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In the last few weeks, we have been drowned, smothered or mired in words that have striven for solemnity. Such occasions as the death of Queen Elizabeth II and the various Grand Finals are held to transcend the everyday and so to demand elegiac or epic words. It is easy to laugh at the manifest failures to reach those heights, whether by Poets Laureate who should have known better, or by excitable journalists. There is, however, something endearingly human in the attempt.
In most circles poetry doesn’t matter. It doesn’t put bread on the table, nor raise people to revolt nor even make news unless a grizzled footballer is outed for secretly writing poems. Even in churches poems and hymns are altered to improve their orthodoxy in matters of faith, gender, race or modernity, but rarely their poetic quality.
In a recent meeting Pope Francis met the editors of European Jesuit cultural magazines. As usual in such meetings he did not give an address but invited the participants to ask questions. The questions ranged across a wide area, reflecting the different readership and religious culture of the magazines. Underlying the Pope’s responses lay a challenging and coherent approach to the Jesuit mission and to communication that invites self-reflection also among Jesuit magazines and their readers outside Europe.
Eureka Street Plus is a place where respectful in-depth public conversation can take place in the grey area between polarities; a place to air differing perspectives, thoughts and concerns without fear of reprisals. It’s about making space to further enable the productive conversations necessary for an engaged, functioning society.
Next week we officially enter winter. The associations of winter are largely negative. They mourn the loss of the summer that has passed. For that reason it may seem incongruous that winter should begin immediately after a Federal Election campaign that ended with the excitement of the people’s choice of a new Government. The potential for a new beginning might fit better with spring.
It seems every fifteen years or so Eureka Street has something to announce. There was 1991, when Eureka Street launched, 2006 with the switch from print to digital, and now, the next chapter in the Eureka Street journey. After 15 years of being a free digital magazine, we are quietly overjoyed to be launching Eureka Street Plus, an expanded content offering for paid subscribers.
One of the most memorable scenes in Russian literature relates the thoughts of a man lying on the ground staring at the sky in the middle of a major European battle. Prince Andrei Bolkonsky is wounded. He is placed in a situation where, instead of running, fighting, and thinking every moment might be his last, he is suddenly met with silence, grandeur, tranquillity.
Philip Harvey has been poetry editor of Eureka Street since its early days. Now he has decided that it is time for him to step down from his position in favour of a younger editor. I appreciate the thoughtfulness and generosity of his decision though I feel deeply his loss to us. And I am grateful to him all that he has given to Eureka Street of his skills and of himself, all on an almost honorary basis.
I was invited to read the poetry at Eureka Street by Morag Fraser, sometime in the mists. She shouted me coffee at the Chinese place across Victoria Street from the magazine’s Richmond offices. That was nearly twenty years ago. As we crunched on fortune cookies, she popped the question. I’ve been editing poetry at Eureka Street ever since and have only chosen to let go of the job this summer.
Although I teach poetry and do occasional workshops, the following is written in response to one such workshopper, new to writing poetry, who in lockdown would message me on social media with fairly open-ended questions about poetry. My answers are written after the wry manner of the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska; wry, but generally helpful. They are not the launch pad for a new poetics. I have stopped for now at 12 questions, but the questions keep rolling in.
After an excruciating few weeks of negotiations with the Nationals — and far too many hours subjected to Barnaby Joyce’s ramblings — the Morrison government has finally announced their predictably underwhelming plan to reach net zero emissions by 2050.
These weekday mornings all is quiet. / I stroll across the highway, / a piddle of cars in the outbound lane, / a puddle at the distant lights. / Along the parkland trail / cowled figures walk alone, / measuring their distance. / From the rise above the railway cutting / Macedon stands burly in the smoke-free air.
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