“If You Don’t Mind Me Arsing”: Insubordination and Land in Marty Hiatt’s the manifold

Abstract

Rather than read representations of land in terms of the politics they support or contest, this essay asks what happens when we read poems of politics through the entity of the land? Farrell then suggests that this is and continues to be the primary way to read Australian poetry as Australian poetry, politically. This essay provides a close reading of Marty Hiatt’s long poem the manifold, suggesting that initiating interplay between poetics and philosophical concepts or arguments is apt as a reading methodology for poetry that is interested in “non-scene” poetic representation, of ideas of land that are not land. What is evoked in this reading, in the context of the earth’s adversarial relation to Empire (and in that of climate change), is not the earth’s limits (which some accept and some deny), but the earth’s manifold deployment of elemental forces against all bodies.