Poetry

Moons and Money

Item: Heroic Money
Author: Don Anderson

by Don Anderson •

August 2001, no. 233

Heroic Money by Gig Ryan

Brandl & Schlesinger $21.95 pb, 66 pp

Sun Shadow, Moon Shadow by J. S. Harry

Vagabond Press, $12 pb, 32pp

Poetry

Moons and Money

by Don Anderson •

August 2001, no. 233

They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne.
We shall return at twilight from the lecture
Pleased that the irrational is rational.
Money is a kind of poetry.

(Wallace Stevens)

It may be a question not so much of what poetry we read but of how we read it. I confess myself to be a snail-pace reader – a Marianne Moore snail, that is – and rereader, above all a rereader. And the problem with being a university teacher of poetry is that you are obliged to appear to believe, for professional purposes, that poetry is explicable. ‘Read it? I haven’t even lectured on it!’ (with apologies to Stephen Knight). Yet the context in which one reads a poem may determine one’s sense of it.

Don Anderson

Don Anderson is the author/editor of eight books, collections of essays and reviews, and anthologies of prose, largely of texts from the Americas, Australia, and Europe. For fourteen years in the 1980s and 1990s he was a regular literary columnist in the National Times and the Sydney Morning Herald. He was for thirty years a member of the English department at the University of Sydney, where he taught American, Irish, and Australian literature, and literary theory. He was for some years a member of the Advisory Panel of ABR.