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Paul Kane
Paul Kane is Professor Emeritus at Vassar College. He has published eight collections of poems and a dozen other books. His awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Bogliasco Foundation. He holds an honorary doctorate from La Trobe University and was awarded the Order of Australia in 2022. He divides his time between upstate New York and rural Victoria.
In 1903 W.E.B. Du Bois famously declared: ‘The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.’ He meant not only in the United States but also elsewhere in the world. As for this century, in America, at least, we can now say it remains the dominant problem. The very fact, for instance, of a movement named ‘Black Lives Matter’ – now a decade old – speaks to somethi ... (read more)
… although my eyes were open
In ’68 I sported a Panic Button on my blazer –
pushed, it read ‘Things will get worse before
they get worse.’ After the assassinations, I threw
it away. On edge, we were now living on the edge.
Across the hall, Drexler, the quiet kid from Belgium,
played Procol Harum full blast whenever
... (read more)
‘Posterity is so dainty,’ complained the American essayist John Jay Chapman, ‘that it lives on nothing but choice morsels.’ Chapman was writing about Browning, whose work for his contemporaries meant life, not art. But, Chapman predicts, ‘Posterity will want only art’. It is a nice distinction when considering our penchant for anthologies. This daintiness goes all the way back to the f ... (read more)
Just off the A9, en route to Port Arthur,
Here close by the Blowhole,
Tasman’s Arch and the Devil’s Kitchen,
the little settlement of Doo
revels in its punning nomenclature.
The vying houses try to outdo one
another: Doo Drop In, Nothing to Doo,
Diggery Doo, Morning Doo –
we are the punning species,
looking for ways to escape
enclosures of language,
the incarcerations of ide ... (read more)
I Scheme: The Good, the Bad, and the Bland
Rhetoric has a bad name. And for good reason. Not only does it suggest insincerity and verbal manipulation, it also has a strong odour of scholasticism about it. It is with some trepidation, therefore, that I turn to ancient rhetoric to urge upon you two terms I find useful in thinking about contemporary Australian poetry. I will make it as palatable as ... (read more)
‘They make a desert and call it peace.’Calgacus, on the Romans, AD 83
How will they remember us, the dead?As a cause – a just cause – or simply an end?
And when we, like traces of shootingstars, have visited our stripes upon the world
and in our turn are gone, how will webe remembered by those who follow, those who
will have overcome us? The victorswho write also read the history o ... (read more)
This is Paul Hetherington’s eighth book of poetry, his first full collection since his selected poems, Stepping Away (2001) and his verse novel, Blood and Old Belief (2003). The publication of a selected poems can sometimes have what the poet Richard Howard refers to as a ‘tombstone effect’, bringing creative work to a pause or halt, but Hetherington’s new book is very much a carrying forw ... (read more)
Wallace Stevens once remarked: ‘One of the essential conditions to the writing of poetry is impetus.’ It’s a statement worth keeping in mind when confronting a new book of poems, because thinking about impetus helps us locate the concerns of the poet and the orientation of the book. Since poems are not objects so much as events, what drives a poem helps govern how it arrives at its destinati ... (read more)
Although the World Wide Web was begun in 1990, it didn’t really get going in a big way until 1994, with the First International World Wide Web conference held at CERN in Switzerland. That was less than a decade ago. And that should give us pause. Think how important the Web has become in those few years. Consider, too, what sort of computer you were using in 1994 and compare it to what you deplo ... (read more)