Thanks for those responses, fellas. Clearly "Australian poetry"
doesn't mean much to anyone who doesn't live in Australia...
I confess, I've never thought of myself as a Victorian writer (though
I've often said I am a Williamstown writer, which makes sense).
"Australian poetry" as a concept tends to fill me with depressing
images of the kind that Max describes. It's still wearing its colonial
rags, I fear, one way or another. Why frinstance do we have an
"Australian Poetry Centre"?? Why not a Poetry Centre? (Why have a
Centre? I suspect it's because the word "hub" makes bureaucrats gets
all touchy feely and excited and they start throwing money...)
xA
On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 8:12 PM, Max Richards <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> That phrase, Alison, makes me chuckle. We don't want chauvinism in literature,
> but Gwen Harwood seems more than a Tasmanian poet and you more than a Victorian.
>
> When I came to Australia after four years in Scotland, and twenty five years in
> New Zealand, I realized I was being exposed to my third regional or national
> literary culture with its anxieties about the relationship with London.
>
> The first evening I spent at Melbourne University in late 1967, or early 1968, I
> noticed how the current 'names' in poetry were never introduced at a reading as
> mere poets but as Australian poets. I asked about this, and without anyone
> saying so sensed there was something defensive in the phrase, related to the
> talk then about a 'cultural cringe' which once-colonial cultures exhibit in
> relation to the metropolis.
>
> Scotland has a long famous history of debating how Scottish poets stand in
> relation to their country and to 'English' poetry.
> At least there the long history of Scots language gave poets there in the
> twentieth century a range of choices - 'pure' English as Edwin Muir chose, or as
> his contemporary Hugh MacDiarmid (born Chris Grieve) chose: a rich version of
> vernacular Scots, beefed up with dictionary reading. Both achieved highly,
> though late McDiarmid lapsed into standard English.
> (BBC Glasgow in the 1960s however used voices almost unidentifiable as Scots.
> That was then, and the diversity of voices more recently is welcome.)
>
> As a student and would-be poet in New Zealand up to 1963, I warmed to the older
> generation of NZ writers who spoke of acclimatizing poetry to the new
> environment. When I heard of Australia's Jindyworobak movement I respected their
> dream of a nativistic culture, though some of the practitioners committed wacky
> poems in their effort.
> The models for all new literatures in an old language had better be Irish and
> American, because of the greatness of their writers.
> Yeats showed NZ poets and Australians how they needed to acculturate themselves
> to the home country before they 'reached out to the universal'.
> FOMatthiessen's book 'American Renaissance', focusing on Emerson, Hawthorne,
> Melville, and pointing on towards Twain, and Marius Bewley's 'The Complex Fate',
> taking up James's phrase about Hawthorne, seemed to show how attention to the
> life and language of the knowable communities you come up through was
> fundamental.
> Your first audience is local, and if things go well larger audiences may warm to
> you.
> It had better not be legislated for, of course!
> And it would be a foolish young poet who didn't read very widely.
> The language of Australians deserves being registered by writers. Its rhythms
> may even be detectable in some poems by Australians. Peter Porter, once thought
> of as an expatriate, has said he was told in England that his pentameters were
> unEnglish.
> Oh I haven't got to the heart of the matter.
> Max
> (like the late Wm Hart-Smith, a poet of two countries)
>
> Quoting Alison Croggon <[log in to unmask]>:
>
>> Out of curiosity: (and also because I am writing an essay and am
>> coming up hard against this one)
>>
>> What do you think when you see or hear the phrase "Australian poetry"?
>> What does it call up? Does it mean anything at all?
>>
>> --
>> Editor, Masthead: http://www.masthead.net.au
>> Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
>> Home page: http://www.alisoncroggon.com
>>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> This email was sent from Netspace Webmail: http://www.netspace.net.au
>
--
Editor, Masthead: http://www.masthead.net.au
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Home page: http://www.alisoncroggon.com
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