Oscar Schwartz on the poetry of Chris Mann

Monday, September 17, 3pm, Menzies N702 (Monash Clayton)

                      Yr stuffed. Not coz yr wrong but coz yr looking in the wrong direction.
                        – Chris Mann

Chris Mann’s poetry is complicated to the point of breathlessness. When engaging with a Mann poem for the first time it is as if one has suddenly become dyslexic: the words are there, but their construction resists meaning. The complex façade of a Chris Mann poem is intimidating for any reader, so his readership is limited almost exclusively to the domain of the international avant-garde - more exclusively, to an international community of experimental composers.

This seminar will provide a point of entry into Mann’s work, and his exploration of cybernetics, linguistics, poetics and composition. Then comes the revelation: to read Chris Mann requires a new conception of what reading can be - as performance.

Gig Ryan - A Reading from New and Selected Poems



Monday, 10th September 2012, 2pm – 4pm

Elizabeth Burchill Rooms,
Building 68  (Performing Arts Centre), Clayton Campus


To celebrate the publication of her long-awaited New and Selected Poems (Giramondo 2011), Gig Ryan will be reading from and discussing her poetry. Her most recent book, also published in the UK, collects work from over three decades, and has been shortlisted for both the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal and the Prime Minister's Literary Awards.


Gig Ryan is the author of six previous volumes: The Division of Anger (1981), Manners of an Astronaut (1984), The Last Interior (1986), Excavation (1990), Pure and Applied (1998), and Heroic Money (2001). She has been awarded the C.J. Dennis Prize for Poetry in 1999, and the FAW Anne Elder Poetry Award.

As the critic Owen Richardson has written, her widely anthologised and influential poetry is,
‘the product of a thoroughgoing research into language where the materials, the data, are displayed, denaturalised: skidding jolting precipitate diction, counterpoints of stateliness and trashiness kept from incoherence by tightly organised sound and rhythmic systems, synaesthesia, catachresis, collage — it’s all absolutely modern….she may even have invented or at any rate done the best R&D on a whole new affect, elegiac sarcasm.’
Gig Ryan has been the poetry editor of The Age since 1998; she also works as freelance reviewer, and has written extended articles on Les Murray, Judith Wright, and Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer.





Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)