Alison Croggon is a Melbourne writer whose work includes poetry, novels and criticism. You can read more of her work at theatre notes. She tweets, too: @alisoncroggon.
The release of The Hobbit over Christmas prompted me to re-watch Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. From the beginning, I thought the real genius of these films is in their spectacular design; it’s what has allowed me to gloss over their myriad faults, most of which can’t be laid at the feet of Tolkien.
I often find it mildly hilarious when I read articles that talk of writing creatively as a ‘career’. This is purely personal: after three decades of making a precarious living through various kinds of writing, it’s impossible for me to look back over my own ‘career’ with anything but rueful amusement. But exhortations for the ‘author’ to become a ‘brand’ don’t make me laugh. They fill me with revulsion.
I’m reading Jane Austen again. As a habitual re-reader to the point of vice, Austen is one of the authors to whom I have returned more often than I can count.
Commissioned by Victorian Opera, to be staged in 2013, with score by Michael Smetanin.
From Montaigne to Nabokov to Emerson, writers have extolled the pleasures of reading in bed. And why not? Reading in bed rolls two of life’s enjoyments into a single uber-pleasure, without the need for the military organisational abilities – not to say the waterproof books – that go with reading in the bath.
‘But we are not historians, and this is not a history book.’ As with its putative subject, the convict outlaw Moondyne Joe, it’s hard to say in a short review what this book, in fact, is: a mixture of history, poetry, criticism, political analysis, memoir and literary esprit, it’s a work that consciously resists closure and definition.
Continue reading '‘History (is) a text demanding to be read’' 0
‘The message of Bild,’ says Enzensberger, after considering earlier Fascist publications, ‘is that no conceivable message exists any more; its sole content is the liquidisation of all content.’ The newspaper is, he says, ‘the total work of art, which liquidates all the dreams of the avant-garde movements, from the dissolution of the distinction between life and art to collective production, by fulfilling them.’
‘I really have nothing to say about poetry in general (except that mine tries to counterfeit the communication of those who communicate by silence). And these poems are mostly private letters. R.S.’
I have given up poetry, at last count, about three times.
There is the initial seduction of the dizzyingly synaesthetic language: a sense peculiar to Mallarmé of a cold, chaste perfume that seems, on the one hand, to be almost suffocating in its density, and on the other to be as motionless and odourless as a fretwork of stone.
Continue reading '‘And what an ear’: on Manson’s Mallarmé' 3
It’s an attractive idea, especially for poets: that poetry, far from being the marginalised wordplay of a powerless minority, in fact exists at the very heart of political power. In Stay on Message, Tom Clark makes this very case, echoing, although he doesn’t cite it anywhere, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s argument in his famous essay ‘A Defence of Poetry’ that ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’.
Continue reading 'Poetry: ‘Is it possible for language to be truthful?’' 15
Poetry is a slow art. Between Kate Fagan’s first full-length collection, The Long Moment, and her second, First Light, is a gap of a decade, punctuated only by a couple of chapbooks. It has been well worth the wait.
Continue reading 'Poetry: A slow art that asks the big questions' 0
Kate Lilley prefaces her anticipated second collection of poems, Ladylike, with an epigraph from American feminist academic Lauren Berlant: ‘Everyone knows what the female complaint is.’ It’s taken from Berlant’s book, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture, which investigates women’s mass culture in America over the past two hundred years, arguing that it returns again and again to a ‘discourse of disappointment’ that is nourished by its own broken promises.
Poetry is popularly considered to be an art of the self. When the figure of the poet is parodied, it’s most often as an emo in a puffy shirt, a narcissistic creature of absurdly heightened sensibility.