A line from Colin McCahon by Mark Young

As an extension of Arc’s Canada-Australia joint issue with Australia’s Cordite magazine, over the next several weeks, Arc will be publishing online selected pieces from Australian poets — this is in addition to the Australian poetry published in print in Arc 77. For the Arc-Cordite joint issue, each magazine handed the editorial responsibilities over to the other: so that Cordite filled Arc #77 (and these these webpages) with nothing but Australian poetry, prose and artwork; Arc did the same for Cordite (Arc’s part of this partnership will be published online at Cordite in December 2014). Our intent in this partnership is to showcase and cross-pollinate poetics between Australia and Canada and to share with a broader audience poetry that may be little known outside of home borders.

 

A line from Colin McCahon

I play golf well; I’m
terrible at squash. If
I had to choose one,
it would probably be

the semi-colon. You
shouldn’t expect me to
understand everything—
punctuation is a social

technology, & I often
have errors in my SQL
syntax. This paraphrase
of a panoramic photo

was taken shortly after
sunset & contains few
grammatical variations.
These formal landscapes

are evocative, full of
canola, good choices as
a taxonomic identifier
or translating between

languages with different
word order patterns. I
read the poem out loud.
The composer as exegete.

 

Mark Young’s most recent books are the e-book Asemic Colon from The Red Ceilings Press, The Codicils, a 600-page selection of poems written between 2009 & 2012, out from Otoliths, & the eclectic world from gradient books of Finland. He lives south of Townsville in North Queensland.

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