Reading the City of Literature is a snapshot of Melbourne’s literary activity over the span of a year. It’s been a while since our last Reading the City of Literature, but we are happy to say that it’s back.
So please scroll through this whole website, click, read and share!
I will have learnt to see that a muddy swamp can be called a fen, that not knowing where you’re going can be a virtue, and that walking is a kind of perfection.
It’s impossible to hold on to anything concrete in the everything poem because the background scenery is always changing. The effect is that each poem has a life of its own.
Within each desire is a secondary desire, and relations for which this desire is primary.
Somehow the beauty of the place made it all worse.
I know I shouldn’t go back there… For so many reasons…
Mama, she said they was dead. But I thought Mama was wrong. I imagined I could feel Owens up there wading around in the deep snow, foggy breath coming from his mouth.
Tiepolo’s work in this / period is characterised by always a mantled light, / having the characteristic of excessive luminosity. His / frescoes exposing, through the cunning duplicity / of hand and eye, a kind of internal corrosion of the / objects.
Swimming is the liminal space between life and death when we are not vigilant or adept.
Now that he was dead, I only had my failing memory, and failed understanding, and the corroborating evidence of other equally fragile and partial sensibilities to fall back on. It added to my responsibilities, and I already had so many of those.
Over the next few weeks, he took hundreds of discarded books from Cash Converters and piled them around the basement for insulation. Encyclopaedias and atlases lined the brick walls. Physics textbooks and world histories towered around her bed.
I was electric with pain as Grace tended me in the dark. I smelled something cool and coppery, like a coin laid on the tongue.
Gravity forcing me to sit quietly as I try / not to collapse. This weight of grief – / a trillion goodbyes at once.
I haven’t written for a year now. I may never do it again & I feel enormous but suppressed grief about this. I’ve been gardening instead.
I am hit with the overpowering scent of rose petals. It doesn’t smell soft and sweet, like Nan’s roses at home. This scent is rich and bloody, like roses strewn on a battlefield.
Taking pictures is one way to engage in and record our experiences as they are happening. But most things don’t appear in photographs, they escape.
