AustLit

'In ‘Mental Ears and Poetic Work’ JH Prynne writes that “no poet has or can have clean hands, because clean hands are themselves a fundamental contradiction. Clean hands do no worthwhile work.” Resistance is the tenor of reality, and action in it is compromised, bloody-handed, in the world and of it. In some senses it can seem that an ever-larger stake of leftist discourse is consumed by a miserabilist scramble for seniority on a narrowing mesa of unhistorical piety. In the crisis of social, ethical, and ecological collapse that greets us daily, clean hands look more than ever like magical thinking.' (Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk, Introduction)