Chris, are you sure it was Dorothy Porter who called herself a romantic, not
Dorothy Hewett, or Gwen Harwood...? (I wish I liked her verse fiction. I wonder
if it is read outside Australia? I do recall one review in the LRB.)
best from Max in Melbourne
Quoting Chris Jones <[log in to unmask]>:
> Frederick, many thanks for the comments. You have said in a far clearer
> and fluent way what goes to the essential core of a poetics I argue for
> and support and have spent a good part of my life trying to think. (The
> cost of this is I throw out 80 to 90 percent of what I write as
> uninteresting and not worth keeping. I am not that prolific.)
>
> It is interesting that in terms of prose novels, historically, a poetics
> of the limited lyric is also pushed and usually known as realist novels
> as opposed to modernist novels. But more so, even in recent poetics this
> limited lyricism is still pushed and more often in the name of a
> Heideggerean poetics which in the second coming is given the name of
> Derrida and Deconstruction. This is why I am so opposed to such a
> poetics and consider it to be a hermeneutics of colonialism or to be
> even more blunt and use Lenin's term, an imperialist hermeneutics. Or
> put another way, the Heideggerean song of the Earth is an imperial first
> person lyric. A song too often repeated in critical journals as
> so-called critical discourse in Latin derived terms and as if the term
> critical is an embarrassed silence on the journal's masthead.
> Deconstruction becomes an excuse to avoid real critique in this slippery
> way. (There is perhaps a real Derrida, but who reads him?)
>
> Perhaps this is also why I find Dorothy Porter's verse novels not only
> interesting but important and I would say very important in terms of
> recent Australian poetics. (I will always remember Dorothy saying to the
> Postmodernists critics; I am a Romantic. Think about the poet's critical
> twist in terms of POV, here, and feel free to laugh.)
>
> Anyways, I will get off me soapbox and press the send button.
>
> best wishes
>
> Chris Jones.
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