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• Australian Poetry
• poetry

NPW2011: One Day Archaeologists… by Daniel Graham

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Johannes Jakob

Sep 08, 2011

The following poem is from Voiceworks 85 Other, which you can buy here.

One Day Archaeologists Will Find a Hole in the Shape of Our Embracing Bodies Where We Were Deposited in a Prehistoric Marsh by Daniel Graham (22)

Your love is a woolly mammoth, large, ponderous and sought by primitive man. My love is a sabre-toothed tiger, dangerous, unwieldy and violent.

Your love is a Diplodocus, long, and searching for leaves. My love is an Ankylosaurus, defensive, armoured and clubbed at the tail.

Our love is Cro-Magnon man, painting the walls, sleeping in furs, waiting for the sun and the deer to return. Our love is Cro-Magnon man.

Roaming the icy countryside, roaming the icy countryside, roaming the icy countryside, lighting fires, with flint.

• Australian Poetry
• poetry

NPW2011: don’t tell me your dreams by Rosa Campbell

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Johannes Jakob

Sep 07, 2011

[We are still having a teeny tiny linebreak issue. If you're looking at this on the main blog page, open up the individual post and it'll be all proper and good. Working on getting it fixed.]

The following poem is from Voiceworks 84 Pulp, which you can buy cheaply here. don't tell me your dreams by Rosa Campbell (24)

but in this one you are hiding

on the edge of Miami in a motel; Echo Point or North Palms.

You said I could pick the name.

A smiling dolphin dives into the O – of Echo of North –

her luminescence keeps you company bathes you in neon through lace

curtains, underwear.

Every second second you are purple.

You smog up your room with menthol cigarettes to get rid of the smell of air freshener other bodies dirt sad New Year’s Days.

The dream goes for months. You swan around in a robe, bare feet on manicured lawn lazily eating boxed chocolates reading the first pages of novels before casting them restlessly aside.

You trail your hands in a pool, slick like glass you stare at yourself but don’t look yourself dustily glamorous heavy with valium

to get rid of the smell.

You believe your horoscope cultivate a mid-west accent

don’t tell me your dreams but in this one everything means exactly what it is

• Australian Poetry
• poetry

NPW2011: Mother Tongue by V. Tan

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Johannes Jakob

Sep 06, 2011

[We are still having a teeny tiny linebreak issue. If you're looking at this on the main blog page, open up the individual post and it'll be all proper and good. Working on getting it fixed.] The following poem is from Voiceworks 83 Technicolour, which you can purchase right here. Mother Tongue by V. Tan (24)

i wish for incisions to be made in language: tangled orthographic wedges excised layers of phonological tissue grafted to form a forked                                   tongue to speak things lost – never taught, in the name of Your English Is So Good concise essays broad ‘strine telephone voice mingling into new soil and prospect.

immerse me, i begged this year, mum, who else can i learn it from? but our lingua franca resurfaced worming through fissures of disuse. we’re too used to speaking english with you. did you know i stopped dreaming in hokkien years ago?

i would trade precision for wholeness nasal vowels for voiced consonants to start dreaming to speak to listen to you amah, nainai, before you too are lost to me.

• Australian Poetry
• poetry

NPW2011: Wonder White by Adam Carr

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Johannes Jakob

Sep 05, 2011

[Whoops, we are having a teeny tiny linebreak issue. If you're looking at this on the main blog page, open up the individual post and it'll be all proper and good. Working on getting it fixed.] To celebrate Australian Poetry's National Poetry Week, we're going to publish a Voiceworks poem every day this week. On Friday we'll publish a piece from V, our upcoming issue. Exciting! The following poem is from Voiceworks 82 Hunger, which you can still buy for cheap here. Wonder White by Adam Carr (19)

you type the words ‘something good’ into Google Images and hit enter, just to see if it’s something you’ve ever seen before and it is. you see: children, coffee cups, a rainbow, a woman’s nipples, a corpse floating face-down in a river like your happiness. you can’t deny these are all very ok things

indeed, but suddenly a thing catches your eye, and that thing

is bread. ordinary bread, not bread with polymorphic superpowers (such as the ability to not be bread) but bread; just bread. you feel excessive and materialistic and guilt-stricken and you deserve to. it was there all this time waiting for you, waiting for sandwiches something as good as bread and you thought ‘bread, fuck bread. i want women’s nipples!’

but you’ve been lying to yourself your entire life. you know you will look back and warmly remember not fondling or areola, but wholemeal and nutella.

Website Issues

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Johannes Jakob

Aug 08, 2011

So we're on the way to recovering from having our website seriously broken. We'll work on getting everything back in order over the coming weeks - please excuse our messiness in the meantime. UPDATE 24/8: Almost everything in the Voiceworks part of the site should be up to date and reliable again. Give us a little while longer to figure out what we were doing with this here blog...

An Un-Friday Not-Quite Writing Exercise

2 comments

Rosanna Stevens

Jul 27, 2010

Are you finding Friday Writing Exercises tie your knickers in a knot? Feeling anxious? Are you reaching the end of the blog post, opening a word document, and flopping toward the pantry door Piderman-style, in the hope you’ll chance upon food that was invisible five minutes earlier? Unfortunately the pantry will only continue to offer stale starch, a strange breed of savoury conserve from a 2006 Christmas hamper, and a ransacked packet of snakes featuring only stiff orange and yellow. Worse still, you’ve given up on tapping out a Friday Writing Exercise post. The latter is a grand shame - I can only imagine the deliciously imaginative things you would have written (far better than anything in that bland old pantry). I stumbled across (i.e. a very cool friend of mine linked me) this piece of fantastic last week, and couldn’t help but daydream about some of the wild responses y’all would invent. It’s not Friday, and this isn’t quite a writing exercise, but it might just loosen up those joints in lieu of the end of this week.

Friday Writing Exercise

5 comments

Cathy Tran

Jul 24, 2010

Personally, I find descriptions to be the hardest part of a story. See, what happens is that I’ll have a rough plot in my head and there’s this part in the narrative that I desperately want to get to, because that’s the part I have the words for. But what about the other parts? What about setting up the scene, creating an image of my characters or adding that extra bit of depth? That’s unfortunately where the clichés come in. For this exercise, I’m going to give you the beginnings of a sentence that requires you to follow up with a description. See if you can expand on it; create characters or scenes or emotions. As always, work with the first thing that pops into your head. However, watch out for phrases that you’ve read before, see if you can twist them round. Bonus points if you can guess where I stole these from: He looked down at me from his pedestal. ‘Have faith.’ Having faith in him was like… To start the bar I’d borrowed as much as I could from every place that would lend me money, and I’d almost repaid it all. Things were settling down. Up until then, it had been a question of sheer survival, of keeping my head above water, and I didn’t have room to think of anything else. I felt like I’d… That’s all it was. A huge plate of fat. His fingers found the fork. It seemed as if I was watching… What they are hanging from is hooks. The hooks have been set into the brickwork of the Wall, for this purpose. Not all of them are occupied. The hooks look like…

• pseudonyms
• submissions

a pen by any other name

8 comments

Susie

Jul 22, 2010

Submissions to Voiceworks have the option of being published under a pseudonym. A few months ago I was submitting a story that I thought could probably offend certain acquaintances of mine should they read it and figured it would be safest to use a nom de plume. Discussing possible names with my family members (as it was over Christmas) the most astute of them suggested that if I wasn’t able to publish the story under my own name I shouldn’t try to have it published at all. Fortunately it wasn’t selected and in hindsight I realise it wasn’t a very good story anyway. Funny how the powers that be at Voiceworks could divine the inwards shame I felt about it. I don’t know if there’s any legitimate reason why submissions to Voiceworks should be under a different name. In my case, I thought there might be some sort of conflict of interest or moral dilemma involved and a pseudonym would protect everyone. Should I be writing things that people need to be protected from? Probably not. Or if I had written something outstanding, would the success have negated any ill or immoral feelings I had about it? Should we be worried about the moral implications of writing something, or should we plough on with our literary pursuits regardless of consequences, in a Helen Garner way? Gone are the days of the Bronte sisters or George Eliot where we have to change our names just because we’re ladies – I haven’t noticed a crippling insistence on nineteenth century values at any Ed Comm meetings – besides, names aren’t included on submissions, so they are all treated with the same anonymity. But despite the crazy values we uphold at Voiceworks, I remember reading that JK Rowling was encouraged by publishers to make her sex more ambiguous so young boys wouldn’t be put off reading her books by her name. Which is frankly a bit weird when you think of the success of Diana Wynne Jones. Anyway the K wasn’t even part of her name, she stole it from her grandmother to go from Joanne Rowling to how we know her today.

• books
• Jane Austen
• merchandise
• Virginia Woolf
• Writing

How to buy presents for book lovers

4 comments

Elizabeth Redman

Jul 20, 2010

Buying presents is never as easy as you expect. It's a particular problem when buying for the book lover. They like books, let's get them a book, I think to myself. Oh wait. Will they already have it? Will they like it? Will they turn their nose up and forever doubt my literary tastes? Maybe I should get them a nice Moleskine instead. It seems one solution is to buy them a gift that looks like a book but isn't one. Like this:

I've been given a tea cup and a notebook with the Penguin classics design. I've also bought similar gifts for heavy-reading friends.

• events
• live
• wheeler centre

Voiceworks Live

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Johannes Jakob

Jul 19, 2010

If you're in Melbourne, we're running another Voiceworks Live event this Thursday, and we'd love to see you there. There'll be readings from Birthmark, including Daniel Hogan, Christopher O'Neill and Holly Voigt. We'll give away some prizes in games of boggle and a spelling bee, and the editorial committee will do a radio play of Danielle Bink's 'Is this a miracle?' All of us have a face for the big screen, not radio, and the only way to enjoy said faces is to be there! It's a free event at the Wheeler Centre, but bookings are required. To see what happened the last time we did one of these, see Sam's recap.