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Judith Bishop

In May 2021, scientists at Woebot Health, a US-based artificial intelligence company, published a paper titled ‘Evidence of Human-Level Bonds Established with a Digital Conversational Agent’. Reading it back then, I felt like a door had suddenly opened from nowhere. But not just any door: this one led directly to a passage into human inner life and one of its most intimate dimensions: the nature and experience of emotional bonding.

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Published in December 2023, no. 460

Alcatraz is an international anthology of prose poems which builds on the success of previous collaborations between the artist Phil Day and poets Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington. Contributors include many outstanding poets from the United States (twenty-eight), the United Kingdom (ten), and Australia (thirteen), with smaller numbers of poets from India, New Zealand, Germany, Singapore, Vietnam and Hong Kong. The title with its alphabetical alpha and omega, was offered to the poets as an inspiration. I was halfway through the book before I realised the book itself embodies a multitude of jail breaks, vaulting over a range of conventions. These include its front and back cover – entirely taken up by a numinous painted image, the title on its spine the only printed word – and even the luxurious feel of its paper.

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Twenty years of the Porter Poetry Prize

Australian Book Review
Thursday, 24 August 2023

This week on the ABR Podcast we celebrate twenty years of the Peter Porter Poetry Prize with readings from six winners. We invited these poets to reflect on the prize and their winning poems. Hear fresh readings from Judith Beveridge, A. Frances Johnson, Damen O’Brien, Sara M. Saleh, Alex Skovron and Judith Bishop. The 2024 Porter Prize, worth a total of $10,000, closes on October 9.

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Published in The ABR Podcast

Portraits of the Future II

Judith Bishop
Wednesday, 24 May 2023

'Portraits of the Future II', a new poem by Judith Bishop.

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Published in June 2023, no. 454

In a world both foul and fallen, where delusion, death, and unassailable Dummheit seem to wait on every corner, what can poetry do that warrants our rapt attention more than every other kind of distraction? Justin Clemens voiced the common lament when he wrote, ‘No-one reads poetry anymore, there being not enough time and more exciting entertainments out there.’ The issue, he said, is ‘a materialist problem that has always proven fundamental for poets: how to compose something that, by its own mere affective powers alone, will continue to be read or recited’ (‘Being Caught dead’, Overland, 202, 2011). That clinches the dilemma rather well. And yet, entertainment or not – and effective or not in their affective power – poetry collections seem to endure as a place, of Lilliputian dimensions, to encounter other worlds and world views.

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Published in April 2023, no. 452

Harbour

Judith Bishop
Thursday, 25 August 2022

As if / the black window / at the solitary pass / from I to this (or you or now) / could let a human mind ...

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Judith Bishop reviews 'New and Selected Poems' by J.S. Harry

Judith Bishop
Saturday, 23 April 2022

J.S. Harry and her lapin alter ego, Peter Henry Lepus, would assuredly have had ‘words to say’ about the war in Ukraine and its manufacture by a group of human beings. Peter, a Wittgensteinian, would have pondered hard the nature of the war ‘games’ that preceded use of arms: games in which each ‘move’ was a crafted piece of language and (dis)information, known as ‘intelligence’ or ‘diplomacy’, but where the ‘endgame’ and ‘stakes’ would involve the disposition of human flesh and blood. ‘The dead do not have a world ... / A human’s world is language: “logic” & “words”, Peter thinks’ (‘After the Fall of Baghdad’).

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Published in May 2022, no. 442

The Forest

Judith Bishop
Wednesday, 23 March 2022

There could be someone, there, walking through a forest – upright or / slightly bending – gathering, not berries, or fallen nuts, or mushrooms, / but thoughts; there could be thoughts like whining insects that drill down

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Published in April 2022, no. 441

Sein und Zeit

Judith Bishop
Wednesday, 23 June 2021

We can walk into a room not knowing. / It doesn’t happen every time. // A white room can be painted to be pure. / I mean, just to show us that it’s clean.

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Published in July 2021, no. 433

Portraits of the Future

Judith Bishop
Thursday, 22 October 2020

i.
Look, said the sonographer, your sister says hello!
A black photo
where the future rival sucks a thumb-to-be.
Never in all history
was such a portent visible
without a guiding star ...

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Published in November 2020, no. 426
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