Can ‘pastoral’ as both a super-rarefied genre-form and a historical political vehicle — of a problematic variety — have any relevance in the age of factory farming, consciousness of land destruction, cloning, genetic modification, pesticides, herbicides, the citification of the rural, and the de-landing and disenfranchisement of indigenous communities (nomadic, agrarian, civic, urban, etc.)? Traditionally, pastoral worked as a vehicle of empowerment for the educated classes through the idylli-cising and most often romanticising of the rural world. There was a huge gap between the rural workers portrayed and the manner of their presentation.

One possible turning point in this approach was Wordsworth’s...

The lyric is the basis of all my poetry, but its signature is blurred and reconstituted. I consider myself a linguistic lyricist, a ‘new lyricist’, or a lyrical hybridiser. A deconstructive lyricist. As to the question of the unified self, I have been many people in my life — I remember them all, though the memories are tenuous. I think an ethics and a politics binds these selves together — though I am probably wrong. The error in the line is where ‘truth’ lies. Metaphors are mistakes, metonyms associations that the arbiters of language would like us to believe are there. The...

Since the mid-1990s, I have edited a number of special Australian issues of literary journals from Britain, Canada, and the United States. I have also edited an anthology of contemporary Australian poetry,Landbridge(1999a), and am at present completing a two-volume historical anthology. These projects were very different in orientation from the process of including Australian poetry (and prose) in the many ‘general’ issues of literary journals that I edited over the same period of time, and indeed over the last dozen or so years. Apart from the obvious agenda of representing place and culture — or especially with a continent-country...

The crumbling foundations were solid in my childhood. Is this ageing, or something that happens outside time? Temporal? Reincarnated, I can expect another exposure in a different body. Ageing fuels visionary dreariness, but the spots in time are empty. The child is long in the tooth, the curtains are drawn. Marginalise, contain. The Home. The piano. Dancing with hip replacements. A nomenclature of ridicule. And that smell, so emphasised from early memory, yet not noticed until it is too late. Too late? In God, in wisdom and respect, the elders are spiritual leaders, guardians. The codes we have to work...