Literary History and Avant-Garde Poetics in the Antipodes: Languages of Invention

Avant-garde poetry in the Antipodes causes all sorts of trouble for literary history. It is an avant-garde that seems to arrive too late and yet right on time. In 1897, Christopher Brennan made his own version of Un Coup de Dés, the same year Mallarmé published it in Cosmopolis. In the 1940s, the same period avant-gardism was declared dead or fatally injured due to the Ern Malley affair, Harry Hooton began writing a significant body of experimental poetry. From the 1950s to the 1970s, Australian Dada emerged ’belatedly’ through figures like Jas H. Duke (Tristan Tzara had previously sung Aboriginal songs at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916). First Nations and Migrant poets then began reinventing avant-garde poetry in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This book maintains that such a confounding literary history poses a distinct challenge to the theories of the avant-gardes we have become accustomed to and changes our perspective of avant-garde time.

A. J. Carruthers is a poet-critic, and Associate Professor in the English Department at Nanjing University. Carruthers is author of Stave Sightings: Notational Experiments in North American Long Poems (Palgrave, 2017), and three volumes of the long poem AXIS: AXIS Book 1 (Vagabond, 2014), AXIS Book 2 (Vagabond, 2019) and AXIS Z Book 3 (Cordite, 2023). Carruthers has written on Antipodal, North American and Chinese poetries, as well as reflections upon literary criticism as a discipline.