thanks for that maria
regards to my friend herb wharton, though i suspect he's not in cunamulla
much these days with all his international engagements.
i do not deny anyone's right to write from their experience nor do i
belittle anyone who does live and write in the bush, but as far as
australian poetry goes there is a lot of rural imagery in it, even from
cityfolk, and i was wondering why?
regards
komninos
At 02:04 AM 1/23/01 +1100, you wrote:
> As one of the rural “5%”, I feel I ought to speak up,
>though softly, regarding recent discussions on landscape, romanticism and
>rural poets/poetry in Australia. As far as definitions go, Cuddon
>writes that “In the Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal (1948) F L
>Lucas counted 11,396 definitions of Romanticism”. To add my own
>seems like throwing a small twig onto an extremely large pyre – so
>I’ll be brief J Cunamulla is a small country town in outback
>Australia which is currently the centre of some controversy. A filmmaker
>recently spent two years documenting the lives of the people of Cunamulla,
>living with them, sharing their lives, their stories, entrusted with their
>truths. The recent release of the film however, has turned the people of
>the town against him. Quite simply, they feel betrayed. In my current
>experience, living in a rural community is to share in a very real, honest
>and direct sense, the lives and stories of others, which become
>intrinsically, crucially part of your writing. The difficulty lies in the
>public telling of that experience. I struggle in my writing, with the
>sense that Tasmania, my home, is often portrayed as a green and lush
>island, promoted through evocative and beautiful images of wilderness and
>water. Yet the landscape in which I live is drought stricken, dry, barren
>and dying. I also struggle with the telling of truths which I feel
>form part of my poetic responsibility – (a responsibility to respond
>to experience honestly.) The truths of the hardships of other
>people’s lives, which they have shared with you and which you observe
>and live with daily, are precious and it is sometimes difficult to know
>where observation and interpretation end and betrayal begins. As
>poets, how do we resolve the real, ethical struggle with the responsibility
>we have in telling the stories of the people who share our living,
>breathing time? Perhaps in this century, we still carry with us
>remnants of the romantic ideal that poetry has to have a sense of the
>prophetic, or at least reflect our aspirations - which makes it difficult
>to express the pure truth of our experience. I’m not sure. Maria
>Fletcher
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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