Rags of snow unmelting on the southern lawn.Those younger ones, whose death turns
on the hair’s-breadth incidence of accident,avoid this perduration of slow misrecognition.
He dreams his cotton blankets are combusting,but won’t press the hospital buzzer because
the nursing staff are occupied extinguishing flames.That vandals have broken into the cupboard
of the genial stroke victim in the ... (read more)
John Hawke
John Hawke is a Senior Lecturer, specialising in poetry, at Monash University. His books include Australian Literature and the Symbolist Movement, Poetry and the Trace (co-edited with Ann Vickery), and the volume of poetry Aurelia, which received the 2015 Anne Elder award.
When Viktor Shklovsky, in his famous 1917 essay 'Art as Technique', asserts that the fundamental task of the poetic function is one of 'making strange' the reader's customary perceptions, he is arguing for more than just the avoidance of linguistic cliché. Through the medium of poetic form, the accepted conventions of our habitualised view of the world can be defamiliarised: the political implica ... (read more)