Journal articles on the topic 'Bush poet'

The article, based on the material of M.A. Voloshin’s work, examines the elements of Tolstoy’s myth. The biographical myth of L.N. Tolstoy, which has been actively developing for a century and a half until today, but at the beginning of the 20th century, when Tolstoy’s departure from his own home became popular, it became especially relevant. The structure of the Tolstoy’s myth is analyzed, the mythologies associated with it (mythologized constant representations) created and reproduced by M.A. Voloshin in accordance with his own poetic worldview, personal attitude to the work and personality of L.N. Tolstoy. In the light of the problem posed, the author examines the poet's books “The Burning Bush” and “The Ways of Cain”. Attention is focused on the originality of Tolstoy’s text in the creative heritage of Voloshin, based on the proximity of worldviews, the sacralization of the image of the great writer. The poet interprets Tolstoy's mythologem about non-resistance to evil by violence in a completely new way. In the attempts of the great artist to protect himself and others from evil, Voloshin sees the reason for his tragic departure from Yasnaya Polyana. The question is raised about the features of the perception of this myth in the culture and literature of the first third of the XX century.

The background and genesis of Hubert du Plessis’s German and French songs On 7 June 2002 the South African composer Hubert du Plessis turned 80. Among his 77 art songs there are (apart from songs in Afrikaans, Dutch and English) eleven on German texts and one on a French text. The aim of this article is to investigate the genesis of these German and French songs. Du Plessis was influenced by his second cousin, the Afrikaans poet Barend J. Toerien, who lived in the same residence as Du Plessis at the University of Stellenbosch where they studied in the early 1940s. Toerien introduced Du Plessis to the work of Rilke, of whose poetry Du Plessis later set to music “Herbst”. Du Plessis’s ten Morgenstern songs were inspired by a chance gift of a Morgenstern volume from Susanne Stark-Schwietering, a student in Grahamstown where Du Plessis taught at Rhodes University College (1944-1951). During his studies in London (1951-1954) Du Plessis also received a volume of Morgenstern poetry from Howard Ferguson in 1951. The choice of French verses from Solomon’s Song of Songs was influenced by the advice of Hilda de Wet (Stellenbosch, 1966). It is notable that Du Plessis’s main composition teachers, William Bell, Friedrich Hartmann and Alan Bush, had practically no influence on the choice of the texts of his German and French songs.

The Background to Kellgren’s ”On a bust of Propertius”. This article examines the Swedish eighteenth-century poet Johan Henric Kellgren’s widely celebrated epigram “On a bust of Propertius” (“Öfver Propertii Buste eller Porträt”), published posthumously. An attractive but fanciful story about the poem as Kellgren’s autobiographical reflection and personal farewell on his deathbed has triggered an unwillingness among scholars to explore what the writer himself declares: that the piece is a translation of the epigram In statuam Propertii by the virtually unknown Italian Renaissance poet Guido Postumo Silvestri of Pesaro. The first section of the article surveys the intertextual field of Postumo’s poem and analyses its fusion of common tropes and motifs in the Greco-Roman and Neo-Latin ekphrastic epigram traditions. The second section traces the subsequent textual history of Postumo’s poem and the changes it underwent in reprints as well as in the eighteenth-century Danish philologist Frederik Plum’s translation into his native language. The third and final section focuses on Kellgren’s interpretation of the Danish text. It was through a process in several steps of reproductions and translations that the Neo-Latin creation was strained of its manierism, mythological references and allusions to late antique poetry, producing this pathos-driven swansong.

In this paper, we have analyzed the manifestations of poetic self-consciousness in the poetry of Stevan Raičković in the poem cycle Razgovor sa ilovačom and in the poem from the poetry collection Verses, Iz mraka te, pesmo, zovem, iz ničega. By semantically shaping the motif of the loam, the poetic complementarity between the poem and the cycle was established-the ideal of the poem as sculpture and the meta-lyrical reflection of the poet, evoked by observing the transformation of his own character into a bust. The poem Iz mraka te, pesmo, zovem, iz ničega evokes a symbolic attempt to sculpt the poem, based on visual imagination. Explicit autopoiesis is manifested in this poem-the poetic self-consciousness tries to view the poetic text as a matter that can be manually shaped, and in the end reaches a conclusion about the incompatibility of the means of expression and the assumed result. In the cycle Razgovor sa ilovačom, the means by which the poem is supposed to be materialized also appears to be incompatible with poetic contents, and lyrical subject expresses doubts about the constitutive power of language. The discrepancy between the stativity of the sculpture and the dynamism of the inner life, however, causes a return to words. Self-referentiality in the cycle Razgovor sa ilovačom indicates the implicit autopoiesis manifested in the treatment of the relationship between life and art and the problematization of equivalence between nature and poetry: because the poet tries to fix phenomena from life in the poem, just like the sculptor, he moves away from the dynamism of life. Interpreting the way in which the motif of the loam is shaped in relation to the theme of poetry, demonstrates the development of poetic self-awareness and doubts about the possibility of writing an authentic poem.

On an October day in 1869 Lord Houghton, friend of Thackeray and Tennyson, appeared in the cemetery at Kensal Green, in West London. He was there to unveil a tomb memorial to the poet Leigh Hunt; this was surmounted by a bust, and bore the legend:It is not really surprising that place of honour on Leigh Hunt's tomb is taken by a quotation from “his exquisite little fable ‘Abou ben Adhem’” which “has assured him a permanent place in the records of the English language”,1 and whose “touch of glory, like a sacred flame on a clear and graceful altar, has captured the succeeding generations”.2 The poet himself, Leigh Hunt, regarded this poem as one of his best.3 It is recorded that a friend presented to him an illuminated copy of it, which he hung above his writing table.4

Any attempt to interpret Pushkin’s The Monument [ Pamyatnik ] has for a long time been frustrated by the struggle to explain what the poet meant by ‘the Alexandrian column’ ( Aleksandriyskiy stolp ), with which he contrasts the ‘the monument not built with hands’. The author proves that the researchers looking for the only correct answer (a pursuit that has kept Pushkin scholars busy for decades) have been asking the wrong question all along. It is his belief that the phrase ‘Alexandrian column’ is used in the poem without any identifiable denotation and that the image’s artistic vagueness is deliberate. The poem alludes to several historical objects from various countries and epochs, including the more contemporary rein of the Russian emperor Alexander I. However, it appears that none of those allusions have any distinguishable features for identification purposes, hence easy confusion of the Alexander column with the Lighthouse of Alexandria. A similar effect occurs from the use of the ambiguous adjective ‘Aleksandriyskiy’ (‘Alexandrian’) to describe the Alexander column, illustrating the eroding historical memory about rulers.

Abstract The article discusses the hierarchical model of readers’ types outlined by Marcel Proust in his essay “Journées de lecture” and reconstructs Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetics of reading in accordance with the poems “Der Lesende” and “Der Leser” as well as the thematic relevant parts of the novel Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge. Based on the conclusions made thereby, it draws attention to the possibilities arising from a comparative reading of the description of the scene in which the young Marcel reads in the garden of Combray from Proust’s Du côté de chez Swann, and Rilke’s poem “Hebend die Blicke vom Buch”. Moreover, it is shown that in this short but complex poem, the German poet fulfills the ideal of a unity of reading and writing emphasized by the French author. Combining the motive of looking away from the book typical of his prose and poetry with Proust’s typical motive of the memory of a certain read, Rilke brings into being a poetic picture of reading, which triggers both the memory and the reflection, and an image of a reader that reveals his own productive reception.

This article deals with Martin Opitz’s didactic poem Vesuvius (1633) and tries to elucidate its fundamental poetical and epistemological issues. In his Buch von der Deutschen Poeterey (1624), Opitz establishes a set of rules for the genre of carmen heroicum that comprises both didactic poetry and narrative epics. Especially didactic resp. scientific poetry plays a decisive role in Opitz’s overall concept of poetry as it denies being fiction (‘Erdichtung’) and claims strict factuality. Thus it is not surprising that Vesuvius becomes the opening piece of the posthumous collection of Opitz’s Teutsche Poemata (1644). Vesuvius reveals itself not only as an imitation / translation of De Aetna (a didactic poem included in the Appendix Vergiliana), but also as an attempt to connect literary tradition, natural philosophy and religious knowledge: The purely scientific parts of the poem (on earthquakes and volcanism) are functioning to reveal the natural order of creation (the aspect of theodicy avant la lettre). The Vesuv-catastrophe is interpreted as God’s clear hint for mankind towards the ending of moral deprivation and civil war. The poet’s role as poeta vates resp. poeta theologus is thus to be the mediator / translator / interpreter between god and mankind, a mediation which actually takes the form of philological interpretation and commentary. The text of the 1633 print reflects this constellation by interweaving text and paratext (commentary) to a unique ensemble. With its particular textual arrangement and discoursive complexity, Vesuvius is symptomatic for premodern negotiations between natural sciences, religious knowledge, and literature.

For Bernd Niebling and his colleagues at the Lesesaal Altes Buch of the Universitätsbibliothek München While the earliest complete manuscripts of Catullus to survive today were written in the fourteenth century, it is well known that poem 62 already appears in an anthology from the ninth century, the Codex Thuaneus (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Parisinus lat. 8071). However, the Thuaneus may once have contained one more poem of Catullus. In his commentary on the poet, which appeared in 1684 but had been written decades earlier, the Dutch scholar Isaac Vossius makes the following comment on the last two lines of poem 11: Praetereunte postquam Tactus aratro est ] Vetustissimum exemplar Thuanæum in quo hoc Catulli carmen variorum epigrammatis subjungitur, legit fractus, non tactus. Et hoc probo, nisi malis stratus, nam in quibusdam libris tractus legebatur. It is surprising to find a reference to a lost part of such a well-known manuscript in a source from the seventeenth century. One may well ask whether Vossius really read this poem in the Codex Thuaneus. Could he have seen this manuscript? Can he be relied on to report its contents truthfully? And could a part of the volume have been lost since the seventeenth century? I will argue that the answer to all these questions is yes, and that it is very likely that the Thuaneus once contained Catullus 11 as well as 62. I will set out the consequences of this for our understanding of Catullus' manuscript tradition. Next, I will discuss another ancient manuscript of Catullus that Vossius claims to have read, namely his ‘vetus liber Mediolanensis’. The article will close with an appendix on the history of the Thuaneus before it was studied by Vossius.

This is a eulogy of the Kuwaiti poet and writer Ali Hussein Al-Sabti, who died at the age of 86. He was a prominent poet of Kuwait who contributed to the beginnings of the modern poetic movement in Kuwait, writing literary and social stories and articles subsequently published in Kuwaiti and Arab newspapers. He served as a member of the Writers Association and the Journalists Association and wrote for many Kuwaiti newspapers. He also won many awards and honors from authorities and institutions sponsoring poetry and literature, including the Abdulaziz Saud Al-Babtain Prize for Poetic Creativity. The National Council for Culture, Arts and Letters mourns this man who enjoyed a busy journey in literary and cultural work marked by elaborate poems and distinguished writings. The death of Al-Sabti, a great poet and writer, marks a loss for the cultural and literary movement in Kuwait.

This article attempts to understand Herbert’s suspicion of all attempts at defining the soul’s relation to God, and suggests that each image Herbert uses, captures something of that relationship, but only partially. I suggest that the poem is a quiet but effective rebuke to all who ‘approach the burning bush with cheerful aplomb.

AbstractResearch on the history of fiction of the early modern period has up to now taken primarily the novel into consideration and paralleled the rise of the novel as the leading genre of narrative literature with the development of the modern consciousness of fictionality. In the present essay, we argue that contemporary reflections on fictionality in epic poetry, specifically, the carmen heroicum, must be taken into account to better understand the history of fiction from the seventeenth century onwards. The carmen heroicum, in the seventeenth century, is the leading narrative genre of contemporary poetics and as such often commented on in contexts involving questions of fictionality and the relationship between literature and truth, both in poetic treatises and in the poems themselves. To reconstruct a historical understanding of fictionality, the genre of the epic poem must therefore be taken into account.The carmen heroicum was the central narrative genre in antiquity, in the sixteenth century in Italy and France, and still in the seventeenth century in Germany and England. Martin Opitz, in his ground-breaking poetic treatise, the Buch von der Deutschen Poeterey (1624), counts the carmen heroicum among the most important poetic genres; but for poetry written in German, he cites just one example of the genre, a text he wrote himself. The genre of the novel is not mentioned at all among the poetic genres in Opitz’ treatise. Many other German poetic treatises of the seventeenth century mention the importance of the carmen heroicum, but they, too, provide only few examples of the genre, even though there were many Latin and German-language epic poems in the long seventeenth century. For Opitz, a carmen heroicum has to be distinguished from a work of history insofar as its author is allowed to add fictional embellishments to the ›true core‹ of the poem. Nevertheless, the epic poet is, according to Opitz, still bound to the truthfulness of his narrative.Shortly before the publication of Opitz’ book, Diederich von dem Werder translated Torquato Tasso’s epic poem Gerusalemme liberata (1580); his translation uses alexandrine verse, which had recently become widely successful in Germany, especially for epic poems. Von dem Werder exactly reproduces Tasso’s rhyming scheme and stanza form. He also supplies the text with several peritexts. In a preface, he assures the reader that, despite the description of unusual martial events and supernatural beings, his text can be considered poetry. In a historiographical introduction, he then describes the course of the First Crusade; however, he does not elaborate about the plot of the verse epic. In a preceding epyllion – also written in alexandrine verse – von dem Werder then poetically demonstrates how the poetry of a Christian poet differs from ancient models. All these efforts can be seen as parts of the attempt to legitimate the translation of fictional narrative in German poetry and poetics. Opitz and von dem Werder independently describe problems of contemporary literature in the 1620s using the example of the carmen heroicum. Both authors translate novels into German, too; but there are no poetological considerations in the prefaces of the novels that can be compared to those in the carmina heroica.Poetics following the model established by Opitz develop genre systems in which the carmen heroicum is given an important place, too; for example, in Balthasar Kindermann’s Der Deutsche Poet (1664), Sigmund von Birken’s Teutsche Rede- bind- und Dicht-Kunst (1679), and Daniel Georg Morhof’s Unterricht von der Teutschen Sprache und Poesie (1682). Of particular interest for the history of fictionality is Albrecht Christian Rotth’s Vollständige Deutsche Poesie (1688). When elaborating on the carmen heroicum, Rotth gives the word ›fiction‹ a positive terminological value and he treats questions of fictionality extensively. Rotth combines two contradictory statements, namely that a carmen heroicum is a poem and therefore invented and that a carmen heroicum contains important truths and is therefore true. He further develops the idea of the ›truthful core‹ around which poetic inventions are laid. With an extended exegesis of Homer’s Odyssey, he then illustrates what it means precisely to separate the ›core‹ and the poetic embellishments in a poem. All these efforts can be seen as parts of the attempt to legitimize a poem that tells the truth in a fictional mode.The paper argues that a history of fictionality must be a history that carefully reconstructs the various and specifically changing constellations of problems concerning how the phenomenon of fictionality may be interpreted in certain historical contexts. Relevant problems to which reflections on fictionality in seventeenth-century poetics of the epic poem and in paratexts to epic poems react are, on the one hand, the question of how the genre traditionally occupying the highest rank in genre taxonomy, the epic, can be adequately transformed in the German language, and, on the other hand, the question of how a poetic text can contain truths even if it is invented.

After being called ‘Hollywood of the East’, Egypt’s soft power has witnessed a decline from the start of the years 2000s; due to 9/11/2001 and its aftermath, until it reached its lowest point since the Arab Spring in 2011. The deterioration hit its media sector, arts industry, sports and diplomacy. However, since 2014 a revival for one of its soft power capabilities happened. Its diplomacy. Diplomacy is on the rise and has some potential to restore Egypt’s status as ‘an active’ regional player. To illustrate that Egypt is now a temporary Security Council member in the United Nations for two years. This status earned after a lot of recommendation from Arab, African and Islamic blocks in the Security Council. To win this seat it required a lot of diplomatic efforts and lobbying which were successful at the end after being absent from non-permanent membership in UNSC since 1997. The first signs of decline in its diplomatic power started in 2006. This was due to USA’s neglect for Egypt and putting a lot of pressure on it from Bush junior’s Administration to comply with US values and interests in the region. This has been accentuated in the Bush Doctrine and was a natural outcome of September 11 attacks in 2001. The argument in here is that despite the decline in Egyptian status on all levels, and its soft power among them, due to turmoil resulting from the Arab Spring yet Egypt still has potential for revival and gaining a leading role due to its soft power. This study will be based on qualitative analysis to prove the argument. A diplomat and an academic have been interviewed to further illustrate the ideas expressed in this article. There are a number of issues that show success in Egypt’s diplomacy to prove this argument since 2014.

Abstract Although Notker III. is known for his highly sensitive language and rhetorical skills, his texts are not considered to be poetic works. Yet, in his translation-cum-commentary on a Latin poem from Boethius’ ›Consolatio‹ Notker uses poetic techniques – figurative and especially acoustic references and a modified rhetorical structure – to communicate a new meaning. Scholarship is thus confronted with the particularities of commentary aesthetics. The article also shows that Notker’s text, interwoven with the phrases of the Latin poem, is dialogical on the level of commentary (Christian answers to Boethius’ lines), on the level of content (answers to the mysteries of nature and their hidden meanings) and on the pragmatic level of his monastic school (communication with the students).

[straipsnis ir santrauka lietuvių kalba; santraukos anglų ir rusų kalbomis]
 Straipsnyje nagrinėjami trijų lietuvių egzodo poetų – Henriko Radausko, Alfonso Nykos-Niliūno ir Tomo Venclovos atsiminimai, dienoraščiai, vertimai, dedikacijos, poezija. Šiuos lietuvių egzodo poezijos atstovus vargu ar galima būtų priskirti kokiai nors vienai literatūrinei srovei. Todėl Anos Achmatovos kūrybos recepcija bus apžvelgiama atskirai kiekvieno iš pasirinktų autorių kūrybinio palikimo kontekste. Remiantis recepcijos koncepciją, suvokimo procesas nėra pastovus faktas, tai besikeičiantis, dinamiškas reiškinys, kuriame svarbiausia yra priimanti literatūra, todėl nagrinėjant Achmatovos kūrybos recepciją, svarbu atskleisti lietuvių poetų kūrybos ypatumus, jų meno suvokimą, poezijos vertinimus.

A Scottish literary icon of the nineteenth century, Burns's ‘The Cotter's Saturday Night’ was a key component of the cultural baggage carried by emigrant Scots seeking a new life abroad. The myth of the thrifty, humble and pious Scottish cottager is a recurrent figure in Scottish colonial writing whether that cottage is situated in the South African veld or the Otago bush. This article examines the way in which Burns's cotter informed the myth of the self-sufficient Scottish peasant in the poetry of John Barr and Thomas Pringle. It will argue that, just as ‘The Cotter’ could be used to reinforce a particular set of ideas about Scottish identity at home, Scottish settlers used Burns's poem to respond to and cement new identities abroad.

Following the recent discovery of artesian supplies, the Shearers’ Strike of 1891 and the onset of the Federation drought (1895–1902), A. B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson’s Song of the Artesian Water, published in 1896, was written at a time of profound social and environmental upheaval in the ‘bush’ of Australia. In order to better understand the historical encounters between colonial capitalism and semiarid rangeland environments, this paper unpacks the cultural meaning behind Song of the Artesian Water by exploring the interactions between water, scientific knowledge, drought and environmental transformation along the pastoral frontier of Queensland. Banjo Paterson’s poem is used as a framework to provide an historical interpretation of European exploitation of the Great Artesian Basin as well as a framework for current economic uses and environmental threats.

In her long poem Calgary, This Growing Graveyard, Aritha van Herk presents the cemetery as a public garden of critical reflection within the rapidly changing urban environment of Calgary, Alberta. Foregrounding the simultaneous processes of growth and decay, van Herk suggests that the cemetery as garden becomes symbolic not only of the city’s successive generations, but also of the ongoing creation, destruction, and recreation of the city’s physical-cultural landscape. First published in 1987, Calgary, This Growing Graveyard captures the “boom and bust” economy of Calgary following the implementation of Canada’s National Energy Program in 1980. Now in 2007, van Herk’s poem turns prophetic as Calgarians experience the growing pains that coincide with a lucrative economy, mass migration, and urban sprawl.

The researcher has tried to highlight the dilemma of modern man described in the poem leisure by William Davies. Modern man is so much engrossed in getting and spending that he has no time to see and enjoy the beauty of nature. Nature is present everywhere in its full bloom and splendour but modern man is so much pre-occupied with worldly pursuits and materialistic designs that he has no time to see and enjoy the beauty manifested in various forms. The natural elements present an invitation to man but a modern man,being busy in rat race, refuses their invitation. He has declared blunt refusal to his aesthetic sense and replaced it with lust for money and other worldly designs. Even animals are much better than man because they live in the heart of nature and enjoy its company. God has, no doubt,created man to explore the nature and praise its beauty but modern man has made himself slave of time and gives preference to his evil designs instead of thinking and brooding upon nature and its blessed beauty.

Abstract The present paper presents a hitherto unstudied collection of twenty-six early Arabic poems (sixth to eighth centuries) on date palms. The poems are preserved in the Kitāb al-Fuṣūṣ (“Book of Gemstones”) of Ṣāʿid al-Baġdādī (ca. 335–417/945–1026), an Iraqi philologist and littérateur who made a career as a court poet in Muslim Spain. Despite its importance as a crop, the date palm was a topic very rarely raised in Abbasid poetry. As this unique collection shows, however, poems praising the date palm were more common in earlier times. The poems examined here express the benefits of date palm farming by contrasting the supposed ease and safety of agriculturists to the difficulties and risks faced by camel breeders. The repeated comparison of palm trees with camels conveys the tension between the sedentary and the nomadic lifestyles, as they co-existed in pre-Islamic and early Islamic Arabia.

Opening ParagraphThomas Alexander Leighton Decker, o.b.e., teacher, journalist, broadcaster, poet, dramatist, linguist and senior civil servant—to name only some of the major occupations or preoccupations of his busy life—was the man who, more than any other, crusaded for the acceptance of Krio as a language in its own right. At a time when others dismissed Sierra Leone's main lingua franca as a debased or corrupt form of English and failed to recognise its distinct identity and full potential, Thomas Decker never once faltered in his conviction that it was as good a language as any other. He spent much of his life trying to convince others of the truth of this, and the fact that Krio has at last begun to gain the acceptance he sought for it is in no small measure due to him and his efforts on its behalf.

The impact of neither Andrei Belyi nor Velimir Khlebnikov has been fully comprehended, and their legacies are joined in unusual combination in the work of the contemporary visual poet Elizaveta Mnatsakanova. Her poetry appeals to both eye and ear, expanding on innovations introduced by Belyi and Khlebnikov, and it raises broad questions about the integration of sensory experiences by readers of visual poetry. Mnatsakanova uses illustrative handwriting, calligraphy, and images of a hand or a face in her one-of-a-kind albums and books, and her poems are set out in symmetrical columns or other spatial arrangements. Repetition is the central rhetorical device in her work, yet her unique albums emphasize individualized aesthetic production and anticipate highly charged reader reaction. Special attention is paid to “Das Hohelied,” a part of Das Buch Sabeth, which engages both the literary tradition and the immediacy of a reader's experience with the text.

Virgil's poetry has long been recognised as delving into a poetics of comparison which employs sudden shifts from the miniature to the gigantic. So too have Virgilian similes long been singled out as a privileged locus where complex inter- and intra-textual allusions serve to highlight the primary role that these similes play in the narrative and poetic context of Virgil's work. Along these lines, this paper addresses one such simile atAene.d1.430–6, where the Tyrians building Carthage are compared to busy bees working at their hive. The paper explores the impact that the recognition of the simile's inter- and intra-textual connections may have on the interpretation of the scene of Aeneas’ arrival at Carthage, and on certain long-debated aspects of the poem as a whole.

The article considers the motif structure of the books by three young poets: G. Medvedev (A Butterfly Knife [Nozh-babochka], 2019), A. Trifonova (a yellow Ikarus bus in the distance [zhelty ikarus vdali], 2019), and A. Kinash (Fragments from a Dream Dictionary [Otryvki iz sonnika], 2019). A comparative analysis of the three books helps the author to identify typical generational traits — in poetics, themes, the motif structure, as well as ways to interpret the laws of the universe and solve semantic problems. The topic of a child’s world features in the works by Medvedev, Trifonova and Kinash alike; their childhood is shaped by playgrounds in provincial towns, active outdoor games and 1990s children’s folklore, although each of them treats these biographical and literary themes in their own way. Trifonova prefers a linear interpretation of time and space, while Kinash chooses to employ a mythological chronotope; in Medvedev’s book, time and space follow the principles of historical organization with their holistic and systematic character. Childhood appears to be the starting point for creation of the poetic system of each of the poets as well as a destination they keep returning to.

Paddy Bushe was born in Dublin in 1948 and now lives in Waterville, Co. Kerry. He writes in Irish and in English. His collections include "Poems With Amergin" (1989), "Digging Towards The Light" (1994), "In Ainneoin na gCloch" (2001), "Hopkins on Skellig Michael" (2001) and "The Nitpicking of Cranes" (2004). "To Ring in Silence: New and Selected Poems" was published in 2008. He edited the anthology "Voices at the World’s Edge: Irish Poets on Skellig Michael" (Dedalus, 2010). His latest collections are "My Lord Buddha of Carraig Eanna" (2012), "On A Turning Wing" (2016) and "Móinéar an Chroí" (2017). He received the 2006 Oireachtas prize for poetry, the 2006 Michael Hartnett Poetry Award and the 2017 Irish Times Poetry Now Award. He is a member of Aosdána. In 2020, Dedalus Press publishes "Double Vision", a two-volume publication comprising Second Sight, the author’s own selection of his Irish language poems, accompanied by the author’s own translations, as well as "Peripheral Vision", his latest collection in English.
 Bernard O’Donoghue’s was born in Cullen, County Cork in 1945, he has lived in Oxford since 1965. His first full-length collection, "The Weakness", emerged in 1991 with Chatto & Windus, following on from a trilogy of pamphlets. His second collection, "Gunpowder" (1995) won the Whitbread Poetry Award. More recently, he published the collection "Outliving" and a selection of his poetry by Faber in 2008, followed by "Farmers Cross" (2011), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. In 2009 he was honoured by the Society of Authors with a Cholmondeley Award. Until recently, O’Donoghue taught and worked for Oxford University, specialising in medieval verse and contemporary Irish literature. His reputation as a scholar consolidated in 1995 with his critical work, "Seamus Heaney and the Language of Poetry", described as “excellent” by Ian Sansom in "The Guardian". More recently O’Donoghue edited the "Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney" and has produced a number of translations of medieval works, including "Gawain and the Green Knight" (2006) and, forthcoming from Faber, "Piers Plowman".
 Xesús Miguel "Suso" de Toro Santos (1956-) is a Spanish writer. A modern and contemporary arts graduate, he has published more than twenty novels and plays in Galician. He is a television scriptwriter and regular contributor to the press and radio. Suso de Toro writes in Galician and sometimes translates his own work into Spanish. His works have been translated into several languages, and have been taught in European universities. There are plans to make three of his works into films: "A Sombra Cazadora" (1994), "Non Volvas" (1997), and "Calzados Lola" (2000).

The article presents a publication of two epigrams written by D. G. Messeschmidt and dedicated to I. Ph. Breyn; both are preserved in the latter’s archive. The first epigram is an inscription in verse to Breyn’s portrait and was probably sent to him from Saint Petersburg following Messerschmidt’s return from Siberia, i.e. between 1727 and 1735 (and not 1701–1800 as indicated on the site of Dresden Fotothek). It is very likely that the inscription was meant to accompany the engraving a copy of which is preserved at Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (SKD, Kupferstich-Kabinett, Signatur/Inventar-Nr.: Anon 1, Singer 3769/9920) and may be seen on the website of Deutsche Fotothek Dresden (Archiv-Nr 169051). I. Ph. Breyn might have sent two portraits to Saint Petersburg, one of himself and one of his father, and Messerschmidt would have composed an inscription in verse for each. In 1739 an elegiac distich by Messerschmidt was published that was also incorporated in the frame of the portrait of Jakob Breyn, painted by the famous engraver P. G. Busch. S. S. Orekhov has suggested that P. G. Busch’s engraving might render the portrait drawn by the same unknown master (Deutsche Fotothek Dresden, Archiv-Nr 169050). Iohannes Philipp Breyn’s own portrait remained unpublished. The second poem is a dedication in an album that is preserved in I. Ph. Breyn’s museum in Gdansk (Forschungsbibliothek Gotha Chart. B 1002) and is dated November 1716. The poem is untitled (the fact that is also emphasized in the text), but introduced by an epigraph in Old Hebrew that has been extensively commented upon by Cyrill von Buettner (Bitner). The Latin poem that abounds in assonances and complex word play leaves the feeling of a certain emotional strain. Both poems, however, reflect Messerschmidt’s general erudition and character, as well as his enthusiastic admiration for I. Ph. Breyn as a senior colleague in scientific and medical studies.

In 1833, Henry Alford, a Cambridge don, writes to an ‘earthly friend’ entreating help to cure his intolerance for some of his fellow Cantabrigians. He is, subsequently, visited in dreams by an unearthly friend. One hundred and sixty years later, John Holloway writes Civitatula, a poem celebrating Cambridge University's history. The year before, Holloway had been busy protesting the award of Derrida's Honorary Doctorate there. Reflecting on the turbulence of 1968, Holloway's narrator suggests a Cantabrigian encounter with extra-terrestrials as tonic to this agitation. These oneiric visitations coalesce around a certain saying otherwise, which is also the saying of the other. They thus come into the orbit of Bartleby the Scrivener, he whom Derrida considers ‘the secret of literature’. This post-critical work of conspiracy theory considers, then, the force of this ‘secret’ in both space and time, whilst posing the question of how fantastic might the search for meaning become.

This paper examines the Parisian neighbourhood of Montmartre during the 1880s and 1890s. Isolating themselves on a hilltop to the north of the city, a defiant community of painters and poets left the busy macadam below to position themselves physically and symbolically at the apex of anti-bourgeois, countercultural sentiment. Known for its subversive character, Montmartre's legacy appealed to these passionate and creative youths, and their appropriation of a semi-rural district on the fringes of the metropolitan centre of modernity symbolized their desire to escape stifling cultural traditions. Particularly revealing are the ways in which their art and literature represented at once a deeply interior questioning of identity as well as a loosely unified movement of cultural protest. By the turn of the 20th century, many of these artists and writers had been tamed by the commercialization of their nonconformity, but Montmartre remains a powerful site for the memory of its influential social and cultural transgressions.

The people representing Servet-i Fünun do not attend to social issues. They lock themselves in the house and are mostly interested in the nature and people they feel sorry about. The poets and writers of Servet-i Fünun literatures adapted Western literature and influenced many writers and poets of their time and later times by some changes in style, theme, and wording. The best sample of this interaction in literary periods can be observed in the comparative Works by the same community in different areas. In this study, a theme comparison will be done between the Work by Tevfik Fikret and the Turkish Cypriot writer and the theme interaction in Turkish Literature will be finalized. Tevfik Fikret is appointed as the Editor-in-chief of the Scientific and Science Journal. Then he converts the journal into Literature Journal and gathers young people around it. The Servet-i Fünun people use an arty language, peculiar to them, in expressing feelings and thoughts down to the last detail with ample images and characters. Most of the Servet-i Fünun writers and poets were raised in the same educational institutions, experienced the same political, social, and financial conditions, were engaged in the same issues, were almost at the same age generation from the middle-class, were educated in Western schools and with good knowledge of foreign languages. Naturally, these similarities created a common joy and culture among them. These writers and poets believed in strong family bonds and would take up the same motives when they were together to talk about literature issues. They influenced many writers and poets. Pessimism and tediousness, the basis of literature, became the main starting points for the whole literature. In his many poems, Tevfik Fikret treated compassion and reflected the grief of many poor and lonely people. In the 1970s Turkey adapted Western Literature type but this type of literature was introduced to Cyprus late, not before the 1890s. Even though, the Servet-i Fünun followers began to influence the literateurs and their Works in Cyprus. Soon after the British era in 1878 in Cyprus, tension between Moslem Turk and Christian Greek communities started to increase. In 1901, Ahmet Tevfik published the “Mir’at-ı Zaman” and in 1909 the “Kokonoz” newspapers. A fundamental change in the literature came about particularly when these newspapers were published in Cyprus. Tevfik Fikret brought up his views and his feelings about life in an allergoric and symbolic way. In both Works, the themes were full of pessimism and melancholy. While T. Fikret emphasized the fantasy-reality contradictions and the difference between thoughts and personalities of two lovers, the melancholy-pessimism theme was the priority in Ahmet Tevfik Efendi’s work. In both works, the nature was explained with pessimism and melancholy and was symbolized as the place of love. The Servet-i Fünun followers were a family. Even more, it is emphasized that, in some Works the main characters are the writers and poets themselves. The Servet-i Fünun followers were effective in Abdülhamid II era, during which there was a pressure on the poets and writers. The pressure and censure took the writers and poets away from social issues and made them busy with an individual, pessimistic and sickly literature. This is why, melancholy and its analysis was amply mentioned in their Works. Turkish Story-writing started in 1897 in Cyprus. Ahmet Tevfik, who was in Istanbul then, was influenced by the Servet-i Fünun followers and took them as a model in his Works. They were strongly bound to the principles of arts. Although everything could be a topic for poems, but due to the political pressure of the day, they limited their Works to love, nature, family-life, and simple current issues. As the aim, the themes by the two writers will be compared and important parts of comparative studies in Turkish literature will be dealt with, to open a way to different comparisons.

This study dealt with figurative language in Amir Hamzah’s selected poems. The objective of this study were to investigate the types of figurative language found in Amir Hamzah’s selected poems and to find out the literal meaning of figurative language found. This study was conducted by using qualitative method to solve the problems. The data of this study were phrases and sentences contained figurative language in the poems. The sources of data were six poems poems which had multiple series taken from Amir Hamzah’s Poetry Anthology of Buah Rindu. The data were selected by using random sampling technique. For collecting the data, this study used documentary technique, and the instruments of data were documentary sheets. The data were analyzed by using descriptive qualitative method. The findings of this study are there twenty two figurative languages found as follows, three figurative language of metaphor (13.63%), seven figurative language of hyperbole (31.81%), five figurative language of personification (22.72%) and seven figurative language of simile (31.83%). The literal meaning of figurative language found in Amir Hamzah’s poems were basically was about the love story of Amir himself and also talking about his longing to his mother.Keywords : Figurative Language, Figure of Speech, Poem

Abstract We present the life, career and memory of Pápai Páriz Ferenc (1649, Dés - 1716, Nagyenyed), professor and rector of the Protestant College of Nagyenyed, the famous Transylvanian humanist, medical doctor, poet, philosopher, church historian, heraldist. He studied in Dés (now Dej, Romania), Gyulafehérvár (now Alba Iulia, Romania), Kolozsvár (now Cluj-Napoca, Romania), Marosvásárhely (now Târgu-Mureş, Romania) and Nagyenyed (now Aiud, Romania). In the spring of 1672 he set off from Nagyenyed for a pedestrian trip abroad. He admired the Treasury in Dresden, and attended medical studies in Leipzig and Heidelberg. He completed his medical studies in Basel. In 1674 he became doctor medicus and was elected member of the board of the medical faculty. He returned to Nagyenyed in 1675. Between 1676 and 1690 he is the physician of the court of the Transylvanian princely couple. In 1678 he got a department in the College of Nagyenyed, extended in 1680 with Greek, physics, natural sciences and medical knowledge departments. Between 1681 and 1715 he was the rector of the College. Above all he cherished peace. He was a versatile writer. His medical book written in Hungarian, the PAX CORPORIS, i.e. “the peace of the body” was printed and published at Kolozsvár in 1690. This was dedicated to the target community: “for the benefit of the stupid poor”, it substituted the physician in the family. The rules of a healthy lifestyle were formulated also. The popularity of the book was proved by those eleven editions we know about. Another great work was the Hungarian-Latin, Latin-Hungarian dictionary (Lőcse, now Levoca, Slovakia, 1708). His memory is kept by a bust and plate in the courtyard of the Protestant College of Nagyenyed. The Hungarian postal service (Magyar Posta) released a stamp on his 350th anniversary. His life, work and importance were appreciated by a number of authors across centuries. An internet search on the terms “Pápai” + “Páriz” + “Ferenc” returns an important number of hits. Many foundations and associations are dedicated to his memory.

Abstract This article highlights how the process of semantic extension applied to the OIA onomatopoeic noun dundubhí, usually meant as “drum”, is the token of significant cultural changes: especially within ritual performances, such as the mahāvrata rite, gradually canonised in the Brahmanical ritualism, it turns out to be a device to promote a new model of sovereignty, related to the establishment of the so-called Kuru-Pañcāla realm. Such a cultural transformation, carried out in the Middle and Late Vedic period in northern India, entailed that ancient Indo-European tribal cultural traits were intermingled with cultural substrate/adstrate elements: the term dundubhí is “etymologically” connected to the Proto-Muṇ ḍa *ḍub-/*dum- “to be swollen, roundish”, the PAA *duby-/*dub- “tail, buttock, animal limbs”, and Middle Iranian isoglosses meaning “tail, extremities, fat-tailed animals”. Moreover, as bhūmidundubhi “earth-drum” beaten on the border of the ritual area in the mahāvrata rite, representing earthly sonority and the “mighty bellowing” of cattle, it is associated with the IIr myth of valá/vará, the “enclosure”, in which the treasure/cattle “endowed with rock as foundation” (ádri-budhna, ṚV 10.108.7ab), is hidden. The related lexicon and imagery recall mythical archetypes, such as the Serpent of the Bottom (OIA áhir budhníyaḥ, Gr Pythô ophis) or primordial Monster of the Deep (Gr Typhôn/Typhôeus), and BMAC interferences are also embedded. However, although linguistic evidence confirms the etymological relationship between the OIA budh-ná and the Greek pythmên, the case of the Greek Typhôn/Typhôeus seems more uncertain: the IE reconstruction *dhubh-/*dhub­ “depths” is considered a secondary outcome, and cannot be convincingly applied to the term dundubhí, because of its onomatopoeic nature. Nonetheless, as an outcome of linguistic and cultural interferences, “Sanskritised” within the ritualism, which supported the paradigm of the Kuru-Pañcāla sovereignty, the term dundubhí conveys the double “redundant” value of deep/high sonority and swollen/roundish abundant prosperity, to which the figure of Bṛhaspati is correspondent: in ṚV 10.64.4 he is defined as the kaví tuvīrávān “poet endowed with powerful bellowing”, which announces prosperity, spreading it loftily, throughout the cosmos.

Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mendeskripsikan struktur dan unsur stilistik lirik lagu dalam kesenian Ronggeng Gunung. Metode yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini adalah metode deskriptif dengan menggunakan teknik observasi dan wawancara. Data dalam penelitian ini yakni lirik lagu dari hasil wawancara dengan bi Raspi yang merupakan seniman Ronggeng Gunung di Desa Ciulu Kecamatan Banjarsari Kabupaten Ciamis. Dari hasil analisis, terdapat 114 imaji yang terdiri dari (1) 29 imaji visual; (2) 9 imaji auditif; dan (3) 75 imaji taktil/rasa. Lirik lagu tersebut menggunakan patokan pantun, ada 109 buah pantun yang terdiri dari: (1) 79 paparikan; (2) 25 rarakitan; dan (3) 5 wawangsalan. Rima yang terdapat dalam lirik ini adalah ”purwakanti mindoan kawit”, “larasmadya”, “laraswekas”, dan “pangluyu”. Tema dari lirik lagu dalam kesenian Ronggeng Gunung paling banyak berkaitan dengan asmara dan kesedihan. Rasa yang paling banyak tergambar dari lirik tersebut adalah bingung, sedih, dan sakit hati. Nada yang digunakan dalam menyampaikan lirik tersebut di antaranya nada bingung, sedih, dan kecewa. Maksud dari lirik tersebut menjelaskan tentang seseorang yang merasa tergila-gila, keinginan untuk bersama, dan kesedihan ketika patah hati. Sebagaimana cerita Ronggeng Gunung yang tercipta dari rasa kehilangan seorang perempuan yang ditinggal mati oleh kekasih yang sangat ia cintai. Jadi, isi lirik lagunya berhubungan dengan asmara antara seorang perempuan dan laki-laki. Unsur stilistik atau gaya bahasa yang ada di antaranya (1) 1 gaya bahasa simile; (2) 1 gaya bahasa metafora; (3) 4 gaya bahasa personifikasi; (4) 1 gaya bahasa metonimia; (5) 2 gaya bahasa litotes; (6) 1 gaya bahasa hiperbola; dan (7) 1 gaya bahasa pleonasme. ABSTRACTThis study aimed to describe the structure and stylistic the lyrics of song in Ronggeng Gunung. The method used in this research is descriptive analysis method by using observation and interviews techniques. Sources of data in this study is lyrics of song from interviews with Ronggeng Gunung artists in Ciulu Village Banjarsari Sub-district Ciamis Regency. From the analysis of the physical structure, there are 114 images which consists of (1) 29 visual image; (2) 9 auditif image; and (3) 75 images of tactile/sense. Lyrics of the song are using poem, there are 109 pieces of poem that consisting of: (1st) 79 paparikan; (2) 25 rarakitan; and (3) 5 wawangsalan. Rhyme contained in the lyrics is assonance “mindoan kawit", "larasmadya", "laraswekas", and "pangluyu". From the analysis of the inner structure, the theme of the lyrics most associated with romance and sadness. The most sense of the lyrics are sad, indecisive, and heartache. The tone used in the lyrics are which vacillation, sadness, and disappointed. The purpose of the lyrics describes someone who feels infatuation, desire to be together, and sadness when heartbroken. As the story of Ronggeng Gunung that is created from a sense of a woman who was left to die by someone she loved very much. Thus, the lyrical content associated with romance between a woman and a man. Stylistic element or language style that is contained in the lyrics which consists of (1) 1 simile; (2) 1 metaphors; (3) 4 personified; (4) 1 metonymy; (5) 2 litotes; (6) 1 hyperbole; and (7) 1 pleonasme.

The article is an attempt to define a very special role of women in society, inherent in only Ukrainian historical realities. In particular, a somewhat non-trivial approach to the formation of a source base for the study allowed referring to works of fiction. Most attention is paid to the issue of women entering society medium in the times of the Cossacks. Among the conclusions – contrary to national, gender and social oppression for several centuries – Ukrainian women have maintained their commitment to universal human and Christian ideals and virtues. The role and place that women take in the social structure is an extremely significant criterion for assessing the level of civilizing development of one or other society. It was the words “Equal among equals” that one could quite accurately define the positions of Ukrainian women in the glorious and tragic times of the national history – during the emergence and heyday of the Cossacks. It was a time when Ukrainian women, not only a gentry, but also a simple Cossack women, invariably felt not imaginary but sincere self-respect both in the family and in the society. However, not only in Cossack times, but throughout the turbulent history of our country, Ukrainian women did not just “walk alongside of” their men, they often stepped forward, and their actions were decisive for the further course of events for many years to come. Unfortunately, there are reasons to consider the current (as of 2019) stage of research in the format of scientific inquiry, which directly relates to Ukrainian women in the historical and cultural context, only as an initial one. With this in mind, the aim of the proposed work is to begin filling in quite substantial gaps in the civilizing history of Ukraine. It was they, Ukrainian women – even from renowned Princess Olha – who became the worthy examples to follow for their compatriots. There are countless names of women, by whom Ukraine is proud of and who are respected all over the world – from the poetess Lesia Ukrainka, folk paintress Yekateryna Bilokour, opera vocalist Solomiia Krushelnytska up to bright personalities already from the contemporary generation of Ukrainian women. They did never and under no circumstances bow to a slavish worldview. In this regard the observation of a well-known European writer, made by him as far back as in the last century, is very accurate: “The Ukrainian woman is the Spanish woman of the East ... At every opportunity, her irrepressible Cossack nature flares up in her soul that does not know any repressor ...”. And further: “They are always ready to change ploughshares for spears, they live in small republican communities, as equals among equals ...”. We discover all this for ourselves in the “Female Images from Galicia” by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Paul of Aleppo, known also as Paul Zaim, an Arab traveller, who visited Ukraine twice in the middle of the XVII century, testified: “... Throughout the Cossack land we saw a strange thing – they all are, with few exceptions, literate; even most of their women and daughters can read and know the procedure of church service ... Ukrainian women are well dressed, busy with their own affairs, and no one casts sassy glances at them.” Numerous documents have survived, indicating that the wives of the Cossack Starshyna not only knew writing and reading well but were also able, when the need arose, to help their husbands in solving the most important political problems. The material, which is no less important in its cognitive weight from documentary evidence, also provides imaginative literature, where the realities of bygone times are reflected through the author’s creative imagination. These are the dramatic poem “Boyaryna” by Lesia Ukrainka, and “Hanna Montovt”, the story written by a famous Ukrainian historian and writer Orest Levytskyi, as well as “Aeneid”, a burlesque and tranny poem written by Ivan Kotliarevskyi; the latter literary work can be considered as a kind of encyclopaedia of Olde Ukrainian life. In “Boyarina”, the comparison of the “civil society” (using the modern definition) of the Ukrainian Cossack State with the conditions prevailing in neighbouring Muscovy is especially striking. A young girl of Ukrainian noble descent, who left her motherland for the sake to be with her beloved man, met in a foreign land very different ideas about human truths, class-specific and inherent female virtues, which are significantly different from those truly Christian and deeply democratic principles of life that she was used to since childhood in her native Ukraine. And, becoming a Boyarina, although she obeyed fate, however, she was no longer able to get used to her new life. The fate of poor Princess Hannа from the story by Orest Levytskyi was formed in a different manner. However, not at all because of the imperfection of the then social system, but solely because of her own frivolity and inability to execise her (tremendous) rights. But in “Aeneid” by Ivan Kotliarevskyi, where antique plots were whimsically intertwined with the signs of Cossack life, the remark: “Like a lady of certain sotnyk ...” became virtually the highest mark for one of the goddesses. As the expression goes, it speaks for itself, and the irony about the mention of the sotnyk will be completely inappropriate, given the trace that Bohdan Khmelnytskyi, the former Chygyryn sotnyk and subsequently a Hetman of Ukraine, left in the history of Ukrainian nationality! In the times of Cossacks, men have the opportunity to spend more or less long time with their families too rarely. But they went to a military campaign with peace of mind because from this moment their faithful wives took active roles in all matters – and not only household, but the domesticities too. And, say, not the eldest of their sons, but she herself took part, when necessary, in resolving property or other disputes, defended the interests of their families before the society, and even in court. Moreover, their wives could often ride horses with arms in hands to defend their native homes. Unfortunately, then-Muscovy have introduced serfdom in its most despotic form on intaken Ukrainian lands, combined with her absolutist system of government and public relations which immediately changed the state of Ukrainian women for the worst. And this applied not only to the impoverished and enslaved people, but also to the wealthy and influential sections of the then population. And subsequently Taras Shevchenko became the most sincere voice of a deeply tragic female fate ... Conclusions. Even when then Ukrainians were slowly forgetting about the previous rights and privileges of their women, undeniable documentary and literary evidence remained the mention of them, which in one way or another were connected with the times of Cossacks. So, Ukrainian women of those, already far from us times was not only faithful wives, caring mothers and teachers for their children, real Bereginias of the families, but also a self-sufficient persons, conscious in their place in the society.

Sea shanties and other kinds of vernacular song in New Zealand might be among historian James Cowan’s lesser known interests, but he wrote about them persuasively in two long articles in the Canterbury Times: “The Chantey” (1912) and “The Bush Poet” (1913). This essay discusses the background, sources and content of these articles, as well as their influence on later New Zealand music research. While providing some inspiration for local folksong collecting in the 1950s to 1970s period, these efforts ultimately trailed off and Cowan’s articles seem to have rarely been consulted since. I argue that Cowan’s work still offers some stimulating pathways into New Zealand music history, which could be further explored. An appendix listing articles and books by Cowan with references to the relevant kinds of songs is also included.

Nature is one of the most predominant themes in Literature. Writers who are inspired by the beauty of nature write about it in different genres, especially in the form of poetry. They write poems briefly or elaboratively, about the splendid beauty of the physical world that has entralled them. In some of the nature poems, one could not only find wonderful descriptions of the natural world but also find a touch of pantheism, because of the poets' intense observation of the natural phenomena as the Divine power. In such works, the poets show a sense of gratitude to the Creator and His creations, because of the abundant blessings man has been receiving in various forms. The poems written on nature, can also be rightly called as 'Green poems' or 'Environmental poems'. These poems not only appreciate the loveliness of nature, but also tells about the importance of man's relationship with nature. Such poems insist on the value of the environment man lives in, which is sometimes taken for granted. If only man finds time to appreciate the greatness of the physical world, would the Welsh poet have written the poem "Leisure", which appeared in his collection of poems titled, "Songs of Joy and Others", published in 1911. "What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare. No time to stand beneath the boughs And stare as long as sheep or cows. No time to see, when woods we pass, Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass. No time to see, in broad daylight, Streams full of stars, like skies at night, No time to turn at Beauty's glance,..." In the above-mentioned poem, the poet surrenders himself to nature admiring various things he sees around him. He states that each of the creations looks splendid in its way, but man fails to appreciate or even notice that. This is because, man has no time to spend for nature in this busy world, though he lives in the midst of it. Further, the poet also feels a communion with God when he values each of His creations. In the same way, the eleven poems mentioned in this article find a similarity, where the poets explicitly share the divinity and mysticism they find in the creations and the Creator. KEYWORDS: Creator, Creation, Nature poems, Mysticism, Pantheism, Pantheist, Environmental poems.

The Australian film director Peter Weir has created, over the last twenty years, a body of work of remarkable quality and consistency of vision. In virtually all of his films something -- often quite literally someone -- gets lost. Innocence, idealism, and faith are the usual casualties. Moreover, there is nearly always a clash of cultures. His characters are thrown into a milieu they are not equipped to understand, one that seems hostile and threatening if only for its strangeness. In this, Weir is the quintessential Aussie; the perennial outsider. Australians are neither European, nor Asian, nor South Sea Islanders, yet they are all of these. Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) takes place on St. Valentine's Day, 1900, at a girls' school in Southeast Australia, a Victorian outpost on the edge of the bush. In the atmosphere of hothouse romanticism that pervades the place the girls exchange valentines and love...

The difficulty of reading Allen Ginsberg's poetry is a recurring theme in criticism of his work and that of other post-WWII "Beat Generation" writers. "Even when a concerted effort is made to illuminate [Beat] literature," laments Nancy M. Grace, "doing so is difficult: the romance of the Beat life threatens to subsume the project" (812). Of course, the Beat life is romantic to the extent that it is romantically regaled. Continual romantic portrayals, such as that of Ginsberg in the recent movie Howl (2010), rekindle the Beat romance for new audiences with chicken-and-egg circularity. I explore this difficulty of reading Ginsberg that Grace and other critics identify by articulating it with respect to "Kaddish"—"Ginsberg's most highly praised and his least typical poem" (Perloff 213)—as a difficulty of interpreting Ginsberg suspiciously. Philosopher Paul Ricoeur's theories of interpretation—or "hermeneutics"—provide the theoretical foundation here. Ricoeur distinguishes between a romantic or "restorative" mode of interpretation, where meaning is reverently reconciled to a text assumed to be trustworthy, and a "suspicious" approach, where meaning is aggressively extrapolated from a text held as unreliable. In order to bring these theories to bear on "Kaddish" and its criticism, I draw on Rita Felski's pioneering work in relating Ricoeur's concept of "suspicious reading" to the field of literature. Is it possible to read "Kaddish" suspiciously? Or is there nothing left for suspicious readers to expose in texts such as "Kaddish" that are already self-exposing? In "Kaddish," Ginsberg tells the story of his mother Naomi Ginsberg, a Russian Jewish immigrant, who died in a mental hospital in 1956. It is a lengthy prose poem and spans a remarkable 19 pages in Ginsberg's Collected Poems (1984). In the words of Maeera Y. Shreiber, "Kaddish" "is a massive achievement, comprised of five numbered parts, and an interpellated 'Hymmnn' between parts two and three" (84). I focus on the second narrative part, which forms the bulk of the poem, where the speaker—I shall refer to him henceforth as "Allen" in order to differentiate between Ginsberg's poetic self-representation and Ginsberg-the-author—recounts the nervous breakdowns and hospital movements of his mother, whom he calls by her first name, Naomi. I begin by illustrating the ways in which Allen focalises Naomi in the text, and suggest that his attempts to "read" her suspicious mind alternate between restorative and suspicious impulses. I then take up the issue of reading "Kaddish" suspiciously. Acknowledging Ricoeur's assertion that psychoanalysis is an unequivocal "school of suspicion" (32), I consider James Breslin's psychoanalytic criticism on "Kaddish," in particular, his reading of what is easily the most contentious passage in the poem: the scene where Naomi solicits Allen for sex. I regard this passage as a microcosm of the issues that beset a suspicious reading of "Kaddish"—such as the problem posed by the self-exposing poem and poet—and I find that Breslin's response to it raises interesting questions on the politics of psychoanalysis and the nature of suspicious interpretation. Finally, I identify an unpublished thesis on Ginsberg's poetry by Sarah Macfarlane and classify her interpretation of "Kaddish" as unambiguously suspicious. My purpose is not to advance my own suspicious reading of "Kaddish" but to highlight the difficulties of reading "Kaddish" suspiciously. I argue that while it is difficult to read "Kaddish" suspiciously, to do so offers a fruitful counterbalance to the dominant restorative criticism on the poem. There are as yet unexplored hermeneutical territories in and around this poem, indeed in and around Ginsberg's work in general, which have radical implications for the future direction of Beat studies. Picking her tooth with her nail, lips formed an O, suspicion—thought's old worn vagina— (Ginsberg, "Kaddish" 218)Ginsberg constructs Naomi's suspicion in "Kaddish" via Allen's communication of her visions and descriptions of her behaviour. Allen relates, for example, that Naomi once suspected that Hitler was "in her room" and that "she saw his mustache in the sink" ("Kaddish" 220). Subsequently, Allen depicts Naomi "listening to the radio for spies—or searching the windowsill," and, in an attempt to "read" her suspicious mind, suggests that she envisages "an old man creep[ing] with his bag stuffing packages of garbage in his hanging black overcoat" ("Kaddish" 220). Allen's gaze thus filters Naomi's; he watches her as she watches for spies, and he animates her visions. He recalls as a child "watching over" Naomi in order to anticipate her "next move" ("Kaddish" 212). On one fateful day, Naomi "stared out the window on the Broadway Church corner"; Allen interprets that she "spied a mystical assassin from Newark" ("Kaddish" 212). He likewise observes and interprets Naomi's body language and facial expressions. When she "covered [her] nose with [a] motheaten fur collar" and "shuddered at [the] face" of a bus driver, he deduces that, for Naomi, the collar must have been a "gas mask against poison" and the driver "a member of the gang" ("Kaddish" 212). On the one hand, Allen's impetus to recover "the lost Naomi" ("Kaddish" 216)—first lost to mental illness and then to death—may be likened to Ricoeur's concept of a restorative hermeneutic, "which is driven by a sense of reverence and goes deeper into the text in search of revelation" (Felski 216). As if Naomi's mind constitutes a text, Allen strives to reveal it in order to make it intelligible. What drives him is the cathartic impulse to revivify his mother's memory, to rebuild her story, and to exalt her as "magnificent" and "mourned no more" ("Kaddish" 212), so that he may mourn no more. Like a restorative reader "driven by a sense of reverence" (Felski 216), he lauds Naomi as the "glorious muse that bore [him] from the womb [...] from whose pained head [he] first took Vision" ("Kaddish" 223). Critics of "Kaddish" also observe the poem's restorative impulse. In "Strange Prophecies Anew," Tony Trigilio reads the recovery of Naomi as "the recovery of a female principle of divinity" (773). Diverging from Ginsberg's earlier poem "Howl" (1956), which "represses signs of women in order to forge male prophetic comradeship," "Kaddish" "constructs maternity as a source of vision, an influence that precedes and sustains prophetic language. In 'Kaddish', Ginsberg attempts to recover the voice of his mother Naomi, which is muted in 'Howl'" (776). Shreiber also acknowledges Ginsberg's redemption of "the feminine, figured specifically as the lost mother," but for her it "is central to both of the long poems that make his reputation," namely "Kaddish" and "Howl" (81). She cites Ginsberg's retrospective confession that "Howl" was actually about Naomi to argue that, "it is in the course of writing 'Howl' that Ginsberg discovers his obligation to the elided (Jewish) mother—whose restoration is the central project of 'Kaddish'" (81). On the other hand, Allen's compulsion to "cut through" to Naomi, to talk to her as he "didn't when [she] had a mouth" ("Kaddish" 211), suggests the brutality of a suspicious hermeneutic where meanings "must be wrestled rather than gleaned from the page, derived not from what the text says, but in spite of what it says" (Felski 223). When Naomi was alive and "had a mouth," Allen aggressively "pushed her against the door and shouted 'DON'T KICK ELANOR!'" in spite of her message: "Elanor is the worst spy! She's taking orders!" ("Kaddish" 221). As a suspicious reader wrestles with a resistant text, Allen wrestles with Naomi, "yelling at her" in exasperation, and even "banging against her head which saw Radios, Sticks, Hitlers—the whole gamut of Hallucinations—for real—her own universe" ("Kaddish" 221).Allen may be also seen as approaching Naomi with a suspicious reader's "adversarial sensibility to probe for concealed, repressed, or disavowed meanings" (Felski 216). This is most visible in his facetiously professed "good idea to try [to] know the Monster of the Beginning Womb"—to penetrate Naomi's body in order to access her mind "that way" ("Kaddish" 219). Accordingly, in his psychoanalytic reading of "Kaddish," James Breslin understands Allen's "incestuous desires as expressing [his] wish to get inside his mother and see things as she does" (424). Breslin's interpretation invokes the Freudian concept of "epistemophilia," which Bran Nicol defines as the "desire to know" (48).Freud is one of "three masters" of suspicion according to Ricoeur (32). Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx "present the most radically contrary stance to the phenomenology of the sacred and to any hermeneutics understood as the recollection of meaning" (Ricoeur 35). They "begin with suspicion concerning the illusions of consciousness, and then proceed to employ the stratagem of deciphering" (Ricoeur 34). Freud deciphers the language of the conscious mind in order to access the "unconscious"—that "part of the mind beyond consciousness which nevertheless has a strong influence upon our actions" (Barry 96). Like their therapeutic counterparts, psychoanalytic critics distinguish "between the conscious and the unconscious mind," associating a text's "'overt' content with the former" and "'covert' content with the latter, privileging the latter as being what the work is 'really' about" (Barry 105). In seeking to expose a text's unconscious, they subscribe to a hermeneutic of suspicion's "conviction that appearances are deceptive, that texts do not gracefully relinquish their meanings" (Felski 216). To force texts to relinquish their meanings suspicious readers bear "distance rather than closeness; guardedness rather than openness; aggression rather than submission; superiority rather than reverence; attentiveness rather than distraction; exposure rather than tact" (Felski 222).For the most part, these qualities fail to characterise Breslin's psychoanalytic criticism on "Kaddish" and "Howl." Far from aggressive or superior, Breslin is a highly sympathetic reader of Ginsberg. "Many readers," he complains, are "still not sympathetic to the kind [sic] of form found in these poems" (403). His words echo Trigilio's endorsement of Marjorie Perloff's opinion that critics are too often "unwilling to engage the experimental scope of Ginsberg's poems" (Trigilio 774). Sympathetic reading, however, clashes with suspicious reading, which "involves a sense of vigilant preparedness for attack" (Shand in Felski 220). Breslin is sympathetic not only to the experimental forms of "Kaddish" and "Howl," but also to their attestation to "deep, long-standing private conflicts in Ginsberg—conflicts that ultimately stem from his ambivalent attachment to his mother" (403). In "Kaddish," Allen's ambivalent feelings toward his mother are conspicuous in his revolted and revolting reaction to her exposed body, combined with his blasé deliberation on whether to respond to her apparent sexual provocation: One time I thought she was trying to make me come lay her—flirting to herself at sink—lay back on huge bed that filled most of the room, dress up round her hips, big slash of hair, scars of operations, pancreas, belly wounds, abortions, appendix, stitching of incisions pulling down in the fat like hideous thick zippers—ragged long lips between her legs—What, even, smell of asshole? I was cold—later revolted a little, not much—seemed perhaps a good idea to try—know the Monster of the Beginning Womb—Perhaps—that way. Would she care? She needs a lover. ("Kaddish" 219)In "Confessing the Body," Elizabeth Gregory observes that "Naomi's ordinary body becomes monstrous in this description—not only in its details but in the undiscriminating desire her son attributes to it ('Would she care?')" (47). In exposing Naomi thus, Allen also exposes himself and his own indiscriminate sexual responsiveness. Such textual exposés pose challenges for those who would practice a hermeneutic of suspicion by "reading texts against the grain to expose their repressed or hidden meanings" (Felski 215). It appears that there is little that is hidden or repressed in "Kaddish" for a suspicious reader to expose. As Perloff notes, "the Ginsberg of 'Kaddish' is writing somewhat against the grain" (213). In writing against the grain, Ginsberg inhibits reading against the grain. A hermeneutic of suspicion holds "that manifest content shrouds darker, more unpalatable truths" (Felski 216). "Kaddish," however, parades its unpalatable truths. Although Ginsberg as a Beat poet is not technically included among the group of poets known as the "confessionals," "Kaddish" is typical of a "confessional poem" in that it "dwells on experiences generally prohibited expression by social convention: mental illness, intra-familial conflicts and resentments, childhood traumas, sexual transgressions and intimate feelings about one's body" (Gregory 34). There is a sense in which "we do not need to be suspicious" of such subversive texts because they are "already doing the work of suspicion for us" (Felski 217). It is also difficult to read "Kaddish" suspiciously because it presents itself as an autobiographical history of Ginsberg's relationship with his mother. "Kaddish" once again accords with Gregory's definition of "confessional poetry" as that which "draws on the poet's autobiography and is usually set in the first person. It makes a claim to forego personae and to represent an account of the poet's own feelings and circumstances" (34). These defining features of "Kaddish" make it not particularly conducive to a "suspicious hermeneutic [that] often professes a lack of interest in the category of authorship as a means of explaining the ideological workings of texts" (Felski 222). It requires considerable effort to distinguish Allen, speaker and character in "Kaddish," from Ginsberg, celebrity Beat poet and author of "Kaddish," and to suspend knowledge of Ginsberg's public-private life in order to pry ideologies from the text. This difficulty of resisting biographical interpretation of "Kaddish" translates to a difficulty of reading the poem suspiciously. In his psychoanalytic reading, Breslin's lack of suspicion for the poem's confession of autobiography dilutes his practice of an inherently suspicious mode of interpretation—that of psychoanalysis. His psychoanalysis of Ginsberg shows that he trusts "Kaddish" to confess its author's intimate feelings—"'It's my fault,' he must have felt, 'if I had loved my mother more, this wouldn't have happened to her—and to me'" (Breslin 422)—whereas a hermeneutic of suspicion "adopts a distrustful attitude toward texts" (Felski 216). That said, Breslin's differentiation between the conscious and unconscious, or surface and underlying levels of meaning in "Kaddish" is more clearly characteristic of a hermeneutic of suspicion's theory that texts withhold "meanings or implications that are not intended and that remain inaccessible to their authors as well as to ordinary readers" (Felski 216). Hence, Breslin speculates that, "on an unconscious level the writing of the poem may have been an act of private communication between the poet" and his mother (430). His response to the previously quoted passage of the poem suggests that while a cursory glance will restore its conscious meaning, a more attentive or suspicious gaze will uncover its unconscious: At first glance this passage seems a daring revelation of an incest wish and a shockingly realistic description of the mother's body. But what we really see here is how one post-Freudian writer, pretending to be open and at ease about incestuous desire, affects sophisticated awareness as a defense [sic] against intense longings and anxieties. The lines are charged with feelings that the poet, far from "confessing out," appears eager to deny. (Breslin 422; my emphasis)Breslin's temporary suspicious gaze in an otherwise trusting and sympathetic reading accuses the poet of revealing incestuous desire paradoxically in order to conceal incestuous desire. It exposes the exposé as an ironic guise, an attempt at subterfuge that the poet fails to conceal from the suspicious reader, evoking a hermeneutic of suspicion's conviction that in spite of itself "the text is not fully in control of its own discourse" (Felski 223). Breslin's view of Ginsberg's denial through the veil of his confession illuminates two possible ways of sustaining a suspicious reading of "Kaddish." One is to distrust its claim to confess Ginsberg, to recognise that "confession's reality claim is an extremely artful manipulation of the materials of poetry, not a departure from them" (Gregory 34). It is worth mentioning that in response to his interviewer's perception of the "absolute honesty" in his poem "Ego Confession," Ginsberg commented: "they're all poems, ultimately" (Spontaneous 404–05). Another way is to resist the double seduction operative in the text: Naomi's attempted seduction of Allen, and, in narrating it, Allen's attempted seduction of the psychoanalytic critic.Sarah Macfarlane's effort to unmask the gender politics that psychoanalytic critics arguably protect characterises her "socio-cultural analysis" (5) of "Kaddish" as unmistakably suspicious. While psychoanalytic critics "identify a 'psychic' context for the literary work, at the expense of social or historical context" (Barry 105), Macfarlane in her thesis "Masculinity and the Politics of Gender Construction in Allen Ginsberg" locates Allen's "perception of Naomi as the 'Monster of the Beginning Womb'" in the social and historical context of the 1950s "concept of the overbearing, dominating wife and mother who, although confined to the domestic space, looms large and threatening within that space" (48). In so doing, she draws attention to the Cold War discourse of "momism," which "envisioned American society as a matriarchy in which dominant mothers disrupted the Oedipal structure of the middle-class nuclear family" (Macfarlane 33). In other words, momism engaged Freudian explanations of male homosexuality as arising from a son's failure to resolve unconscious sexual desire for his mother, and blamed mothers for this failure and its socio-political ramifications, which, via the Cold War cultural association of homosexuality with communism, included "the weakening of masculine resolve against Communism" (Edelman 567). Since psychoanalysis effectively colludes with momism, psychoanalytic criticism on "Kaddish" is unable to expose its perpetuation in the poem. Macfarlane's suspicious reading of "Kaddish" as perpetuating momism radically departs from the dominant restorative criticism on the poem. Trigilio, for example, argues that "Kaddish" revises the Cold War "discourse of containment—'momism'—in which the exposure of communists was equated to the exposure of homosexuals" (781). "Kaddish," he claims, (which exposes both Allen's homosexuality and Naomi's communism), "does not portray internal collapse—as nationalist equations of homosexual and communist 'threats' would predict—but instead produces […] a 'Blessed' poet who 'builds Heaven in Darkness'" (782). Nonetheless, this blessed poet wails, "I am unmarried, I'm hymnless, I'm Heavenless" ("Kaddish" 212), and confesses his homosexuality as an overwhelming burden: "a mortal avalanche, whole mountains of homosexuality, Matterhorns of cock, Grand Canyons of asshole—weight on my melancholy head"("Kaddish" 214). In "Confessing the Body," Gregory asks whether confessional poetry "disclose[s] secrets in order to repent of them, thus reinforcing the initial negative judgement that kept them secret," or "to decathect that judgement" (35). While Allen's confession of homosexuality exudes exhilaration and depression, not guilt—Ginsberg critic Anne Hartman is surely right that "in the context of [the 1950s] public rituals of confession and repentance engendered by McCarthyism, […] poetic confession would carry a very different set of implications for a gay poet" (47)—it is pertinent to question his confession of Naomi. Does he expose Naomi in order to applaud or condemn her maternal transgressions? According to the logic of the Cold War "urge to unveil, [which] produces greater containment" (Trigilio 794), Allen's unveiling of Naomi veils his desire to contain her, unable as she is "to be contained within the 1950's [sic] domestic ideal of womanhood" (Macfarlane 44). "Ginsberg has become such a public issue that it's difficult now to read him naturally; you ask yourself after every line, am I for him or against him. And by and large that's the criticism he has gotten—votes on a public issue. (I see this has been one of those reviews.)" (Shapiro 90). Harvey Shapiro's review of Kaddish and Other Poems (1961) in which "Kaddish" first appeared illuminates the polarising effect of Ginsberg's celebrity on interpretations of his poetry. While sympathetic readings and romantic portrayals are themselves reactions to the "hostility to Ginsberg" that prevails (Perloff 223), often they do not sprout the intellectual vigour and fresh perspectives that a hermeneutic of suspicion has the capacity to sow. Yet it is difficult to read confessional texts such as "Kaddish" suspiciously; they appear to expose themselves without need of a suspicious reader. Readers of "Kaddish" such as Breslin are seduced into sympathetic biographical-psychoanalytical interpretations due to the poem's purported confession of Ginsberg's autobiography. As John Osborne argues, "the canon of Beat literature has been falsely founded on biographical rather than literary criteria" (4). The result is that "we are for the immediate future obliged to adopt adversarial reading strategies if we are to avoid entrenching an already stale orthodoxy" (Osborne 4). Macfarlane obliges in her thesis; she succeeds in reading "Kaddish" suspiciously by resisting its self-inscribed psychoanalysis to expose the gender politics of Allen's exposés. While Allen's confession of his homosexuality suggests that "Kaddish" subverts a heterosexist model of masculinity, a suspicious reading of his exposure of Naomi's maternal transgressions suggests that the poem contributes to momism and perpetuates a sexist model of femininity. Even so, a suspicious reading of a text such as "Kaddish" "contains a tacit tribute to its object, an admission that it contains more than meets the eye" (Felski 230). Ginsberg's own prophetic words bespeak as much:The worst I fear, considering the shallowness of opinion, is that some of the poetry and prose may be taken too familiarly, […] and be given the same shallow treatment, this time sympathetic, as, until recently, they were given shallow unsympathy. That would be the very we of fame. (Ginsberg, Deliberate 252)ReferencesBarry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. 2nd ed. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2002. Breslin, James. "The Origins of 'Howl' and 'Kaddish.'" On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg. Ed. Lewis Hyde. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1984. 401–33.Edelman, Lee. "Tearooms and Sympathy, or, The Epistemology of the Water Closet." The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. Ed. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin. New York: Routledge, 1993. 553–74.Felski, Rita. "Suspicious Minds." Poetics Today 32.2 (2011): 215–34. Ginsberg, Allen. Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952-1995. Ed. Bill Morgan. London: Penguin, 2000.---. "Kaddish." Collected Poems 1947–1980. New York: Harper and Row, 1984. 209–27. ---. Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews 1958–1996. Ed. David Carter. New York: Harper Collins, 2001. Grace, Nancy M. "Seeking the Spirit of Beat: The Call for Interdisciplinary Scholarship." Rev. of Kerouac, the Word and the Way: Prose Artist as Spiritual Quester, by Ben Giamo, and The Bop Apocalypse: The Religious Visions of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs, by John Lardas. Contemporary Literature 43.4 (2002): 811–21.Gregory, Elizabeth. "Confessing the Body: Plath, Sexton, Berryman, Lowell, Ginsberg and the Gendered Poetics of the 'Real.'" Modern Confessional Writing: New Critical Essays. Ed. Jo Gill. London: Routledge, 2006. 22–49. Hartman, Anne. "Confessional Counterpublics in Frank O'Hara and Allen Ginsberg." Journal of Modern Literature 28.4 (2005): 40–56. Howl. Dir. Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. Perf. James Franco. Oscilloscope Pictures, 2010.Macfarlane, Sarah. "Masculinity and the Politics of Gender Construction in Allen Ginsberg." MA thesis. Brown U, 1999.Nicol, Bran. "Reading Paranoia: Paranoia, Epistemophilia and the Postmodern Crisis of Interpretation." Literature and Psychology 45.1/2 (1999): 44–62.Osborne, John. "The Beats." A Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry. Blackwell Reference Online. Ed. Neil Roberts. 2003. 16 Oct. 2011 ‹http://www.blackwellreference.com/subscriber/uid=1205/tocnode?id=g9781405113618_chunk_g978140511361815&authstatuscode=202›.Perloff, Marjorie. "A Lion in Our Living Room: Reading Allen Ginsberg in the Eighties." Poetic License: Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1990. 199–230.Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Trans. Denis Savage. New Haven: Yale UP, 1970. Shapiro, Harvey. "Exalted Lament." Rev. of Kaddish and Other Poems 1958-1960, by Allen Ginsberg. On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg. Ed. Lewis Hyde. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1984. 86–91. Shreiber, Maeera Y. "'You Still Haven't Finished with Your Mother': The Gendered Poetics of Charles Reznikoff and Allen Ginsberg." Singing in a Strange Land: A Jewish American Poetics. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007. 46–97.Trigilio, Tony. "'Strange Prophecies Anew': Rethinking the Politics of Matter and Spirit in Ginsberg's Kaddish." American Literature 71.4 (1999): 773–95.

AbstractThree texts about comic duos are compared. Foma and Yerema (F&Y), characters of a 17th-century Russian folk poem, are twins. Being harmless idiots, they suffer endless failures, are regularly beaten and eventually drowned. Two other brothers, Max and Moritz (M&M), heroes of a quasi-didactic German poem for children written and illustrated by Wilhelm Busch (1865), play ruthless tricks on their neighbors. Eventually they are caught and ground in a mill. Beavis and Butt-head (B&B) are heroes of American animated cartoons by Mike Judge (1993). These juvenile imbeciles are intermediate between F&Y and M&M in terms of mischief and are centered on sex, never realizable. Despite understandable differences between the texts, numerous similarities are evident. All the three duos resemble twin clowns, fools, jesters, and mythical tricksters. F&Y are “dupes”, M&M are “knaves”, and B&B are ambiguous. Archaic parallels include interchangeability of characters, consonant names, grotesque appearance, violence, obscenities, connection with birds, etc. Whether these parallels are “archetypical” or derive from some common source, is not clear. In all cases, the potential moral response evoked by the description of quasi-dramatic events is cancelled by comic devices aimed at dehumanizing the characters and making them similar to puppet-like characters of folk theatre.

If you cannot learn to love (yes love) this city you have no other. Simon Tay, 'Singapore Night Song' (137). Having lived in Australia for more than a year now, it is easier to view my own country through a telescope and learn to love what I used to loathe. It is easier to hold and weigh the ball of its contradictions in my palm and learn how each strand I unknot tells on myself, on my writing, to realise with a shudder that I am a moving microcosm of the city I was born in. Indeed, the more removed I am, the easier it is to be an apologist as it is to be a patriot. Robert Drewe makes the claim that Australia is the most urbanised country in the world (7). Obviously, he has yet to walk the length and breadth of Singapore. To talk about Singapore is to talk about the city. As the joke goes, the capital of Singapore is Singapore, and there is no other city quite like Singapore. It cheerfully admits to being an artificial creation, a test tube mixing West and East and bubbling with possibilities. It resents the reach and rinse of Western influences, yet it cannot afford to close itself from international trade and commerce. It is an Asian metropolis with a noveau-riche arrogance about its place in the world, yet is a mere blip on the map. Call it what you will - a glass-dome city, a Disneyland postcard, an autocratic, authoritarian state with a muzzle and cane ready to keep its citizens in line the name-calling is probably valid, at some point, to some extent. Yet Surprising Singapore, as the tourist brochures coin it, is a lot more elusive than the rumours. Everything about it - its size and vulnerability, the quirk of its history, the fabric of its immigrant cultures that sometimes threatens to fray along the fringes - demands its failure. But in just one full leap of a generation, Singapore has sprung the trap of Third World poverty, rising to become one of the richest nations in the world. Something has to give, and it is in the Singaporean writer's sensibility that we read and understand the human cost. Sometimes it is hard to believe that creatures of flesh and bone may tear up the roads like paper, peeling the rind of earth as carelessly as eating an orange. Aaron Lee, 'Road-Works' (65). Dennis Haskell rightly points out that it would be impossible to be a Romantic in Singapore (27). Not only impossible, but also false. For the reality is this: whatever nature there is, is there by design, not by default, nor by coincidence. Nostalgia is cheap when land is scarce. The country has no hinterland to call its own, no natural resources to draw on but the will of its population of just over three million people. Because of the sheer limitation of size poet Edwin Thumboo once quipped that Singapore is physically an island 224 square miles - 226 square miles at low tide (159) the city has to keep changing, evolving, re-sculpting its coastlines, taking over the sky, laying mazes of walkways and tunnels beneath the ground. Flux becomes a necessity by virtue of circumstance, a virtue of necessity. We are a country of dust where nothing is saved but face. Felix Cheong, 'Work in Progress' (45). The consequence is that Singapore is and will always be - a work in progress, constantly re-modelling its fa瀥volvAade, its face, its planners drafting and grafting the way a poet must rework his manuscript to the fullness of his gift. It is a post-modernist fable turning upon itself, over and over, deconstructing its own meaning, answering only to its own vision. The moment it has finished, arms outstretched and ill at ease, it is finished. In his essay Chaos in Poetry, D.H. Lawrence avers that the task of poets is to reveal the inward desire of mankind… The desire for chaos is the breath of their poetry. The fear of chaos is in their parade of forms and technique (92). Stretch the analogy a little and the same holds true for Singapore. Examine its skyline on a clear blue day and you cannot help but marvel at how well this city-state parades its forms and technique. How well it conceals its fear of chaos beneath skyscraper chrome and glass. How, at its heart, it is still a frightened child of a city learning to cope with the means and meanings of change, pitched at once between promise and compromise, between a desire for chaos and the craftsmanship to contain it. Perhaps this fluidity is a measure of redemption, like a writer with the wit and strength to scratch out the eyes of an unclear poem and begin on a clean sheet, all resources and lines shaped and sharpened by impatient fingers. Everything else about Singapore its politics, policies, polemics follows from this, originates from this fundamental insecurity. When I love you for my fallen love, O City of Endless Energies, your eyes burn out along the street. Gwee Li Sui, 'Kenosis' (34). Having grown up in the relative ease and affluence of Singapore after independence, all I know is the city. I am a child of my times, a child of the city, and its energy has now become my own. It is in my fingertips, in the grip of pen poised steady above paper. The restlessness owns me, steers eloquence towards a mouth, towards poetry. I have even conditioned myself to write on the move in a crowded train or a bus letting the jolt and shuffle set a rhythm in my head. The whirl of a world as I stand on the still ledge of words, recording, rendering, remembering. There is poetry in the silence of a man contemplating his feet on a train, unable - or unwilling - to connect with another through the corner of his eye. There is poetry in the knowing snatches of conversation eavesdropped. There is poetry in the smile of flowers as the boy opens his heart, for the first time, to his first love. For a moment, just a moment the lyrical in the transient. The City is what we make it, You and I. We are the City. For better or for worse. Edwin Thumboo, 'The Way Ahead' (39). Excerpts of poems taken from No Other City: The Ethos Anthology of Urban Poetry. References Drewe, Robert. Introduction. The Penguin Book of the City. Victoria, Australia: Penguin Books, 1997. 1-7. Haskell, Dennis. Foreword. No Other City: The Ethos Anthology of Urban Poetry. Ed. Alvin Pang and Aaron Lee. Singapore: Ethos Books, 2000. 26-31. Lawrence, D.H. Selected Literary Criticism. London: Heinemann, 1967. Thumboo, Edwin. Edwin Thumboo Interviewed by Peter Nazareth. World Literature Written in English. 18.1(1979): 151-171. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Cheong, Felix. "A Poets Sense of the City" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.2 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/poets.php>. Chicago Style Cheong, Felix, "A Poets Sense of the City" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 2 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/poets.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Cheong, Felix. (2002) A Poets Sense of the City. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(2). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/poets.php> ([your date of access]).

The paper focuses on the performative and material memorialization (anniversaries, funeral, obituaries in the press, the gravestone, and the memorial museum) ofMaironis (Jonas Mačiulis, 1862–1932) in the 1930s, which contributed to the consolidation of the poet’s position in the national literary canon. It also describes what prevalent meanings of his literary works were being formed by different practices of memorialization. When Maironis died in 1932, the press was full of obituaries, detailed commentaries, and interpretations of his funeral. We also have a script of his 70th birthday celebration, which, together with the mentioned acts of memorialization, shows that Maironis occupied the central spot in the national literary canon in the early 1930s. The very fact of his death granted an additional motive towards a faster canonization of the poet and served as a base to form Maironis’s patriotic cult. In the obituaries, the meaning of Maironis’s poetry was predominantly judged from the point of view of its social and historical impact and Maironis was extolled as a prophet of the national revival who had awakened the Lithuanians to the fight for their language, culture, and statehood. During the interwar period, the era of the national revival had become an essential place of collective memory in general, thus the poetry of Maironis, who had already been treated as the national poet of the revival, was recognized not only as a witness of that epoch, but also as the one that could fulfill the vitally important function of mobilization of the community and of the formation of national and civil identity. When Maironis was still alive, he was commemorated in various toponyms of Kaunas and other regions of Lithuania. After his death, the importance of his memorialization in different ways became obvious. Shortly after his funeral, the publication of memoirs about his life, stories about the processes of writing poetry, and his letters was initiated. In the late 1930s, a mausoleum of Maironis was built near Kaunas Cathedral Basilica, a bust of Maironis was erected in the square of the Military Museum of Vytautas the Great, and Maironis Memorial Museum was founded. There were no other Lithuanian writers in the period of the Republic of Lithuania (1918–1940) who received so much attention from the state and so much financial support as was assigned to the memorialization of Maironis.

Glosses on Chancellor Angela Merkel: In ancient times the poets of Ireland and Scotland wrote satires on royals and chiefs they held to be administratively challenged and/or ungenerous to needy bards. The poems were not in strict form, but, generally, 17 line stanzas implied “should be put down”, while 13 line stanzas connoted “harmless but dim”. Walküre, whence Valkyrie, means “chooser of the slain” in Old German. In the bloodletting attending the formation of the present Grand Coalition in Germany, Edmund Stoiber was a casualty and withdrew, embittered, to lead Bavaria again. Angela is widely reported to find relief from the tensions of major political crises by baking cakes, a method more acceptable to the German middle-class than that once favoured by President Clinton. Prince Potemkin, lover and right-hand-man, of Czarina Catherine II, is – maybe slanderously – supposed to have had fake villages built in which actors mimed happy peasants as she drove past in her carriage. When Bush visited Angela’s provincial electorate, the real locals were sent somewhere else, while blokes from Germany’s security services replaced them, smiling, cheering and waving American flags. Consuming coffee and cake at 4 p.m. is the only Categorical Imperative that Germany absolutely obeys. The plot of Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods resembles a stale lamington, as do Germany’s present economic woes. The Grand Coalition is also looking crumbly and dry, despite Angela’s keeping it in the fridge in glad-wrap.

The traditional German tale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin inhabits an ambiguous narrative borderland, a liminal space between fact and fiction, fantasy and horror, concrete details and elusive mystery. In his study of the Pied Piper in Tradition and Innovation in Folk Literature, Wolfgang Mieder describes how manuscripts and other evidence appear to confirm the historical base of the story. Precise details from a fifteenth-century manuscript, based on earlier sources, specify that in 1284 on the 26th of June, the feast-day of Saints John and Paul, 130 children from Hamelin were led away by a piper clothed in many colours to the Koppen Hill, and there vanished (Mieder 48). Later manuscripts add details familiar today, such as a plague of rats and a broken bargain with burghers as a motive for the Piper’s actions, while in the seventeenth century the first English-language version advances what might also be the first attempt at a “rational” explanation for the children’s disappearance, claiming that they were taken to Transylvania. The uncommon pairing of such precise factual detail with enigmatic mystery has encouraged many theories. These have ranged from references to the Children’s Crusade, or other religious fervours, to the devastation caused by the Black Death, from the colonisation of Romania by young German migrants to a murderous rampage by a paedophile. Fictional interpretations of the story have multiplied, with the classic versions of the Brothers Grimm and Robert Browning being most widely known, but with contemporary creators exploring the theme too. This includes interpretations in Hamelin itself. On 26 June 2015, in Hamelin Museum, I watched a wordless five-minute play, entirely performed not by humans but by animatronic stylised figures built out of scrap iron, against a montage of multilingual, confused voices and eerie music, with the vanished children represented by a long line of small empty shirts floating by. The uncanny, liminal nature of the story was perfectly captured. Australia is a world away from German fairy tale mysteries, historically, geographically, and culturally. Yet, as Lisa M. Fiander has persuasively argued, contemporary Australian fiction has been more influenced by fairy tales than might be assumed, and in this essay it is proposed that major motifs from the Pied Piper appear in several Australian novels, transformed not only by distance of setting and time from that of the original narrative, but also by elements specific to the Australian imaginative space. These motifs are lost children, the enigmatic figure of the Piper himself, and the power of a very particular place (as Hamelin and its Koppen Hill are particularised in the original tale). Three major Australian novels will be examined in this essay: Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967), Christopher Koch’s The Doubleman (1985), and Ursula Dubosarsky’s The Golden Day (2011). Dubosarsky’s novel was written for children; both Koch’s and Lindsay’s novels were published as adult fiction. In each of these works of fiction, the original tale’s motifs have been developed and transformed to express unique evocations of the Pied Piper theme. As noted by Fiander, fiction writers are “most likely to draw upon fairy tales when they are framing, in writing, a subject that generates anxiety in their culture” (158). Her analysis is about anxieties of place within Australian fiction, but this insight could be usefully extended to the motifs which I have identified as inherent in the Pied Piper story. Prominent among these is the lost children motif, whose importance in the Australian imagination has been well-established by scholars such as Peter Pierce. Pierce’s The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety explores this preoccupation from the earliest beginnings of European settlement, through analysis of fiction, newspaper reports, paintings, and films. As Pierce observed in a later interview in the Sydney Morning Herald (Knox), over time the focus changed from rural children and the nineteenth-century fear of the vast impersonal nature of the bush, where children of colonists could easily get lost, to urban children and the contemporary fear of human predators.In each of the three novels under examination in this essay, lost children—whether literal or metaphorical—feature prominently. Writer Carmel Bird, whose fiction has also frequently centred on the theme of the lost child, observes in “Dreaming the Place” that the lost child, the stolen child – this must be a narrative that is lodged in the heart and imagination, nightmare and dream, of all human beings. In Australia the nightmare became reality. The child is the future, and if the child goes, there can be no future. The true stories and the folk tales on this theme are mirror images of each other. (7) The motif of lost children—and of children in danger—is not unique to the Pied Piper. Other fairy tales, such as Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood, contain it, and it is those antecedents which Bird cites in her essay. But within the Pied Piper story it has three features which distinguish it from other traditional tales. First, unlike in the classic versions of Hansel and Gretel or Red Riding Hood, the children do not return. Neither are there bodies to find. The children have vanished into thin air, never to be seen again. Second, it is not only parents who have lost them, but an entire community whose future has been snatched away: a community once safe, ordered, even complacent, traumatised by loss. The lack of hope, of a happy ending for anyone, is striking. And thirdly, the children are not lost or abandoned or even, strictly speaking, stolen: they are lured away, semi-willingly, by the central yet curiously marginal figure of the Piper himself. In the original story there is no mention of motive and no indication of malice on the part of the Piper. There is only his inexplicable presence, a figure out of fairy folklore appearing in the midst of concrete historical dates and numbers. Clearly, he links to the liminal, complex world of the fairies, found in folklore around the world—beings from a world close to the human one, yet alien. Whimsical and unpredictable by human standards, such beings are nevertheless bound by mysteriously arbitrary rules and taboos, and haunt the borders of the human world, disturbing its rational edges and transforming lives forever. It is this sense of disturbance, that enchanting yet frightening sudden shifting of the border of reality and of the comforting order of things, the essence of transformation itself, which can also be seen at the core of the three novels under examination in this essay, with the Piper represented in each of them but in different ways. The third motif within the Pied Piper is a focus on place as a source of uncanny power, a theme which particularly resonates within an Australian context. Fiander argues that if contemporary British fiction writers use fairy tale to explore questions of community and alienation, and Canadian fiction writers use it to explore questions of identity, then Australian writers use it to explore the unease of place. She writes of the enduring legacy of Australia’s history “as a settler colony which invests the landscape with strangeness for many protagonists” (157). Furthermore, she suggests that “when Australian fiction writers, using fairy tales, describe the landscape as divorced from reality, they might be signalling anxiety about their own connection with the land which had already seen tens of thousands of years of occupation when Captain James Cook ‘found’ it in 1770” (160). I would argue, however, that in the case of the Pied Piper motifs, it is less clear that it is solely settler anxieties which are driving the depiction of the power of place in these three novels. There is no divorce from reality here, but rather an eruption of the metaphysical potency of place within the usual, “normal” order of reality. This follows the pattern of the original tale, where the Piper and all the children, except for one or two stragglers, disappear at Koppen Hill, vanishing literally into the hill itself. In traditional European folklore, hollow hills are associated with fairies and their uncanny power, but other places, especially those of water—springs, streams, even the sea—may also be associated with their liminal world (in the original tale, the River Weser is another important locus for power). In Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, it is another outcrop in the landscape which holds that power and claims the “lost children.” Inspired partly by a painting by nineteenth-century Australian artist William Ford, titled At the Hanging Rock (1875), depicting a group of elegant people picnicking in the bush, this influential novel, which inspired an equally successful film adaptation, revolves around an incident in 1900 when four girls from Appleyard College, an exclusive school in Victoria, disappear with one of their teachers whilst climbing Hanging Rock, where they have gone for a picnic. Only one of their number, a girl called Irma, is ever found, and she has no memory of how and why she found herself on the Rock, and what has happened to the others. This inexplicable event is the precursor to a string of tragedies which leads to the violent deaths of several people, and which transforms the sleepy and apparently content little community around Appleyard College into a centre of loss, horror, and scandal.Told in a way which makes it appear that the novelist is merely recounting a true story—Lindsay even tells readers in an author’s note that they must decide for themselves if it is fact or fiction—Picnic at Hanging Rock shares the disturbingly liminal fact-fiction territory of the Piper tale. Many readers did in fact believe that the novel was based on historical events and combed newspaper files, attempting to propound ingenious “rational” explanations for what happened on the Rock. Picnic at Hanging Rock has been the subject of many studies, with the novel being analysed through various prisms, including the Gothic, the pastoral, historiography, and philosophy. In “Fear and Loathing in the Australian Bush,” Kathleen Steele has depicted Picnic at Hanging Rock as embodying the idea that “Ordered ‘civilisation’ cannot overcome the gothic landscapes of settler imaginations: landscapes where time and people disappear” (44). She proposes that Lindsay intimates that the landscape swallows the “lost children” of the novel because there is a great absence in that place: that of Aboriginal people. In this reading of the novel, it is that absence which becomes, in a sense, a malevolent presence that will reach out beyond the initial disappearance of the three people on the Rock to destroy the bonds that held the settler community together. It is a powerfully-made argument, which has been taken up by other scholars and writers, including studies which link the theme of the novel with real-life lost-children cases such as that of Azaria Chamberlain, who disappeared near another “Rock” of great Indigenous metaphysical potency—Uluru, or Ayers Rock. However, to date there has been little exploration of the fairy tale quality of the novel, and none at all of the striking ways in which it evokes Pied Piper motifs, whilst transforming them to suit the exigencies of its particular narrative world. The motif of lost children disappearing from an ordered, safe, even complacent community into a place of mysterious power is extended into an exploration of the continued effects of those disappearances, depicting the disastrous impact on those left behind and the wider community in a way that the original tale does not. There is no literal Pied Piper figure in this novel, though various theories are evoked by characters as to who might have lured the girls and their teacher, and who might be responsible for the disappearances. Instead, there is a powerful atmosphere of inevitability and enchantment within the landscape itself which both illustrates the potency of place, and exemplifies the Piper’s hold on his followers. In Picnic at Hanging Rock, place and Piper are synonymous: the Piper has been transformed into the land itself. Yet this is not the “vast impersonal bush,” nor is it malevolent or vengeful. It is a living, seductive metaphysical presence: “Everything, if only you could see it clearly enough, is beautiful and complete . . .” (Lindsay 35). Just as in the original tale, the lost children follow the “Piper” willingly, without regret. Their disappearance is a happiness to them, in that moment, as it is for the lost children of Hamelin, and quite unlike how it must be for those torn apart by that loss—the community around Appleyard, the townspeople of Hamelin. Music, long associated with fairy “takings,” is also a subtle feature of the story. In the novel, just before the luring, Irma hears a sound like the beating of far-off drums. In the film, which more overtly evokes fairy tale elements than does the novel, it is noteworthy that the music at that point is based on traditional tunes for Pan-pipes, played by the great Romanian piper Gheorge Zamfir. The ending of the novel, with questions left unanswered, and lives blighted by the forever-inexplicable, may be seen as also following the trajectory of the original tale. Readers as much as the fictional characters are left with an enigma that continues to perplex and inspire. Picnic at Hanging Rock was one of the inspirations for another significant Australian fiction, this time a contemporary novel for children. Ursula Dubosarsky’s The Golden Day (2011) is an elegant and subtle short novel, set in Sydney at an exclusive girls’ school, in 1967. Like the earlier novel, The Golden Day is also partly inspired by visual art, in this case the Schoolgirl series of paintings by Charles Blackman. Combining a fairy tale atmosphere with historical details—the Vietnam War, the hanging of Ronald Ryan, the drowning of Harold Holt—the story is told through the eyes of several girls, especially one, known as Cubby. The Golden Day echoes the core narrative patterns of the earlier novel, but intriguingly transformed: a group of young girls goes with their teacher on an outing to a mysterious place (in this case, a cave on the beach—note the potent elements of rock and water, combined), and something inexplicable happens which results in a disappearance. Only this time, the girls are much younger than the characters of Lindsay’s novel, pre-pubertal in fact at eleven years old, and it is their teacher, a young, idealistic woman known only as Miss Renshaw, who disappears, apparently into thin air, with only an amber bead from her necklace ever found. But it is not only Miss Renshaw who vanishes: the other is a poet and gardener named Morgan who is also Miss Renshaw’s secret lover. Later, with the revelation of a dark past, he is suspected in absentia of being responsible for Miss Renshaw’s vanishment, with implications of rape and murder, though her body is never found. Morgan, who could partly figure as the Piper, is described early on in the novel as having “beautiful eyes, soft, brown, wet with tears, like a stuffed toy” (Dubosarsky 11). This disarming image may seem a world away from the ambiguously disturbing figure of the legendary Piper, yet not only does it fit with the children’s naïve perception of the world, it also echoes the fact that the children in the original story were not afraid of the Piper, but followed him willingly. However, that is complicated by the fact that Morgan does not lure the children; it is Miss Renshaw who follows him—and the children follow her, who could be seen as the other half of the Piper. The Golden Day similarly transforms the other Piper motifs in its own original way. The children are only literally lost for a short time, when their teacher vanishes and they are left to make their own way back from the cave; yet it could be argued that metaphorically, the girls are “lost” to childhood from that moment, in terms of never being able to go back to the state of innocence in which they were before that day. Their safe, ordered school community will never be the same again, haunted by the inexplicability of the events of that day. Meanwhile, the exploration of Australian place—the depiction of the Memorial Gardens where Miss Renshaw enjoins them to write poetry, the uncomfortable descent over rocks to the beach, and the fateful cave—is made through the eyes of children, not the adolescents and adults of Picnic at Hanging Rock. The girls are not yet in that liminal space which is adolescence and so their impressions of what the places represent are immediate, instinctive, yet confused. They don’t like the cave and can’t wait to get out of it, whereas the beach inspires them with a sense of freedom and the gardens with a sense of enchantment. But in each place, those feelings are mixed both with ordinary concerns and with seemingly random associations that are nevertheless potently evocative. For example, in the cave, Cubby senses a threateningly weightless atmosphere, a feeling of reality shifting, which she associates, apparently confusedly, with the hanging of Ronald Ryan, reported that very day. In this way, Dubosarsky subtly gestures towards the sinister inevitability of the following events, and creates a growing tension that will eventually fade but never fully dissipate. At the end, the novel takes an unexpected turn which is as destabilising as the ending of the Pied Piper story, and as open-ended in its transformative effects as the original tale: “And at that moment Cubby realised she was not going to turn into the person she had thought she would become. There was something inside her head now that would make her a different person, though she scarcely understood what it was” (Dubosarsky 148). The eruption of the uncanny into ordinary life will never leave her now, as it will never leave the other girls who followed Miss Renshaw and Morgan into the literally hollow hill of the cave and emerged alone into a transformed world. It isn’t just childhood that Cubby has lost but also any possibility of a comforting sense of the firm borders of reality. As in the Pied Piper, ambiguity and loss combine to create questions which cannot be logically answered, only dimly apprehended.Christopher Koch’s 1985 novel The Doubleman, winner of the Miles Franklin Award, also explores the power of place and the motif of lost children, but unlike the other two novels examined in this essay depicts an actual “incarnated” Piper motif in the mysteriously powerful figure of Clive Broderick, brilliant guitarist and charismatic teacher/guru, whose office, significantly, is situated in a subterranean space of knowledge—a basement room beneath a bookshop. Both central yet peripheral to the main action of the novel, touched with hints of the supernatural which never veer into overt fantasy, Broderick remains an enigma to the end. Set, like The Golden Day, in the 1960s, The Doubleman is narrated in the first person by Richard Miller, in adulthood a producer of a successful folk-rock group, the Rymers, but in childhood an imaginative, troubled polio survivor, with a crutch and a limp. It is noteworthy here that in the Grimms’ version of the Pied Piper, two children are left behind, despite following the Piper: one is blind, one is lame. And it is the lame boy who tells the townspeople what he glimpsed at Koppen Hill. In creating the character of Broderick, the author blends the traditional tropes of the Piper figure with Mephistophelian overtones and a strong influence from fairy lore, specifically the idea of the “doubleman,” here drawn from the writings of seventeenth-century Scottish pastor, the Reverend Robert Kirk of Aberfoyle. Kirk’s 1691 book The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies is the earliest known serious attempt at objective description of the fairy beliefs of Gaelic-speaking Highlanders. His own precisely dated life-story and ambiguous end—it is said he did not die but is forever a prisoner of the fairies—has eerie parallels to the Piper story. “And there is the uncanny, powerful and ambiguous fact of the matter. Here is a man, named, born, lived, who lived a fairy story, really lived it: and in the popular imagination, he lives still” (Masson).Both in his creative and his non-fiction work Koch frequently evoked what he called “the Otherland,” which he depicted as a liminal, ambiguous, destabilising but nevertheless very real and potent presence only thinly veiled by the everyday world. This Otherland is not the same in all his fictions, but is always part of an actual place, whether that be Java in The Year of Living Dangerously, Hobart and Sydney in The Doubleman, Tasmania, Vietnam and Cambodia in Highways to a War, and Ireland and Tasmania in Out of Ireland. It is this sense of the “Otherland” below the surface, a fairy tale, mythical realm beyond logic or explanation, which gives his work its distinctive and particular power. And in The Doubleman, this motif, set within a vividly evoked real world, complete with precise period detail, transforms the Piper figure into one which could easily appear in a Hobart lane, yet which loses none of its uncanny potency. As Noel Henricksen writes in his study of Koch’s work, Island and Otherland, “Behind the membrane of Hobart is Otherland, its manifestations a spectrum stretched between the mystical and the spiritually perverted” (213).This is Broderick’s first appearance, described through twelve-year-old Richard Miller’s eyes: Tall and thin in his long dark overcoat, he studied me for the whole way as he approached, his face absolutely serious . . . The man made me uneasy to a degree for which there seemed to be no explanation . . . I was troubled by the notion that he was no ordinary man going to work at all: that he was not like other people, and that his interest couldn’t be explained so simply. (Koch, Doubleman 3)That first encounter is followed by another, more disturbing still, when Broderick speaks to the boy, eyes fixed on him: “. . . hooded by drooping lids, they were entirely without sympathy, yet nevertheless interested, and formidably intelligent” (5).The sense of danger that Broderick evokes in the boy could be explained by a sinister hint of paedophilia. But though Broderick is a predator of sorts on young people, nothing is what it seems; no rational explanation encompasses the strange effect of his presence. It is not until Richard is a young man, in the company of his musical friend Brian Brady, that he comes across Broderick again. The two young men are looking in the window of a music shop, when Broderick appears beside them, and as Richard observes, just as in a fairy tale, “He didn’t seem to have changed or aged . . .” (44). But the shock of his sudden re-appearance is mixed with something else now, as Broderick engages Brady in conversation, ignoring Richard, “. . . as though I had failed some test, all that time ago, and the man had no further use for me” (45).What happens next, as Broderick demonstrates his musical prowess, becomes Brady’s teacher, and introduces them to his disciple, young bass player Darcy Burr, will change the young men’s lives forever and set them on a path that leads both to great success and to living nightmare, even after Broderick’s apparent disappearance, for Burr will take on the Piper’s mantle. Koch’s depiction of the lost children motif is distinctively different to the other two novels examined in this essay. Their fate is not so much a mystery as a tragedy and a warning. The lost children of The Doubleman are also lost children of the sixties, bright, talented young people drawn through drugs, immersive music, and half-baked mysticism into darkness and horrifying violence. In his essay “California Dreaming,” published in the collection Crossing the Gap, Koch wrote about this subterranean aspect of the sixties, drawing a connection between it and such real-life sinister “Pipers” as Charles Manson (60). Broderick and Burr are not the same as the serial killer Manson, of course; but the spell they cast over the “lost children” who follow them is only different in degree, not in kind. In the end of the novel, the spell is broken and the world is again transformed. Yet fittingly it is a melancholy transformation: an end of childhood dreams of imaginative potential, as well as dangerous illusions: “And I knew now that it was all gone—like Harrigan Street, and Broderick, and the district of Second-Hand” (Koch, Doubleman 357). The power of place, the last of the Piper motifs, is also deeply embedded in The Doubleman. In fact, as with the idea of Otherland, place—or Island, as Henricksen evocatively puts it—is a recurring theme in Koch’s work. He identified primarily and specifically as a Tasmanian writer rather than as simply Australian, pointing out in an essay, “The Lost Hemisphere,” that because of its landscape and latitude, different to the mainland of Australia, Tasmania “genuinely belongs to a different region from the continent” (Crossing the Gap 92). In The Doubleman, Richard Miller imbues his familiar and deeply loved home landscape with great mystical power, a power which is both inherent within it as it is, but also expressive of the Otherland. In “A Tasmanian Tone,” another essay from Crossing the Gap, Koch describes that tone as springing “from a sense of waiting in the landscape: the tense yet serene expectancy of some nameless revelation” (118). But Koch could also write evocatively of landscapes other than Tasmanian ones. The unnerving climax of The Doubleman takes place in Sydney—significantly, as in The Golden Day, in a liminal, metaphysically charged place of rocks and water. That place, which is real, is called Point Piper. In conclusion, the original tale’s three main motifs—lost children, the enigma of the Piper, and the power of place—have been explored in distinctive ways in each of the three novels examined in this article. Contemporary Australia may be a world away from medieval Germany, but the uncanny liminality and capacious ambiguity of the Pied Piper tale has made it resonate potently within these major Australian fictions. Transformed and transformative within the Australian imagination, the theme of the Pied Piper threads like a faintly-heard snatch of unearthly music through the apparently mimetic realism of the novels, destabilising readers’ expectations and leaving them with subversively unanswered questions. ReferencesBird, Carmel. “Dreaming the Place: An Exploration of Antipodean Narratives.” Griffith Review 42 (2013). 1 May 2016 <https://griffithreview.com/articles/dreaming-the-place/>.Dubosarsky, Ursula. The Golden Day. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2011.Fiander, Lisa M. “Writing in A Fairy Story Landscape: Fairy Tales and Contemporary Australian Fiction.” Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 2 (2003). 30 April 2016 <http://openjournals.library.usyd.edu.au/index.php/JASAL/index>.Henricksen, Noel. Island and Otherland: Christopher Koch and His Books. Melbourne: Educare, 2003.Knox, Malcolm. “A Country of Lost Children.” Sydney Morning Herald 15 Aug. 2009. 1 May 2016 <http://www.smh.com.au/national/a-country-of-lost-children-20090814-el8d.html>.Koch, Christopher. The Doubleman. 1985. Sydney: Minerva, 1996.Koch, Christopher. Crossing the Gap: Memories and Reflections. 1987. Sydney: Vintage, 2000. Lindsay, Joan. Picnic at Hanging Rock. 1967. Melbourne: Penguin, 1977.Masson, Sophie. “Captive in Fairyland: The Strange Case of Robert Kirk of Aberfoyle.” Nation and Federation in the Celtic World: Papers from the Fourth Australian Conference of Celtic Studies, University of Sydney, June–July 2001. Ed. Pamela O’Neil. Sydney: University of Sydney Celtic Studies Foundation, 2003. Mieder, Wolfgang. “The Pied Piper: Origin, History, and Survival of a Legend.” Tradition and Innovation in Folk Literature. 1987. London: Routledge Revivals, 2015.Pierce, Peter. The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.Steele, Kathleen. “Fear and Loathing in the Australian Bush: Gothic Landscapes in Bush Studies and Picnic at Hanging Rock.” Colloquy 20 (2010): 33–56. 27 July 2016 <http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/wp-content/arts/files/colloquy/colloquy_issue_20_december_2010/steele.pdf>.

Woodward, Caroline. Singing Away the Dark. Illus. Julie Morstad. Vancouver: Simply Read Books, 2010. Print. Verse has always been present in texts for children, and it is a pleasure to read a modern children’s book that employs verse effectively. Singing Away the Dark is a poem about a young girl traversing forest and field on a dark, winter morning to catch the bus to her rural school. Thematically, the journey is about a child’s emotional resourcefulness in the face of the routine but intimidating challenge of walking alone through the dark countryside. The verse is spare, balanced, and evocative and flows nicely when read aloud. What elevates Singing Away the Dark above the text’s potential for a reductionist, sentimental reading is the confluence of Woodward’s verse and Julie Morstad’s illustrations. Expressive, spacious, with a balance of stark and detailed representation, Singing Away the Dark’s illustrations look Canadian. The feeling they evoke along with the text speaks directly to a current conception of what childhood in this country contributes to our national sense of aesthetics and our place in the world. I came upon my four year old “reading” Singing Away the Dark independently. Noticing my presence, she said, haltingly, “Mom… the pictures in this book are very… beautiful.” Her awe-struck reaction seemed to mirror a facet of the Canadian experience—being stunned, silent in the grip of the vast, rather uncanny beauty of the wilderness. Woodward and Morstad have succeeded in imbuing Singing Away the Dark with a nuanced emotional weight and a sensibility that speaks to something intrinsic in the experience of being Canadian. To encounter a beautiful and very personal example of Canadiana like Singing Away the Dark is thrilling. For it to be appealing to, and appropriate for, pre-schoolers, early readers, and older children interested in poetry is even better. Recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Matilda RocheMatilda spends her days lavishing attention on the University of Alberta’s metadata but children’s illustrated books, literature for young adults and graphic novels also make her heart sing. Her reviews benefit from the critical influence of a four year old daughter and a one year old son – both geniuses. Matilda’s super power is the ability to read comic books aloud.

Diaspora This article looks at diaspora through the transformations of an established public service broadcaster, the BBC World Service, by considering some of the findings of the AHRC-funded Tuning In: Contact Zones at the BBC World Service, which is part of the Diasporas, Migration and Identities program. Tuning In has six themes, each of which focuses upon the role of the BBC WS: The Politics of Translation, Diasporic Nationhood, Religious Transnationalism, Sport across Diasporas, Migrating Music and Drama for Development. The World Service, which was until 2011 funded by the Foreign Office, was set up to cater for the British diaspora and had the specific remit of transmitting ideas about Britishness to its audiences overseas. Tuning In demonstrates interrelationships between the global and the local in the diasporic contact zone of the BBC World Service, which has provided a mediated home for the worldwide British diaspora since its inception in 1932. The local and the global have merged, elided, and separated at different times and in different spaces in the changing story of the BBC (Briggs). The BBC WS is both local and global with activities that present Britishness both at home and abroad. The service has, however, come a long way since its early days as the Empire Service. Audiences for the World Service’s 31 foreign language services, radio, television, and Internet facilities include substantive non-British/English-speaking constituencies, rendering it a contact zone for the exploration of ideas and political opportunities on a truly transnational scale. This heterogeneous body of exilic, refugee intellectuals, writers, and artists now operates alongside an ongoing expression of Britishness in all its diverse reconfiguration. This includes the residual voice of empire and its patriarchal paternalism, the embrace of more recent expressions of neoliberalism as well as traditional values of impartiality and objectivism and, in the case of the arts, elements of bohemianism and creative innovation. The World Service might have begun as a communication system for the British ex-pat diaspora, but its role has changed along with the changing relationship between Britain and its colonial past. In the terrain of sport, for example, cricket, the “game of empire,” has shifted from Britain to the Indian subcontinent (Guha) with the rise of “Twenty 20” and the Indian Premier League (IPL); summed up in Ashis Nandy’s claim that “cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the English” (Nandy viii). English county cricket dominated the airways of the World Service well into the latter half of the twentieth century, but the audiences of the service have demanded a response to social and cultural change and the service has responded. Sport can thus be seen to have offered a democratic space in which new diasporic relations can be forged as well as one in which colonial and patriarchal values are maintained. The BBC WS today is part of a network through which non-British diasporic peoples can reconnect with their home countries via the service, as well as an online forum for debate across the globe. In many regions of the world, it continues to be the single most trusted source of information at times of crisis and disaster because of its traditions of impartiality and objectivity, even though (as noted in the article on Al-Jazeera in this special issue) this view is hotly contested. The principles of objectivity and impartiality are central to the BBC WS, which may seem paradoxical since it is funded by the Commonwealth and Foreign office, and its origins lie in empire and colonial discourse. Archive material researched by our project demonstrates the specifically ideological role of what was first called the Empire Service. The language of empire was deployed in this early programming, and there is an explicit expression of an ideological purpose (Hill). For example, at the Imperial Conference in 1930, the service was supported in terms of its political powers of “strengthening ties” between parts of the empire. This view comes from a speech by John Reith, the BBC’s first Director General, which was broadcast when the service opened. In this speech, broadcasting is identified as having come to involve a “connecting and co-ordinating link between the scattered parts of the British Empire” (Reith). Local British values are transmitted across the globe. Through the service, empire and nation are reinstated through the routine broadcasting of cyclical events, the importance of which Scannell and Cardiff describe as follows: Nothing so well illustrates the noiseless manner in which the BBC became perhaps the central agent of national culture as its cyclical role; the cyclical production year in year out, of an orderly, regular progression of festivities, rituals and celebrations—major and minor, civic and sacred—that mark the unfolding of the broadcast year. (278; italics in the original) State occasions and big moments, including those directly concerned with governance and affairs of state, and those which focused upon sport and religion, were a big part in these “noiseless” cycles, and became key elements in the making of Britishness across the globe. The BBC is “noiseless” because the timetable is assumed and taken for granted as not only what is but what should be. However, the BBC WS has been and has had to be responsive to major shifts in global and local—and, indeed, glocal—power geometries that have led to spatial transformations, notably in the reconfiguration of the service in the era of postcolonialism. Some of these massive changes have involved the large-scale movement of people and a concomitant rethinking of diaspora as a concept. Empire, like nation, operates as an “imagined community,” too big to be grasped by individuals (Anderson), as well as a material actuality. The dynamics of identification are rarely linear and there are inconsistencies and disruptions: even when the voice is officially that of empire, the practice of the World Service is much more diverse, nuanced, and dialogical. The BBC WS challenges boundaries through the connectivities of communication and through different ways of belonging and, similarly, through a problematisation of concepts like attachment and detachment; this is most notable in the way in which programming has adapted to new diasporic audiences and in the reworkings of spatiality in the shift from empire to diversity via multiculturalism. There are tensions between diaspora and multiculturalism that are apparent in a discussion of broadcasting and communication networks. Diaspora has been distinguished by mobility and hybridity (Clifford, Hall, Bhaba, Gilroy) and it has been argued that the adjectival use of diasporic offers more opportunity for fluidity and transformation (Clifford). The concept of diaspora, as it has been used to explain the fluidity and mobility of diasporic identifications, can challenge more stabilised, “classic” understandings of diaspora (Chivallon). A hybrid version of diaspora might sit uneasily with a strong sense of belonging and with the idea that the broadcast media offer a multicultural space in which each voice can be heard and a wide range of cultures are present. Tuning In engaged with ways of rethinking the BBC’s relationship to diaspora in the twenty-first century in a number of ways: for example, in the intersection of discursive regimes of representation; in the status of public service broadcasting; vis-à-vis the consequences of diverse diasporic audiences; through the role of cultural intermediaries such as journalists and writers; and via global economic and political materialities (Gillespie, Webb and Baumann). Tuning In thus provided a multi-themed and methodologically diverse exploration of how the BBC WS is itself a series of spaces which are constitutive of the transformation of diasporic identifications. Exploring the part played by the BBC WS in changing and continuing social flows and networks involves, first, reconfiguring what is understood by transnationalism, diaspora, and postcolonial relationalities: in particular, attending to how these transform as well as sometimes reinstate colonial and patriarchal discourses and practices, thus bringing together different dimensions of the local and the global. Tuning In ranges across different fields, embracing cultural, social, and political areas of experience as represented in broadcasting coverage. These fields illustrate the educative role of the BBC and the World Service that is also linked to its particular version of impartiality; just as The Archers was set up to provide information and guidance through a narrative of everyday life to rural communities and farmers after the Second World War, so the Afghan version plays an “edutainment” role (Skuse) where entertainment also serves an educational, public service information role. Indeed, the use of soap opera genre such as The Archers as a vehicle for humanitarian and health information has been very successful over the past decade, with the “edutainment” genre becoming a feature of the World Service’s broadcasting in places such as Rwanda, Somalia, Nigeria, India, Nepal, Burma, Afghanistan, and Cambodia. In a genre that has been promoted by the World Service Trust, the charitable arm of the BBC WS uses drama formats to build transnational production relationships with media professionals and to strengthen creative capacities to undertake behaviour change through communication work. Such programming, which is in the tradition of the BBC WS, draws upon the service’s expertise and exhibits both an ideological commitment to progressive social intervention and a paternalist approach drawing upon colonialist legacies. Nowadays, however, the BBC WS can be considered a diasporic contact zone, providing sites of transnational intra-diasporic contact as well as cross-cultural encounters, spaces for cross-diasporic creativity and representation, and a forum for cross-cultural dialogue and potentially cosmopolitan translations (Pratt, Clifford). These activities are, however, still marked by historically forged asymmetric power relations, notably of colonialism, imperialism, and globalisation, as well as still being dominated by hegemonic masculinity in many parts of the service, which thus represent sites of contestation, conflict, and transgression. Conversely, diasporic identities are themselves co-shaped by media representations (Sreberny). The diasporic contact zone is a relational space in which diasporic identities are made and remade and contested. Tuning In employed a diverse range of methods to analyse the part played by the BBC WS in changing and continuing social and cultural flows, networks, and reconfigurations of transnationalisms and diaspora, as well as reinstating colonial, patriarchal practices. The research deconstructed some assumptions and conditions of class-based elitism, colonialism, and patriarchy through a range of strategies. Texts are, of course, central to this work, with the BBC Archives at Caversham (near Reading) representing the starting point for many researchers. The archive is a rich source of material for researchers which carries a vast range of data including fragile memos written on scraps of paper: a very local source of global communications. Other textual material occupies the less locatable cyberspace, for example in the case of Have Your Say exchanges on the Web. People also featured in the project, through the media, in cyberspace, and physical encounters, all of which demonstrate the diverse modes of connection that have been established. Researchers worked with the BBC WS in a variety of ways, not only through interviews and ethnographic approaches, such as participant observation and witness seminars, but also through exchanges between the service, its practitioners, and the researchers (for example, through broadcasts where the project provided the content and the ideas and researchers have been part of programs that have gone out on the BBC WS (Goldblatt, Webb), bringing together people who work for the BBC and Tuning In researchers). On this point, it should be remembered that Bush House is, itself, a diasporic space which, from its geographical location in the Strand in London, has brought together diasporic people from around the globe to establish international communication networks, and has thus become the focus and locus of some of our research. What we have understood by the term “diasporic space” in this context includes both the materialities of architecture and cyberspace which is the site of digital diasporas (Anderssen) and, indeed, the virtual exchanges featured on “Have Your Say,” the online feedback site (Tuning In). Living the Glocal The BBC WS offers a mode of communication and a series of networks that are spatially located both in the UK, through the material presence of Bush House, and abroad, through the diasporic communities constituting contemporary audiences. The service may have been set up to provide news and entertainment for the British diaspora abroad, but the transformation of the UK into a multi-ethnic society “at home,” alongside its commitment to, and the servicing of, no less than 32 countries abroad, demonstrates a new mission and a new balance of power. Different diasporic communities, such as multi-ethnic Londoners, and local and British Muslims in the north of England, demonstrate the dynamics and ambivalences of what is meant by “diaspora” today. For example, the BBC and the WS play an ambiguous role in the lives of UK Muslim communities with Pakistani connections, where consumers of the international news can feel that the BBC is complicit in the conflation of Muslims with terrorists. Engaging Diaspora Audiences demonstrated the diversity of audience reception in a climate of marginalisation, often bordering on moral panic, and showed how diasporic audiences often use Al-Jazeera or Pakistani and Urdu channels, which are seen to take up more sympathetic political positions. It seems, however, that more egalitarian conversations are becoming possible through the channels of the WS. The participation of local people in the BBC WS global project is seen, for example, as in the popular “Witness Seminars” that have both a current focus and one that is projected into the future, as in the case of the “2012 Generation” (that is, the young people who come of age in 2012, the year of the London Olympics). The Witness Seminars demonstrate the recuperation of past political and social events such as “Bangladesh in 1971” (Tuning In), “The Cold War seminar” (Tuning In) and “Diasporic Nationhood” (the cultural movements reiterated and recovered in the “Literary Lives” project (Gillespie, Baumann and Zinik). Indeed, the WS’s current focus on the “2012 Generation,” including an event in which 27 young people (each of whom speaks one of the WS languages) were invited to an open day at Bush House in 2009, vividly illustrates how things have changed. Whereas in 1948 (the last occasion when the Olympic Games were held in London), the world came to London, it is arguable that, in 2012, in contemporary multi-ethnic Britain, the world is already here (Webb). This enterprise has the advantage of giving voice to the present rather than filtering the present through the legacies of colonialism that remain a problem for the Witness Seminars more generally. The democratising possibilities of sport, as well as the restrictions of its globalising elements, are well represented by Tuning In (Woodward). Sport has, of course become more globalised, especially through the development of Internet and satellite technologies (Giulianotti) but it retains powerful local affiliations and identifications. At all levels and in diverse places, there are strong attachments to local and national teams that are constitutive of communities, including diasporic and multi-ethnic communities. Sport is both typical and distinctive of the BBC World Service; something that is part of a wider picture but also an area of experience with a life of its own. Our “Sport across Diasporas” project has thus explored some of the routes the World Service has travelled in its engagement with sport in order to provide some understanding of the legacy of empire and patriarchy, as well as engaging with the multiplicities of change in the reconstruction of Britishness. Here, it is important to recognise that what began as “BBC Sport” evolved into “World Service Sport.” Coverage of the world’s biggest sporting events was established through the 1930s to the 1960s in the development of the BBC WS. However, it is not only the global dimensions of sporting events that have been assumed; so too are national identifications. There is no question that the superiority of British/English sport is naturalised through its dominance of the BBC WS airways, but the possibilities of reinterpretation and re-accommodation have also been made possible. There has, indeed, been a changing place of sport in the BBC WS, which can only be understood with reference to wider changes in the relationship between broadcasting and sport, and demonstrates the powerful synchronies between social, political, technological, economic, and cultural factors, notably those that make up the media–sport–commerce nexus that drives so much of the trajectory of contemporary sport. Diasporic audiences shape the schedule as much as what is broadcast. There is no single voice of the BBC in sport. The BBC archive demonstrates a variety of narratives through the development and transformation of the World Service’s sports broadcasting. There are, however, silences: notably those involving women. Sport is still a patriarchal field. However, the imperial genealogies of sport are inextricably entwined with the social, political, and cultural changes taking place in the wider world. There is no detectable linear narrative but rather a series of tensions and contradictions that are reflected and reconfigured in the texts in which deliberations are made. In sport broadcasting, the relationship of the BBC WS with its listeners is, in many instances, genuinely dialogic: for example, through “Have Your Say” websites and internet forums, and some of the actors in these dialogic exchanges are the broadcasters themselves. The history of the BBC and the World Service is one which manifests a degree of autonomy and some spontaneity on the part of journalists and broadcasters. For example, in the case of the BBC WS African sports program, Fast Track (2009), many of the broadcasters interviewed report being able to cover material not technically within their brief; news journalists are able to engage with sporting events and sports journalists have covered social and political news (Woodward). Sometimes this is a matter of taking the initiative or simply of being in the right place at the right time, although this affords an agency to journalists which is increasingly unlikely in the twenty-first century. The Politics of Translation: Words and Music The World Service has played a key role as a cultural broker in the political arena through what could be construed as “educational broadcasting” via the wider terrain of the arts: for example, literature, drama, poetry, and music. Over the years, Bush House has been a home-from-home for poets: internationalists, translators from classical and modern languages, and bohemians; a constituency that, for all its cosmopolitanism, was predominantly white and male in the early days. For example, in the 1930s and 1940s, Louis MacNeice was commissioning editor and surrounded by a friendship network of salaried poets, such as W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, C. Day Lewis, and Stephen Spender, who wrote and performed their work for the WS. The foreign language departments of the BBC WS, meanwhile, hired émigrés and exiles from their countries’ educated elites to do similar work. The biannual, book-format journal Modern Poetry in Translation (MPT), which was founded in 1965 by Daniel Weissbort and Ted Hughes, included a dedication in Weissbort’s final issue (MPT 22, 2003) to “Poets at Bush House.” This volume amounts to a celebration of the BBC WS and its creative culture, which extended beyond the confines of broadcasting spaces. The reminiscences in “Poets at Bush House” suggest an institutional culture of informal connections and a fluidity of local exchanges that is resonant of the fluidity of the flows and networks of diaspora (Cheesman). Music, too, has distinctive characteristics that mark out this terrain on the broadcast schedule and in the culture of the BBC WS. Music is differentiated from language-centred genres, making it a particularly powerful medium of cross-cultural exchange. Music is portable and yet is marked by a cultural rootedness that may impede translation and interpretation. Music also carries ambiguities as a marker of status across borders, and it combines aesthetic intensity and diffuseness. The Migrating Music project demonstrated BBC WS mediation of music and identity flows (Toynbee). In the production and scheduling notes, issues of migration and diaspora are often addressed directly in the programming of music, while the movement of peoples is a leitmotif in all programs in which music is played and discussed. Music genres are mobile, diasporic, and can be constitutive of Paul Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic” (Gilroy), which foregrounds the itinerary of West African music to the Caribbean via the Middle Passage, cross-fertilising with European traditions in the Americas to produce blues and other hybrid forms, and the journey of these forms to Europe. The Migrating Music project focused upon the role of the BBC WS as narrator of the Black Atlantic story and of South Asian cross-over music, from bhangra to filmi, which can be situated among the South Asian diaspora in east and south Africa as well as the Caribbean where they now interact with reggae, calypso, Rapso, and Popso. The transversal flows of music and lyrics encompasses the lived experience of the different diasporas that are accommodated in the BBC WS schedules: for example, they keep alive the connection between the Irish “at home” and in the diaspora through programs featuring traditional music, further demonstrating the interconnections between local and global attachments as well as points of disconnection and contradiction. Textual analysis—including discourse analysis of presenters’ speech, program trailers and dialogue and the BBC’s own construction of “world music”—has revealed that the BBC WS itself performs a constitutive role in keeping alive these traditions. Music, too, has a range of emotional affects which are manifest in the semiotic analyses that have been conducted of recordings and performances. Further, the creative personnel who are involved in music programming, including musicians, play their own role in this ongoing process of musical migration. Once again, the networks of people involved as practitioners become central to the processes and systems through which diasporic audiences are re-produced and engaged. Conclusion The BBC WS can claim to be a global and local cultural intermediary not only because the service was set up to engage with the British diaspora in an international context but because the service, today, is demonstrably a voice that is continually negotiating multi-ethnic audiences both in the UK and across the world. At best, the World Service is a dynamic facilitator of conversations within and across diasporas: ideas are relocated, translated, and travel in different directions. The “local” of a British broadcasting service, established to promote British values across the globe, has been transformed, both through its engagements with an increasingly diverse set of diasporic audiences and through the transformations in how diasporas themselves self-define and operate. On the BBC WS, demographic, social, and cultural changes mean that the global is now to be found in the local of the UK and any simplistic separation of local and global is no longer tenable. The educative role once adopted by the BBC, and then the World Service, nevertheless still persists in other contexts (“from Ambridge to Afghanistan”), and clearly the WS still treads a dangerous path between the paternalism and patriarchy of its colonial past and its responsiveness to change. In spite of competition from television, satellite, and Internet technologies which challenge the BBC’s former hegemony, the BBC World Service continues to be a dynamic space for (re)creating and (re)instating diasporic audiences: audiences, texts, and broadcasters intersect with social, economic, political, and cultural forces. The monologic “voice of empire” has been countered and translated into the language of diversity and while, at times, the relationship between continuity and change may be seen to exist in awkward tension, it is clear that the Corporation is adapting to the needs of its twenty-first century audience. ReferencesAnderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities, Reflections of the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Anderssen, Matilda. “Digital Diasporas.” 2010. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www8.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/diasporas/cross-research/digital-diasporas›. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Briggs, Asa. A History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Volume II: The Golden Age of Wireless. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. Cheesman, Tom. “Poetries On and Off Air.” 2010. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www8.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/diasporas/cross-research/bush-house-cultures›. Chivallon, Christine. “Beyond Gilroy’s Black Atlantic: The Experience of the African Diaspora.” Diaspora 11.3 (2002): 359–82. Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Fast Track. BBC, 2009. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/sport/2009/03/000000_fast_track.shtml›. Gillespie, Marie, Alban Webb, and Gerd Baumann (eds.). “The BBC World Service 1932–2007: Broadcasting Britishness Abroad.” Special Issue. The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 28.4 (Oct. 2008). Gillespie, Marie, Gerd Baumann, and Zinovy Zinik. “Poets at Bush House.” 2010. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www8.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/diasporas/about›. Gilroy, Paul. Black Atlantic. MA: Harvard UP, 1993. Giulianotti, Richard. Sport: A Critical Sociology. Cambridge: Polity, 2005. Goldblatt, David. “The Cricket Revolution.” 2009. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0036ww9›. Guha, Ramachandra. A Corner of a Foreign Field: The Indian History of an English Game. London: Picador, 2002. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. Ed. Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990, 223–37. Hill, Andrew. “The BBC Empire Service: The Voice, the Discourse of the Master and Ventriloquism.” South Asian Diaspora 2.1 (2010): 25–38. Hollis, Robert, Norma Rinsler, and Daniel Weissbort. “Poets at Bush House: The BBC World Service.” Modern Poetry in Translation 22 (2003). Nandy, Ashis. The Tao of Cricket: On Games of Destiny and the Destiny of Games. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1989. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992. Reith, John. “Opening of the Empire Service.” In “Empire Service Policy 1932-1933”, E4/6: 19 Dec. 1932. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.open.ac.uk/socialsciences/diasporas/research.htm›. Scannell, Paddy, and David Cardiff. A Social History of British Broadcasting, 1922-1938. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991. Skuse, Andrew. “Drama for Development.” 2010. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www8.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/diasporas/core-research/drama-for-development›. Sreberny, Annabelle. “The BBC World Service and the Greater Middle East: Comparisons, Contrasts, Conflicts.” Guest ed. Annabelle Sreberny, Marie Gillespie, Gerd Baumann. Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 3.2 (2010). Toynbee, Jason. “Migrating Music.” 2010. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www8.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/diasporas/core-research/migrating-music›. Tuning In. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.open.ac.uk/socialsciences/diasporas/index.htm›. 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Lorri Neilsen, whose feature article appears in this edition of M/C Journal, is Professor of Education at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Neilsen has been teaching and researching in literacy studies for more than four decades. She is internationally recognised as a poet and as an arts-based research methodologist specialising in lyric inquiry. In the latter half of this last decade she was appointed for a five year term to be the Poet Laureate for Nova Scotia. As an academic, she has published widely under the name of Lorri Neilsen; as a poet, she uses Lorri Neilsen Glenn. In this article I refer to her as Neilsen. This article reflects specifically on the poetics and the politics of the work of poet-scholar Lorri Neilsen. In doing so, it explores the theme of catastrophe in several senses. Firstly, it introduces the reader to the poetic articulations of the everyday catastrophes of grief and loss found in Neilsen’s recent work. Secondly, it uses Neilsen’s work on grief and loss to draw attention to a rarely recognised scholarly catastrophe: the catastrophe of the methodological divide between the humanities and the social sciences that runs the risk of creating, for the social sciences, a limiting and limited approach to research project design, knowledge production, and relationships between researchers and subjects, to which Lorri Neilsen’s ground-breaking use of lyric inquiry is a response. And thirdly, it alerts us to the need to fight to retain the arts and humanities within universities, in order to avoid a scholarly catastrophe of a different order. In undertaking this exploration, the article uses several terms with which some readers of M/C Journal might not be familiar. Research literacies is a term used to signal capacity and fluency in the understanding and use of research methodologies. Arts-based inquiry is the umbrella term used by researchers using their creative practice in the arts—in writing, theatre performance, visual arts, music, dance, movement—to lead them into new insights into the topic under investigation. This work is frequently embodied and sensuous. So, for example, the understanding of anorexia might be deepened by a dance performance or a series of paintings or a musical score devised in response to work with research participants; or, as I argue here, understandings of the everyday catastrophes of grief and loss might be deepened by the writing of poetry or expressive prose that uncovers nuance and sheds light in ways not possible using the more traditional research methodologies available to social scientists. Lyric inquiry, a sub-set of arts-based inquiry, is Neilsen’s own term for a research methodology that uses writing itself as the research tool, and whose hallmark is embodied language expressed as poem, song, or poetic prose, to “create the possibility of a resonant, ethical, engaged relationship between the knower and the known” (Handbook 94).This article, then, reflects on the research work of Lorri Neilsen. In this article I use Neilsen’s responses to grief and loss as the starting point to follow her journey from the early days of her involvement in literacy research to her present enchantment with arts-based inquiry in literacy and social science research. I outline her writing on research literacies, explore her notion of lyric inquiry as a crucial facet of arts-based research, and conclude with examples of her poetry born of creative reflection on what we might call everyday catastrophes. Ultimately I argue the need to avoid a scholarly catastrophe of a different order from those Neilsen explores, through the continued recognition of the crucial place of the arts in academic institutions.I open with excerpts from a piece in Lorri Neilsen’s collection, Threading Light, published in 2011. This piece, The Sea, written out of the grief of losing her aged mother, is one I find most moving. It begins: Days later—a week, a month, hard to tell—sun comes out of drizzle and ice and fog and snow showers, ripping open a bright day. Snow-mounded. If you were a kid, you’d look for your sled. He is sure the box of wrenches is in the cabin, and you know a drive to the country is better than another day in bed with Kleenex and a hacking cough, hiding a flayed heart, and pouring CBC into your ears around the clock. (104) The two figures in the piece, he and she, head south to their seaside cabin. They take a walk beside an ice-covered seashore.Today, you step carefully because of ice, and what you find catches your breath. For a brief moment you have escaped the grizzly claws of grief ripping at your chest. You are kneeling on the ice, touching the frosted edges of kelp and weeds, slimy umber and sienna, and putrid green growths that slurp in and out most of the year, but here, now, are stunned, immobile, impaled on the rocks by the cold. Desire is a feral animal; let it loose, it will seek beauty. You point out to each other tableaus: rimming white, translucent blues and greens, coppered plants flash-frozen, fringed by crystalline tatters. A Burtynsky, you think, but not man-made. This is life’s ebb, as Tu Fu wrote. The ocean’s winter verge. Death’s magnificent intaglio. Your fingers follow the lines of kelp: these things once lived, and moved. Take the long view, maybe they still do. You pause to sit on a cold rock and look at the sky; for a moment you are back beside her body, that last morning, your fingers on cooling flesh. Then, water, the sound of waves. Presence. You look up. He has found one periwinkle fused to a rock, then another. Several more. He places them in your hand, one by one, each dark brown ball with its own scurf of ice that gives off the smallest breath of mist as it touches the heat of your palm. Each a small jolt. This is what the sea creates while you are busy with your own tides: precise cups of glossy perfection with curves like a blues howl that open your heart, craning for light. (Threading Light 104–5)One of the things I appreciate most about Lorri Neilsen’s lyric work is her capacity to hold the miniscule simultaneously with the universal; a flash of insight under the arc of a timeless sky. “Smaller than small; larger than large,” write the Hindu prophets (Upanishads). “This is what the sea creates while you are busy with your own tides,” she writes, and in that moment of reading I am jolted into an awareness of the contours of grief that no amount of social scientific observation could provide: an awareness of the nature of self-absorption and inward focus so intense that even the most inevitable of natural rhythms—the ocean’s tides—are forgotten: forgotten, that is, until the protagonist is shaken awake again, by exquisite beauty, into a new kind of response-ability to the world. Lorri Neilsen’s feature article in this edition of M/C creates layer upon layer of insights exploring the notion that loss, an everyday catastrophe, involves a turning inside-out, a jolting into a new sense of self, or a propulsion out of an old, restrictive one; and that inevitably it propels us headlong into a state of living in the moment, of being present to what is, rather than distantly taking stock of what we have. As I ponder this experience, as a reader of her work, I re-experience that moment of stasis:physiologically we all know that experience of time suspended after shock, time inexplicably, irrationally, standing still. But what Neilsen has done so successfully as a poet-scholar, in my view, is not simply find words to express this turning inside out as poetry. Additionally, she has claimed the moment of poetic insight as a crucial form of knowledge-making that has a central and necessary place in illuminating our social worlds. This claim has far-reaching political significance for social science researchers, introducing, as it does, a re-invigorated understanding of the very concept of research:Research [she tells us] is not only the creation of products to market at the academic fair; research is the process of learning through the words, actions and revisionings of our daily life. […] Research is the attuned mind/body working purposefully to explore, to listen, to support, to transgress, to gather with care, to create, to disrupt, to offer back, to contribute, sometimes all at once […] Inquiry is praxis that cannot be boxed up and delivered: it is a story with no ending. (Knowing 264) Neilsen’s particular fascination is with lyric inquiry which she claims as political, poetic, and sustaining of the individual and the larger world: It has the capacity to develop voice and agency in both researcher and participant; it foregrounds conceptual and philosophical processes marked by metaphor, resonance and liminality; and it reunites us with the vivifying effects of imagination and beauty – those long-forgotten qualities that add grace and wisdom to public discourse. (Knowing 101)So what has led her here, to that place where lyric inquiry forms the basis of her engagement with the knowledge-making endeavour in the academy and beyond? As a feminist scholar fascinated by biography, by life writing and story, I find myself drawn as much towards the story of Neilsen’s evolution as a poet-scholar as to the work itself. How has she come to an awareness of the need to create new ways of doing research? What has she uncovered here about the ethics and the politics of doing research in the social world? As I read her work I become aware that her current desire to dance at the edge of the conventional research world has been driven as much by a series of professional catastrophes as by an underpinning desire for methodological innovation. Neilsen herself explores these issues in her 1998 collection of academic essays, called Knowing Her Place: Research Literacies and Feminist Occasions. There are several threads weaving their way through this account of a young academic researcher and scholar finding her way into a larger, wiser, more resonant space: there’s the story of the young graduate student learning the language of and experiencing the perpetual isolation of disembodied fact-finding statistically resonant research into literacy; there’s the story of the young mother juggling academic life and research and parenting, wanting to make sense to the teaching research participants she is working with, wanting to close the gap between the public and the private worlds, wanting to spend time with her partner and her two sons, especially her second son whose birth could have been a catastrophe but whose gentle ways of being in the world gifted them all with the desire to slow down, to see afresh; and, later, there’s the story of the mature woman whose impulse is to community and to solitude, to living with a generosity of spirit that takes seriously the intertwining of her poetic life and her academic and everyday worlds. Interwoven with these stories is the story of writing itself: here we find the formal disembodied writing of Western scientific research practices; here now is collectivist writing generated at kitchen tables, in community centres, in schools; here now is every mode of writing that evokes nuance and explores the senses; and here now too is the research writing that privileges response-ability, scholartistry, bodily sensation, reciprocity, engagement with the world.Neilsen’s account of this journey begins when, as a young postgraduate student doing research into literacy, she learned the language of statistical significance to measure syntactic complexity, noting, as she wrote up her MA, the distance between the language she had learned and the everyday language of the classroom teachers the research was meant to inform. The emphasis of this early research was on removing language from its context, isolating components of language for scrutiny, making findings that were replicable. In time she came to see this kind of knowledge-making as dry, limited, rule-bound, androcentric. From this disengaged, disembodied place she moved, over decades, into a space where compassion, wisdom, humility, and wonder combine to locate her as researcher who understands, alongside researcher David Smith, that “writing is a holy act, an articulation of limited understanding” (qtd. in Neilsen, Knowing 119). In an echo of Luce Irigaray’s insistence that the research and writing we do as fully alive feminist scholars will link the celestial and the terrestrial, the horizontal, and the vertical, and in a further echo of Helene Cixous’ claim that when writing from the body, “an opera inhabits me” (Cixous 53), Neilsen writes unabashedly of the metaphysical nature of her research world: Artful living, artful writing, connecting with a purpose to help each other transcend and grow through inquiry. Connection, embodiment, transformation, transcendence. All these expressions tap spiritual chords […] But if inquiry is to transcend the destructive circumstances of our lifeworlds, if its purpose is to make a difference, not a career, we cannot avoid using words such as vision, spirit, humanity, soul. Interest in metaphysical perspectives is not new in feminist circles, but is IS new in conventional research communities where the intangible, the deeply disturbing and consciousness-awakening dimensions of life are compartmentalized, reserved […] for a walk by the ocean, for the rare meditative times of our lives, if we find them at all […] But (she concludes) the awareness that we know when we live in the eternal present […] is an awareness full of tremendous power, and, ultimately, hope. (Knowing 280)In the final chapter of this 1998 text outlining her journey into research literacies, called Notes on Painting Ghosts and Writing the Poetry Report: Some Things I know But Not For Certain, Lorri Neilsen writes confidently against the grain of what she sees as the limits of androcentric research practices: Everything we know is at once out there and in here […] My place is to apprentice myself to the world, to paraphrase Merleau-Ponty, not in subservience and compliance, as the androcentric practices we have followed would keep me, but in reciprocity, curiosity and response-ability. What we must seek are the transgressive experiences and the fresh words which reveal us, in Annie Dillard’s words, ‘startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down bewildered’. (qtd. in Neilsen, Knowing 261)And in a gesture that I find heartwarming, she writes of the impact of being scooped up into a collective research-making endeavour, of belonging to a community of scholars (including poet-sociologists Laurel Richardson and Trinh T. Minh-ha) whose research agenda is to expand the ways we might know, to reflect the fullness and richness and complexity of the research endeavour itself, and, in so doing, of human experience: Time and enculturation have combined to make inquiry a terrain where I live, rather than a place I visit on occasion.Inquiry is less a stance and more an intentional gesture, a re-bodied approach to working with people, particularly women, on projects which matter to them locally and globally. Inquiry is a conspiracy, a breathing together, for which we need the conditions of being together and sharing a climate, or air, for breathing. Inquiry values difference, rather than fearing it, sees contiguity or complementarity as necessary for working together without suppressing our diversity. (Knowing 262) Hers is no airy-fairy disengaged mood-making endeavour. It is decidedly political: the inclination is to openness and growth, to take risks, to create critical spaces[…] When we make the assumptions of the norms of research problematic, we make the assumptions and the norms of life together on this planet problematic as well. We begin to dismantle the Western knowledge project, and we begin to learn a fundamental humility. Expanding our research literacies keeps us full of wonder, in spite of the shakey ground and the shadows. We can learn more when our pen is a tool of discovery, not domination.And her focus is ever on the artistry of research practices: The ontological and epistemological waters in which these [research] literacies continue to develop are social, political, ecological [...] Re-imagining inquiry is re-imagining ways to work with people and ideas which keep us, like the painter, the dancer, and the performance artist, watchfully poised, momentarily still, and yet fluidly in motion. (Knowing 263)In summary, then, the kind of writing that accompanies the research methodology that Lorri Neilsen has created cuts across the notion of knowledge as product, commodity, trump card. Knowing [for Neilsen] is an experience of immersion and expression rather than one of gathering data only to advance an argument […] A reader does not take away three key points or five examples. A reader comes away with the resonance of another’s world…our senses stimulated, our spirit and emotions affected. (Knowing 96) This kind of writing emerges from her desires to create a resonant, embodied, ethical, activist, feminist-honouring, and collaborative way to grapple with the nuance of human experience. This she calls lyric inquiry. Lyric inquiry sits on the margins, inhabits the liminal spaces, “places where we perceive patterns in new ways, find sensuous openings into new understandings, fresh concepts, wild possibilities” (Knowing 98). In her chapter on lyric inquiry in the 2008 Sage Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research, Neilsen argues that lyric inquiry leans on no other mode of enquiry: it stands on its own, resonant and expressive, inviting fresh ways to see, read, consider experience. Unlike the narrative enquiry that currently popularly accompanies much social science research in order to bolster an argument, or illustrate a point being made in policy formulation or discussion (Hopkins), lyric inquiry adopts its own mode, its own performative spaces. It’s a heady concept and, I would argue, a brave contribution to the repertoire of qualitative arts-based research methodologies.For me Lorri Neilsen’s stance as poet, writer, researcher, woman, is beautifully captured in her piece from Threading Light which she has titled Writing has always felt like praying. Here we glimpse the lives of four figures: the Buddha, Muhammad, Jesus Christ, and the poet herself, each responding to catastrophe of sorts: Gotama saw the face of his infant son and sleeping wife,shaved his head and beard, put on his yellow robe, andleft without saying good-bye. Duties, possessions,ties of the heart: all dustweighing down his soul. He walked and walked,seeking a life wide open, complete and pure as polished shell.In a cave away from the fray of Mecca, vendettas,and a world soured by commerce, Muhammadshook as the words of a new scripturecame to him. Surrendered himselfto its beauty, singing and weeping verse by verse, year by yearfor twenty-one years.Of course you remember the man from Galileewho carried on his back the very wood on whichhis blood was spilled. How he pushed back the rockfrom the front of the cave and – this is gospel –ascended, emptied of self and full of god, returningnow in offerings of bread and wine.I pace back and forth on a cliff above the unknowable, luredby slippery and maverick tales that call forth terror, crackthe earth, shatter my bones with light. I have no needto verify old brown marks of stigmata, translate Coptic fragments.A burlap robe on display in the cold stone air of the Church of Santa Croceis inscrutable: it tells me only that my body is a ragged garmentand will be discarded too.But here, now, I am ready as a tuned stringto witness what is ravenous, mythic. Here I am holy, misbegotten,gossip on the lips of the gods, forgotten by the time the cupsare washed and put away. So I start as I start every day,cobbling a makeshift pulpit, casting for truths as they are given me:Man, woman, child, sun, moon, breath, tears,Stone, sand, sea. (Threading Light 102–3) It is ironic that the kind of research that Neilsen advocates, research that draws specifically on the arts to create new methodologies for the uncovering of topics traditionally explored by the social sciences, is being developed at precisely that moment when university arts departments around the world are being dismantled, and their value questioned (See Cohen, NY Times; Donoghue, Chronicle of Higher Education; Kitcher, Republic). As I indicated at the beginning of the article, I use this homage to Lorri Neilsen and her work to make the broader point that we lose the arts and the humanities in our universities at our peril. It’s not just that the arts are a pleasant addition, a ruffle on the edge of the serious straight-tailored cut of the research garment: rather, as Neilsen has argued throughout her research and writing career, the arts are central to our survival as a response-able, interactive, creative, thoughtful species. To turn our back on the arts in contemporary research practices is already a dangerous erosion, a research and knowledge-making catastrophe which Neilsen’s lyric inquiry seeks to address: to lose the arts from universities altogether would be a catastrophe of a much higher order. References Cohen, Patricia. “In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth”. New York Times. 24 Feb. 2009. Cixous, Helene. Coming to Writing and Other Essays. Ed. Deborah Jensen. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.Dillard, Annie. The Writing Life. New York: Harper & Row, 1993. Donoghue, Frank. “Can the Humanities Survive the 21st Century?” The Chronicle of Higher Education. 5 Sep. 2010. Hopkins, Lekkie. “Why Narrative? Reflections on the Politics and Processes of Using Narrative in Refugee Research.” Tamara Journal for Critical Organisation and Inquiry 8.2 (2009): 135-45.Irigaray, Luce. “Sexual Difference.” The Irigaray Reader. Ed. Margaret Whitford. Oxford: Blackwell, 1987. 165-77. Kitcher, Philip. “The Trouble with Scientism”. New Republic. 4 May 2012.Muller, M. (trans.). The Upanishads. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1879.Neilsen Glenn, Lorri. Threading Light. Explorations in Loss and Poetry. Regina, SK: Hagios Press, 2011. Neilsen, Lorri. “Lyric Inquiry.” Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research. Eds. J. Gary Knowles and Ardra Cole. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2008. 88-98. Neilsen, Lorri. Knowing Her Place: Research Literacies and Feminist Occasions. San Francisco: Caddo Gap Press, and Halifax, NS: Backalong Books, 2008. Richardson, Laurel. “The Consequences of Poetic Representation: Writing the Self and Writing the Other.” Investigating Subjectivity: Windows on Lived Experience. Eds. Carolyn Ellis and Michael Flaherty. Newbury Park: Sage, 1992. 125-140. Richardson, Laurel. “Writing: A Method of Inquiry.” Handbook of Qualitative Research. Eds. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna. S. Lincoln. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1994. 959-978.Trinh, T. Minh-ha. Woman, Native, Other. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989.


 
 
 The following article is in response to a research project that took the form of a road trip from Perth to Lombadina re-enacting the journey undertaken by the characters in the play Bran Nue Dae by playwright Jimmy Chi and Broome band Kuckles. This project was facilitated by the assistance of a Creative and Research Publication Grant from the Faculty of Communications and Creative Industries, Edith Cowan University, Western Australia. The project was carried out by researchers Kara Jacob and Margaret Hair.
 
 One thing is plainly clear. Aboriginal art expresses the possibility of human intimacy with landscapes. This is the key to its power: it makes available a rich tradition of human ethics and relationships with place and other species to a worldwide audience. For the settler Australian audience, caught ambiguously between old and new lands, their appreciation of this art embodies at least a striving for the kind of citizenship that republicans wanted: to belong to this place rather than to another (Marcia Langton in Watson 191).
 
 
 Marcia Langton is talking here about painting. My question is whether this “kind of citizenship” can also be accessed through appreciation of indigenous theatre, and specifically through the play Bran Nue Dae, by playwright Jimmy Chi and Broome band Kuckles, a play closely linked to the Western Australian landscape through its appropriation of the road trip genre. The physical journey taken by the characters metaphorically takes them also through the contact history of black and white Australians in Western Australia. Significantly, the non-indigenous characters experience the redemptive power of “human intimacy with landscapes” through travelling to the traditional country of their road trip companions.
 
 The road trip genre typically places its characters on a quest for knowledge. American poet Gary Snyder says that the two sources of human knowledge are symbols and sense-impressions (vii). Bran Nue Dae abounds with symbols, from the priest’s cassock and mitre to Roebourne prison; however, the sense impressions, which are so strong in the performance of the play, are missing from the written text, apart from ironic comments on the weather.
 
 In my efforts to understand Bran Nue Dae, I undertook the road trip from Perth to the Kimberley myself in order to discover those missing sense-impressions, as they form part of the “back story” of the play. In the play there is a void between the time the characters leave Perth and reach first Roebourne, where they are locked up, and then Roebuck Plains, not far from Broome, yet in the “real world” they would have travelled more than two thousand kilometres. What would they have seen and experienced on this journey?
 
 I took note of Krim Benterrak, Paddy Roe and Stephen Muecke’s Reading the Country, a cross-cultural and cross-textual study on Roebuck Plains, near Broome. Muecke talks about “stories being contingent upon place … Aboriginal storytellers have a similar policy. If one is not prepared to take the trouble to go to the place, then its story can only be given as a short version” (72). In preparing for the trip, I collected tourist brochures and maps. The use of maps, seemingly essential on any road trip as guides to “having a look at” country (Muecke ibid.), was instantly problematic in itself, in that maps represent country as colonised space.
 
 In Saltwater People, Nonie Sharp discusses the “distinction between mapping and personal journeying”:
 
 Maps and mapping describe space in a way that depersonalises it. Mapping removes the footprints of named creatures – animal, human, ancestral – who belong to this place or that place. A map can be anywhere. ‘Itineraries’, however, are actions and movements within a named and footprinted land (Sharp 199-200).
 
 
 The country journeyed through in Bran Nue Dae, which privileges indigenous experience, could be designated as the potentially dangerous liminal space between the “map” and the “itinerary”. This “space between” resonates with untold stories, with invisibilities. One of the most telling discoveries on the research trip was the thoroughness with which indigenous people have been made to disappear from the “mapped” zones through various colonial policies. It was very evident that indigenous people are still relegated to the fringes of town, as in Onslow and Port Hedland, in housing situations closely resembling the old missions and reserves. 
 
 Although my travelling companion and I made an effort in every place we visited to pay our respects by at least finding out the language group of the traditional owners, it became clear that a major challenge in travelling through post-colonial space is in avoiding becoming complicit in the disappearance of indigenous people. We wanted our focus to be “on the people whose bodies, territories, beliefs and values have been travelled though” (Tuhiwai Smith 78) but our experience was that finding even written guides into the “footprinted land” is not easy when few tourist pamphlets acknowledge the traditional owners of the country. Even when “local Aboriginal” words are quoted, as in the CALM brochure for Nambung National Park (i.e., the Pinnacles), the actual language or language group is not mentioned. In many interpretive brochures and facilities, traditional owners are represented as absent, as victims or as prisoners.
 
 The fate of the “original inhabitants of the Greenough Flats”, the Yabbaroo people, is alluded to in the Greenough River Nature Walk Trail Guide, under the title, “A short history of Greenough River from the Rivermouth to Westbank Road”:
 
 The Gregory brothers, exploring for pastoral land in 1848, peacefully met with a large group of Aborigines camped beside a freshwater spring in a dense Melaleuca thicket. They named the spring Bootenal, from the Nyungar word Boolungal, meaning pelican. Gregory’s glowing reports of good grazing prompted pastoralists to move their flocks to Greenough, and by 1852 William Criddle was watering cattle for the Cattle Company at the Bootenal Spring. The Aborigines soon resented this intrusion and in 1854, large numbers with many from surrounding tribes, gathered in the relative safety of the Bootenal thicket. Making forays at night, they killed cattle and sheep and attacked homesteads. The pastoralists retaliated by forming a posse at Glengarry under the command of the Resident Magistrate. On the night of the 4th/5th July they rode to Bootenal and drove the Aborigines from the thicket. No arrests were made and no official report given of casualties. Aboriginal resistance in the area was finished.
 
 
 The fact that the extract actually describes a massacre while purporting to be a “history of Greenough River” subverts the notion that the land can ever really be “depersonalised”.
 
 At the very heart of the difference lie different ways of being human: in Aboriginal classical tradition the person dwells within a personified landscape which is alive, named, inscribed by spiritual and human agents. It is a ‘Thou’ not an ‘It’, and I and Thou belong together (Sharp 199-200).
 
 
 Peter Read’s book Belonging: Australians, Place and Aboriginal Ownership contains a section titled “The Past Embedded in the Landscape” in which Read discusses whether the land holds the memory of events enacted upon it, so forming a tangible link between the dispossessed and the possessors. While discussing Judith Wright’s poem Bora Ring, Read states: “The unlaid violence of dispossession lingers at the sites of evil or old magic”, bringing to mind Wright’s notion of Australia as “a haunted country” (14).
 
 It is not surprising that the “unlaid violence of dispossession lingers” at the sites of old prisons and lock-ups, since it is built into the very architecture. The visitor pamphlet states that the 1890s design by George Temple Poole of the third Roebourne gaol, further up the great Northern Highway from Greenough and beautifully constructed from stone, “represents a way in which the state ideology of control of a remote and potentially dangerous population could be expressed in buildings”. The current Roebourne prison, still holding a majority of Aboriginal inmates, does away with any pretence of architectural elegance but expresses the same state ideology with its fence topped with razor wire.
 
 Without a guide like Bran Nue Dae’s Uncle Tadpole to keep us “off the track”, non-indigenous visitors to these old gaols, now largely museums, may be quickly led by the interpretation into the “mapped zone” – the narrative of imperialist expansion. However, we can follow Paul Carter’s injunction to “deepen grooves” and start with John Pat’s story at the Roebourne police lock-up, or the story of any indigenous inmate of the present Roebuck prison, spiralling back a century to the first Roebuck prison in settler John Withnell’s woolshed (Weightman 4). Then we gain a sense of the contact experience of the local indigenous peoples.
 
 John Withnell and his wife Emma are represented as particularly resourceful by the interpretation at the old Roebourne gaol (now Roebourne Visitors Centre and Museum). The museum has a replica of a whalebone armchair that John Withnell built for his wife with vertebrae as the seat and other bones as the back and armrests. The family also invented the canvas waterbag. The interpretation fails to mention that the same John Withnell beat an Aboriginal woman named Talarong so severely for refusing to care for sheep at Withnell’s Hillside Station that “she retreated into the bush and died of her injuries two days later”. No charges were brought against Withnell because, according to the Acting Government Resident, of the “great provocation” by Talarong in the incident (Hunt 99-100). Such omissions and silences in the official record force indigenous people into a parallel “invisible country” and leave us stranded on the highways of the “mapped zone”, bereft of our rights and responsibilities to connect either to the country or to its traditional owners.
 
 Roebourne, and its coastal port Cossack, stand on the hauntingly beautiful country of the Ngarluma and seaside Yapurarra peoples. Settlers first arrived in the 1860s and Aboriginal people began to be officially imprisoned soon after, primarily as a result of their resistance to being “blackbirded” and exploited as labour for the pearling and pastoral industries. Prisoners were chained by the neck, day and night, and forced to build roads and tramlines, ostensibly a “civilising” practice. As the history pamphlet for The Old Roebourne Gaol reads: “It was widely believed that the Roebourne Gaol was where the ‘benefit’ of white civilisation could be shown to the ‘savage’ Aboriginal” (Weightman 2).
 
 The “back story” I discovered on this research trip was one of disappearance – indigenous people being made to disappear from their countries, from non-indigenous view and from the written record. The symbols I surprisingly most engaged with and which most affected me were the gaols and prisons which the imperialists used as tools of their trade in disappearance. The sense impressions I experienced – extreme beauty, isolation, heat and sandflies – reinforced the complexity of Western Australian contact history. I began to see the central achievement of Bran Nue Dae as being the return of indigenous people to country and to story. This return, so beautifully realised in when the characters finally reach Lombadina and a state of acceptance, is critical to healing the country and to the attainment of an equitable “kind of citizenship” that denotes belonging for all.
 
 References
 
 Aboriginal Tourism Australia. Welcome to Country: Respecting Indigenous Culture for Travellers in Australia. 2004. Benterrak, Krim, Stephen Muecke, and Paddy Roe. Reading the Country. Perth: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1984. Carter, Paul. The Lie of the Land. London: Faber & Faber, 1996. Dalton, Peter. “Broome: A Multiracial Community. A Study of Social and Cultural Relationships in a Town in the West Kimberleys, Western Australia”. Thesis for Master of Arts in Anthropology. Perth: University of Western Australia, 1964. Hunt, Susan Jane. Spinifex and Hessian: Women’s Lives in North-Western Australia 1860–1900. Nedlands, WA: U of Western Australia P, 1986. Read, Peter. Belonging: Australians, Place and Aboriginal Ownership. UK: Cambridge UP, 2000. Reynolds, Henry. North of Capricorn: The Untold History of Australia’s North. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2003. Reynolds, Henry. Why Weren’t We Told? Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin Books Australia, 1999. Sharp, Nonie. Saltwater People: The Waves of Memory. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2002. Shire of Greenough. Greenough River Nature Walk Trail Guide. 2005. Tuhiwai Smith, Linda. Decolonizing Methodologies. Dunedin, New Zealand: U of Otago P, 1999. Watson, Christine. Piercing the Ground. Perth: Fremantle Arts Centre P, 2003. Weightman, Llyrus. The Old Roebourne Gaol: A History. Pilbara Classies & Printing Service. Wright, Judith. The Cry for the Dead. 1981. 277-80.
 
 
 
 
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IntroductionAustralia is at a particular point in its history where there is a noticeable diaspora of artists and creative practitioners away from the major capitals of Sydney and Melbourne (in particular), driven in no small part by ballooning house prices of the last eight years. This has meant big changes for some regional spaces, and in turn, for the face of Australian cultural life. Regional cultural precincts are forming with tourist flows, funding attention and cultural economies. Likewise, there appears to be growing consciousness in the ‘art centres’ of Melbourne and Sydney of interesting and relevant activities outside their limits. This research draws on my experience as an art practitioner, curator and social researcher in one such region (Castlemaine in Central Victoria), and particularly from a recent interview series I have conducted in collaboration with art space in that region, Wide Open Road Art. In this, 23 regional and city-based artists were asked about the social, economic and local conditions that can and have supported their art practices. Drawing from these conversations and Bourdieu’s ideas around cultural production, the article suggests that authentic, diverse, interesting and disruptive creative practices in Australian cultural life involve the increasingly pressing need for security while existing outside the modern imperative of high consumption; of finding alternative ways to live well while entering into the shared space of cultural production. Indeed, it is argued that often it is the capacity to defy key economic paradigms, for example of ‘rational (economic) self-interest’, that allows creative life to flourish (Bourdieu Field; Ley “Artists”). While regional spaces present new opportunities for this, there are pitfalls and nuances worth exploring.Changes in Regional AustraliaAustralia has long been an urbanising nation. Since Federation our cities have increased from a third to now constituting two-thirds of the country’s total population (Gray and Lawrence 6; ABS), making us one of the most urbanised countries in the world. Indeed, as machines replaced manual labour on farms; as Australia’s manufacturing industry began its decline; and as young people in particular left the country for city universities (Gray and Lawrence), the post-war industrial-economic boom drove this widespread demographic and economic shift. In the 1980s closures of regional town facilities like banks, schools and hospitals propelled widespread belief that regional Australia was in crisis and would be increasingly difficult to sustain (Rentschler, Bridson, and Evans; Gray and Lawrence 2; Barr et al.; ABS). However, the late 1990s and early 21st century saw a turnaround that has been referred to by some as the rise of the ‘sea change’. That is, widespread renewed interest and idealisation of not just coastal areas but anywhere outside the city (Murphy). It was a simultaneous pursuit of “a small ‘a’ alternative lifestyle” and escape from rising living costs in urban areas, especially for the unemployed, single parents and those with disabilities (Murphy). This renewed interest has been sustained. The latest wave, or series of waves, have coincided with the post-GFC house price spike, of cheap credit and lenient lending designed to stimulate the economy. This initiative in part led to Sydney and Melbourne median dwelling prices rising by up to 114% in eight years (Scutt 2017), which alone had a huge influence on who was able to afford to live in city areas and who was not. Rapid population increases and diminished social networks and familial support are also considered drivers that sent a wave of people (a million since 2011) towards the outer fringes of the cities and to ‘commuter belt’ country towns (Docherty; Murphy). While the underprivileged are clearly most disadvantaged in what has actually been a global development process (see Jayne on this, and on the city as a consumer itself), artists and creatives are also a unique category who haven’t fared well with hyper-urbanisation (Ley “Artists”). Despite the class privilege that often accompanies such a career choice, the economic disadvantage art professions often involve has seen a diaspora of artists moving to regional areas, particularly those in the hinterlands around and train lines to major centres. We see the recent ‘rise of a regional bohemia’ (Regional Australia Institute): towns like Toowoomba, Byron Bay, Surf Coast, Gold Coast-Tweed, Kangaroo Valley, Wollongong, Warburton, Bendigo, Tooyday, New Norfolk, and countless more being re-identified as arts towns and precincts. In Australia in 2016–17, 1 in 6 professional artists, and 1 in 4 visual artists, were living in a regional town (Throsby and Petetskaya). Creative arts in regional Australia makes up a quarter of the nation’s creative output and is a $2.8 billion industry; and our regions particularly draw in creative practitioners in their prime productive years (aged 24 to 44) (Regional Australia Institute).WORA Conservation SeriesIn 2018 artist and curator Helen Mathwin and myself received a local shire grant to record a conversation series with 23 artists who were based in the Central Goldfields region of Victoria as well as further afield, but who had a connection to the regional arts space we run, WideOpenRoadArt (WORA). In videoed, in-depth, approximately hour-long, semi-structured interviews conducted throughout 2018, we spoke to artists (16 women and 7 men) about the relocation phenomenon we were witnessing in our own growing arts town. Most were interviewed in WORA’s roving art float, but we seized any ad hoc opportunity we had to have genuine discussions with people. Focal points were around sustainability of practice and the social conditions that supported artists’ professional pursuits. This included accessing an arts community, circles of cultural production, and the ‘art centre’; the capacity to exhibit; but also, social factors such as affordable housing and the ability to live on a low-income while having dependants; and so on. The conversations were rich with lived experiences and insights on these issues.Financial ImperativesIn line with the discussion above, the most prominent factor we noticed in the interviews was the inescapable importance of being able to live cheaply. The consistent message that all of the interviewees, both regional- and city-based, conveyed was that a career in art-making required an important independence from the need to earn a substantial income. One interviewee commented: “I do run my art as a business, I have an ABN […] it makes a healthy loss! I don’t think I’ve ever made a profit […].” Another put it: “now that I’m in [this] town and I have a house and stuff I do feel like there is maybe a bit more security around those daily things that will hopefully give me space to [make artworks].”Much has been said on the pervasive inability to monetise art careers, notably Bourdieu’s observations that art exists on an interdependent field of cultural capital, determining for itself an autonomous conception of value separate to economics (Bourdieu, Field 39). This is somewhat similar to the idea of art as a sacred phenomenon irreducible to dollar terms (Abbing 38; see also Benjamin’s “aura”; “The Work of Art”). Art’s difficult relationship with commodification is part of its heroism that Benjamin described (Benjamin Charles Baudelaire 79), its potential to sanctify mainstream society by staying separate to the lowly aspirations of commerce (Ley “Artists” 2529). However, it is understood, artists still need to attain professional education and capacities, yet they remain at the bottom of the income ladder not only professionally, but in the case of visual artists, they remain at the bottom of the creative income hierarchies as well. Further to this, within visual arts, only a tiny proportion achieve financially backed success (Menger 277). “Artistic labour markets are characterised by high risk of failure, excess supply of recruits, low artistic income level, skewed income distribution and multiple jobholding” (Mangset, Torvik Heian, Kleppe, and Løyland; Menger). Mangset et al. point to ideas that have long surrounded the “charismatic artist myth,” of a quasi-metaphysical calling to be an artist that can lead one to overlook the profession’s vast pitfalls in terms of economic sustainability. One interviewee described it as follows: “From a very young age I wanted to be an artist […] so there’s never been a time that I’ve thought that’s not what I’m doing.” A 1% rule seems widely acknowledged in how the profession manages the financial winners against those who miss out; the tiny proportion of megastar artists versus a vast struggling remainder.As even successful artists often dip below the poverty line between paid engagements, housing costs can make the difference between being able to live in an area and not (Turnbull and Whitford). One artist described:[the reason we moved here from Melbourne] was financial, yes definitely. We wouldn’t have been able to purchase a property […] in Melbourne, we would not have been able to live in place that we wanted to live, and to do what we wanted to do […]. It was never an option for us to get a big mortgage.Another said:It partly came about as a financial practicality to move out here. My partner […] wanted to be in the bush, but I was resistant at first, we were in Melbourne but we just couldn’t afford Melbourne in the end, we had an apartment, we had a studio. My partner was a cabinet maker then. You know, just every month all our money went to rent and we just couldn’t manage anymore. So we thought, well maybe if we come out to the bush […] It was just by a happy accident that we found a property […] that we could afford, that was off-grid so it cut the bills down for us [...] that had a little studio and already had a little cottage on there that we could rent that out to get money.For a prominent artist we spoke to this issue was starkly reflected. Despite large exhibitions at some of the highest profile galleries in regional Victoria, the commissions offered for these shows were so insubstantial that the artist and their family had to take on staggering sums of personal debt to execute the ambitious and critically acclaimed shows. Another very successful artist we interviewed who had shown widely at ‘A-list’ international arts institutions and received several substantial grants, spoke of their dismay and pessimism at the idea of financial survival. For all artists we spoke to, pursuing their arts practice was in constant tension with economic imperatives, and their lives had all been shaped by the need to make shrewd decisions to continue practising. There were two artists out of the 23 we interviewed who considered their artwork able to provide full-time income, although this still relied on living costs remaining extremely low. “We are very lucky to have bought a very cheap property [in the country] that I can [also] have my workshop on, so I’m not paying for two properties in Melbourne […] So that certainly takes a fair bit of pressure off financially.” Their co-interviewee described this as “pretty luxurious!” Notably, the two who thought they could live off their art practices were both men, mid-career, whose works were large, spectacular festival items, which alongside the artists’ skill and hard work was also a factor in the type of remuneration received.Decongested LivingBeyond more affordable real estate and rental spaces, life outside our cities offers other benefits that have particular relevance to creative practitioners. Opera and festival director Lindy Hume described her move to the NSW South Coast in terms of space to think and be creative. “The abundance of time, space and silence makes living in places like [Hume’s town] ideal for creating new work” (Brown). And certainly, this was a theme that arose frequently in our interviews. Many of our regionally based artists were in part choosing the de-pressurised space of non-metro areas, and also seeking an embedded, daily connection to nature for themselves, their art-making process and their families. In one interview this was described as “dreamtime”. “Some of my more creative moments are out walking in the forest with the dog, that sort of semi-daydreamy thing where your mind is taken away by the place you’re in.”Creative HubsAll of our regional interviewees mentioned the value of the local community, as a general exchange, social support and like-minded connection, but also specifically of an arts community. Whether a tree change by choice or a more reactive move, the diaspora of artists, among others, has led to a type of rural renaissance in certain popular areas. Creative hubs located around the country, often in close proximity to the urban centres, are creating tremendous opportunities to network with other talented people doing interesting things, living in close proximity and often open to cross-fertilisation. One said: “[Castlemaine] is the best place in Australia, it has this insane cultural richness in a tiny town, you can’t go out and not meet people on the street […] For someone who has not had community in their life that is so gorgeous.” Another said:[Being an artist here] is kind of easy! Lots of people around to connect—with […] other artists but also creatively minded people [...] So it means you can just bump into someone from down the street and have an amazing conversation in five minutes about some amazing thing! […] There’s a concentration here that works.With these hubs, regional spaces are entering into a new relevance in the sphere of cultural production. They are generating unique and interesting local creative scenes for people to live amongst or visit, and generating strong local arts economies, tourist economies, and funding opportunities (Rentschler, Bridson, and Evans). Victoria in particular has burgeoned, with tourist flows to its regions increasing 13 per cent in 5 years and generating tourism worth $10 billion (Tourism Victoria). Victoria’s Greater Bendigo is Australia’s most popularly searched tourist destination on Trip Advisor, with tourism increasing 52% in 10 years (Boland). Simultaneously, funding flows have increased to regional zones, as governments seek to promote development outside Australia’s urban centres and are confident in the arts as a key strategy in boosting health, economies and overall wellbeing (see Rentschler, Bridson, and Evans; see also the 2018 Regional Centre for Culture initiative, Boland). The regions are also an increasingly relevant participant in national cultural life (Turnbull and Whitford; Mitchell; Simpson; Woodhead). Opportunities for an openness to productive exchange between regional and metropolitan sites appear to be growing, with regional festivals and art events gaining importance and unique attributes in the consciousness of the arts ‘centre’ (see for example Fairley; Simpson; Farrelly; Woodhead).Difficulties of Regional LocationDespite this, our interviews still brought to light the difficulties and barriers experienced living as a regional artist. For some, living in regional Victoria was an accepted set-back in their ambitions, something to be concealed and counteracted with education in reputable metropolitan art schools or city-based jobs. For others there was difficulty accessing a sympathetic arts community—although arts towns had vibrant cultures, certain types of creativity were preferred (often craft-based and more community-oriented). Practitioners who were active in maintaining their links to a metropolitan art scene voiced more difficulty in fitting in and successfully exhibiting their (often more conceptual or boundary-pushing) work in regional locations.The Gentrification ProblemThe other increasingly obvious issue in the revivification of some non-metropolitan areas is that they can and are already showing signs of being victims of their own success. That is, some regional arts precincts are attracting so many new residents that they are ceasing to be the low-cost, hospitable environments for artists they once were. Geographer David Ley has given attention to this particular pattern of gentrification that trails behind artists (Ley “Artists”). Ley draws from Florida’s ideas of late capitalism’s ascendency of creativity over the brute utilitarianism of the industrial era. This has got to the point that artists and creative professionals have an increasing capacity to shape and generate value in areas of life that were previous overlooked, especially with built environments (2529). Now more than ever, there is the “urbane middle-class” pursuing ‘the swirling milieu of artists, bohemians and immigrants” (Florida) as they create new, desirable landscapes with the “refuse of society” (Benjamin Charles Baudelaire 79; Ley New Middle Class). With Australia’s historic shifts in affordability in our major cities, this pattern that Ley identified in urban built environments can be seen across our states and regions as well.But with gentrification comes increased costs of living, as housing, shops and infrastructure all alter for an affluent consumer-resident. This diminishes what Bourdieu describes as “the suspension and removal of economic necessity” fundamental to the avant-garde (Bourdieu Distinction 54). That is to say, its relief from heavy pressure to materially survive is arguably critical to the reflexive, imaginative, and truly new offerings that art can provide. And as argued earlier, there seems an inbuilt economic irrationality in artmaking as a vocation—of dedicating one’s energy, time and resources to a pursuit that is notoriously impoverishing. But this irrationality may at the same time be critical to setting forth new ideas, perspectives, reflections and disruptions of taken-for-granted social assumptions, and why art is so indispensable in the first place (Bourdieu Field 39; Ley New Middle Class 2531; Weber on irrationality and the Enlightenment Project; also Adorno’s the ‘primitive’ in art). Australia’s cities, like those of most developed nations, increasingly demand we busy ourselves with the high-consumption of modern life that makes certain activities that sit outside this almost impossible. As gentrification unfolds from the metropolis to the regions, Australia faces a new level of far-reaching social inequality that has real consequences for who is able to participate in art-making, where these people can live, and ultimately what kind of diversity of ideas and voices participate in the generation of our national cultural life. ConclusionThe revival of some of Australia’s more popular regional towns has brought new life to some regional areas, particularly in reshaping their identities as cultural hubs worth experiencing, living amongst or supporting their development. Our interviews brought to life the significant benefits artists have experienced in relocating to country towns, whether by choice or necessity, as well as some setbacks. It was clear that economics played a major role in the demographic shift that took place in the area being examined; more specifically, that the general reorientation of social life towards consumption activities are having dramatic spatial consequences that we are currently seeing transform our major centres. The ability of art and creative practices to breathe new life into forgotten and devalued ideas and spaces is a foundational attribute but one that also creates a gentrification problem. Indeed, this is possibly the key drawback to the revivification of certain regional areas, alongside other prejudices and clashes between metro and regional cultures. It is argued that the transformative and redemptive actions art can perform need to involve the modern irrationality of not being transfixed by matters of economic materialism, so as to sit outside taken-for-granted value structures. This emphasises the importance of equality and open access in our spaces and landscapes if we are to pursue a vibrant, diverse and progressive national cultural sphere.ReferencesAbbing, Hans. Why Artists Are Poor: The Exceptional Economy of the Arts. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2002.Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory. London: Routledge, 1983.Australian Bureau of Statistics. “Population Growth: Capital City Growth and Development.” 4102.0—Australian Social Trends. 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