Audio: Mark O'Connor on poetry and evolution: Hearts Left Behind

In an exciting ABC first, Pool is releasing some ABC audio and video archives back to the public for use and re-use under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial licence. This audio is part of the Gene Pool remix project. If you use or reuse this clip, please attribute the speakers and the ABC.

This is an excerpt from a show called Books & Writing. It was broadcast on Radio National on 2nd February 1981. Martin Harrison is interviewing the Australian poet Mark O'Connor. Mark talks about how evolution and the environment are connected to poetry.

TRANSCRIPT:

The early Australian poets were what we would now call New Australian poets. They came with their hearts and minds left behind in another country where May was a Spring month and so on, and Orion was a winter constellation. And of course they were very slow to create the connections that they European poets had woven over the millenia.

A European can hear the song of a European Skylark, which is a very common place trill, but to him it carries all those reverberations and associations that have been built up by hundreds of generations of people who’ve lived and died with this sound as part of the web of nature around them. In Australia the problem was that the external landscape and the animals didn’t seem to mean anything – poets kept looking at them and saying ‘That’s a beautiful flower but what does it mean?’

I think we’re at last working our way towards some notion of what the animals and plants, and the overall environment in Australia does mean and that should open the possibility to a much more powerful external and internal poetry.