how to launch a poem

About the author

Grace Yee

Grace Yee’s collection Chinese Fish won the Victorian Prize for Literature, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry, and the Mary and Peter Biggs...

More from this edition

Non-fictionFrom a modern perspective Gordon makes an odd choice for a national poet, since he wrote only rarely about the country that embraced him. He set many of his popular verses in England and studded the others with the classical references familiar to an English gentleman. Yet before the passage of the 1931 Statute of Westminster – or, more exactly, until similar laws passed through the Australian Parliament in 1942 – Britain retained the legal right to determine foreign relations for the Australian Commonwealth. Accordingly, prior, during and for some time after the Great War, respectable Australian nationalism generally manifested as Empire patriotism.

Class acts

Non-fictionSocial media has made available to us whole new audiences and vectors for class and lifestyle performance. Where previously your political commitments or what books you were reading might have been topics of conversation with close friends at the pub, now they can be projected to hundreds or thousands of followers. Eating at a restaurant is another example; a previously private and intimately social act can now be a place to be seen, not by the people you’re dining with, or even the other patrons, but by everybody who follows you.

Healthcare is other people

Non-fiction IN 1977 A gastroenterologist named Franz Ingelfinger had cancer, a cancer that originated in his gastroenteric tract. He was perhaps the most informed patient...