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Poetry post-1900
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Published as an introduction to poems published in Southerly, Vol. 57, No. 1, Autumn, 1997.
Some random notes
Poems are never unaccompanied, they’re practised in a context, a world.
Poems are always working, not pure objects of contemplation. Thus, they’re unfinished in their continuing work and sometimes the best may seem awkward and gritty in their practice.
Being occasionally perverse, I’m attracted to unfashionable ideas, for instance, that good poems can be speculative, discursive, committed. There can be a tyranny in the poetry of things, a controlling empiricism fooling itself it’s being respectful and open.
Poems bear the signs of making and origin. I’m interested in relationships between states, times and locales. Shifting borders. The openings in closures. The pleasures of exploration and journeys. The great themes, like the weather.
http://april.edu.au/jones-jill/statements.shtml