Ania Walwicz taught us that art is central to being human. She recognised that to be an artist is also to be a teacher. She wanted to create a community and a movement, and when it suited, that community was also her court.

This second issue of electronic poetry, Photonic Overland, sees eight more pieces of literature that engage meaningfully with the digital world. Reading through the submissions revealed a diversity of styles, formats and media. Each work, and each work published in this issue, requires exploration, both for the reader and the writer.

The pieces here are products of our time – a time of diverse mediums and expression, and the web a place where such boundaries blur. That is to say, all of these works are poems, yet the poet/writer/composer/programmer/artist has used significantly different methods to write them. These poems are textual, aural, visual and reader controllable, and this materiality is critical to their reading.

Contents Benjamin Laird Editorial Poetry Mez Breeze Real_Time_”1sts!” [or: PanoptiConned Imagery From the Scene] Jim Andrews Aleph Null Jason Nelson Textsky Pip Smith Wayside Renga Gary Barwin The new squeeze Hazel Smith, Roger Dean and Greg White Disappearing Tully Hansen Writing Jessica Rae Counting

Should freelance writers be organising? If so, how?

‘Plagiarism is necessary. Progress demands it. Staying close to an author’s phrasing, plagiarism exploits his expressions, erases false ideas, replaces them with correct ideas.’

‘Interactivity’ has long acted as a buzzword. It is representative of the relationship we have with the market in general and the media specifically.

Someone once told me that the direction that languages follow – left to right, right to left, top to bottom – is decided by the tools that influenced their development. I remember the anecdote more than the teller, but, basically, Hebrew is right to left because right-handed people hold the chisel in their left hand and hammer in their right.

Can a piece of writing suffer from too much feedback? Writing, it has often been said, is a conversation, so critiques are essential to the process. This is both the lore and the law of writing. But whose notes should we take note of?

If technology was going to thwart anything, I’d expect it to be a literary journal. Fittingly enough the current issue of Island is ‘Digitalism’, dedicated to the ‘digital’. It has a collection of essays tackling self-publishing, literary participation and the Australian book publishing industry. Southerly has, as always, two tables of contents: one for print articles and one for their online articles, ‘The long paddock’.

As a child of the ’80s my interests coincided with the high points of the decade’s nerdiness: Dungeons & Dragons, Choose Your Own Adventures and text adventure games. In text adventure games, most famously Zork, the player would interact with the game by typing out commands like ‘north’ (or just ‘n’) to go north, ‘examine’ objects, ‘look’ to view their environment, ‘give’ and sometimes ‘kill’.

We have reached a point where reading and writing are now inseparable from the consumer technology and software that produce them. Those who don’t use computers at their place of employ will almost certainly own a mobile phone – and increasingly, it will be a smart phone, of the kind that have made fortunes for companies and CEOs.

So I received this in my PO Box this morning. No envelope. Apparently members can use their union membership to campaign for the ALP – but not for the actual issues mentioned (it’s good that the unions would use their workplaces to campaign for issues but why just for the ALP?). The text can also […]

I recently watched Peter Carey’s closing address to the Sydney Writers’ Festival. In the video, he lectures earnestly about people once reading in the ‘shearing sheds, lending libraries, mechanics institutes’ and ‘the trenches’ (he even uses Gallipoli, and Burke and Wills to stress his point), imploring everyone to teach children Shakespeare because it will even […]