AustLit

'This essay puts forth Laurie Duggan’s decades-long serial poem, Blue Hills (1980–), as a radical antimythic and ecological approach to longform ‘epic’ poetics – or what I term the ‘ecological anti-epic’. The essay first reflects on the mythic ambitions of twentieth century Anglo-American modernist epic poets, such as Ezra Pound and TS Eliot, before turning to what I call the North American ‘antiepic’ postmodernist serial poem tradition. Centring on Robert Duncan’s Passages -- a key influence on Duggan’s own series -- I argue this ‘anti-epic’ approach to the long poem replaced the ‘mythical method’ (Eliot 1923: 483) of early modernist epics with a compositional method. Reading Blue Hills through the guiding principle of Duncan’s series, ‘grand collage’ (2014: 298), the essay then posits that Blue Hills -- as a localised re-deployment of Duncan’s grand collage method -- can be read as both a continuation, and subversive settler Australian reimagination, of the North American anti-epic serial poem tradition. Drawing on Peter Minter’s archipelagic approach to reading Australian poetry, Blue Hills is then read as a type of archipelago of poetic islands, one which challenges not only the epiccum-mythic ambitions of modernist longform poetry, but also the racially charged environmental myth-conceptions of early settler Australian poetic movements, such as the Jindyworobaks. I conclude with a brief reflection on the links between the process-based aesthetics of post-modern anti-epics and what Connor Weightman calls the ‘ecological long poem’ (2020: 3), ultimately positing that Duggan’s Blue Hills refutes the modernist penchant for speaking declaratively about the world and instead affects a sense that the world is reveling in its own wording.' (Publication abstract)

'The poem as a whole reads, Chinese characters, a shelf on which stand burnt sticks of incense and three oranges, wind gusts broken branches mauve shadows under the jacaranda and oddly, a row of cypress pines along the tin wall of the Rheem factory Apparent gaps in the poem give the visual record of omission. Unlike the previous poems discussed, "Blue Hills 38" is not aerial but works at ground level, describing the historical layers of a suburban area of Melbourne; the poem as a whole reads, Lanes I will never trace of sheoak and flowering gum fork through these suburbs under the campanile, Mentone, where the rail curves towards the bay and its townships: median clock towers and creek borders, overtaken by the city, the lowlands between, drained, filled in, overlooked by railway stations, a vista from Edithvale to Wheelers Hill. The speculation here regards the question of art's relationship-in this case, of non-Aboriginal art-to its environment in Australia and its willingness to allow its language and conventions to be thereby changed. [...]the line democratizes art and heat as simply two small words, two potentially volatile ingredients. The properties of art and heat in "Blue Hills 48" are mirrored by a transformative exchange between architecture and art: australian mercantile lanD concrete lettering embossed around the warehouse entablature broken off on one wall leaving the infill of words in red brick, a negative space with the unexpected gravity of a Magritte.' (Publication abstract)