AustLit

'In this significant critical work, Michael Farrell offers up a dialectical method (not announced as such), which I daresay is not unworthy of such a one as Lionel Trilling. In chapter 1, "The Hunted Writer," Farrell provides a bracing reading of unsettlement through both The Jerilderie Letter by Ned Kelly—"the notorious bushranger" (I1)—and also Bennelong's "Letter to Lord Mr Philips, Lord Sidney's Steward." By pairing these particular texts—so historically fecund as regards the discursivity of settler-hunter (Kelly) vis-à-vis Indigenous travel (Bennelong)—in a poetics of unsettlement, Farrell maintains that "these two colonial writers were participants, as both protagonists and victims" (13). The integrity of Farrell's readings stands on their own merits: there is no need to "pun"—for Farrell has already criticized others for exploiting the "affective, punning quality" of the word "unsettlement" (7)—to tell us that that the protagonist/victim synchronicity that Kelly and Bennelong apparently sham is an "unsettling fact" (13) that informs Farrell's readings. Indeed, to unsettle so iconic a figure as Kelly is not just a dialectic but also a dialogue among genres: cinematically, as Farrell points out, Kelly has been played on film "by both Mick Jagger and Heath Ledger," while culinarily Kelly's "image is used to sell pork in Castlemaine" (13). (Introduction)

' (Introduction)

'That poetry is implicated with politics is incontrovertible.  As Theodore Adorno writes ‘art exists in the real world and has a function in it, and the two are connected by a large number of mediating links.’   Those mediating links however, the things that connect each to the other, are harder to grapple with. What does the daily life of a protest poet look like compared to a conservative one when both work in a modern university? What poetry does the politician read?' (Introduction)

'There has been a rich history of anthologising Australian poetry this far into the twenty-first century. This article claims that contemporary poetics, with a renewed focus on the recoprocal relation between cultural and linguistic inquiry, can rediscover alternative ways of reading the history of Australian avant-garde, inventive and experimental work. Considering several key anthologies published after the turn of last century, the article provides readings of both the frameworks the anthology-makers provide and the poems themselves, claiming that mark, trace and lexical segmentivities can already be read as social. It then proposes a new possibility for an experimental anthology that might bring these facets into lived praxis: the chrestomathy.' (Publication abstract)

'William Blake’s articulation of the ‘bounding line’ as ‘the great and golden rule of art, as well as of life’ may seem a far-fetched place to start an examination of the poetics of the fence in Australian poetry. The line’s cosmic necessity and ethical force were being asserted by Blake in the context of a long-running dispute amongst art theorists as to whether outline or colour was the predominant element in the pictorial arts. But my mind reverts to this quotation when thinking about the cathected attitude to lines, boundaries, and fences that is emblematic of the settler-colonial establishment in this country in both its agrarian and suburban contexts.' (Introduction)