Flash-floods : genre subversion and the abject erotic in Dorothy Porter’s The monkey’s mask and El Dorado

When discussing her verse novels, Dorothy Porter explicitly stated that she loved to ‘write bad’. This paper will argue that it was Porter’s engagement with the verse novel form and genre subversion, most notably seen with her detective and crime thriller verse novels The monkey’s mask and El Dorado, that allows for a destabilisation of traditionally established genre conventions, which in turn provide a narrative foundation for Porter’s use of abject erotic imagery.

In both The monkey’s mask and El Dorado there are several types of ‘bodies’ to be examined: the body of the verse narrative, the bodies of the characters subjected to crime, the body of poetry that is referred to as evidence, and the abject eroticised body. Extending upon the studies of Rose Lucas (1997) and Fleur Diamond (1999), this paper contends that it is Porter’s engagement with the abject erotic, as informed by Julia Kristeva’s (1982) theory of the abject and Johanna Blakley’s (1995) discussion of the abject in relation to eroticism, that allows Porter to subvert the phallocentric limitations upheld through the crime fiction genre and offer an alternative representation for lesbian sexuality and desire.

'Untranscended / life itself': the poetry of Pam Brown

Pam Brown's cynicism, satire, attractions and repulsions seem built around an absent centre, something always already in the poetry lost in the tedious non-occurrences of contemporary Australian life. Brown has typically published in a scattered, small-press way and while this small-press, small-readership approach is something most Australian poets know intimately, Brown has made it into an art form, and one which seems in keeping with her own ironic and at times cynical approach to the world of appearance, celebrity and media hype.

The impossible infinite: Les Murray, poetry, and the sacred

In 1983, the provocative and idiosyncratic Australian poet Les Murray published a volume entitled The People's Otherworld. At the heart of that middle volume of Murray's work is a poem about grace entitled Equanimity. Here, McCredden examines how does the poetry of Murray seek to represent the sacred.

Contemporary poetry and the sacred: Vincent Buckley, Les Murray and Samuel Wagan Watson

VINCENT Buckley's Golden Builders and Other Poems (1976) is an important poetic experiment in its direct and exulted address to the city and to the sacred. The city is Melbourne in which Buckley lived, worked and wrote for forty years. In the original volume, the epigraph to the twenty-seven part sequence 'Golden Builders' is from William Blake's Jerusalem, a profound and idiosyncratic yoking together of the corporeal and the sacred

Poetry as a starting point for drama: learning to tolerate ambiguity

This article explores the use of process drama in an English classroom to explore issues raised by 'A poem for the Rainforest' by Judith Nicholls. The drama is used to explore both the themes and forms of the poem, the episodic nature of the drama reflecting the episodic form of the poem. The work engages the students, and the process drama works to layer complexity onto the issues rather than simplifying them.