Configurations – by Trevor Code

Product details

Paperback: 138 pages

Publisher: Ódrerir Books

ISBN: 9780980672541

Trim size: 210 x 148 mm

Author’s Note

A major scholar has recently pointed out the tendency, fuelled by Creative Writing courses, for an assumption that literary works, of any time period past or present, are inescapably autobiographical. After all, it is easier to gossip about the author’s, or composer’s, or painter’s sex-life and deprivation than the work itself. As a poet, I am not writing autobiography. I don’t think Shakespeare, Whitman or Dickinson were doing so either. And I don’t find it particularly helpful to reduce the arts to “self-expression”. I engage in an art which may be speculative, imaginative, philosophical, probing, subject to trains of thought, association of ideas – or even caprice. Like a mathematician, I grapple with symbols; unlike a mathematician I perceive, and sometimes play with, the inexact nature of the symbols or words which make up our language. Whitman said it was “a language experiment.” I am not “I”; “I” is not I – or me. I place things on the page, objectively at times, but sometimes swept up in the emotions of the theme or the work. I hope that the reader might experience such emotion too – and hear it. I refer to the titles of two late volumes by Robert Lowell: Notebook, and History. They morphed into versions of the one book. I am engaged with the terrain and the climate, the daily events often of Dromana and the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria – but in my Irish poems I am heavily wrapped up in the traditions, history, ballads and fate mainly in Wexford. In Which Way the Wind (2010) I argued that the reader completes the line and the poem. The book belongs to the reader.

About the Author

A pioneer in the teaching of Writing and Literature in Australia, Trevor Code was the chairperson of the ground-breaking first Literary Studies course team at Deakin University. He has taught in schools at all levels, lectured in English at State Colleges, and served as Head of Department at Geelong Stage College. He was an actor, director of theatre, member of senior level Education Department committees and the board of Victorian Association of Teachers of English, delegate for several years to the Federal Conference for Aboriginal Advancement, and an activist for human rights. He has taught creative writing at all levels, and a full range of Literary courses. In the United States, he served on the board of the Worcester County Poetry Association, was its vice-president for programming, and directed several major projects, especially in association with the Worcester Art Museum. He was a Professor of English at Worcester Polytechnic Institute university, where he taught a full range of creative, American and British courses, and he also taught at Clark University and the College of the Holy Cross. His poetry and other writings are prolific and wide-ranging. In 2004 he returned to live in Dromana on the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria. He heads the Melbourne chapter of DLS, an organization for literary enthusiasts, of which he was the co-founder. He supports the Australian Poetry Centre, the Victorian Writers’ Centre, and the Fellowship of Australian Writers. He has written study guides on Shakespeare and American Literature, and a Workshop Manual for writers. He has several books of poetry, the latest of which is Configurations. He is a director of Ódrerir Books.

Reviews

“… a strong Shakespearean influence that stretches the mind to deeper appreciations.”

“the poetry is a diverse and varied tapestry on themes tailored to an individual personal expression that is stimulating, emotive and thought-provoking…like a mature bottle of wine…”

“I take great pleasure in the way the intellect and passion drives through each poem generating its imagistic sequence. “

“…both a powerful argument and plea for more meaningful communication in our increasingly electronic, dislocated world, and ultimately very moving.”

“…there’s a dusty dusky flavour in this but also a strangely academic sense
which I relate to but am kind of removed from.”

“the satires, and the variation in style, and the quirky Code-like humour.”

“I drank from the cauldron…There is much tenderness, much cleverness, a sense of fun, exquisite grammar, punctuation and formatting. .a brilliant literary master…tour de force.”

“Stage by Stage was a tremendous pleasure to read. A beautiful book from cover to cover. ”

“I have been surprised and delighted by this book…the old punch is still there in the purer vision that knows it doesn’t see the emperor’s clothes – except hanging in the closet.”

“The musicality of the poems is beautiful…I felt that I have been missing a sound in poetry — for the last decade – but I have found it in these poems. This book deserves a big publisher such as Norton’s. Wow!”

“This book has become my morning book, poems with tea and toast.”

“In a way, the poem affords meaning to sound: aural pleasure, fluidity of movement, and what I will call: visual sound, sound which is arrived at cerebrally during the course of letters and words repeatedly being viewed by the eyes when reading in silence.”

“I especially like the energy of the poems, and the way in which the poet so deftly mixes lyrical impulses with edgier, more ‘experimental’ ones.”

“He is an accomplished poet, and the collection is a pleasure.”

“… the observation pieces, the experiments … with just this degree of play among simple structures and unextravagant subject.) …haunting in its sparseness and bleakness.”

“Witty and frightening, urban and strangely rural, unified by variety.”
“I love to savor these poems before I go to sleep.”

Trevor Code

Confessions of a Pub Rock Promoter

Category

Configurations

For One Brief Instant

Stage by Stage

Which Way the Wind