Cirrus@Austlit

'Although other related questions may arise, primarily I'm dealing with the questions of: how writing about poetry is possible, and how writing poetry is possible. Georg Simmel says of Kant, `[he] could propose and answer the fundamental question of his philosophy, "How is nature possible?", only because for him nature was nothing but the representation of nature'. In determining to talk of poetry, I want to emphasise that I am talking as a poet, and that writing poetry is, for me (though it has not always been), a daily practice, and that if you are wondering where this paper is going, it is going, ultimately, towards practice. Perhaps, then, the term 'poetry' gets in the way, because of the nature of its Anglo-European representation, based on a veritable soup of nineteenth and twentieth century clichés, added with a few skerricks of troubadour bone, or Chaucer tale, Shakespeare plot, Romantic image, biographical, as much as lyrical, thrown in, and perhaps a waft of the ghost of Homer over the pot. That's without even considering the considerable influences of Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Turkic, Egyptian, and Arabic, poetry.' (Introduction)