The Judith Wright Poetry Prize was established in 2007 by Overland magazine, one of Australia’s more inspired quarterlies and among the nation’s best homes for poetry, as an annual award recognizing new and emerging poets. In 2021, Overland published Groundswell: The Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize 2007-2020, an anthology which collected not only the winning poems (including the runners up), but also a selection of poems written by the winning poets since they were honored by the prize. Edited by Overland’s poetry editor, Toby Fitch, Groundswell is perhaps the best chronicle of the state of Australian poetry over the past 14 years you’re likely to find, mapping its fashions and trajectory through the work of a number of innovative voices.
2015’s winning poem “alkaway” by Ella O’Keefe grabs you with the sheer charisma of its opening line “a punchline flies business class”—how could anyone resist reading what comes next? But there is more than mere surface charm to the line: when it comes to jokes and their punchlines, we speak of their success in terms of “landing.” This joke, still in flight, remains hanging in the balance. It also occupies a place of privilege, flying not in coach but “business class,” which brings up the question of the role of humor in our society more generally, and comedians in particular, many of whom feel they are entitled to say the un-sayable, that their punchlines, no matter where they land, deserve to travel in a certain amount of comfort and be received with immunity.
What follows is a series of surprising images and phrases juxtaposed against one another, which, as the award judges note, address a range of themes “from high capitalism, health fads, technology and the law, to the domestic, cohabitation, indifference and the refuse of human consumption”, but throughout the poem the privilege of distance (how we can remove ourselves, or be removed, from what we say, see or do) seems to lurk disturbingly in the background.
Ella O’Keefe’s first collection of poems Slowlier was published by Cordite in 2020. She currently teaches at Deakin University, where she was awarded her thesis which discussed the poetry and critical writing of Veronica Forrest-Thomson and Barbara Guest.
alkaway
a punchline flies business class
towards vague archipelagos
in the deepening Pacific
I find glassy petrol spots the size of 5-cent pieces
refracting intervals of the day
thrushy embers in mornings overturn
woken by shapeless violence
your body returned
from sleep’s legal trip
quilling into the afternoon
discovering ‘the therapeutic power of water’
while wasp-shaped helicopters
spotlight the oval – but when?
(in violet enamel
when bees were discovered)
after filtering the whole house
cohabited refuse goes archaeological
turncoat, Georgic pink
bread bag (garment)
elastic calendar as in
day-shaped moments between yawns
time-check:
pearling three o’clock clicks to
night without dusk
floating floor
live improv set in the big suburb
replica village reality effect
the bodice sits over the body
know this well already, cf. ‘it mimics nature to filter’
old-sponge chunks of wattle
slumping on your cheek
gathering a full body testimonial
Go to Source
Author: Thomas Moody
