This whole landscape take is interesting. I recently saw some landscapes
painted by a lady who started painting in her seventies. She painted them
off photos and postcards, landscapes from snowy fields to rocky canyons to
streams with wooded banks. You know the sort of thing. Her teacher told her
they were good and very 'true'. They were, in fact, spiritless and dull -
except their use of bright colours, balanced in a formulaic method taught
in adult evening classes. She said she was no good with faces or the human
figure. She had gone to life classes and admitted failure.
What she had failed in was painting from life. None of these 2D landscapes
had life in them - they were representative of other artists'
representations of vibrant scenes in nature.
So it goes with poets. JVK grew up in the wheatlands of Western Australia.
He has experienced many a landscape since, yet his original landscape stays
with him in a vibrant way which is impossible for 'city slickers' to
represent in the way he does. Les Murray ditto.
I'm a city boy. When I write about landscape, I write with wonder - as a
stranger surprised by the sheer size and granduer of it all, and at times
in wonder at the efficiency of nature's cycle(s). But my work's theme truly
revolves around relationships: people, me, me/them, you, my siblings, my
offspring, my love(r)s ... Many poets in Australia are city dwellers, and
many of them write landscape poems when they are on holiday, or temporarily
posted elsewhere by their employer. Yet others (mainly versifiers) are
stuck in a timewarp - the Lawson/Paterson influence continues in both city
and country town. Like the lady artist I spoke of, they copy past masters,
often badly.
So, 'rural romantics' is a description of praise and affection from some
mouths, and a term of derision when said by others. Email doesn't carry
tone of voice successfully (eg, I have missed much irony on this list until
it was pointed out by following posts) so the tone of the original posting
was ambiguous to me. Romantics, to me, are the opposite of classicists;
they believe in the high value of art and the creative process, and still
have faith in something intangible called 'inspiration'. They may even
refer to their muse, carefully noting the small-letter 'm'. (We must move
with the times ...) There are romantics on the land still. They are
normally bad farmers who are escaping a dull life in the city, or vainly
trying to find a safe environment to bring-up their children. Very few of
them are poets.
My friend Viv Kitson once pointed out the difference between my poetry and
his: I write about relationships, and he writes about the physical world he
lives in - perhaps his own personal landscape, but this is a bit of a
stretch of the term when you start applying it to the human body, etc. I
can swallow it as a term for the backyard and the suburban streetscape ...
So, many an Australian poet has landscape in his/her poems. Our backdoors
open onto an ancient scape worth talking about, a scape often evoking fear
and isolation. I travel there as a stranger, looking for the exotic and
unfamiliar; others report from there all their lives for it lies in the
core of them.
I am circling the same point over and over, so I shall shut-up, and go and
watch the tennis. G'night
Andrew
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Andrew Burke Copywriting
[log in to unmask] Creative Writing
http://www.bam.com.au/andrew/ Editing
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