Australian Poetry

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) ...

Alfred Leslie Guppy was an extraordinary Australian. He was brave and loyal, honest and dutiful. In truth, there isn’t much extraordinary about that for an Australian of the time, but he was extraordinary nonetheless. He is a confirmed member of the Australian Great War Poetry canon, and he was the only known poet-prisoner in the canon. His bravery and service are well documented, and his post-war service should never be forgotten and well. Interestingly, he was also the first cousin of distinguished Australian World War Two Surgeon and POW survivor, Sir Edward “Weary” Dunlop.

Poetry has great value for those who can engage with it. It resonates and echoes with images and notions that most prose simply fails to capture. It is far more likely that we will remember verse longer than we will remember prose. In fact, when we do remember prose, it is because it had a poetic rhythm to it. It sang to us from the page. It got into our musical memory and sat like a mirror to our memories. Poetry is just that, but when poetry is non-fictional, it then speaks to us in a deeper, stronger way when thinking about the events it relates. Non-fiction poetry then, is a research source which is of great benefit to researchers and historians.

There is probably nothing more quintessentially Australian than the notion of the mate and mateship. The very idea of what it is to be an Australian is bound up in the notion of what it is to be a mate, and for any Australian who found himself at war, the mate was the one thing that could make the bleakness seem sunny. He was the one who knew you best, and could best understand your sufferings. The mate was there
in thick and thin; good times and bad; better and worse.

The story of Australia’s ascending Star is something that should be taught in schools. It should be spoken of more than it is. The story of a nation’s birth is more important than a nation’s life, because its life is often times determined by its birth. Australia’s Star, the Southern Star, is more than a mere idea or notion, it is the very figure of our national identity; free, bright, true and upward bound.

This essay looks at the notion of "shame" in the colonial landscape of contemporary Australian literary studies, with a particular emphasis on the ways in which Aboriginal women engage with concepts of "shame" to explore return to ancestral language. This essay critiques settler appropriations of Aboriginal languages in contemporary poetics.

This essay was published in Rabbit Poetry Journal's Indigenous Issue, 2017.

Beginning with a description of a Year 10 poetry unit taught by the writer, the article argues that despite apparent decline, poetry teaching in secondary literacy programs for years 7–10 remains vital because of its potential for deep personal engagement and for its promotion of a diverse range of literacy competencies. The article offers suggestions for enhancing poetry teaching and nurturing greater focus on poetry, not only in literacy and English classrooms, but across the curriculum.

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.

Drawing on Bernd Mahr’s model theory, this volume offers a new theory of Romanticism in contemporary (sub)urban Australia. Taking a transcultural approach, it brings together two writers: David Malouf and Indigenous poet Samuel Wagan Watson. In this first book dedicated to these authors’ poetic oeuvre, comprehensive readings reveal an ironic dialectic underpinning how they write from within a disjunct of culture and environment following colonisation. Irony enables an evocation of place, even as it acknowledges the impossibility of ever achieving a unified sense of place in Australia’s palimpsestic layers of histories and myths. The theoretical framing of Romanticism in this book effectively rehabilitates Romanticism as a productive paradigm in contemporary Australian poetry.

Kath McLean and Louise Poland (with additional research by Jacinta van den Berg). A Case for Literature: The Effectiveness of Subsidies to Australian Publishers, 1995–2005. (Sydney: Australia Council for the Arts, May 2010 (released October 2010)): 1–68:
Over the ten-year period under examination, at least 800 titles were subsidised by the Literature Board. This project examines the range of titles and publishers supported by the subsidies, and considers the extent to which those titles made a significant contribution to Australian literature, either directly, in recognition of their value, or indirectly through the contribution they made to authors’ careers and reputations, and to the reputations and lists of the publishers concerned.

Mt Tamborine is a crucial location for Judith Wright's poetry, and for the development of her thought. She wrote the majority of her poetry collections while living on the mountain from 1948–75; it was there that she came face to face with the complexities of Australian ecologies and colonial histories. While her earlier poems from this period reflect a concerted, anti-colonial desire to separate the world of Tamborine from her European inheritance and perspective, by the early 1970s her work becomes preoccupied with symbiotic relationships between her body, her house and garden, and the surrounding landscape. This turn reflects broader shifts in thought in the mid-twentieth century, where notions of separation and precision were being problematised by the emerging field of quantum mechanics.

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 ?...

Most Australians who know anything about the Great War have heard about the Australian war correspondent, Charles Bean. His history of the Great War stands as a towering testament of research and dedication unrivalled in Australian history. He was not only a war correspondent, but he was an historian, promoter of the Anzacs, publicist, editor, visionary, idealist, writer and photographer. Yet, not many Australians will know that our beloved Charles Bean was also a fine poet. Like many of the Australians who went to war with a gun in one hand and a pencil in the other, Bean sat in the trenches and composed poetry, leaving us a legacy that seems to have been forgotten.

"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.

Ali Cobby Eckermann's poem 'Intervention Payback' is spoken in the voice of an Aboriginal man of the Northern Territory, living under the Northern Territory Emergency Response, or more commonly 'The Intervention'. 1 Cobby Eckermann's narrator is a father of young children, who with his wife has provided for his family and, through the stories of 'tjamu and nana', has kept them in contact with both culture and their elders' experiences of colonisation. The intervention brings fear that another generation will be stolen, and income management brings with it problems with buying good food, employment and gambling. The poem opens "I love my wife" and closes on a tense note: the narrator's wife has taken to gambling her remaining wages-the narrator says "if she spent all the money not gonna share with me and the kids/I might hit her first time". 2 Lionel Fogarty's 'Reality of a Murri Dreaming World' 3 offers a different perspective on living in (post)colonial Australia. The experience can be bitter, sour tasting. There is rebellion, but the rebellion is oriented toward hope. The opening syntax is difficult and perhaps echoes the rap rhythms to which the first stanza refers. As the poem develops, the writing becomes more immediately accessible. The speaker is urban and speaks to an urban audience, but the urban space-the city-is "not here". The bush persists in this space and with it the possibility of healing.

Judith Wright, the great Australian poet, writer, environmentalist and activist for Aboriginal rights, was asked at a celebration for her 85th birthday what year had been the best of her life. She chose not one of the years of great public achievement - not the year her first book of poems was published or the years she won the ASAN World Prize for Poetry or the Queen's Gold Prize. Her best year was when she was 27. It was the year she met Jack McKinney.
In her autobiography, Judith Wright wrote: 'He alone knew how much I owed to his searching mind, his wit and his help and support in my own work.'

This essay will argue for the relevance of the ‘neobaroque’ in relation to recent examples of Australian poetics. The baroque and neobaroque are central strains of Latin American poetry, and much has been made of the neobaroque turn in Latin American theory, with the alternatives it proposes to hegemonic, linear narratives of modernity and rationalism. However, despite the fact that some of Australia’s greatest writers have profoundly baroque qualities, the baroque as an aesthetic, ontological and/or political category receives scant attention in Australian criticism. In light of these concerns, this essay will provide an outline of both baroque and neobaroque poetics with relation to Australian, European and Latin American examples. I then address the work of leading Mexican poet Coral Bracho, and consider her influence on the last collection of the late Australian poet Martin Harrison (Happiness, 2015). In examining the relations between Bracho’s neobaroque contortions and Harrison’s ‘late style’, I propose that Happiness is illustrative of an alternative trajectory of Australian poetics, which turns from the discipline and reticence of Anglophone models in order to embrace ambiguity, disorder and incompletion – an imagination of complexity (as opposed to its reduction).

https://danteaustralia.org/dante-under-the-southern-cross-2021-australian-reflections-for-the-700th-anniversary-of-the-passing-of-dante-alighieri/

To mark the 700th anniversary of the passing of Dante Alighieri in 2021, the Dante Alighieri Societies of Australia came together to host a national seminar series held at events hosted around Australia. This publication collects the remarkably diverse contributions that were made by speakers during those seminars. The resulting volume provides a window into the continuing influence of the poetry of Dante Alighieri in the cultural life of Australia. Preface by Joshua Brown. Contributed papers and presentations by Rodney Lokaj, Gaetano Rando, Theodore Ell, Paolo Totaro AM, John Kinder, Chris Mooney Singh, Drina Oldroyd, John Kinsella, Angela Scarino, Anna Rita Tamponi and Michael Curtotti.

Of the 40 Georgian poets who wrote in the five anthologies, there were only English poets, except for one Australian, and his name was Walter James Redfern Turner. It might be considered as a strange privilege, but of all the other English poets who could have been included, it was an Australia who was chosen. Interestingly, or perhaps, strangely, there aren’t too many Australians who seems to know this.

Ανάμεσα στο Όνομα του Πατρός
και του Υιού, ο Ποιητής

στέκει σιωπηλός, ένας Άγγελος που μεσιτεύει.

Α΄δημοσίευση στο λογ. ιστολόγιο "Ποιητικός Πυρήνας": https://ppirinas.blogspot.com/2015/12/john-mateer.html?fbclid=IwAR2j9Vb4vc5RvGKCMu6saxvdLaxjsfx-Cd1pZ0QfW3__Ib07wgmArDdHt1Q

This article seeks to illuminate the entwined aesthetics of Vicki Viidikas’s poetry. Viidikas was a Sydney poet: she lived in Balmain, and spent long periods of time in India later in life. She was part of the generation of ‘68, which revelled in the countercultural spirit of the 1960s and 70s. Viidikas published three books of poetry in her lifetime: Condition Red (1973), Knäbel (1978), and India Ink (1984), as well as a book of short stories and prose poems, Wrappings (1974). Between 1985 and 1998 she published only a handful of poems in journals; India Ink would be her last book.

The essay uses formative aesthetic, political, and material influences to read Viidikas’s work from 1973 to 1998. I argue that there are three major aspects in Viidikas’s poetry: the confessional, the surrealist, and the feminist. By contextualising her work in the confessional poetry genre, the surrealism of André Breton, and second wave feminism, I show that these aspects interact and overlap in subtle ways in her poems. Viidikas was steeped in feminist ideals for women’s writing, and was committed to representing female subjectivity in highly personal and uncensored ways. I show that in her poetry, a feminist ethos energises both her confessional voice and her surrealism. I also pay attention to the material circumstances of her poetry’s production, and the social and aesthetic practices of the generation of ‘68. This situated reading of Viidikas’s poetry allows me to look to the last 14 years of her life, when she retreated from publishing. While critics typically focus on her drug addiction in explaining her later marginalisation, I posit that the anti-capitalist values that Viidikas absorbed in her youth played a significant role in her withdrawal, in the 1980s and 90s, from the literary networks that had previously sustained her.

Louise Poland. ‘‘Sisterhood is Powerful”: Sisters Publishing and Book Club in Australia 1978–85’. Paradise: New Worlds of Books and Readers, a special issue of Script & Print: Bulletin of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand (BSANZ), 29 (1–4), 2005 (released in 2007): 276–289.

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.

Poet, editor, and school teacher Flexmore Hudson is best remembered as a long time, if sometimes reluctant, supporter of Rex Ingamells’ Jindyworobak Movement. However, unlike many of his nationalist counterparts, Hudson was interested in internationalism and the encouragement of ‘self-conscious world citizens.’ In 1947 Hudson was writing the educational comic Discovery, which he would later describe as ‘hack work’, in a failed attempt to keep his highbrow magazine Poetry financially afloat. Though Hudson was doubtful of the literary merit of Discovery, both texts show signs of his concerted effort to promote respect and communication between people ‘regardless of their colour, race or religion.’ This paper will use a range of Hudson’s little studied literary output to demonstrate his simultaneous support for ‘world-mindedness’ and the Jindyworobaks. Though this double allegiance yielded tension, Hudson took advantage of the ideological intersection that saw the environment become crucial to both nationalism and new world-minded thinking. Hudson’s overtly ‘placed’ poetry, written while a resident of rural South Australia, resonated with the Jindyworobak call for literary attention to ‘environmental values’ and gave him a curious advantage as an adherent of world-mindedness.

One of the main issues, if not the main issue of my thesis work, is the notion that Australia had emerged out of the darkness and obscurity of the early convict days, when Australia was little known by anyone outside an immediate association with the dark continent. Prior to Australia’s landing at Gallipoli, on the 25th of April, 1915, Australia was basically known as “Terra incognita”, and its sons and daughters were of no consequence for the rest of the world. Australian history was insignificant on a world scale, and not even known by those at the international tables of consequence.

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 paper was written for the first global Dante Day commemorated on 25 March 2020 in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. It has been published online by the Dante Alighieri Society Canberra. Dante Alighieri is a household name in Australia, but what has been his influence here and how did he make the voyage to Australia's "altro polo"? The history and presence of Italian literature in English literature is outlined, as are the presence of Dante Alighieri's works in Australian literature and art. Dante Alighieri Societies and the Italian diplomatic corps have been active promoters of Dante's work and Italian literature and culture generally in Australia. However it can be concluded that, at least in the past, Dante's influence on Italian Australians has been slight. The historical reasons and factors underlying this contradiction are explored. Moreover the question of the potential relevance of Dante to Australia's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities is also considered. Dante Day is considered in the context of the meaning that might be attributed to Dante in the context of Italy's diverse history and culture. Dorothea Mackellar, famous for her poet "My Country", dedicated to Australia, is recruited as Beatrice for the paper.

Journal of Commonwealth Literature
Published online before print August 6, 2015, doi: 10.1177/0021989415589833

When Judith Wright travelled to Europe in the “loaded spring” of February 1937, the 22-year-old poet found herself witness to “a break in the consciousness of Europe”. This article argues that Wright’s experience of being an outsider in Europe at this crucial historical moment had profound implications for her poetics, in the form of a compound and productive series of displacements. Her peripatetic encounters with European cultures-in-crisis caused Wright to despair of Europe as a source of political and creative renewal, and exposed fault lines in her own cultural orientation. Sundered from her Anglophile cultural inheritance, and able to reflect on home with the distance and imaginative ambivalence of an outsider, Wright invoked Ulysses — that archetypal poetic wanderer — whose experience of archipelagic journeying came to express for her the contingencies and hauntedness of Australia’s palimpsestic identity. This essay positions the shifting perspectives and excursive patterns of Wright’s developing poetics in relation to concepts of outsideness and embodiment, drawing on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and phenomenological philosophies of mind.

In the last stanza of a poem by John Monash; written in 1895, just 19
years prior to the outbreak of the Great War in which Monash would
so strongly distinguish himself, Australia’s ultimate “first soldier”
showed that even generals had hearts. John Monash was not only an
Anzac, but he ended up becoming the commander-in-Chief of all Anzac
forces, and had the war gone into 1919, he very likely would have taken
Haig’s position as Commander-in-Chief of all British forces. He was a
much loved Australian who saw his men as having value as living
soldiers instead of cannon fodder.

There is a strange phenomenon which is caused by war. It is something quite extraordinary and somehow spiritual, even for those who hold no faith in God or eternal life. When young men go to war, they take with them only four things; their life, their youth, their memories and their hopes. For some, they bring all these things back home with them, and for others, they bring home some of these things. But for many, they bring nothing home, for they would be killed in war and lose all their worldly possessions.

This research focuses on analyzing Clarence Michael James Dennis's character and works that illustrate the atmosphere of natural beauty and romance in Australia when during and after the war. In this paper also explained that the development of literary works in the UK affect the development of literary works in Australia. The works sampled in this study are the works of C.J Dennis made before World War 1, until after World War 1 was completed. The values of humanity, the atmosphere of war, and romance became the characteristic of C. Dennis's poems. The study concludes that C. J Dennis is a world writer thanks to his synchronized work and is relevant to the issues that can be absorbed by the world community, as well as explaining how the first world war from the standpoint of the army world.

This article analyses Australian fiction and poetry from the 1930s through to the 21st century. It discusses a number of writers in the context of the development of ecological science as well as engagement with Aboriginal conceptions of the sacred. Writers discussed include Xavier Herbert, Judith Wright, Les Murray, Roland Robinson and John Kinsella.

BARRON FIELD, WHO IS TODAY A LARGELY FORGOTTEN FIGURE, WAS FROM 1817 TO 1824 the highest judge in New South Wales. His place in literary history rests on his First Fruits of Australian Poetry of 1819, which, as the title announces, was the first book of poetry to be published in that country. At almost exactly the same time, Field was promulgating the first known formal statement of terra nullius in Australia. As such, Field is a crucial figure in the history of Australian literature’s intertwinements with colonial genocide: he was the founding father, so to speak, of the poetics of terra nullius.