{"id":213,"date":"2019-02-17T21:27:47","date_gmt":"2019-02-17T21:27:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/?p=213"},"modified":"2022-02-16T21:28:50","modified_gmt":"2022-02-16T21:28:50","slug":"feedback-for-michael-sharkeys-many-such-as-she-victorian-australian-women-poets-of-world-war-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/2019\/02\/17\/feedback-for-michael-sharkeys-many-such-as-she-victorian-australian-women-poets-of-world-war-one\/","title":{"rendered":"Feedback for Michael Sharkey’s ‘Many Such As She: Victorian Australian Women Poets of World War One’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some welcome feedback for Michael Sharkey’s anthology, Many Such as She<\/em>….<\/p>\n

“I’ve just been having another and deeper look into those women ‘war’ poets you’ve so
\nassiduously collected and wonderfully written up, and up till now I’ve found their
\ntreatment of war, loss, patriotism, etc — by which I mean their favourite ‘positions’ to
\ncouple up in thought with their absent men — quite troubling and, here and there,
\nalarming.That is, until I suddenly began to ‘hear’ it all quite differently — not as a
\ncontemporary reader, but as a witness to their times. In fact, ‘times’ is the snuggly
\nfitting key, and you have to almost become a time-traveller to get back there. It’s not so
\nmuch a different world I find that they are living and thinking in — which would have to
\nbe a nonsense, unless they were all mad — rather, they are using a language where
\nthe words have different weights and values from our own. You have to make an effort
\nto free, or disencumber, their words from the interrogations that the language we at first
\nthink they are using has subsequently been loaded with. Some of it, even making this
\nallowance, remains, however interesting as examples, affected, crude and even silly.
\nBut a lot more becomes, in dramatic contrast, affecting and some seems to catch at
\nstunned moments of a genuine distress with flair and to be heart-breaking. Fine job
\ndigger — or perhaps delver’s the truer word.”
\n\u00b6\u00b6
\nMichael’s response was to find the remarks pretty spot-on, regarding the way we read
\nthe language of writers of another era. ‘It’s something that fascinated me all my reading
\n& teaching life \u2014the way in which we get to enter another world’ \u2014 ‘time travelling’, as
\nhe put it.\u2014 ‘so we can relive the thoughts & emotions of characters we encounter
\nthere. We do that without resort to theory or any worry about ‘how’ we should read
\nsuch work from a bygone time. People who pick up a copy of some novel from the past
\n\u2014 say, Pride and Prejudice<\/em>, or Gulliver’s Travels<\/em> \u2014 don’t go into a fret about how to go
\nabout it; they just open the book and engage with the language without any great
\nconcern that some words may be a bit strange or that the punctuation’s not exactly
\n2019 style… they go at it in the same way that someone reads a newspaper online or
\nin print, or like people on a bus or plane or train read a contemporary detective story,
\nromance or biography. We’re not all conscious scholars of linguistics or historical
\nanthropology…. So the comments on the way we can read such people as those early
\ntwentieth century women poets’ work are helpful. Their language does have certain
\ndifferent values or weights embedded in it \u2014 words they took for granted as having
\nconnotations as well as denotations according to the time they inhabited. We might put
\na different weight on some words, but we still seem to effortlessly know what they were
\ngetting at, and we unconsciously enter into their world view, even if we have different
\nattitudes to the meaning of a word like ‘duty’ or ‘peace’ or ‘love’ or ‘family’ nowadays.
\nWe can understand the writers’ anxiety, fear and other passions. It’s why we can relate
\nto the love-poems of Lesbia Harford, or the cool outrage of Fullerton’s poem ‘The
\nTargets’, which another friend wrote to say that a reading aloud, by a woman who
\nteaches theatre, had a profound effect on an audience recently.’<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some welcome feedback for Michael Sharkey’s anthology, Many Such as She…. “I’ve just been having another and deeper look into those women ‘war’ poets you’ve so assiduously collected and wonderfully … Continue reading “Feedback for Michael Sharkey’s ‘Many Such As She: Victorian Australian Women Poets of World War One’”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-213","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sharkey-michael"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t