thanks alison
cheers
komninos
At 01:41 PM 1/21/01 +1100, you 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
>
komninos's cyberpoetry site http://student.uq.edu.au/~s271502
cyberpoet@slv site http://www.experimedia.vic.gov.au/cyberpoet/
komninos zervos, tel. +61 7 5552 8872
lecturer in cyberStudies,
school of arts,
gold coast campus,
griffith university,
pmb 50, gold coast mail centre
queensland, 9726
australia.
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