Dan Disney – författare

Dan Disney''s highly original either, Orpheus remakes the villanelle. The ''sound-swarms'' in this contemporary ''orphic'' work riff laterally on received poetic and philosophical ideas and incorporate fascinating shreds of thinking and saying. Rainer Maria Rilke and Søren Kierkegaard are the presiding spirits in the volume, and Disney is also in discussion about divergent ways of seeing and understanding with writers from all over the globe. This inventive poetry explores culture, authenticity and translation, and quizzes the lyric modes of apostrophe and song.- Paul HetheringtonDan Disney''s either, Orpheus arrives with the force of a tropical weather event to deliver a series of pulsating shocks to the languages of everyday life. Neither strictly poetic nor purely philosophical, these deliriously pedagogical poems summon Rilke, Levertov, Ashbery, Sartre, Kierkegaard, Cage and multitudinous others to reconsider what we thought we knew of authorship, form, religion, phenomenology and love. For Disney, the proper response to Bloom''s anxiety of influence is ''a godless both/and'' in which a series of ''elegiac anthroposcenes'' transforms the labyrinth of solitude into the kinds of worlds that we ''non-residents'' might want to inhabit. Hospitable, demanding, festive and fearless, either, Orpheus passes through ''where previously it was not evident that anyone could find a passage''.- Fiona Hile

Surely we are better than this? The seeking of asylum in Australia has been politicised in recent decades. Our national conversation has vilified people fleeing persecution and desensitised the Australian polity to human suffering. We are further marginalising the most vulnerable groups in the world and at greater expense than accommodating refugees in the community. What impact does this have upon our collective ethics and national identity? And if our public conversation is steering us into murky moral territory, where may a dissenting voice be heard?

This book sets out to navigate questions of the future of Australian poetry. Deliberately designed as a dialogue between poets, each of the four clusters presented here—“Indigeneities”; “Political Landscapes”; “Space, Place, Materiality”; “Revising an Australian Mythos”—models how poetic communities in Australia continue to grow in alliance toward certain constellated ideas. Exploring the ethics of creative production in a place that continues to position capital over culture, property over community, each of the twenty essays in this anthology takes the subject of Australian poetry definitively beyond Eurocentrism and white privilege. By pushing back against nationalizing mythologies that have, over the last 200 years since colonization, not only narrativized the logic of instrumentalization but rendered our lands precarious, this book asserts new possibilities of creative responsiveness within the Australian sensorium.