Audio: Mark O'Connor on poetry and evolution: Origin of Species and Literacy

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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

I remember being very struck by something the Northern English poet Basil Bunting once said and it went along the lines of that any poet who hadn’t read and absorbed the Origin of Species was in effect illiterate and yet many poets, including modern poets, seem to almost take a perverse pride in not knowing anything very much about modern science and as a scientist and a poet I was wondering what your attitude towards that sort of wilful ignorance might be? Well there are still great steaming resources of ignorance on biology around but I would have thought the trend, particularly in Australia, has been the other way. I think Judith Wright was the first to realise the enormous resources opened up for an Australian poet by the theory of evolution in a poem she wrote called The Cycads.