POETRY IN REVIEW

1990

[sic] - a journal of literature, culture and literary translation, 2012

In his essay on Australian poetry of the early twentieth century, Nicholas Birns claims that the poetry of the given period was not at the time fully appreciated in the rest of the world, and that metropolitan centres placed low esteem on Australian poetic production (173). There was the lack, as he puts it, of "an efficient market", caused by various factors, including the remoteness and isolation of the country, its distance from the hotspots of political crisis, and its "perceived rejection of modernism" (Ibid). It was the Anglo-American experimental modernism that the young Australian poets rejected, composing verse that "tended to rhyme and obey metrical contentions" (Ibid, 174) or at least have a certain melodic quality. In its stylistic aspect, this poetry was rather traditional, and the themes used were also quite different from those explored by American or English modernist poets: exploration by sea and land, and the European explorations of Australia in particular, was a very popular theme, along with the descriptions of nature and typically Australian landscape (as was the case, for instance, with the Jindyworobak school of poetry). Australian literature of the first half of the twentieth century, as noted by Tom Englis Moore, a well-known poet and professor of Australian literature, was marked by "[t]he ideals of peace, freedom and social justice combined with a marked realism" (Waten 26). The anti-realist strain in Australian literature was rather weak at the time when poets like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound wrote their best works across the globe. The only group of poets truly infatuated with modernism gathered around Max Harris (1921-1995) and called themselves the Angry Penguins. The group that was stimulated by the literary magazine Angry Penguins, was founded in Adelaide in 1940 by Harris and is today probably best-known not for their attempts to introduce modernism into Australian poetry, but for the infamous literary hoax perpetrated by two poets of a more traditionalist orientation, James McAuley [sic]-a journal of literature, culture and literary translation Art and Subversion No. 1-Year 3 12/2012-LC.2

Word and Text, 2022

One hundred years ago T. S. Eliot published The Waste Land, the acme of High Modernism (along with Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies and, for fiction, James Joyce's Ulysses, Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time and Franz Kafka's composition of The Castle, to name but these), in which the poet articulated his response to post-WW1 disillusionment. 1 Five years before the appearance of Eliot's 'long poem', Ezra Pound, who will, ironically somewhat belatedly, utter his famous slogan 'make it new', 2 had begun serializing his Cantos in Poetry, an epic magnum opus which took him half a century to complete and cast a long shadow across the best of postmodern(ist) poetry, such as William Carlos Williams's Paterson (1946), 'a hodgepodge, the American version of Pound's more famous "ragbag"', 3 Charles Olson's own epic project of the Maximus Poems (1950-1970), and, more generally, much of the experimental poetic output of the second half of the 20 th century that still owed its aesthetic principles, however distantly, to an 'ideogrammic' method of composition. 4 Fast forward to our contemporary epoch and the (broadly defined) ethno-ethicalincluding in the sense of a localism, or ethos-and political re-anchoring of much post-WW2 (especially North American) poetry, in the wake of (inter alia) Olson's epochmaking castigation of the moral failure of Poundian aesthetics, but also ethnopoetics à la Jerome Rothenberg, which emphasized connections between human activity and the environment that produces it, continues to leave its indirect imprint on some of the latest poetic agendas. Witness trends such as 'poetry and the environment' (Wendell Berry, Mary Oliver), 'nature poetry', or a renewed tradition of 'ecopoetics'-a (re)opening of

Victorian Studies, 2021

Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine is an exciting new series that focuses on one of the most vibrant and interdisciplinary areas in literary studies: the intersection of literature, science and medicine. Comprised of academic monographs, essay collections, and Palgrave Pivot books, the series will emphasize a historical approach to its subjects, in conjunction with a range of other theoretical approaches. The series will cover all aspects of this rich and varied field and is open to new and emerging topics as well as established ones.

The Journal of Medical Humanities, 2007

Victorian Poetry, 2004

Nordic Irish Studies, 2004

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Bareknuckle Books: Frazer, B. (Ed.)., 2016, 2015

BAREKNUCKLE POET ANNUAL VOL.1 2015 2nd Edition 2016 Edited by Brentley Frazer & A. G. Pettet. Publisher: BAREKNUCKLE BOOKS. IMPRINT: Bareknuckle Poets. ISSN: 2205 – 7218. STATUS: Published: 01/11/2016. Copyright: Bareknuckle Books & Contributors. Language: English. Extent: 348 pages. Binding: Perfect-bound Paperback. Interior Ink: Black & white. Dimensions: (inches) 6x 9 CONTRIBUTORS: L. Ward Abel, Robert Adamson, Venero Armanno, Melissa Ashley, Lisa Marie Basile, Mandy Beaumont, Sally Breen, MTC Cronin, B. R. Dionysius, Maria C. Dominguez, Martin Edmond, Michael Farrell, Toby Fitch, Brentley Frazer, Claire Gaskin, Allen Ginsberg, Matt Hetherington, Eleanor Jackson, Anthony Lawrence, Alexandra McCallum, Tim McGabhann, Laura Jean Mckay, Corey Mesler, Reg Mombassa, A. G. Pettet, Mark Pirie, Rufo Quintavalle, Kris Saknussemm, Gary Snyder, David Stavanger, Todd Swift, John Tranter, Joanna C. Valente, Samuel Wagan Watson, Fakie Wilde, Mark Young, Ali Znadi + More

Keynote address to Geopoetics Symposium, Griffith University, Gold Coast campus, 26th. April, 2019 Abstract: What is the poet's task in the age of the Anthropocene? This is the guiding question of my talk today. I take my cue from comments made by the French philosopher Alain Badiou in the late 1990s, who proclaimed that the "age of the poets" is over. Badiou exhorts philosophers and critical theorists alike to abandon the poem as the privileged bearer of truth because it leads to a resacralization of nature, effectively blocking critique from the task of engaging with and exposing the "barbarity" of Capital and its foundation on the mathematical principle of the "count as one" (Badiou, pp. 69-77). While accepting Badiou's broader critical stance, I will counter-claim that the poem should not be abandoned, but opened to the singularity of its own saying as a praxis that desacralizes nature. Employing Jacques Derrida's notion of survivance as the capacity to 'go on' after the 'extinction' of the sovereign 'I' in an experience of the abyss, my talk will focus on two poetic works: the poem Todtnauberg by Paul Celan, and a recent art work entitled Extinction Flock by Emma Lindsay. Todtnauberg exemplifies the poetic mode of being receptive to a voice that speaks from a future "to come," while Extinction Flock opens perception to an abyss of time in the event of species extinction. The poet's task is to keep the open open by making ourselves receptive to another way of being human after the "extinction cascades" of the hypermodern age.