My second instalment of WDYWP?, featuring the illustrative genius of US comicpoet Paul Tunis, author of the glorious Blind to Blue, is now available for your reading pleasure over at The Blue Corner.
He makes a Rube Goldberg reference. This pleases me no end.
Belatedly, I am happy to declare that I successfully completed the challenge that I set myself last year as part of the Australian Women Writers Challenge, to wit: to read at least 10 books written by Australian women and to review at least 4 of them.
Happy to say that I actually managed to review 9 of the books that I read, the only unreviewed book being Man Wolf Man by LK Holt, which I’d borrowed from a friend and had to give back before I could finish my second read-through, which I like to do when reviewing poetry especially. In place of a finished review of Ms. Holt’s book in the list below, allow me to say that I did like it quite a lot, and that I fully intend to review the bugger properly when I get my hands on a copy once again.
Anyway, here are links to the 9 that I DID review:
EDIT: Whoops. After it was announced that Amazon had bought Goodreads I deleted my GR account in a fit of moral righteousness so none of the below links work right now. I have a plan though – stay tuned.
There’s only one author in that list who got a mention when I posted at the end of 2011 about taking up the 2012 challenge, and that’s LK Holt, who I haven’t actually reviewed. No Gwen Harwood, no Joanne Burns, no Tracy Ryan (though I did start Scar Revision toward the end of the year, but I had to return it to the library before I’d finished it and I haven’t re-borrowed it yet)… I’m not sure a biography of Mary Gilmore counts, though some of her poems were quoted in that book…
As an experiment in expanding my experience of the words of Australian women poets, then, I guess I kind of failed, but as an experience in reading authors who were new to me, I did pretty well – prior to 2012 I’d only read Linda Jaivan’s work before.
Looking back on that list and my reviews, though, it strikes me that there aren’t many books on it that I really really enjoyed. Elmo Keep’s little freebie ebook collection of articles and essays was a cracker, and Dymphna Cusack (excellent name btw) hits it for six and a half with A Bough In Hell – so much so that I pretty much went straight out and bought a whole bunch more of her novels – and Fiona Wright’s Knuckled is a damn fine debut collection that any poet could be proud of, but the overweening emotion that I got from most of these books was disappointment, if not active dislike.
I guess that’s not the point though – you can’t expect to finish up an exercise like this all “all Australian women writers are fabulous“. That would be disingenuous. And even if you don’t like a book there are some good things to be taken from the experience.
I found the finer details of Anita Heiss’s family life and career dull, but the important argument her book makes is well serviced by that fact. I thought Anne Whitehead’s book exemplified the worst of memoir and travel writing, but it did give me an overview of Mary Gilmore’s character and point me in the direction of some other books to read about both Gilmore and the New Australia colony. I didn’t think Linda Jaivan’s novel quite held together under the competing tensions of humour and political allegory, but it was moving and thought-provoking nonetheless.
It may not have been as happy clappy a year of reading as I subconsciously expected, but the challenge was a good thing to do all the same, and I recommend that anyone who’s interested or even intrigued consider taking the 2013 challenge for themselves.
I won’t be joining you this year – I need to hold off on taking on another annual reading plan for now because I already have one reading project underway at the moment: Anna and I have signed up for The Year of Reading Proust and to be honest I’m about 80-120 pages behind where I need to be in order to get the entirety of In Search of Lost Time read by the end of the year. But more on that at a later date.
Four more of my poetries were rejunkted by the folks at Overland, this time “If We Detached the Hands of the Town Hall Clock From Its Internal Mechanism and Let Gravity Have Its Way”, “…and for a moment”, “After the Beep” and “Second Comes Right After First”.
“We appreciate the chance to read it,” they said. “Unfortunately, the piece is not for us,” they said. Four times they said it.
I’ve noticed that there seem to be two tiers of rejection at Overland, the aforementioned “not for us” bit, and the less-all-encompassing “While we can’t use this particular piece at the moment, we like the writing, and hope you will continue to send us your work,” with which they greeted the earlier submission of my odd little Run-DMC-inspired biopoem of William Strunk Jr., leading me to conclude either that a) they liked the Strunk thing better than the other things and it might be a good idea to revise it and resubmit or b) they’re just tired of my writing altogether and are now resigned to sending me the less encouraging form rejection so that I’ll stop wasting their time. I think I’ll go with a) for now.
Long-time readers might be familiar with my semi-regular blog posts wherein I put the above question to practitioners of the poetic art to find out what motivates them to practise it in the first place.
As of now that semi-regular feature will become a regular feature, appearing once a month over at Going Down Swinging‘s Blue Corner blog. The first post went up today, featuring ex-GDS ed Kevin Brophy’s answer-in-the-form-of-a-poem which some of you may remember as originally appearing right here back in November.
It’s nice to be taken under the GDS wing once more. I’m really looking forward to hanging out with the other blue cornerers and seeing what they come up with in the weeks ahead.
If you’re a poet type and you want to have a swing at an answer to the above, by all means contact me by leaving a comment here or by using the somewhat confusing email address listed somewhere on this blog. Or if you just want to know what drives other poets, stay tuned to the Blue Corner for more.
You still here?
Just before Christmas I got contacted by David Prater about participating in a little blog meme thing called Next Big Thing, whereby you do a short self-interview about the next big project that you plan on unleashing on the world. I was supposed to get it done by Boxing Day, but that didn’t happen.
Anyway, here’s the interview, in which I reveal more than I ever have before about a sekrit projekt I’ve been noodling away on for the last couple years.
What is the title of your book?
Working title is The Devastator Poems, or possibly The Face of Devastation.
What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
A multi-author suite of poems about giant transforming robots, the poems in which also literally transform and merge together to form a giant robot.
I’ve started doing some comic reviews for the Australian Comics Journal, a blog dedicated – as you might expect from the title – to news and reviews about Australian comics. It’s nice to be among such esteemed company, and also nice to have a venue within which to wax lyrical about ozcomics, so thanks to Gary Chaloner, ACJ’s founder and manager, for the opportunity.
My first cab – or perhaps submarine is a better mixed metaphor – off the rank is a review of 2011′s The Deep: Here Be Dragons, a comic about a family of underwater scientists, which was released back in 2011. The Deep’s been in the ozcomics news of late thanks to the recent announcement of its being licenced as an animated television series, so the review is kind of timely, although the good timing is just a coincidence, I have to admit.
Short version: I didn’t like it very much. You can read why over at ACJ.
Sometimes the red river gums rustled
in the beginning of colonization when
Wurundjeri
Bunnerong
Wathauring
and other Kulin nations
sang and danced
and
laughed
aloud
For Invasion Day.
Man Bites Dog, Adam's novel about posties, poets, dobermans & Angela Lansbury is only $5!
Not Quite the Man for the Job, Adam's award-winning poetry collection, is also only $5!
Adam Ford is the author of the poetry books The Third Fruit is a Bird, Not Quite the Man for the Job and From My Head, the novel Man Bites Dog and the short story collection Heroes and Civilians.
He is the genius behind the cult-hit website Monkey Punch Dinosaur and the twitter novel Aramis Fox.
He also makes zines and comics. This is his website.
His email is ADAMFORD-escargot-LABYRINTH-full-stop-NET-full-stop-AU
This website was made on the traditional lands of the Jaara Jaara and the Wurundjeri peoples.
