Tag: Geoff Page

Geoff Page: Letter to David Brooks

Southerly78.2

Dear David As someone who grew up on a cattle station and still (very occasionally) eats red meat, I’ve been reading your article, ‘The Fallacies”, in the latest Southerly with considerable interest. I agree that the“fallacies” you identify there can actually be quite useful, both as cautions and enablers. I’ve also had similar reservations to yours about the reception of, and enthusiasm for, many postmodern ideas. In numerous ways these ideas have been liberating (in dissuading us, for instance, from pointlessly pursuing Absolute Truth and other chimeras) but they can also be disabling when taken too seriously and institutionalised. Certainly…

… read more

Four Things About ‘Teaching’ Poetry

SoutherlyBlog1 Comment on Four Things About ‘Teaching’ Poetry

by Geoff Page Recent events have suggested there may soon be a renewed emphasis on teaching poetry in Australian schools. To Australian poets, and lovers of poetry, these rumours should be welcome. For course designers and English teachers there may now seem to be an attractive vacuum – which needs to be filled intelligently. Extremes, such as the rote learning of a few nineteenth century poems ‘set’ by the teacher (or some distant committee) or the imposition of a swag of pseudo-postmodern ‘critical theory’, need equally to be avoided. As a poet and a former teacher of poetry at secondary…

… read more

A Blog on Clive

SoutherlyBlog1 Comment on A Blog on Clive

by Geoff Page I have always been slow to take up the latest communication device and have usually deferred doing so till it becomes inexcusable not to. Hence my advance from the typewriter to word processor somewhere in the late eighties and my acquisition of an old Nokia about ten years ago. I plan to hold off on Facebook and Twitter for a while yet, even though I know it may lose me “Friends” in the interim. Now, confronted with the demand for a “blog”, I am told it should be a short, chatty, reasonably intimate piece of writing with…

… read more

Why Don’t People Read Faulkner Anymore?

SoutherlyBlog1 Comment on Why Don’t People Read Faulkner Anymore?

by Geoff Page It was one of those poet/teacher dreams. About a week ago. I was in a rambling school I’d never seen before and had been suddenly prevailed upon to give a talk on the great American novelist, William Faulkner. The audience was scattered over one of those large open-plan areas and aged roughly sixteen — not the best age for Faulkner, I would have thought. I’m not sure if I’d been introduced or not but suddenly I was telling them everything I remembered about Faulkner from when I was devoted to his work in my early twenties. I…

… read more

Obscurity in Poetry — A Spectrum

SoutherlyBlog57 Comments on Obscurity in Poetry — A Spectrum

by Geoff Page (Developed from a short talk given in Bondi on November 7, 2014 at the salon of Luke Fischer and Dalia Nassar) Firstly, we need to remember a successful poem is both an act of communication and a work of art. There is a tension between the point I first heard from John Tranter (“If I wanted to tell you something I’d have sent you a telegram”) and the fact that almost all poems (even the most obscure) are an attempt, in one way or another, to address a putative reader or listener. There exists in current Australian…

… read more

November monthly blogger – Geoff Page!

SoutherlyBlog2 Comments on November monthly blogger – Geoff Page!

A huge thanks to Nicolette Stasko for her excellent posts. This month, our monthly blogger is Geoff Page. His bio is below. Geoff Page is based in Canberra and has published twenty-one collections of poetry as well as two novels and five verse novels. His recent books include 1953 (UQP 2013), Improving the News (Pitt Street Poetry 2013) and New Selected Poems (Puncher & Wattmann 2013). His Aficionado: A Jazz Memoir is forthcoming from Picaro Press. Photo credit: Alison Hastie