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MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY
POETRY AND POETICS
Edited by
Dan Disney · Matthew Hall
Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics
Series Editor
David Herd, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK
Founded by Rachel Blau DuPlessis and continued by David Herd, Modern
and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics promotes and pursues topics in
the burgeoning field of 20th and 21st century poetics. Critical and
scholarly work on poetry and poetics of interest to the series includes:
social location in its relationships to subjectivity, to the construction of
authorship, to oeuvres, and to careers; poetic reception and dissemination
(groups, movements, formations, institutions); the intersection of poetry
and theory; questions about language, poetic authority, and the goals of
writing; claims in poetics, impacts of social life, and the dynamics of the
poetic career as these are staged and debated by poets and inside poems.
Since its inception, the series has been distinguished by its tilt toward
experimental work – intellectually, politically, aesthetically. It has consis-
tently published work on Anglophone poetry in the broadest sense and
has featured critical work studying literatures of the UK, of the US, of
Canada, and Australia, as well as eclectic mixes of work from other social
and poetic communities. As poetry and poetics form a crucial response to
contemporary social and political conditions, under David Herd’s editor-
ship the series will continue to broaden understanding of the field and its
significance.
Editorial Board
Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Temple University
Vincent Broqua, Université Paris 8
Olivier Brossard, Université Paris-Est
Steve Collis, Simon Fraser University
Jacob Edmond, University of Otago
Stephen Fredman, Notre Dame University
Fiona Green, University of Cambridge
Abigail Lang, Université Paris Diderot
Will Montgomery, Royal Holloway University of London
Miriam Nichols, University of the Fraser Valley
Redell Olsen, Royal Holloway University of London
Sandeep Parmar, University of Liverpool
Adam Piette, University of Sheffield
Nisha Ramaya, Queen Mary University of London
Brian Reed, University of Washington
Ann Vickery, Deakin University
Carol Watts, University of Sussex
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14799
Dan Disney · Matthew Hall
Editors
New Directions
in Contemporary
Australian Poetry
Editors
Dan Disney Matthew Hall
Sogang University Deakin University
Seoul, Korea (Republic of) Williamstown, VIC, Australia
ISSN 2634-6052 ISSN 2634-6060 (electronic)

Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics
ISBN 978-3-030-76286-5 ISBN 978-3-030-76287-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76287-2
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Praise for New Directions in
Contemporary Australian Poetry
“Dan Disney and Matthew Hall have produced a critical anthology that is
much more than a showcase for a particular poetic nationalism. Rather, as
their twenty poet-critics demonstrate so elegantly, the aim is to remodel
poetic community itself as an active site of political contestation. Whether
exploring the indigeneities that distinguish Australian poetry from others,
or exploding the common myths about its animating nature and culture,
the essays, written by the leading practitioners in their field, will force
you to rethink what it means to be an Australian poet in the twenty-first
century. An exemplary collection!”
—Marjorie Perloff, author of Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other
Means in the New Century (2010)
“New Directions in Contemporary Australian Poetry is a genuinely

decolonizing anthology which reveals many of Australia’s best writers
addressing us in their most cogent and renovating voices. Whereas others
would assume rhetorical innovations are enough to express resistance,
and still others would lean upon the political as a prefabricated base, the
essays and poetic inventions Disney and Hall have assembled stage a real
dialogue between affordances of ramified form and networks of critical
practice.”
—Nicholas Birns, New York University, USA
v
vi PRAISE FOR NEW DIRECTIONS IN CONTEMPORARY AUSTRALIAN …
“While the nation state may be a barrier to a more interconnected prac-

tice of poetry, before crossing that line we do well to acknowledge—
even while deranging and unsettling—actually existing poetry cultures.
New Directions in Contemporary Australian Poetry takes on this work,
illuminating the contours and recesses, multiplicities, contraventions, and
Aboriginalities of Australian poetics with brio, ingenuity, heat, and light.
This book is notable not only for the great individual poets and poems
that it illuminates, but also for the case it makes for the power of newly
emerging poetries in Australia. All that’s left is to join the conversation.”
—Charles Bernstein, University of Pennsylvania (Emeritus), USA
“The last decade has brought a surge in Indigenous poetry that uses
fresh modes of language to refuse the intransigent and systemic injustices
of past and present Australian settler mentality. It is timely that this book
begins with Indigenous voices. This expansive critical presentation of
Australian poetics affirms poetry as performing the work of the social
and opens the field to a future imagined as a continuum of diversities,
biopolitics, ethics, experiment, and connectivity. It’s an indispensable
resource.”
—Pam Brown, author of Missing Up (2015) and Click Here for What
We Do (2018)
“A new generation of poetry is growing from the network of song-

lines that are reconnecting across flood-ravaged highways. There are
new movements: a burgeoning Aboriginal renaissance, co-creations with
animals and plants, other diagrams for being, feeling, and belonging.
When poetic language resplices ancient myths new powers are released,
that is what this book of brilliant essays taught me: denationalise, hit the
track, listen for the songs.”
—Stephen Muecke, Flinders University, Australia
“Ambitious and playful, this collection seeks nothing less than to redraw
(to unsettle and de-range) the boundaries, histories, and practices of
Australian poetry. Disney and Hall have brought the lively and critical
voices collected here into conversation, and in doing so they illustrate
how the project of decolonising poetry in Australia is one that should be
approached with hope.”
—David McCooey, Deakin University, Australia
Contents
Introduction: New Directions in Contemporary Australian

Poetry? 1
Dan Disney and Matthew Hall
Indigeneities
Our Poetic-Justice 15
Natalie Harkin
The Intimacy in Survival Poetics 31
Ellen van Neerven
Response to Natalie Harkin: A Labor of Love 45
Jeanine Leane
All the Trees 55
Peter Minter
Just Poetry 71
Alison Whittaker
Political Landscapes
Bordering, Dissolving, Meeting, Regenerating 85
Bonny Cassidy
vii
viii CONTENTS
Writing Unwriting Writing 97

Anne Elvey
“If You Don’t Mind Me Arsing”: Insubordination
and Land in Marty Hiatt’s the manifold 107
Michael Farrell
Against Place (the Lyrebird Shows the Way) 119
Stuart Cooke
Disembodying and Reembodying the Poem as Act
of Acknowledgment of Land Rights and a Rejection
of “Property”: On Acts and Actioning of Environmentally
Concerned Poetry 133
John Kinsella
Space, Place, Materiality

Space, Place, Materiality in Contemporary Australian
Poetry 145
Justin Clemens
Archiving the Undercommons: An Infrastructural Reading
of Contemporary Australian Poetry 159
Kate Lilley
The Antipodal Avant-Gardes: Chronometrics 171
A. J. Carruthers
New Australian Poetry: Deranged and Teeming 183
Jill Jones
The Work of Poetry 193
Astrid Lorange
Revising an Australian ‘Mythos’

Poets, Truths, and Australia 207
Ali Alizadeh
Revising an Australian Mythos 217
Ann Vickery
CONTENTS ix
On Machines and Metamorphoses: Notes Toward a Future

Australian Mythos 229
Bella Li
Revisionist Myth Cycles and the State of Poetry 239
Louis Armand
Shadowlands, or Somewhere in the Australian Odyssey 251
Michelle Cahill
Afterword: The Province of L’Avenir 265
Philip Mead
Index 273
Notes on Contributors
Ali Alizadeh is a Senior Lecturer at Monash University, Australia. His

books include Marx and Art (2019), the collections of poetry Towards
the End (2020), Ashes in the Air (2011), and Eyes in Times of War
(2006), and the works of fiction The Last Days of Jeanne d’Arc (2017),
Transactions (2013), and The New Angel (2008).
Louis Armand directs the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory at
Charles University, Prague. He is the author of the novels The Garden
(2020), The Combinations (2016), and Clair Obscur (2011). In addition,
he has published collections of poetry, including Letters from Ausland
(2011), Indirect Objects (2014), and Monument (with John Kinsella,
2020). He is the author of Videology (2015) and The Organ-Grinder’s
Monkey: Culture after the Avantgarde (2013), and is formerly an editor
of VLAK magazine. www.louis-armand.com.
Michelle Cahill has Goan-Anglo Indian heritage. Her book Letter to
Pessoa (2016) won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for New Writing.
She is the author of three collections of poetry, including Vishvarupa
(2019) and The Herring Lass (2016). She has received several prizes and
grants in poetry and fiction from the Australia Council, the Copyright
Agency Limited, and an Australian Postgraduate Award. She was Poetry
Fellow at Kingston Writing School, London and a Visiting Scholar at
UNC Charlotte. Her criticism has appeared in Sydney Review of Books,
The Weekend Australian, Westerly, Southerly, and Wasafari.
xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
A. J. Carruthers is a literary critic and poet, author of Stave Sightings:

Notational Experiments in North American Long Poems (2017), Axis
Book 1: Areal (2014), and Axis Book 2 (2019). As a critic, he works in
the areas of general literary criticism, rhetoric, theory, history, divination,
and various kinds of poetics, Antipodal, North American and Eastern. He
works in the School of Languages and Literature, Shanghai University of
International Business and Economics (SUIBE).
Bonny Cassidy is the author of three poetry collections and numerous
essays on Australian writing. She was co-editor with Jessica L. Wilkinson
of the anthology Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry (2016) and
has previously been Reviews Editor at Cordite Poetry Review. Bonny
lectures in Creative Writing and is a facilitator of the Bundyi Girri (Shared
Futures) program at RMIT University. She lives in Dja Dja Wurrung
Country in Castlemaine, Victoria.
Justin Clemens writes poetry and criticism. His books of poetry include:
Limericks, Philosophical and Literary (2019); The Mundiad (2013); and
Villain (2013). Among his critical works are Lacan, Deleuze, Badiou
(2014), co-written with A. J. Bartlett and Jon Roffe; Psychoanalysis is
an Antiphilosophy (2013); and Minimal Domination (2011). He has also
helped to translate several works of French philosophy, including Alain
Badiou’s Happiness (2019) and The Pornographic Age (2020), and has
edited many scholarly collections on the work of Giorgio Agamben, Alain
Badiou, Jacques Lacan, and Jacqueline Rose. His current research is on
Barron Field, who published the first book of poetry in Australia. He is
an Associate Professor at the University of Melbourne, Australia.
Stuart Cooke’s books include Speaking the Earth’s Languages: a theory
for Australian-Chilean postcolonial poetics (2013) and the poetry collec-
tions Lyre (2019), Opera (2016), and Edge Music (2011). He is a senior
lecturer in creative writing and literary studies at Griffith University.
Dan Disney has published four collections of poetry, and his writing
appears in Angelaki, Kenyon Review, Antipodes, Orbis Litterarum, and
CounterText. He is an associate editor with the Journal of English
Language and Literature, and a regular reviewer with World Litera-
ture Today. He teaches with the English Literature Program at Sogang
University, in Seoul.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii
Anne Elvey lives in Boonwurrung Country in Seaford, Victoria.

Managing editor of Plumwood Mountain: An Australian Journal of
Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics, Anne holds honorary appointments at Monash
University and University of Divinity. Poetry collections include On
arrivals of breath (2019), White on White (2018), Kin (2014), and
Intatto/Intact (co-authored with Massimo D’Arcangelo and Helen
Moore, 2017). Scholarly publications include Ecological Aspects of War:
Engagements with Biblical Texts (co-edited with Keith Dyer and Deborah
Guess, 2017) and The Matter of the Text: Material Engagements between
Luke and the Five Senses (2011).
Michael Farrell is from Bombala NSW, now living in Melbourne. He
has a Ph.D. from the University of Melbourne: his revised thesis was
published as Writing Australian Unsettlement: Modes of Poetic Inven-
tion 1796–1945 (2015). Michael’s books of poetry include Family Trees
(2020), I Love Poetry (2017), A Lyrebird (2017), and Cocky’s Joy (2015).
He also edited Ashbery Mode (2019), as well as (with Jill Jones) Out of the
Box: Australian Gay and Lesbian Poets (2009). He edits a poetry maga-
zine, Flash Cove. He is an adjunct fellow at Curtin University, and has a
mid-career critic’s fellowship at Sydney Review of Books.
Matthew Hall holds a doctorate from the University of Western
Australia. He is the author of numerous books, including the monograph
On Violence in the work of J.H. Prynne, and has published scholarship
with Angelaki, Contemporary Women’s Writing, and The Journal of British
and Irish Innovative Poetry, among others. He works as a designer and
education consultant in Melbourne, Australia.
Natalie Harkin is a Narungga woman and activist-poet from South
Australia. She is a Senior Research Fellow at Flinders University with an
interest in decolonizing state archives, engaging archival-poetic methods
to document Aboriginal women’s domestic service and labor histories in
South Australia. Her words have been installed and projected in exhi-
bitions comprising text-object-video projection, including creative-arts
research collaboration with the Unbound Collective. She has published
widely, including with literary journals Overland, Westerly, Southerly,
The Lifted Brow, Wasafiri International Contemporary Writing, TEXT ,
and Cordite. Her poetry collections include Dirty Words (2015), and
Archival-poetics (2019).
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Jill Jones was born in Sydney and has lived in Adelaide since 2008. She
is a Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at University of
Adelaide, as well as a widely published poet. In 2015 she won the Victo-
rian Premier’s Prize for Poetry for The Beautiful Anxiety. Recent books
include Wild Curious Air (2020), A History Of What I’ll Become (2020),
and Viva the Real, which was shortlisted for the 2019 Prime Minister’s
Literary Award for Poetry and the 2020 John Bray Award. Her work has
been translated into Chinese, French, Italian, Czech, Macedonian, and
Spanish.
John Kinsella’s most recent poetry volumes include Drowning in
Wheat: Selected Poems (2016), Open Door (2018), The Wound (2018),
and Insomnia (2019). He has also written fiction, criticism, and plays,
and often works in collaboration with other writers, artists, and musi-
cians. His critical books include Disclosed Poetics (2006), Activists Poetics
(ed. Niall Lucy; 2010), Spatial Relations (2013), Polysituatedness (2017),
and Temporariness (co-written with Russell West-Pavlov; 2018). He is a
Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, and Emeritus Professor of Liter-
ature and Environment, Curtin University, Western Australia. He has lived
in various places around the world, but mainly in the Western Australian
wheatbelt.
Jeanine Leane is a Wiradjuri writer, poet, essayist, and academic from
southwest New South Wales. Her poetry, short stories, and essays have
been published in Hecate: an Interdisciplinary Journal of Women’s Liber-
ation, The Journal of the Association of European Studies of Australia,
Australian Poetry Journal, Antipodes, Sydney Review of Books, Best
Australian Poems, Overland, and Australian Book Review. She has
published widely in the area of Aboriginal literature, poetry, writing other-
ness, and creative non-fiction. Her research interests concern the political
nature of literary representation, cultural appropriation of minority voices
and stories, and writing identity and difference.
Bella Li has a Ph.D. from the University of Melbourne, and is the author
of Argosy (2017), which won the 2018 Victorian Premier’s Literary
Award for Poetry and the 2018 NSW Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry,
and Lost Lake (2018), shortlisted for the 2018 QLD Literary Award for
Poetry. Her writing and artwork have been published in journals and
anthologies including Australian Book Review, The Best Australian Poems,
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv
Kenyon Review, and Archives of American Art Journal. She is also an

editor and book publisher.
Kate Lilley is an Honorary Associate Professor of English at the Univer-
sity of Sydney where she specializes in wide-ranging queer feminist literary
history and intermedia poetics. She is the editor of Margaret Cavendish:
The Blazing World (1994) and Dorothy Hewett: Selected Poems (2010)
and the author of three full-length collections of poetry: Versary (2002),
winner of the Grace Leven Prize; Ladylike (2012), and Tilt (2018), winner
of the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry. Follow her work at https://
sydney.academia.edu/KateLilley.
Astrid Lorange is a writer, editor, and teacher from Sydney, Australia.
She lectures at UNSW Art & Design, and is the author of How Reading
is Written: A Brief Index to Gertrude Stein (2014) and Labour and Other
Poems (2020). She is one-half of the critical art collective Snack Syndicate.
She researches social infrastructures, networks of care, and histories and
futures of intimacy.
Philip Mead was born in Brisbane and educated in Queensland, the
U.K. and in the United States. From 2009 to 2018 he was inaugural
Chair of Australian Literature at the University of Western Australia. From
1987 to 1994 he was Poetry Editor of Meanjin Quarterly magazine and
Lockie Fellow in Creative Writing and Australian Literature in the English
Department, University of Melbourne. He has edited The Penguin Book
of Modern Australian Poetry (1992), with John Tranter, and edited selec-
tions of poetry by Frank Wilmot, Selected Poetry and Prose (1997) and
David Campbell, Hardening of the Light (2007). In 2009 he published
a critical study, Networked Language: History & Culture in Australian
Poetry and in 2018 a collection of poetry, Zanzibar Light.
Peter Minter is a poet, poetry editor, and writer on poetry and poetics.
His books include Rhythm in a Dorsal Fin (1995), Empty Texas (1998),
blue grass (2006), and In the Serious Light of Nothing (2014). He was
a founding editor of Cordite poetry magazine, poetry editor for leading
Australian journals Meanjin, and Overland, and has co-edited antholo-
gies such as Calyx: 30 Contemporary Australian Poets (2000) and the
Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature (2008). He teaches
at the University of Sydney in Indigenous Studies, Creative Writing, and
Australian Literature.
xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Ellen van Neerven is a First Nations Australian writer and editor from
Mununjali Yugambeh country in South East Queensland. Ellen’s books
include the award-winning fiction collection Heat and Light (2014), and
the poetry collections Comfort Food (2016) and Throat (2020).
Ann Vickery is Associate Professor of Writing and Literature at Deakin
University. She is the author of Leaving Lines of Gender: A Femi-
nist Genealogy of Language Writing (2000), and Stressing the Modern:
Cultural Politics in Australian Women’s Poetry (2007). She co-authored
The Intimate Archive: Journeys through Private Papers (2009) and co-
edited Poetry and the Trace (2013). She is the author of three poetry
collections, Bees Do Bother: An Antagonist’s Carepack (2021), Devious
Intimacy (2015), and The Complete Pocketbook of Swoon (2014). She
was editor-in-chief of HOW2, an online journal on innovative women’s
writing and scholarship, and co-founder of the Australasian Modernist
Studies Network.
Alison Whittaker is a Gomeroi woman from Gunnedah. She is a Senior
Researcher at the Jumbunna Institute. Her second book, BLAKWORK
(2018), was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, the
Victorian Premier’s Literary Award and received the Queensland Literary
Award for Poetry.
Introduction: New Directions
in Contemporary Australian Poetry?
Dan Disney and Matthew Hall
This book sets out to navigate questions of the future of Australian

poetry. In tracing a cartography wherein the past has shaped processes of
becoming, New Directions in Contemporary Australian Poetry focuses on
fields of the possible, on the field in flux. This anthology of possible ideas
emerges generationally after other Australian writers who have, in their
own ways, sought to explore the possibilities of Australian writing. Each
essay in this book works to the logic of A.J. Carruthers’ assertion that
“a poetics-minded anthology can still provide a social model of literary
community,” a commons with a global reach that exists outside, or in
contestation of, settled accounts of a nationalist–statist framework (21).
In modeling the potentialities of community, the essays gathered into this
collection constitute a step toward recalibrating our compositional coordi-
nates. Energetically thinking toward such possibilities, after Philip Mead’s
Networked Language (2008), we maintain the essays here intervene,
problematize, and perhaps may precipitate a restructuring and “radical
D. Disney (B)
Sogang University, Seoul, Republic of Korea
M. Hall
Deakin University, Williamstown, VIC, Australia
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
D. Disney and M. Hall (eds.), New Directions in Contemporary
Australian Poetry, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76287-2_1
2 D. DISNEY AND M. HALL
reformulation of stories of language and nation—how is it defined? who

belongs to it? who gets to imagine it?” (401).
While not an especially new or novel claim, that “Australia” has long
been a contested site outside geographic or cultural specificity remains an
ethos that anchors New Directions in Contemporary Australian Poetry.
Extending Bonny Cassidy and Jessica Wilkinson’s acknowledgment that
there is no one feminist voice defining Australian feminist writing (xii),
this book similarly seeks to make room for heterogeneous multitudes
and the potent possibilities that can arrive when multiple creatives gather
together a constellation of revelatory ideas. We acknowledge our indebt-
edness to Martin Harrison’s Who Wants to Create Australia? (2004), and
note also Corey Wakeling’s prescient introduction to Outcrop: Radical
Australian Poetry of Land (2013), which articulates belief in “poetry’s
potential for critique and dissent, but too the possibility of recupera-
tion and efflorescence of land’s multiplicity in a theatre of language”
(9). Our anthology is especially indebted to Philip Mead’s critical read-
ings of Australian poetry, through which he understands how “[l]anguage
persists as a site of political contestation and continually emergent reali-
ties in contemporary Australian life” (421). As this country edges toward
the 250th year since British colonization, we hope this book formalizes
some of Mead’s transformative work. Asserting an abundance of critical
(and we argue constitutional) angles, each essay here demonstrates how
to write back against “Australianized” infrastructural scenes.
Following Andrew Taylor’s Reading Australian Poetry (1987)
via Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s essay “The Solitary Shapers” (1974), in
Australian Poetry: Romanticism and Negativity (1996) Paul Kane asserts
the absence of romanticism in this country “has functioned as a gener-
ative presence […] for each significant poet has had to come to terms
with the lack of an indigenous cultural origin” (203). Of course, Kane’s
survey of a cadre of canonized Australian specters occludes an account of
those forces (imperial, epistemic) which empower and historicize specific
modes of language and its uses. In his essay for this anthology, Justin
Clemens extends Kane to venture how British romanticism, relocated,
“is essentially integrated with the colonial state form and its institu-
tions of education, publication, and policing” (p. 148). Those discourse
formations have endured into and across the twentieth century, causing
some Australian poets to narrowly interpolate coordinates in which “we’re
country, and Western” (Murray 64). Are Australians and their poets to
remain as if provincial Boeotians displaced in the so-called Terra nullius
INTRODUCTION: NEW DIRECTIONS IN CONTEMPORARY … 3
of a so-called new world (Murray contra Porter)? This anthology parlays

a paradigmatic, discursive adjustment. Rather than taking “the guise of
a reproduced, lesser version of British culture” (Rudy 4), can recently
emerged contemporary Australian poetries be read as fomenting newly
inclusive visions of community and cultural identity? Writing at the end
of the twentieth century, Kane foresees “an important change” on the
horizon, in which “Australian poetry itself is the frame within which
Australian poets are writing” (204). This book ventures through that
turn, toward the future, and away from colonial forms that have too long
endured, unchallenged.
In Writing Australian Unsettlement (2015), Michael Farrell forays
into the biopolitical, and embraces the task of “unsettling” Australian
literature by reading colonial texts as an archive of violently constitu-
tional forms. Similar to that book’s imperative to shift away from unitary
literary hagiographies, this anthology also seeks to reframe the past so
as to contest and assert futures in which as-yet unwritten Australian
poetries shift beyond “authoritative, dogmatic, and conservative” tropes
(Bakhtin 287). This anthology presupposes a future which has “com[e]
to terms with the unsettling difference of Indigenous narratives of place
and history and the plural knowledges of the multicultural present”
(Mead 401). The “difference” Mead asserts is both culturally defined and
delimits ontologies; in taking his lead, this book takes the opportunity to
push back against any position that would remain indifferent to language
as an agent which irradiates power to create not only difference but also
structures of oppression. This remains relevant to the historical discourse
of “Australian poetry” for, as John Kinsella asserts “[t]he machine of
state has many guises, and the poetry industry is one of them” (51). In
mapping the emergence of a disparate and loosely connected network
of ethically minded, critically savvy, and diverse voices, this book nour-
ishes newer possibilities. We remain optimistic that the critical framings
presented here may cause readers to dare to hope.
∗ ∗ ∗
Casting a critical gaze over the work of Slessor, Hope, Wright, Murray,
et al., Kane’s book argues “for a continuity of romantic concerns in
Australian poetry, even as [it attempts] to show that romanticism as a
cultural movement did not actually occur in Australia” (4). But when re-
emplotting the much-told historical story of canonized white Australian
poets as merely dislocated from a tradition, Kane’s book also enshrines as

unproblematic those hegemonic cultural machineries which perform and
murderously actuate exclusion. This line of argument endures, preserving
and privileging various national conservatisms which, broadly, commen-
tators in the current anthology will refer to as a kind of settler logic. We
understand this as a trope which is spoken directly from colonial anxi-
eties and which makes visible a so-called absence or negativity which (as
we read it) participates in a mythologizing that re-conceals oppressed
and often violently silenced others. In response, the current text seeks
to provide a forum in which highly literate contemporary Australian
poet-critics cauterize extant mythologies of Australian-ness. We hope the
languages of this book remain part of its impact; that these discussions
can act as maps guiding readers onto next modes of knowing, naming,
and performing reassertions of who, what, how, and why an “Australian
poetry” might be. This book has very little interest in clarifying a homo-
geneous dialect, but seeks instead to make voluminous (and exemplary)
a multi-voiced community’s interventions in asserting new possibilities of
creative responsiveness within the Australian sensorium.
Whether we are the linguistic descendants of antipodean inflections
of a romantic vacuity (Kane contra Taylor) or spring from lineages
in which modernity and postmodernity have been coeval, creating a
milieu “in which experiment [has long been] more or less mandatory”
(Haskell 266), the twenty essays in this anthology indicate how a suite
of newer visions may traverse increasingly extreme landscapes, intent on
interfering with some of those nationalizing mythologies that instru-
mentalize and render our lands precarious. Certainly, some may remain
skeptical toward this book’s claims for “new directions,” and will call to
attention other anthologies such as Tom Shapcott and Rodney Hall’s
New Impulses in Australian Poetry (1968), a book which two gener-
ations ago purported to showcase “the accomplishments of Australian
poetry in breaking fresh ground during the past decade” (1). We assert
that the critical commentaries contained herein perform a different kind
of groundwork, exemplifying how critical engagements remain funda-
mental to any creative stance seeking to critique power relations so as
to redress historical imbalances. Each poet in this book writes tenden-
tiously, and criticality informs creative output. Breaching the 200-year-old
systems of Australian identity, no poet in New Directions in Contemporary
Australian Poetry is “taking nationality for granted” (Shapcott 5).
Perhaps unlike other moments in our 200-year-old literary history,

most (if not all) of the contemporary Australian poet-critics contributing
to this anthology write out of the “entangled significance” of a transna-
tional everyday (van Dooren 7). Sharing connection with other languages,
other lands, and other cultures, the mobility of these hypermodern
cross-cultural interconnections serves to constitute “a poetry that is in
conversation with parallel poetries that are changing the landscape of
Australian literature” (Aitken 13). Collectively the gaze is extranational,
and this perceptual mode seems to enable a clearer focus that sees far
beyond the anodyne lyric, into an ethical core. As Astrid Lorange frames
it, we see evidence in this anthology of a turn toward an interrogation of
how future Australian poetries might participate in anti-colonial struggles
which “enact[] a critique of settler sovereignty as well as a critique of the
economic and legal subjectivities vital to the settler project” (p. 193). Or
as Michelle Cahill phrases it, the turn that this book institutes may instead
require that we not only retune our aesthetics but also keep returning to
the sites of this turn, exercising vigilance against replacing one hegemonic
structure with another:
There are those who admire the geometry,

these metaphors of space.
Be elevated, they advise. Take in the air,
the uncommon with the requisite.
What is ethics? Not smugness
or complacency. Not prescription.
Nothing which is not political. (p. 252)
∗ ∗ ∗
Speaking as a loose formation of critically minded creative producers,

this book seeks to initiate narratives that dare to rethink who, and
what, and by which methodological means we might co-create inclu-
sive textual spaces that, foremost, acknowledge Indigenous voices at the
center of any narrative of the country. Into the twenty-first century, the
very notion of community in this country stands to be paradigmatically
relearned, and this probably starts with reasserting the question of who
gets to construct revisionary discourses. Perhaps those transplanted, phan-
tomic lyric impulses read by Kane as shrieking through an Australian
imaginary are indeed not only catalyzed versions of the anxieties Justin
Clemens listens for in his essay for this book; perhaps our Anglicized (and
“Englishized”) historical styles have performed not only panic (anxiety,

pathologized) but no less than the socially legitimized artefactualizing of
an Australian paranoiac. Contributors to this book remain mindful of the
epistemic erasures that pass as history in a place that continues to position
capital over culture, property over community. If it is after all “a part of
morality not to be at home in one’s home” (Adorno 39), then perhaps
irregularity and outsideness are principles in any activism remaining ethi-
cally and experimentally slanted toward a politicized aesthetics. In the face
of an increasingly aestheticized authoritarian politics in Australia, perhaps
the work of any contemporary poet remains in founding and finding
subversive means to advance the potentialities of writing itself. It seems
clear that now is the time for newer kinds of generative “madness” that
are structurally and stylistically innovative, denominative, both creatively
intelligent and intelligently extra-creative.
Without wishing to talk over, through, or across any contributor in
this book, as editors it has been a privilege to observe each cluster stabi-
lize a suite of what we consider to be imperative gestures. We pay special
thanks to Natalie Harkin for her engagement with ideas at the heart of
this book, and for suggesting contributors to the “Indigeneities” section.
In our collective discussions, we felt it appropriate to let Harkin estab-
lish the most appropriate protocols for and circumstances in which this
section would be completed. Harkin opens this group of essays with a
personal, relational history that seeks “to better understand those entan-
gled past-present-future contexts and theoretical strengths from which
texts emerge; to consider the counter-narrative potential of poetry to
collective memory, shaping national consciousness and identity” (p. 16).
It is to the epistolary “Our poetic-justice” that Ellen van Neerven, Jeanine
Leane, Peter Minter‚ and Alison Whittaker respond. Ellen van Neerven’s
“The Intimacy in Survival Poetics” braids poems and critical prose to
create a reply that is simultaneously personal and political, while reflecting
on the communicative exchange between lovers, activists, writers, and
others. As a striking testament to the power of connection she finds
in the exchange between Indigenous writers, van Neerven claims that
despite the cost of writing the self, “[l]ove is not labor if its recipro-
cal” (p. 35). Mapping the interwoven essays, letters, and poetry which
resonate between the group, Jeanine Leane’s essay opens by reflecting on
the life and impact of Wiradjuri Elder, activist, author, Aunty Kerry Reed-
Gilbert, to whom this section of the book is dedicated. Peter Minter notes
that his essay “All the Trees” is inspired by a line of poetry from Natalie
Harkin, which contemplates “that tree / that family tree” and proceeds
to consider the genealogy of trees in poems by Aboriginal poets, from
Jack Davis to Ali Cobby Eckermann. This section concludes with Alison
Whittaker’s pointed reflection on the entrenched politics of Indigenous
poetry. In “Just Poetry,” Whittaker recounts the personal “relationality,
refusal and reckoning” that encompasses justiciable “wordwork” (p. 71).
Each essay in this section is candidly personal, and the section represents
the very idea of community, a gestalt which we hope this anthology, taken
as a whole, might also gesture toward.
The “Political Landscapes” section investigates how sovereign power
transmits selectively, and reads poetry as a site of myriad potential resis-
tance. In her opening essay, “Bordering, waiting, dissolving,” Bonny
Cassidy considers the possibilities for a “decolonial poetics made by
settlers who are educated or governed within neocolonial Australia”
(p. 88). How to determine the cultural work to be undertaken by poets
responding to settler logic? Anne Elvey’s “Writing Unwriting Writing”
surveys a suite of poets whose work she understands “unwrites” places
of genocide and erasure. Switching the gaze toward emergent poetries,
Michael Farrell reads Marty Hiatt’s the manifold (2017) as an exem-
plary text that serves to selectively explore the question, “what happens
when we read poems of politics through the entity of the land?” (p. 108).
Meditating on place and the intricacies of place-making, Stuart Cooke’s
essay surveys a suite of contemporary poetries as part of an emergent
nexus of cultural, ontological, and ecological responsiveness, and his essay
“Against Place” marks “a progressive poethics” (p. 121) that simulta-
neously asserts the impossibility of writing place while referencing the
Australian “biosemiotic complexity of non-human systems” (p. 121).
John Kinsella’s environmental poetics of care and community demon-
strates another possible mode of cultural labor, which “challenge[s]
the annihilation of languages by power structures of colonial capital”
(p. 141). In his essay, “Disembodying and Re-embodying the Poem as
Act of Acknowledgement of Land Rights and A Rejection of ‘Prop-
erty,’” Kinsella speaks of “tolerance, mutual respect, peace/non-violence,
equality and egalitarianism, the rights of difference, rights to associate in
community” as the means by which we arrive somewhere close to poetry
that “can be written out of the damage to resist and even ‘repair’ some
of that damage” (p. 133).
In the “Space, Place, Materiality” cluster of essays, a selection of

twenty-first-century Australian poetry is read as an undercommons popu-
lated by newly critical stylists seemingly intent on interfering with the
narrow logic of a so-called Australian “commonwealth,” in which privi-
lege once played unchallenged into the hands of specific kinds of cultural
inheritors. In the lead essay, Justin Clemens interrogates how fetishistically
imposing English names on newly imperialized places entails a loss (pre-
objectal) that speaks of “an originary lack” in which “melancholia and
anxiety are […] its key affects, inscribed in the dissimulating symptoms of
colonial settlement” (pp. 147–8). Clemens reads epistemically overwritten
domains as foreclosing the possibilities of settler poetries which, he also
speculates, are currently shifting toward an “irreversible displacement” of
their own (p. 149). In different ways, his interlocutors each seem to agree:
Kate Lilley reads forward from John Tranter’s Jacket project (1997–
2010), to assert an “archival and pyschogeographical turn” that opens
onto an “undercommons” constituting newly enlivened spaces which, in
A.J. Carruthers’ essay, can be read as vanguardist and excluded, too often
overlooked and/or misread. Jill Jones understands much experimental
Australian poetry to be materially akin to the decompositional processes
of composting, and surveys emergent writing that gazes futurewards even
while connected to “the detritus of the past” (p. 191). Finally, in her
interrogation of two recent Australian collections (from Alison Whittaker
and Elena Gomez), Astrid Lorange lionizes creative interventions able
to push back against infrastructural language. Lorange understands these
modes of writing to speak back to indivisible histories of colonization and
capitalism, and that both Whittaker’s Blakwork (2018) and Gomez’s Body
of Work (2018) each locate a “way to approach thoughts that are not yet
thinkable” (p. 200).
The final section in this book, “Revising an Australian Mythos,” opens
with an account from Ali Alizadeh who, re-reading Badiou’s Hand-
book of Inaesthetics (1998), frames emergent topologies of contempo-
rary Australian poetry as performing in nationalized spaces which can
also generate newly radicalized poetics. Ann Vickery’s paper locates “a
multiplicity of possible human worlds” (Bell, qtd. in Vickery) before
understanding, as Lorange similarly understands, “how myth can gesture
toward what cannot be accounted for” (p. 218)‚ a mode by which to insti-
tute interruption and interference. Drawing on two essays influenced by
cybernetic theory (Italo Calvino’s “Cybernetics and Ghosts” and Donna
Haraway’s “A Manifesto for Cyborgs”), Bella Li’s essay asserts that myth
may act as an agent generating change, a positivistic means of escaping not

only structures of power and authority, but also the limits of language
itself. Louis Armand’s paper further critiques the role of myth in the
disseminations of power, and re-reads Georges Bataille’s “absence of
myth” as a central polemical trope in the critique of modernity. Agreeing
with Bataille, that the “absence of myth” is no closure but “an opening up
to the infinite,” Armand critiques how this apparent paradox contributes
to poetry as a radical force able to counteract the operations of power.
Turning the critique partially toward this anthology project, Michelle
Cahill calls for renewed accountability from all Australian poet-critics. In
asserting that some still fail to “acknowledge whiteness as part of [the
critic’s] personal experience of canonical, institutional and cultural privi-
lege” (p. 256), Cahill argues how “white Australian critics normalize the
practice of naming their own identity implicitly through the naming of
others” (p. 256). If we are to do more than merely echo and reiterate
those power relations which are “operational from inside and outside the
institutional and organizational spaces of poetry” (p. 262) Cahill argues
vigilance remains urgently necessary, and (like other commentators in this
book) reads the contemporary domains of Australian poetry as far from
equitable places.
∗ ∗ ∗
Among this mix of generations, energies remain indefatigably focused

toward questions of poetic expression, the cultural imaginary, and how
these intersect with concepts of nation. Of course, this book is incom-
plete—how could it be otherwise?—and from a range of possibilities
we have selected four clusters which we deem to be Australia’s most
pressingly important topoi. We have designed this book to represent a
developing discussion, and it has been through the care and engagement
of each contributor that we hope such a vision is at least partly achieved.
In each section, two critical thinkers have written essays aligned with the
body of their poetic interests. These opening essays have next been circu-
lated to other writers within each group, who were asked to respond to,
problematize, and extend possibilities as defined in the opening essays.
Community has always been the focus of our model, and we have hoped
that dialectically animating discussions in these ways would reflect the
manner in which Australia’s poetic community grows in alliance toward
certain constellated ideas. The strategies of each exploration have led to
radically different outcomes, explained by way of the entangled histo-

ries we each carry as writers, and the embodiment of multi-genred and
transnational literatures we divulge through our writing. The result is
polyphonous, inconclusive by design, perhaps even incommensurable.
Contributors to this book represent a diverse range of poetic, ideolog-
ical, cultural, and personal histories. While we have attempted to provide
a wide range of perspectives within the anthology, we chose a set of
contributors equally known for their academic publications as well as
their ongoing creative labors. There were many, many more voices that
we wished to include here, and we hope that the discussions, debates,
and discourses which arise from each of these sections will be carried
on by those stakeholders and by you, the reader. This book would not
exist without the wholesale belief that Australian poetry might bear more
meaning that it is given credit, that Australian poetry encompasses more
than the isolationist or combative caricature it is sometimes circumscribed
by. This book does not seek to represent the past. We have asked contribu-
tors to cast their vision toward unfolding or as-yet untold possibilities, and
each poet-critic here has set their sights determinedly on these new direc-
tions. As editors, we pay homage and our thanks to each commentator
here: without your tireless energies over the last decades, this community
would not exist to be written into place. Every act of writing is an act of
hope, just as every publication creates a unique public. In this book you
will encounter the opening of discussions that contemplate, enact, and
cultivate a diverse range of perspectives on what the future of Australian
poetry may become.
Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor W. 1978. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life.
Trans. E.F.N. Jephcott. London: Verso.
Aitken, Adam, Kim Cheng Boey and Michelle Cahill, eds. 2013. Contemporary
Asian Australian Poets. Waratah, NSW: Puncher & Wattmann.
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist.
Austin: University of Texas Press.
Balius, Jeremy and Corey Wakeling, eds. 2013. Outcrop: Radical Australian
Poetry of Land. Fremantle: Black Rider Press.
Carruthers, A. J. 2018. Who’s Afraid of Poetic Invention? Anthologizing
Australian Poetry in the Twenty-First Century. Journal of the Association for
the Study of Australian Literature 17(2): 1–23.
Cassidy, Bonny, and Jessica L. Wilkinson, eds. 2016. Contemporary Australian

Feminist Poetry. Brisbane and Melbourne: Hunter Publishers.
Farrell, Michael. 2015. Writing Australian Unsettlement: Modes of Poetic Inven-
tion 1796–1945. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Haskell, Dennis. 1998. Poetry Since 1965. In The Oxford Literary History of
Australia, eds. Bruce Bennett and Jennifer Strauss, 265–84. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Kane, Paul. 1996. Australian Poetry: Romanticism and Negativity. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Kinsella, John. 2007. Disclosed Poetics: Beyond Landscape and Lyricism. Manch-
ester and New York: Manchester University Press.
Murray, Les. 1980. The Boeotian Strain. Kunapipi 2(1): 45–64.
Rudy, Jason R. 2017. Imagined Homelands: British Poetry in the Colonies.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Shapcott, Thomas W., ed. 1970. Australian Poetry Now. Melbourne: Sun Books.
Shapcott, Thomas W. and Rodney Hall, eds. 1968. New Impulses in Australian
Poetry. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press.
Tranter, John. 1977. Four Notes on the Practice of Revolution. Australian
Literary Studies 8(2): 127–135.
van Dooren, Thom. 2014. Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Indigeneities
Our Poetic-Justice
Natalie Harkin
A Labor of Love
Dear Peter, Jeanine, Alison, and Ellen,
I’ve been reflecting on our many conversations on the subject of poetry
and the work of a poet, specifically the labor of Indigenous poets past and
present, and our dreamt-up hopes for work yet to come. These conver-
sations, framed by a politic of relationality, refusal and reckoning, have
occurred in multiple places and contexts: locally at our kitchen tables,
in coffee shops, around campfires, at book-launches, and workplaces;
nationally via border-crossing collaborations, networks, and sharing stages
at festivals; and globally, via opportunities with literary comrades on
concerns and aspirations that connect us all. Such conversations are
devoid of any colonial filter that might hear and read us in ways we do
not intend. They are nourishing, to sustain and cultivate unique writing
communities that rise from the grassroots to grow and agitate against
the grain of persisting colonialisms. Such word work is often framed with
loving and urgent intent to disrupt and transform toward something else
just, celebratory and decolonizing; from conversations between ourselves
to connecting with radical movements and shaping beloved communities.
N. Harkin (B)
Flinders University, Adelaide, SA, Australia

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76287-2_2
16 N. HARKIN
This paper does not set out to describe Indigenous poetry in defini-
tive ways. Like the inspirational Indigenous Conversations About Biography
project (Te Punga Somerville et al. 2016), I recognize infinite other
starting points, and diverse voices and emphases not represented here.
There is no authoritative end-point of asserted certainty, but rather, a
call-and-response exploration of ideas from incredible poets and thinkers
who fill my heart, inspire my own praxis, shape my activism, and guide
the way I want to live. My hope is for this to be yet another “starting
space of possibility” (Te Punga Somerville et al. 2016, 242): to further
stimulate conversations on the vibrancy of Indigenous poetry, and its
significant contributions to literature of the world (Heiss and Minter
2008); to better understand those entangled past–present–future contexts
and theoretical strengths from which texts emerge; and to consider
the counter-narrative potential of poetry to collective memory, shaping
national consciousness and identity.
These critical yarns tend to navigate back and forward and back again;
a resurgence of old ideas, struggles and stories by leading word warriors
whose writings have kept us strong and visible in worlds that would still
have us disappear. These are the conversations that shape our belonging
and our becoming as a proud and diverse community of poets, anchored
by this rich legacy of voices that keep us afloat in the wake of deep colo-
nialisms. This is our poetic justice—our labor of love—and we do not take
it for granted.
War of Words
The Black Pen celebrates our defiance
our resistance, our survival, our unity
sets our spirits free
and honors the memory of those
read on pages. (Johnson 2004, 52)
The place of poetry in today’s Indigenous literature landscape

continues the inherently political protest and counter-narrative tradition
of past leading poets in shaping national consciousness, memory and
identity. Poets Jack Davis, Kevin Gilbert, Lionel Fogarty, Eva Johnson,
Oodgeroo Noonuccal, and so many more, are recognized as tireless
leaders and activists whose words were tools of protest motivated by
experiences of injustice, loss, and oppression at the hands of the colonial
OUR POETIC-JUSTICE 17
state. Many of these twentieth-century activist poets are represented in

Wiradjuri poet/activist Kevin Gilbert’s 1988 landmark anthology Inside
Black Australia, and their poems and voices remain unforgettable, and
as resonant and emotionally intact today as they were then (xxiv). They
fought hard wars with their words. As generous and deeply loving opti-
mists who dreamt the world anew, their voices are firmly rooted in
their cultural continuance standpoint to reverberate forward. We honor
them as strategic literary heroes, whose situated-imaginings are recog-
nized today as foundational to our own desires (Abbey and Phillips 2003;
Heiss and Minter 2008; Johnson 2004).
Poetry is the largest platform of published Indigenous writing in
Australia (Abbey and Phillips 2003; Heiss 2006), and despite writing
across all manner of topics from land rights to love affairs, “you’d be
hard pushed to find a collection of Indigenous writing absent of racism
and colonialism as pervasive themes” (Blank and Reed-Gilbert 2014, 6).
Like an incantation springing from deep places and reshaping the English
language (Scott, 2001b [Untreated]), these poems are often punctuated
with melancholic grief, loss, and rage, juxtaposed with a strong sense of
hope and faith in social change. Overwhelmingly, their immense gener-
ousity, forgiveness, and love shine through (Abbey and Phillips 2003;
Blank and Reed-Gilbert 2014; Cobby Eckermann and Fogarty; Douglas
2001; Heiss 2006; Heiss and Minter 2008; Heiss and van Toorn 2002).
This emotional purge, mopped up in print, is delivered with astute clarity
and intent, as lived realities are distilled to connect with people through
the broad themes including: history; struggle and survival; identity and
questions of place and belonging; connection to country; injustice and
legacies of government policies, such as land theft and Stolen Gener-
ations; deaths in custody and incarceration; and Reconciliation (Heiss
2006; Heiss and Minter 2008; Moreton 2001; Scott 2001b [Untreated]):
I’m searching for the corners of the soul where joy can be found …
Our words are weapons too. Our books are time bombs and already are
breaking down many barriers on their way across the world. (Wright 2002,
19–20)
Beyond these broad themes, Indigenous writers have become increasingly

concerned with the politics of representation and questions of sovereignty,
authenticity, and voice; a continuum response to being defined, catego-
rized, and written about by cultural institutions of power that historically
18 N. HARKIN
rendered us voiceless (Heiss 2003). As Waanyi author/poet/scholar

Alexis Wright says, we have been locked in in this storytelling war from
the point of first contact; a war that still fosters and maintains negative,
racialized, stereotyped narratives about who we are, and invades every
sense of our sovereignty and resistance (Wright 2016). We may be inti-
mate knowers of our own histories, but we have not been in control of the
dominant narrative of our lives. Writing allows us to cultivate sovereignty
of the mind and regain the plot-line of our lives (Lucashenko 2018;
Wright 2006, 2016):
I will make oppression work for me

With a turn and with a twist
Be camouflaged within stated ignorance
Then rise
And surprise you by my will. (Moreton 2004, 136)
Bundjalung author/poet/scholar Melissa Lucashenko also reminds us to

choose our own reference points from where our stories are told; to inter-
rogate colonial fantasies and be “vigilant about what we allow into our
consciousness and what we recognize as the very Big Lie of colonial-
ism” (Lucashenko 2018). We have a responsibility to remain alive on the
page; to rise up and keep fighting and staying strong with our words and
demonstrate our survival, intelligence, beauty, and pride.
Narungga educator/scholar Lester-Irabinna Rigney reflects on the
epistemic power of poetry from the Mapuche Nation exiled from the
Chilean state, as similar to Indigenous Australian poets “… not even
the most brutal colonial force can deny our humanness or the love we
have for peace, our peoples and our land” (2014, x). Rigney draws from
Native American scholar Robert Warrior’s work on “Indigenous intel-
lectual sovereignty” as the means of writing stories by, for, and about
ourselves (2014, xi). This desire to “speak back” or “move from silence
into speech” (hooks 1989, 9) has potential to heal and expand conscious-
ness; sovereign literary acts, shared by First Nations people globally, that
make new life and new growth possible (hooks 1989; Huenún Villa
2014):
Any dictatorship worth its violent salt executes the poets first. It is the way
it should be, as a great poem cuts through the crap and goes for the heart
and heat like a double-barreled shotgun. (Birch 2016, ix)
In the wake of Australia’s active forgetting as a form of cultural amnesia

and erasure, our most acclaimed literary-warriors bear witness and reckon
with colonial histories of exclusion, an embodied means to weave stories
into a framework of common knowledge and pride (Cobby Eckermann
and Fogarty 2011). Poets include: Lisa Bellear, Tony Birch, Ali Cobby
Eckermann, Jim Everett, Lionel Fogarty, Charmaine Papertalk Green,
Anita Heiss, Yvette Holt, Jeanine Leane, Romaine Moreton, Kerry Reed-
Gilbert, Ellen van Neerven, Sam Wagan Watson, Allison Whittaker, Herb
Wharton (to name but a few). They write invisible, silenced and forgotten
worlds, from nothing into existence, to expose what Tony Birch calls
Australia’s “national secrecy about colonialism” (Birch 2006), unveil what
Kim Scott calls “Australia’s continuing neurosis” (Scott, May 2001a) and
keep the wounds open, as Alexis Wright states, to reverse the prescribed
forgetting with a “steadfast telling of the truth” (Wright 2002, 19). They
reveal how the gaps in dominant colonial narratives of history are in fact
not silent after all (Gough 2007):
the things I have to say and how I say them are a direct response to the
environment in which I have grown up and continue to live in. To create
works that do not deal with the morbid and mortal affects of racism for
one, and the beauty of Indigenous culture for another, would be for me
personally, to produce works that are farcical. (Moreton 2001)
Our poetry engages the language of “love and war alike” (Justice
2018b, 60) imbued with the autobiographical voice: life-writing, personal
narrative, memory-work, auto-ethnography, and storywork; rooted in
body-politics, deep and real; flesh, mind and spirit; past, present, and
future. When whiteness is the dominant invisible norm, and racist, gender
and homophobic-fueled violence is a daily reality for so many, poetry can
become the will to survive and stay safe with words; to “face the reality
of dealing with pain” (Bellear 2000, 70); to trust one’s own voice, that
it may give voice to others, and to live passionately, imaginatively, and
creatively, beyond embodied and genealogical pain.
As a sovereign act, poetry is a means to rise up and transcend contain-
ment, boundaries, and essentialist labeling; a therapeutic means to “name
our oppressions and our oppressors” (Bellear 2000, 70) and considered
dangerous to hegemonic power (Bunda 2007; DeShazer 1994; Heiss
2012 [Black Enough]; Lucashenko 2018). I think about this often; the
power and the importance of staying safe with others who also yearn
20 N. HARKIN
to live in a more just and “beloved community”; a bell hooks-inspired

community that is formed “not by the eradication of difference but by
its affirmation, by each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies
that shape who we are and how we live in the world. To form beloved
community, we do not surrender ties to precious origins” (hooks 1995,
265). Our writing communities are indeed generative spaces that decenter
whiteness and make meaning on our terms through a sense of collective
community resurgence.
Haunt in the Wake

Dust off the pages,
Fragile words into stone;
Prepare for heartbreak … (Watson 2016, 13)
I find solace with constellations of poets who navigate old terrain, imagine
and labor through words; who ache with perpetual mourning because we
refuse to leave the trauma of the past alone. My own writing is driven
by lived experience underpinned with a deep sense of acknowledgment,
accountability, and responsibility that extends beyond the present. I am a
product of layered histories and disruptions, intergenerational and collec-
tive memories, and (re)connections to country. My sense of “belonging”
through relationship to place is necessarily woven into the fabric of the
land on which I live and work and knowing its colonial legacies (Justice
2013). Cherokee writer/scholar Daniel Heath Justice also refers to the
responsibility of “not knowing” (Justice 2013) to honor those mysteries
that both connect and distinguish us; to respect the silences and recog-
nize when and where to tread lightly, if to tread at all. This “relationality”
centers Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and doing; learnt through
“reciprocity, obligation, shared experiences, coexistence, cooperation and
social memory”; and grounded in holistic interconnectedness between
and among all living things (Moreton-Robinson 2016, 71; 2000, 16):
We need to be creating a present that will inspire a radically different

future than the one settler colonialism sets out for us. This means taking
on heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism, and anti-blackness, and
actualizing Indigenous alternatives on the ground, not in the future, but
in the present. (Simpson 2016, 32)
Beyond our own unique standpoints, as storytellers in these political

times, we need to pay attention and compassionately engage with broader
contemporary politics and human rights concerns, and to gain strength
and solidarity with “the greats” of Black, Queer, and Indigenous literature
from around the world, for sustenance and as “powerful medicine bundles
in our hours of need” (Lucashenko 2018, 6). Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg
poet/artist/scholar Leanne Betasomasake Simpson also urges us to think
big: to forge strategic alliances with others who refuse Western patriar-
chal structures of colonialism; build movements with intellectual warriors
in Black communities and radical communities of color; and seek inspi-
ration from those creative, compassionate visionaries who are interested
in building new worlds that affirm and reinsert the Indigenous presence
(Simpson 2016, 30; Simpson and Brand 2018).
Conversations framed by Black, Queer, and postcolonial feminisms are
critical to decolonial praxis and thinking through the work of Indigenous
poetry in Australia; to better understand intersecting dynamics of power
and oppression, and think through alternative systems of accountability
for race, class, and gender-based violence (Anzaldúa and Keating 2002;
Driskill et al. 2011; Green 2007; Lorde 2007; Moraga and Anzaldúa
2015; Rifkin 2012; Simpson 2017; Suzack et al. 2010). African Amer-
ican artist/historian/scholar Christina Sharpe’s (2014, 17) theorizing
on African American history and post/neoslave narratives is also useful.
She metaphorically frames “wake work” as a site for artistic production,
resistance, and consciousness and offers a way forward for living “in
the wake” of such horrific, violent histories: in the path behind a ship,
keeping watch with the dead, and coming to a state of “wakefulness as
consciousness” (Sharpe 2014, 4). This is a call to recognize signs that
continue to mark and haunt contemporary Black (and Indigenous) life;
to continue imagining the unimaginable and theorize from the “position
of the unthought” (Sharpe 2014, 59). This work resonates with African
American author/poet/scholar Toni Morrison’s theorizing on “remem-
ory” (Gordon 2008, 164–69; Morrison 2019, 322–25). Despite our lives
being historically controlled and archived by the colonizers to the point
of erasure, our memories still exist, out there in the world, deeply social,
collective, and waiting for us to bump into so we might read the signs
and write at that point of struggle between remembering and forgetting.
As Indigenous poets writing “in the wake” of colonialism’s violence,
we too are awake through neo-colonial history war and culture war
22 N. HARKIN
contexts, and the hegemonic culture it creates can feel impossible to navi-
gate. We not only encounter the past through uncanny triggers, but we
will ourselves to recollect, reassemble, and reconstitute what we know
and don’t know, in order to counter dominant narratives of our lives.
This process of reinscribing stories and experience shapes consciousness
and is transformative and liberating (Morrison 2019, 324):
If you have the gift, you’re called upon to use if for the People, your own,
and the rest… your words are needed… the wounded world still needs
you, now as much as ever. We need you, as do future generations. (Justice
2018a)
Many Indigenous writers position the art of writing with voice, freedom,
and responsibility to continue our stories, including those displaced from
traditions through colonial disruption (Franklin 2015; Justice 2018b;
Owens 1998). Muscogee poet Joy Harjo, refers to the “responsibility
of remembering”; the need “to continue the stories, to write and tell
what we know, whether they are stories of growing up on country
with community, or stories of displacement, loss and survival” (Harjo
in Perreault 2010, 200). This obligation through the literary trope
“blood memory” relates to writing one’s family, community, and ances-
tors through the landscape and the body, as an interrelated site of
struggle; a sifting of one’s Indigenous roots through generational move-
ment and storytelling (Allan 2012; Kilpatrick 2004; Momaday 1968;
Perreault 2010). Given the history of intense dislocation and removal
from lands and communities, this blood memory does not always flow
easily. This collective activity of mapping stories through Indigenous
narrative memory, enables the creation of new “institutions of memory”
(Huggins 2005), and intimate relationships and experiences of self
and/with Country are a product of such mappings; interdependent and
nonlinear, individual and communal:
People ask me for my story

But I thought my story was your story
When I see a map of Country, I see land, sea and family
When they see a map of Country they see mining fantasies
When I see the sea-bed, I see sacred sites
When they see the sea-bed they see dollar signs. (Eather 2014)
Wiradjuri elder/poet/activist Aunty Kerry Reed-Gilbert’s book The

Strength of Us as Women is a clarion call for responsibility through such
a critical relationality. She drives a direct challenge to non-Indigenous
readers to understand multiple ways of belonging; to act and engage
in the political struggle with Indigenous Australians: “Responsibility is
learning this country, sharing the stories. Sharing the pain, the hurt.
Sharing the untruths. Who’s responsible? You are. If you call this country
home, you are” (2000, 13). Bundjalung poet/researcher Evelyn Araluen
echoes this sentiment. She reminds non-Indigenous decolonial poets and
literary scholars to carefully consider what is returned to communities,
and to meaningfully engage with the Indigenous struggle beyond the
sandstone walls of the academy (2017):
This is your language your culture

This is your naming your ideals
of who I am supposed to
be, represent.
Am I allowed to
mourn. (Bellear, in Bellear and Brown 2018, 44)
As warrior woman activist/poet/scholar Audre Lorde notably states,

“poetry is not a luxury” (2007, 36). The very act of writing is vital to the
existence and provides a way to transform dreams and hopes into action
“toward survival and change”; imagining and enacting hopeful futures
here and now, as well as on “the farthest horizons” (Lorde 2007, 37).
Leanne Simpson identifies something similar; writing as an obligation to
the responsibility of “freedoms to come” (Simpson and Brand 2018); a
means to build alternatives in the present, because today’s actions give
birth to the future, so our children will know “what freedom feels like …
so they know what to fight for” (Simpson 2016, 33).
Reckoning/Signposts of Hope
And how can we ever
gather up all of our ghosts,
kiss each of them on the cheek
and say,
Everything’s gonna be all right.
It’s time to go home now, sugar.
It’s time to go home. (Driskill 2005, 18)
24 N. HARKIN
As a transformative site of resistance and coming to consciousness, writing

is a kind of therapy through the work of mourning, where the possibility
of a just future lies in the ability to live in remembrance of histo-
ry’s injustices (DeShazer 1994; Galeano 1983; Sharpe 2016). There are
specters everywhere, calling and willing us to investigate; leading us to
that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life (Gordon
2008, 8). Such recognition, transformation and action through a frame-
work of haunting as a way of knowing enables profound honoring and
restorative justice. Decolonial poets reckon with specters of colonialism,
and desire to awaken readers for some kind of redress or change in
the present. Readers in-turn, “are made complicit in the poet’s vision
through an invitation to view, on the poet’s terms, the site of resistance
as a shared location” (DeShazer 1994, 303). They too work through
colonial histories, confront their own role and place in the collective or
communal through recognition, mourning and conjuring the past rather
than burying it (DeShazer 1994; Durrant 2004; Galeano 1983; Goldman
and Saul, 2006; Gunew 2004).
African American and Cherokee poet/writer/activist/humanitarian
Alice Walker’s potent work Over-Coming Speechlessness bears witness to
crimes against humanity so horrifying, it can render you speechless. She
believes that whatever is currently happening to humanity is happening to
all of us, and in the ongoing devastation of poverty, climate change, and
the violence of war, we will all suffer. She refers to her literary sister Audre
Lorde, who said “our silence will not protect us” (Walker 2010, 67–68),
and as global citizens we are all connected: “allowing freedom to others
brings freedom to ourselves” (Walker 2010, 71). Walker also recognizes
the restorative power of poetry, which has continually saved her from the
darkest depths of depression and hopelessness. While the emotional labor
of witnessing “makes demands on others to hear, but which does not
always get a just hearing” (Ahmed 2004, 200), the late American writer
and historian Howard Zinn (Walker 2010, back cover) offers:
Perhaps it takes a poet to reach into her own heart and into ours, to break
out of silence and despair, to speak the unspeakable truth … she [Walker]
insists that we will reach out to one another, across all boundaries, to create
a better world.
Poetic-acts of speaking unspeakable truths do generate space and potential

to nourish the consciousness of the reader, as a small part of something
vast: “Literature as a form of action can help create symbols of a new

reality, with potential to radically alter the course of history, and preserve
for generations to come, in the words of the poet, the true name of all
things” (Galeano 1983, 178). The late spoken-word artist/activist Candy
Royalle considers the affective dimensions of Indigenous poetry to also
alter the reader’s consciousness, for generations to come. She reflects
on the visceral and emotional force of Kokatha poet/activist Ali Cobby
Eckermann’s work to educate, to move people beyond academic articles,
government reports, or dehumanizing statistics “where the continued
reduction of humans to numbers is a massive injustice” (Royalle 2017,
5). And like Howard Zinn’s testimony for Alice Walker, Royalle reveals
how the empathy and compassion of poets like Cobby Eckermann can
generate action and transform toward better worlds:
Every wild flower that blooms in this

desert of red
is a signpost of hope
for my people. (Cobby Eckermann 2012, 39)
26 N. HARKIN
Refuse/Return/Remain
This work was supported by the Australian Research Council (grant number
DE180100559).
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The Intimacy in Survival Poetics
Ellen van Neerven
Dear Natalie,
My Narungga Sis from South Australia, all respect to you and your
Country and ancestors. Your strength and determination as demonstrated
in your writing has influenced me toward being the writer and person I
am today. I remember the first time I read Dirty Words , and Archival-
Poetics : both works a revelation. For us mob, you are a vital weaver and
you write your words with such care. The Cordite edition you edited,
Domestic, was a valuable gathering of many poets and storymakers from
across the country. It’s a pleasure to have a relationship with you and with
your words, my big sister.
As we sit inside this Emergency Room called Australia, through the
sense of warmth and communion you’ve ceremoniously crafted through
your paper, you’ve already populated this room with people we love.
So now, already the walls of this room are looking more beautiful and
maybe someone’s opened a window or two and there’s a fresh breeze
blowing through. Peter, Alison, Jeanine, and I sit with you. As do the
presences of womxn and others who have paved the way for us to get
here. We got Aunty Oodgeroo and Sister Lisa Bellear, and Aunty KRG,
E. van Neerven (B)

Mununjali, QLD, Australia

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76287-2_3
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Karamazovin
veljekset II
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Title: Karamazovin veljekset II

Romaani
Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Translator: V. K. Trast
Release date: September 20, 2023 [eBook #71690]
Language: Finnish
Original publication: Helsinki: Otava, 1969
Credits: Juhani Kärkkäinen and Tapio Riikonen
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK

KARAMAZOVIN VELJEKSET II ***
KARAMAZOVIN VELJEKSET II
Romaani
Kirj.
F. M. DOSTOJEVSKI
Suomentanut
V. K. Trast
Helsingissä, Kustannusosakeyhtiö Otava, 1. p. ilm. v. 1927.

SISÄLLYS:
KOLMAS OSA JATKUU
Kahdeksas kirja: Mitja
1. Kuzjma Samsonov 2. Ljagavyi 3. Kultakaivos 4. Pimeässä 5.

Äkillinen ratkaisu 6. Itse olen tulossa 7. Entinen ja kiistämätön 8.
Houre
Yhdeksäs kirja: Valmistava tutkinta
1. Virkamies Perhotinin menestyksen alku

2. Hälytys
3. Sielun kulku koettelemusten kautta. Ensimmäinen koettelemus.
4. Toinen koettelemus
5. Kolmas koettelemus
6. Prokuraattori sai Mitjan kiinni
7. Mitjan suuri salaisuus. Vihellettiin
8. Todistajain kertomus. Lapsukainen
9. Mitja vietiin pois
NELJÄS OSA
Kymmenes kirja: Pojat
1. Kolja Krasotkin 2. Lapsiparvi 3. Koulupoika 4. Žutška 5. Iljušan

vuoteen ääressä 6. Varhainen kehitys
Yhdestoista kirja: Veli Ivan Fjodorovitš
1. Grušenjkan luona
2. Kipeä jalka
3. Reuhtova lapsi
4. Hymni ja salaisuus
5. Et sinä, et sinä
6. Ensimmäinen keskustelu Smerdjakovin kanssa
7. Toinen käynti Smerdjakovin luona
8. Kolmas ja viimeinen käynti Smerdjakovin luona
9. Piru. Ivan Fjodorovitšin painajainen
10. »Hän sen sanoi!»
Kahdestoista kirja: Tuomiovirhe
1. Kovan onnen päivä

2. Vaarallisia todistajia
3. Lääketieteellinen asianymmärtäjäin lausunto ja naula pähkinöitä
4. Onni hymyilee Mitjalle
5. Äkkiarvaamaton katastrofi
6. Prokuraattorin puhe. Karakteristiikka.
7. Historiallinen katsaus
8. Tutkielma Smerdjakovista
9. Psykologiaa täydellä höyryllä. Kiitävä kolmivaljakko
Prokuraattorin
puheen loppu.
10. Puolustajan puhe. Kepissä on kaksi päätä
11. Rahoja ei ollut. Ryöstöä ei tapahtunut.
12. Eikä murhaakaan tapahtunut
13. Avionrikkoja ajatuksissa
14. Talonpojat olivat miehiä puolestaan
EPILOGI
1. Suunnitelmat Mitjan pelastamiseksi 2. Hetken ajaksi valhe

muuttuu totuudeksi 3. Iljušetškan hautajaiset. Puhe kiven luona.
KOLMAS OSA JATKUU
Kahdeksas kirja
Mitja
1.
Kuzjma Samsonov
Dmitri Fjodorovitš, jolle Grušenjka lentäessään uuteen elämään oli
»käskenyt» sanomaan viimeisen tervehdyksensä ja käskenyt
ikuisesti muistamaan hänen lempensä tunnin, oli tällä hetkellä,
tietämättä mitään siitä, mitä Grušenjkalle oli tapahtunut, niinikään
suuren ahdistuksen ja huolten vallassa. Viimeisinä kahtena päivänä
hän oli ollut sellaisessa sanoin kuvaamattomassa tilassa, että olisi
todellakin voinut saada aivokuumeen, niinkuin hän itse myöhemmin
sanoi. Aljoša ei ollut edellisen päivän aamuna voinut saada häntä
käsiinsä, eikä veli Ivan samana päivänä saanut toimeen kohtausta
hänen kanssaan ravintolassa. Hänen asuntonsa isäntäväki peitti
hänen käskystään hänen jälkensä. Hän oli näinä kahtena päivänä
aivan sananmukaisesti häärinyt joka puolella, »taistellen kohtaloaan
vastaan ja koettaen pelastaa itsensä», kuten hän myöhemmin
lausui, olipa muutamaksi tunniksi erään polttavan asian vuoksi
kiitänyt pois kaupungista, vaikka hänestä oli kauheata poistua ja
jättää Grušenjka vaikkapa hetkeksikin näkyvistään. Kaikki tämä
selvitettiin myöhemmin mitä seikkaperäisimmin ja asiakirjain
perusteella, mutta nyt mainitsemme vain kaikkein välttämättömimmät
kohdat näiden hänen elämänsä kahden kauhean päivän historiasta,
jotka hän eli sen hirveän katastrofin edellä, joka niin äkkiä järkähdytti
hänen kohtaloaan.
Vaikka Grušenjka todella oli häntä rakastanut tunnin verran

totisesti ja vilpittömästi, niin hän oli myös kiusannut häntä tänä
aikana jonkin kerran tosiaankin julmasti ja säälimättömästi. Pääasia
tässä on, että Mitja ei voinut arvata mitään Grušenjkan aikeista;
mahdotonta oli myös päästä niiden perille houkuttelemalla
hellyydellä tai väkivallalla: Grušenjka ei olisi millään ehdolla
antautunut, vaan ainoastaan suuttunut ja jättänyt hänet kokonaan,
sen hän ymmärsi silloin selvästi. Hän epäili silloin varsin oikein, että
Grušenjka itsekin kävi jonkinmoista taistelua ja oli jonkinmoisen
tavallisuudesta poikkeavan epäröinnin vallassa, aikoi tehdä jonkin
päätöksen eikä voinut päästä tulokseen, ja siksipä hän syystä kyllä
otaksui, sydämen ahdistusta tuntien, että joinakin hetkinä
Grušenjkan suorastaan täytyi vihata häntä ja hänen intohimoaan.
Kenties olikin niin, mutta mitä Grušenjka nimenomaan kaihosi, sitä
hän ei kuitenkaan ymmärtänyt. Oikeastaan häntä kiusaava kysymys
hänen mielessään kiteytyi ainoastaan kahteen määritelmään: Joko
hän, Mitja, tai Fjodor Pavlovitš. Tässä on sivumennen merkittävä
eräs varma tosiseikka: hän oli varma siitä, että Fjodor Pavlovitš
ehdottomasti esittää (jollei jo ollut esittänyt) Grušenjkalle laillista
avioliittoa, eikä hän hetkeäkään uskonut, että vanha irstailija toivoo
selviävänsä vain kolmellatuhannella. Tähän johtopäätökseen Mitja
oli tullut tuntien Grušenjkan ja tämän luonteen. Siksipä hänestä aika
ajoin saattoi näyttääkin siltä, että koko Grušenjkan kärsimys ja koko
hänen epäröintinsä johtui ainoastaan siitä, että hän ei tietänyt,
kumman heistä valitsisi ja kumpi heistä olisi hänelle edullisempi.
»Upseerin», t.s. Grušenjkan elämän kohtaloihin niin paljon
vaikuttaneen miehen, pikaista palaamista, jota Grušenjka odotti niin
kiihtyneenä ja peloissaan, ei Mitja — omituista kyllä — näinä päivinä
edes ottanut ajatellakseen. Totta oli, että Grušenjka aivan viime
päivinä ei ollut hänen kanssaan ollenkaan puhunut tästä. Kuitenkin
hän tiesi aivan hyvin Grušenjkan itsensä kertomuksesta siitä
kirjeestä, jonka tämä kuukausi sitten oli saanut tuolta entiseltä
viettelijältään, tiesipä osittain kirjeen sisällyksenkin. Silloin oli
Grušenjka eräänä ilkeänä hetkenään näyttänyt hänelle tämän
kirjeen, mutta Grušenjkan ihmeeksi hän ei antanut sille juuri mitään
arvoa. Ja hyvin vaikeata olisi selittää, mistä syystä: kenties
yksinkertaisesti sen tähden, että kun häntä itseään näännytti sen
taistelun koko säädyttömyys ja kauheus, jota hän kävi omaa isäänsä
vastaan tämän naisen tähden, niin hän ei enää voinut ajatellakaan
mitään hänelle itselleen peloittavampaa ja vaarallisempaa, ei
ainakaan siihen aikaan. Sulhaseen, joka oli ilmestynyt jostakin
oltuaan viisi vuotta kateissa, hän suorastaan ei uskonut, varsinkaan
ei siihen, että tämä saapuisi kohta. Ja itse tuossa »upseerin»
ensimmäisessä kirjeessäkin, joka oli näytetty Mitenjkalle, puhuttiin
tämän uuden kilpailijan saapumisesta sangen epämääräisesti: kirje
oli hyvin hämärä, hyvin korkealentoinen ja täynnä vain
tunteellisuutta. On huomattava, että Grušenjka sillä kertaa ei ollut
näyttänyt hänelle kirjeen viimeisiä rivejä, joissa puhuttiin paluusta
jonkin verran täsmällisemmin. Lisäksi vielä Mitenjka muisteli
jälkeenpäin huomanneensa tuolla hetkellä Grušenjkan kasvoissa
ikäänkuin jonkinmoista tahdotonta ja ylpeätä halveksimista tuota
Siperiasta tullutta tervehdystä kohtaan. Tämän jälkeen ei Grušenjka
ollut kertonut Mitenjkalle mitään muusta yhteydestään tämän uuden
kilpailijan kanssa. Näin hän oli vähitellen kokonaan unohtanut
upseerin. Hän ajatteli ainoastaan sitä, että kävipä miten tahansa ja
saipa asia minkä käänteen tahansa, niin tulossa oleva lopullinen
yhteentörmäys hänen ja Fjodor Pavlovitšin välillä oli kovin lähellä ja
oli saatava selvitetyksi ennen kuin mikään muu. Mielenahdistuksen
vallassa hän odotti joka hetki Grušenjkan ratkaisua ja uskoi kaiken
aikaa sen tapahtuvan odottamatta, hetken hurmiossa. Grušenjka
sanoo äkkiä hänelle: »Ota minut, olen ikuisesti sinun», — ja kaikki
on päättynyt: hän ottaa Grušenjkan ja vie hänet heti maailman ääriin.
Oi, hän vie hänet heti mahdollisimman kauas, jollei maailman ääriin,
niin jonnekin Venäjän rajoille, menee siellä hänen kanssaan
naimisiin ja asettuu hänen kanssaan asumaan incognito, niin ettei
kukaan tiedä heistä kerrassaan mitään, ei täällä eikä siellä eikä
missään. Silloin, oi, silloin alkaa heti aivan toinen elämä! Tästä
toisesta, uudistuneesta ja »hyveellisestä» elämästä (»ehdottomasti,
ehdottomasti hyveellisestä») hän haaveksi joka hetki ja kiihkeästi.
Hän janosi tätä ylösnousemusta ja uudistusta. Iljettävä liejuhauta,
johon hän oli takertunut omasta tahdostaan, tuntui hänestä kovin
vastenmieliseltä, ja kuten hyvin monet tämmöisissä tapauksissa,
samoin hänkin pani uskonsa ensisijassa paikan muutokseen:
kunhan vapautuisi näistä ihmisistä, näistä oloista, kunhan vain
pääsisi pois tästä kirotusta paikasta, niin — kaikki syntyisi uudelleen,
kaikki lähtisi menemään uutta latua! Niin hän uskoi ja tätä hän ikävöi.
Mutta näin kävisi vain, jos kysymys saisi ensimmäisen, onnellisen

ratkaisun. Oli olemassa toinenkin ratkaisu, mieleen nousi toinenkin,
mutta kauhea mahdollisuus. Grušenjka sanoo yhtäkkiä hänelle:
»Mene pois, minä olen juuri sopinut Fjodor Pavlovitšin kanssa ja
menen hänen kanssaan naimisiin enkä tarvitse sinua», — ja silloin…
mutta silloin… Mitja ei kylläkään tietänyt, mitä silloin tapahtuisi, ei
tietänyt aivan viimeiseen hetkeen asti, se on mainittava hänen
puolustuksekseen. Hänellä ei ollut mitään täsmälleen määriteltyjä
aikeita. Hän vain piti silmällä, vakoili ja kiusasi itseään, mutta
valmistautui muutoin vain kohtalonsa ensimmäisen, onnellisen
ratkaisun varalta. Vieläpä hän karkoittikin mielestään kaikki muut
ajatukset. Mutta tässä alkoi jo aivan toinen vaikeus, aivan uusi ja
syrjäinen, mutta myös kohtalokas seikka, joka ei ollut ratkaistavissa?
Nimittäin jos Grušenjka sanoo hänelle: »Minä olen sinun omasi,

vie minut pois», niin kuinka hän hänet vie? Mistä hän saa siihen
keinot, rahat? Häneltä olivat juuri nyt tyrehtyneet kaikki tähän saakka
niin monen vuoden kuluessa yhtä mittaa jatkuneet tulonsa, jotka
johtuivat Fjodor Pavlovitšin antimista. Tietysti Grušenjkalla oli rahoja,
mutta tässä suhteessa ilmeni Mitjassa äkkiä suuri ylpeys: hän tahtoi
viedä itse hänet pois ja aloittaa hänen kanssaan uutta elämää omilla
eikä hänen varoillaan; hän ei voinut kuvitellakaan, että ottaisi
Grušenjkalta rahoja, ja tämä ajatus tuotti hänelle niin suurta
kärsimystä, että hän lopulta tunsi kiusallista inhoa. En syvenny tässä
tähän tosiasiaan, en ryhdy sitä analysoimaan, vaan huomautan
ainoastaan: sellainen oli hänen sielunsa rakenne tällä hetkellä. Tämä
kaikki saattoi välillisesti ja ikäänkuin tiedottomasti johtua myös hänen
salaisista omantunnontuskistaan sen johdosta, että hän oli tavallaan
varastanut Katerina Ivanovnan rahat: »Toisen edessä olen konna ja
toisen edessä osoittaudun heti taas konnaksi», ajatteli hän silloin,
kuten myöhemmin itse tunnusti: »Ja jos Grušenjka saa tietää, niin
hän ei itsekään tahdo ottaa tämmöistä konnaa.» Mistä siis oli
otettava varat, mistä otettava nämä kohtalokkaat rahat? Muuten on
kaikki hukassa eikä synny mitään, »ja yksinomaan sen tähden, ettei
ollut riittävästi rahaa, oi, se on häpeä!»
Menen kertomuksessani kauemmaksi eteenpäin: siinäpä se onkin,

että hän ehkä tiesikin, mistä voisi saada nämä rahat, tiesi ehkä,
missä ne olivatkin. Yksityiskohtaisemmin en tällä kertaa esitä mitään,
sillä kaikki selviää myöhemmin; mutta hänen suurin
onnettomuutensa, — sanon sen, vaikkapa se on epäselvää, — oli
tämä: voidakseen ottaa nuo jossakin olevat varat, ollakseen
oikeutettu ne ottamaan, hänen oli ensin palautettava kolmetuhatta
ruplaa Katerina Ivanovnalle — muuten »minä olen taskuvaras,
konna, mutta uutta elämää en tahdo aloittaa konnana», päätti Mitja,
ja siksi hän oli päättänyt mullistaa koko maailman, jos niin tarvittiin,
mutta ehdottomasti toimittaa nuo kolmetuhatta takaisin Katerina
Ivanovnalle millä tavalla tahansa ja ennen kaikkea. Tämän
päätöksen syntymisen lopullinen prosessi oli hänessä tapahtunut
niin sanoakseni hänen elämänsä aivan viimeisinä hetkinä, nimittäin
kun hän viimeksi oli tavannut Aljošan kaksi päivää sitten illalla tiellä,
sen jälkeen kuin Grušenjka oli loukannut Katerina Ivanovnaa ja Mitja,
kuultuaan Aljošan kertomuksen tästä tapahtumasta, oli tunnustanut
olevansa konna ja käskenyt kertoa sen Katerina Ivanovnalle, »jos
tämä voi jossakin määrin tehdä hänen oloansa helpommaksi».
Silloin, tuona samana yönä, hän oli erottuaan veljestään tuntenut
kiihkoissaan, että hänen on parempi vaikkapa »tappaa ja ryöstää
joku, mutta maksaa Katjalle velka». »Olkoon mieluummin niin, että
minä tuon murhatun ja ryöstetyn edessä ja kaikkien ihmisten
silmissä olen murhaaja ja varas ja menen Siperiaan, kuin että
Katjalla olisi oikeus sanoa, että minä petin hänet ja varastin häneltä
rahat sekä karkasin näillä rahoilla Grušenjkan kanssa aloittamaan
hyveellistä elämää! Tätä minä en voi!» Näin lausui hampaitaan
kiristellen Mitja ja saattoi aika ajoin todellakin kuvitella saavansa
lopuksi aivotulehduksen. Mutta nyt hän vielä kamppaili…
Omituista: luulisi, että kun hän oli näin päättänyt, niin hänellä ei
enää voinut olla jäljellä mitään muuta kuin epätoivo; sillä mistä
saattoi äkkiä ottaa sellaisen rahasumman, varsinkin hänen
kaltaisensa köyhä raukka? Mutta kuitenkin hän koko tuon ajan
loppuun asti toivoi, että saa nuo kolmetuhatta, että ne tulevat,
lentävät hänelle ikäänkuin itsestään, vaikkapa taivaasta. Niinpä juuri
onkin sellaisten laita, jotka niinkuin Dmitri Fjodorovitškin koko
elämänsä ajan osaavat vain tuhlata ja panna menemään perittyjä,
vaivatta saatuja rahoja, mutta joilla ei ole mitään käsitystä siitä, miten
rahaa hankitaan. Mitä fantastisimpia ajatuksia oli alkanut pyöriä
hänen päässään heti sen jälkeen kuin hän toissa päivänä oli eronnut
Aljošasta, ja hänen kaikki ajatuksensa menivät aivan sekaisin. Siitä
johtui, että hän ensimmäiseksi ryhtyi sangen hurjaan yritykseen.
Niin, kenties juuri tämmöisissä tiloissa tämänkaltaisista ihmisistä
kaikkein mahdottomimmat ja fantastisimmat yritykset näyttävät
ensimmäisiltä mahdollisilta. Hän päätti äkkiä mennä kauppias
Samsonovin, Grušenjkan suojelijan luo ja esittää hänelle erään
»suunnitelman», saada häneltä tätä »suunnitelmaa» vastaan heti
koko tarvitsemansa rahasumman; suunnitelmaa liikeyrityksenä
ajatellen hän ei epäillyt ollenkaan, vaan epäili ainoastaan sitä, miten
arvostelee hänen päähänpälkähdystään itse Samsonov, jos hän ei
tahdo katsoa sitä ainoastaan liikeyrityksen kannalta. Vaikka Mitja
tunsikin tämän kauppiaan ulkonäöltä, niin hän ei kuitenkaan ollut
tuttu hänen kanssaan eikä edes ollut kertaakaan puhunut hänen
kanssaan. Mutta jostakin syystä hänessä jo kauan sitten oli syntynyt
vakaumus, että tämä vanha irstailija, joka nyt oli henkihieverissä, nyt
kenties ei ollenkaan olisi sitä vastaan, että Grušenjka järjestäisi
elämänsä jollakin kunniallisella tavalla ja menisi naimisiin
»luotettavan miehen» kanssa. Eikä hän vain ole panematta vastaan,
vaan haluaa itsekin sitä ja tilaisuuden ilmaantuessa itsekin on valmis
asiaa edistämään. Joistakin huhuistako vai joistakin Grušenjkan
sanoistako Mitja lienee myös tehnyt sen johtopäätöksen, että ukko
kenties soisi Grušenjkalle mieluummin hänet kuin Fjodor Pavlovitšin.
Kenties monen kertomuksemme lukijan mielestä tämä hänen
luulonsa, että saisi tuolla tavoin apua, ja hänen aikeensa ottaa
morsiamensa niin sanoakseni tämän suojelijan käsistä, tuntuu liian
karkealta ja häikäilemättömältä Dmitri Fjodorovitšin puolelta. Voin
huomauttaa vain sen, että Grušenjkan entisyys näytti Mitjan mielestä
olevan jo kokonaan lopussa. Hän katseli tätä menneisyyttä
rajattomalla säälillä ja päätti intohimonsa koko hehkulla, että kun
Grušenjka lausuu hänelle rakastavansa häntä ja menevänsä hänen
kanssaan naimisiin, niin samassa heti on olemassa uusi Grušenjka
ja yhdessä hänen kanssaan myös aivan uusi Dmitri Fjodorovitš,
ilman mitään vikoja ja vain hyveellinen: he kumpikin antavat anteeksi
toisilleen ja alkavat elää aivan uudella tavalla. Mitä taas tulee
Kuzjma Samsonoviin, niin tätä hän piti tuossa Grušenjkan entisessä,
jo ohitse menneessä elämänkaudessa Grušenjkan elämään
kohtalokkaasti vaikuttaneena miehenä, jota Grušenjka ei kuitenkaan
koskaan ollut rakastanut ja joka myös, se oli tässä tärkeintä, jo oli
»mennyt ohi», oli loppunut, niin että häntäkään nyt ei lainkaan ollut
olemassa. Kaiken lisäksi Mitja ei voinut enää pitää häntä
ihmisenäkään, sillä tunnettua oli kaikille ja koko kaupungille, että hän
oli vain sairas raunio, joka oli säilyttänyt Grušenjkaan niin
sanoakseni vain isällisen suhteen, aivan toisella pohjalla kuin ennen,
ja että näin oli ollut jo pitkän aikaa. Joka tapauksessa tässä oli paljon
vilpittömyyttäkin Mitjan puolelta, sillä kaikista vioistaan huolimatta
hän oli sangen suora mies. Tämän suoruutensa vuoksi hän muun
muassa oli vakavasti vakuutettu siitä, että vanha Kuzjma nyt
valmistautuessaan lähtemään toiseen maailmaan tuntee vilpitöntä
katumusta entisen käytöksensä johdosta Grušenjkaa kohtaan ja ettei
Grušenjkalla ole uskollisempaa suojelijaa ja ystävää kuin tämä nyt jo
vaaraton ukko.
Keskusteltuaan Aljošan kanssa kedolla ei Mitja ollut nukkunut juuri

ollenkaan koko yönä, ja seuraavana päivänä hän ilmestyi
Samsonovin taloon kello kymmenen tienoissa aamulla ja käski
ilmoittaa tulostaan. Tämä talo oli vanha, synkkä, hyvin iso,
kaksikerroksinen, ja siihen kuului piha- ja sivurakennuksia.
Alakerroksessa asuivat Samsonovin kaksi nainutta poikaa
perheineen, hänen hyvin vanha sisarensa ja yksi naimaton tytär.
Sivurakennuksessa asusti kaksi hänen kauppa-apulaistaan, joista
toisella oli myös iso perhe. Sekä lapsilla että kauppa-apulaisilla oli
ahdasta asunnoissaan, mutta talon yläkerroksen piti ukko yksin
hallussaan eikä päästänyt luokseen asumaan edes tytärtäänkään,
joka hoiti häntä ja jonka piti määrättyinä tunteina ja epämääräisinä
aikoina ukon kutsuessa joka kerta juosta alhaalta hänen luokseen
ylös, huolimatta häntä jo kauan vaivanneesta hengenahdistuksesta.
Tämän »yläkerran» muodosti joukko suuria loistohuoneita, jotka oli
kalustettu vanhanaikaiseen kauppiastapaan, pitkät, ikävät rivit
kömpelötekoisia mahonkisia tuoleja ja nojatuoleja seinustoilla,
verhoihin käärittyjä kristallisia kynttiläkruunuja katoissa, kolkon
näköisiä kuvastimia seinillä ikkunain välissä. Kaikki nämä huoneet
seisoivat aivan käyttämättöminä, sillä sairas ukko oli vetäytynyt
yhteen ainoaan huoneeseen, kaukana perällä olevaan
makuuhuoneeseensa, jossa häntä palveli vanha palvelijatar, tukka
huiviin käärittynä, ja palvelijapoika, joka oleili eteisessä
laatikkopenkillä. Kävellä ei ukko juuri ollenkaan voinut, kun hänen
jalkansa olivat turvonneet, ja vain harvoin hän nousi nahkaisesta
nojatuolistaan, jolloin eukko tukien häntä kainalosta kävelytti häntä
kerran tai pari ympäri huoneen. Hän oli ankara ja harvapuheinen
myös tätä eukkoa kohtaan. Kun hänelle ilmoitettiin »kapteenin» tulo,
niin hän heti käski ilmoittaa, ettei ota vastaan. Mutta Mitja oli
itsepintainen ja pyysi uudelleen ilmoittamaan itsensä. Kuzjma
Kuzjmitš tiedusteli tarkasti palvelijapojalta: miltä se näyttää, eikö ole
juovuksissa? Eikö se räyhää? Vastaukseksi hän sai, että »ei ole
päissään, mutta ei tahdo mennä pois». Ukko käski viedä uudelleen
kieltävän vastauksen. Silloin Mitja, joka oli aavistanut tätä ja tämän
varalta vartavasten ottanut mukaansa paperia ja lyijykynän, kirjoitti
selvästi paperipalalle yhden rivin: »Mitä tärkeimmän asian johdosta,
joka läheisesti koskee Agrafena Aleksandrovnaa», ja lähetti sen
ukolle. Vähän aikaa ajateltuaan ukko käski palvelijapojan viedä
vieraan saliin ja lähetti eukon alas käskemään hänen nuorinta
poikaansa tulemaan heti hänen luokseen ylös. Tämä nuorin poika,
joka oli noin kuuden jalan mittainen mies ja määrättömän väkevä
sekä oli aina sileäksi ajettu ja saksalaiseen tapaan puettu (itse
Samsonov oli puettu viittaan ja oli pitkäpartainen), saapui heti ja
mitään puhumatta. Kaikki he vapisivat isän edessä. Isä ei ollut
kutsunut tätä nuorta miestä sen tähden, että olisi pelännyt
»kapteenia», sillä hän ei ollut ensinkään arka luonteeltaan, vaan
muuten vain kaiken varalta, etupäässä todistajaksi. Poikansa
kanssa, joka talutti häntä, ja palvelijapojan seuraamana hän viimein
tulla laahusti saliin. Täytyy otaksua, että hän tunsi myös jonkinmoista
varsin voimakasta uteliaisuutta. Tämä sali, jossa Mitja odotti, oli
hyvin iso, synkkä, mieltä ikävystyttävä huone, jossa oli kaksi
ikkunaa, »marmoriset» seinät ja kolme hirveän isoa kristallista
kynttiläkruunua katossa. Mitja istui pienellä tuolilla ulos johtavan
oven luona ja odotti hermostuneen kärsimättömästi kohtaloansa.
Kun ukko saapui vastapäätä olevasta ovesta, jonne oli
kymmenkunta syltä matkaa Mitjan tuolista, niin tämä äkkiä hypähti
pystyyn ja lähti astumaan häntä vastaan lujilla, pitkillä sotilaan
askelilla. Mitja oli hyvin puettu, napitetussa takissa, pyöreä hattu ja
mustat hansikkaat kädessä, aivan samoin kuin oli ollut puettu kolme
päivää aikaisemmin luostarissa luostarinvanhimman luona,
perhekokouksessa Fjodor Pavlovitšin ja veljiensä seurassa. Ukko
odotti, häntä arvokkaana ja ankarana seisoen paikallaan, ja Mitja
tunsi heti, että hänen lähestyessään ukko oli päässyt täysin selville
hänestä. Mitjaa hämmästyttivät Kuzjma Kuzjmitšin viime aikoina
tavattomasti pöhöttyneet kasvot: hänen muutenkin paksu
alahuulensa oli nyt kuin riippuva makkara. Arvokkaasti ja ääneti hän
kumarsi vieraalle, osoitti hänelle sohvan luona olevaa nojatuolia ja
alkoi itse hitaasti poikansa käteen nojaten ja sairaan tavoin ähkien
laskeutua istumaan vastapäätä Mitjaa sohvalle, niin että tämä
nähdessään sairaan miehen ponnistukset heti alkoi tuntea
sydämessään katumusta ja herkkää häpeän tunnetta nykyisen
mitättömyytensä johdosta niin arvokkaan henkilön edessä, jota hän
oli tullut vaivaamaan.
— Mitä te, hyvä herra, tahdotte minusta? — lausui ukko,

päästyään viimein istumaan, hitaasti, selvästi, mutta kohteliaasti.
Mitja hätkähti, aikoi hypähtää pystyyn, mutta istahti taas. Sitten
hän heti alkoi puhua kovalla äänellä, nopeasti, hermostuneesti, eleitä
tehden ja hyvin kiihtyneenä. Näkyi, että siinä mies on mennyt
äärimmäiselle rajalle, on tuhon oma ja etsii viimeistä pelastuskeinoa,
ja jos ei onnistu, niin on valmis heti hukkumaan. Kaiken tämän ukko
Samsonov luultavasti ymmärsi silmänräpäyksessä, vaikka hänen
kasvonsa kaiken aikaa olivat liikkumattomat ja kylmät kuin
kuvapatsaan.
— Jalosukuinen Kuzjma Kuzjmitš on luultavasti jo useasti kuullut

minun riidoistani isäni Fjodor Pavlovitšin kanssa, joka on ryöstänyt
minulta äitini perinnön… sillä koko kaupunki juoruaa tästä… koska
täällä kaikki juoruavat siitä, mistä ei tarvitsisi… Ja sitäpaitsi on voinut
tulla tiedoksi myös Grušenjkan… anteeksi: Agrafena
Aleksandrovnan kautta… kunnioitettavan ja suuressa arvossa
pitämäni Agrafena Aleksandrovnan… — näin alkoi Mitja ja sekaantui
jo ensimmäisissä sanoissaan. Mutta me emme tässä esitä
sananmukaisesti hänen koko puhettaan, vaan ainoastaan
selostamme sen. Asia muka on semmoinen, että hän, Mitja, vielä
kolme kuukautta sitten vasiten neuvotteli (hän lausui nimenomaan
»vasiten» eikä vartavasten) asianajajan kanssa läänin
pääkaupungissa, kuuluisan asianajajan, Kuzjma Kuzjmitš, Pavel
Pavlovitš Korneplodovin kanssa, olette varmaankin kuullut? Perin
viisas mies, miltei valtiomiehen äly… tuntee teidätkin… mainitsi teitä
mitä mairittelevimmin… takertui Mitja toistamiseen puheessaan.
Mutta nämä katkeamiset eivät saaneet häntä pysähtymään, hän
hyppäsi heti niiden yli ja riensi yhä eteenpäin. Tämä samainen
Korneplodov, kyseltyään asioita seikkaperäisesti ja tarkastettuaan ne
asiakirjat, jotka Mitja saattoi hänelle esittää (asiakirjoista Mitja puhui
epäselvästi ja kiiruhti erityisesti tässä paikassa), oli sitä mieltä, että
Tšermašnjan kylään nähden, jonka kylän muka pitäisi kuulua
hänelle, Mitjalle, äidin perintönä, voisi todellakin aloittaa jutun ja sillä
ahdistaa hävytöntä ukkoa… »sillä eivät kaikki tiet ole tukossa, ja
oikeudenhoito kyllä tietää, mistä on tunkeuduttava läpi». Sanalla
sanoen, voisi toivoa saavansa Fjodor Pavlovitšiltä, lisää vielä kuusi-
tai seitsemäntuhatta, koska Tšermašnja on kuitenkin vähintään
kahdenkymmenenviidentuhannen arvoinen, tai oikeastaan
varmastikin kahdenkymmenenkahdeksan, »kolmenkymmenen,
kolmenkymmenentuhannen, Kuzjma Kuzjmitš, enkä minä,
ajatelkaahan, ole tältä kovasydämiseltä mieheltä saanut
seitsemäätoistakaan!…» Niin että minä, Mitja, silloin tämän asian
jätin sikseen, sillä en minä ymmärrä mitään oikeusjutuista, mutta
tänne tultuani jouduin ällistyksekseni uloshaun alaiseksi (tässä Mitja
taas sekaantui ja hyppäsi taas jyrkästi toiseen asiaan): niinpä että
ettekö te, jalosukuinen Kuzjma Kuzjmitš, haluaisi ottaa kaikkia minun
oikeuksiani tuota petoa kohtaan ja antaa siitä minulle vain
kolmetuhatta… Tehän ette missään tapauksessa voi joutua
kärsimään tappiota, sen vannon kunniani kautta, kunniani kautta,
vaan voitte päinvastoin ansaita kuusi- tai seitsemäntuhatta kolmen
asemesta… Mutta pääasia on, että asia päätetään »jo tänään».
»Minä toimitan notaarille taikka miten vain tarvitaan… Sanalla
sanoen, minä olen valmis kaikkeen, annan kaikki asiakirjat mitä
vaaditte, allekirjoitan kaikki… ja me laittaisimme heti kuntoon tämän
paperin, ja jos suinkin mahdollista, jos suinkin mahdollista, jo tänä
aamuna… Te antaisitte minulle nuo kolmetuhatta… sillä kukapa muu
on teidän veroisenne rahamies tässä kaupungissa… ja sillä te
pelastaisitte minut… sanalla sanoen, pelastaisitte minut hyvää asiaa
varten, jaloa asiaa varten, voi sanoa… sillä minulla on mitä
kunniallisimmat tunteet erästä henkilöä kohtaan, jonka te hyvin
tunnette ja josta pidätte huolta isällisesti. En olisi muuten tullutkaan,
jos ette tekisi sitä isällisesti. Ja, jos niin tahdotte, niin tässä on

New Directions in Contemporary Australian Poetry 1St Edition Dan Disney Full Chapter

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New Directions in Contemporary

Australian Poetry 1st Edition Dan

More information about this series at

ISSN 2634-6052 ISSN 2634-6060 (electronic)

Cover credit: piranka/Getty

“New Directions in Contemporary Australian Poetry is a genuinely

“While the nation state may be a barrier to a more interconnected prac-

“A new generation of poetry is growing from the network of song-

Introduction: New Directions in Contemporary Australian

Writing Unwriting Writing 97

Space, Place, Materiality

Revising an Australian ‘Mythos’

On Machines and Metamorphoses: Notes Toward a Future

Ali Alizadeh is a Senior Lecturer at Monash University, Australia. His

A. J. Carruthers is a literary critic and poet, author of Stave Sightings:

Anne Elvey lives in Boonwurrung Country in Seaford, Victoria.

Kenyon Review, and Archives of American Art Journal. She is also an

Dan Disney and Matthew Hall

This book sets out to navigate questions of the future of Australian

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

reformulation of stories of language and nation—how is it defined? who

of a so-called new world (Murray contra Porter)? This anthology parlays

poets as merely dislocated from a tradition, Kane’s book also enshrines as

Perhaps unlike other moments in our 200-year-old literary history,

There are those who admire the geometry,

Speaking as a loose formation of critically minded creative producers,

“Englishized”) historical styles have performed not only panic (anxiety,

In the “Space, Place, Materiality” cluster of essays, a selection of

may act as an agent generating change, a positivistic means of escaping not

Among this mix of generations, energies remain indefatigably focused

radically different outcomes, explained by way of the entangled histo-

Cassidy, Bonny, and Jessica L. Wilkinson, eds. 2016. Contemporary Australian

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 15

The place of poetry in today’s Indigenous literature landscape

state. Many of these twentieth-century activist poets are represented in

Beyond these broad themes, Indigenous writers have become increasingly

rendered us voiceless (Heiss 2003). As Waanyi author/poet/scholar

I will make oppression work for me

Bundjalung author/poet/scholar Melissa Lucashenko also reminds us to

In the wake of Australia’s active forgetting as a form of cultural amnesia

to live in a more just and “beloved community”; a bell hooks-inspired

Haunt in the Wake

We need to be creating a present that will inspire a radically different

Beyond our own unique standpoints, as storytellers in these political

People ask me for my story

Wiradjuri elder/poet/activist Aunty Kerry Reed-Gilbert’s book The

This is your language your culture

As warrior woman activist/poet/scholar Audre Lorde notably states,

As a transformative site of resistance and coming to consciousness, writing

Poetic-acts of speaking unspeakable truths do generate space and potential

vast: “Literature as a form of action can help create symbols of a new

Every wild flower that blooms in this

protectarnhemland. 24 November 2014. “Alice Eather—My Story Is Your

Ellen van Neerven

E. van Neerven (B)

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 31

Title: Karamazovin veljekset II

Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Release date: September 20, 2023 [eBook #71690]

Original publication: Helsinki: Otava, 1969

Credits: Juhani Kärkkäinen and Tapio Riikonen

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK

Helsingissä, Kustannusosakeyhtiö Otava, 1. p. ilm. v. 1927.