Allegory and Ideology by Fredric Jameson (Verso, 2019) is a book that I’ve been thoroughly looking forward to discussing. It is perhaps the seminal American thinker’s major reflection on literature, or at least his most major reflection on literature since his last major reflection on literature.

It seems to me that in thinking about art and politics – that is, either in thinking about art and politics at the same time, as parts of the same regime, as Jacques Rancière might have it; or as ontologically separate conditions, as Alain Badiou would have it – one of the key themes is the rapport and/or divergence between diversity (in an artistic sense) and democracy.

Samira Alizadeh was a fearful girl living in a very dull city in Australia. It was perhaps not an evilly banal city (as a certain German philosopher may have put it) but simply uninteresting. Samira had lived the first sixteen years of her life in a very eventful country in the Middle East.

I2013 has seen quite a number of notable collections and anthologies released in this country, although, rather predictably, the more general considerations of Australian poetry this year were overshadowed by those notorious plagiarists.

I must admit to a level of scepticism upon first hearing about the editors’ plan to compile an anthology of Asian-Australian poetry. As a Marxist universalist, I felt troubled by the proposal for yet another defensive – and potentially ghettoising – proclamation of particularism and cultural identity.

The Years of Lead is the title given to a period of political upheaval and explosive urban unrest in recent Italian history. Charged with the spirit of earlier autonomist and workerist actions, and energised by the global upsurge in rebellion and subversion in the late 1960s, a myriad of far-left factions, supporters and other radicals took to the streets of major Italian cities during the 70s.

In a recent book review in the Australian, the influential poet and critic Geoff Page referred to a ‘burgeoning group of young (or youngish) Australian female poets who are dominating the field [of Australian poetry] at the moment’.

Italian thinker and media activist Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi is an important figure of today’s Leftist European theory. Having joined the Italian Communist Youth Federation in 1962 at the age of 14, he is often associated with the autonomist Anarcho-Marxist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, such as operaismo.

At the time of her appearance in the influential 2000 anthology Calyx: 30 Contemporary Australian poets, MTC Cronin had already presented herself as one of the most distinct voices among the new poets to have emerged in the 1990s.

My own ten favourite poetry releases of the year (in alphabetical order of their titles).

The title under review is not particularly recent – it was first published in France in 1998 – but was only translated into and published in English last year, and its view of art and literature is very much new and groundbreaking. It is, in the words of the book’s superb introduction by Gabriel Rockhill, ‘a major offensive against the modernist doxa (and its postmodernist avatars).’

Although I was rather disappointed by a recent novel billed by its publishers as an ‘Arab Spring novel’, I am not prepared to accept that the cataclysmic events that have rejuvenated and disfigured so much of the Middle East cannot result in good Anglophone writing.

Online literary platforms are, by their very nature, protean. I was reminded of this as I tried, and failed, to access the editorial for the first issue of one of Australia’s first web-based poetry journals.

I first came across Luka Lesson’s work at last year’s Brisbane Writers Festival. The young Melbourne-based poet – also known as Luka Haralampou – was sharing the stage with a number of spoken-word artists or stage poets, there to compete for the audience’s approval against a group of page poets. I must admit that such competitive divisions make me cringe.

How is it that very long, book-length poems continue to be written and published despite the overwhelming preoccupation with either short closed forms (the sonnet is proving rather popular with some Australian poets) or minimalist wordplays by more experimental writers? Two new books provide very different but equally convincing answers to this question.

Why set out to be so unforgiving about what is, ultimately, just an anthology, i.e. a subjective selection made by two mere, imperfect mortals?

That many celebrated fiction-writers began their careers rather humbly as poets is perhaps one of the literary world’s worst kept secrets. And although it is generally acknowledged that behind renowned novels by the likes of Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Angela Carter and David Malouf lurk often-ignored early small press and/or self-published poetry books and chapbooks, the connection between an author’s poetry and her fiction is often viewed as a trivial thing, e.g., as a testimony to the writer’s supposed versatility.

Like the Russian poet, I, too, have seen many countries, and it is my understanding of the cataclysmic events in the country where I was born which provides me with an introduction to these comments on the Occupy Movement. The Iranian Revolution of 1978 serves as both an example of a grassroots civil insurrection that overthrew an entire political system, as well as a warning about the idea of ‘universal brotherhood’ being subverted by religious particularism and sectarian chauvinism.

Robert Lukins’ argument is redolent with over-sentimental symbolism, jargon of motivational speaking, discourse of self-help culture and PR clichés.

According to the AP website, the organisation’s primary aim is to ‘promote excellence in Australian poetry’. If so, AP should desist from further bringing poetry into the so-called mainstream.

One of the more prevalent perceptions propagated by the dominant ideologies of the last few decades has been the belief in the death of the avant-garde. Ever since the ex-Leftist French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard decided to announce the arrival of a ‘postmodern condition’ by denouncing radical Marxist politics as well as artistic iconoclasm as outdated […]

I’m delighted that less sycophantic views of the career of the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs are being voiced – here on Overland, and also in the Guardian – and it’s comforting to know that I’m not the only one bewildered by the businessman’s glorification as a ‘visionary’ and a ‘creative genius’. While it may […]

The spectre of the internet has been haunting Australian literary journals for well over a decade. But a few recent events seem to have transformed this spectral haunting into a brutal hunt. According to The Mercury newspaper, Tasmanian Premier Lara Giddings has decided to terminate funding for one of the country’s main print literary journals […]

It would be safe to say that, thanks to the acknowledged horrors of cyberspace (see ‘Internet child pornography a growing problem’ or ‘Terrorists Take Recruitment Efforts Online’, for starters), our view of the wonders of the brave new world of the internet is becoming increasingly less sanguine. As the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek observed in […]

My entry for the Meanland blogger competition began with a reference to the work of the Marxist thinker Walter Benjamin and his mostly enthusiastic view of the impact of modern technology on artistic production. I’d like to begin this blog with a quote from Minima Moralia, the wonderfully complex and magnificently complicated book by Benjamin’s […]

Rivers are all the same. Dirty water if you’re lucky, smelly mud and silt

Well, it’s official: the (printed) book is dead, long live the (e)book. Or so many political and cultural elites would like us to believe. On the very day of my writing this blog, for example, we were subjected to federal Minister for Small Business Nick Sherry’s apocalyptic diagnosis that Australian booksellers will be annihilated within […]