In early April, Peter Minter provided the opening address to The Political Imagination: Contemporary Diasporic and Postcolonial Poetries Symposium held at Deakin University in Melbourne. His paper, ‘Toward a Decolonised Australian Poetry’ raised a radical, timely revision of approaches to reading our local poetic traditions. Minter’s key contention is that ‘nationality’ (i.e. what is un/Australian) is no longer a convincing way of viewing Australian poetry’s trends, and I agree wholeheartedly. As an alternative, he proposes not a nation-shaped block of poetic endeavour, but an ‘archipelagic map’ of localised activity. Such a map aims to ‘reassess the monolithic’ image of poetic development as assimilative. In doing so, Minter’s archipelagic model offers alternative images of ‘outcrops of non-Anglophilic’ poetic diasporas and ‘psycho-geographic intensities’.
The result of this alternative view of Australian poetry, argues Minter, is a ‘more ethical set of metaphors’ to describe the intentions and movements of Australian poets and the affects of their work. Such metaphor would include, for example: distance; poetry as diplomacy; and poetry as survival, among others. Another result of archipelagic understandings of Australian poetry is that critical terms must be shifted. Those that hinge upon the concept of a national poetry tend to disintegrate: transnationalism and multiculturalism become complicated; even globalism, moots Minter, could become a less useful view of our archipelagic relationships.
These are exciting ideas. They articulate the ways I’ve come to view my own work and that of many other Australian poets over the last few years. I’ve been thinking about how Minter’s archipelago could be further expanded and detailed. For what they’re worth, here are some questions I’m currently asking myself as I think about how the archipelagic map could prompt new critical discussions:
How would ‘offshore’ areas of Australian poetic activity be included in the archipelagic map? Recently I wrote an essay for So Long Bulletin about travelling to Antarctica, and considering the tradition and function of literature written to/from there. While no longer attached to Australia, parts of Antarctica are Australia’s scientific territory and Australian poets have interacted with them. Potential poetic outcrops such as Antarctica and Norfolk Island sit alongside those of mainland, federally governed and permanent populations.
Stemming from this, I wonder how Australian poetic travel might be figured in the archipelago—including trans-Tasman exchanges and physical sites of cumulative poetic activity such as Asialink host venues. These seem to me to constitute another image of poetic activity: hauntings.
Psycho-geographic intensities could include those sites that have attracted repeated poetic attentions—anywhere from Bunda Cliffs to New England. On the archipelagic map, they might appear as palimpsests or 3D exposures. The Red Room Company’s current project, The Disappearing, reveals a way that such sites might be represented for a reading public. The Disappearing collects poems about locations including Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide and later regional towns and areas and ascribes them GPS coordinates in a mobile mapping app. This is a whole new way of reading-in-space, perhaps one closest to the way we remember poetic images.
How might extra-poetic activity inform this kind of mapping? Australia’s long tradition of overlap between visual art and poetic practices has often drawn upon geographical sites, be they Hobart or the Pilbara. How could this kind of interdisciplinary intensity be more frequently considered in our approaches to Australian poetic development?
And what reality do we give to imaginary localities within Australian poetry? Antarctica comes to mind again; its literature, hampered by the continent’s inaccessibility, has often been more ‘psycho’ than ‘geographic’. Yet it has a place on the poetic map. There are less specific examples, such as the sometimes-revealed, sometimes-hidden localities in Anthony Lawrence’s ‘The Welfare of My Enemy’, the named-yet-obscured setting of Jaya Savige’s ‘The dreamworld murders’, Alan Wearne’s invented suburbs in ‘Out Here’, or the imagined landscapes in my own long poem, ‘Final Theory’.
The archipelagic model is primarily about poetry’s relationships to place, in which are nestled society, culture and government. Minter may be signalling a way to break down that vague, North American term, ‘ecopoetics’, into more specific accounts of our island poetics.
About Bonny Cassidy
Bonny Cassidy is a Melbourne poet, writer and teacher. Her first full-length collection of poems, Certain Fathoms (Puncher & Wattmann), was published in 2012 and she is currently completing her second book, due out through Giramondo in mid-2013.
Further reading:
As much as I hate big noting myself by monopolising the Cordite comment board lately without having any credit in the poetry bank myself (my rationale being that no-one else seems to be saying too much), the many fruitful lines of thought and inquiry covered in this post lead me to say more, especially relating to the ‘outcrops of non-Anglophilic’ poetic diasporas and ‘psycho-geographic intensities’ discussed in this post.
Minter’s archipelagic model, said to be a way of mapping “relationships to place” in a way that disarms and disintegrates a national poetry understanding of transnationalism and multiculturalism, can be read against Lorange’s Sydney in Cordite 38, a place of avowed non-representation, where a city of dialogic minor players is said to demonstrate “the total disorientation of finding yourself in language in a city, in a city of language”.
Fair enough, and let me state unreservedly, that I admire to the point of jealousy the poems chosen for that issue, as I admire the poetry of Astrid Lorange. Criticism, however, has its role too. My question, set against the proposed archipelagic model outlined here, is whether that “city of minor players” found themselves in language per se, or simply and unreflectively, one particular language only, English. If that “city of minor players” found themselves in “sedimented” fashion in one particular language only, then they suffer the same charge made by Lorange against a Sydney that “self-identifies monolinguistically and monoculturally at the level of media and political representation”. And more: Lorange claims also, “this is what makes poetry political, in a literal sense: poetry examines the way language functions in order to construct a politics”. I argue that her “city of minor players” falls down on this point too.
How? The poems in Cordite 39 appear strange at the language level initially, and do make the stone stonier lexically, syntactically and semantically, and occasionally at a punctuation level, but not at a typographic level. The psychogeography, like psychoanalysis, exists only within the boundary of “the city of minor poets”; like all boundaries, once you move beyond them you are free to see and explore as you wish. You have to look only to the Guncotton leader board to see the different typographic layouts (the guncotton formula is instructive too) of a range of different language alphabets from around the world. Many of these languages and alphabets comprise the multiculturalism and politics of the greater Sydney area.
If you contrast the way the English and Arabic alphabets play out in their written language systems, for example, you can see how in English, following a Latin lead, the text is justified by using spaces between letters and words, and occasionally hyphenation, and that the movement from left to right is a vertical movement; whereas in the Arabic text, the script is justified by a horizontal movement, which elongates the connections between the letters. Arabic punctuation derived from Latin, so there is not a great deal of difference between English and Arabic on that score, except that Arabic flips some punctuation signs. All this is and more has been well documented and is easy to find. There was little investigation of the politics of language other than English in 38: Sydney, perhaps Australia’s most multicultural city.
So, back to the ‘outcrops of non-Anglophilic’ poetic diasporas and ‘psycho-geographic intensities’, you might say that my charge of monolinguism and monoculturalism against the “city of poets” in Cordite 38 lacks operational validity because they were writing in English and were constrained by that language and could do nothing different. I would reply that yes, language is a strait jacket, and that there is no ethnic cleansing without poetry. Also, Cordite 38 is just three issues from Ozko 35, an Issue which opened up the language terrains being discussed here to dialogism on the Cordite website. It would appear that the language lesson of that issue cannot be transferred easily, and will take more than a city of Anglophilic minor players bound by dialogue in the strangeness of one language only.
cities look ‘diverse’ to anthropocenes, but when you get down to it there’s just people and their machines overpopulating. regardless of language diversity the athenian metropolises are monological, made so by backgrounding ecological knowledges and foregrounding technics.
Some excellent points, Bonny, and I like this idea of Antarctica and its polyvalent imaginary.
Dennis, I think your call for better representation of the multilingual is a good one. However, I’m not sure this is adequate criticism of a collection of poems on the concept ‘Sydney’, as well as geographic site, Sydney. This is not to say I don’t think Lorange’s curatorship doesn’t mobilise aspects of Minter’s archipelagic programme, I think in fact especially since it is this conceptual, psycho-geographical Sydney that is so strongly foreshadowed in an issue by poets from around Australia it as a collection of poems shows real, incidental fidelity to the notion.
Firstly, many of the poems speak about Sydney from elsewhere, and in fact flag their participation from satellite spaces and circle the notion of Sydney via digressions through a farrago of other spaces, psychic and geographical. Perhaps the centripetal nature of this circling you’ve overlooked, Dennis. What dissatisfies you as seemingly void of the real, underrepresented and multifarious cultural-linguistic space of Sydney I think is instead a gyre of these same sometimes disseminative, sometimes digressive forces whose eye is Sydney, meaning all the cosmopolitan aspects to these poems entailed. To me, Pam Brown’s poem ‘Worldless’ speaks volumes: “Korea and Kinglake / photography exhibitions” in a poem that maps an experiential itinerancy.
As multiculturalism becomes proceedingly co-opted as part of a larger, homogenising state-led nationalism – that the immigrant’s specificity be renounced for the sake of “Australian” “values” – the need for poetry to map “the broad set of unofficial Sydneys” seems to me to become proceedingly more vital. I think many of these poems demonstrate Sydney’s cosmopolitanism, it feels no need to take the hand of its reader, as if in a zoo, and reflect on the taxonomy of its cultural diversity. That said, yes the multilingualism is missing here. This however does not make it ineligible for the archipelagic, the transnational, and to overlook the obvious cosmopolitanism of these poems – just count the instances of hybridity, locality national and international – can only be wilful, or at least mistaken. Remember, a conceptual, psycho-geographic Sydney, whose rightful multiplicity – its ability to speak for itself and thus the weird appearance and desire to speak about places inextricably connected to Sydney (I don’t think Sydney only wants to speak about itself!) in a broader international archipelago – is presented here with sophistication, spontaneity, and breadth.
If I may hazard speculation on Astrid’s methodologies, perhaps if soliciting the poetry rather than blind assessing submissions she might have sought out multilingual poetry in aid of her project of presenting unofficial Sydney in the plural. However, to properly read her curatorship I think it’s worthwhile valuing this non-representative gesture that I do think, mind you, brings us to some fascinating new perspectives of the city.
Firstly, I apologise to Bonnie Cassidy for not first thanking her for her brilliant coverage of a conference I didn’t attend, and for (mis?)appropriating her work.
As to Patrick Jones’s city comment, mostly I don’t live in them. But millions do, where the ability to learn to communicate more effectively between and across languages is of increasing importance.
And Corey, I note the singular here: “it feels no need to take the hand of its reader, as if in a zoo”. Ouch! Did I say that? This is starting to turn nasty, like over at Overland. Zoo politics? I’m more Albee’s The Zoo Story than anything.
More seriously, I don’t know why I drew on a filtered understanding of a paper delivered at a conference I didn’t attend. I liked what I read. It seemed to fit. I’m sticking with it. (Though I must stop coveting things just down the road; just as I must stop hitting these comments boxes.)
I got the centripetal bit: that may be the differend here. Of course there are Sydney’s and there are Sydney’s. It’s not that the Sydney I got in Cordite 38 wasn’t the Sydney I wanted. More that I would have liked to have seen and read of a Sydney with a political imagination that was more representational and representative of its linguistic, ethnic and cultural diversity, one that I, and perhaps other people, have actually experienced. If that paints me as a poetry conservative, so be it. The Sydney I saw in the grain of sand that is Cordite 40, although beautifully grainy in its language use, lacked the political imagination I desire and desired.
Thanks for the turbo-charged replies. Now the choral ode that is the moaning frog chorus in my wake is reaching its epode, and soon I’ll be asked to join in.
Oh Dennis, my comments can sometimes come across as embittered, but I just thought the zoo analogue worked for the discussion at hand. Glad you raised this issue.
Your tone says it all, Corey. In jest, always in jest. There is no criticism except by those capable of it. If you dish it out, you’ve got to be able to take it too. I look forward to more interviews.
Great discussion all.
It’s easy enough to look at a selection of work — an issue of cordite, for example, or (ahem) an anthology — and see its exclusions, beginning first with whatever the reader’s personal bugbears happen to be. This is fine enough — we’ve all got agendas, else perhaps we wouldn’t find reading very interesting.
I don’t want to be glib here — this mode of engagement is absolutely necessary when engaging in a proper critique. I think though, it is rarer and harder for readers to make connections between what they have in front of them, and grapple properly with the frisson caused by a set of poems together. In this instance, a set of poems very carefully chosen by Astrid.
When I put Bonny’s post up, I was really excited by the way her ideas sat with the content of the Sydney issue, and I’m very glad that Dennis and Corey have both engaged with this. And Dennis, while I disagree with the specifics of your comment, I do think your perspective on the Sydney issue as three issues away from OZ-KO is a really interesting one. There is no point having an archive of issues if we don’t look back and forth and continue to generate new ideas about and between them.