Lakes

I cycled to the lake this evening and the water was very still. The pine trees, gilded by the late sun, mirrored themselves perfectly. Then a fish jumped and flopped and splashed and the ripples circled out, a perfect bulls eye, eventually hitting the bank and folding in on themselves. It reminded me of this [...]

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Adelaide

I always find blogging more difficult from here. I guess it’s because many of the people who read the blog are just around the corner. But it’s been good. I’ve been hanging out with my grandparents, and my brother, and my old friends. And it’s good good good. There’s something about old friends which is [...]

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Why you should still love Les Murray

I felt so tired this morning that I promised myself an early night tonight. Why is it not possible to get more done? I am making progress but I wish it were quicker.
I am working on my Les Murray chapter. I like his work very much. I’m not sure my chapter will do him justice. [...]

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Ezra Pound sings cuckoo

The things you find on Wikipedia. I must confess, I’ve never been able to get into Ezra Pound. I never had the chance to study his work formally, and the few times I opened his collected poems as a conscientious undergraduate in the library on rainy afternooons, I found them impenetrable. But I was looking [...]

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To quote a poem entirely out of context

I am like the sea trying to straighten myself out
On a beach while ships are sinking elsewhere
Kevin Hart
That’s what the thesis feels like right now, as I straighten a few niggling, messy footnotes. (The poem, by the way, is called ‘To the Spirit’, and isn’t talking about theses at all, but I’ve always loved that [...]

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Why I’m doing this

Been thinking about Australian poetry. What it means to me. Why it called out to me, and drew me to study it. Why on earth I ended up devoting several years of my life to studying Australian poetry and the Middle Ages, together. It has something to do with being out of the limelight. And [...]

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I am modelled on the sun

I appear from the inner world, singular and many, I amthe animals of my tree, appointed to travel and be eatensince animals are plants’ genital extensions, I’m clothed in lusciousdung but designed to elicit yet richer, I am modelled on the sun,dry shine shedding off mottled surface but having like it a crack seed. . [...]

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Why you should read Francis Webb (with a medievalist interlude)

Because he’s different from anything you’ve ever read, or ever will read. Because he fools you into thinking he’s naive or obtuse before you realise he’s something else altogether. Because he knits his stanzas together with rhyme schemes so cleverly that you don’t even know they’re there. Because – just sometimes – his words make [...]

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Reading Webb

Reading Francis Webb’s poems is an extremely odd experience. Practically any Australian poet will tell you he was Australia’s greatest poet, but Australian poets aside, hardly anyone knows about him. He was born in Adelaide in 1925 and died in 1973. And the poems are – well – strange. They are densely constructed and glitter [...]

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Australian poetry takes on the world

A couple of days ago, a fellow phd student who’s teaching on the poetry module at the moment told me he got his class to look at ‘Noonday Axeman‘ because he remembered a paper I gave on Les Murray about a year ago. He said he’d never heard of Murray before then, but when he [...]

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