A few favourites on this Friday for your poetical enjoyment:

Joe Dolce – (yes, that Joe Dolce) Australian poet and songwriter – won the 2017 University of Canberra Health Poetry Prize with his poem ‘And let the wonder in‘ reproduced in full in Meniscus Journal Volume 5 (it’s on page 166 if the link doesn’t take you directly). Meniscus is published twice a year and supported by the Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP) with editors from the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand. The journal is full of autumnal or spring lyrical and literary goodies (depending on the season in your hemisphere) – and it’s free to download. We love that word.

‘And let the wonder in‘, a choral libretto in eight movements

The ever-interesting Cordite Poetry Review has a new edition Suburbia – edited by Lachlan Brown and Nathanael O’Reilly. Being a suburban boy myself, I couldn’t wait to browse through the 60 new poems on my homeland. Favourite so far is Jake Goetz’ The Sound of Spitting 

it rises in school yards
of smashed-fruit afternoons
sun peeling back day’s dazed
in Shakespeare
and Pythagoras’s theorem
when two kids use sticks
to cast spells on each other’s shins…

Jake also has a blog where he publishes Marrickville Pause –

….[which] started in early 2016 as a print zine of poems written by a friend and I under numerous pseudonyms. We wanted the magazine to be fun, democratic, piss-taking, colloquial and full of all the other attributes we believed one would (should?) associate with contemporary Australian poetry and writing.

It’s in it’s third edition and on WordPress, so go check it out (and give the authors a like or two).

And finally, a word that fell out of my reading this week: parataxis – list making (kinda) where the arrangement of items (clauses in a sentence; images in a poem) appears to be  unconnected or of equal importance. One of the helpful grammar pages offered this as an example of paratactic style:

“I remember walking across 62nd Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later . . .” (Joan Didion, “Goodbye to All That.” Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1968)

Image: Triple Front (With 4 Fronts) style house in Heidelberg, Victoria by Nick Carson at English Wikipedia [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons. And here’s the terrific Courtney Barnett with her paean to another Melbourne suburb, de-Preston.