Michael Farrell
Note: The following is a talk – in the form of a verse essay – that I gave at the University of Washington in Seattle on 19 April 2016 at the invitation of Professor Brian Reed. It outlines my PhD project, as well as the postdoctoral work I’ve been doing. I brought the two together through the theme of sharing: in a literary sense, sharing a place in criticism, sharing the page. As such it is not a direct response to the theme of the issue, yet it does deal with the questions raised in relation to the colonial. I have thought of the colonial as being about ownership, particularly with regard to land. The decolonial would then mean turning back the property paradigm. The definition of “colonialism” given by my copy of the Concise Oxford Dictionary is itself so colonial it made me laugh: “… alleged policy of exploitation of weak or backward peoples”. More usefully, it gives the origin of the word “colony”: Middle English, from the Latin “colonia,” derived from “colonus” (farmer) and “colere” cultivate. Two historical meanings given for the word are 1. Greek: “independent city founded by emigrants” and 2. Roman: “garrison settlement (usu. of veteran soldiers) in conquered territory”. These etymological fragments remind us that the word was itself a colonised term, a product of the Roman occupation of Britain; that the city of Sydney was a colony, but that ‘somehow’ the idea spread out to the whole continent; that the continuing colonising of Australia is the work of metaphorical veterans with a garrison mentality (centurion Abbott … ). From the point of view of my own history, and my own research, however, what seems most pertinent is the role of farming. That colonialism in Australia meant enforced farming, and the enforced culture of farming. It is farming ideology that drove British colonialism, taking on a whole new fervour in Australia: both de- and recultured; retheologised even. It is not possible, I think, to separate what aspects of the Australian contemporary are farming by other means (whether mining, sport, art, education or bureaucracy) from other histories, but my idea of the decolonial would start by questioning how and where (the thinking formed by) enforced farming takes place, and thinking of other possibilities at these sites. Perhaps sharing might be one of these possibilities.
Rodney Harrison talks of a shared history, meaning
the history of Indigenous people and settlers – invaders
if you prefer – since settlement, and this is an idea that
has stuck with me. It doesn’t mean that the same traumas
or exploits are shared by everyone, but the history of
their effects and implications is shared by everyone
So it became one of the ideas behind what I’m calling
project 1: my PhD, which later became a book called
Writing Australian Unsettlement. If settlement belongs
to everyone, though again, I’m not suggesting that it
brings everyone benefits, or the same kinds of deficits
then so does unsettlement, the movement back upriver
or perhaps, even, the beginning of new streams. Poetics
though, who cares about that? Well, we all make the
nation, and we all affect the land that we walk on and
draw from for survival. So that’s a version of poetics
yet there is an emphasis in the term on making which
suggests it’s about human making, rather than humans
being made along with everything else. Francisco Gon-
zalez translates a quote from Jean Derrida that “the
soul of a human is not solely or simply human”, and
he continues, “the human is an act or project before
it is a genus or species, and as rational life it is perhaps
condemned to remain a problem, a paradox and even
an oxymoron. It is not given to us as something accom-
plished and it is not as such that we should seek it.“ A
human makes a poem in parallel with themselves, the
poem makes them, and the forces of the land, air and
other beings make the poem, too. If we are to retain the
term, then poetics is a parallel, or accompanying, act
or project of the human. This relates to conclusions I
had and had not reached by the end of project 1, so I
had better go back upriver or start a new stream of
thought here. I want to tell you about the writers in
the book without précis-ing the chapters, though that
would be to think as much as generalising is. I’m
changing the ‘z’s to ‘s’s as I go (i.e. not “generalizing”)
I think it’s something to do with control. If you inherit
a form, then it is to some extent tamed: a body of forms
like British poetry circa 1788, might seem like a farm
yes, with rabbits to shoot, and poachers, and bad weather
and fences, and cows and sheep that act like cows and
sheep. It seems like wholeness but in a horse it means
brokenness. Never mind that in retrospect we see that
William Wordsworth had some funny ideas about or-
ganic farming methods and that Samuel Coleridge was
an early adaptor of German hydroponics. Writing a PhD
for me at least meant trying to make a floor, walls and
roof simultaneously while trying to pretend it’s in a
contemporary style. It’s only later you realise that the
beams spell out your mother’s name or your first pet’s
Or you dream that it does, or you dream you tell a room
full of people that it does. Everyone, no matter how sel-
fish they are, shares. Terms like focus, definition, and
even theorisation, can encourage us in a non-sharing di-
rection. The point of a shared poetics in project 1, was
not just to bring European settler and Indigenous Anglo-
phone poetics into the same study (I was lucky enough
to find a self-termed Chinese “nugget” also): but to o-
pen up Australian poetics beyond that of a British import
or inheritance, increasingly influenced by North American
modernism, with additional Chinese, Japanese and other
effects. The spray from across different oceans of formal
hegemonies and their clashes with a series of increasingly
radical modes (eg New York School, langpo, conceptual
poetry), the drops of which fall on our pages and make
critics think they’re emotional or that letters are becoming
grotesque. This was the disagreement that was meant to
constitute poetry. Was Australian poetry meant to just
try and catch up with what others were doing, using
kangaroos and boomerangs to attract attention? I wish
but mainly such Indigenous elements are thought of
by settler poets as kitsch. So, and I’m speculating a bit
here, the more that the poetries challenging poetries be-
gin to accumulate, and get taught in MFA programs, the
more pressure to justify the things that teachers want to
teach, as well as the need to clarify what’s going on that’s
not as simple as new readings of poems, or large historical
movements, and, perhaps the desire to preserve things as
well. I mean not throw out William Carlos Williams, or
the favourite of whoever you are reading or teaching or
is teaching you. I’m compacting histories both Australian
and North American, and indirectly leading to how I started
reading Marjorie Perloff and Charles Bernstein and how
their approaches became part of my critical vocabulary. Spe-
cifically, Perloff showed how, following Williams, the
page became a unit of reading; her notion of visual prosody
was also important. Perloff showed me how I could approach
anything, no matter how seemingly unliterary, and, in a
relatively conventional scholarly manner, conduct a close
reading of its poetics, and, not, or not just, what Veronica
Forrest-Thomson would refer to as its semantic levels)
Bernstein, more than anyone, showed me that not just
what was deemed poetry was up for grabs, but the way
poetics was practiced, as poetics, not just as a version of
literary criticism, was too. This probably waylaid me a bit
and I would have to say that ultimately my poetics research
and criticism – that is, reviewing – has veered to the fairly
straight in manner. But Bernstein’s proclamation of poetry’s
“aversion to conformity” and his notion of an“anti-absorp-
tive” poetics, following Bertolt Brecht whose aversion to
suspense had already influenced my poetry, were part
of the assemblage I needed to take on the rough, otherly
literate, homeless, exophonic (another useful term from
Perloff) poetics of the colonial archive. I wouldn’t have
written and be giving this talk in lines either if it weren’t
for Bernstein’s verse essays, though his are wilder on the
page, more flood-like than mine. Following the efforts of
the langpo poets there was, then, what seems to me to be
a poetics explosion in the U.S. Suddenly there were heaps
of books about contemporary poetry and its antics to read
What did they have to do with Australia, however? This is
a question. Poetics reading is something that poets share
with each other, and perhaps Australians as much with
British poets as much as North American poets. We use
our greater knowledges of North American poetry to com-
municate, knowing relatively little of each other’s. Some
of it, inevitably, gets into our own poetry and poetics. We
could resist it, it’s more resistable than the movies, TV
and pop music which we are probably legally bound to
consume due to some trade deal. But capitalism doesn’t
determine everything. Giving is important. What I read
is a gift to me, what I write is a gift to the dead. As if they
cared! Rather than fill your heads with names, I will fill
them instead with descriptions. My book begins with an
Irish convict’s son turned bushranger (or outlaw) wanted
for shooting four police and the letter he that he writes in
defence; there’s also a letter by the first (one of two) Abo-
riginals to go to England, enquiring after his former hosts
written in 1796, it’s the earliest text I discuss; then there’s
a diary written in English words and Cantonese syntax by
a Chinese goldminer seeking to be released from an insane
asylum; a coded diary by a wealthy young settler poet
who is having an affair with a married man; a letter replete
with questions regarding the treatment of Aboriginal people
in the 1920s; a prose poem by the son of convicts which
mimics being drunk, from 1850; a quoting game drawn
from memory; an 1897, handwritten, Mallarmé pastiche
with attendant collage of press notices; translations of Ab-
original stockman songs; a compositional exercise by a young
Aboriginal woman in a “Native Settlement” that describes
said settlement from 1930; two unpunctuated diaries by
settler women on the road looking for pasture and accom-
modation; the message texts by droving stockmen, carved
into trees and painted onto water tanks; the clubs of Wirad-
juri people, carved with serifed letters; and finally, the
drawings, incorporating words and letters, of an Aboriginal
stockman awaiting trial for murder of his overseer. These
texts range around the country, but are not from every
state. You could say they were un- or under-networked
texts, in terms of poetics. Some were – and generally this
too is a recent development – networked as historical texts
but I wanted to bring them into the poetics arena. To share
space with the bush ballads and the modernist hoaxes and
the Jindyworobaks (you can ask about any of this in question
time): when summed up in three phrases the known poetics
sound more interesting! I wanted to shift the paradigmatic
division of that between the conservation of English liter-
ature versus adaptation of northern hemisphere inno-
vation in or as poetry qua poetry. Because poetics was
no longer about verse, as, to give another example, some
of Susan Howe’s work demonstrates. It felt like a meta-
conceptual exercise. My mentor as a poet was another
Harrison, first name Martin, and his critical work stresses
the need for new terms for Australian poetics: of not simp-
ly borrowing from the U.S. or Europe. The term sharing
is of course not one, but unsettlement might be, negative
as it is. New terms can best be introduced subtly, over time
as I think no manifesto (that hoary European genre) or other
bout of rhetoric (ditto) will stick. The lack of other relevant
sources in Australian poetics – as they relate to poetry di-
rectly – means that I, and my peers, not only look internation-
ally, but perhaps more readily than we would otherwise
adapt ideas from other Australian sources, such as, for
example, the history of Paul Carter, the environmental
philosophy of Val Plumwood and Deborah Bird Rose
the ethnography of Stephen Muecke. Muecke was involved
in producing a model of shared poetics in the co-authored
book Reading the Country. The book features paintings by
Krim Benterrak, the transcribed talk of Gularabulu elder
Paddy Roe and the written commentary and photographs
of Muecke. The book is devoted to Roe’s country: around
Roebuck Plains, near Broome in Western Australia (or
W.A.). All contributors are credited equally as authors
The project enacts poetics comparativism, across mode
and culture. It is a modest and unique book; a symposium
which I attended celebrated its thirty-year anniversary in
2014. So, I have started giving you lists of names after all
Another one: the idea of my book, of unsettlement, comes
from a local poet and poetry critic, Philip Mead. In his
book Networked Language, which wrenches the canon in
a counter-direction, towards Indigenous poet Lionel Fog-
arty and Greek poet TTO, Mead writes of the breaking
up of settlement. Settlement is not just a euphemism for
the coming of the Europeans to Aboriginal country, eli-
ding the massacres and other destructions, but refers to
a set of policies established at Federation, that is, when
Australia was formed as a nation of states. These policies
included tariff protection and the White Australia policy
which discriminated against non-European migrants. Mead
notes that poetry was not innocent in its cheering the mod-
el that the new rulers had determined on. Poets also pro-
tested in different ways, but such protests and their shades
of radicalism, contradiction – or possibly hypocrisy, were
not what interested me. Rather, I was looking for writing
that, despite being in English, was not itself interested
in, was not participating in the glory of, English literature
(I like the word “glory”, which is associated with heaven-
ly light; according to its wiki, its use has steadily declined
since 1800, but, since around 2000, it is on the rise. Scary!)
But to go back to the Australian, human, inglorious: this
poetics is what I call unsettlement poetics. I’ve tried to
write a fresh version of this, without looking at my book
If you want a less general, more critical introduction, you
can read it for free on my book page on the Palgrave Mac-
millan website. Poetics starts today, but history also starts
today, and I, maybe we, need both. If you’re not satisfied
with what you have, then be ingenious or outrageous in
order to create it. I started a PhD at the age of forty-two
Christ couldn’t have done that. But now I’m trying for a
second miracle, a postdoctoral fellowship to write project
2. Perhaps I can’t be satisfied or perhaps I’m now addict-
ed to research. This project, which has begun in the form
of various papers, is also a shared one. But the emphasis
is not on the space of poetics in terms of the page, nor the
writer, but on species. In particular, Australian native an-
imal species, many of which are more famous than the Aus-
tralian writers I’ve mentioned. The kangaroo, for example
often stands in for Australia. What interests me most is
not the beauty of the kangaroo, suggested by the curve
of its back, nor the movement of the kangaroo, nor the
rhythm or sound of its name as such, as new to English
as it is, but rather the way that kangaroos and other spe-
cies share space in poems. That means something about
their names of course and how they move. Do they interact?
How? What does this interaction consist of? How does
the human poet share this imaginary space of the poem?
This project is about structure, and address, and agency
It does not assume that the characteristics which animals
(in a poem) possess – that resemble human characteris-
tics – even that of speaking English! – means that the an-
imals are really representing humans or that the poems
are anthropomorphic. All poems, like everything humans
make, will tend to resemble the human. But as Jean Der-
rida states: “the human is an act or project before it is a
genus or species … it is perhaps condemned to remain
a problem … It is not given to us as something accomp-
lished”. If the human is not yet finished then neither is
the poem, and if the human began by imitating the non-
human animal, then the poem is not then “purely human”
(cf the soul, Derrida again). Birds invented song (and dance)
for example, so if you think poetry begins in song, birds
in poems have a particular relation to the poems they ap-
pear in. Of course mentioning a bird in a poem is not the
same as putting a bird in a cage or setting one free. The
word “bird” is not a bird: not even the word flamingo is
but then neither are the words “Helen” or “Dr Zhivago”
humans. (A.H. Chisholm, the author of a book of amateur
ornithology, Mateship With Birds, writes that the robin’s
call is a “word”.) Regarding fantastic animals, or mons-
ters, Galvano Della Volpe says that “the ‘unreality’ or
‘ideality’ of … [creatures like] Ariosto’s hippogryph is
not ‘unreality’ or ‘ideality’ in absolute terms. [It] is con-
stituted by a rationale in the same way as any being in
the real world.” What I’m saying is if an animal seems
human, how do we know humans didn’t copy this ani-
mal and trademark its traits? Are we merely seeing the
human because we’re seeking human structures in every-
thing, perhaps it’s all we can recognise? (see Midgley)
If you think poetry comes from making marks that become
writing, you know animals do this too. That the marks
that became the alphabet often represented animals –
and in the case of Chinese characters (Hegel), tortoise shell
and animal bones were used in their development. And
if an animal’s speaking English or other human language
mightn’t this be more interestingly thought of as relating
perhaps to translation, or parody, rather than a poem’s
representation of humans camouflaged by word/name
substitution? Again, this is poetics, and so is the sentiment-
alisation of animals in poems or other literature. This is
some of the assumed background, not my argument. It’s
too early for an argument, and I think that 24/7, so don’t
wait for it to be later. I mentioned interaction: I am not
interested in animal portraiture as such, or the human
encounter with the animal other, but in poems which in-
clude at least two nonhuman species. Because then you
have more than one relation, and there are more interest-
ing decisions about how these relations are structured
both in writing and reading terms. Sharing too, becomes
an explicit issue. One of the obvious points of entry, then
into what is basically a comparativist project across Aus-
tralian poetry, is the ecological. What is the ecological
trajectory of Australian poetry? Is an ecological poem just
another version of pastoral with new animal names? What
is the human’s role in the poem? Do they have a footprint?
One of the modes of representing species, which recurs
throughout the history of Australian poetry (and the sub-
ject of the paper I gave at Berkeley a few days ago) is what
I refer to as the species catalogue poem, in which species
are listed. A list might seem like a simple structure, and
therefore a good one to start with. But the five I focused
on, from the early nineteenth to the early twenty-first cen-
turies, were all very different in terms of how they the
poem is shared. The first two were about kangaroos: that
is, the species listed, that constituted a catalogue, were
named in order to explain or indicate something about
the kangaroo – and Australia. This is the animal as idea
the kangaroo, not a kangaroo. Both poems (and you can
find them online), “The Kangaroo” by Barron Field and
“Kangaroo” by DH Lawrence, are concerned with the
kangaroo in its signification (and non-signification) of
Australia. Both poems try to explain the kangaroo, using
other animals to do so. In his book on Kafka’s “Zurau
aphorisms,” Paul North writes on what he calls “snake-
work”. North opposes Nietzsche’s ideas of the snake with
Kafka’s. In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche proffers two
snake scenarios: one in which the snake is in a visionary
figure’s throat, and Zarathustra cries out for them to bite
the snake’s head off. In a later scene, the snake circles end-
lessly, biting itself. Relating “snake-work” to North’s o-
verall thesis of “yielding”, he suggests that Kafka’s snake
“seduce[s] us away from seduction”, and that Kafka “hopes
to render the snake’s bite harmless, pleasant even”. North’s
remarkable reading is useful, I think, in getting away from
the relations of the animal-as-human idea, and that of the
poem attempting animal mimesis. His reading, rather
presents, the snake with so much agency that it appears
as a twofold animal and idea [Blanchot] and, further, a
snake in conspiracy with the human and the human idea
a fourfold relation at least. It interests me, then, in attempt-
ing to theorise further animal work. What is kangaroo
work? What is lyrebird work? What critical work is required
to make such work look like work? (Using the snake, per-
haps the most overworked species in the business, as a
yardstick.) What of species catalogues? Can animal spe-
cies do group work? Menagerie work? Social work? I have-
n’t written or read about this before. A shared poetics does-
n’t mean that I give you a rehash of the same readings
and ideas I talked about in Berkeley: so what follows is
also new. In Astrid Lorange’s poem “Wolves are Swarms”
a kind of swarm work is being done; or perhaps, rather
catalogue work is presented as swarm work. Lorange takes
Stein’s mode in “Tender Buttons” and adds aliveness –
or hyperaliveness. Jean-Luc Nancy writes about the art
catalogue, and how it is an appendix to the actual list of
an artist’s works in existence. But an artwork’s plaque in
a museum has its own little catalogue of media; so, cata-
logues on catalogues. (Think of the dictionary as catalogue …)
Lorange writes: “The lion’s mane swarms with fleas, a
wolf a symbol./Cosmic egg. GIANT MOLECULE. teeth
fingernail. a rope./sperm, a few sunbeams. catapults. teeth
making a full body./the way we can stimulate a crowd
to riot. ants. ants up skirts.” This stanza is a kind of mixed
description, resembling ingredients for a recipe. It could
be ekphrastic but in the materialist sense of listing elements
of an installation. Verbs support the key term of swarm
while humour derails it. How many species or things are
swarming here? What species does the egg, the GIANT
MOLECULE, the sperm and teeth belong to? Swarm work
is perhaps just that: swarming, keeping possibility alive
A bit later comes this:
- the parasite [wolf] doesn’t stop yelling or burping
- the parasite [wolf, lion, fingernail] laps swelling waters
- the parasite [sheepdog, bee] is a bit free
- the parasite [wolf, actor, orbit] is a swarm around a synthesiser
- the parasite [a king, knee-deep in silt] is a chain of living beings
- the parasite [grub] wastes time talking about tablecloths
The wolf, as parasite, appears three times. Parasite work
(Serres) is non-work, is appropriation of another’s work
It is non-making, non-poetics. It derails aesthetics also
Here parasitism is a form, an excuse, a description, a para-
phrase. The wolf acts but doesn’t insist on itself. Lorange
is not merely making language seem active, but rather
networking writing, or kinds of writing. She is not deny-
ing the humdrum, nor falling into the trap of a hyper-en-
ergised style that would quickly become exhausting. This
is an ecology of writing that both continually reminds it-
self of nonhuman species and things, and that it is a pract-
ice of writing, not of representation. It is a citation of sen-
sation that knows aliveness is qualified. Repetition can
imply sharing: a parasite for every species in the room or
hole. “And the wombat comes out of its hole with its hands
up.” This line, from Corey Wakeling’s poem, “Success”
inaugurates a catalogue of species surrender. Following
the wombat, and repeating the same syntactic formula
are: a fox, a rabbit, a bilby, a brown snake, a platypus, a
wolf, spider, an opossum, a fruit bat and a Bombala. “The
bloodhounds responsible are the poem.” The work of blood-
hounds in the poem is not unambiguously of looking for
criminals; nor are those animals who come out of their
holes unambiguously afraid. Each is given hands in order
to gesture, don’t shoot. Lacan writes that gesture “is cer-
tainly something that is done in order to be arrested and
suspended. It is this very special temporality, which I have
defined by the term arrest and which creates its signification
behind it, that makes the distinction between the gesture
and the act.” This quote, which conveniently puns on the
notion of arrest, makes the gestural pun more apparent
between seizing and stopping. Stop being a bloodhound
(stop being parasited upon by the human) stop being a
success … perhaps, but it seems that those unafraid (in
Wakeling’s poem) are rewarded, and the catalogue returns
in a new, cinematic, form, as the species form pageants
on Brunswick Road. Wakeling’s cinematic gesture allows
a new sharing out of the inner north of Melbourne. Wake-
ling’s non-bloodhound species perform poetics as dance
as gesture. He and Lorange propose new ideas of what
nonhuman animals are and can do (in poems). They are
not excuses for mirrors with their hands up saying we sur-
render to the greatness of humanity, who need bloodhound
technology in order to be a parasite. If anything they are
too busy swarming and interacting with each other to no-
tice humanity. In and out of poems, animals make, share
and transform space: and perhaps model a shared poetics
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Michael Farrell edited an Australian feature for ecopoetics journal in 2009. More recently he has published an article on poetic craft in an Australian context (in Wasafiri), and is also working on an animal species project. Books include Cocky’s Joy (Giramondo) and Writing Australian Unsettlement (Palgrave Macmillan).