Cirrus@Austlit

'The Australian Poetry Library (APL) aims to promote a greater appreciation and understanding of Australian poetry by providing access to a wide range of poetic texts as well as to critical and contextual material relating to them, including interviews, photographs and audio/visual recordings.

This website currently contains over 42,000 poems, representing the work of more than 170 Australian poets. All the poems are fully searchable, and may be accessed and read freely on the World Wide Web. Readers wishing to download and print poems may do so for a small fee, part of which is returned to the poets via CAL, the Copyright Agency Limited. Teachers, students and readers of Australian poetry can also create personalised anthologies, which can be purchased and downloaded. Print on demand versions will be availabe from Sydney University Press in the near future.

It is hoped that the APL will encourage teachers to use more Australian material in their English classes, as well as making Australian poetry much more available to readers in remote and regional areas and overseas. It will also help Australian poets, not only by developing new audiences for their work but by allowing them to receive payment for material still in copyright, thus solving the major problem associated with making this material accessible on the Internet.

The Australian Poetry Library is a joint initiative of the University of Sydney and the Copyright Agency Limited (CAL). Begun in 2004 with a prototype site developed by leading Australian poet John Tranter, the project has been funded by a major Linkage Grant from the Australian Research Council (ARC), CAL and the University of Sydney Library. A team of researchers from the University of Sydney, led by Professor Elizabeth Webby and John Tranter, in association with CAL, have developed the Australian Poetry Library as a permanent and wide-ranging Internet archive of Australian poetry resources.' Source: www.poetrylibrary.edu.au (Sighted 30/05/2011).

'In Sacre Coeur: A Salt Tragedy Kinsella writes with great feeling about the Western Australian wheatlands in a kind of anti-pastoral poetry populated with people he has encountered, and the landscape he loves. He writes with urgency and alarm but also hope.

'For this production, Christopher Williams journeyed to historic York in Western Australia to accompany John Kinsella into the salt-scarred wheatlands. John has been observing and writing about this landscape over the past 40 years and has seen first-hand the devastating environmental consequences of large-scale tree felling, and the damming of waterways such as at Lake Yenyening. John describes the way the landscape has informed his writing and reads selections of his poems inspired by particular places. He also shares his thoughts on how this environmental catastrophe might be addressed.'

Source: A Pod of Poets, http://www.abc.net.au/rn/poetica/features/pod/poets/kinsella.htm
Sighted: 11/03/2009