Briefly - it's dinnertime -
Komninos writes:
>what does your reader see, a landscape or you?
Themselves, quite probably - but I don't truthfully know. Do you control
what your readers see? Have you ever considered the potential fascism of
the Image, its usefulness to the corporate?
>a rural romantic, it follows, would express in their poetry the country as
>being a wholesome place, the country people as being wise if not worldly,
>and that our urban ills would be cured if we returned to a rural way of
>living.
Well, then, I'm not aware of any "rural romantics" on this list. But
perhaps if anyone recognises themselves, they could speak up. And if
you're talking about me - well, you're very mistaken. I've never
espoused such beliefs.
It's true, there are many Australian poets who do evoke landscape in
their work to varying degrees - but hardly in the nostalgic (_not_
romantic) sense you mean. Off the top of my head I can think of John
Kinsella, Peter Minter, Geraldine McKenzie, MTC Cronin, John Anderson,
Anthony Lawrence - but they're all coming with such variousness out of
modernist and post-modernist influences and exploring ideas of perception
and reality and relationship to landscape and language; none of them are
the kind of fuzzy-minded conservatives you seem to be complaining about,
and many of them might as easily be described as urban poets. To
describe a swathe of poets as acolytes of Les Murray because they might
mention the word "tree" seems rather to diminish the rest of the history
of poetry. But perhaps those on this list can better speak for
themselves.
Best
Alison
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