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...

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IntroductionStatus itself is a little like a riddle: a code to be cracked, a hand in which you can’t see all the cards. Unless you’re Batman, however, the stakes for solving riddles tend to be comfortingly low, whereas the pressures of deciphering status can occupy a far more consequential role in our lives (it’s all fun and games until somebody loses their cultural capital).

Conferral

Non-fictionBeneath my fantasy of a regular wage is the puerile hunch that if I stay in academia, I can regain some of the nervy possibility I held as an undergraduate student. It was at university that I first met people whose days were preoccupied with thinking, reading and writing, revelatory mostly because they were compensated for these activities with bourgeois trappings and validation. With hindsight, I can recognise that my straining so doggedly to become the kind of person who succeeded according to the university’s metrics mainly taught me what bell hooks says is the primary lesson of college – namely, ‘obedience to authority’.

Uninsurable nation

Non-fiction AS I DRIVE into the small Victorian riverside town of Rochester, a banner tied to a metal fence greets me on the main road....