Thinking in time: the poetry of Laurie Duggan, Pam Brown and Ken Bolton & Suns and other poems

Abstract

This thesis comprises two parts: a work of criticism, and a collection of poems. The critical work focuses on three contemporary Australian poets — Ken Bolton, Laurie Duggan, and Pam Brown. It argues that the work of each demonstrates a modernist preoccupation with time, interrelated with the use of discursive-critical modes of expression. Analysis is brought to bear on the various ways that time is exercised as a conscious constraint on key poems, and the differing ways in which this allows for a poetry of temporalised ‘thinking’. Examples of the serial poem or the sequence, the process poem, the notebook poem, the lyric and the elegy are closely-read in illustration of this argument. Favoured styles and techniques such as collage, citation of popular culture, and a continuing engagement of the present tense of inscription, are analysed with respect to the differing ‘time senses’ the poems inhabit and express. Contemporary with and often considered members of the Generation of ’68, the poets have been friends and correspondents since the 1970s, when each began publishing, and this social connection is overt in a number of the poems. A distinct aesthetic begins to appear in the late 1970s, and this is developed in the later poetry of the 1990s and 2000s. Notable aspects of the work of the three poets include: an ironic and deflationary tone; the use of satirical and parodic modes; a continuing interest in the complexities of the everyday; and the eschewing of metaphor and favouring of critical and discursive modes. The poems that make up the second part of the thesis were composed in parallel with the research, and the models and approaches explored in this research find their way into the writing. Several poems extend from forms and styles evident in poems by Duggan, Brown and Bolton (as well as poems by those who have influenced them). A wish to experiment with forms that render time an overt element of the poem (and of poetic thinking more broadly) motivates a number of poems included in the collection. These connections are explored in a brief exegesis which is positioned at the end of the collection.