>At 8:35 AM +0100 13/8/02, Douglas Barbour wrote:
>> If you look
>>back to Allen Curnow's early anthologies, you'll find a definite nod mainly
>>to 40s British poetry. In a way, it's really (as I feel to a degree in
>>Australia) with The New American Poetry that things get shaken up (as in
>>Canada too, but we're right on the sidelines here).
>
>Maybe - though on the other hand it could seem merely to be the
>replacement of one kind of colonisation with another - and poets like
>Slessor and Webb were writing fantastic poetry well before then. Not
>that I subscribe to any kind of inward looking nationalism...
Alison
As someone who falls all too easily into making easy binary comparisons, I
have come sowly to understand that none work. And that alway everything is
more coomplex than one is usually prepared for. But in my reading of
Australian poetry, I find the really heavy refusal of the formal aspects of
modernism, which I have thought was attached to something in the love of
bush poetry, quite fascinating. Webb is fascinating, & was getting off to
something unique. Slessor, well, I'm not quite so sure. 'Five Bell's is an
amazing piece, yet asmuch for what it doesn't quite do as for what it does.
So, yes, of course, it can be another kind of colonisation, or it could be
a postcolonial collaging, an ability to begin the bricolage of various
poetics, & thus 'becoming modernist' while also becoming Australian, New
Zealandish, or Canadian...?
And then we're left with the fact that it's not the kinds, but the poem
themselves that count -- differently for each of us...
Doug
Douglas Barbour
Department of English
University of Alberta
Edmonton Alberta Canada T6G 2E5
(h) [780] 436 3320 (b) [780] 492 0521
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
I fear this war
will be long and painful
and who
pursue
it
Lorine Niedecker
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