Placing a poetics of anti-propaganda: Collage as a spatial mode in the poetry of Laurie Duggan

Abstract

This article conducts a spatial reading of Laurie Duggan’s place-based approach to poetic collage in Australia, focusing on poems which span four decades of the poet’s career. The article centres on how Duggan’s use of both a textual and experiential collage practice, and its resultant effects of juxtaposition and recontextualisation, can provide a way of reading the poet’s place-based poetics as ‘anti-propaganda’ (Cran, 2004, p. 151). I argue that Duggan challenges mainstream conceptions of Australia’s colonial narrative and its anthropocentric regime of land mismanagement. This analysis provides a new way of understanding Duggan as not only a poet but also an ‘experimental geographer’ who foments ‘insurgent countertopographic and counterhegemonic alternatives’ for understanding place in the settler state of Australia (Boykoff, 2013, p. 252). The article also considers Duggan’s work through an ecocritical and decolonial lens, concluding by reading his work in light of Anglo-Australian artist, Jonathon Kimberley, and plangermairreenner elder puralia meenamatta’s transcultural ‘painting-writing’ project, meenamatta lena narla puellakanny, which Peter Minter describes as a rejection of ‘settler-colonial landscape representation’ in favour of ‘a more reciprocal and meaningful discussion with Country’ (2021, p. 208).