Cirrus@Austlit

'Holocene Pointbreaks presents a triptych of long poems that veer physically, temporally, and textually across the lands of the Dharawal and Eora Nations. From morning reflections on Australia’s most polluted urban waterway, the ‘Cooks River’, to a discursive rumination on the history of whaling from the cliffs of Kamay, and an archival interrogation of Australia’s colonial ‘coalture’ on the NSW South Coast, the three ‘drifts’ gathered here weave the poet’s own bodily thought-steps to a socio-historical critique of three ‘resources’ key to the early colonial project: water, whales, and coal. As an Eco-Marxist experiment in poetic composition, or poetic composting, these local histories are further drawn into conversation with the transnational free-market forces that shaped them. Through this stratigraphic interpretation of ‘place’ ― one where the poet’s own relation to different social, cultural, and historical strata is brought into question through a network of exchange ― Holocene Pointbreaks points toward a type of eco-antipoetics: an interrogation of not only human and nonhuman relations, but the very nature of nature, and what it means to write ‘ecopoetry’ as a settler on the unceded lands of First Nations People.' (Publication summary)

'This essay puts forth Laurie Duggan’s decades-long serial poem, Blue Hills (1980–), as a radical antimythic and ecological approach to longform ‘epic’ poetics – or what I term the ‘ecological anti-epic’. The essay first reflects on the mythic ambitions of twentieth century Anglo-American modernist epic poets, such as Ezra Pound and TS Eliot, before turning to what I call the North American ‘antiepic’ postmodernist serial poem tradition. Centring on Robert Duncan’s Passages -- a key influence on Duggan’s own series -- I argue this ‘anti-epic’ approach to the long poem replaced the ‘mythical method’ (Eliot 1923: 483) of early modernist epics with a compositional method. Reading Blue Hills through the guiding principle of Duncan’s series, ‘grand collage’ (2014: 298), the essay then posits that Blue Hills -- as a localised re-deployment of Duncan’s grand collage method -- can be read as both a continuation, and subversive settler Australian reimagination, of the North American anti-epic serial poem tradition. Drawing on Peter Minter’s archipelagic approach to reading Australian poetry, Blue Hills is then read as a type of archipelago of poetic islands, one which challenges not only the epiccum-mythic ambitions of modernist longform poetry, but also the racially charged environmental myth-conceptions of early settler Australian poetic movements, such as the Jindyworobaks. I conclude with a brief reflection on the links between the process-based aesthetics of post-modern anti-epics and what Connor Weightman calls the ‘ecological long poem’ (2020: 3), ultimately positing that Duggan’s Blue Hills refutes the modernist penchant for speaking declaratively about the world and instead affects a sense that the world is reveling in its own wording.' (Publication abstract)