AustLit

Author's note: 'Part 5, "Galah Songs", is made up of lines filched from a rich gathering of my contemporaries from the 1960s through to the most recent postmodernists, hence the many lines taken from poets such as Bruce Dawe, writing about the dailiness of life and suburban matters (for instance, line 157, from a poem of his called "Enter without so much as knocking": "Blink, blink. HOSPITAL. SILENCE"). In this period, the "New Romantic" poets like Robert Adamson ("Here is some strange writing hidden away in an old book") and others contribute lines; Adamson's line is immediately juxtaposed with Fay Zwicky's beautifully apt line on the generation of poets after James McAuley ("The minnow class swims in"). The poem shuffles through all sorts of 1970s/ 80s/90s verse: poets writing about each other, poems writing in lowercase, employing slashes or no internal punctuation; poets writing in phonetic and slang and so on, until the poem slips in some lines by poets working on language experimentation, to a stage where it appears that meanings ("boundaries", in the final line) dissolve. That last line is contributed by Peter Minter to whom, as in every other case I am indebted.' (Source: Editorial p. 9)