Michael Farrell

Michael Farrell is the author of Writing Australian Unsettlement: Modes of Poetic Invention 1796-1945 (Palgrave Macmillan). His latest book of poetry is Cocky’s Joy (Giramondo).
All essays by Michael Farrell
‘If You Don’t Mind My Arsing’
Rather than read representations of land in terms of the politics they support or contest, what happens when we read poems of politics through the entity of the land? I am suggesting that this is (continues to be) the primary way to read Australian poetry as Australian poetry, politically. (Readings of poetry through lenses of class or other struggle are not primary in terms of their national character, only as they, too, relate to land.) My test case is Marty Hiatt’s long poem ‘the manifold’.
A Nose For Furphies: Click Here For What We Do by Pam Brown
Pam Brown’s poems are not inimical to close reading, but they do resist it. What they seem to encourage, however, is a new mode of conceptual criticism: one that thinks about the conceptual on the line – and even the word – level (rather than that of the project, say). The short poetic segments that make up each whole provide (potentially infinite) new takes on the matter at hand: as extensions, corrections, additions, relocations. Brown’s poetry suggests reading as an active process: the poem being made as you read, not the poem waiting for your interpretation.
Laconic Stance Drive: hows its by Nick Whittock
‘There are other Australian poems about cricket, but no one but Nick Whittock has taken it for their major theme. For Whittock, cricket – the matches, the players, the history, and its accompanying discourse: of commentary, commodification (sponsorship), and sensation (cricket on the front pages) – is not only his subject, but his medium.’ Michael Farrell on Nick Whittock and the Australian avant-garde.
All essays featuring Michael Farrell
The Poetry of As If
With each collection of poems, Farrell has absorbed new tones and registers in ways subtle enough that it is easy to miss a decisive shift in the make-up of whimsy and seriousness in his work. And so we may suddenly find, reading Family Trees, that irony, kitsch, and burlesque have started to feel like elegy, philosophy, and flashes of utopian vision.
Who fries a crumpet? Cocky’s Joy by Michael Farrell
Michael Farrell enjoys a reputation as one of the foremost experimental poets in the contemporary Australian scene. In Cocky’s Joy, while experimentalism is strongly evident, he seems to have struck a superb and playful balance, a kind of lyrical abstractionism that generates pleasure and intellectual satisfaction at the same time as it continues to question and resist the urge to meaning. The consequence is a free-wheeling, idea-shifting, constantly suggestive, sometimes touching, politically acerbic and often very funny book of poetry. Farrell shows himself to be a ludic master, and reading Cocky’s Joy is as refreshing as going on a holiday.