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Laurie Duggan

Laurie Duggan

Laurie Duggan was born in in Melbourne and was involved in the poetry worlds of that city and Sydney from the 1970s to the late 1990s. After six years in Brisbane he moved to England, living in Faversham, Kent until 2018 when he returned to Sydney. He has published some twenty books of poems together with Ghost Nation, a work about imagined space. His most recent books are Homer Street (Giramondo 2020), Selected Poems 1971–2017 (Shearsman 2018), and No Particular Place To Go (Shearsman 2017).

'Poems against economics' by Laurie Duggan

April 1994, no. 159 • 01 April 1994
Despite the protestations of my close friends I choose to regard myself as a normal person. Only at certain times of the year do I realise how tenuous are my links with the mundane world. One of these trou­blesome occasions is when I prepare my income tax form. ... (read more)

'The Americans, baby' by Laurie Duggan

November 1994, no. 166 • 01 November 1994
When I started publishing my poems back in the early 1970s, I did so amidst a concern that Australian poetry was being Americanised: Coca-Cola, the pizza parlour, and the rock and rollers’ preoccupation with that thing called ‘lurve’ had swept all that was pure and true into the trashcan of history, and we with our Olsons, O’Haras, and Berrigans were unwitting accomplices to this annulling ... (read more)

'How to have fun with poems' by Laurie Duggan

September 1994, no. 164 • 01 September 1994
A few years ago I found myself grouped with some other poets and given a label: ‘Generation of ‘68’. Like most tags it became after a while more a source of irritation than anything else. The description had been given by John Tranter to the inmates of his 1979 anthology, The New Australian Poetry, but before long had become a term of collective abuse as such labels tend to. One of the ident ... (read more)

'Words', a poem by Laurie Duggan

August 2021, no. 434 • 26 July 2021
a poem is a house into whichwords are inserted permeable, vapour or rainaltering the light outside a movement before the movement of treesa lens on those branches words drop into the streetonto the floor of imagination a sky contains all this,the jigsaw of a baroque paintingthings tending outward at angles held together for a momentspace between the leaves vivid, darknesscast down on the ea ... (read more)