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Issue Details: First known date: 1999... 1999 John Forbes : A Layered Event
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Australian poet John Forbes died in January last year, aged 47. Since then, there has been an upsurge of attention to his poetry. Forbes wrote poems about world politics, history, art, the media, the military, and also ironic, somehow despairing love poetry. His style was intellectual, laconic and consciously Australian.

'Forbes was also a tireless critic and influencer of poets around him. In this feature, young Melbourne producer Clea Woods recorded telephone conversations with more than 30 people who knew John Forbes, to create a composite picture of the man and his poetry. The program also contains archival recordings of Forbes reading his poems.' (Source: http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/poetica/september-1999/3558128 )

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Works about this Work

John Forbes, The Australian Poet : Representations of National Identity in A Layered Event on ABC Radio National Prithvi Varatharajan , 2016 single work criticism
— Appears in: Adaptation , March vol. 9 no. 1 2016; (p. 1-11) 'John Forbes was an Australian poet who lived from 1950 to 1998 and was one of the so-called ‘generation of 68’ who were deeply influenced by contemporary American poetics and culture. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC)’s Radio National paid tribute to Forbes’s life and work in 1999, in the posthumous radio adaptation A Layered Event. This article analyses representations of national identity in A Layered Event, using Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of the ‘arboreal’ or unified versus the ‘rhizomic’ or networked. I argue that, through edited biographical interviews on the one hand, and adaptations of Forbes’s poems on the other, A Layered Event cultivates two distinct images of national identity—arboreal and rhizomic—and that it plays these off against each other. The article asks why Forbes and Forbes’s work is represented in these ways in the program. I use this reading of A Layered Event to reflect on the ABC’s role as a national public service broadcaster at the turn of the millennium. I argue that A Layered Event’s handling of national representations may be read as an allegory for the ABC’s negotiation of its Charter aim to ‘contribute to a sense of national identity’, in an age of increasingly trans-national and fragmented identities and audiences.' (Publication abstract)
John Forbes, The Australian Poet : Representations of National Identity in A Layered Event on ABC Radio National Prithvi Varatharajan , 2016 single work criticism
— Appears in: Adaptation , March vol. 9 no. 1 2016; (p. 1-11) 'John Forbes was an Australian poet who lived from 1950 to 1998 and was one of the so-called ‘generation of 68’ who were deeply influenced by contemporary American poetics and culture. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC)’s Radio National paid tribute to Forbes’s life and work in 1999, in the posthumous radio adaptation A Layered Event. This article analyses representations of national identity in A Layered Event, using Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of the ‘arboreal’ or unified versus the ‘rhizomic’ or networked. I argue that, through edited biographical interviews on the one hand, and adaptations of Forbes’s poems on the other, A Layered Event cultivates two distinct images of national identity—arboreal and rhizomic—and that it plays these off against each other. The article asks why Forbes and Forbes’s work is represented in these ways in the program. I use this reading of A Layered Event to reflect on the ABC’s role as a national public service broadcaster at the turn of the millennium. I argue that A Layered Event’s handling of national representations may be read as an allegory for the ABC’s negotiation of its Charter aim to ‘contribute to a sense of national identity’, in an age of increasingly trans-national and fragmented identities and audiences.' (Publication abstract)
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Last amended 6 Jul 2016 11:18:29
Subjects:
  • Panto John Forbes , 1995-1996 single work poetry
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