John Hawke

John Hawke reviews 'The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem' by Jeremy Noel-Tod

September 2019, no. 414 • 27 August 2019

In his infamous 1955 review of Patrick White’s The Tree of Man, A.D. Hope’s dismissal of the book as ‘illiterate verbal sludge’ focuses on a perceived confusion between the categories of poetry and prose. White ‘tries to write a novel as if he were writing poetry, and lyric poetry at that’, writes Hope; however, ‘the imagery, the devices of poetry are effective because they are wedde ... (read more)

John Hawke reviews 'Feeding the Ghost 1: Criticism on contemporary Australian poetry' edited by Andy Kissane, David Musgrave, and Carolyn Rickett

January-February 2019, no. 408 • 20 December 2018

Perhaps the most encouraging sign in this Puncher & Wattmann collection of critical essays on contemporary Australian poets is the prominent ‘1’ on its front cover, promising that this will be the first in a series. Given that last year’s Contemporary Australian Poetry anthology by the same publisher featured more than two hundred poets, only fourteen of whom are featured for discussion ... (read more)

John Hawke reviews 'Contemporary Australian Poetry' edited by Martin Langford et. al. and 'The Best Australian Poems 2016' edited by Sarah Holland-Batt

March 2017, no. 389 • 26 February 2017

According to The Magic Pudding, Bunyip Bluegum’s erudition is established through his ability to ‘converse on a great variety of subjects, having read all the best Australian poets’, a questionable achievement in Norman Lindsay’s day. A glance through the Annals of Australian Literature reveals the paucity of quality Australian poetry volumes published through most of the twentieth century ... (read more)

'Zero Degrees' by John Hawke

November 2016, no. 386 • 26 October 2016

Rags of snow unmelting on the southern lawn.Those younger ones, whose death turns on the hair’s-breadth incidence of accident,avoid this perduration of slow misrecognition. He dreams his cotton blankets are combusting,but won’t press the hospital buzzer because the nursing staff are occupied extinguishing flames.That vandals have broken into the cupboard of the genial stroke victim in the ... (read more)

John Hawke reviews 'Pitch of Poetry' by Charles Bernstein

October 2016, no. 385 • 26 September 2016

When Viktor Shklovsky, in his famous 1917 essay 'Art as Technique', asserts that the fundamental task of the poetic function is one of 'making strange' the reader's customary perceptions, he is arguing for more than just the avoidance of linguistic cliché. Through the medium of poetic form, the accepted conventions of our habitualised view of the world can be defamiliarised: the political implica ... (read more)