Peter Nicholson on Poetry and Culture

There are (and it's conceivable that long-term readers might even have noticed) some strange paradoxes in my life. On the one hand I spent a working lifetime in the intellectual powerhouse which is the university sector of English education, and I acquired, along the way, three university degrees; but on the other hand my tastes in the arts are almost invariably of the lowbrow variety; and high-level intellectual discussion of almost any variety leaves me cold to the point of hypothermia.

That said, I recognise that there are perfectly sensible people who prefer Beethoven to the Beatles, and who choose to discuss things at a more rarefied level than I care to myself. And it is in that spirit that I point you towards a two-part essay by the Australian poet Peter Nicholson. Part one can be found here, and part two here.

Peter is clearly a thoughtful individual with an alarmingly wide frame of artistic reference to draw upon, and his subject in the two-part essay is 'poetry and limitations of the ironic mode in the new millennium'. If you want to know more about Peter's background and work, you can find it on his own web site.