edging on eleven pm redfern station, december in a hard year,
a train pulls up, direct to ashfield terminal, never seen it before.
its been raining i've been in tears on and off
things not worth mentioning, but there's a split in the pressure. of the air tonight
lights replying to themselves in platform puddles, they can do this
for however long the rain lifts offers this, a small stillness to see
i want to understate it so bad.
an empty train, yellow inside slowing gradually, stopping quick
the opposite of an orgasm but kind of like one, in its pace?
ah, whatever, i feel like i've cum
bewildered in the dark rooted in place pulsing, agape
i want to understate it so bad.
every unwashed window has these prints of grease
abandoned hairs from commuters resting their heads
a day of human stink, visible in this only because the source left and
because my sad and briefly still night its cavern illuminated me and to me
their stained glass window, kind of their chorus their chorus, kind of.
I step on the train i think i'm the only one
it carries me, not quite home overwhelmed with a terrible love
for strangers pain for ghosts
i tell friends who'll listen this sweaty train, how it hit me
and if they listen as i tell them how it hot me, that they will love me
I want to understate it so bad.
From ;
Best of Australian Poems 2025
Guest Editors : Nam Le + Jill Jones
Australian Poetry, Naarm/Melbourne 2025
I was rich & lying
on my Newstart
I could buy us petrol,
maybe drinks at the Das Capital
where we once saw Kim Beazley,
who just lost an election
post-Tampa post-9/11
I had this sweet office gig
making photocopies,
answering phones
Mum's neighbour Craig
ran the cafe across the road.
He gave us freebies.
My Boss loved Craig
& his coffees
Her daughter rang the office
at least twice a day.
Hanging up she would say:
"Don't get married"
"Don't have kids"
My Newstart got us
a converted garage
with a sloping bathroom
& underfloor Millipedes.
We snuck in a kitten.
Craig had two kids
plus a wife on mat leave
He checked on Mum
Mum loved Craig
& his two kids
Kim Beazley promised
he'd make Les Murray
poet laureate as soon as he was PM
but Labor dumped Kim
the same week his brother died.
Les later died,
Craig moved out
Das Capital is an açai place
from ;
Best of Australian Poems 2025
Guest Editors : Nam Le + Jill Jones
Australian Poetry, Naarm/Melbourne 2025
Design Notes
Arbitrary choice to go abstract, mixed media. The first image was used as a source for the subsequent works.
This also got around the problem that Midjourney rendered Beazley as random suit guy.
[note the '/' character is being used in place of the spaces in the poem)
the painting we brought / of the interior
of someone else's / home now come across
as somewhat ironic / such black and white it seems
do we know when to unmask ourselves
how far should we stand from those we love
gloves make for poor intimacy
I caught sight
of a man at his desk / by a window previously
always shuttered / he saw me sweating
on my exercise machine / dressed only in a chemise
I was ashamed
I heard the music next door / and thought
of our neighbours who loved / spanking
we would listen through the wall / and wonder
who was hurting the most
there are people
sitting on park benches / their eyes follow me
I worry / they can tell I am Asian underneath
ticker tongues send out / numbers in the thousands
sites crash and burn
your colleague
has curious taste in art / she gets up
sits inside the closet
I feel lucky
I am childless
dream about jars and wake to
measure
rise not descend write it down
the sun is watery / we have missed the summer
do leave even fall / if you are no longer a witness
from ;
Best of Australian Poems 2025
Guest Editors : Nam Le + Jill Jones
Australian Poetry, Naarm/Melbourne 2025
This is Sunday night; this is the night of August fifteenth
The moon is a blank circle; in the lychee trees
A cool breeze sways inside the pure white body, so many wordless years
Silence in the evergreen weeds, insects cry out, the lamps of the whole city burn bright
Inside the factories, so many dialects, so much homesickness,
So many frail and skinny workers dwell there, so much moonlight falls upon
Sunday’s machines and blueprints. And now it is rising
Shining on my face. Slowly, I am loosing my heart
So many lamps are glaring, so many people passing by
Place yourself inside the bright factories, memories, machines
The speechless moonlight, lamplights, like me
Are so tiny, fragments of spare parts, filaments
Using their vulnerable bodies to warm the factory’s hustle and noise
And all the tears, joy, pain we have ever had
Those noble or humble ideas, spirits are
Illuminated, stored up by moonlight, and taken so far
To fade away as unnoticed rays of light
Translation: 2011, Jonathan Stalling
www.poetryinternational.com/
Industrial Notes prompts design
The initial images created were usable but too late 1800's industrial England. An image of a modern factory in Dongguan used as an image prompt with the fist two lines. From the image then created the image which appears as the first image in the series was used a s style prompt for subsequent poetry lines.
Two lines of the poem used as more will create images which lack focus.
16:P for possible video use.
Chaos 10 for more variety.
The profiles is my general global profile.
Prompt :
Modern Chinese semi abstract painting of < two poetry lines> --chaos 10 --ar 16:9 --profile cdyqjk4
How much love, how much pain, how many nails
Pin me to the machine table, blueprint, order form
Early morning dew, midday’s blood
Must have an iron nail to pin down overtime, industrial disease
And the nameless grief follows, the time of the working class
From the factory buildings unfolds an era of fortune and misery
How many exhausted shadows flash beneath the dull lamps
How many emaciated, frail young working-class women smile numbly
Their love and memory, like moss shaded by green trees, silent and vulnerable
How many soundless nails pass through their calm flesh
Their youth flows with virtue and purity, separated from profit, back pay
Labor law, homesickness, and an unknown love
The sky-blue assembly line dangles booth seats
One painful nail at a time, a momentary stop
Outside the window, autumn passes by, someone right beside it lives
Translation: 2011, Jonathan Stalling
www.poetryinternational.com/
Iron Nails notes on creating the prompt
The initial prompt was just the first stanza of the poem. The result was literal and photographic while a more painterly abstract style was preferred.
Different versions of midjourney used for variations of interpretation.
'Semi abstract, constructionist' across multiple versions used in the prompt but this was too abstract though some generally usable images created.
Appending 'abstract painting by Zhang Kechun' created usable images with industrial machines, bleeding hearts, blueprints and work orders.
Zhang Kechun does photography not paintings but a sparse industrial style is imprinted without impinging on his photographic work.
Two images were selected and used to create a mood board for subsequent stanzas.
Home again among the gardens and fields (T'ao Ch'ien)
1.
Nothing like the others, even as a child
rooted in a love for hills and mountains
I fell into a net of dust, that one
departure a blunder lasting thirteen years.
But a tethered bird longs for its forest
a pond fish its deep waters
So now my
land out on the south edge cleared. I
nurture simplicity among gardens and fields,
home again.
I've got nearly two acres here,
and four or five rooms in my thatch hut.
Elms and Willows shade the caves out back
and in front peach and plum spread wide
Distant - village people lost in the distant haze,
kitchen smoke hangs above wide-open country.
Here dogs bark deep in back roads
and roosters crow from mulberry treetops
No confusion within the gate, no dust
my empty home harbours idleness to spare
Back again: after so long in that trap,
I've returned to all that comes of itself.
Design Notes
Image 1 : Using a moodboard from image created for other poems in version 6 and 5. Many of the images in the moodboard come from images created for a previous T'ao Ch'ien poem:
From my youth up I never liked the city.
I never forgot the mountains where I was born
The world caught me and harnessed me.
And drove me th
The aesthetics are preferable as version 7 is more accurate. However the inaccuracies in previous version often created more interesting images.
Image 2 : Still the Midjourney tendency to have people moving away from the viewer.
Image 3 : A number of reruns and remixes to get the fish into the water and not floating in air.
Image 4 : These images remind me of paintings on the walls in hotels.
Image 6 : This image does not fit the rural themes of the poem. It just seemed a more interesting image. Midjourney for it's own reason added ponds or river or else ice reflection s in the images.
Image 7 : Revised mood board to reduce the icy reflections. Some still there. Having figures in the image was a criteria for selection. This was the third selected image. It has a more rural village look with haze and chimney smoke.
Image 8 : added Image 7 to the mood boards. Reduced the stylise value to 100. No images had the roosters in the trees and dogs on the ground. it was either dogs or roosters on the ground. Dogs are a bit too representational.
Image 9 : It took a while. The reflections need to be reduced in the mood board.
Image 10 : Pushed the stylise parameter ( --s {50, 100, 200, 400, 600, 800} ). The words of the poem from a Midjourney perspective are daily non specific. I select an image with a figure but not within a town.
Locusts a-wing with heavy sound;
strong as great rope may thy line
abound
Wing'd locusts that seem to cease,
in great companies hibernate,
so may thy line last and be great
in hidden ease
Design notes
Image 1 : The style comes from two mood boards. One mood board is from a Midjourney image the other is from a selectionof images by the Australian artist Brett Whiteley.
The Whitely idea came from watching the ABC documentary, 'The Whiteley Art Scandal' on Netflix and ABC iView.
Image 2 : The original image was square and initial rise just added white borders. Had to edit that image by cutting borders then do a Midjourney edit. to image it fit 4:3 my standard size.
Image 3: The appearance of the river was unexpected as was the lines of people. In many image Midjourney get the number of legs wrong.
Shih Ching, Book of Odes
New Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry
Ed: Eliot Weinberger
Here we are picking our first fern shoots
And saying: when shall we get back to our country?
Here we are because we have the Ken-nin for our foreman
We have not comfort because of these Mongols.
We grub the soft fern-shoots.
When anyone says return the others are full of sorrow.
Sorrowful minds, sorrow is strong, we are hungry and thirsty
Our defence is not yet made sure, no can let his friend return.
We grub the old fern-shoots.
We say "Will we be let to go back in October"?
There is no ease in royal affairs, we have no comfort.
Our sorrow is bitter but we would not return to our country.
What flower has come into blossom?
Whose chariot? The General's.
Hs horses even are tired. They were strong.
We have no rest, three battles a month
By heaven his horses even are tired.
The generals are on them. The soldiers are by them
The horses are well trained, the generals have ivory arrows and quivers ornamented with fish-skin.
The enemy is swift, we must be careful.
When we set out the willow ere drooping with Spring,
We came back in snow.
We go slowly, we are hungry and thirsty,
Our minds are full of sorrow, who will know of our grief?
Prompt : oil painting, [Poetry text] , by [Zhang Kechun].
Quotations marks are not used in prompt as this indicates text to Midjourney which is not required.
Design Notes
As much an exploration of poetry and images as Midjourney's processing.
Image 1 : The image has modern aspects Zhang Kechun is a contemporary photographer and the era is not specified.
The focus of much of my work is to have minimal direction on the subject in the prompt. This is to observe how Midjourney creates the images from Indeterminant subject prompts.
"Fern roots". Edible ferns are some of the most important wild vegetables in China. This paper reviews their food uses. The history of eating ferns in China may go back as far as 3000 years. An ethnobotanical inventory of edible ferns was created, with 52 species (including 4 varieties), which were traditionally used.
Acta Societatis Botanicorum Poloniae Vol 81, No 4 (2012)
(via Perplexity)
MJ Version 7 is used for consistency while Version 4 was used previously the faces rendered by Version 4 were often distorted.
Topaz is used to update by only 1x time to add more details but not to make it too illustrative with higher upscaling. The 1x version also are three time smaller and easier to update.
Image 2 : Kennings an Ezra Pound is a mistranslation of the term 玁狁 -Xiānyún, which is a generic name for nomadic tribes hostile to China. The mongols mentioned are probably generic nomads rather than the Mongols of the 12th and 13th centuries.
Image 3 : Optionally added "Chinese male archers" to to the first line. This is to focus the main topic otherwise Midjourney create images with women and children.
Image 4 : Developing into an instructive project where the subject is distinct. Using Topaz Gigapixel to engage at 4x since the line are less jagged than a 1x enlargement. Acorn image programs then reduced the size for upward as maximum 20 mb allowed.
Image 5 : Midjourney has improved the creation of small faces but there can still be incorrect rendering. Topaz used to resize and add detail at 6x then reduced in Acorn to fit websites.
Some interesting alternatives created but this image fitted the theme more consistently in style and subject.
"Ancient Chinese archers" added to the poem prompt to focus on the period and people. Otherwise contemporary structures are included in the image.
"Old fern-shoots" could mean the last of the local wild harvest which would not be as good as the "first fern-shoots" in line 1.
"October" is the end of the traditional campaigning season.
Image 6 : Added "... archers" after "... w". There are issues Midjourney have with creating bows and arrows. Not all bows drawn fully notably the bow is on the other side of the body. Hands often need attention still!. Background faces distorted.
Image 7 : A strange combination but comprehensible given the text.
The size of horses does not match the chariot's however Midjourney is getting better at depicting the wheels properly and the horses have four legs. Small faces still a bit distorted.
Image 8 : Modern aspects will be included if it works for the poetry.
Image 9 : The image selected as it better conveyed the tireless and desolation. It took a number of renders as Midjourney often favours groups with their backs to the camera and I wanted people to face forward. .
"Chinese" had to be added to "generals" and "soldiers" to better specify nationality.
Midjourney's problems in creating small facts is again evident but the overall image was more illustrative.
Revision : Used the Midjourney upscale which abstracted the faces which works better than the distortions.
Image 10 : I like the action in the image but the initial image had too much action with lines everywhere. Even with a lot of editing and erasing there are major errors in the image. The "Upscale" function worked well enough to create some coherent detail.
Image 11 : Just straight text. No "archers" even though this did provide a more illustrative image. Despite various prompts the figures would no face the camera. It was the facing away that was the main reason for the choice. A big part of this exercise is to see what Midjourney computation creates and often it is not what you exactly want.
It is note worthy that the snow is present despite being the assumption is that early words have more prominence in the process.
A quick test over multiple versions still had the snow even if the subjects varied considerable.
Topaz not used just Midjourney upscale.
Image 12 : This will be the last one. The poem reiterates of existing themes which are already covered. I also want to try different prompts on different poems. Selected Images were less illustrative of ancient Chinese bowman and allowed for Midjourney creativity. The image has edited from an initial square.
Going forward I need to embrace Midjourney's process at the expense of strict illustration of the text and allow for variations in style over a series. The aim is to explore the depths of Midjourney.
Here we are picking our first fern shoots
And saying: when shall we get back to our country?
Prompt : oil painting, iHere we are picking our first fern shoots And saying: when shall we get back to our country?, by [Zhang Kechun]. --v 4
While this version 4 image worked out many version 4 image faces are distorted. This makes using version 4 for a longer term project which has some consistency a problem. Therefore I will use the latest V7 model.
New Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry
Ed: Eliot Weinberger
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theartofmadeline
kaledo-art
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