Jas H. Duke and the Chronicle of Avant-Garde Poetics
Keywords:
Australian poetry, poetry and poetics, experimental poetry, avant-garde poetry, poetry and history, Jas H. DukeAbstract
The critical study of Australian poetics has often been unable to account for those more difficult limit-cases in neo-avant-garde and contemporary experimental poetry. This article examines the heterogeneous works of Jas H.Duke (1939-1992) as both resolving and opening up further contradictions around questions of "derivation" in antipodal experimental writing. Duke's poetics, performances and writing practices are informed by Dadaism, Expressionism, Suprematism and Concrete Poetry, but also rework these histories; sometimes sarcastically, but always with close attention to their aesthetics. I put a special focus on those works of Duke's that critique notions of Australian nationhood, public policy and cultural assumptions, poems which call for a localised yet transcultural avant-garde poetics. Implicit here is that critical study of Australian poetry must begin to make sense of its languages of invention, and to find ways of reading those poetries that call for a more total emancipation of disjunction.References
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