Michael Farrell – December 29 2019

Michael is an editor, short story writer and prize-winning poet. He holds an MA (thesis on the billycan in Australian poetry) and PhD (on experimental poetics in the nineteenth century). Michael’s poems have appeared in the Picador New Writing 3 and Calyx: 30 Contemporary Poets anthologies and have been included in The turnrow Anthology of Contemporary Australian Poetry and Active Aesthetics: Contemporary Australian Poetry. He co-edited Out of the Box: Contemporary Gay and Lesbian Poets with Jill Jones and has edited poetry features for both Australian and US magazines. Michael is the Australia editor for the US journal Slope and he currently edits Flash Cove magazine with designer Wendy Cooper. He also writes songs with Jimmy Hawk and co-wrote the Dick Diver single ‘Waste the Alphabet’. Michael’s other work includes his short story, ‘Making Love (To A Man)’ (Overland, 2012) and the literary criticism book, Writing Australian Unsettlement: Modes of Poetic Invention 1796–1945. His other poetry collections include Living at the Z, ode ode, BREAK ME OUCH (cartoon poems), a raiders guide, thou sand and Cocky’s Joy.

Open Sesame
Giramondo, 2012; ISBN 9781920882846
Michael Farrell is well known for his ability to break language and action into their component gestures, freeing the emotion locked up in them, and very often their comic or magical aspects too, as the title of his new poetry collection suggests. Open Sesame includes sonnets derived from the TV drama ‘The Bill’, a sestina featuring JFK set in a laundrette, an improvised parody which cuts up writing found on supermarket shelves, collage poems including one on Phar Lap, four long poems on the theme of friendship, and ‘luke and henrys storyline’, the story of a commitment ceremony between two gay men. In an earlier form, the manuscript of this collection won the inaugural Barrett Reid Poetry Prize for experimental poetry, and was praised by the judges for its playfulness, craft and ‘subliminal force.’

A Lyrebird: Selected Poems of Michael Farrell – Edited by Jared Schickling
Blazevox, 2017; ISBN 9781609642808
“Revelation and habit conspire in this selection of Michael Farrell’s poetry, whose shambling virtuosity brings to mind the lost art of scat singing. From his earliest poems, Farrell’s skittish lines echo the studied laissez-faire of the New York School, but they also make it new, with a startling range of tone and diction broadcast – and exquisitely garbled – from somewhere down under. Yet perhaps the most astonishing quality of Farrell’s poetry is the way it summons that rarest of affinities – a correspondence with the movement of dance. For reading Farrell’s poems can feel like one is shadowing a step, a combination, by Gene Kelly – or Savion Glover, looping and breaking across a field of trifles and sorrows.” – Daniel Tiffany
“Enter A Lyrebird and you open onto a polyphony of slang and nuance. Expect a humorous disorientation and deep travel through undersides of all that can be said and borrowed. Just in time, since mono-culture cannot know itself, Michael Farrell’s deft bravery transmutes English and gives us journeys out.” – Sarah Riggs