KEN BOLTON edits this magazine. Books include Sestina To The Centre Of The Brain and a Selected Poems from Penguin (1992) and, with John Jenkins, The Gutman Variations (Little Esther) and other collaboratively written titles. Ken Bolton's art criticism has appeared in various magazines. He is associated with Adelaide's Experimental Art Foundation. Recent work appeared in the UTS Review, Southerly, Heat and in NZ magazines Sport, Just Another Art Movement, A Brief Description of the Whole World and Landfall. A volume is promised from Adelaide's Wakefield Press. Email Ken Bolton here.
JENNY BORNHOLDT is a New Zealand writer and lives in Wellington. Her latest collection is Waiting Shelter (Victoria University Press, 1991), whose twin themes are family and travel and, via these, the experience of cultural and linguistic specificity, and other issues. It's a great book. Her previous collections, This Big Face (1988) and Moving House (1989), were both shortlisted in the New Zealand Book Awards and her work appears in only the best of New Zealand magazines and anthologies. Bornholdt co-edited the recent Oxford Anthology of New Zealand Poetry with Gregory O'Brien & Mark Williams.
PAMELA BROWN is a poet and prose writer living in Sydney. Her many books include Cafe Sport, Keep It Quiet, (both from Sea Cruise Books), and many others now out of print - as was her Selected Poems, until updated and reissued by Wild & Woolley as New & Selected. A further title, This World, This Place, published by UQP, was a highlight of 1994. A scarifying intelligence.
LAURIE DUGGAN's work has appeared in many small magazines and is much anthologized. His New and Selected Poems (from University of Queensland Press earlier this year) demonstrates the range, depth and acuity of his work: 'What other Australian poet is able to inhabit a number of 'styles' as though each were his only one?' Um, none? As well as the Selected see Duggan's Memorials published by Little Esther at the beginning of the year.
JOHN FORBES - Books include Tropical Skiing, On The Beach, Stalin's Holidays, The Stunned Mullet and a New & Selected Poems (A & R, 1992). John Forbes' work is much anthologised. He is the editor of the occasional, casual, and salutary magazine Surfers Paradise. He is the very 'type' of the modern poet.
JOHN JENKINS lives in Melbourne. Besides poetry he has written and published much prose, criticism and a number of successful, co-written performance pieces involving dance, text and music. He is the author of the pioneering study 22 Contemporary Australian Composers. Titles include The Inland Sea (Rigmarole/Brunswick Hills), Chromatic Cargoes (Post Neo Publications) and, in collaboration with Ken Bolton, Airborne Dogs, poems (Brunswick Hills) and the verse novella The Ferrara Poems (Experimental Art Foundation) - basis for the Jenni Robertson film of the same name. John Jenkins' latest book is Days Like Air from Modern Writing Press.
CATHERINE KENNEALLY is an Adelaide writer, critic and broadcaster. Her reviews and criticism (of literature, cultural theory, visual arts and more) appear frequently in The Australian, The Adelaide Review, The Australian Book Review, Overland and elsewhere; her poetry has appeared recently in Meanjin, Fine Line, Southerly, in the Women's Redress Press Shrieks anthology - and in previous Otis Rushes. Around Here, a poetry collection, is due for publication by Penguin. Her debut title, Harmers Haven appeared from Little Esther early this year.
GREGORY O'BRIEN is a terrific New Zealand poet. He co-edited the recent Oxford Anthology of New Zealand Poetry with Jenny Bornholdt & Mark Williams. A knock-out poet and anthologist to boot - he has also published (via Godwit) Lands and Deeds - profiles of and conversations with 18 major New Zealand painters. Malachi, published in Otis Rush #8, is also available in book form from Little Esther books. Previous titles by O'Brien include Diesel Mystic (Wellington University), and Great Lake (Local Consumption). Gregory O'Brien is included in the recent Penguin anthology of Contemporary NZ Poetry. He has published in various New Zealand magazines and in such local journals as Scripsi. Latest title - Days Beside Water from Auckland University Press.
ANDREW PETRUSEVICS is generally to seen to make the most consistently & gracefully witty art in Adelaide over the last ten years - paintings, sculptures, performances & parodic live music. He has shown in numerous group shows and solo at Greenaway Gallery and smaller., more fugitive galleries. This issue shows his more recent agit-prop computer-assisted work. Petrusevics runs the net site: KONSTRUKTO "The art political ezine for thinking Australians", which keeps tabs on the cardboard politics of our times. (http://dove.mtx.net.au/~andypc) The "e" party world headquarters is also at this url, which predicts a sociological order driven purely by rationalisation programs and one dimensional "e"-deology.
SERGIO SELLI (1901 - 1932)'s reputation has declined from its apogee in the late twenties/early thirties - especially in Italy, where his writing is seen as affectedly & falsely 'French'. There is some Francophone critical re-evaluation underway though since the 70s from which vantage his work again seems to prefigure if not indeed to pre-empt tendencies nascent then in sixties France.
ARDENGO SOFFICI was born in April 1879 and spent his adolescent years in Florence, painting and writing while working in a lawyer's office. In 1900 he went to Paris, where he came into contact with French avant garde circles. Returning to Florence, he collaborated on the magazines Voce and Lacerba, associating himself with Futurism. As well as poems he wrote a number of polemics, including a defence of Futurism, a reinterpretation of Rimbaud, and a substantial autobiographical work. Soffici gradually became a neoclassicist and fascist; a believer in an artistic and political "return to order". He died in 1964. The poems translated here all date from around 1915.
JYANNI STEFFENSEN is an Adelaide based writer. Some of her work has been published in the U.S. She has not published literary work widely in Australia to date, most of it being confined so far to previous issues of Otis Rush. However her critical and theoretical writing has appeared often in Art & Text, Photofile, Broadsheet and elsewhere. She has recently completed a master's thesis on French feminist literary theory. Jyanni Steffensen has also worked in theatre and experimental film. She is an alumni of the EAF. Jyanni Steffensen, with Linda Marie Walker, co-curates & co-edits the following three webb sites -
firstly: http://www.va.com.au/parallel/gap/ secondly: http://www.va.com.au/parallel/ and thirdly: http://va.com.au/ensemble/
TONY TOWLE is a dues-paid-up member of the famed "New York School" of poets, which includes such as John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, and, in Towle's generation, Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, Bernadette Mayer, Peter Schjeldahl, David Shapiro and others. Tony Towle's major collections are North (Columbia), Autobiography and other Poems (Sun & Moon), New and Selected Poems (Kulchur) and, more recently, Some Musical Episodes (Hanging Loose Press). Gemini, a book of Towle's collaborations with poet Charles North, was published by Swollen Magpie. Tony Towle was for sixteen years administrative assistant to Tatyana Grosman's Universal Limited Art Editions. His art reviews have appeared in Arts and Arts in America.
LINDA MARIE WALKER works both as writer and artist. She has done much collaborative work with Paul Hewson on image-and-text series and art installations. Some of this collaborative work appeared in the first Otis Rush. Her work is well known in the visual arts. Walker's writing on art - both criticism and 'parallel texts' - appears often in the CAC Broadsheet, Agenda and Art & Text as well as Otis Rush. A sequence of her work appeared in Southerly's survey of contemporary writing. An early Hewson / Walker title, published by the Experimental Art Foundation, is Cherished Objects. Linda Marie Walker also edited Ö but never by chanceÖ (EAF), the book accompanying the nationally touring exhibition of the same name and which she curated. Linda Marie Walker, with Jyanni Steffensen, co-curates & co-edits the following three webb sites - firstly: http://www.va.com.au/parallel/gap/ secondly: http://www.va.com.au/parallel/ and thirdly: http://va.com.au/ensemble/