Cirrus

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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'On any day, my favourite poem is the one I happen to be lost in, reading or writing. To be honest, the idea of a favourite Australian poem is absurd: it suggests that the favourite poem will sustain the spirit through every exigency — dutiful committee meetings, lingering ailment, cancer diagnosis, car crash, funeral. I don't have a favourite song, symphony or opera, or favourite tipple. No favourite outdoor scene. In any locality, my favourite drink will be whatever's local, my favourite music whatever the buskers are playing. It all depends, as the American feller said. I've read some knockout European, English, American, and other poems, but the damnedest poems come to mind at times for no immediately obvious reason: a compelling arrangement of words, rhythm, melody or other mental or physiological trigger.' (Introduction)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

Appears in:

y Five Bells Between! The Fifth Australian Poetry Festival Issue : Critical and Poetic Responses to Australian Poems vol. 13 no. 3 Winter 2006 Z1307388 2006 periodical issue 2006
(
2006
)
pg. 42-43
Appears in:

y The Poetic Eye : Occasional Writings 1982-2012 Michael Sharkey , Netherlands : Brill , 2016 10632316 2016 selected work criticism Abstract
'This volume contains a selection of the Australian poet Michael Sharkey’s uncollected essays and occasional writings on poetics and poets, chiefly Australian and New Zealand. Reviews and conversations with other poets highlight Sharkey’s concern with preserving and interrogating cultural memory and his engagement with the practice and championing of poetry. Poets discussed range from Lord Byron to colonial-era and early twentieth-century poets (Francis Adams, David McKee Wright, and Zora Cross), underrepresented Australian women poets of World War I, traditionalists and experimentalists, including several ‘New Australian Poetry’ activists of the 1970s, and contemporary Australian and New Zealand poets. Writings on poetics address form and tradition, the teaching and reception of poetry, and canon-formation. The collection is culled from commissioned and occasional contributions to anthologies of practical poetics, journals devoted to literary and cultural history and book reviewing, as well as newspaper and small-magazine features from the 1980s to the present. The writing reflects Sharkey’s poetic practice and pedagogy relating to the teaching of literature, rhetorical analysis, cultural studies, and writing in universities'.
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Netherlands : Brill , 2016
(
2016
)
pg. 491-493