Sunday 31 March 2013

Two poems in special ‘Ratbaggery’ issue of the Australian poetry publication Cordite

I have two poems in the just published  special ‘Ratbaggery’ issue of the Australian online poetry publication Cordite.

The poems are ‘Use’
& ‘What It Says About You’

"Like all designations of high hermeneutic mystery, the phrase ‘Ratbag Poetry’ requires a personal archaeology. I needed to know what a Ratbag Poem could be – poems that are vituperative, poems that are a nuisance. I call upon Byron’s distaste for Keats’ propensity for frigging with his imagination, which seems to us a virtue, and counts as a measure of the bile produced when a Ratbag is, in their turn, Ratbagged. It is partly the wickedness of your type and partly the quality of your infection; the spleen is actually the Romantic organ”

Sunday 17 March 2013

Interview on The Reading Life

In this just published interview I answer Mel Ulm's questions on his website The Reading Life and say nothing controversial at all. We talk about poetry workshops, Lenin, Trotsky, George Orwell, the Khmer Rouge and the Argentinian Generals.

General Videla