Just to add a piece--and I don't know how relevant to Australia. In the US
and Western Europe it's not unusual for urban people who can take vacations
to do so someplace rural. In the US the middle class often send the kids
away to a summer camp and rural second residences are not uncommon, the
wealthy have rural compounds adjacent to each otherfor all ages. So for the
kids a rurality freed of toil--a vacation from toil--enters the
imagination, and is sustained into adulthood.
For adults who write the rural place may even be an art colony.
So leisure to write happens disproportionately when one is away from one's
usual residence, and the rural as freedom from toil becomes an imagined
topos.
Now multiply this by a few millenia--Roman poets also wrote their poems
while rusticating.
And then there are the other myths to which Kominos refers as romantic. Old
old habits that are alive and well at the movies, for example. Not just
that somewhere there's an Edenic existence that's more real than the
imperfect one we lead--a reflection of awareness of injustices or
mortality--but that, at least in America, the belief in the Eden of perfect
freedom that's supposed to exist beyond the rural is promoted by those it
serves to offer to dwellers in overcrowded cities as an imaginative out, a
release of pressures that could otherwise cause the whole social construct
to explode--one's daily life has an escape clause, one can light out for
the territories. Space as opiate.
Mark
So the rural
At 01:41 PM 1/21/2001 +1100, [log in to unmask] wrote:
>Hi Komninos - some stray thoughts -
>
>>why do we continue to use imagery which is not part of our everyday
>>experience?
>>
>There are a number of people who _do_ live in the country, and it is part
>of their everyday experience; are you speaking of them as well? What
>about poets like Lionel Fogarty? However, there have been some peculiar
>things in the bush - those centaurs that Hugh McCrae put there, for
>instance - which suggest that for Europeans and other immigrants it's a
>representation that's always been full of tension and contradictions.
>It's fair to say that the strain of Australian writing which might be
>called urban - starting with Jonah, and through poems by Furnleigh
>Maurice, Kenneth Slessor etc - has tended to be undervalued and
>unrepresented in the general glaze of the tv bushman: but it is there,
>and has been very visible in the past couple of decades, I would say
>especially in poetry. Same as Rick Amor's urban landscapes are there, in
>dialogue with Fred Williams.
>
>As JK pointed out, alot of contemporary "landscape" poetry tends to the
>dystopian - environments destroyed and lost - and look rather at the
>violent and brutal, pace Barbara Baynton (Coral Hull is another one I
>forgot to mention: violence looms large in her work).
>
>>is it a need to establish that we, white australians who have appropriated
>>this country, actually belong here, so we try to write ourselves into the
>>landscape. and this may not be conscious in individual writers but
>>underlying in all of us who have come to live in australia and are not
>>indiginous?
>
>The landscape thing is or has been I think an expression of alienation -
>think of the first European paintings of Australia, which made it all
>look like English parks. Part of the problem for the non-indigenous
>population has been "seeing" it - it has often struck me as a good joke
>that one of the first Europeans to write about the Australian landscape
>was called Barron Field, which sort of sums up European perceptions of
>the time. Landscape has by far more often been presented as hostile and
>threatening, and there is that thing about cutting down trees, which I
>have never understood except as a desire to "conquer" a resistant and
>frightening environment (which leads to that heroicisation of the
>"battler" - but you know, Steele Rudd is rather more sardonic and harsh
>than the kitsch representations of On Our Selection etc suggest).
>
>But there are many people who have thought about all this much more than
>me. I have my own problems with all that, a sort of linguistic
>alienation due to my own background, which means I _don't_ write poems
>about the Australian landscape, although I was brought up in the country;
>which is perhaps another kind of response to those issues.
>
>And there are many takes on all this - John Anderson's poems for example
>attempt none of these things, but rather seek to linguistically inhabit
>the landscape, as a European Australian. A patient and gentle
>attentiveness, owing much to Ponge, Bonnefoy and others. Anderson might
>well be called a romantic, but in the proper sense, descending from
>Wordsworth.
>
>>why is so much australian poetry which appears in international anthologies
>>tied to rural landscape?
>
>That might have been true once. I'm not so sure it is now. But I don't
>know if it's an exclusively Australian thing.
>
>Best
>
>Alison
>
>
|