AustLit

Author's note from Editorial: 'The poem "Where the Bunyip Builds its Nest" is at once a poetical history of Australia, a sort of showcase of poetical language of the last 200-odd years, and a celebration of the poets' work. The poem is 200 lines long and is made up of 5 centos (poems made up of other poets' lines). Every line is lifted from someone else's poem. Structurally, the poem is pretty straightforward, but readers have to make some leaps as with any poem that selects and compresses details. I had no particular model in mind, but it could help to think of Ashbery's cut-up narra tives or Pound's idea of a "poem containing history" - per haps the centos could be thought of as mini-cantos?

The title is a take on the title poem of an 1885 collection, Where the Pelican Builds Its Nest, by the Queensland poet Mary Hannay Foott (1846-1914). The Australian Dictionary of Biography notes that Foott's poem, "much anthologized, uses the legend that the best land outback is where the pelican builds her nest, that is, at the end of the rainbow". The bunyip of my poem is, of course, a frightening creature of Aboriginal legend (suggested by sceptical later persons to be based on ancient memory of a diprotodont or similar creature). The creature is called by other names in different Aboriginal people's languages. It seemed to me fitting to give the bunyip a niche among the ghostly products of other imaginings. I started with the early colonial period - hence the archaic diction in the first two centos.' (p. 7-8)