Published 26 February 201026 February 2010 · Main Posts How about radical success? Jennifer Mills Interesting piece by US academic and poet Joshua Corey (spotted via Currajah) on poetry, institutional support, gatekeepers, and the relationship between what we make and how we make it. It has given me a lot to think about in terms of the ongoing strategies of radical writer-reader relationships. If you can synergize with institutions, do so, but don’t sit around waiting for them to recognize or rescue you: they can offer you everything but initiative. This is the best path I’ve found for resisting the otherwise inevitable alienation from one’s own creative labor that comes from permitting oneself and one’s work to be processed by workshops and editors and tenure committees. The possibilities of initiative are exciting at the moment in terms of self-promotion and potentially having so much more control over our means of production, at least in the brief window before Amazoogle takes over our very brains. I’m curious what folks here think about the possibilities of ‘DIY’ (or is that entrepreneurialism?), and whether your work can or should be liberated from institutional gatekeepers? It seems to me that the academics don’t have as much of a stronghold here in Oz, but I don’t spend any time with academics or established poets. (Corey’s post is itself quite academic in tone and I had to read it a few times to get the threads.) How do we avoid conformity and marginalisation? Perhaps I have misunderstood the concept of ‘strategies of failure,’ but I would like to think we have more strategies of resistance up our sleeve than bad writing. It is an old problem of the Left in capitalist societies to embrace failure as a form of resistance. Can we have radical success instead? What do you reckon? Jennifer Mills Jennifer Mills was Overland fiction editor between 2012 and 2018. Her latest novel, The Airways, is out through Picador. More by Jennifer Mills Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places. If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate. Related articles & Essays First published in Overland Issue 228 25 May 202326 May 2023 · Main Posts The ‘Chinese question’ and colonial capitalism in New Gold Mountain Christy Tan SBS’s New Gold Mountain sets out to recover the history of the Gold Rush from the marginalised perspective of Chinese settlers but instead reinforces the erasure of Indigenous sovereignty. Although celebrated for its multilingual script and diverse representation, the mini-TV series ignores how the settlement of Chinese migrants and their recruitment into colonial capitalism consolidates the ongoing displacement of First Nations peoples. First published in Overland Issue 228 15 February 202322 February 2023 · Main Posts Self-translation and bilingual writing as a transnational writer in the age of machine translation Ouyang Yu To cut a long story short, it all boils down to the need to go as far away from oneself as possible before one realizes another need to come back to reclaim what has been lost in the process while tying the knot of the opposite ends and merging them into a new transformation.
