This response wagers that Butler’s poetics might be read productively in the light of two interventions in Australian poetics: Rex Ingamels’s ‘Conditional Culture’ (1938) and A.D. Hope’s ‘The Discursive Mode’ (1956/7). These two essays suggest that (so far) Australian poetry has been structured around an absence; in both, there is an appeal to ecology as the base of craft. Of both, I want to ask the following: When an ecology is invoked, whose ecology is it? What do these essays have to offer for thinking ‘the material’ in Australian poetry?
Audio
Date Recorded: 13 Sep 2013Duration: 22:26
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