If Cooke’s previous book, Lyre, urged us towards the ‘more’ of the more-than-human world, then Th... more If Cooke’s previous book, Lyre, urged us towards the ‘more’ of the more-than-human world, then The grass is greener over your grave returns to the ‘human’ end of that spectrum—though always with an eye to the porosity of the human and its immersion in waves of land, language, dream, and sea. Typically wide-ranging in form, this new collection develops Cooke’s preoccupations with colonisation, ecology, metaphysics, and travel, while also acknowledging their heritage in the life and work of the late poet Martin Harrison.
Lyre is a sonic, sculptural cornucopia of new and startling forms. Stuart Cooke proposes that all... more Lyre is a sonic, sculptural cornucopia of new and startling forms. Stuart Cooke proposes that all kinds of life—animal, plant and otherwise—have their own modes of expression, each of which can each be translated into a different kind of poetry. Ranging across Australasian oceans, coastlines, rainforests, savannahs and deserts, and similarly wide-ranging in its approach to form and lineation, Lyre asks what happens when poems make contact with non-human worlds; in so doing, it welcomes whole new worlds to poetry.
Opera is the imagination of a trans-Pacific synthesis, a fusion of geography and history, of lang... more Opera is the imagination of a trans-Pacific synthesis, a fusion of geography and history, of language and love, of animal, human and inorganic potency. These poems sing from opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean in order to weave a new territory that recovers what was once, long ago, intimately connected.
George Dyuŋgayan was a powerful Nyigina lawman from the Roebuck Plains (east of Broome). Over the... more George Dyuŋgayan was a powerful Nyigina lawman from the Roebuck Plains (east of Broome). Over the course of a life spanning much of the twentieth century, the spirit of his late father visited him in dreams and gave him the seventeen verses of the The Bulu Line. Full of magic and local history, the poems describe journeys with ancestors and spirit beings, encounters with rainbow serpents and ferocious storms, and explore the vast distances of the West Kimberley landscape.
A pioneering experiment in contemporary Australian literature, George Dyuŋgayan’s Bulu Line is the translation of a richly textured oral poetry into printed form. Rather than reduce the songpoetry to short, static lines of verse, Stuart Cooke has assembled a series of startling multi-vocal texts that invite a plethora of never-ending readings. Just like Cooke, you can also become a translator, and contribute to the performance of the poetry. In this way, writes Cooke in the introduction, we “let the force of the Bulu keep rolling.”
This book showcases the complexity and power of one of the world’s oldest and greatest literary traditions, and provides testament to its remarkable capacity for ongoing evolution.
Speaking the Earth’s Languages brings together for the first time critical discussions of postcol... more Speaking the Earth’s Languages brings together for the first time critical discussions of postcolonial poetics from Australia and Chile. The book crosses multiple languages, landscapes, and disciplines, and draws on a wide range of both oral and written poetries, in order to make strong claims about the importance of ‘a nomad poetics’ – not only for understanding Aboriginal or Mapuche writing practices but, more widely, for the problems confronting contemporary literature and politics in colonized landscapes.
The book begins by critiquing canonical examples of non-indigenous postcolonial poetics. Incisive re-readings of two icons of Australian and Chilean poetry, Judith Wright (1915–2000) and Pablo Neruda (1904–1973), provide rich insights into non-indigenous responses to colonization in the wake of modernity. The second half of the book establishes compositional links between Aboriginal and Mapuche poetics, and between such oral and written poetics more generally.
The book’s final part develops an ‘emerging synthesis’ of contemporary Aboriginal and Mapuche poetics, with reference to the work of two of the most important avant-garde Aboriginal and Mapuche poets of recent times, Lionel Fogarty (1958–) and Paulo Huirimilla (1973–).
Speaking the Earth’s Languages uses these fascinating links between Aboriginal and Mapuche poetics as the basis of a deliberately nomadic, open-ended theory for an Australian–Chilean postcolonial poetics. “The central argument of this book,” the author writes, “is that a nomadic poetics is essential for a genuinely postcolonial form of habitation, or a habitation of colonized landscapes that doesn’t continue to replicate colonialist ideologies involving indigenous dispossession and environmental exploitation.
Departure into Cloud traces a line between the earth and the sky. Beginning with the seeds of an ... more Departure into Cloud traces a line between the earth and the sky. Beginning with the seeds of an organic, composting language beneath our feet, it grows into a breathing, sentient world before finally bursting into a cloud of almost-forms, where vaporous language tickles the edges of dense matter.
Edge Music explores what it means to talk about, and to write on, the edges of Australian landsca... more Edge Music explores what it means to talk about, and to write on, the edges of Australian landscapes – be they geographical or historical. Responding to a complex, globally engaged nation, this innovative book openly displays the author's eagerness to write in an extremely eclectic range of styles and forms. It reveres the voices of the past, and grants them new life in the blinding sun of the present.
Corrosions is a prequel to Stuart’s first full-length collection, Edge Music (IP, 2011). A collec... more Corrosions is a prequel to Stuart’s first full-length collection, Edge Music (IP, 2011). A collection of corroded points or beginnings, it is about some of the paths taken by a young poet as he struggles to understand the relationship between language, landscape and history in contemporary Australia, and how to locate his own body in the midst of it all.
“Far-ranging, he can return his poems to the immediate context of Australian voice and manner... a strong new poetic presence, a presence already very assured and one that is already offering a true moment of enrichment to Australian poetry.” – Martin Harrison
Bringing together decolonial, Romantic and global literature perspectives, Transcultural Ecocriti... more Bringing together decolonial, Romantic and global literature perspectives, Transcultural Ecocriticism explores innovative new directions for the field of environmental literary studies. By examining these literatures across a range of geographical locations and historical periods – from Romantic period travel writing to Chinese science fiction and Aboriginal Australian poetry – the book makes a compelling case for the need for ecocriticism to competently translate between Indigenous and non-Indigenous, planetary and local, and contemporary and pre-modern perspectives. Leading scholars from Australasia and North America explore links between Indigenous knowledges, Romanticism, globalisation, avant-garde poetics and critical theory in order to chart tensions as well as affinities between these discourses in a variety of genres of environmental representation, including science fiction, poetry, colonial natural history and oral narrative.
Drawing on recent developments in critical plant studies, this essay attempts to develop an ethol... more Drawing on recent developments in critical plant studies, this essay attempts to develop an ethological poetics of trees. I start by analysing four examples of recent fiction, poetry and nonfiction that are each about different kinds of trees - The Overstory by Richard Powers; Translations from Bark Beetle by Jody Gladding; Tree Talks by Wendy Burk; The Biggest Estate on Earth by Bill Gammage - with relation to JC Ryan's phytocritical model. In addition to their representation of botanical lives, I also consider how Powers and Gammage understand trees as constitutive of Indigenous kinship networks. Then, I combine the insights gleaned from the textual analysis with work by Michael Marder and others in order to outline key features of tree ontology and articulation, and I conclude by positing a provisional arboreal poetics.
This essay will argue for the relevance of the ‘neobaroque’ in relation to recent examples of Aus... more This essay will argue for the relevance of the ‘neobaroque’ in relation to recent examples of Australian poetics. The baroque and neobaroque are central strains of Latin American poetry, and much has been made of the neobaroque turn in Latin American theory, with the alternatives it proposes to hegemonic, linear narratives of modernity and rationalism. However, despite the fact that some of Australia’s greatest writers have profoundly baroque qualities, the baroque as an aesthetic, ontological and/or political category receives scant attention in Australian criticism. In light of these concerns, this essay will provide an outline of both baroque and neobaroque poetics with relation to Australian, European and Latin American examples. I then address the work of leading Mexican poet Coral Bracho, and consider her influence on the last collection of the late Australian poet Martin Harrison (Happiness, 2015). In examining the relations between Bracho’s neobaroque contortions and Harrison’s ‘late style’, I propose that Happiness is illustrative of an alternative trajectory of Australian poetics, which turns from the discipline and reticence of Anglophone models in order to embrace ambiguity, disorder and incompletion – an imagination of complexity (as opposed to its reduction).
ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2022
In this article I examine leaf-cutter ants, and particularly their nest architecture, in terms of... more In this article I examine leaf-cutter ants, and particularly their nest architecture, in terms of what I call an ‘ethological poetics.’ I propose that thinking about leaf-cutter architecture is an engagement with a radically alternative aesthetics. I begin by contrasting human and insect ontologies, before focusing on ants. I then outline characteristics of leaf-cutter societies. Having established a broad, ontological basis for their production, I conclude by analysing leaf-cutter nest architecture. Leaf-cutter architecture is based not on predetermined plans, but on a transcorporeal poetics of immanence, or a multispecies process of making that is entangled with the living conditions of an environmental field.
In this essay, the author argues that the appreciation of nonhuman poetic forms, or an “ethologic... more In this essay, the author argues that the appreciation of nonhuman poetic forms, or an “ethological poetics,” is a necessary but neglected mode of ecological relation, and is especially important in the Anthropocene. Motivated by his own creative practice—in particular, the composition of Lyre, a book of poems about different animals, plants, and landforms—he considers important examples of ethologically attentive poetics before outlining how his compositional method attempts to incorporate insights from the environmental humanities and animal studies. Rather than insisting on their essential difference from human worlds, the author argues for an attentive, ethical, and imaginative engagement with nonhuman lives, through which surprising and unusual forms of poetry might emerge.
In this essay I outline the ecopoetic properties of Deborah Bird Rose's thought. I argue that her... more In this essay I outline the ecopoetic properties of Deborah Bird Rose's thought. I argue that her interest in poetics derives from five broad themes in her work, which together constitute a powerful, ethical model of ecological poetics: an insistence on location and context; an understanding, derived from her Aboriginal teachers, of how to privilege [Dreaming] space over temporal sequence; an interest in open-ended, plural and perpetually unsettled forms; an appreciation of mystery, and the humility required to recognise it; and finally, a proto-ecological understanding of dance as both ceremonial or celebratory, and as a practice inherent to ecological function and its experience. Taken together, these themes underscore the irreducible singularity of places, which are imbued with musical, rhythmic structures that, with the right education and initiation, can become the basis for song and dance. In other words, through place we encounter rhythmic, musical expression, or poetry. Furthermore, Rose encourages her readers to take seriously the sensuous, embodied qualities of language acts, or the ways that they are inextricable from the times, places and bodies in which they occur. This is a poetics which recognises that a text is open and porous, and thoroughly entangled with the community in which it was composed. Accordingly, in the second half of this essay I will use Rose’s work to perform a reading of a story each from Indigenous Australia and North America. When considered in the terms of Rose’s poetics, these stories unfurl into complex, poetic events of multiple, sometimes contradictory directions, which remain resolutely tied to the grounded particularities of their production.
In an attempt to respond to the West’s general obliviousness to non-human semiosis, this article ... more In an attempt to respond to the West’s general obliviousness to non-human semiosis, this article proposes a method for appreciating non-human poetics. By combining the critical tools of poetics and literary theory with insights from ethology and biosemiotics, I outline a method of criticism for non-human creative compositions. Drawing on the work of Gerald Bruns, Elizabeth Grosz and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, I begin by theorising a poetics which attends to the ecology of forces that produce, and are produced by, a work, rather than the intentions of a single artist. I propose that an ethological poetics emphasises the expressive capacity of materials across a range of written, musical, visual and performative structures. By studying these expressive forces, I argue, we can extend our appreciation of art and poetics into multi-species domains. The challenge is not to focus on the 'meaning' or intention of nonhuman artworks, but to study their disruptive, and exciting, forces. The third part of the essay is a case-study of an Australian songbird, the Albert's lyrebird, whose remarkable performance I read in terms of an ethological poetics. Producing an operatic complex of song, dance, instrumentation and stage design, the lyrebird’s composition is thoroughly entangled with the flora and fauna of his umwelt. Resistant to categorisation by any generic label, I argue that the lyrebird’s composition is best approached in the terms of transgressive, avant-garde performative and sound poetics—even as it escapes such terms, the bird’s composition nevertheless compels us into a relation with his territory.
This article outlines a transcultural fluctuation between indigenous poetics from Australia and S... more This article outlines a transcultural fluctuation between indigenous poetics from Australia and South America in order to respond to some of the most pressing concerns in contemporary ecocritical discourse. I propose that we might turn to indigenous knowledge systems not as part of a reactionary, antimodern form of Romanticism, but as an alternative, syncretic understanding of the contemporary, in which the past is partner to the present in the formation of future possibility. I outline key features of Indigenous Australian and South American thought, including the centrality of language and poetics in the maintenance of country, before outlining an Indigenous philosophical poetics that spans the Australian and American continents. Indigenous knowledge systems, while to some extent understandable with generalized terms such as “The Dreaming” or “Pachamama” (“World Mother”), are thoroughly localized conceptions of much more extensive, transnational forces.
Plumwood Mountain: a Australian journal for ecopoetry and ecopoetics, Feb 1, 2017
This essay considers the presence of animal or non-human language in a selection of twentieth cen... more This essay considers the presence of animal or non-human language in a selection of twentieth century and contemporary poems. Of course, critical discussion of the representation of animals and plants in poetry is hardly unusual in the growing number of forums for ecocriticism. Less common, however, is attention to those moments when a poet attempts to provide space in his or her poem for the poetry of the animals and plants themselves. So, focusing first on poems by Tomas Tranströmer and Eugenio Montejo, in which turns to the non-human are quite common, I want to ask why non-human languages are so important in their work. From here I will map out a series of concerns that are often entangled with the presence of animal voices in poetry, involving examples from a number of Australian and North and South American poets, including Les Murray, Judith Wright, Pablo Neruda and José Emilio Pacheco. The aim here is not to provide an historical account of the evolution and tradition of animalistic poetic forms, or literary ‘bestiaries’, as they are often referred to, but rather to give a sense of the function and importance of such forms in modern and contemporary practice, and to show how, regardless of geographical location, many such poems turn to the animal as part of a similar route of exploration. These poems gesture towards the possibility of poetry beyond the human, just as recent critical theory has also attempted to venture beyond the human in the analysis of concepts such as “body”, “text” and “culture”.
This paper will perform a reading of two creation narratives from either side of the Pacific Ocea... more This paper will perform a reading of two creation narratives from either side of the Pacific Ocean, the relationships between which will catalyse the theorisation of a transcultural approach to ecological poetics.
Mt Tamborine is a crucial location for Judith Wright's poetry, and for the development of her tho... more Mt Tamborine is a crucial location for Judith Wright's poetry, and for the development of her thought. She wrote the majority of her poetry collections while living on the mountain from 1948–75; it was there that she came face to face with the complexities of Australian ecologies and colonial histories. While her earlier poems from this period reflect a concerted, anti-colonial desire to separate the world of Tamborine from her European inheritance and perspective, by the early 1970s her work becomes preoccupied with symbiotic relationships between her body, her house and garden, and the surrounding landscape. This turn reflects broader shifts in thought in the mid-twentieth century, where notions of separation and precision were being problematised by the emerging field of quantum mechanics.
If Cooke’s previous book, Lyre, urged us towards the ‘more’ of the more-than-human world, then Th... more If Cooke’s previous book, Lyre, urged us towards the ‘more’ of the more-than-human world, then The grass is greener over your grave returns to the ‘human’ end of that spectrum—though always with an eye to the porosity of the human and its immersion in waves of land, language, dream, and sea. Typically wide-ranging in form, this new collection develops Cooke’s preoccupations with colonisation, ecology, metaphysics, and travel, while also acknowledging their heritage in the life and work of the late poet Martin Harrison.
Lyre is a sonic, sculptural cornucopia of new and startling forms. Stuart Cooke proposes that all... more Lyre is a sonic, sculptural cornucopia of new and startling forms. Stuart Cooke proposes that all kinds of life—animal, plant and otherwise—have their own modes of expression, each of which can each be translated into a different kind of poetry. Ranging across Australasian oceans, coastlines, rainforests, savannahs and deserts, and similarly wide-ranging in its approach to form and lineation, Lyre asks what happens when poems make contact with non-human worlds; in so doing, it welcomes whole new worlds to poetry.
Opera is the imagination of a trans-Pacific synthesis, a fusion of geography and history, of lang... more Opera is the imagination of a trans-Pacific synthesis, a fusion of geography and history, of language and love, of animal, human and inorganic potency. These poems sing from opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean in order to weave a new territory that recovers what was once, long ago, intimately connected.
George Dyuŋgayan was a powerful Nyigina lawman from the Roebuck Plains (east of Broome). Over the... more George Dyuŋgayan was a powerful Nyigina lawman from the Roebuck Plains (east of Broome). Over the course of a life spanning much of the twentieth century, the spirit of his late father visited him in dreams and gave him the seventeen verses of the The Bulu Line. Full of magic and local history, the poems describe journeys with ancestors and spirit beings, encounters with rainbow serpents and ferocious storms, and explore the vast distances of the West Kimberley landscape.
A pioneering experiment in contemporary Australian literature, George Dyuŋgayan’s Bulu Line is the translation of a richly textured oral poetry into printed form. Rather than reduce the songpoetry to short, static lines of verse, Stuart Cooke has assembled a series of startling multi-vocal texts that invite a plethora of never-ending readings. Just like Cooke, you can also become a translator, and contribute to the performance of the poetry. In this way, writes Cooke in the introduction, we “let the force of the Bulu keep rolling.”
This book showcases the complexity and power of one of the world’s oldest and greatest literary traditions, and provides testament to its remarkable capacity for ongoing evolution.
Speaking the Earth’s Languages brings together for the first time critical discussions of postcol... more Speaking the Earth’s Languages brings together for the first time critical discussions of postcolonial poetics from Australia and Chile. The book crosses multiple languages, landscapes, and disciplines, and draws on a wide range of both oral and written poetries, in order to make strong claims about the importance of ‘a nomad poetics’ – not only for understanding Aboriginal or Mapuche writing practices but, more widely, for the problems confronting contemporary literature and politics in colonized landscapes.
The book begins by critiquing canonical examples of non-indigenous postcolonial poetics. Incisive re-readings of two icons of Australian and Chilean poetry, Judith Wright (1915–2000) and Pablo Neruda (1904–1973), provide rich insights into non-indigenous responses to colonization in the wake of modernity. The second half of the book establishes compositional links between Aboriginal and Mapuche poetics, and between such oral and written poetics more generally.
The book’s final part develops an ‘emerging synthesis’ of contemporary Aboriginal and Mapuche poetics, with reference to the work of two of the most important avant-garde Aboriginal and Mapuche poets of recent times, Lionel Fogarty (1958–) and Paulo Huirimilla (1973–).
Speaking the Earth’s Languages uses these fascinating links between Aboriginal and Mapuche poetics as the basis of a deliberately nomadic, open-ended theory for an Australian–Chilean postcolonial poetics. “The central argument of this book,” the author writes, “is that a nomadic poetics is essential for a genuinely postcolonial form of habitation, or a habitation of colonized landscapes that doesn’t continue to replicate colonialist ideologies involving indigenous dispossession and environmental exploitation.
Departure into Cloud traces a line between the earth and the sky. Beginning with the seeds of an ... more Departure into Cloud traces a line between the earth and the sky. Beginning with the seeds of an organic, composting language beneath our feet, it grows into a breathing, sentient world before finally bursting into a cloud of almost-forms, where vaporous language tickles the edges of dense matter.
Edge Music explores what it means to talk about, and to write on, the edges of Australian landsca... more Edge Music explores what it means to talk about, and to write on, the edges of Australian landscapes – be they geographical or historical. Responding to a complex, globally engaged nation, this innovative book openly displays the author's eagerness to write in an extremely eclectic range of styles and forms. It reveres the voices of the past, and grants them new life in the blinding sun of the present.
Corrosions is a prequel to Stuart’s first full-length collection, Edge Music (IP, 2011). A collec... more Corrosions is a prequel to Stuart’s first full-length collection, Edge Music (IP, 2011). A collection of corroded points or beginnings, it is about some of the paths taken by a young poet as he struggles to understand the relationship between language, landscape and history in contemporary Australia, and how to locate his own body in the midst of it all.
“Far-ranging, he can return his poems to the immediate context of Australian voice and manner... a strong new poetic presence, a presence already very assured and one that is already offering a true moment of enrichment to Australian poetry.” – Martin Harrison
Bringing together decolonial, Romantic and global literature perspectives, Transcultural Ecocriti... more Bringing together decolonial, Romantic and global literature perspectives, Transcultural Ecocriticism explores innovative new directions for the field of environmental literary studies. By examining these literatures across a range of geographical locations and historical periods – from Romantic period travel writing to Chinese science fiction and Aboriginal Australian poetry – the book makes a compelling case for the need for ecocriticism to competently translate between Indigenous and non-Indigenous, planetary and local, and contemporary and pre-modern perspectives. Leading scholars from Australasia and North America explore links between Indigenous knowledges, Romanticism, globalisation, avant-garde poetics and critical theory in order to chart tensions as well as affinities between these discourses in a variety of genres of environmental representation, including science fiction, poetry, colonial natural history and oral narrative.
Drawing on recent developments in critical plant studies, this essay attempts to develop an ethol... more Drawing on recent developments in critical plant studies, this essay attempts to develop an ethological poetics of trees. I start by analysing four examples of recent fiction, poetry and nonfiction that are each about different kinds of trees - The Overstory by Richard Powers; Translations from Bark Beetle by Jody Gladding; Tree Talks by Wendy Burk; The Biggest Estate on Earth by Bill Gammage - with relation to JC Ryan's phytocritical model. In addition to their representation of botanical lives, I also consider how Powers and Gammage understand trees as constitutive of Indigenous kinship networks. Then, I combine the insights gleaned from the textual analysis with work by Michael Marder and others in order to outline key features of tree ontology and articulation, and I conclude by positing a provisional arboreal poetics.
This essay will argue for the relevance of the ‘neobaroque’ in relation to recent examples of Aus... more This essay will argue for the relevance of the ‘neobaroque’ in relation to recent examples of Australian poetics. The baroque and neobaroque are central strains of Latin American poetry, and much has been made of the neobaroque turn in Latin American theory, with the alternatives it proposes to hegemonic, linear narratives of modernity and rationalism. However, despite the fact that some of Australia’s greatest writers have profoundly baroque qualities, the baroque as an aesthetic, ontological and/or political category receives scant attention in Australian criticism. In light of these concerns, this essay will provide an outline of both baroque and neobaroque poetics with relation to Australian, European and Latin American examples. I then address the work of leading Mexican poet Coral Bracho, and consider her influence on the last collection of the late Australian poet Martin Harrison (Happiness, 2015). In examining the relations between Bracho’s neobaroque contortions and Harrison’s ‘late style’, I propose that Happiness is illustrative of an alternative trajectory of Australian poetics, which turns from the discipline and reticence of Anglophone models in order to embrace ambiguity, disorder and incompletion – an imagination of complexity (as opposed to its reduction).
ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2022
In this article I examine leaf-cutter ants, and particularly their nest architecture, in terms of... more In this article I examine leaf-cutter ants, and particularly their nest architecture, in terms of what I call an ‘ethological poetics.’ I propose that thinking about leaf-cutter architecture is an engagement with a radically alternative aesthetics. I begin by contrasting human and insect ontologies, before focusing on ants. I then outline characteristics of leaf-cutter societies. Having established a broad, ontological basis for their production, I conclude by analysing leaf-cutter nest architecture. Leaf-cutter architecture is based not on predetermined plans, but on a transcorporeal poetics of immanence, or a multispecies process of making that is entangled with the living conditions of an environmental field.
In this essay, the author argues that the appreciation of nonhuman poetic forms, or an “ethologic... more In this essay, the author argues that the appreciation of nonhuman poetic forms, or an “ethological poetics,” is a necessary but neglected mode of ecological relation, and is especially important in the Anthropocene. Motivated by his own creative practice—in particular, the composition of Lyre, a book of poems about different animals, plants, and landforms—he considers important examples of ethologically attentive poetics before outlining how his compositional method attempts to incorporate insights from the environmental humanities and animal studies. Rather than insisting on their essential difference from human worlds, the author argues for an attentive, ethical, and imaginative engagement with nonhuman lives, through which surprising and unusual forms of poetry might emerge.
In this essay I outline the ecopoetic properties of Deborah Bird Rose's thought. I argue that her... more In this essay I outline the ecopoetic properties of Deborah Bird Rose's thought. I argue that her interest in poetics derives from five broad themes in her work, which together constitute a powerful, ethical model of ecological poetics: an insistence on location and context; an understanding, derived from her Aboriginal teachers, of how to privilege [Dreaming] space over temporal sequence; an interest in open-ended, plural and perpetually unsettled forms; an appreciation of mystery, and the humility required to recognise it; and finally, a proto-ecological understanding of dance as both ceremonial or celebratory, and as a practice inherent to ecological function and its experience. Taken together, these themes underscore the irreducible singularity of places, which are imbued with musical, rhythmic structures that, with the right education and initiation, can become the basis for song and dance. In other words, through place we encounter rhythmic, musical expression, or poetry. Furthermore, Rose encourages her readers to take seriously the sensuous, embodied qualities of language acts, or the ways that they are inextricable from the times, places and bodies in which they occur. This is a poetics which recognises that a text is open and porous, and thoroughly entangled with the community in which it was composed. Accordingly, in the second half of this essay I will use Rose’s work to perform a reading of a story each from Indigenous Australia and North America. When considered in the terms of Rose’s poetics, these stories unfurl into complex, poetic events of multiple, sometimes contradictory directions, which remain resolutely tied to the grounded particularities of their production.
In an attempt to respond to the West’s general obliviousness to non-human semiosis, this article ... more In an attempt to respond to the West’s general obliviousness to non-human semiosis, this article proposes a method for appreciating non-human poetics. By combining the critical tools of poetics and literary theory with insights from ethology and biosemiotics, I outline a method of criticism for non-human creative compositions. Drawing on the work of Gerald Bruns, Elizabeth Grosz and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, I begin by theorising a poetics which attends to the ecology of forces that produce, and are produced by, a work, rather than the intentions of a single artist. I propose that an ethological poetics emphasises the expressive capacity of materials across a range of written, musical, visual and performative structures. By studying these expressive forces, I argue, we can extend our appreciation of art and poetics into multi-species domains. The challenge is not to focus on the 'meaning' or intention of nonhuman artworks, but to study their disruptive, and exciting, forces. The third part of the essay is a case-study of an Australian songbird, the Albert's lyrebird, whose remarkable performance I read in terms of an ethological poetics. Producing an operatic complex of song, dance, instrumentation and stage design, the lyrebird’s composition is thoroughly entangled with the flora and fauna of his umwelt. Resistant to categorisation by any generic label, I argue that the lyrebird’s composition is best approached in the terms of transgressive, avant-garde performative and sound poetics—even as it escapes such terms, the bird’s composition nevertheless compels us into a relation with his territory.
This article outlines a transcultural fluctuation between indigenous poetics from Australia and S... more This article outlines a transcultural fluctuation between indigenous poetics from Australia and South America in order to respond to some of the most pressing concerns in contemporary ecocritical discourse. I propose that we might turn to indigenous knowledge systems not as part of a reactionary, antimodern form of Romanticism, but as an alternative, syncretic understanding of the contemporary, in which the past is partner to the present in the formation of future possibility. I outline key features of Indigenous Australian and South American thought, including the centrality of language and poetics in the maintenance of country, before outlining an Indigenous philosophical poetics that spans the Australian and American continents. Indigenous knowledge systems, while to some extent understandable with generalized terms such as “The Dreaming” or “Pachamama” (“World Mother”), are thoroughly localized conceptions of much more extensive, transnational forces.
Plumwood Mountain: a Australian journal for ecopoetry and ecopoetics, Feb 1, 2017
This essay considers the presence of animal or non-human language in a selection of twentieth cen... more This essay considers the presence of animal or non-human language in a selection of twentieth century and contemporary poems. Of course, critical discussion of the representation of animals and plants in poetry is hardly unusual in the growing number of forums for ecocriticism. Less common, however, is attention to those moments when a poet attempts to provide space in his or her poem for the poetry of the animals and plants themselves. So, focusing first on poems by Tomas Tranströmer and Eugenio Montejo, in which turns to the non-human are quite common, I want to ask why non-human languages are so important in their work. From here I will map out a series of concerns that are often entangled with the presence of animal voices in poetry, involving examples from a number of Australian and North and South American poets, including Les Murray, Judith Wright, Pablo Neruda and José Emilio Pacheco. The aim here is not to provide an historical account of the evolution and tradition of animalistic poetic forms, or literary ‘bestiaries’, as they are often referred to, but rather to give a sense of the function and importance of such forms in modern and contemporary practice, and to show how, regardless of geographical location, many such poems turn to the animal as part of a similar route of exploration. These poems gesture towards the possibility of poetry beyond the human, just as recent critical theory has also attempted to venture beyond the human in the analysis of concepts such as “body”, “text” and “culture”.
This paper will perform a reading of two creation narratives from either side of the Pacific Ocea... more This paper will perform a reading of two creation narratives from either side of the Pacific Ocean, the relationships between which will catalyse the theorisation of a transcultural approach to ecological poetics.
Mt Tamborine is a crucial location for Judith Wright's poetry, and for the development of her tho... more Mt Tamborine is a crucial location for Judith Wright's poetry, and for the development of her thought. She wrote the majority of her poetry collections while living on the mountain from 1948–75; it was there that she came face to face with the complexities of Australian ecologies and colonial histories. While her earlier poems from this period reflect a concerted, anti-colonial desire to separate the world of Tamborine from her European inheritance and perspective, by the early 1970s her work becomes preoccupied with symbiotic relationships between her body, her house and garden, and the surrounding landscape. This turn reflects broader shifts in thought in the mid-twentieth century, where notions of separation and precision were being problematised by the emerging field of quantum mechanics.
This paper reevaluates the work of late Australian poet Philip Hodgins (1959-1995) in the context... more This paper reevaluates the work of late Australian poet Philip Hodgins (1959-1995) in the context of related inquiries into the work of other late poets Jennifer Rankin and John Anderson. The emphasis is on Hodgins's 'landspeak', or the unusual capacities for his lines to both delimit Australian country and to leave open the potential for what is unknown and/or unseen. This relates to tropes of provincialism and of geopoetics in other Australian poetry. The paper argues that, despite the apparent conservatism of his poetics, Hodgins's work actually interrogates the foundations of colonial Australian places.
An essay on the practice of reviewing/an account of Robert Gray's poetry as a practice of thought... more An essay on the practice of reviewing/an account of Robert Gray's poetry as a practice of thought & reading.
Australasian Journal of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology, 2013
This essay explores the ecologically sensitive properties of oral poetics, or of written poetries... more This essay explores the ecologically sensitive properties of oral poetics, or of written poetries with a close relationship to oral traditions. Looking in particular at the work of contemporary Mapuche poet Leonel Lienlaf (from southern Chile), I outline some of the important links between his written work and the Mapuche oral tradition. I then show how the proximity of Lienlaf's poems to songpoetry - and, by extension, to the voice and to the limits of breath - produces a highly ecologically sensitive poetic. Several parallels are drawn between properties of Mapuche songpoetry and of Aboriginal songpoetry, suggesting that a similar concern with ephemera, bodily location and movement can also be found in the work of some contemporary Aboriginal poets.
Rose, D., T. van Dooren, M. Chrulew, S. Cooke, M. Kearnes and E. O’Gorman (2012) “Thinking Through the Environment, Unsettling the Humanities” Environmental Humanities, 1, 2013
'We were driving through Death Valley, an American-Australian and two Aussies, taking the scenic ... more 'We were driving through Death Valley, an American-Australian and two Aussies, taking the scenic route from Las Vegas to Santa Cruz.'
This multi-voiced account of multispecies encounters along a highway takes up the challenge of playful and humorous writing that is as well deeply serious and theoretically provocative. Our travels brought us into what Donna Haraway calls the contact zone: a region of recognition and response. The contact zone is a place of significant questions: ‘Who are you, and so who are we? Here we are, and so what are we to become?’ Events were everything in this ecology of play, in which the movements of all the actors involved the material field in its entirety. We were brought into dances of approach and withdrawal, dances emerging directly, to paraphrase Brian Massumi, from the dynamic relation between a myriad of charged particles.""
New Directions in Contemporary Australian Poetry, 2021
In this essay Stuart Cooke argues against poetics of place. He begins by outlining three ways in ... more In this essay Stuart Cooke argues against poetics of place. He begins by outlining three ways in which place-based thinking perpetuates elements of imperialist practice. Chiefly, thinking about place negates the diverse lives and forces upon which a habitat depends. Drawing on the work of Heriberto Yépez, Cooke concludes that place is an “absolutist fiction.” Instead, he turns to the lyrebird (Menura alberti and novaehollandiae) as a conceptual totem for an ethical, Australian poetics. Examining the presence (or absence) of the lyrebird in a selection of late twentieth-century and contemporary Australian poems, Cooke outlines how non-Indigenous Australian poets might learn from the lyrebird an alternative, ecological poetics that is not predicated on the eradication of multispecies complexity. The essay concludes with a brief account of a superb lyrebird’s poetics.
Transcultural Ecocriticism: Global, Romantic and Decolonial Perspectives, 2021
This article introduces a wetland in southern Chile, the Humedal Antiñir, as a site of environmen... more This article introduces a wetland in southern Chile, the Humedal Antiñir, as a site of environmental resistance and transcultural encounter. In Section 1, I outline the ecological and cultural significance of the Humedal, before turning to address the poetics of one if its principal champions, Juan Paulo Huirimilla. For Huirimilla, the Humedal is an island: a site of significance in itself, it is also connected to many other, similar sites. To develop some of these connections, I contextualise Huirimilla’s thought with relation to other theory from the southern hemisphere and beyond. In Section 2, I describe how Huirimilla and I are documenting the importance of the Humedal in a project that involves collaborative, poetic composition, where poetry serves as a cohering mechanism for multiple disciplinary and cultural perspectives. Our research is motivated by the following questions: a) how can we understand the Humedal in local and global contexts? b) how, through poetry, is important knowledge about the Humedal protected and shared? c) how might such knowledge ‘move’ transculturally, or be translated for non-Huilliche and/or international readers? I Section 3 I provide some examples of poems that we have written as part of this project.
In the following tribute, the author offers a reading of Pitol’s masterwork, El arte de la fuga. ... more In the following tribute, the author offers a reading of Pitol’s masterwork, El arte de la fuga. “Escape—flight—fugue,” he writes; “the polyphony of the book is as much about freedom and imagination as it is about baroque, symphonic music, or about building, over the course of ten, fifty, or two hundred pages, multiple resonances and whorls of affect.”
A rhizomic sketch of Australian-Chilean relation, which draws on natural and colonial histories, ... more A rhizomic sketch of Australian-Chilean relation, which draws on natural and colonial histories, botany and autobiography.
‘We were driving through Death Valley, an American-Australian and two Aussies, taking the scenic... more ‘We were driving through Death Valley, an American-Australian and two Aussies, taking the scenic route from Las Vegas to Santa Cruz.’ This multi-voiced account of multispecies encounters along a highway takes up the challenge of playful and humorous writing that is as well deeply serious and theoretically provocative. Our travels brought us into what Donna Haraway calls the contact zone: a region of recognition and response. The contact zone is a place of significant questions: ‘Who are you, and so who are we? Here we are, and so what are we to become?’ Events were everything in this ecology of play, in which the movements of all the actors involved the material field in its entirety. We were brought into dances of approach and withdrawal, dances emerging directly, to paraphrase Brian Massumi, from the dynamic relation between a myriad of charged particles.
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A pioneering experiment in contemporary Australian literature, George Dyuŋgayan’s Bulu Line is the translation of a richly textured oral poetry into printed form. Rather than reduce the songpoetry to short, static lines of verse, Stuart Cooke has assembled a series of startling multi-vocal texts that invite a plethora of never-ending readings. Just like Cooke, you can also become a translator, and contribute to the performance of the poetry. In this way, writes Cooke in the introduction, we “let the force of the Bulu keep rolling.”
This book showcases the complexity and power of one of the world’s oldest and greatest literary traditions, and provides testament to its remarkable capacity for ongoing evolution.
The book begins by critiquing canonical examples of non-indigenous postcolonial poetics. Incisive re-readings of two icons of Australian and Chilean poetry, Judith Wright (1915–2000) and Pablo Neruda (1904–1973), provide rich insights into non-indigenous responses to colonization in the wake of modernity. The second half of the book establishes compositional links between Aboriginal and Mapuche poetics, and between such oral and written poetics more generally.
The book’s final part develops an ‘emerging synthesis’ of contemporary Aboriginal and Mapuche poetics, with reference to the work of two of the most important avant-garde Aboriginal and Mapuche poets of recent times, Lionel Fogarty (1958–) and Paulo Huirimilla (1973–).
Speaking the Earth’s Languages uses these fascinating links between Aboriginal and Mapuche poetics as the basis of a deliberately nomadic, open-ended theory for an Australian–Chilean postcolonial poetics. “The central argument of this book,” the author writes, “is that a nomadic poetics is essential for a genuinely postcolonial form of habitation, or a habitation of colonized landscapes that doesn’t continue to replicate colonialist ideologies involving indigenous dispossession and environmental exploitation.
“Far-ranging, he can return his poems to the immediate context of Australian voice and manner... a strong new poetic presence, a presence already very assured and one that is already offering a true moment of enrichment to Australian poetry.” – Martin Harrison
A pioneering experiment in contemporary Australian literature, George Dyuŋgayan’s Bulu Line is the translation of a richly textured oral poetry into printed form. Rather than reduce the songpoetry to short, static lines of verse, Stuart Cooke has assembled a series of startling multi-vocal texts that invite a plethora of never-ending readings. Just like Cooke, you can also become a translator, and contribute to the performance of the poetry. In this way, writes Cooke in the introduction, we “let the force of the Bulu keep rolling.”
This book showcases the complexity and power of one of the world’s oldest and greatest literary traditions, and provides testament to its remarkable capacity for ongoing evolution.
The book begins by critiquing canonical examples of non-indigenous postcolonial poetics. Incisive re-readings of two icons of Australian and Chilean poetry, Judith Wright (1915–2000) and Pablo Neruda (1904–1973), provide rich insights into non-indigenous responses to colonization in the wake of modernity. The second half of the book establishes compositional links between Aboriginal and Mapuche poetics, and between such oral and written poetics more generally.
The book’s final part develops an ‘emerging synthesis’ of contemporary Aboriginal and Mapuche poetics, with reference to the work of two of the most important avant-garde Aboriginal and Mapuche poets of recent times, Lionel Fogarty (1958–) and Paulo Huirimilla (1973–).
Speaking the Earth’s Languages uses these fascinating links between Aboriginal and Mapuche poetics as the basis of a deliberately nomadic, open-ended theory for an Australian–Chilean postcolonial poetics. “The central argument of this book,” the author writes, “is that a nomadic poetics is essential for a genuinely postcolonial form of habitation, or a habitation of colonized landscapes that doesn’t continue to replicate colonialist ideologies involving indigenous dispossession and environmental exploitation.
“Far-ranging, he can return his poems to the immediate context of Australian voice and manner... a strong new poetic presence, a presence already very assured and one that is already offering a true moment of enrichment to Australian poetry.” – Martin Harrison
This multi-voiced account of multispecies encounters along a highway takes up the challenge of playful and humorous writing that is as well deeply serious and theoretically provocative. Our travels brought us into what Donna Haraway calls the contact zone: a region of recognition and response. The contact zone is a place of significant questions: ‘Who are you, and so who are we? Here we are, and so what are we to become?’ Events were everything in this ecology of play, in which the movements of all the actors involved the material field in its entirety. We were brought into dances of approach and withdrawal, dances emerging directly, to paraphrase Brian Massumi, from the dynamic relation between a myriad of charged particles.""