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Course of Study:
(ALL102) From Horror To Romance: Genre And Its Revisions

Title of work:
Unemployed at last! (2002)

Section:
The Monkey’s Mask and the Poetics of Excision pp. 72--85

Author/editor of work:
Walker, Shirley; Croft, Julian; Stewart, Ken; University of New England. Centre
for Australian Language and Literature Studies.

Author of section:
F Plunkett

Name of Publisher:
CALLS, Centre for Australian Studies, UNE
 FELICITY PLUNKETT

The Monkey's Mask and the Poetics of Excision

In 1995, crime writer Finola Moorhead wrote a review of The Monkey's

Mask - Dorothy Porter's lesbian detective verse novel - entitled 'She
Doesn't Prove Who Did It Anyway'. In the review, which writer Kathleen
Mary Fallon subsequently described as 'breathtakingly literal and
moralist' (191), Moorhead argued that the book, a publishing success
which had sold 10,000 copies in the first eighteen months (see Freeman
1
11) and Jttracted a great deal of attention, was 'morally and ethically
depraved' (192). Although the review is a reductive and scathing one, its
subliminal motifs - those of lack, loss and cutting - for me unwittingly
gesture towards a compelling perspective on the text. This perspective
may, in tum, be extrapolated to offer a way of thinking about a particular
mode of poetics - a poetics of excision.
Moorhead's review is sliced into portions, with headings: 'The Story',
'The Characters', 'The Theme' and so on. In this way, either inadvertently
echoing the structure of The Monkey 's Mask itself: or deliberately seeking
to parody it, Moorhead shadows Porter's linked, and exquisitely pared,
lyric poems (for instance 'The New Job', 'Someone's Daughter', 'My
Car'), replacing them with the less lyrical pieces of the stages of a
romplaint Like Porter's titles, most ofMoorhead's are clipped, while one
longer one, 'A Thoroughly Disturbing Piece of Work', states the theme of
the review with a rush of outrage.
Rather than more directly articulating the ideological antagonism - a
discomfort with the text's representations of sexuality, femininity and
class - with which the review is saturated, the review's title admonishes
Porter for her lack of adherence to the conventions of the detective genre,
one of the genres within which she is working. By the end of the piece,
there is a more direct confrontation, in which the subject of The Monkey's
Mask is described as "a bout of cholera ... a case of the hots ... morally

1
For example 1'he Monkey's Mask won 1'he Age Book of the Year award, and a
National Book Council 'Banjo' for Poetry, and has been published internationally
and widely reviewed. It was made into a film, directed by Samantha Lang (2001).
72
 THE MONKEY'S MASK
and ethically depraved' (192). Yet the thematic seems not to be the only
problem for Moorhead. The fact that the review is presented in slices
suggests a preoccupation with the cut of the text - its sharpness, its
absolute lack of excess, and its cinematic jump-cut style editing. The style
and structure of Moorhead's review express something crucial about the
nature of the poetry she discusses, and the nature of the 'depravation' she
finds within that poetry. The stylistic motif of slicing, paring and cutting,
and its concomitant thematic of the figurative - and literal - excisions and
absences around which Porter's text revolves, emerge as the
preoccupations of the review, in a sort of negation. While not the overt
targets, they dominate and haunt the essay in other ways.
On the surface of the review, the grounds for what Fallon calls 'a
lesbian feminist denunciation from the pulpit [by) the Right Reverend F.
Moorhead' (192), are several. Moorhead claims that her concerns with the
book amount to: 'what is said and what is done' (178). Yet her case is
predominantly about what the book doesn't do - its lac1cs, fissures and
silences; what has been omitted or excised. Occasionally, the corollary is
true: Mooihead recoils from a complexity in the text, and seeks the
excision of ambiguous or ambivalent aspects. In terms of what the text
refuses to do, not 'say[ing) who did it' is at the fore of Moorhead's
argument. This reveals a discomfort with Porter's transgressive
deployment and melding of genres, coded as her breaking the rules of one
of those genres, detective fiction, as well as, perhaps, a desire for a more
readily containable example of a single genre. What one of the jurors in
Snow Falling on Ced/Irs says about an accumulation of prosecution
evidence, seems true of Moorhead's attitude to genre: 'If it looks like a
dog and walks like a dog, then most prob'ly it is a dog, that's all there's
going to be to it' (379).
In Moorhead's case, the complaint functions as something of a
metonym: there are deeper currents of transgressiveness and lawlessness
to which Moorhead's more crucial objection is made. Or perhaps, rather
than a metonym, the focus of the argument is something of a patsy.
Breaking the rules of genre is the transgression that takes the rap, while
elsewhere, activities Moorhead finds even more culpable and disturbing
go on. So, the argument against the book is framed in literary terms:
Moorhead objects to the fact that, despite borrowing the detective genre,
the story resists the closure traditionally associated with it Moreover,
73
 FELICITY PLUNKETT
certain other features of the genre are missing. In a more typical example
of the genre, one 'you can safely take . . . away on holiday and relax
with':
The little bloke takes on big city corruption, finds out the truth ... mone y is
symbolic, and the little guy is usually out of pocket, damaged, disillusioned
and fundamentally decent. Decadence is addressed, defeated . . . Basic
decency, respect for fact and logi c, warmth of personality contribute to a
satisfying solution, and if the conclusion includes courage on the detective's
part, the genre, as escapist fiction, succeeds. (179)
This describes what for Moorhead constitutes the generic aspect that The
Monkey's Mask seems to offer - or to evoke - but ultimately withhold. The
pronouns in this description are telling. Moorhead � not to
countenance a feminist project of reinventing genres, such as Anne
Cranny Francis describes:
Feminist writers work to challenge the interpellation of the individual within
bourgeois patriarchal ideologies, to introduce contradiction and complexity
which involves the reader in a renegotiation of his/her own subject position
and works towards the production of the feminist subject. (144)
Nor does Moorhead consider that Porter might be engaged in the more
specifically lesbian feminist project of reinventing genres, described by
Elaine Hobby and Chris White in the introduction to their collection of
essays What Lesbians Do in Books:
One of the things that lesbians frequently do in books is to appropriate certain
well-known genres of fiction, recreating and revising them in a manner
which aims to interrogate and subvert patriarchal, heterosexual codes of
conduct. (9)
For Moorhead, just as a clear generic categorisation is elusive, so too the
characters lack clarity, and 'warmth of personality' (179). An argument
starts by finding the nature of the characters unrealistic. Detective and
protagonist Jill Fitzpatrick, for example 'rings true neither as ex-Catholic
Irish nor working class ... how she comes over sounds like a construct of
a personal fantasy imagined :from reading rather than ever really known in
person' (178). It then mmphs into a paradoxical description of characters
evoked so well that the problem is, actually, that Moorhead doesn't want

74
 THE MONKEY'S MASK
them to be so complex. Moorhead eschews the possibility that Porter may
be representing fragmented people, or people lacking the integrity she
(Moorhead) would wish them to have - especially if they are women.
This is particularly true of two characters: Mrs Nonis, the mother of
Mickey, the murdered girl the mystery of whose death Jill seeks to
uncover, and Diana Maitland, Mickey's poetry tutor. In each case, the
lack Moorhead identifies is that of sympathetic representations of
femininity. In the former case, Moorhead intervenes 'as a lesbian who
loves and respects women', to say 'a word on Mrs Norris' behalf'(189).
Thus she reveals just how :fully she believes in Porter's construction, and
begins a forensic uncovering of what Mrs Norris would really be feeling.
As Fallon says of the review more generally: 'FINOLA! TIIEY ARE
FICTIONAL CHARACTERS. PORTER MADE THEM UP. DON'T GO TO
THE COPS. NOONE WAS REALLY KILLED' (195).
Porter's Mrs Norris is a repressed and probably oppressed woman, a
woman evoked in the impressionistic slashes of imagery that are
hallmarks of Porter's style - the language is sinewy, with transferred
epithets jangling otherwise crystalline metaphors, and monosyllables
succinctly building meaning. Mrs Norris is a woman of 'checks and
pleats' (249) with a 'missionary position face' (138), a 'flat chest' (138)
and a 'nice frock' (138), living in a neat home on Sydney's North Shore,
expressing little of berseU: but evincing horror at her daughter's sexual
activities. When she reads her daughter's erotic poems, she reacts with
white shock, blankly reporting: 'We didn't bring her up to use words like
that' (137). Jill, recognising that Mrs Nonis is 'crying because her
daughter wrote cunt in a poem' (137), tells her that the poems were love
poems. 'Then she was a monster', replies Mrs Norris (138).
Whether it is eroticism or poetry which most disturbs her is
unresolved - Porter leaves it open. 'Words like that' might immediately
suggest an abhorrence of the diction itself - but 'using words like that'
describes the dangerous and passionate craft of the poet, which it is
equally unlikely Mickey was brought up to apprentice herself to. For
poetry allows Mickey to excavate and articulate that which has been
buried in the pristine North Shore home of her original family,
particularly the sphere of emotional and sexual experience. Eith� way,
Moorhead defends Mrs Nonis against the charge of ambivalence her
reaction suggests: 'Older women generally know more about what it's

75
 FELJcrn J"LUNKE1T
like living in this world with the constant threat of male �olen...:e, be
C8.Qse
they've lived in it longer' (189). So, the argument goes, MTS N
otiis
wouldn't be surprised, nor would she collude with this 'male violence•
against her daughter.
Here, the excisions are Moorhead's. She won't believe that Mts
Norris could perpetuate a victim-blaming discourse against her daughter_
This is framed in terms of Mrs Norris' portrayal as being as 'pm-,, �orth
Shore' (The Monkey's Mask 1) as her voice. The implication seems b be
that female misogyny, which Moorhead doesn't countenance anyway, is
even less likely on the leafy, wealthy North Shore. Paradoxicall}-, given
the context ofMoorhead's defence of working class complexity earlier in
the review, this refusal to believe inMrs Norris' reaction could be read as
perpetuating a particularly disturbing and pernicious myth about sexual
assault and violence against children - that wealth somehow insulates
against it. Rather, this myth insulates the narrativisation of childhoc,k in
those places - making these stories, and the childhoods they contain, safe
from the violences - overt and covert - more traditionally associated with
the 'lower' classes. This myth itself does violence - to all who know tb.f!
ubiquity of child abuse, and to the middle class victims whose experiences
- both of sexual abuse, and of less-than-loving mothers - it erases.
Moorhead's desire to excise the idea that a woman might not feel
unconditional love and loyalty towards her daughter pleads for a more
utopian version of the moth.er/daughter bond, yet this is one that is clearly
missing from the text. That the cold familial home, and the ambivalence
of her mother, might in fact be the site and source ofMickey's masochism
seems not to suggest itself toMoorhead.
The other excision in Moorhead's reading is that of bisexuality, the
inclusion of which in the text militates against an essentialist reading of
Mickey's death as exemplifying nothing more than the disastrous effects
of 'male violence'. The text shows the collusion of its murderous
husband and wife team, as well asMickey's collusion with at least some
of their violence, if not her own death. Moorhead prefers to locate a man -
Diana's husband Nick - as the sole agent. While many ofMickey's poems
deal in the imagery and topoi of the masochism associated with
conventional heterosexuality, like Shakespeare's sonnets, these are
bisexual love poems, whose subjects vary. YetMoorhead, like the many
readers of Shakespeare who prefer to see an epicene girl th.an a lovely boy
76
 THE MONKEY'S MASK
de 'dark lady' as the second object of all that blazomy, seems
,1-asi the
IJP.wil)ing to acknowledge this, preferring to locate Mickey's masochism
withinthe :frame of the familiar heterosexual mode. This erases the more
iobJematic aspect Mickey's bisexual experiences bring to the questions
p
of agency, consent and collusion with which Moorhead, and the text, are
eoncerned.
Marjorie Garber has argued that bisexuality is often configured as
inhefently untrustworthy, commenting on the emergence of 'biphobia',
aod an association of bisexuality with betrayal and treachery (7). Within
the pathological sexual triangle The Monkey's Mask describes, with which
aod within which Mickey is consumed, both she and Diana are bisexual.
In Diana's case, duplicity and bisexuality function to reinforce one
aoother, and her sexuality is represented as something of a leak in a
culture of 'compulsory heterosexuality', as well as the source of a rupture
or breakdown of morality that results in Mickey's death. Her sexuality is
linked inextricably with the pathological.2 In Mickey's case, it affects the
way she may or may not be construed as a victim, by altering the simpler
paradigm of male/female violence to which Mo�rhead alludes. A reading
like Moorhead's erases this complication, restoring to the text the simpler
sinews of traditional paradigms of abuses of power.
The erasure of problematic bisexuality within Moorhead's reading
exemplifies the reductive nature of her review. Its narrative seeks to erase
the bumps and snarls of the text's ambiguities, and, more often, to smooth
over and fill in the gaps and silences which puncture and :fragment the
text, closing holes which leave open unsettling moral and ethical
questions. Moorhead's activities in the review remind me of the 'Inspector
of Holes', a bizarrely Freudian figure created by Ted Hughes in his
children's book Meet My Folks, whose work centres on the inspection of
ubiquitous and dangerous 'holes':
A Hole's an unpredictable thing -
Nobody knows what a hole might bring.
Caves in the mountain, clefts in the wall,
My Father has to inspect them all! (12)

2
I discuss this in more detail in another article, Felicity Plunkett, 'The Detective,
the Poet and the Femme Fatale: Mourning and Hermeneutics in The Monkey's
Mask'.
77
 FELICITY PLUNKETT
This overarching - and submerged - dynamic in the review is, for me,
more compelling than Moorhead's case itself. Thinking about the book,
and the review, it strikes me that at the heart of the text, and the complaint
against it, is the idea of a poetics of excision. All Moorhead' s claims
against the text are framed in terms of what the text doesn't do, its
silences and refusals, what it lacks.The issue is what isn't in the text: the
narrative closure and readerly satisfaction found in conventional genre
fiction; a female homosocial that is inexorably loving; characters who
show that the world is peopled by the indefatigably loving, as well as the
murderous, and that the two can be distinguished from one another, not
least through the alchemy of crime fiction.
Moorhead is not the only critic to have deployed a discourse of
excision - a focus on what it lacks, or what it doesn't do - when writing
about The Monkey's Mask. In her review, Lee Cataldi writes:
the poetry is stripped of almost all that makes it poetic: emotion, metaphor,
the hidden . . . Only occasionally does something from those depths reveal
itself, those depths into which the detective cannot afford to look. (82)
Penelope Debelle uses the metaphor of the film editor, seeing Porter as:
'working like a film editor who cuts and edits for dramatic effect' (11 ),
while Jenny Digby shares with Moorhead a sense of dissatisfaction with
the ending, mourning a lack of closure and an absence: 'I felt the need for
stronger retribution and justice' (43).
Over the almost thirty years that Porter has been publishing poetry,
and particularly since the publication of The Monkey's Mask, critical work
about her writing has been mediated through a discourse of violence.The
writing is described as pared, spare, cut back to the bone, always implying
knives and blades, sharpness and sculpting. William Wilde commented on
Porter's 'finely honed' and 'sharply witty' lyrics (220) while Helen Elliott
predicted that 'The Monkey's Mask will hit the streets with blades on'
(18). In an interview with Porter, poet and critic Chris Wallace Crabbe
deploys a metaphor used by Kevin Hart, and elaborates on it. He suggests
to Porter that she writes 'what Kevin Hart would call "vertical poetry'' ...
everything extraneous pared away, the language pure, clear, almost

78
 THE MONKEY'S MASK
minimal', and that this evokes an idea of Porter as sculptor: "the idea of
3
the sculpture in the block of Carrara marble (n.p.n. ). '
At the heart of this is an idea of violence, and Porter's own comments
about poetry reinforce this: 'I'm just longing for poetry with verve and
nerve ... I'm longing for poetry that just smacks me across the head'
(Vicars and Louis 10). In the case of The Monkey's Mask, Porter's subject
matter involves an investigation of the world of poets and poetry, since
Mickey has been a student and writer of poetry. I would argue that the text
thus has a metapoetic aspect as part of its slew of postmodern tricks, and
that Porter's 'meta' position, and incisive style, give her a position as
literary surgeon, and the poetry a surgical precision, to deploy and
revivify a metaphor more commonly used in the sphere of war.
All this violence and cutting argues for an association of Porter's
poetic with that of a line of late nineteenth and twentieth century writers,
urging for passion and danger in writing. Arguably something of a lineage
may be posited, along the lines Helene Cixous suggests in her meditation
on writing, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. Cixous argues that all
writing can and must be violent, so that it may do its work of 'unearthing
and unerasing' that which has been occluded - rendered occult - by the
force of hegemonic culture (9). Yet this passage to truth is, for Cixous, a
treacherous one, because our lives - especially our social lives - are built
on an edific� of lies. This renders 'going in the direction of truth and
dying almost synonymous' (36). Cixous' image of the writer sites the
explorer of the hidden as a criminal - 'the moment I pick up my pen -
magical gesture - I forget all the people I love . . . for the duration of the
journey we are killers' (21). She cites Kafka's belief that 'we should only
read those books which wound and stab us' and that 'a book must be the
axe on the frozen sea within'.
Raymond Carver borrowed similar imagery when he regularly quoted
Isaac Babel's maxim that: 'No iron can pierce the heart with such force as
a period put in just the right place' (McCaffery 57). The American
confessional poets spoke of violence as being the province of true poetry.
Robert Lowell praised poetry that is 'jerry-built and forensically deadly'

3
Page numbers are unavailable for this and other material acce$$ed on the
internet. See 'Works Cited'. n.p.n., 'no page number', indicates, in shorter
references, an internet site.
79
 FELICITY PLUNKETT

(Hami�ton 277). �ylv�a. P�� creat�d images of poetry as "blood jet . .

There 1s no stoppmg 1t ( Kindness 270) and saturated her poem8 in th·.
word "blood', which occurs fifty-seven times in her Collected Poems �·
addition to compound variations - "blood-black', 'blood�heat', 'blood,.
�poor', 'blood-caul· �d so on_ (Matovich 58-�9). Plath also uses CXUvial
imagery, and a mottf of panng back, peelmg off 'dead hands, dead
stringencies' ('Ariel' 260) in a quest for ecstatic inspiration. She plaits
motifs of violence, inspiration and sexual pleasure, though always aware
that this will come with a 'charge' ('Lady Lazarus' 244) in all its senses_
legal and moral; a heady rush, a fee, and always a risky electrical imlz.
Cixous, too, fuses images of violence and violent imaginative discm,"'Y
with images of pleasure, calling the writer's crime of exploring the
occluded a 'crime of jouissance', something which pushes the artist to the
limits of danger and pleasure.
This association of writing with violence - stabbing, hacking,
smashing - runs counter to images of the literary as passive and pallid; at
best genteel, at worst soporific. Using similar metaphors, the Australian
poets who drew inspiration from the American confessionals, the
Generation of '68, wrote of revivifying a tired poetic culture. Porter's
poetics of excision inherit some of the speed and heat their work
exemplifies.
As well as these cutting, violent aspects of Porter's style, The
Monkey's Mask revolves around a poetics of excision at a thematic level.
Porter has often spoken of poetry's 'daemonic' aspect: 'Poetry gives that
sixth dimension - the subterranean psychic landscape - that can give the
most evil character a vivid, even sympathetic, luminosity. It's bad
speaking wonders' ('It's Too Hard to Write Good' n.p.n.). Daemonic
poetry both haunts and taunts its reader, offering glimpses of an occult
world, but not seeing its role as bringing to the light those things that
dweJl in the dark. Beneath the surface narrative of The Monkey's Mask
flow ideas of loss and longing, and preoccupations with what is cut out,
omitted, or ignored. The motif of the return of the excised runs through
the poetry, chiefly in its analysis of grief and grieving, and of the
associated taboo.
The book focuses on a dead girl, Mickey Norris, whose absent
presence forms the axis of the narrative's movement. Although Mickey
has died before the events of the book begin, she is not inert, but the
80
 THE MONKEY'S MASK

active centre of the text. The trope of her posthumously read poems
fu_Octions to bring to the fore of the text the notion of her voice, her
feelings, and a sort of haunting. This centrality of her voice and emotions
foregroun ds an idea typically submerged within the rituals of erasure that
-ean attend mourning, that the dead share in mourning. As Nigel Barley
suggests: 'it is above all the dead that feel desperate grief and loneliness'
(31) and the refusal of Mickey's voice to be silenced insists on the
acknowledgment of this.
Grief articulates an excision, marking the removal of a loved one or,
in Mickey's case, the losses of self which prefigure and bring about her
death. But grieving itself is also, arguably, routinely policed and excised
within the contemporary Australian culture Porter describes. A striking
absence in the text is the absence of mourning for Mickey. Her parents
seem more concerned with losses of face, and the loss of an idealised and
infa.ntilised version of their daughter; her lovers smirk about her; her
friends seem self-centred and detached. The absence of mourning is the
socially condoned and thus occluded violence that shadows the more
overt violences which Mickey experiences. It is a final violation and
indecency which Mickey experiences, and it is the natural offspring of the
detached relationships Mickey has had, which are the source of her
masochism and self-abasement.
I would argue that part of the burden Jill assumes, as private
investigator and Mickey's 'shadow', is that of articulating an otherwise
muted or absent mourning. In this way, Porter posits an erotics of
mourning, through which Jill comes to inhabit Mickey's life, her quest as
detective twinned and twined with her erotic quest within the text. At first,
when her job is to find Mickey, she assumes the role of detective-as­
shadow, but increasingly she is that pervasive figure of detective fictions
- detective as assumer-of-identity; someone who becomes subsumed
within the case, and fused and confused with the identity of the person
sought. Following the trace of the absent presence, she or he visits the
home, mends and lovers of the missing person, eventually embodying the
missing or dead person as s/he moves towards his or her fate. That she or
he - but traditionally he - is compelled by a femme fatale as well as the
evidence of the crime stresses the double :function of detection as erotic
pursuit.

81
 FELICITY PLUNKETT

In Jill's case, she 1:>ecomes Mickey in crucial ways. Most importantl

she shares Mickey's infatuation with Diana, which leads her along 0;.
path where Mickey's death lay, and she also eventually becomes ·.
translator of Mickey's poetry, thus ventriloquising the dead grrr !i 10;·
grief and passion. Figuratively, then, this figure of the detectve takes on
the form ofthe dead, a metaphysical grave robber, entering death and the
occult, visiting the occluded and the excised, just as the mown,n in
classical elegy, like Virgil's Orpheus in Georgics IV, entereii the
underworld to close their grieving.
Sandra Gilbert alludes to the dangers of mourning practices which
involve following and conversing with the dead when she writes that:
those who mourn, those who summon the dead while intuiting and perh.aos
resisting their calls into death, know that it is essential to speak of death and
the dead because if those who have died are still part of us even while I.hey
are part of death, then death is part ofus. (n.p.n.)
Since the idea that death is part ofus is an unsettling one, conversing with
the dead is firmly located on the cultural fringes. The Monkey's Mask
plays with the idea of the voice of the dead, and explores the idea of the
giving and taking away of that voice by the living - by those who do the
work of mourning, and those who refuse to, respectively. The partial
testimony offered by Mickey's poems combines with Jill's final lament
for her in the book's last poem 'The Monkey's Mask'. At the end ofthat
poem, Jill conjures a vision of Mickey's ghost 'growing dark', walking
through the hot green ofa summer rainstorm, her voice '[glistening] green
and wet'. Jill's elegy articulates the difficulty of mourning, and the
elusiveness of the mourned object, whilst doing the work of that
mourning. In this final poem, Jill finishes the work of the detective and
lover ('Forget the bitch./ Case closed.') and finds closure in the role of
mourner and elegist. The text's closure is provided not by some pat
denouement or conventional narrative closure, but through the always­
resistant and echoing form ofthe elegy.
Murder mystery provides, arguably, a more socially acceptable
version of elegy's journey into the dead. It, too, is a genre premised on
tracing and trace, and the excision that its crucial absent/presence implies.
Yet it is elegy that finds its energy in resting with the gaps and excisions
ofmourning, while the detective genre conventionally seeks anxiously to
82
 THE MONKEY'S MASK
murder mystery and elegy fuse, as they do towards the
lose them. When
�d of Th e Monkey's Mask, each heightens the other's awareness ofthose
si
aci ons . In the case ofThe Monkey's Mask, a fragmented style suggests
a resistant text, one that refuses a paradigmatic approach to genre, and any
r;asy moral closure, leaving unresolved and open some of its most
unsett}ing gaps.
Moorhead's reading takes the slices of the text and seeks to
reassemble them into an integrated form. But The Mo-nkey 's Mask is a
slippery text. It is bathed in the juices of desire of its protagonists, the
vivid fuel ofexpresso, and the liquid smoothness oflanguage. It is awash
with losses, narrativising the excavation that the detective must undertake,
and the quest ofthe elegist. It evokes the muteness and lack ofmourning
d1at follow Mickey's death, and the silences where moral closure would.
speak in a more conventional text. The dead girl haunts the text through
her poems, which sing her absent presence, and the text's sharp slivers
articulate and perform a poetics ofexcision.

W0RKSOTED

Note: page numbers are not available for web sites.

Barley, Nigel. Grave Matters: A Lively HistoryoJDeathAroundthe World. New
York: Henry Holt, 1997.
Cataldi, Lee. 'Deep Throats.' Review of The Monkeys Mask. Overland 140
(1995): 82-83.
Cixous, Helene. Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. New York: Columbia UP,
1993.
Cranny Francis, Anne. Feminist Fictions: Feminist Uses ofGeneric Fiction.
Cambridge: Polity P, 1990.
Dale, Leigh. 'Canonising Queer: From Hal to Dorothy.' Australian Literature
and the Public Sphere. Eds Alison Bartlett, Robert Dixon and
Christopher Lee. Toowoomba: Association for the Study of Australian
Literature, 1999.
Debelle, Penelope. 'Passion and Magic.' Inteiview with Dorothy Porter. The Age
(15 October 1994): 11.

83
 FELIOTYPLUNKE'IT
Digby, Jenny. 'A Daring Venture-' Review of The Monkey's Mask. Australian
Book.Review 165 (1994): 43.
Elliott, Helen. 'Breaking Conventions: Helen Elliott speaks with Dorothy Porter.'
Bookseller & Publisher 74, 1049 (1994): 18.
Fallon, Kathleen Mary. 'Ham-Fists in Those "Male Size Golf Gloves".' Southerly
55, 3 (1995): 191.
Freeman, Jane. 'Pop goes the Poet.' Sydney Morning Herald (23 March 1996):
11. Qtd in Leigh Dale (above).
Garber, Marjorie. Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism ofEveryday Life.
New York: Touchstone, 1996.
Gilbert, Sandra. Paper given in the 'Silence, Art, Ritual' session of Seeing the
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