Catherine Vidler’s Selected Visual Poems: A Book Launch and Memorial Seminar
Catherine Vidler’s Selected Visual Poems: A Book Launch and Memorial Seminar:
Catherine Vidler (1973-2023) was one of Australia’s foremost visual and lyric poets, editor of the Trans-Tasman literary magazine Snorkel, author of Furious Triangle (Puncher & Wattman, 2011), Wings (Cordite, 2021) and a large and diverse body of small press volumes, chapbooks, and poetic objects published across the globe that defy any easy summation or generalisation. She formed vibrant collaborations with writers, editors and artists that traversed literary formal categories and continents. This seminar both celebrates her unique poetic legacy and marks the launch of Vidler's posthumously published Selected Visual Poems (SOd Press) which presents some of her major visual sequences. Vidler assembled this volume shortly before she passed away. The work in the Selected Visual Poems is testament to the vastness of her visual imagination.
AJ Carruthers is a poet, critic and editor, author of AXIS Z Book 3 (Cordite, 2023), AXIS Book 2 (Vagabond, 2019), AXIS Book 1: 'Areal' (Vagabond, 2014), and books of criticism; Literary History and Avant-Gardes in the Antipodes: Languages of Invention (Edinburgh UP, forthcoming 2024), and Notational Experiments in North American Long Poems: Stave Sightings (Palgrave, 2017). He is founding editor of the small press SOd Press, which published multiple books, chapbooks and visual digital objects by Vidler, including lake labyl (2017); collected composite lost sonnets (2018) and stamp sonnets: 28 poems created from material contained in hartmut abendschein’s ‘stamp stories’ project (2019). He is essays editor of the poetry journal Rabbit and Visiting Fellow at the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics at the Australian National University.
Tom Jenks is a writer and text artist living in Manchester, UK. His books include Pack My Box with Five-Dozen Liquor Jugs (Penteract Press, 2021), a pangrammatic novel, co-written with Catherine Vidler: twenty-six chapters of twenty-six sentences, each sentence containing every letter of the alphabet. He edits the small press zimzalla, whose publications include Catherine Vidler’s Chaingrass, a spiral bound notebook of visual poems inspired by the work of Bill Manhire. More at https://tomjenks.uk
Toby Fitch (he/they) is poetry editor of Overland and a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Sydney. He is the author of eight books of poetry, including Where Only the Sky had Hung Before (2019), Sydney Spleen (2021), and, most recently, a newly expanded and full-colour edition of Object Permanence: Calligrammes (2022). He co-edited Best of Australian Poems 2021 with Ellen van Neerven, and edited the anthology Groundswell: The Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New & Emerging Poets 2007–2020. He lives in Newtown on unceded Gadigal land with his partner, two kids and a staffy.
Amelia Dale is Lecturer in English at the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics at the Australian National University. She is a member of the SOd Press editorial collective which published books, chapbooks and digital objects by Vidler, and wrote the introduction to Vidler’s collection Wings (Cordite, 2023).
