While watching this weekend’s AFL Grand Final between West Coast and Collingwood, listen out for ‘action’ and ‘digression’ in the commentary.
RICHARD WAINWRIGHT
From human suffering to political chicanery to environmental degradation, the tide of bad news, blared in headlines every day, seems overwhelming. One poet and classics scholar asks: What can be done?
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, c. 1555. Rosemary Dobson addressed the painting in her poem Painter of Antwerp.
Wikimedia
Reading the poem Eurydice to her students unleashed surprising emotions for Stephanie Trigg. But literature works in mysterious, unpredictable ways, highlighting the impossibility of trigger warnings.
William Blake, Pity, 1795, Tate.
William Blake/Wikimedia Commons
The Romantics - including poets William Blake and William Wordsworth - lived in the 18th century, but their passionate ideas about imagination and nature are still influential today.
Nelson Mandela’s legacy in poetry can re-familiarise us with the values he embodied.
EPA/Stringer
In order to avoid being labeled a communist sympathizer, King needed to publicly distance himself from the controversial poet. Privately, King found ways to channel Hughes’ prose.
Edward Hopper’s ‘Office in a Small City’ (1953).
Gandalf's Gallery
On his bush block in the WA wheatbelt, poet John Kinsella attempts habitat restoration and reflects on the responsibilities of the writer as a witness to species loss.
Fresco showing a woman called Sappho holding writing implements from Pompeii Naples National Archaeological Museum.
Wikimedia Commons
Sappho sang of desire, passion and love – mostly directed towards women. As new fragments of her work are found, a fuller picture of her is emerging, but she remains the most mysterious of ancient poets.
How will our children view this period in Manus in the future?
Michelle Rooney, 2017
The detention centre for asylum seekers generated some economic benefits for Manus Islanders. But how would their forefathers have reasoned with the incarceration of men in exchange for development and money?
Rebecca Watts, Rupi Kaur, Kate Tempest – the world of poetry is up in arms again. Here’s why.
Dorothea MacKellar’s My Country, with its paen to a sunburnt landscape, excoriated Australians for their nostalgic love of English ‘grey-blue’ countryside and English weather.
Mark Wassell/flickr
There’s a fine tradition of Australian poetry harnessing the corrective power of insult. In doing so, it prompts us to face hard questions about our history and identity.
Tommy Wiseau clutches a football in ‘The Room,’ the 2003 film he wrote, produced and starred in.
Wiseau Films