'This paper investigates the affective labour done by, specifically, native species images in Australian poetry, using Judith Wright's bird poems, and various poems about kangaroos as example. It uses the anthropological term, "deep hanging out", borrowed from an article about fashion models, to extend the idea of affective labour, and to measure poems' attentions to birds and animals, and their relation to iconising as the work of nationalism. It is concerned with cultural capital, and Canberra, and the human empire.' (Publication abstract)
'Gig Ryan (1956–) in my view represents what might become of Australian poetry more so than what has come before, living uneasily in any given cultural, philosophical, or aesthetic tradition. This is work projected towards the future from within modern anxiety. Ryan has lived most of her life in Melbourne, but has also lived in Sydney. She belongs to a minority of living Australian poets published outside of Australia in book form by an active publisher1. The poetic interest of her work lies in its living simultaneously inside and outside the established ways we have of constructing history, especially literary history, along with the poetry’s vivid construction of subjectivity in late modernity using the medium of transhistorical characters from the Western political imaginary, such as Antigone. Hence this work is also unsettled in a monocultural Australian national paradigm, selective with cultural history and legacy outside of the codes of tradition, and incredulous of patriarchy. This introduction to Gig Ryan’s New and Selected Poems (2011) and broader work will bring contrary critical discourses into a syncretic theory of Ryan’s ambiguous political imaginary using a discussion of anxiety and Antigone, in particular, to introduce and explain shifts in the oeuvre’s consciousness of political subjectivity across six books and roughly thirty years of publication, from The Division of Anger (1980) to Heroic Money (2001), to poems from the present (2015), in general.' (Introduction)
'Gig Ryan (1956–) in my view represents what might become of Australian poetry more so than what has come before, living uneasily in any given cultural, philosophical, or aesthetic tradition. This is work projected towards the future from within modern anxiety. Ryan has lived most of her life in Melbourne, but has also lived in Sydney. She belongs to a minority of living Australian poets published outside of Australia in book form by an active publisher1. The poetic interest of her work lies in its living simultaneously inside and outside the established ways we have of constructing history, especially literary history, along with the poetry’s vivid construction of subjectivity in late modernity using the medium of transhistorical characters from the Western political imaginary, such as Antigone. Hence this work is also unsettled in a monocultural Australian national paradigm, selective with cultural history and legacy outside of the codes of tradition, and incredulous of patriarchy. This introduction to Gig Ryan’s New and Selected Poems (2011) and broader work will bring contrary critical discourses into a syncretic theory of Ryan’s ambiguous political imaginary using a discussion of anxiety and Antigone, in particular, to introduce and explain shifts in the oeuvre’s consciousness of political subjectivity across six books and roughly thirty years of publication, from The Division of Anger (1980) to Heroic Money (2001), to poems from the present (2015), in general.' (Introduction)
'This paper investigates the affective labour done by, specifically, native species images in Australian poetry, using Judith Wright's bird poems, and various poems about kangaroos as example. It uses the anthropological term, "deep hanging out", borrowed from an article about fashion models, to extend the idea of affective labour, and to measure poems' attentions to birds and animals, and their relation to iconising as the work of nationalism. It is concerned with cultural capital, and Canberra, and the human empire.' (Publication abstract)
