Cui Yuwei, born in 1983, is a bilingual poet and translator based in China. In 2007, she completed an MA in English Literature in Wuhan University. She has published poems in Mascara Review and Cordite Poetry Review (AU). Her works of translation appear in Off-the-Coast (US), The Sons of Camus Writers International Journal (CA) and Ajar (Vietnam). Her Chinese poems are widely seen in various literary journals and collections in China. Currently, she works as an English lecturer in Beijing Normal University at Zhuhai in China.
Matthew Cheng 鄭政恆 is a poet and editor and author of the poetry collection The First Book of Recollection, and co-author of Wait and See: The Collection of Six Hong Kong Young Writers, and the editor of An Anthology of Hong Kong Poetry of the 1950s, Hong Kong Short Stories 2004-2005, and Hong Kong Cinema Retrospective 2011, among others. The former Vice-Chair of the Hong Kong Film Critics Society, in 2013 he received the Hong Kong Arts Development Award for Best Artist (Arts Criticism).
Michael Crane is an Australian poet, writer and compere of poetry events in Melbourne.
Born in Brisbane in 1961, Crane moved to Melbourne at age 18. He has been an active member of Melbourne’s poetry scene, performing in many open poetry readings from 1989 to 1991. In 1991, Crane organised the first Poetry Slam to be held in Australia and has organised and run more than 150 since.
Crane’s work has been published in literary journals and magazines, and he has self-published three chapbooks between 1991 and 1994, including The Book of Screams, An Almost Summer and Joan of Arc was a fire eater. Ten of Crane’s poems appeared in the collection Loose Kangaroos in 1998. Crane’s first collection of poetry, The Lightmaster, was published in 1999 by Phoebe Press. He released Not Mad Just Raving, a CD of spoken word with musical accompaniment. In 2003, Ninderry Press released A Dog Called Yesterday – Selected Poems and Prose. In 2007, Picaro Press published Crane’s chapbook of poetry entitled Poems from the 29th Floor. This was released at the 2007 Melbourne Writers Festival. Since 2001, Crane has written 200 micro stories called Postcards from the End of the World, many of which have appeared in the literary magazine Gangway. He has also written a yet-to-be-published detective novel.
Michael Crane is one of the most published writers in literary journals and newspapers since 1994 including poems in the Best Australian Poems 2011,2014 & 2015. He has been compared to legendary writer Charles Bukowski, established Poets, David Brooks and Geoff Page.
“Ecology” comes from the Greek oikos meaning “house, dwelling place, habitation” and logia meaning “study of”.
Traversing themes of art, literature, nature, society, technology, science and religion, Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedias (circa 1960s) remain an unsettling testimony to the ongoing destruction of our original home—Earth—as they extol the virtues of Man, his paradoxical fascination with the “wonders” of nature, and his so-called omnipotent triumph over nature through the capitalist myth of progress.
Upcycling both the imagery and the ideologies within these volumes, the Ecology series exploits the cutting power of collage and the magnetism of surrealism to invert historical hierarchies, rewrite the divine rule of cosmic order, create worlds within worlds, and collapse human-centric ideologies preserved in western art and literature.
Chen Fei, born and raised in Guizhou, is a story hunter, a traveler and a graphic designer. Resident in Macao for thirteen years, Fei is currently a Resident Tutor at Henry Fok Pearl Jubilee Residential College in the University of Macau, where he is currently completing a PhD degree in Literary Studies.
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(picture of a meiren kao)
the patio bench meiren kao – 18th April 2014
‘meiren kao, a man leaning on it will be more elegant, suave’
the restaurant manager said to me
meiren kao, a lookout for men
to monitor enemy movements
a belvedere for girls to wait for their beloved
and now I’m leaning here, waiting for my poetry ideas
downstairs Miao waitresses are welcoming guests with wine and song
on the street visitors are taking photos
some people are selling barbecued food
people sitting on the meiren kao of other houses are holding cameras, ready to capture any surprise
here on the meiren kao
I see the whole village
I see people come and go
people come, stay and start businesses here people grow up
people make money and leave
people grow old
sing songs
on such a pleasant afternoon as this I am sitting on the meiren kao
Nathan Curnow is an award-winning poet, spoken word performer and past editor of literary journal, Going Down Swinging. His books include The Ghost Poetry Project, RADAR, The Right Wrong Notes and The Apocalypse Awards. He has recently taught creative writing at Federation University, and toured Europe in 2018 with loop artist, Geoffrey Williams, performing in Poland and opening the Heidelberg Literature Festival in Germany. He lives in Ballarat and is the current judge of the annual Woorilla Poetry Prize.
The Piano Lesson
The last piano lesson I ever had ended in a drug raid on my teacher’s house. Mum was waiting in the car as she did each week. She saw the cops pull up with their dogs. When I ask her about it twenty years later she’s forgotten everything—the raid, the lessons, begging me to practice, that we even had a piano of our own. I want to ask her how, and keep asking, how it’s possible to forget all this, considering her devotion to the black and white, the tunes of discipline and obedience. I let it go because she blames herself for all she can and can’t recollect. There’s a chord that she’s an expert of playing—the guilt hammers, the sustain of regret. So what now of this memory if I can’t afford to share it? I want it to resonate. But it stresses her frailties—a grand excuse to keep pounding away at herself. It’s a grey-scale art every child must learn to master in these final years— to force the duet or to recognise it’s time to learn both parts of Chopsticks for yourself. Now my daughter plays and I wait beside her turning the page when she nods, the metronome tocking, her little hands, in reflection all the right wrong notes.
Chrysogonus Siddha Malilang was a nomad writer and translator before finally settling in in Southern Sweden. He started writing professionally – as a journalist – at an early age of 12, mainly motivated by an innocent wish of seeing his name printed in newspaper. After writing a number of short stories for various newspapers, he published two novels in 2006.
In 2013, he got involved with Flying Islands and started translating Iman Budhi Santosa’s poems (Faces of Java) into English. He was then granted Indonesian government funding for a poetry translation project in 2015. His own collection of bilingual poems, Encounters: Never Random, was published in 2017 by Flying Islands.
He is currently teaching Creative Writing in Malmö University, Sweden and at the same time trying to get back to a poet mode. His latest works, translations of three children’s books from Danish to Indonesian, are coming in March 2021.
watching fado in Macao
old fortress under moon that blooms
gentle sea breeze of a humid October night
husky contralto belting the ballad out
from her throat deep the waves
in which we swim ears least perhaps
this is rhythm all in the chest
where memory is found
because of the words all out of language
because as the singer says this is heart’s translation
she
taping people from her village
The Peloponnese in an agrarian past
collecting voices that will disappear forever
then standing on this edifice
to look backwards
and then deeper, into the 18th century
now like a roaring train, a novel
the history of Greece, so tragic
she says
another she
doing genealogical research
first the family
the migrations, then back
back to the island
becomes
becomes a whole history
Ithaca
the Venetians
the Turks
the Byzantines
very different, she said
we had war
in one of her windows
the mandarin tree stands
in the centre of a brick paved yard
on another window
the lace curtain
shields the lemon tree
180° of glass
the vlita, the horta in the garden
this beautiful peaceful space
In another window
Skype video
I see them
doing genealogical research
and he also doing genealogical research
and the search on our name
a Byzantine tangle
a clan under the radar
maybe secret Turks or secret Jews
escaping the Inquisition
they had records, you know
the Venetians
so Ithaca is a different matter
I hold up the page of the book
to the Skype camera
this proves there were Couani’s on Kastellorizo
a page from this old book
strangely printed in landscape orientation
with the list of boat owners – Κουανης
and he
on video Skype
an English life
reaching back to France, Egypt, Africa
finishing an autobiography
I sit in her living room
a window opens
I see him
Sky
the fairy story effect
the magic of childhood
Sydney in a snow dome
possible because of its
bowl-shaped geography
ringed with mountains
girt by sea
its foamy cliffs
the sublime
people
miniature
the sky
so vast
the clouds so high
and puffy in the southern sky
the higher one, gleaming white in the sunlight
whiter than white is
is it so big
or are we so small?
showers coming and going
humid, then a shower
from above
the land is full of water and sunlight
a shower falling on one small area
shadows and sunlight
Reminiscent of Blackheath in The Blue Mountains and its fabulous summer alpine climate, air constantly washed clean by afternoon thunderstorms, sublime mountain vistas. The 19th century children’s novel, Heidi, set in alpine country. The snowy white bread rolls wrapped in crisp cloth and Heidi’s little gingham swag with her belongings in it. Heidi, so lucky to be an orphan.
people swim in the rain
raindrops cool on their skin
in the pale aqua water
The fact that it’s aqua because of the chlorine feels irrelevant, especially on sunny days. It’s not unlike the colour of the water around the Mediterranean islands. The pool, in the park just next to Broadway.
Broadway, Sydney’s busiest intersection, just erase the traffic and the noise and you’re left with a perfect landscape. I’m dreaming of turf being laid over Broadway like they did on the Harbour Bridge for a day, except permanently.
a flock of corellas
with their pretty call
circling
and doubling back
Broadway is like a bowl or part of a bowl that empties into the harbour at Blackwattle Bay.
Sublime, the depth
of the harbour
a mirror of the mountains
valleys that continue
downwards
but now, into murky depths
Is childhood magical? What is the temperature of the sublime? How we loved Caspar David Friedrich in the early 70’s! Before we were ravaged by Conceptual Art, that is. That’s when many of us stopped painting, when painting died for us, replaced by the minimal gestures of others, requiring no effort and almost no thought. Somnambulist Art. Work they did between hangovers.
The whispering quiet of the
valleys from the cliff tops
transcendent, individuating
rupture in disguise
the sublime thing
I could have gone that way
with feminist representations
some did
that’s where I was wanting to go
drawing female figures falling into chasms
so much like
classic Romantic images
it was men who dissuaded me
but 10 years later
similar images were
visible
in the art galleries
Vivienne Shark LeWitt etc
but then with the
imprimatur
of some art world bureaucrat
incommensurability
that was the problem
between them and us
I met people who understood why you’d want to rail against the parochialism of your peers
Australian Art
it’s a joke
and in Australian minds
it’s all happening elsewhere
distance creates the sublime
not that there aren’t fabulous artists here
but don’t tell me they’re Australian
So my work became
what was possible
maybe constraints help us
to map the unknown
aesthetic unboundedness
rupture
I made small drawings using pencil and aquarelle. Some like an abstract Reg Mombassa, some hyper-real. Learnt the Chinese method of watercolour painting. Wrapped up in teaching art to people who didn’t want to be artists. I took a holiday from history.
thinking
Communism, Utopia
group projects
where every offering
is valued
and adds
another element to the lexicon
The haunting
the bamboo pen
the ink well
vintage glass thing
with its pressed pattern
and three wells
the paper ready
the concertina book
carried around for weeks
where the practice drawing
will occur
also
the sketchbook
the real thing
started
cover done
title chosen
first poem
printed on tracing paper
and glued in
with spray adhesive
photos of all the objects
taken and uploaded to ipad
there
accessible
waiting
all the preparation done
the pen haunts me
I think and dream about
picking it up
I can feel the sensation
of moving the bamboo
across the paper
think about it constantly
imagine the black ink
sitting in the ink well
and about two other colours
as yet unchosen
I mentally scan the box of inks
think about the beautiful
senegal yellow
thick and glowing
everything is ready
and yet
the series consists of drawings
of objects from my parents’ houses
both parents now gone
so objects are not objects
it is essential to choose the colours
at least for the first drawing
the amber cigarette case
and think
is this a gestural exercise
or will each drawing
take on some complexity
become a painted image
become watercolour
water
always there
at the ready
to sooth
now that we’re really alone
