stuart cooke

I am a poet and scholar based in Sydney. I recently completed a PhD Thesis at Macquarie University about Indigenous Australian and Chilean poetics, entitled Speaking the Earth’s Languages: a theory for a trans-Pacific indigenous poetics. My first full-length book of poems, Edge Music, is due for release in 2011.

My first concern as a scholar is with how dominant settler poetics – evidenced in my thesis by Judith Wright and Pablo Neruda – perpetuate simplistic, colonialist forms of seeing and knowing Australian and Chilean ecologies. My second concern is with how some contemporary Aboriginal and Mapuche poets have instead chosen to promote the confusion, diversity and ever-present dynamism of their environments.

I think a lot about what we could call a ‘sustainable poetics’, or a kind of speaking that doesn’t say too much, or continue for too long. Oral Aboriginal and Mapuche poetic traditions are defined by poems that are inseparable from the speaking voice, and which are invariably performed in particular situations and contexts. This means that the form and size of the poems are determined by biological limitations, such as how much breath one has in one’s lungs, and by authorial limitations, such as who has the authority to say what, and when. It also means that poems are often performed with the assistance of other people, animals or spirits. Contemporary poets like Lionel Fogarty and Leonel Lienlaf have been heavily influenced by their respective oral traditions. They produce poems that are far more respectful of – and open to – environmental complexities than Wright or Neruda ever did.

As a poet, I am becoming increasingly interested with an ecopoetics that doesn’t
simply describe ‘nature’ or ‘natural scenes’, as so many of the old nature poets have already done (and continue to do!). Rather, I am looking at ways of articulating ecological networks,or of allowing energy to flow through language(s) in the same way that it flows constantly between different forms and materials in an ecosystem. Ideally, I’d like my language to graft onto the ecology in question. In order to do so, poetry must become as surprising, as fractured and as many-sided as any other member of a complex ecology.


Book Chapters

  • Cooke, S. (2011) ‘Tracing a Trajectory from Songpoetry to Contemporary Aboriginal Poetry’, in Wheeler, B. (Ed.), A Critical Companion to Aboriginal Literature (Rochester, NY: Camden House).

Refereed Articles

  • Rose, D. B., Cooke, S. & van Dooren, T. (forthcoming) ‘Ravens at Play’, Culture, Theory and Critique.
  • Cooke, S. (2011) ‘Echo-Coherence: moving away from dwelling’, Cultural Studies Review, 17 (1).
  • Cooke, S. (2010) ‘Orpheus in the New World: poetry and landscape in Australia and Chile’, Antipodes: the North American journal of Australian literature, 24 (2).
  • Cooke, S. (2010) ‘Two Mapuche Poets (translation and introduction)’, HEAT (22).
  • Cooke, S. (2008) ‘Singing Up Country in the Poetry of Judith Wright and Pablo Neruda’, Australian Literary Studies, 23 (4).
  • Cooke, S. (2007) 'Eventing: wandering through the physiology of Australian narrative’, Antipodes: the North American journal of Australian literature, 21 (2).
  • Cooke, S. (2006) ‘Re-Writing the Australian: towards a new Australian poetic’, conference proceedings from Unaustralia, University of Canberra, December 2006.

Other Essays and Reviews

  • Cooke, S. (2010) ‘Walmadany: one place fighting against many’, Overland, 16/9/10.
  • Cooke, S. (2008) ‘Review of The Littoral Zone: Australian contexts and their writers’, Environmental Values, 17 (3).
  • Cooke, S. (2008) ‘From Replication to Mutation: Roland Barthes and the imagery of two Australian poets’, Tears in the Fence, (36).
  • Cooke, S. (2007) ‘Remembering Romanticism, Negating Negativity: on Kate Rigby's Ecopoetics’, Australian Humanities Review, (42).

Conference Papers

  • ‘Bursting (Back) to Life: some thoughts about the translation of Aboriginal songpoetry’, Sydney Symposium on Literary Translation, University of Western Sydney, Sydney, October 2010.
  • ‘What’s a Poetic Ecology? Pablo Neruda, Leonel Lienlaf and complex systems in Chilean poetics.’ National Young Writers’ Festival, Newcastle, October 2009.
  • ‘Building Resilience with an Eco-Poetic, or a Poetics of Immanence’, Annual Meeting: Association of American Geographers, Las Vegas, March 2009.
  • ‘On Dwelling’, Poetry and the Trace, Monash University, Melbourne, July 2008.
  • ‘Orpheus and the New World: poetry and ecology in Australia and Chile’, Poetic Ecologies, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, May 2008.
  • ‘Feeling World: singing up land and history in Judith Wright and Pablo Neruda’, The Colonial Present, University of Queensland, Brisbane, July 2007.
  • ‘Re-writing the Australian: towards a new Australian poetic’, Unaustralia, University of Canberra, Canberra, December 2006.
  • ‘Getting Closer to Country: wandering through Australian narrative’, Be True to the Earth (the inaugural conference of ASLE-ANZ), Monash University, Melbourne, April 2005.

Poetry

  • Cooke, S. (2011) Edge Music (Brisbane: IP).
  • Cooke, S. (2010) Corrosions (Sydney: Vagabond Press).
  • Garrido-Salgado, J. (2007) Eleven Poems, September 1973 (Picaro Press: Warner’s Bay). [translation]
My poems also appear in a wide variety of national and international literary magazines, and in anthologies such as:
  • Bradstock, M. (Ed.) Antipodes: poetic responses (Putney: Phoenix Education, 2011).
  • Adamson, R. (Ed.) The Best Australian Poems 2010 (Melbourne, Black Inc., 2010).
  • Adamson, R. (Ed.) The Best Australian Poems 2009 (Melbourne, Black Inc., 2009).