from Dominique Hecq and Béatrice Machet’s “Crypto”
Poetic Assaults
veils sails or waves never will abolish the porthole
neither cataract nor tears ever will abolish the retina
a throw of flowers never will abolish sorrow
M
from Greg McLaren’s “After Han Shan”
1.
This bedsit is home to a country boy. Buses or cabs rarely drop passengers off: the street-side trees so still that crows roost here, the gutter full of cigarette butts and used frangers.
I go chocolate shopping on my own, smoke joints in the park with my girlfriend. And in this little flat? Books piled high on my bedside table with the Chinese landscape print.
from Dominique Hecq and Béatrice Machet’s “Crypto”
Virtu L
ce qui ne se voit pas n’existe pas
objet toi Le plus visible
Le plus accessible
Le plus vite possible
hopLa!
tout entier dans son image
comme Narcisse
sans reste aucun
mirez-moi ca
transparence absolue
transparence tue
Virtu L
which is not seen doesn’t exist
object you the most visibLe
the most accessibLe
the most readily possibLe
HopLa! entirely whole in one’s image like Narcissus nothing left over behold id absolute transparency dead muted transparency
Greg McLaren
Greg McLaren (born 1967) is an Australian poet. Born in the New South Wales Hunter Region coalfields town, Kurri Kurri. He moved to Sydney in 1990 where he studied at the University of Sydney and in 2005 he was awarded a PhD in Australian Literature. His thesis was on Buddhist influences on the Australian poets Harold Stewart, Robert Gray and Judith Beveridge. As well as poetry, he has published reviews and criticism. Julieanne Lamond writes in Southerly that “McLaren attempts to find a stable connection between the Buddhist acceptance in the face of unknowing … and the anger and drama of his sense of history”. McLaren’s work has been anthologised widely. His poems appear in Noel Rowe and Vivian Smith’s Windchimes: Asia in Australian Poetry (Pandanus Press, 2006), Australian Poetry from 1788 (edited by Robert Gray and Geoffrey Lehmann), A Slow Combusting Hymn (edited by Kit Kelen and Jean Kent) and Contemporary Australian Poetry (edited by Martin Langford, Judith Beveridge, Judy Johnson and David Musgrave).
Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications
After Han Shan
In National Library of Australia
Translation: Song Zijiang
Wang Mingyun 王明韻：六月雪
Wang Mingyun is a member of the Chinese Writers’ Association and the China Film Association, and was awarded as a National First Class Writer. He is Vice-chairman of Anhui Writers Association and Chief Editor of the Poetry Monthly Magazine. Wang has published more than 10 books of poems, including The Fourteen Lines of the Body, Original Sin, and Immortal Book.
He has issued five volumes of prose essays including Burst into Tears for Life, Walking Fish, and Admiring Pigs. His works have been translated into English, French, Russian, Korean and Japanese.
Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications
Snowrose
Translator(s) 譯者, 梅丹理 Denis Mair.
Béatrice Machet
Béatrice (Anne-Marie, Marie-Jeanne) Machet is a French born poet, living between France and the USA, whose dance lessons as a child influenced and still influence her writing. As a teen she learned a lot from the Native American point of view about Native American history and Native cultures, until she felt impregnated with them. After having been involved in the French science-fiction milieu, flirting with cartoons and magazines such as Actuel, Charlie Hebdo, Fluide Glacial, she met Jean-Hughes Malineau, a Gallimard editor, who encouraged her to begin a career as a poet. From this initial meeting, each published poetry book of hers will testify to an evolution in her writing practice. Since 2016, she is an active member of the sound poetry group Ecrits Studio (ecritsstudio.fr). At her credit some 15 books and 30 chapbooks of poetry (three of them in English) plus 7 Native American poets’ collections she translated into French, and four anthologies gathering 40 Native American contemporary poets whose works she translated into French.
She is used to collaborating with artists from all kinds of disciplines such as painters, sculptors, musicians, composers, video-makers, dancers and choreographers, and with whom she performs her poetry. She is on editorial boards of French poetry magazines such as Recours au poème, Sur le dos de la tortue, Les cahiers d’Eucharis.
She is regularly granted writer residencies, and is regularly invited to international poetry festivals in France and abroad. She leads creative writing workshops, is called for teaching and performing in schools and colleges. She gives lectures and conferences about contemporary Native American literature. She also launched and created Radio cultural programs, poetry oriented, from 1984 to 1986 and from 2018 to now. She produces and is responsible for a monthly radio program (Radio Agora, Grasse) dedicated to contemporary poetry.
Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications
For Unit
Kit Kelen and Béatrice Machet Translators
David McAleavey
David McAleavey was born in Kansas in 1946. He has published seven poetry collections, including Sterling 403 (1971), David McAleavey’s Greatest Hits 1971-2000 (2001), and most recently Rock Taught (2016). His honors include a fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the GW Award from George Washington University. He currently lives in Arlington, Virginia, and teaches English at GWU.
David updated us a little while ago ‘Greetings. My Flying Islands pocket book is titled Talk Music, and it appeared in early 2018 (copyright date Dec. 2017).
I spent the Fall 2016 semester in a faculty exchange at the University of Macau, part of a short-lived program between UM and my home university, George Washington University in Washington, DC.
I have now retired from GW, effective Fall 2020, as a consequence of the coronavirus pandemic: teaching wholly online, with all its imperfections, seeming like more work than pleasure. I’m still adjusting to my new retired status; one of my strategies for exploring the rest of my life includes reducing my involvement in poetry, though I do hope to return to the endeavor, should I recover the motivation.’
Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications
Talk Music
Chrysogonus Siddha Malilang
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.
Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications
Encounters: Never Random
Chris Mansell
Chris Mansell studied Economics at the University of Sydney – because she’d read Das Kapital as a teenager and thought economics was the way to understand what is going on. She spent the first ten years of her life on the central coast of NSW, and then she moved to Niugini (Papua New Guinea). At 14, she decided that she would be a poet. She has won the Queensland Premier’s Award for Poetry, Amelia Chapbook Award (USA) and the Meanjin Dorothy Porter Poetry Prize, and was short-listed for the National Book Council Award and the NSW Premier’s Award.
Also by Chris Mansell: Poetry 101 Quads (Puncher & Wattmann/Thorny Devil Press, 2020) Parole (poems in English and French, translated by Tim Thorne, Well Sprung, 2019) Love Cuts poems, images, essay. With Richard Tipping (Well Sprung, 2014) Seven Stations (text only) (Well Sprung, 2013) Spine Lingo: new and selected poems (Kardoorair, 2011) A View from the Beach (PressPress, 2010) Letters (Kardoorair, 2009), Love poems (Kardoorair, 2006) Mortifications & Lies (Kardoorair, 2005) Stalking the Rainbow (Press Press, 2002) Day Easy Sunlight Fine in Hot Collation (Penguin, 1995) Shining Like a Jinx (Amelia, USA, 1992) Redshift/Blueshift (Five Islands Press, 1988) Head, Heart & Stone (Fling Poetry, 1982) Audio Raptors Blue (audio) (Well Sprung, Sydney, 1989) with music by Rob Cousins Seven Stations (CD) composer: Andrew-Batt Rawden (Hospital Hill, 2014), Fickle Brat (audio + text) (IP Digital, 2002) Short fiction Schadenvale Road (Interactive Press, 2011)
Links: chrismansell.com
Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications
Foxline
Foxline reconnoiters the relationship between the land and the creatures on it: Man (a farmer), and Fox. The relationship between the creatures themselves reveals their alien natures. Both claim the land for themselves but neither is autochthonous. They are opposed to each other but have an understanding and an alliance nevertheless because they both kill and have nowhere else.
Common or Garden Poets #4 – Kathryn Fry inviting Jill McKeowen
Impromptu
for Jill McKeowen
our place in the connectedness of things
Gail Hennessy, ‘Our Eclectic Garden’
His hands skip over the piano keys
trilling them as if there’s no weight
in the years we’ve been together,
the rhythms of family and garden
by a backdrop of native bush. He sets
the harmony with strong chords, melodic
as the orchids and roses in their seasons.
He improvises variations: lunch
by the lillypilly, lorikeets in the grevilleas
and birdbath, a grandchild running across
the lawn by bromeliads and ferns,
that haven of shelter for magpies in the heat.
O, there’s a familiar cadence, welcome
as a homecoming. How lucky to have
such company, lemon and lavender, ficifolia
and cycad, memories from our mothers’
gardens in the breynia and feijoa;
their shape and size and colour are songs
to save us. At the end of his impromptu
it’s as if the room overflows
with the slow, luscious notes of gardenias.
