At 12:24 AM +0200 13/8/02, Maria wrote:
>There is a true need in Australia for debate on the urbane and inwardly
>reflective nature of much contemporary poetry - and, perhaps the
>motivation of poets for looking beyond the Australian landscape - it is
>a debate I am trying to have in my own writing, and I am more and more
>often having to look to the past for inspirational, philosophical or
>truly honest and passionate writing.
I always look to the past, but this seem to dismiss the present
rather comprehensively... surely the urbane nature of much poetry
reflects the fact that Australia is very largely an urban population?
There is a history of romance about the Bush in Australian literature
which has been very problematic, in that it has popularly favoured
Banjo Patterson rather than Barbara Baynton; and this popular Bush
image, if I recall correctly, first happened when the banks crashed
and depression hit urban centres in the 1890s - that is, it was never
an accurate reflection of contemporary Australia, so much as a mirage
which elided actual realities, and served nationalism more than
anything else - it was the stuff of the Red Page of the Bulletin, and
not unconnected with its White Australia banner. Its contemporary
equivalent is the Fosters ads or those ads for four wheel drives,
which pull on the idea that Australians are tough, bluff country
types to sell cars to people who live in Werribee; or John Howard's
sentimental (and dishonest) apotheosis of "battlers".
It seems to me that there is a lively contemporary debate on
Australian landscape in poetry (Kinsella's anti-pastoral, for
example, or Peter Minter's work.) But I immediately wonder if you're
familiar with John Anderson's poetry, which imaginatively enters the
Australian landscape in a way which inherits much from Wordsworth and
Francis Ponge.
What you seem to be picking up on in Boake is a nihilism in the
Australian psyche, assuming that there is such a thing as a national
psyche - a nihilism I've sometimes thought of as a kind of literary
eqivalent of the atavistic European urge to cut down native trees - a
fear of the landscape which is conjured as alien and hostile, and a
bleak human violence. Unacknowledged, it turns into that sentimental
gloss I outline above... That nihilism has always been there, from
Price Warung on, but it isn't very often acknowledged, just as the
violence of our history isn't often acknowledged.
Not sure what you mean by the "expected cringe", but I assure you
that I was brought up in the country and have never attended a
creative writing class in my life. Although I have taught a couple.
Best
Alison
--
Alison Croggon
Home page
http://www.users.bigpond.com/acroggon/
Masthead Online
http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/
|