Kent MacCarter
In the waning days of the Italian lira, I accidentally left a new velvet jacket – pockets stuffed with an early mobile and gobs of cash – in a café in Florence, en route to pay school tuition. 1999. Gone. That forced me to return to Santa Fe, then to Chicago where a friend shoehorned me into a role at the University of Chicago Press. There I dabbled in poetry with Thom Gunn and Mark Strand, and in abstractions with Robert von Hallberg and Julia Kristeva. Initial glimmers. I headed to Melbourne to hopscotch my finance degrees with an English gong with Tony Birch and Chris Wallace-Crabbe. I worked for Thomson Learning and Curriculum Press and was treasurer of Small Press Network. In 2010, I became managing editor of Cordite Poetry Review. I started Cordite Books in 2015.
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I have a host/parasite relationship to my poems, fussing over inspiration until, oftentimes, it decomposes into ruins: host poems. From that non-process, new poems, unique, sprout from the loam, subsuming what 'nutrients' exist and become my better poems. They arrive, and within ten drafts I'm happy.
... (read more)Dust without dimension
The November 13 attacks on ordinary citizens in Paris have outraged and galvanised the world community. We share this sense of revulsion. Australia has a large French population and a rich tradition of Francophilia. Our sympathies go to our French readers and to the families of all the victims.
Words, at such times, are de trop. Not La Marseillaise
In ABR's inaugural 'Poem of the Week' Kent MacCarter introduces and reads his poem 'Are You Ready to Go Superfast?'.
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