Contemporary Australian Poetry

"When Ezra Pound quipped in a letter to R.P. Blackmur in 1924 that ‘one can no longer put Mt Purgatory forty miles high in the midst of Australian sheep land’, he was of course mocking the medieval cosmography of Dante’s La Divina Commedia, which locates Mount Purgatory in the Antipodes..."

If poets are compelled toward cultivating voice then, logically enough, to which ends? In his recent monograph, "Polysituatedness: a poetics of displacement" (2017), one of Australia’s foremost politically engaged poets John Kinsella asserts that poetry “is so often less about ‘art’ and more about ‘activism’,” and that within this reckoning, he remains “interested in the poem’s potential for resistance, not its compliance with a status quo” (40) ...

While this landmark anthology refuses the "voyeuristic obsession with tragedy and trauma as the ultimate and only contribution of Aboriginal writing to Australian literary studies" (xix), at their most angered, the poems in Guwayu "sing for the massacres that litter our lands" (Ali Cobby Eckermann, page 39), and recall "Connected sites of significance [that] have disappeared" (Lorna Munro, page 6).

Abstract: This paper considers the aesthetic and material concepts of the threshold as they figure in contemporary Australian poetry, and examines how the threshold can be a productive and generative space in Australian poetics. The metaphor of the threshold asa point of entry or beginning, place of transition, place of exit, rite of passage, or liminal space, speaks to the writer’s imagination as a location of potent creative power. It is here, on the threshold, that a writer gestates ideas, follows the call of the initial creative impulse, and brings her words forth to be shaped. During this (w)rite of passage something new is made. For a writer, being on the threshold is at once a place where she can thresh out ideas (receptive), and the site of creative acts (generative).

Yet the threshold is not only a metaphor for the creative process; it is a liminal space where certain kinds of knowledge can be sensed in passing. The word ‘liminal’ literally means “[to occupy] a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold” (OED). In an Australian postcolonial context, the threshold as a productive space in literature or art is particularly resonant because of the kinds of terrains that may be crossed and
spoken across the threshold—the productive capacity of the middle ground.

This paper will discuss the poems of Inside My Mother (2015) by
Yankunytjatjara/Kokatha South Australian poet Ali Cobby Eckermann that inhabit the threshold as both an unsettled and productive space in contemporary Australian postcolonial poetics. Writing on the threshold, Cobby Eckermann is engaged in reimagining such poetics.

Keywords: Ali Cobby Eckermann; poetics; threshold.

This discursively monumental collection asserts unwavering pressure on the idea of “Australia;” from within colonially bounded domains, where “One Nation voters eat[ ] lamb on Australia Day,” activist and poet Alison Whittaker asks that her readers look beyond mundanely whitewashed scenes, the 179 pages of "Blakwork" fed up with mindless gluttonies, racist hegemonies, and infrastructural violences. This
book calls out the facile politics and narrow charades that pass for cultural life in that country; here is a voice seething with impatience, grief-stricken at the fate of this occupied place.

Exploring the boundaries of one of the most contested fields of literary study--a field that in fact shares territory with philology, aesthetics, cultural theory, philosophy, and cybernetics--this volume gathers a body of critical writings that, taken together, broadly delineate a possible poetics of the contemporary. In these essays, the most interesting and distinguished theorists in the field renegotiate the contours of what might constitute "contemporary poetics," ranging from the historical advent of concrete poetry to the current technopoetics of cyberspace. Concerned with a poetics that extends beyond our own time, as a mere marker of present-day literary activity, their work addresses the limits of a writing "practice"--beginning with Stéphane Mallarmé in the late nineteenth century--that engages concretely with what it means to be contemporary. Contributors: Charles Bernstein, Marjorie Perloff, Kevin Nolan, Donald F. Theall, Bob Perelman, Simon Critchley, D.J. Huppatz, Michel Delville, Andrew Norris, Ricardo L. Nirenberg, Keston Sutherland, Nicole Tomlinson, Julian Savage, Bruce Andrews, Augusto de Campos, Darren Tofts, Gregory L. Ulmer, J. Hillis Miller, McKenzie Wark, Alan Sondheim, Louis Armand, Steve McCaffery, Allen Fisher.

This article examines the reception of the Thermopylae epigram from classical Greece to modern poetry. The famous inscription for the Three Hundred is markedly unconventional since it is deliberately silent about the glory of the dead heroes. The plain style of the distich invites the readers to fill in the gaps that are left open. While most readers add a patriotic voice to the words of the dead heroes, I argue that we can read the epigram as creating tension between the dead soldiers and their countrymen who are responsible for their death. Kipling and A. D. Hope seem to have read the epigram this way.

BAREKNUCKLE POET ANNUAL VOL.1 2015 2nd Edition 2016
Edited by Brentley Frazer & A. G. Pettet.
Publisher: BAREKNUCKLE BOOKS.
IMPRINT: Bareknuckle Poets.
ISSN: 2205 – 7218.
STATUS: Published: 01/11/2016.
Copyright: Bareknuckle Books & Contributors.
Language: English.
Extent: 348 pages.
Binding: Perfect-bound Paperback.
Interior Ink: Black & white.
Dimensions: (inches) 6x 9

CONTRIBUTORS: L. Ward Abel, Robert Adamson, Venero Armanno, Melissa Ashley, Lisa Marie Basile, Mandy Beaumont, Sally Breen, MTC Cronin, B. R. Dionysius, Maria C. Dominguez, Martin Edmond, Michael Farrell, Toby Fitch, Brentley Frazer, Claire Gaskin, Allen Ginsberg, Matt Hetherington, Eleanor Jackson, Anthony Lawrence, Alexandra McCallum, Tim McGabhann, Laura Jean Mckay, Corey Mesler, Reg Mombassa, A. G. Pettet, Mark Pirie, Rufo Quintavalle, Kris Saknussemm, Gary Snyder, David Stavanger, Todd Swift, John Tranter, Joanna C. Valente, Samuel Wagan Watson, Fakie Wilde, Mark Young, Ali Znadi + More

Several established squatting families have produced writers and artists in an aristocratic tradition of noblesse oblige: Judith Wright and Patrick White are the most striking examples since the 1940s. Both writers were supported in various ways by their puzzled families and their work expresses a difficult affection for life on the land. Both found a literary resource in their rural family heritage while consistently criticising its culture. This paper gives particular consideration to Wright's two histories of her family's life on the land, The Generations of Men (1959) and The Cry for the Dead (1981) as demonstrations of the double heritage of heroic pioneering at the cost of Aboriginal people and the land. Her late poem 'For a Pastoral Family' expresses succinctly her ambivalent feelings about her heritage: 'a doubtful song that has a dying fall'.

Once asked what poets can do for Australia, A.D. Hope replied: “They can justify its existence.” Such has been the charge of Australian poets, from Hope himself to Kenneth Slessor, Judith Wright to Les Murray, Anthony Lawrence to Judith Beveridge: to articulate the Australian experience so that it might live in the imagination of its people. While the presence and potency of the Australian landscape remains an abiding interest, a great deal of Australian poetry has been innovative and experimental, with poets such as Robert Adamson, Michael Dransfield, Vicki Viidikas, John Forbes, Gig Ryan, J.S. Harry, and Jennifer Maiden leading the way. The richness, strength, and vitality of Australian poetry is marked by a prodigious diversity that makes it as exhilarating to survey as it is challenging to encapsulate.

Do I confine you to lines and words
enclosed by margins, stops and commas,
or give you space
to slip through the gaps,
and allow my curiosity
to move into your story
which personifies your absence
in the presence of the standard page ?...

"Fifteeners" is the latest stunning installment in this storied poet’s fearless oeuvre, and Albiston’s book of strangest deformations of the sonnet form traverses “all the life / That an awkward person must go through in / The awkward course toward death” (18). In the first poem, an ars poetica and apologia, Albiston mimics an Elizabethan diction to reassert the privilege of affect over intellect: “Poetry may / be loved but never thought  by love it may / be gotten  holden  but by thought  nay so” (14), and that love is a paramountcy remains amply evidenced across this poet’s extensive catalogue. Her books on love ("Element;" "Euclid’s dog: 100 algorythmic poems;" "the Book of Ethel") and its multiple modes of atrophy ("Warlines;" "Jack & Mollie [& her];" "Vertigo: a cantata") suggest that affective modalities – or is it the quest from disequilibrium toward idealized states – have long determined the impetus of this prolific and widely admired writer.

Although ecocriticism has roots in Romanticism, much discourse around ecopoetry has come to hinge on a distancing from a 'Romantic', 'ego-driven' style of poetry, seen to be unethical. Such positions problematize lyric poetry, given its strong association with both Romanticism and the formal centrality of the self. This paper contends that lyric is often conflated with a reductive view of Romanticism and seeks to uncouple the form from such views. Looking to the work of Australian poet Robert Adamson, lyric is framed here as a performative mode rather than a genre, and is presented as an engaged type of ethical discourse which functions via reader answerability. Maintaining a Merleau-Pontean ontology as regards the lyric subject and the dynamic between word and world, and drawing upon Barthes's use of the term 'place', the paper concludes that the lyric can function as a decidedly ethical ecopoetry, in which the place of lyric is also the place of the ecopoetic.

'Ouyang Yu' was an episode that aired on ABC Radio National's Poetica, a weekly program broadcast across Australia from 1997 to 2014. The episode featured readings of poetry by the contemporary Chinese-Australian poet Ouyang Yu, read by the poet and by the actor Brant Eustace. These readings were embedded in rich soundscapes, and framed by interviews with the poet on the thematic contexts for the poems. In this article I treat 'Ouyang Yu' as an adaptation of Ouyang's work, in Linda Hutcheon's sense of the term. I examine how Ouyang's poetry has been adapted for a national audience, and pay particular attention to how contemporary political discourses of nationhood have influenced the episode's adaptations. For Poetica existed within an institution—the ABC—whose culture had a bearing on its programming, and the ABC was in turn influenced by, and sought to influence, the wider social and political culture in Australia.

2008 Paper Presented to the Modern Greek Studies Association of Australia and New Zealand 9th Conference, La Trobe University, Australia.
Panel with Arnold Zable and Angela Costi to honour the literary odyssey's of the Greek Australia Diaspora, including a homage to Dorothy Porter who died a few days prior to the conference, from Shé Hawke, and Arnold Zable's homage to writers in foreign jails through his work with PEN.

Eileen Chong identifies writing as “an act of recovery, of piecing together, of recording, re-ordering and re-inventing.” In Painting Red Orchids, her third collection, the poet scans the stormy dissonance of places populated by particular emotional weathers, and this short book of lyrical investigation is a virtuosic performance of “questions fall[ing] like wet leaves” against, perhaps, the wet black boughs of turbulent experience.

In the nearly 800 pages that comprise the three volumes of his Graphology Poems 1995–2015 (Five Islands P, 2016), John Kinsella demonstrates an exemplary moral anger registering iterations of colonial “omni-speak” as unethical (1: 93). This paper reads Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer (Stanford UP, 1998) by way of apprehending the rhetorical substrata underpinning discourses of Australia as not just determining a sovereign colonial space; in a place where “history is absurdity […] history is overlay” (Graphology Poems 1: 158), Kinsella shows how indigenous and non-colonial others are consistently cast as extra-juridical and merely sub-human. These Graphology Poems not only anathemise and hex historical falsehoods of nation: Kinsella dares sound out the bullshit, and his iconoclastic language games refuse outright to acquiesce to the epistemically violent nullifications of antipodean identity.

This book sets out to navigate questions of the future of Australian poetry. Deliberately designed as a dialogue between poets, each of the four clusters presented here—“Indigeneities”; “Political Landscapes”; “Space, Place, Materiality”; “Revising an Australian Mythos”—models how poetic communities in Australia continue to grow in alliance toward certain constellated ideas. Exploring the ethics of creative production in a place that continues to position capital over culture, property over community, each of the twenty essays in this anthology takes the subject of Australian poetry definitively beyond Eurocentrism and white privilege. By pushing back against nationalizing mythologies that have, over the last 200 years since colonization, not only narrativized the logic of instrumentalization but rendered our lands precarious, this book asserts new possibilities of creative responsiveness within the Australian sensorium.

John Kinsella remains Australia’s most militant, morally cognizant naysayer, and his oeuvre is an archive of precepts running counter to master narratives of place. This essay re-reads Benjamin’s notion of the artist as cultural producer against the grain of Esposito’s etymological excavations of “community,” and frames Kinsella’s steady output of co-authored books as not only a mode of nomadic munificence but no less than a kind of formative guerrilla poetics. Pairing with poets, rock stars, others to extend his anti-capitalist project, Kinsella’s co-authored works perform a suite of interventions, gifting readers a means by which we too might fathom the generative effects of banding together in a munus speaking its own laws (and lore) to reconfigure notions of co-empowerment, equity, and indeed comradeship. Each of Kinsella’s co-authored books constitutes an intentional community of two and, as if dwelling in compositional possibilities, each text remains steadfastly optimistic. Refusing to be locked into despair by regressively instrumentalist political non-visionaries, from within an Antipodean milieu Kinsella and his many co-authors materialize gestures demonstrating how we might struggle for control of who gets to produce ideas, by which decentralized means, and to which generative ends.

This small collection of poems is part of a bigger collection on Trees and Bees. Attached to these poems is the nuance of grief for life differently lived and understood, either through death, farewell or disregard.

I Wynyard Ghost

Bent with weather and age
its wisdom branches witness to civilization
marked for demolition (or crucifixion) –
the sign of the pink cross.
Euthanasia is too kind a word.
Before the chainsaw sapped it,
bled its storied bark
it sighed and bowed – winded –
felled on its own terms
gapping the human axe.
Tactical ecological suicide. (p.10)

"...Tipping’s debt to Scottish poet and artist Ian Hamilton Finlay is evident throughout; his numerous commissioned installation pieces have appeared in Melbourne, London, New York and, memorably, on the shores of Lake Macquarie, in a large-scale work that he claims is clearly visible on Google Earth. (It is. I checked.)..."

[Print & online: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/words-take-shape-on-the-printed-page/story-fn9n8gph-1226944354966]

Racial Hygiene is published online in Guide to Sydney Crime, Meuse Press, 2022: https://meusepress.tripod.com/SydneyCrime.pdf?fbclid=IwAR1aSxDNNmUpvBqR0pN3PFJAEt9ePwccTSNqO0yOOBif879X0baOAOZNRkc. Racial hygiene was promoted by members of the Women’s Reform League, especially Lillie Goodisson who established the Racial Hygiene Association of New South Wales in 1926. They advocated selective breeding, the segregation and sterilisation of the ‘mentally deficient’ and the introduction of pre-marital health examinations. At a time when backyard abortions were commonly available, highly dangerous and illegal, they also provided advice about contraception. Their program  reflected broadly circulating ideas about eugenics in the 1940s.