Four Notes on the Practice of Revolution
Abstract
It's the beginning of winter, 1977. I'm sitting in a freezing room in Brisbane, staring at a typewriter, thinking about revolutions. I've just returned from Sydney and a poetry reading at the Hogarth Gallery, where visiting American poet Mark Strand was visibly amazed at the amount of blood on the gallery floor once the Antipodean readers had finished slitting their friends' throats to an appreciative but bemused audience. 'This stuff,' he said, referring to the cream of avant-garde Aussie work, 'this stuff is dead, the New York people gave this sort of thing away ten years ago.' He may be right, he may be wrong, but he set me thinking about what this article's all about. It's all about what happened ten years ago. What was it like then, in the age of innocence?
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Published 1 October 1977 in Volume 8 No. 2. Subjects: Australian poetry, Generation of '68 (Poets), Poetry magazines, Writer - critic relations, John Tranter.
Cite as: Tranter, John. ‘Four Notes on the Practice of Revolution.’ Australian Literary Studies, vol. 8, no. 2, 1977, doi: 10.20314/als.b3ab17f7c3.