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”