Article
Editorial: 1 March 2011
February 23, 2011
In this issue of PIW, we present poetry written in English – Irish English, Australian English and Aboriginal English, poetry which embodies cultural and linguistic traditions of specific communities while at the same time probing the liminal spaces at the intersections of languages, places and cultures, those sites in which individual and collective identity are formed.
The Australia domain presents the unique and memorable writing of two Aboriginal poets. Ali Cobby Eckermann, a Yankunytjatjara / Kokatha woman, was born on Kaurna land and adopted, as a baby, into the Eckermann family. Later in life, she found her birth mother Audrey, and now regularly visits her traditional family in rural South Australia. Cobby Eckermann writes in both Aboriginal English and Australian English, sometimes combining the two and incorporating Yankunytjatjara words to powerful effect; her poetry tackles the violent and harrowing realities of Aboriginal historical and contemporary experience with force, compassion and craft. Her poem, ‘Intervention Payback’, for instance, appropriates the voice of a man living in an Aboriginal community, driven to despair and thoughts of violence by the results of the Australian government’s intervention policies.
Lionel Fogarty, a Yugambeh man born on Wakka Wakka land in South Western Queensland, is one of Australian’s best known Aboriginal writers today. He writes poems of resistance and subversion that represent and lament the violence and suffering inflicted on Aboriginal Australians by White Australia. Combining the focused anger of a political activist with exuberant poetic and linguistic innovation, he creates a dialogue space which challenges perceived distinctions between orality and literacy, and in which Aboriginal English and Australian English collide, destabilise and inform each other. In so doing, he carves a much needed space within the nationally and internationally recognised Australian literary canon for Aboriginal writing and Aboriginal English as literary language. As PIW Australia Michael Brennan writes in his excellent introduction, “Fogarty’s work demands the reader attend both to the culture recuperated and the language in which this recuperation occurs. Having read Fogarty’s work, it is impossible to view Australian poetry in the same way again without thereby being complicit in the alienation and dispossession that the work protests against.”
On the Ireland domain, there is work by Ailbhe Darcy, whose first collection, Imaginary Menagerie, is out later this year, and by poet, academic and translator Bernard O’Donoghue. Both writers live outwith Ireland. Darcy was born in Dublin but lives in South Bend, Indiana. Her strange and lovely ‘Halo’, which begins “It was late last night the dog was speaking of me, / and the gulls speaking of me”, seems to be a poem of exile, articulating, through layering and shifting of forms of the verb ‘to speak of’, the way the narrator copes with distance and separation: “I am speaking of you here, to everyone I meet.”
O’Donoghue moved to England as a teenager and lives in Oxford, where he has been since the age of twenty. PIW Ireland editor Patrick Cotter notes O’Donoghue’s “essential Irishness” in terms of his knowledge of Irish life, as well as his own accent and poetic idiom. Most of his poems published here are written in the third person, such as the superb and subtle ‘Gerund’, a poem which also takes speech as its central trope, considering the way identity is entwined with speech, and which reflects on the effects of education, as determined by the dominant power groups, on that relationship. What kind of empowerment, the poem seems to ask, does education offer when it aims at assimilating individuals into a standardised language, into normative modes of thought and ways of living? And what are the advantages and disadvantages of rejecting this kind of education? There are interesting, and, given the rural Irish setting, perhaps surprising resonances to be found here with the tensions between government policy and cultural authenticity as explored in the work of Ali Cobby Eckermann and Lionel Fogarty.
Verbal communication is what we like
Verbal knowledge is what we like
Reading ability in talking we like
Our components of language is stronger
Than criteria type trends
(from ‘Manipulation Modifies Your Structures’ by Lionel Fogarty)In this issue of PIW, we present poetry written in English – Irish English, Australian English and Aboriginal English, poetry which embodies cultural and linguistic traditions of specific communities while at the same time probing the liminal spaces at the intersections of languages, places and cultures, those sites in which individual and collective identity are formed.
The Australia domain presents the unique and memorable writing of two Aboriginal poets. Ali Cobby Eckermann, a Yankunytjatjara / Kokatha woman, was born on Kaurna land and adopted, as a baby, into the Eckermann family. Later in life, she found her birth mother Audrey, and now regularly visits her traditional family in rural South Australia. Cobby Eckermann writes in both Aboriginal English and Australian English, sometimes combining the two and incorporating Yankunytjatjara words to powerful effect; her poetry tackles the violent and harrowing realities of Aboriginal historical and contemporary experience with force, compassion and craft. Her poem, ‘Intervention Payback’, for instance, appropriates the voice of a man living in an Aboriginal community, driven to despair and thoughts of violence by the results of the Australian government’s intervention policies.
Lionel Fogarty, a Yugambeh man born on Wakka Wakka land in South Western Queensland, is one of Australian’s best known Aboriginal writers today. He writes poems of resistance and subversion that represent and lament the violence and suffering inflicted on Aboriginal Australians by White Australia. Combining the focused anger of a political activist with exuberant poetic and linguistic innovation, he creates a dialogue space which challenges perceived distinctions between orality and literacy, and in which Aboriginal English and Australian English collide, destabilise and inform each other. In so doing, he carves a much needed space within the nationally and internationally recognised Australian literary canon for Aboriginal writing and Aboriginal English as literary language. As PIW Australia Michael Brennan writes in his excellent introduction, “Fogarty’s work demands the reader attend both to the culture recuperated and the language in which this recuperation occurs. Having read Fogarty’s work, it is impossible to view Australian poetry in the same way again without thereby being complicit in the alienation and dispossession that the work protests against.”
On the Ireland domain, there is work by Ailbhe Darcy, whose first collection, Imaginary Menagerie, is out later this year, and by poet, academic and translator Bernard O’Donoghue. Both writers live outwith Ireland. Darcy was born in Dublin but lives in South Bend, Indiana. Her strange and lovely ‘Halo’, which begins “It was late last night the dog was speaking of me, / and the gulls speaking of me”, seems to be a poem of exile, articulating, through layering and shifting of forms of the verb ‘to speak of’, the way the narrator copes with distance and separation: “I am speaking of you here, to everyone I meet.”
O’Donoghue moved to England as a teenager and lives in Oxford, where he has been since the age of twenty. PIW Ireland editor Patrick Cotter notes O’Donoghue’s “essential Irishness” in terms of his knowledge of Irish life, as well as his own accent and poetic idiom. Most of his poems published here are written in the third person, such as the superb and subtle ‘Gerund’, a poem which also takes speech as its central trope, considering the way identity is entwined with speech, and which reflects on the effects of education, as determined by the dominant power groups, on that relationship. What kind of empowerment, the poem seems to ask, does education offer when it aims at assimilating individuals into a standardised language, into normative modes of thought and ways of living? And what are the advantages and disadvantages of rejecting this kind of education? There are interesting, and, given the rural Irish setting, perhaps surprising resonances to be found here with the tensions between government policy and cultural authenticity as explored in the work of Ali Cobby Eckermann and Lionel Fogarty.
© Sarah Ream
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