Tahlia Chloe

[theoldestchorusgirlintheworld]

Anne Boyer

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Christopher Hamilton

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Speedboat by Renata Adler

[morleyss]

“He [Nabokov] also reminds us of the main reason it is so hard [for us to notice that other people are suffering]: we all spend a lot of time inventing people rather that noticing them, reshaping real people into characters in stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, stories about how beautiful and rare we are.”

— Richard Rorty, Introduction to Nabokov’s “Pale Fire”

[nebulosa]

[tahlia--chloe]

[tahlia--chloe]

Poems from CD Wright

[tahlia--chloe]

In the past week I have listened to two very good interviews with Ben Lerner (which can be found here and here) and as well as this talk by C.D. Wright about ecopoetics (found here) and read this very informative essay on the vertiginous writing style of post-modern poets by Tony Hoagland (here).

—

Lerner: “It doesn’t seem responsible or interesting to me to produce literature that just wants to turn its back on the world on one hand, and it also doesn’t seem interesting to just write an ironic book or a book that’s a reason to despair. We don’t need more reasons to despair. It seems to me in part about, in a clear eyed way, being aware of the present but also finding possibilities of wonder or spaces for the imagination because that’s what’s necessary to be able to conceive of alternative futures.“

Lerner: “Authenticity isn’t necessarily an uncritical presentation of who you really are…it’s this complex process of figuring out your relation to the social.”

Lerner: “For me fiction isn’t a word for an alternative to reality, fiction is a word for the way we organise reality into some kind of coherence.”

Lerner: “Art is a way of being alive in the glimmers of potentiality and in the midsts of the mundane…art is a way of attending to the present with an intensity that is difficult to achieve when you’re just locked in the rhythms of the mundane day.”

Hoagland: “The poem and the reader engage in a sort of muscular struggle with each other—that struggle is how they become intimate, how they really “know” each other. Stevens suggests that a good poem, as part of its process, resists, twists, and enmeshes the reader (and perhaps the poet as well), an engagement in which perspective is challenged, and by no means guaranteed.”

Hoagland: "To dismiss the poetry of “dis-arrangement,” the poetry that aims to disrupt or rearrange consciousness—to dismiss poems that attract (and abstract) by their resistance, thus drawing the reader into a condition of not-entirely-understanding—such a dismissal also seems to foreclose some powerful dimensions of poetry as an alternate language, a language expressive of certain things otherwise unreachable.”

Hoagland: “We have communication sickness. Add to that our drastically increased sense of the corruption of commercial and political speech, and the instability of language—surely our resulting collective dizziness is a fundamental symptom of modern life, one to which poems naturally refer.”

[subbedin]

subbed in is fricking hecked up to announce their most satanic event yet: a night with US poet Steve Roggenbuck!

:DD

Steve Roggenbuck has published six collections of writing and performed at over 250 events worldwide. Best known for their youtube videos, Steve’s work draws influence from the internet, activism, humour, and horse content. They are also the founder of Boost House, a poetry publishing group. This is their first tour ‘down under’.

This truly rare night will be bolstered by the demonic presence of much loved subbed in writers/poem readers/alumni: Kenji Khozoei, Giulia McCool, Stacey Teague, David Tran, and Dan Hogan.

Tickets are $10 and available from: http://tix.yt/subbed-in-presents-steve-roggenbuck-our-life-is-so

Tickets are strictly limited 

- Doors 6pm

- First poet 6.30pm

Books, zines, and merch available

Food and drink available from venue

See youse so soon

♥▲ ♥ ▲ ♥ ▲ ♥ ▲ ♥ ▲ ♥

http://steveroggenbuck.com

http://subbed.in

[fyi it is possible this event will destroy what you previously thought about corn and koЯn]

[anatomy-lessons]

Anne Carson on wanting to be unbearable 

[observando]

She knew that was not an honest prayer, and she did not linger over it. The right prayer would have been, Lord … I am miserable and bitter at heart, and old fears are rising up in me so that everything I do makes everything worse.

Marilynne Robinson (via observando)

[tahlia--chloe]

The lake at our feet was plain, clear water, bottomed with smooth stones or simple mud. It was quick with small life, like any pond, as modest in its transformations of the ordinary as any puddle. Only the calm persistence with which the water touched, and touched, and touched, sifting all the little stones, jet, and white, and hazel, forced us to remember that the lake was vast, and in league with the moon (for no sublunar account could be made of its shimmering, cold life).

Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson

[subbedin]

dart bath by cody edwards

cody read this piece at subbed in #1: if you’re reading at this it’s too late

My Grandma used to have an outdoor bathtub. She would let the bath catch the rain water and then she would bath naked in the sun, with her feet all sticking out and touching the air. No-one was allowed outside when Grandma was in the tub.

My brother and I found the bathtub on the council clean-up. We slid some skateboards underneath and played Cool Runnings up ‘n’ down the street, till Grandma came out, put the bathtub under one arm, and dumped it in the backyard. 

But the clean-up day everyone remembers is the one where Grandma nearly died. Heaps of kids cruised the streets and found tonnes of cool shit. We found, a working wheelchair, some sharpened cricket stumps, and a portable oxygen tank with mask. I loaded it all into the wheelchair and started pushing, till some big guy from down the road pulled up, took the wheelchair and the oxygen tank, while we stared at his elderly mother in the passenger seat. 

When we got home my Uncle was smoking on the front deck. We asked him if we could play Kelly Slater Pro Surfer. And he said “no worries”, till he found out we let someone take the wheelchair and oxygen tank. He said, “Fuck that, don’t you boys know how to say go fuck yourself?”

Then he rode my brother’s bike all the way down the street, all the way down the big hill, yelling something no-one remembers. 

And when he came back, he was carrying the bike, because it looked all mangled and stuffed and it was all mangled and stuffed. The back tyre was bent in half and there was no seat anymore. “Oi, don’t tell Nana. I’ll get you a new one,” my broke Uncle said to my brother. And back then, I thought how it would take me forever to save up enough for a new bike. And right now, I’m thinking about how it would still take me forever.

And then we are all in my uncle’s ute, and we are driving Grandma to the hospital. We found her passed out in the outdoor bath. It wasn’t even her really, it was my brothers fault. After our Uncle broke his bike, my brother stole his 40 pack of Longbeach ciggies and chucked them all in the tub. And when Grandma went to take her bath, the water was poisoned. The nicotine had leaked from the cigarettes and poisoned the water. My Grandma had a dart bath. No-one is allowed to mention my Grandma’s dart bath.

But because Grandma woke up ok, and shouted some at my Uncle, we got to leave the hospital before paying. We put the bathtub back out on the clean-up, and then we saw it rolling down the street with kids inside, and then we saw it full of somebody’s beer and ice, and then we saw it glowing with smoke and flames, because that was about the time the sun had gone down.

Cody Edwards is “thankful for another day… Blessed! x” He is from Sydney and is from a family of truck drivers. He tweets @hashbrowneye

[subbedin]

a poem by tahlia chloe

It is in situations like these

It is in situations like these where I am trying to pull my brain out of my body. The telling conjunction of two souls risen from different waters. The clangour of the wrong two people in the wrong room at the wrong time. My lungs are galloping. Everything you’ve ever wanted you’ve pulled in by its hair; the world just got a little bit closer. How far can one run on just a single breath? How far can one run with no breath at all? I sling the memories of us under my arm – the lyricism of my tongue, lapping against your tongue, like waves along the coast. The ocean was never enough for you. The earth was never enough for you. Hanging me from my neck was never enough for you. The day we stopped moving with the shoreline was the day you stopped calling me home. The last time I tried to prevent white noise from becoming an elegy you came back with clenched fists. I no longer attempt to turn vicissitudes into something good.  A noticeable declension. So I froze into a caryatid; in a state of rigor mortis I offered up the bone. You came and placed your heart on mine. Please, I beg, either peel me from my chrysalis and skip me like a stone, or let me follow a new trajectory: trying to fit into the margins.  Ignore the diminished chords and sombre notes. Blood can only rush for so long. Give me back my lilt and all its synonyms. I will cast the net and hope for the best, maybe beneath the oyster beds I can sink my feet into clay.

19y.o. Tahlia identifies as “a very bad writer, and an even worse lover”. She is from Sydney, Australia.

[tahlia--chloe]

YEEEEEEWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW

[melodyhansen]

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The sense of heightened life that goes with the tragic experience is conditioned by a transcending if the ego…it is as if we were challenged at the profoundest level with the question, ‘In what does the significance of life reside?’

Leavis, Tragedy and the ‘Medium’

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Anne Sexton