Martin Harrison
Martin Harrison (1949–2014) was a celebrated poet and critic. Born in Yorkshire, he settled in Sydney in 1978 after living for a few years in New Zealand. He worked as a journalist for the ABC, where he was responsible for adventurous and innovative arts programming (particularly with regard to poetry and sound art), and taught at UTS, where he was a Senior Lecturer. He authored nine collections of poetry, including the critically acclaimed Wild Bees (2008) and the posthumously published Happiness (2014). A collection of his critical writings is currently being edited.
State of mind: it’s a simple phrase but it is one which has always interested me. ‘State of mind’ is about what? Sets of feelings? Predispositions and moods? Or perhaps more it’s a term to do with the groove which thoughts regularly follow along. A state of mind is one which makes you respond in a particular way: you tend to act in a particular way; you have recurrent feelings.
The phrase ... (read more)
The problem with K.F. Pearson’s Melbourne Elegies is that Goethe – on whose classic of sextourism, Roman Elegies 1788–1790, these rhetorical, literary poems are loosely based – is Goethe: difficult to translate, still little read in English. It gives him problems. Pearson, to my mind, is not attempting a Poundian ‘replacement’ of an ancient text within the framework of a cont ... (read more)
Blackout is a poem written (deliberately, I think) in transition – or even perhaps in transit. Structured such that it lacks a singular, personal voice, it could be read as a response to the question: What is a poem in the era of digital media? Or more particularly, more precisely –Where does such a poem start? What’s its language, how does it end? Blackout, for example, is left unfinished: ... (read more)