Geordie Williamson

speaker

728 appearances 5 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2018 last heard 21 Aug

Geordie Williamson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.

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The Bookshelf · Anjet Daanje's extraordinary The Stork and the Dromedary + Liane Moriarty returns with Big Little Truths · 21 Aug 2026 podcast

So you could say that all of Australian literature comes out of.

I think we have to have poetry, don't we?

And I think our great poet uh and now that the dust has settled, um and we're not so thinking about the politics of Les Murray, I think that we all acknowledge that Les is the greatest poet who

has uh lived in European Australia.

And I have always been drawn to the way in which he takes language to a kind of, you know, extreme.

And the most extreme experiment that I'm aware of that Les practiced during his life was published in 1992.

And it was a volume called Translations from the Natural World.

Many listeners will remember a poem called The Cows on Killing Day, in which Les attempts to enter the mind of a cow that is.

Is at the moment of its ending and uh its death.

And what he does in this sequence of poems in translations from the natural world is leave the human altogether and to try and write a series of poems, a suite of poems, from the perspective of animals and from bats, from eagles, from mollusks.

From lyre birds, from pigs.

And what he's trying to do, I think, is basically say.

I'm not projecting human morals or emotions onto this natural world.

I'm going to try radical empathy.

I'm going to translate the sensory bodily experience of non-human life directly into English.

And it's quite an extraordinary kind of result.

There really is nothing like it in the corpus of world poetry.

Um, and and I think w what I love about it most is that, you know.

kind of that sense of one feels like um uh the human uh uh uh is is plagued by subjectivity and ego and a kind of you know like we get in the way of ourselves and yet these animals they're just present unlike our distraction they're just living inside their moment and there's something powerful

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