Poets on the air: authorial presence and national identity in ABC Radio National's Poetica

Abstract

This thesis examines the adaptation of contemporary Australian lyric poetry by ABC Radio National’s Poetica, with a focus on the extent to which institutional models of national identity inflected the program’s aesthetic choices. Poetica was a pre-recorded program broadcast weekly on ABC RN from 1997 to 2014. It featured readings of poetry—in the voice of the poet or an actor—embedded in rich soundscapes and framing interviews. The program worked to a quota of 60% contemporary Australian poetry and 40% drawn from other sources from around the world. One of its aims was to make Australian poetry accessible to a broad national audience, and it operated under the ABC Charter of 1983, which stipulates that the ABC’s programs should “contribute to a sense of national identity.” National identity representation has long been a focus in scholarship on Australian arts such as poetry, novels, film and TV—including adaptations across media. This thesis undertakes such research on radio poetry, which is an aesthetically complex form of adaptation that has been comparatively less studied. Lyric poetry—the form of poetry most often featured on Poetica—is known for its intimate evocations of the author’s presence, as embodied in the voice of the poem. Due to this aesthetic of the lyric, the author is at the core of radio adaptations of lyric poetry, more so than in adaptations of novels into film, or of plays into radio drama. As I show, Poetica adapted the authorial presences of Australian lyric poetry into radio sound, and also into the national identity ethos of the ABC. I demonstrate this through a theoretically-informed close reading of four Poetica episodes on Australian poets (this theoretical framework is interdisciplinary, and allows sensitivity to each of the different layers—poetics, radio aesthetics, and institutional ethos—operating within Poetica). The case study episodes are “Ouyang Yu” (1997) on the Chinese-Australian poet Ouyang Yu, “John Forbes: A Layered Event” (1999) on the Australian poet John Forbes, “Vicki’s Voice – Remembering Vicki Viidikas” (2005) on the Australian poet Vicki Viidikas, and “Little Bit Long Time” (2010) on the Indigenous Australian poet Ali Cobby Eckermann. Through close readings of these episodes, I show that Poetica’s manner of adaptation differed, depending not just on the themes of the source poetry, but also on the poet’s social politics, their belonging or not belonging to accepted notions of Australianness, and narratives of national identity circulating in the lead up to each broadcast. The thesis seeks to deepen our understanding of the aesthetic complexity of radio poetry programs. The framework I develop in the thesis can also be applied to the many poetry podcasts that have sprung up in Australia in recent years, at a time when public service broadcasting models are in flux, and as radio listening moves more and more online. The thesis sheds light on the complex nature of aesthetic adaptation in institutionally-situated radio poetry programs. It shows how institutional policy may shape artistic representations given to the public, even when a program existing within such a structure is not overtly political nor invested, on a day-to-day basis, in narratives of national identity.