will remember the moment when Jaya Savige took the podium to receive the Kenneth Slessor Prize for poetry. A cool young man with a ponytail, he stilled the room with a spontaneous recital of Slessor's poem South Country: "You come to the South Country / As if the argument of trees were done ..."
That was the first I knew of the 27-year-old Savige. Impressed by his presence, his intelligence and his unaffected respect for a poetic elder, I hurried away to read his award-winning first collection, Latecomers.
We met a few months later when Savige came down from Brisbane to one of the many writers' festivals he has attended as poetry's new star. We sat for hours as he rolled cigarettes and talked with addictive enthusiasm.
His story begins on Bribie Island near Queensland's Sunshine Coast, where his mother took eight-year-old Jaya and his younger brother from Sydney and Canberra to live. He has no memory of his natural father, an enigmatic Indonesian, but grew up close to his stepfather and four more siblings. "The island was barefoot on the beach and all Dad's brothers and sisters and their children are fishermen of the island," he says. "So we'd run around with our cousins and some of the poems in the book are inspired by that."
At his bush school on the mainland, Savige won his first poetry prize when he was 10. "Poetry was just a little hobby I enjoyed. No one encouraged me but once I'd started I kept going and realised how much fun it was." His mother, who had run away from home as a teenager, worked in a supermarket so Savige could have violin lessons and board at Nudgee College in Brisbane, an elite, rugby-playing Catholic school. He became dux of economics and legal studies as well as English and modern history.
"The reading we did, like The Lord of the Flies, there were some passages there that I wanted to turn into wallpaper and put all over my room. I published a couple of poems in the school magazine. The head of English said to me: 'One thing, Jaya, always write. Never stop writing.' "
Pushed into a law degree by the school counsellor, he lasted six erratic months before switching to arts at Queensland University. With "kick-arse grades" in English and philosophy, he had a scholarship to do honours, added four semesters of Latin "for fun" and graduated with a university medal. His mother died as his honours thesis was due.
"I was there when she took her last breath and it was overwhelming," he says. "One of the last things I said to her - it felt superficial and I castigated myself - I told her I'd dedicate my first book to her."
That loss had a crucial effect on Savige's life and writing. He moved back to Bribie Island to help his stepfather with the young family. "So I had the landscape of my childhood as well as the kids and Dad, as well as the time and space to write, finally."
He was also doing his master of philosophy in creative writing on another scholarship. His thesis applied the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard's ideas to the Australian poet Michael Dransfield - "not because of the trendy, romanticised persona that a lot of people enjoy Dransfield for, but more because of the fireworks of his bloody imagination, his unbelievable use of words".
He wrote most of the poems in Latecomers while on Bribie Island. "I could walk out of the house and walk two houses down to the beach. I was also dealing with grief, so all my responses to nature are informed by my grief."
The first poem in the book, Desires Are Already Memories, takes its title from an Italo Calvino book and observes a dead Christmas beetle clinging to a leaf that blew over from the bushfires on Moreton Island.
Agapanthus is "a strange, experimental poem", written after Savige saw his mother's body at the funeral home. It opens with the image of an agapanthus petal slamming into a whirlpool and is dense with references to history and mythology, linguistic pirouettes and memories: the sarongs his mother wore and the ice-cream he fed her as she was dying. The poem is also a response to one written by Martin Johnston for his mother, the writer Charmian Clift.
Savige knows readers won't understand all his allusions in this "indulgent" poem. So it should be noted that some of his poems are almost haikus in their brevity. ("I dare you to buy / someone's art / then murder them / so the price goes up")
"I'm very conscious of how accessible a poem is for a reader," he says. "Language is used in poems in a way it's not used anywhere else, possibly with the exception of marketing and headlines. In poetry, you're allowed to let words breathe and move a bit."
Bribie Island's history underlies many of the poems, from the 1799 landing of Matthew Flinders at Skirmish Point, named after his conflict with local Aborigines, to the evacuation of civilians for a World War II base.
Savige writes with an awareness of the layered human history in every physical place, not just its sacred sites but also fast food joints and the park where he played as a child. He took the title Latecomers from a theatre sign, "Latecomers will not be admitted". As he says, "We're all latecomers to history. When we get here all this stuff has happened."
He feels his own ties to Australia's poetic past and believes the old poetry wars have given way to a hybrid poetry. "I'm not one of those dudes who says, 'Down with the old', you know?" He points to the blurb on his book from the poet Peter Minter: "[Savige] reminds us of our lyrical traditions but obliterates their conservative inheritances, making total sense of the now."
Among his friends is David Malouf. They bonded over a shared love of Ovid and Savige says that "having him blurb my book was like an angel dropping down and touching it". Latecomers won the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize for unpublished work, established by Arts Queensland in 2003.
Savige is part of a wave of young Queensland poets who missed the rigid Joh Bjelke-Petersen era. "There's a sense of energy there now and opportunities, almost like the valve has been released in the music, theatre and writing scenes," he says.
Savige tutors in Shakespeare and poetics at Queensland University, though he's not sure he wants an academic career. His girlfriend, Emma, is a PhD student and his unofficial manager. "We get to places on time thanks to her."
At present, he is working on a collection of poems that explore Queensland's image as the crazy "deep north". But he writes about other places, too. A poem in Latecomers was written on Australia Day while watching "the jumble of undulant breasts" on Bondi Beach.
Next year his physical and imaginative worlds will expand further when he takes up a six-month residency at the Australia Council apartment in Rome. "I hope to do a lot of writing there," he says. "I suppose with my Latin and my passion for a bit of the ancient it might be overwhelming."
By Susan Wyndham October 14, 2006 — 10.00am Sydney Morning Herald
Anyone who was at the NSW Premier's Literary Awards dinner in May will remember the moment when Jaya Savige took the podium to receive the Kenneth Slessor Prize for poetry. A cool young man with a ponytail, he stilled the room with a spontaneous recital of Slessor's poem South Country: "You come to the South Country / As if the argument of trees were done ..."
That was the first I knew of the 27-year-old Savige. Impressed by his presence, his intelligence and his unaffected respect for a poetic elder, I hurried away to read his award-winning first collection, Latecomers.
We met a few months later when Savige came down from Brisbane to one of the many writers' festivals he has attended as poetry's new star. We sat for hours as he rolled cigarettes and talked with addictive enthusiasm.
His story begins on Bribie Island near Queensland's Sunshine Coast, where his mother took eight-year-old Jaya and his younger brother from Sydney and Canberra to live. He has no memory of his natural father, an enigmatic Indonesian, but grew up close to his stepfather and four more siblings. "The island was barefoot on the beach and all Dad's brothers and sisters and their children are fishermen of the island," he says. "So we'd run around with our cousins and some of the poems in the book are inspired by that."
At his bush school on the mainland, Savige won his first poetry prize when he was 10. "Poetry was just a little hobby I enjoyed. No one encouraged me but once I'd started I kept going and realised how much fun it was." His mother, who had run away from home as a teenager, worked in a supermarket so Savige could have violin lessons and board at Nudgee College in Brisbane, an elite, rugby-playing Catholic school. He became dux of economics and legal studies as well as English and modern history.
"The reading we did, like The Lord of the Flies, there were some passages there that I wanted to turn into wallpaper and put all over my room. I published a couple of poems in the school magazine. The head of English said to me: 'One thing, Jaya, always write. Never stop writing.' "
Pushed into a law degree by the school counsellor, he lasted six erratic months before switching to arts at Queensland University. With "kick-arse grades" in English and philosophy, he had a scholarship to do honours, added four semesters of Latin "for fun" and graduated with a university medal. His mother died as his honours thesis was due.
"I was there when she took her last breath and it was overwhelming," he says. "One of the last things I said to her - it felt superficial and I castigated myself - I told her I'd dedicate my first book to her."
That loss had a crucial effect on Savige's life and writing. He moved back to Bribie Island to help his stepfather with the young family. "So I had the landscape of my childhood as well as the kids and Dad, as well as the time and space to write, finally."
He was also doing his master of philosophy in creative writing on another scholarship. His thesis applied the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard's ideas to the Australian poet Michael Dransfield - "not because of the trendy, romanticised persona that a lot of people enjoy Dransfield for, but more because of the fireworks of his bloody imagination, his unbelievable use of words".
He wrote most of the poems in Latecomers while on Bribie Island. "I could walk out of the house and walk two houses down to the beach. I was also dealing with grief, so all my responses to nature are informed by my grief."
The first poem in the book, Desires Are Already Memories, takes its title from an Italo Calvino book and observes a dead Christmas beetle clinging to a leaf that blew over from the bushfires on Moreton Island.
Agapanthus is "a strange, experimental poem", written after Savige saw his mother's body at the funeral home. It opens with the image of an agapanthus petal slamming into a whirlpool and is dense with references to history and mythology, linguistic pirouettes and memories: the sarongs his mother wore and the ice-cream he fed her as she was dying. The poem is also a response to one written by Martin Johnston for his mother, the writer Charmian Clift.
Savige knows readers won't understand all his allusions in this "indulgent" poem. So it should be noted that some of his poems are almost haikus in their brevity. ("I dare you to buy / someone's art / then murder them / so the price goes up")
"I'm very conscious of how accessible a poem is for a reader," he says. "Language is used in poems in a way it's not used anywhere else, possibly with the exception of marketing and headlines. In poetry, you're allowed to let words breathe and move a bit."
Bribie Island's history underlies many of the poems, from the 1799 landing of Matthew Flinders at Skirmish Point, named after his conflict with local Aborigines, to the evacuation of civilians for a World War II base.
Savige writes with an awareness of the layered human history in every physical place, not just its sacred sites but also fast food joints and the park where he played as a child. He took the title Latecomers from a theatre sign, "Latecomers will not be admitted". As he says, "We're all latecomers to history. When we get here all this stuff has happened."
He feels his own ties to Australia's poetic past and believes the old poetry wars have given way to a hybrid poetry. "I'm not one of those dudes who says, 'Down with the old', you know?" He points to the blurb on his book from the poet Peter Minter: "[Savige] reminds us of our lyrical traditions but obliterates their conservative inheritances, making total sense of the now."
Among his friends is David Malouf. They bonded over a shared love of Ovid and Savige says that "having him blurb my book was like an angel dropping down and touching it". Latecomers won the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize for unpublished work, established by Arts Queensland in 2003.
Savige is part of a wave of young Queensland poets who missed the rigid Joh Bjelke-Petersen era. "There's a sense of energy there now and opportunities, almost like the valve has been released in the music, theatre and writing scenes," he says.
Savige tutors in Shakespeare and poetics at Queensland University, though he's not sure he wants an academic career. His girlfriend, Emma, is a PhD student and his unofficial manager. "We get to places on time thanks to her."
At present, he is working on a collection of poems that explore Queensland's image as the crazy "deep north". But he writes about other places, too. A poem in Latecomers was written on Australia Day while watching "the jumble of undulant breasts" on Bondi Beach.
Next year his physical and imaginative worlds will expand further when he takes up a six-month residency at the Australia Council apartment in Rome. "I hope to do a lot of writing there," he says. "I suppose with my Latin and my passion for a bit of the ancient it might be overwhelming."
An extract from
Australian Poetry Review Posted on 1 November 2011 by Martin Duwell
“Circular Breathing”, for example, is a fine poem – one of a series about visiting Italy – and in it Savige stumbles across a man playing a didgeridoo in Rome near the great church of Santa Maria. (Its title suggests more than the breathing technique of a didgeridoo player since the idea of breathing, of coming up for air, is found throughout this book.) Inevitably the situation leads to a lot of meditative material about topics as far apart as cultural dislocation and religion. In my reading of the poem, the poet wants to see the conventionally venerable Catholic church as a johnny-come-lately from the perspective of Aboriginal traditions while registering that those traditions are not ones which, as a white Australian, he comfortably inhabits. At any rate, the significant point for my description of this book is that the poem is structured in a way that is designed to recall Les Murray’s “An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow” (“There’s a fellow crying in Martin Place. They can’t stop him”) from its opening lines, “There’s a man with dreadlocks playing the didgeridoo / in the Piazza di Santa Maria, and everyone is listening” on. As is so common with allusions, one isn’t sure how far to take this. It’s tempting to remind oneself of Murray’s catholicism and see “Circular Breathing” as a kind of displacement of Murray’s famous poem so that what was the uncanny appearance of true religious expression in the setting of a superficial, mercantile and godless city suddenly becomes the expression of a far older religious tradition in the context of a comparatively (in terms of age) recent religion. As so often with allusions and borrowings which are more than passing gestures, a reader finds that he or she is asking whether this is a homage, an extension, an engagement or a rebuff.
Michelle Cahill reviews Surface to Air by Jaya Savige APRIL 27, 2012 / MASCARA /
Surface to Air
by Jaya Savige
University of Queensland Press, 2011
ISBN 9780702239137
There is a dazzling quality about Jaya Savige’s second collection, Surface to Air, though if the poems are rapid and rippled in their dialectic, their wit is matched by complexity. Savige’s virtuosity accommodates an impressive range of poetic forms, from the lyric to the narrative, from the sonnet to the visual and the elegy. His subject matter shifts from real to hyperreal, from technologies of the personal to the political in scenes refracted through the lens of historical and mythic relativities. This said, the ethical intention of Surface to Air seems more probing than in Latecomers. Despite the supreme assurances of tradition, logic and erudition, there are undercurrents of cultural doubt and disembodiment fragmenting the identity of speaker-subject to the point of vulnerability. It is at such thresholds that Savige’s most convincing poetry performs.
The parabolic argument in Surface to Air is evidenced by the structure of its sections. There’s a movement from the organic contingencies of physical existence in “Snorkelling Lessons” to the transcriptive poems of “Circular Breathing,” the ballistic, reflexive tropes of “A Brief History of Risk,” to the final sequence “Memory Card” in which nostalgia and rhetoric, reason and progress are mediated. It’s an ambitious arc informed by awareness of the uncontrolled relativism of postmodern challenges to the body, to coherence, temporality and space. That the self is in crisis is sensed from the opening poem, “Sand Island”, which evokes, with anatomical precision, the perceptual disruptions of leaving and clinging, mystery and experience. In the search for “common knowledge”, even the sea must be sundered:
What cleaves each muscle of wave
from its bone of ocean?
Hear the snap
of its ligaments
Listen to the severing tendons.
(3)
The poem seems intentionally to echo the opening poem of Latecomers with the poet being in “two minds”, though now the sense of a distant destination lies beyond an antipodean or utopian reach. It is not merely home or the body that the poet is called to renounce, but language and its tradition. Savige effortlessly melds the diction of geek-speak with various lyric forms throughout the collection, yet he seems most at home in the natural world, as this poem shows in its evocation of themes:
This morning a stingray
seeking a poem
of its own
strayed into the estuary
of this one.
Crestfallen, it turned
at my dismissive gesture.
(5)
The phrasing is flawless, truncated; the personification creates pathos. There are undercurrents of regret in this and other poems. “Circular Breathing” describes a scene in which the poet expatriate, hearing the didgeridoo being played in a Rome piazza, is faced with his own neglect and disconnectedness from home:
I want to bolt up the stairs of the fountain
and claim that sound as the sound of my home--
but stop when I recall how rarely I slow to hear
the truer player busking in King George Square.
Memory kinks my measured walk into a lurch.
My stomach fills with fire. Far above cold stars wheel
around the spire of Rome’s oldest Christian church.
(25)
Despite the free verse stanzas the plain, unaffected tone of this poem strengthens its authenticity, providing a human face to a more general theme of colonial inheritance. This sensitivity is appealing to the reader. We encounter it in poems like “Elegy for an Old School Friend” and in the dramatic climax of “Riverfire.” Vulnerabilities are exposed as the poet questions class privilege and cultural assumptions and yet there are distinct sources of conservatism in Savige’s lyrics. His rhymes and puns can be reductive, his registers at times are anachronistic, though they exercise humour as they parody and invoke Elizabethan rhetoric. The repetition of “hum,” “sum, “fun and Om” in the penultimate stanza of “Circular Breathing” strives for a wholeness, that is undone by the closing stanza’s paradox of psychological incompletion.
Juxtapositions arise in tone and image, between the conventional and the new, creating complexity and richness. Savige is the consummate metaphysician, armed with a volley of conceits ranging from gaming, astronomy, love, speed. Space for the poet is a cyber field, where language implodes on the physical surface. Many poems reference the culture of technology, its frames and tropes suitably materialized in a cosmos where “spry grandmothers compose text messages”, where Raphael’s Galatea is a 16th century Paris Hilton, “statuesque on a jetski” with her “skimpy cosi slipping from her hips” and where, according to Wikipedia, the Iliad is an e-book device. “The Iliad” is a witty reflection on the derivative intertextuality of late capitalism which trashes history, dumbing down the Homerian epic to an attractive product. At the same time, it’s a response to the crisis in print. The poet takes up the gauntlet, reversing the assault on language with sweet revenge. It’s an art to extract lyric essence from cultural jargon and I admire his success in poems such as this. Another of my favourites is the sexy, savvy “Disconnect ” with its
Pale wireless mermaid
washed up on the shore
by bright pixeltide.
(43)
Here, the conventionally addressed lady of courtly lyrics is busy booking cheap flights, surfing the net, persuaded by the poet to come to bed, to “close down windows.” and “zip the file.” Reminiscent of Donne or Marvell, Savige renews convention with agile associations of thought, with clarity of image. His variations in rhythm and tone are pleasing. Other poems like “First Person Shooter” are more protracted in their technique, and more contrived theoretically.
There’s no doubt that eschatological concerns run as a sinister theme through the collection, as it questions the auguries of innocence and experience. I found strange Blakean echoes in the poem “Crisis”:
Once I was entrusted with a planet
I was a child in a sweltering house.
All the world’s peace was up to me,
Quiet, cross-legged before the mouse.
(33)
The seemingly naïve child-subject playing a Nintendo PlayStation or Atari game is solely responsible for the planet’s “cinereous grey”, its missiles and “coughing creatures.” Disturbingly, the child’s passive absorption of violence, is imbued with Cold War psychology and the militarisation of space. The emergence of this virtual consciousness, implied by the book’s title, seems informed by experience as much as by theory. It brings to mind Baudrillard’s social philosophies, particularly those concerned with the West’s technological and political global expansion, the way in which the simulacra are seductive. We hear echoes too, of Foucault’s technologies of the self, connecting the microrelations of the subject in space and time with the macrologic of power.
Savige argues that in blurring the distinctions between self and technology, the simulacra have social consequences. In “Missile”, the player will ride to the Pleiades in search of blue jewels, with the trick being
to avert your vision, look off
to one side, allow a less abused
section of the retina to drink
in the distant emanation.
Alterations in tone from awe to nihilism in these shorter lyric pieces create an impact sometimes lacking in the longer poems. While the syntax is conventionally ordered, the diction is restless, the language layered with adjectives and nouns used as verbs as in “zip”, “swing”, “sticky”, “spark”, “out-yoga”, “bail”, “jink”. This action invigorates poems that might otherwise be burdened with logos, jargon or social theory. A recycling of poetic personas and their personal dramas is refreshing in poems like “26 Piazza di Spagna” (Keats’ death place) or the translation of ‘La notte bella” by Ungaretti. “The Minutes” rarefies Auden’s separation of poetry from the world of finance, with the poet recast as fiscal secretary, taking the minutes in the business of illumination. It’s a humourous, though somewhat flat description, symptomatic of the poet’s audacity to address any subject he chooses.
For me, some of the most beautiful poems in this collection are those in which one senses not speed but stillness, when the moment is distilled and thought, emotion and experience are entwined. “Summer Fig” for instance, captures a brief reprieve from “the impossible/puzzle of light, cut by hot oscilloscopes.’ If nature abounds, the simulacra of a crow’s silhouette awaits the poet’s attention, while technology’s shadow is perilously cast by the ‘giant fig,/downloading gigs of shade onto the fresh, cut grass.”
Personal crisis is constantly present, beautifully evoked amidst the civic in “Public Execution”. In “Desuetude” the poet, overwhelmed by life’s economic demands has “fallen outside of the habit.” Yet, constraint is obliquely resisted in the scatological “Posture.” Its edgy rhythms and attitude liberate the poet from political correctness:
“Your voice is so handcuffed
is how it looks to me, every
tremulous bubble frisked
for sense.”
(68)
And in the shapely “Stingray” the marine creature is like a “thought” barbed in the “sea’s mind” “patrolling the palimpsest” where paradise is the antithesis of clarity.
For a second collection it’s an ambitious constellation, which yokes together disparate images and tropes. The poems are layered, skilful, postured and probing. Their permutations operate in versed and free verse forms. Personal crisis is juxtaposed with historical and social contingencies, and yet the collection turns a full circle by its closing poem, “Riverfire”. By taking the statue of Oxley, a 19th century Queensland explorer, down from his pedestal and imbuing him with diverse cultural elements, by giving voice in his last stanzas to a Murri woman who has witnessed a shooting star, Savige turns his gaze from our colonial past to the future. Certainly he has the capacity for such manoeuvres. Savige is a privileged tenant of the “eternal city” whose conservative values are wholeness, resolution and tradition. In Surface to Air he strafes the frontiers of language where power and consciousness are at odds; where risk is mediated.
MICHELLE CAHILL writes poetry, fiction and essays and serves as editor for Mascara Literary Review. Vishvarupa is her most recent collection of poems.
#Issue Ten - October 2011
LINKS RELATING TO JAYA SAVIGE AND HIS WORKS
https://www.qlrs.com/interview.asp?id=1140
https://mascarareview.com/michelle-cahill-reviews-surface-to-air-by-jaya-savige/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiturPizxcQ
https://shawjonathan.com/tag/jaya-savage/
https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/circular-breathing/
MERLINDA BOBIS
Award-winning writer Merlinda Bobis grew up in Albay, Philippines at the foot of an active volcano, which figures prominently in her writing and performance. As a child her main interest was painting, but at age ten she began writing poetry because ‘painting with words’ was cheaper. She has published novels, short stories, dramas and poems. Her plays have been produced/performed on stage and radio in Australia, the Philippines, Spain, USA, Canada, Singapore, France, China, Thailand and the Slovak Republic. She has performed some of her works as theatre, dance and music.
Award-winning writer Merlinda Bobis grew up in Albay, Philippines at the foot of an active volcano, which figures prominently in her writing and performance. As a child her main interest was painting, but at age ten she began writing poetry because ‘painting with words’ was cheaper. She has published novels, short stories, dramas and poems. Her plays have been produced/performed on stage and radio in Australia, the Philippines, Spain, USA, Canada, Singapore, France, China, Thailand and the Slovak Republic. She has performed some of her works as theatre, dance and music.
Merlinda Bobis’s Poem-plays: Reading Ethics and Identity across Cultures
January 2007
Abstract by Dolores Herrero
Merlinda Bobis is a bilingual writer who was born in the Philippines but now lives in Australia, which turns her into an in-between, a woman who has been carried across different cultures and cannot therefore be defined by making exclusive reference to any of them. The aim of this paper will be to show her two poem-plays Promenade and Cantata of the Warrior Woman, not as isolated phenomena, but as part of a rich tradition of (diasporic) Filipino poets and activist playwrights. Moreover, this paper will study these works from the perspective of a postmodern post-foundational ethics, since they are mainly concerned with writing as a means, not only to do away with fixed and rigid national/ cultural/ social/ gender/ ethnic categories, but also of liberation and celebration of a shared experience among the oppressed, especially women who have been suppressed by the combined oppression of nationalism, patriarchy and colonialism. By putting forward a quest for national, collective and individual identity through reconstructing the lost voices of women both in the pre-and post-contact periods, these poem-plays emphasize the importance of communication between self and other as the only way to give tolerance and peace a chance.
https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/portal/article/view/153
January 2007
Abstract by Dolores Herrero
Merlinda Bobis is a bilingual writer who was born in the Philippines but now lives in Australia, which turns her into an in-between, a woman who has been carried across different cultures and cannot therefore be defined by making exclusive reference to any of them. The aim of this paper will be to show her two poem-plays Promenade and Cantata of the Warrior Woman, not as isolated phenomena, but as part of a rich tradition of (diasporic) Filipino poets and activist playwrights. Moreover, this paper will study these works from the perspective of a postmodern post-foundational ethics, since they are mainly concerned with writing as a means, not only to do away with fixed and rigid national/ cultural/ social/ gender/ ethnic categories, but also of liberation and celebration of a shared experience among the oppressed, especially women who have been suppressed by the combined oppression of nationalism, patriarchy and colonialism. By putting forward a quest for national, collective and individual identity through reconstructing the lost voices of women both in the pre-and post-contact periods, these poem-plays emphasize the importance of communication between self and other as the only way to give tolerance and peace a chance.
https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/portal/article/view/153
LINKS RELATING TO MERLINDA BOBIS
https://www.merlindabobis.com.au/praise.htm#:~:text='In%20Banana%20Heart%20Summer%2C%20Bobis,'&text='Cultures%20meet%2C%20mix%2C%20and,of%20short%20stories%20The%20Kissing%20%E2%80%A6
https://www.merlindabobis.com.au/dramatic.htm
https://redroomcompany.org/projects/wordshed/
https://redroomcompany.org/poet/melinda-bobis/
https://www.poetryinternational.org/pi/poet/22871/Merlinda-Bobis/en/tile
https://writersedit.com/fiction-writing/interview-merlinda-bobis/
https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/portal/article/view/153
https://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/C774885
https://cordite.org.au/reviews/van-bobis/
https://cordite.org.au/interviews/dunn-bobis/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SuYnZWDY-8&list=PL6JcE9XKo7QGHbeIcrszNA6dQVB32ZFGT&index=10&t=0s
https://merlindabobis.com.au/praise.htm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SuYnZWDY-8&list=PL6JcE9XKo7QGHbeIcrszNA6dQVB32ZFGT&index=10&t=0s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvT9s-lS5eU&list=PL6JcE9XKo7QGHbeIcrszNA6dQVB32ZFGT&index=12&t=0s
https://www.jstor.org/stable/41274362?seq=1
https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/routledg/cij/2013/00000006/00000001/art00004?crawler=true
https://books.google.com.au/books?id=A786X6Zyz3cC&pg=PA85&lpg=PA85&dq=merlinda+bobis+language+in+her+poems&source=bl&ots=NXnGxdbsw1&sig=ACfU3U19mzre-IEXD9G7LdynRvHXcaixcQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiH9u_4zZbqAhVHgUsFHbs0AVo4HhDoATADegQICBAB#v=onepage&q=merlinda%20bobis%20llanguage%20in%20her%20poems&f=false
https://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/A80727?mainTabTemplate=agentWorksBy
MIRIAM WEI LO
Miriam Wei Wei Lo was born in Toronto, Canada in 1973. Her heritage is Chinese-Malaysian on her father's side and Anglo-Australian on her mother's. Both her grandmothers Liang Yue Xian and Eva Sounness feature prominently in her poetry. Miriam grew up and was educated in Singapore, moving to Australia in 1993
MIRIAM WEI WEI LO
https://miriamweiweilo.com/home-poem-miriam-wei-wei-lo-nsw-hsc-syllabus
“Home” Q&A
“Home” is a poem I wrote in 2012. It has recently been selected for the NSW HSC syllabus.
Teachers have written asking for more information on the poem. I’m posting to share their questions and my answers.
WHAT ARE YOUR POETIC INFLUENCES?
I admire the discipline of traditional poetic forms (both in English and Chinese). The Metaphysical poets (Donne, Herbert, Marvell) and the Tang Dynasty poets (Li Bai, Tu Fu) all helped me develop an ear for rhythm and rhyme. Most poets writing in English are influenced (whether consciously or not) by the Imagists and the Free Verse movement of the early twentieth century. I count myself in that majority.
My contemporary influences are diverse and include African-American poet Gwendolyn Brooks (especially "The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock"), Chinese-Singaporean poet Angeline Yap (“Lesong”), Anglo-Australian poet Peter Boyle ("On Invoking the Goddess" has been really important), and Asian-Australian poet Michelle Cahill ("Ode to Mumbai" - particularly for its last line).
CAN YOU DESCRIBE THE FORM OF “HOME”?
"Home" itself is written in fairly standard free verse form. Its stanza lengths vary and so do its line lengths. The line is still important, though and it is good to pay attention to the line breaks. I have written prose poems and they are not the same as free verse. Free verse still pays attention to rhythm in a way that prose poetry does not.
CAN YOU PLEASE COMMENT ON THE CONTENT OF “HOME”?
My intention in "Home" was to fuse image and emotion (this is where the Peter Boyle poem mentioned above has been so influential). The idea of 'home', for anyone who has experienced dislocation or uncertainty about identity, is complex. The greater the dislocation or uncertainty, the deeper the complexity. Personally, I have lived in three different nation-states (Canada, Singapore, and Australia). I am also the product of a mixed-race marriage (my father is Chinese-Malaysian and my mother Anglo-Australian). My father was born in incredible poverty. I live in relative affluence. I know what it is to live in a city where the lights never go out and the traffic never stops, and I know what it is to live in a quiet country town where the entire town centre takes up one street. Where is home? What is home? Is it the memory of what I grew up with? Is it something I look back to or forward to? Is it something I experience now?
The other notion of 'home' that is central to the poem in question is the belief that 'home' could be an other-worldly place - a place not confined to the space-time dimension of this universe. Perhaps all the 'homes' we experience in this life are shadows or imperfect copies of a perfect Ideal - a Home that is both Place and Person - perfect 'at-home-ness' and deepest connection. My understanding of this Place/Person is heavily influenced by my Christian beliefs. A good way into understanding "Home", especially the second section ("Without Warning"), would be to read the following:
Biblical references:
It was the Unicorn who summed up what everyone was feeling. He stamped his right fore-hoof on the ground and neighed, and then cried:
'I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason we loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this."
PLEASE DESCRIBE YOUR CULTURAL HERITAGE AND EXPERIENCES OF ‘HOME’
I was born in Canada. My parents decided, at my birth, to apply for Australian citizenship for me through my mother. I do not have Canadian citizenship. My first memories, however, are of snow and ice. We then moved to Malaysia (a wildly different landscape) for a few months, and then to Singapore. I lived in Singapore (as it was rapidly urbanising) until my late teens. I moved to Australia to go to university, met and married my husband while at university, and have lived in this country ever since. Within Australia I have lived in Perth, Brisbane (for 5 years), Perth again, Margaret River for 11 years as a Baptist pastor's wife, and now Perth yet again, where we have very recently co-located with my husband's aging parents. I now have the joys and challenges of living in a multi-generational household.
I am very much aware that I have had the privilege of some choice when it comes to where I live. While I did not feel comfortable with Singaporean culture or with the Singaporean political landscape, I was not compelled to flee because I lived in fear of losing my life. I had the option of simply choosing to live in Australia, without even the hassle of filling out an application form. I have read many refugee narratives. My own experiences of displacement and loss, while genuine, do not have the same degree of pain, injustice, suffering, or intense uncertainty. I think of Rosemary Sayer's More to the Story: Conversations with Refugees and Robin de Crespigny's account of Ali Al Jenabi's life in The People Smuggler, and I recognise a depth of hardship that I have yet to experience.
PLEASE DESCRIBE YOUR SPIRITUAL HOME
One of the effects of moving so many times is that I know I cannot cling too tightly to any earthly home. I find this difficult. I think we all long for certainty and complete belonging. When I face yet another move it helps to remember that I have an ultimate home - yes, a spiritual home - that this whole life is a journey towards.
In St Paul's second letter to the Corinthians he writes: "For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this tent we groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling" (2 Cor 5:1-2).
When I wrote "Home" I was living, with three young children, in a manse behind Margaret River Baptist church. A manse is a peculiar sort of dwelling built to house ministers of religion and their families. It is not quite the same as living in your own house, and it is not quite the same as renting. I still struggled with feeling like it was not really mine. When I struggled, I would remember the tiny Chinatown shophouse in Kuching, Malaysia, that my father was born into. I would also think about the passage from 2 Corinthians mentioned above. There was, at the time, blue plumbago and white jasmine in the garden at the manse; as well as a Chinese mulberry tree, which I had (rather defiantly) planted.
Even if every other thing I hang my identity on changes, I am a loved and forgiven child of God, bought by the blood of Jesus. This does not change. It is the anchor of my spiritual home.
CAN YOU DESCRIBE YOUR CURRENT HOME IN AUSTRALIA?
We have, very recently, moved from Margaret River back to Perth to co-locate with my husband's parents. Even though they are Anglo-Australian they were beginning to think that the Chinese and Italians had better cultural traditions of multi-generational living as a way for the young and the old to provide for each other. They approached us to see if we were interested in co-locating with them and we agreed to embark on this journey together. I was brought up immersed in a culture where multi-generational households were and still are normal, so this new type of 'home' feels like a good fit.
Acknowledgements“Home” was first published in the 2013 anthology Contemporary Asian Australian Poets (edited by Adam Aitken, Kim Cheng Boey & Michelle Cahill). Thanks, you three, for all you do for poetry and for Asian-Australian poets.
https://miriamweiweilo.com/home-poem-miriam-wei-wei-lo-nsw-hsc-syllabus
“Home” Q&A
“Home” is a poem I wrote in 2012. It has recently been selected for the NSW HSC syllabus.
Teachers have written asking for more information on the poem. I’m posting to share their questions and my answers.
WHAT ARE YOUR POETIC INFLUENCES?
I admire the discipline of traditional poetic forms (both in English and Chinese). The Metaphysical poets (Donne, Herbert, Marvell) and the Tang Dynasty poets (Li Bai, Tu Fu) all helped me develop an ear for rhythm and rhyme. Most poets writing in English are influenced (whether consciously or not) by the Imagists and the Free Verse movement of the early twentieth century. I count myself in that majority.
My contemporary influences are diverse and include African-American poet Gwendolyn Brooks (especially "The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock"), Chinese-Singaporean poet Angeline Yap (“Lesong”), Anglo-Australian poet Peter Boyle ("On Invoking the Goddess" has been really important), and Asian-Australian poet Michelle Cahill ("Ode to Mumbai" - particularly for its last line).
CAN YOU DESCRIBE THE FORM OF “HOME”?
"Home" itself is written in fairly standard free verse form. Its stanza lengths vary and so do its line lengths. The line is still important, though and it is good to pay attention to the line breaks. I have written prose poems and they are not the same as free verse. Free verse still pays attention to rhythm in a way that prose poetry does not.
CAN YOU PLEASE COMMENT ON THE CONTENT OF “HOME”?
My intention in "Home" was to fuse image and emotion (this is where the Peter Boyle poem mentioned above has been so influential). The idea of 'home', for anyone who has experienced dislocation or uncertainty about identity, is complex. The greater the dislocation or uncertainty, the deeper the complexity. Personally, I have lived in three different nation-states (Canada, Singapore, and Australia). I am also the product of a mixed-race marriage (my father is Chinese-Malaysian and my mother Anglo-Australian). My father was born in incredible poverty. I live in relative affluence. I know what it is to live in a city where the lights never go out and the traffic never stops, and I know what it is to live in a quiet country town where the entire town centre takes up one street. Where is home? What is home? Is it the memory of what I grew up with? Is it something I look back to or forward to? Is it something I experience now?
The other notion of 'home' that is central to the poem in question is the belief that 'home' could be an other-worldly place - a place not confined to the space-time dimension of this universe. Perhaps all the 'homes' we experience in this life are shadows or imperfect copies of a perfect Ideal - a Home that is both Place and Person - perfect 'at-home-ness' and deepest connection. My understanding of this Place/Person is heavily influenced by my Christian beliefs. A good way into understanding "Home", especially the second section ("Without Warning"), would be to read the following:
Biblical references:
- the first chapter of the gospel of John
- 2 Corinthians 4:16 - 5:4
- the final two chapters of The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis.
It was the Unicorn who summed up what everyone was feeling. He stamped his right fore-hoof on the ground and neighed, and then cried:
'I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason we loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this."
PLEASE DESCRIBE YOUR CULTURAL HERITAGE AND EXPERIENCES OF ‘HOME’
I was born in Canada. My parents decided, at my birth, to apply for Australian citizenship for me through my mother. I do not have Canadian citizenship. My first memories, however, are of snow and ice. We then moved to Malaysia (a wildly different landscape) for a few months, and then to Singapore. I lived in Singapore (as it was rapidly urbanising) until my late teens. I moved to Australia to go to university, met and married my husband while at university, and have lived in this country ever since. Within Australia I have lived in Perth, Brisbane (for 5 years), Perth again, Margaret River for 11 years as a Baptist pastor's wife, and now Perth yet again, where we have very recently co-located with my husband's aging parents. I now have the joys and challenges of living in a multi-generational household.
I am very much aware that I have had the privilege of some choice when it comes to where I live. While I did not feel comfortable with Singaporean culture or with the Singaporean political landscape, I was not compelled to flee because I lived in fear of losing my life. I had the option of simply choosing to live in Australia, without even the hassle of filling out an application form. I have read many refugee narratives. My own experiences of displacement and loss, while genuine, do not have the same degree of pain, injustice, suffering, or intense uncertainty. I think of Rosemary Sayer's More to the Story: Conversations with Refugees and Robin de Crespigny's account of Ali Al Jenabi's life in The People Smuggler, and I recognise a depth of hardship that I have yet to experience.
PLEASE DESCRIBE YOUR SPIRITUAL HOME
One of the effects of moving so many times is that I know I cannot cling too tightly to any earthly home. I find this difficult. I think we all long for certainty and complete belonging. When I face yet another move it helps to remember that I have an ultimate home - yes, a spiritual home - that this whole life is a journey towards.
In St Paul's second letter to the Corinthians he writes: "For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this tent we groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling" (2 Cor 5:1-2).
When I wrote "Home" I was living, with three young children, in a manse behind Margaret River Baptist church. A manse is a peculiar sort of dwelling built to house ministers of religion and their families. It is not quite the same as living in your own house, and it is not quite the same as renting. I still struggled with feeling like it was not really mine. When I struggled, I would remember the tiny Chinatown shophouse in Kuching, Malaysia, that my father was born into. I would also think about the passage from 2 Corinthians mentioned above. There was, at the time, blue plumbago and white jasmine in the garden at the manse; as well as a Chinese mulberry tree, which I had (rather defiantly) planted.
Even if every other thing I hang my identity on changes, I am a loved and forgiven child of God, bought by the blood of Jesus. This does not change. It is the anchor of my spiritual home.
CAN YOU DESCRIBE YOUR CURRENT HOME IN AUSTRALIA?
We have, very recently, moved from Margaret River back to Perth to co-locate with my husband's parents. Even though they are Anglo-Australian they were beginning to think that the Chinese and Italians had better cultural traditions of multi-generational living as a way for the young and the old to provide for each other. They approached us to see if we were interested in co-locating with them and we agreed to embark on this journey together. I was brought up immersed in a culture where multi-generational households were and still are normal, so this new type of 'home' feels like a good fit.
Acknowledgements“Home” was first published in the 2013 anthology Contemporary Asian Australian Poets (edited by Adam Aitken, Kim Cheng Boey & Michelle Cahill). Thanks, you three, for all you do for poetry and for Asian-Australian poets.
LINKS RELATING TO MIRIAM WEI LO
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ht_pfcHLaDE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzlmTsReqx0&list=PL6JcE9XKo7QGHbeIcrszNA6dQVB32ZFGT&index=7&t=0s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ekh9kSZvZOs&list=PL6JcE9XKo7QGHbeIcrszNA6dQVB32ZFGT&index=5&t=0s
https://miriamweiweilo.com/home-poem-miriam-wei-wei-lo-nsw-hsc-syllabus
https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/archived/poetica/miriam-wei-wei-lo/3912758
https://prezi.com/p/hiyiqmu8nm7d/language-culture-identity/
MAUREEN TEN
LANGUAGE, CULTURE & IDENTITY
MULTI-CULTURAL AUSTRALIA
BY POLLY POWELL
https://prezi.com/p/hiyiqmu8nm7d/language-culture-identity/
MULTI-CULTURAL AUSTRALIA
Australian Society
Over the past 30 or so years, Australia’s population has almost doubled; it lives longer and in more diverse arrangements. Australia has transformed into a successful multiracial, multi-ethnic and multilingual society, where more than a quarter of the population was born overseas.
AUSTRALIA'S RICH CULTURAL TAPESTRY
Culture
But ‘multicultural’ does not simply mean that many different cultures live in one country – it implies that they each continue their own traditions and practices harmoniously within the adopted country.
Poems
Introduction
This, the essence of Australia’s thriving cultural diversity, is mused upon in the poems 'Translucent Jade' by Maureen Ten and 'Mother' by Vuong Pham; and in Naghmeh Farzaneh's animation. Each of these works focus on a set of sentiments and circumstances around living the shadows of two cultures.
TRANSLUCENT JADE
by Maureen Ten
Translucent Jade, by Maureen Ten, a Chinese-Australian who emigrated in 1989, explores themes of reclaiming one’s cultural identity and belonging through language and name. The title ‘Translucent Jade’ represents the thin veil between a life lived and the poet’s true Chinese ethnicity, which over time had slipped away only to be retrieved through the conscious reckoning of her Chinese birth name.
The poet speaks of her grandfather’s “gift” to her – a metaphor for her ancestral name, language and heritage – that had been subliminally replaced by her mother’s “gift”, the cultural identity and comforts of her adopted home, Australia.
GRANDFATHER
The passage of time prompted the poet to seek the answers to the “hidden aspects” of her ethnicity that she had “heard stories” about, and through her poetry she describes her tentative re-immersion into her ancestral culture. She slips it on like an old yet “pristine” costume, and from somewhere curious it awakens oddly familiar “vibrations” in her.
HIDDEN ASPECTS
But can one live in-between two identities? Traverse between two cultures? “Do I to it belong”? Only when she recognises the true value of her ‘gem’ – Jade, a significant stone in the culture of China – does she understand that the Chinese language is an essential element of her culture and identity. And through it she will find her way slowly back from her diaspora.
MOTHER
By Vuong Pham
Mother is a free-verse lyric poem by Vuong Pham, a Vietnamese Australian. The poem is about the persona’s reflections on the love he bears for his elders. The Vietnamese-born mother in the poem has had rich life experiences in both Vietnam and Australia, which is communicated through her son’s reflections on the sacrifices she made to secure her son’s future.
THEMES
There are three significant themes explored throughout this poem. The first relates to the debt that we owe our parents for sacrificing their identities back in their home countries for our future happiness and success. The second relates to the passage of her time which creates a sense of reflection and gratitude. And the third theme connect to the importance of language and culture in the immigrant’s new homeland.
TECHNIQUES
The repetition of the motif “grey hair” symbolises the importance of the ageing mothers’ Vietnamese language, and the son’s desire to acquire his ‘mother tongue’ in order to unlock his true identity and cultural wisdom. As said in the eight stanza, “I know now, as I did in my childhood wonder, what it must’ve been to mother” infers to the intelligence his mother holds, and the reckoning the son acquires. The use of dreamlike imagery immediately creates the theme of wonder and fantasy. It establishes the importance of memory and imagination to understand and appreciate the family history. For instance, the memory of his mother gardening is an additional means through which her son can unlock his mother’s wisdom, and ultimately his own culture.
MEANING
The two poems, Translucent Jade and Mother, both speak of diaspora looking to reconnect with their culture through name, language and memory. The poem’s infer that language is the most powerful conduit to an individual’s identity - the ability to understand one’s language is power, and to know one’s language is to know one’s identity and culture.
RELATED TEXT
Scent of Geranium, written and directed by Naghmen Farzaneh, is an award winning short animation about immigration from Iran to America. It depicts a new chapter of her life, of unexpected events that take her down paths never imagined.
SCENT OF GERANIUM
By Naghmeh Farzaneh
ANALYSIS
In the opening scene the persona talks about her mother telling her "when you move a plant from one place to another, you need to give it some time before it will grow any leaves.". This is a consistent metaphor throughout the animation that gently infers that you cannot migrate from one country to another and expect it to feel like your birth-home straight away. It takes time for you to put down your roots and for your new identity and language to form – “When you move a plant from one place to another, it’s roots may get damaged. The soil changes. It needs time to get used to its new atmosphere, before the roots get strong. Then, you will see, soon it will bloom again.”
Metamorphosis is a running theme throughout the film, used as a metaphor for immigration. It is most vividly captured by the mother’s geraniums, which bloom in the final frames, but metamorphosis is also present in the clever compositions and transitions between memories. This, along with Farzaneh’s witty observations, gives the film its ultimately hopeful tone.
Farzaneh’s beautiful style of hand-drawn animation is like a painting come to life. Her minimalist black-and-white style adds another emotional layer to the film, as flourishes of watercolour act as visual accents but also balance out the difficult memories of her changing identity.
RELATION TO POEMS
The three works discussed offer views around living between two identities and traversing cultures. In each, the subject connects to their ethnicity, frequently metaphorically, through experiences with and memories of their mothers. They all seek out the layered identities innate of members of the diaspora, either through language or memory.
MULTI-CULTURAL AUSTRALIA
BY POLLY POWELL
https://prezi.com/p/hiyiqmu8nm7d/language-culture-identity/
MULTI-CULTURAL AUSTRALIA
Australian Society
Over the past 30 or so years, Australia’s population has almost doubled; it lives longer and in more diverse arrangements. Australia has transformed into a successful multiracial, multi-ethnic and multilingual society, where more than a quarter of the population was born overseas.
AUSTRALIA'S RICH CULTURAL TAPESTRY
Culture
But ‘multicultural’ does not simply mean that many different cultures live in one country – it implies that they each continue their own traditions and practices harmoniously within the adopted country.
Poems
Introduction
This, the essence of Australia’s thriving cultural diversity, is mused upon in the poems 'Translucent Jade' by Maureen Ten and 'Mother' by Vuong Pham; and in Naghmeh Farzaneh's animation. Each of these works focus on a set of sentiments and circumstances around living the shadows of two cultures.
TRANSLUCENT JADE
by Maureen Ten
Translucent Jade, by Maureen Ten, a Chinese-Australian who emigrated in 1989, explores themes of reclaiming one’s cultural identity and belonging through language and name. The title ‘Translucent Jade’ represents the thin veil between a life lived and the poet’s true Chinese ethnicity, which over time had slipped away only to be retrieved through the conscious reckoning of her Chinese birth name.
The poet speaks of her grandfather’s “gift” to her – a metaphor for her ancestral name, language and heritage – that had been subliminally replaced by her mother’s “gift”, the cultural identity and comforts of her adopted home, Australia.
GRANDFATHER
The passage of time prompted the poet to seek the answers to the “hidden aspects” of her ethnicity that she had “heard stories” about, and through her poetry she describes her tentative re-immersion into her ancestral culture. She slips it on like an old yet “pristine” costume, and from somewhere curious it awakens oddly familiar “vibrations” in her.
HIDDEN ASPECTS
But can one live in-between two identities? Traverse between two cultures? “Do I to it belong”? Only when she recognises the true value of her ‘gem’ – Jade, a significant stone in the culture of China – does she understand that the Chinese language is an essential element of her culture and identity. And through it she will find her way slowly back from her diaspora.
MOTHER
By Vuong Pham
Mother is a free-verse lyric poem by Vuong Pham, a Vietnamese Australian. The poem is about the persona’s reflections on the love he bears for his elders. The Vietnamese-born mother in the poem has had rich life experiences in both Vietnam and Australia, which is communicated through her son’s reflections on the sacrifices she made to secure her son’s future.
THEMES
There are three significant themes explored throughout this poem. The first relates to the debt that we owe our parents for sacrificing their identities back in their home countries for our future happiness and success. The second relates to the passage of her time which creates a sense of reflection and gratitude. And the third theme connect to the importance of language and culture in the immigrant’s new homeland.
TECHNIQUES
The repetition of the motif “grey hair” symbolises the importance of the ageing mothers’ Vietnamese language, and the son’s desire to acquire his ‘mother tongue’ in order to unlock his true identity and cultural wisdom. As said in the eight stanza, “I know now, as I did in my childhood wonder, what it must’ve been to mother” infers to the intelligence his mother holds, and the reckoning the son acquires. The use of dreamlike imagery immediately creates the theme of wonder and fantasy. It establishes the importance of memory and imagination to understand and appreciate the family history. For instance, the memory of his mother gardening is an additional means through which her son can unlock his mother’s wisdom, and ultimately his own culture.
MEANING
The two poems, Translucent Jade and Mother, both speak of diaspora looking to reconnect with their culture through name, language and memory. The poem’s infer that language is the most powerful conduit to an individual’s identity - the ability to understand one’s language is power, and to know one’s language is to know one’s identity and culture.
RELATED TEXT
Scent of Geranium, written and directed by Naghmen Farzaneh, is an award winning short animation about immigration from Iran to America. It depicts a new chapter of her life, of unexpected events that take her down paths never imagined.
SCENT OF GERANIUM
By Naghmeh Farzaneh
ANALYSIS
In the opening scene the persona talks about her mother telling her "when you move a plant from one place to another, you need to give it some time before it will grow any leaves.". This is a consistent metaphor throughout the animation that gently infers that you cannot migrate from one country to another and expect it to feel like your birth-home straight away. It takes time for you to put down your roots and for your new identity and language to form – “When you move a plant from one place to another, it’s roots may get damaged. The soil changes. It needs time to get used to its new atmosphere, before the roots get strong. Then, you will see, soon it will bloom again.”
Metamorphosis is a running theme throughout the film, used as a metaphor for immigration. It is most vividly captured by the mother’s geraniums, which bloom in the final frames, but metamorphosis is also present in the clever compositions and transitions between memories. This, along with Farzaneh’s witty observations, gives the film its ultimately hopeful tone.
Farzaneh’s beautiful style of hand-drawn animation is like a painting come to life. Her minimalist black-and-white style adds another emotional layer to the film, as flourishes of watercolour act as visual accents but also balance out the difficult memories of her changing identity.
RELATION TO POEMS
The three works discussed offer views around living between two identities and traversing cultures. In each, the subject connects to their ethnicity, frequently metaphorically, through experiences with and memories of their mothers. They all seek out the layered identities innate of members of the diaspora, either through language or memory.
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Yu Ouyang Yu was born in the People's Republic of China, arriving in Australia in 1991 to study for a Ph.D. at La Trobe University (which he earned in 1995.) He is a contemporary Chinese - Australian poet Chinese- Australian Poet, translator and academic. Ouyang Yu, now based in Melbourne, came to Australia from Wuhan, China, in early 1991. By 2015, he had published 75 books of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, literary translation and literary criticism in the English and Chinese languages. He also edits Australia’s only Chinese literary journal, Otherland (since late 1994). Website: https://www.ouyangyu.com.au/ |
Interview with Ouyang Yu
May 9, 2010
Interviewed by Magdalena Ball
Tell me about the origins of On the Smell of an Oily Rag. How did the book come about?
The book began as early as 1998 or earlier, in the form of diary-entry-like fragments, disparate and unrelated, but always dated. I spent much of my Peking University residence (September to December 1999), funded by the Asialink residence program, working on the book, then slowly taking shape.
Were the essays written for the book as a group, or did you write them as individual pieces, designed to stand alone?
As the fragments accumulated, certain patterns appeared, which I subsequently grouped under different headings.
Do you feel that there’s an overall conclusion that the book presents – eg some overview that comes out of the observations?
The conclusion, if any, came late, very very late, near the end, but as time went by, it turned out that each heading acted as a kind of conclusion in itself, not the ones in the published book, but the ones that were not included in the editing process. In fact, the editing did away with much that I cherished, a fact that I have now grown increasingly resigned to.
Did you begin with a hypothesis about the relationship between English or Chinese, or did your perceptions about the connections, similarities and differences between the two languages change as you began to explore it.
‘Hypothesis’? Sounds very English or Western to me. It’s nothing if not organic. The whole thing is an organic growth out of my combination of daily literary activities, fiction, poetry, literary criticism, literary translation and literary magazine editing, in both languages, a growth bit by organic bit, and by fits and starts.
Talk to me a bit about the biji xiaoshuo (pen-notes fiction) genre that the book was written in. What made you choose this style?
I think I’ve given it quite a lot of explanation in my preface to the book. Other than that, I can’t say any more except that people should perhaps start thinking of learning the Chinese language if they really want to know something that is fascinating in another language that they themselves have the least idea about. One highly recommended book of pen-notes fiction is, of course, yuewei caotang biji, by Ji Yun. To read it in the original is to appreciate all the beauty of it. I, for one, read all the English novels in my early days when I had this craze for them, thus knowing what I had wanted to know. As for why I chose the style, it was as unexplainable as why a seed took roots in a particular patch of the soil and grew into a tree or a flower but part of the reason is really my disgust with the books published here and elsewhere, big chunks of stuff that I had little patience for while things could be done in fragments that are much more meaningful. It’s what the pace of life demands of us, too.
The book has been out for a few years now. Have you been pleased with its reception?
No idea how it was received. Can’t be bothered. Did hear from someone that at one particular university the book was so thumbed that it was nearly worn down to a pulp. That pleased me.
There’s quite a lot of sometimes ribald humour throughout the book and much of your other work as well, though it’s subtle at time. But you’re often referred to as the “angry Chinese poet”. Do you feel that your reviewers tend to miss (or misconstrue) the funny in your work?
The epithet ‘angry’ is so passé that the mere mention of it brings a smile to my lips. I haven’t seen anyone that is not angry at times nor have I seen anyone that is always angry. Putting a label on a live person is treating the person as a commodity, not a real human being. It tells more about the labeller and the user of the label than the labelled. On the other hand, if I deny that I sometimes am angry it sounds like Australia saying it is not a racist country because it is but labelling Australia as a racist country is like labelling me as an angry poet. Plain wrong and plain simplistic.
You haven’t hesitated to call attention to Australia’s many flaws and failings, and of course On the Smell of an Oily Rag is no exception, but there’s also much in Australia that you look on dotingly, and note the many connections between both languages. Do you also love Australia in a way that might mirror your feelings towards your first country?
I have always loved Australia, exactly why I still stay here and probably will be for the rest of my life and death. It’s a sad thing if a writer ceases to see ‘flaws and failings’ of a place where he ties his life, and, I mean, why do we always expect our writers to sing praise of something that sometimes is far from being praiseworthy? The very fact that a writer is expected to be nice suggests that he or she is treated as an outsider because he or she has no right to do so except to curry favour with, or lick the arse of, something that stinks. No. A writer must say no to anything that smells.
You’re a man who works across many genres. Does one genre appeal to you more than others? Eg would you call yourself a poet before a fiction writer, or are those distinctions unimportant?
I am not in the habit of putting myself in a box or pigeon hole. It’s up to academics or others to do so. I might as well call myself a poet novelist translator essayist critic or criticessayisttranslatornovelistpoet. What does it matter what I do or call myself as long as I engage in creative business?
Talk to me about some of the work that you have in the pipeline.
Two novels are forthcoming, one, The English Class, out in August this year, with Transit Lounge, and the other, Loose: A Wild History, to be out shortly after that, with Wakefield Press. Otherwise, there are two new books of translation in Chinese out shortly in China and three reprints of my translation, also to be out later this year, they being The Female Eunuch, The Whole Woman and The Shock of the New.
Compulsive Reader
AUTHOR INTERVIEWS
About the interviewer: Magdalena Ball runs The Compulsive Reader. She is the author of the poetry book Repulsion Thrust, the novel Sleep Before Evening, a nonfiction book, The Art of Assessment, Quark Soup, and, in collaboration with Carolyn Howard-Johnson, Cherished Pulse , She Wore Emerald Then , and Imagining the Future. She runs a monthly radio program podcast The Compulsive Reader Talks.
Read our review of On the Smell Of An Oily Rag here.
https://www.compulsivereader.com/2010/05/09/interview-with-ouyang-yu-2/
Cyril Wong reviews The Kingsbury Tales by Ouyang Yu
JANUARY 1, 2011 / MASCARA
The Kingsbury Tales
By Ouyang Yu
Brandl and Schlesinger
ISBN 978-1-876040-82-6
Reviewed by CYRIL WONG
In The Kingsbury Tales, Ouyang Yu has decided that he has written a novel, instead of just a collection of poems. Although there is no overarching, dramatic narrative beyond the physical and emotional transitions the poet makes between Australia, China, and even Singapore, Yu’s latest verse volume is arguably a novel in the Bakhtinian sense. Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin has made a general point about poems for when they are potentially novelised: “They become…dialogised, permeated with laughter, irony, humour, elements of self-parody and finally…the novel inserts into these other genres an indeterminacy, a certain semantic openendedness, a living contact with unfinished, still-evolving contemporary reality.” Bakhtin has emphasised that a novel is dialogical by being constituted by various autonomous discourses in respect to which the author takes the position of an interlocutor.
This is certainly the case here, in which Yu’s book consists of an imagined, or remembered, smorgasbord of characters held together by the poet’s critical and poetic imagination. If one is searching for narratives in these poems, they can be found in the established, historical ones that intersect across the poet’s diasporic position as a Chinese writer living in Australia (Kingsbury, Victoria, to be exact.) The Kingsbury Tales has irony and humour, but they are subsumed under the long shadow of melancholy (life, Yu writes in the book’s closing poem, is, for an old man, “not worth living / Better never born”.) This melancholy permeates the poems as they struggle to expose the often discomfiting “openendedness” of historical discourses and contemporary multiculturalism (an openendedness that also exists in the definition of genres like the novel form, which Yu unabashedly exploits for his purposes here). Divided into general sections such as Historical Tales, Women’s Tales, Migrants’ Tales, Singapore Tales etc., the poems within them care less about offering an aesthetic thrill than about conveying a sense of jarring displacement or tragedy that stems from the poet or his characters being unable to make sense of the world.
From a poem like “An Aboriginal Tale,” in which the poet parallels the same racism faced by both an Aboriginal person and a Chinese woman, to a poem like “Shanghai Women” about how a Shanghainese woman, who is “living a not very interesting Australian life,” longs to return to China with the ashes of her dead husband, Yu starkly brings to our attention the real life stories and microscopic incidents that go wrongfully unnoticed by larger narratives about society. The poet’s own life is put under scrutiny too. In “The Palm Reader’s Tale,” the palm reader takes the poet’s hand and reads him as a man “not content with doing one thing only” and notes that whatever he does, “there is always something there that tries to frustrate it or him.” Restlessness and frustration are the fuel that drives these poems to form a picture of what John Kinsella has described, in his preface, as “a paranoid zone wrestling with its own exclusion and belonging.” What is excluded are the oppressive ideologues according to which our lives are forcibly aligned, while what belongs in the picture, or Yu’s poetic zone, is the indeterminacy and fragmented nature of dissonant, cultural units that the poet, and other diasporic figures like the poet, are forced to hold together within the conflicted spaces of their own self-identification.
If language is the entryway into a different culture, then it is also how we most evidently manifest our inability to ever assimilate ourselves. In “New Accents,” the character, “C from Canton,” mispronounces the word “English” as “Anguish,” indicating the pain that comes from being thrown into a culture that one often remains paradoxically excluded from. It is a paradox that a poet like Yu is struggling to resolve, and also—hence offering another paradox--not resolve, at the same time. On one hand, the poet aims to re-imagine a new linguistic space for cultural disparities, yet it is a space of more conflict than harmony, more chaos and shit than the shaking of hands. After the poem, “Holding Up The Candle,” where the poet recounts a story in which an officer accidentally writes.
JANUARY 1, 2011 / MASCARA
The Kingsbury Tales
By Ouyang Yu
Brandl and Schlesinger
ISBN 978-1-876040-82-6
Reviewed by CYRIL WONG
In The Kingsbury Tales, Ouyang Yu has decided that he has written a novel, instead of just a collection of poems. Although there is no overarching, dramatic narrative beyond the physical and emotional transitions the poet makes between Australia, China, and even Singapore, Yu’s latest verse volume is arguably a novel in the Bakhtinian sense. Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin has made a general point about poems for when they are potentially novelised: “They become…dialogised, permeated with laughter, irony, humour, elements of self-parody and finally…the novel inserts into these other genres an indeterminacy, a certain semantic openendedness, a living contact with unfinished, still-evolving contemporary reality.” Bakhtin has emphasised that a novel is dialogical by being constituted by various autonomous discourses in respect to which the author takes the position of an interlocutor.
This is certainly the case here, in which Yu’s book consists of an imagined, or remembered, smorgasbord of characters held together by the poet’s critical and poetic imagination. If one is searching for narratives in these poems, they can be found in the established, historical ones that intersect across the poet’s diasporic position as a Chinese writer living in Australia (Kingsbury, Victoria, to be exact.) The Kingsbury Tales has irony and humour, but they are subsumed under the long shadow of melancholy (life, Yu writes in the book’s closing poem, is, for an old man, “not worth living / Better never born”.) This melancholy permeates the poems as they struggle to expose the often discomfiting “openendedness” of historical discourses and contemporary multiculturalism (an openendedness that also exists in the definition of genres like the novel form, which Yu unabashedly exploits for his purposes here). Divided into general sections such as Historical Tales, Women’s Tales, Migrants’ Tales, Singapore Tales etc., the poems within them care less about offering an aesthetic thrill than about conveying a sense of jarring displacement or tragedy that stems from the poet or his characters being unable to make sense of the world.
From a poem like “An Aboriginal Tale,” in which the poet parallels the same racism faced by both an Aboriginal person and a Chinese woman, to a poem like “Shanghai Women” about how a Shanghainese woman, who is “living a not very interesting Australian life,” longs to return to China with the ashes of her dead husband, Yu starkly brings to our attention the real life stories and microscopic incidents that go wrongfully unnoticed by larger narratives about society. The poet’s own life is put under scrutiny too. In “The Palm Reader’s Tale,” the palm reader takes the poet’s hand and reads him as a man “not content with doing one thing only” and notes that whatever he does, “there is always something there that tries to frustrate it or him.” Restlessness and frustration are the fuel that drives these poems to form a picture of what John Kinsella has described, in his preface, as “a paranoid zone wrestling with its own exclusion and belonging.” What is excluded are the oppressive ideologues according to which our lives are forcibly aligned, while what belongs in the picture, or Yu’s poetic zone, is the indeterminacy and fragmented nature of dissonant, cultural units that the poet, and other diasporic figures like the poet, are forced to hold together within the conflicted spaces of their own self-identification.
If language is the entryway into a different culture, then it is also how we most evidently manifest our inability to ever assimilate ourselves. In “New Accents,” the character, “C from Canton,” mispronounces the word “English” as “Anguish,” indicating the pain that comes from being thrown into a culture that one often remains paradoxically excluded from. It is a paradox that a poet like Yu is struggling to resolve, and also—hence offering another paradox--not resolve, at the same time. On one hand, the poet aims to re-imagine a new linguistic space for cultural disparities, yet it is a space of more conflict than harmony, more chaos and shit than the shaking of hands. After the poem, “Holding Up The Candle,” where the poet recounts a story in which an officer accidentally writes.
LINKS RELATING TO OUYANG YU
https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/foreign-ness-michelle-cahill-and-ouyang-yu
https://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=2837&context=artspapers
https://www.nla.gov.au/audio/otherland-ouyang-yu
https://cordite.org.au/interviews/dale-yu/
https://cordite.org.au/reviews/heather-taylor-johnson-reviews-ouyang-yu/
https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/archived/poetica/ouyang-yu/4806204
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12Ztr6KaFS0
https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/foreign-ness-michelle-cahill-and-ouyang-yu
https://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=2837&context=artspapers
https://www.nla.gov.au/audio/otherland-ouyang-yu
https://cordite.org.au/interviews/dale-yu/
https://cordite.org.au/reviews/heather-taylor-johnson-reviews-ouyang-yu/
https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/archived/poetica/ouyang-yu/4806204
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12Ztr6KaFS0
Vuong Pham
Vuong Pham is an English teacher. He lives in Brisbane, where he was born to Vietnamese refugees. Pham has received many awards throughout his life such as the Edwards Property Mentorship Award through the Ipswich Poetry Feast Competition in 2011. His poetry has appeared in many journals and magazines in Australia and around the world. His poems express ideas of what it means to be a multi-cultural Australian.
Vuong Pham is an English teacher. He lives in Brisbane, where he was born to Vietnamese refugees. Pham has received many awards throughout his life such as the Edwards Property Mentorship Award through the Ipswich Poetry Feast Competition in 2011. His poetry has appeared in many journals and magazines in Australia and around the world. His poems express ideas of what it means to be a multi-cultural Australian.
https://grahamnunn.wordpress.com/tag/interview-with-vuong-pham/
https://prezi.com/p/i3axicktl_5d/english/
SUPPLEMENTARY LINKS:
https://prezi.com/p/ds_ybtvgihyp/language-identity-culture/
https://brealaa.weebly.com/
https://prezi.com/p/zq1t1xvarc6x/task-two/