I will raise some thoughts on mobile craft, suggesting transcultural alignments between Charles Olson’s projectivism and 1970s Papunya desert art, and brooding on ecopoetic form.

My paper looks at four different kinds of ‘craft’, in the context of white settlement and Australian poetry, with examples of issues and poems for each. The writing issues I attend to are: noun use and abuse; narration; the end of a poem; positive and negative space.

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).

I want to propose that in the colonial situation the colonising poet associates herself or himself with ars and the colonised poet with ingenium.

In the aftermath of his confrontation with Mike Kirkwood at Poetry ’74, a conference hosted by the Centre for Extra-Mural Studies at UCT, Guy Butler seems to have diminished in stature from year to year.