Cate Kennedy
" ... is writing poems going to be the most useful thing ...
when the world needs clean water ... not more poems ....
... sometimes, it's worth remembering, a poem can be like a glass of water ..."
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/poetica/2012-03-24/3840784
26 March 2012
25 March 2012
24 March 2012
from an interview with artist John Olsen
"The more a creative person enlarges their capacity, enlarges their vocabulary, the more they are able to challenge their own talent."
The masterly Mr Squiggle, by Janet Hawley, Good Weekend, 2 September 2006.
The masterly Mr Squiggle, by Janet Hawley, Good Weekend, 2 September 2006.
22 March 2012
The Myth of Plato and Plato the Myth-maker
Rick Benitez: Look, I think that’s a really good question. Partly it does have to do with literature. Most people would know that Plato has a great antagonism to the poets of his day, the ones who went before him...
Alan Saunders: Yes, he wanted them garlanded and then dismissed from the city, didn’t he?
Rick Benitez: That’s right, but he didn’t want all of poetry dismissed. He wanted a particular kind of poetry, his philosophic poetry, to replace that, or anyone else who could write poetry in a philosophic way. So in the Phaedo he famously has Socrates say that philosophy is the greatest music, right, so he does think of philosophy as a kind of art form and he’s pioneering a new genre. He’s not the first to begin to write dialogues, but he’s one of the ones who takes it to its highest form as a genre. So in part he is doing something aesthetic, something like a novelist would do. In part he’s doing that, but I also think embedded in his purposes is the use of pictures, images. The Greek word is icons, representations, to lead people from one kind of perspective, one way of thinking about things, to another, and his myths have that kind of function which I think of as at least pedagogical and maybe more philosophical of shifting perspective to a new kind of perspective, a different one.
... ... ... ... ... ...
Alan Saunders: How did Plato regard the power of myth to control lives?
Rick Benitez: It’s a double-edged sword, it has incredible power to control lives, and I think you want to say not just the lives of people who are the irrational lot. It has the power to control the lives of even the most rational of people, and one of the things you find described in The Republic is that even the guardians of the republic, those most rational of all people in the society, are people for whom the power of the image is so great that it slips in under the radar of rationality and has its effect on them. This is one reason why he’s so scared of some kinds of poetry and its ability to persuade. He’s scared of propaganda. Many people may think, well, he’s got his own propaganda to replace it, but he doesn’t like the power that image has to persuade even the most rational of people. So, the most important thing for him is if you’re going to have the use of myths and images in society, he wants them to be ones that reflect in more accurate ways the truth of the matter about things, and this is where his belief that there is a truth of the matter about even the most ordinary practical sorts of things, right and wrong in everyday life, may differ from more recent views about that, more relativistic views about that.
read full transcipt:
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/philosopherszone/the-myth-of-plato-and-plato-the-myth-maker/3881230
Alan Saunders: Yes, he wanted them garlanded and then dismissed from the city, didn’t he?
Rick Benitez: That’s right, but he didn’t want all of poetry dismissed. He wanted a particular kind of poetry, his philosophic poetry, to replace that, or anyone else who could write poetry in a philosophic way. So in the Phaedo he famously has Socrates say that philosophy is the greatest music, right, so he does think of philosophy as a kind of art form and he’s pioneering a new genre. He’s not the first to begin to write dialogues, but he’s one of the ones who takes it to its highest form as a genre. So in part he is doing something aesthetic, something like a novelist would do. In part he’s doing that, but I also think embedded in his purposes is the use of pictures, images. The Greek word is icons, representations, to lead people from one kind of perspective, one way of thinking about things, to another, and his myths have that kind of function which I think of as at least pedagogical and maybe more philosophical of shifting perspective to a new kind of perspective, a different one.
... ... ... ... ... ...
Alan Saunders: How did Plato regard the power of myth to control lives?
Rick Benitez: It’s a double-edged sword, it has incredible power to control lives, and I think you want to say not just the lives of people who are the irrational lot. It has the power to control the lives of even the most rational of people, and one of the things you find described in The Republic is that even the guardians of the republic, those most rational of all people in the society, are people for whom the power of the image is so great that it slips in under the radar of rationality and has its effect on them. This is one reason why he’s so scared of some kinds of poetry and its ability to persuade. He’s scared of propaganda. Many people may think, well, he’s got his own propaganda to replace it, but he doesn’t like the power that image has to persuade even the most rational of people. So, the most important thing for him is if you’re going to have the use of myths and images in society, he wants them to be ones that reflect in more accurate ways the truth of the matter about things, and this is where his belief that there is a truth of the matter about even the most ordinary practical sorts of things, right and wrong in everyday life, may differ from more recent views about that, more relativistic views about that.
read full transcipt:
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/philosopherszone/the-myth-of-plato-and-plato-the-myth-maker/3881230
21 March 2012
A John Kinsella Manifesto
"Publishing poetry in a literary journal is a form of articulation, and a declaration of the desire to be heard. There are no half-measures in this, no pretending one is writing for an audience of one. Submit a poem for journal publication and you’re putting your communication forward: a communication with the journal itself (and all it engenders), with the editor/s, with the readers, and with your ‘self’ as public entity. The publication of a poem necessitates the merging (and sometimes clashing) of private and public spaces. I think the intention behind offering a poem for publication is relevant. A poem will do what a poem will do, and each reader or group of readers will bring their own ways of reading to it and necessarily disrupt intention. But the act of presenting a poem for publication is a deliberate act and carries a politics. Think carefully about what you’re submitting and why. For many poets it’s as simple as getting attention and a pay cheque. But it never stops there. Poems have lives of their own beyond copyright, beyond original contexts."
Read the whole article (includes some relevant paragraphs on 'the competition poem')http://spunc.com.au/splog/post/a-john-kinsella-manifesto-what-i-do-and-don-t-look-for-in-a-poem-when-selecting-for-a-literary-journal/
Read the whole article (includes some relevant paragraphs on 'the competition poem')http://spunc.com.au/splog/post/a-john-kinsella-manifesto-what-i-do-and-don-t-look-for-in-a-poem-when-selecting-for-a-literary-journal/
15 March 2012
12 March 2012
Sylvia Plath
'Do you know what a poem is, Esther?'
'No, what?' I said.
'A piece of dust.' And he looked so proud of having thought of this that I just stared ...
... a whole year later ... I finally thought of an answer to that remark ...
'So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you think you're curing. They're dust as dust as dust. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together.'
And of course Buddy wouldn't have any answer to that, because what I said was true. People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn't see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick and couldn't sleep.'
from The Bell Jar (1963)
Faber and Faber, 1966, p. 58
'No, what?' I said.
'A piece of dust.' And he looked so proud of having thought of this that I just stared ...
... a whole year later ... I finally thought of an answer to that remark ...
'So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you think you're curing. They're dust as dust as dust. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together.'
And of course Buddy wouldn't have any answer to that, because what I said was true. People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn't see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick and couldn't sleep.'
from The Bell Jar (1963)
Faber and Faber, 1966, p. 58
10 March 2012
09 March 2012
01 March 2012
Russel Edson
"Poetry, which, paradoxically, is not really a language art as we know fiction to be, is ... more related to painting. But even more, perhaps silent film, because dreams, if not completely, are mainly wordless. The babyish subconcscious doesn't know how to speak. It is the land of physical understandings. Its language is a language of images. Poetry is a physical art without a physical presence, so that it often finds itself in cadence to the heartbeat, the thud of days, and in the childish grasp of the reality of rhymes."
from The Writer's Brush, Donald Friedman, 2007, Mid-List Press, Minneapolis, p. 116.
from The Writer's Brush, Donald Friedman, 2007, Mid-List Press, Minneapolis, p. 116.
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