Part 1: ‘True Receivers': Rilke and the Contemporary Poetics of Listening In this part of this thesis I argue that a contemporary ‘poetics of listening' has emerged in the UK, and explore the writing of three of our most significant poets - John Burnside, Kathleen Jamie and Don Paterson - to find out why they have become interested in the idea of the poet as a ‘listener'. I suggest that the appeal of this listening stance accounts for their engagement with the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, who thought of himself as a listening ‘receiver'; it is proposed that Rilke's notion of ‘receivership' and the way his poems relate to the earthly (or the ‘non-human') also account for the general ‘intensification' of interest in his work. An exploration of the shifting status of listening provides context for this study, and I pay particular attention to the way innovations in audio and communications technology influenced Rilke's late sequences the Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus. A connection is made between Rilke's ‘listening poetics' and the ‘listening' stance of Ted Hughes and Edward Thomas; this establishes a ‘listening lineage' for the contemporary poets considered in the thesis. I also suggest that there are intriguing similarities between the ideas of listening that are emerging in contemporary poetics and Hélène Cixous' concept of ‘écriture féminine'. Exploring these similarities helps us to understand the implications of the stance of the poet-listener, which is a counter to the idea that as a writer you must ‘find your voice'. Finally, it is proposed that ‘a poetics of listening' would benefit from an enriched taxonomy. Part 2 of the thesis is a collection of my poems entitled ‘Small Weather'.

This thesis explores ways in which the reality of Kantor’s existence at a key moment in occupied Kraków may be read as directly informing the genesis and development of his artistic strategies. It argues for a particular ontological understanding of human being that resonates strongly with that implied by Kantor in his work and writings. Most approaches to Kantor have either operated from within a native perspective that assumes familiarity with Polish culture and its influences, or, from an Anglo-American theatre-history perspective that has tended to focus on his larger-scale performance work. This has meant that contextual factors informing Kantor’s work as a whole, including his happenings, paintings, and writings, as well as his theatrical works, have remained under-explored. The thesis takes a Heideggerian-hermeneutic approach that foregrounds biographical, cultural and aesthetic contexts specific to Kantor, but seemingly alien to Anglo-American experience. Kantor’s work is approached from Heideggerian and post-Heideggerian perspectives that read the work as a world-forming response to these contexts. Read in this way, key writings, art and performance works by Kantor are revealed to be explorations of existence and human being. Traditional ontological distinctions between process and product, painting and performance, are problematised through the critique of representation that these works and working practices propose. Kantor is revealed as a metaphysical artist whose work stands as a testament to a Heideggerian view of human being as a ‘positive negative’: a ‘placeholder of nothing’, but a ‘nothing’ that yet ‘is’ …

Doctor of Philosophy(PhD) / This study investigates the poetic foundation of David Malouf’s poetry and prose published from 1960 to 1982. Its purpose is to extend reading strategies so that the nature of his poetic and its formative influence are more fully appreciated. Its thesis is that Malouf explores and tests with increasing confidence and daring a poetic imagination that he believes must meet the demands of the times. Malouf’s work is placed in relation to Wallace Stevens’ belief that the poetic imagination should “push back against the pressure of reality”, a view discussed by Seamus Heaney in “The Redress of Poetry”. The surprise of the poetic as “unpredicted aesthetic value” (García-Berrio, 1989) is significant to his purposes and techniques, as it creates idea-images and feeling-values (Jung, 1921) that bring together apparently opposite ways of knowing the world. In seeking to represent the meeting of inner and outer perceptions, Malouf’s work shows the influence not only of Stevens but also Rilke and contemporary American poetry of “deep image”. The Australian context of Malouf’s work is considered in relation to Judith Wright’s essay “The Writer and the Crisis” and the poetry of Malouf’s contemporaries. Details of the manuscript development of his first four novels show Malouf’s steps towards a clearer representation of his holistic, post-romantic vision. His correspondence with the poet Judith Rodriguez provides useful insights into his purposes. Theories and research about brain functions, the nature of intelligence and learning provide an important international context in the 1960s and 1970s, given Malouf’s interest in how meaning forms from perception and experience. Jean Piaget’s view of intelligence and David Kolb’s theory of experiential learning (1984) offer frameworks for reading Malouf that have not yet been considered. The thesis offers a model of poetic learning that highlights the interplay of dialectically opposed ways of forming meaning and points to the importance for Malouf of holding diverse states of mind together through the poetic imaginary.

Doctor of Philosophy(PhD) / This study investigates the poetic foundation of David Malouf’s poetry and prose published from 1960 to 1982. Its purpose is to extend reading strategies so that the nature of his poetic and its formative influence are more fully appreciated. Its thesis is that Malouf explores and tests with increasing confidence and daring a poetic imagination that he believes must meet the demands of the times. Malouf’s work is placed in relation to Wallace Stevens’ belief that the poetic imagination should “push back against the pressure of reality”, a view discussed by Seamus Heaney in “The Redress of Poetry”. The surprise of the poetic as “unpredicted aesthetic value” (García-Berrio, 1989) is significant to his purposes and techniques, as it creates idea-images and feeling-values (Jung, 1921) that bring together apparently opposite ways of knowing the world. In seeking to represent the meeting of inner and outer perceptions, Malouf’s work shows the influence not only of Stevens but also Rilke and contemporary American poetry of “deep image”. The Australian context of Malouf’s work is considered in relation to Judith Wright’s essay “The Writer and the Crisis” and the poetry of Malouf’s contemporaries. Details of the manuscript development of his first four novels show Malouf’s steps towards a clearer representation of his holistic, post-romantic vision. His correspondence with the poet Judith Rodriguez provides useful insights into his purposes. Theories and research about brain functions, the nature of intelligence and learning provide an important international context in the 1960s and 1970s, given Malouf’s interest in how meaning forms from perception and experience. Jean Piaget’s view of intelligence and David Kolb’s theory of experiential learning (1984) offer frameworks for reading Malouf that have not yet been considered. The thesis offers a model of poetic learning that highlights the interplay of dialectically opposed ways of forming meaning and points to the importance for Malouf of holding diverse states of mind together through the poetic imaginary.