Kevin Hart (poet)

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This page is about the poet and critic. For other persons with this name, see Kevin Hart

Kevin Hart (b. 1954) is an Australian poet, literary critic, philosopher and theologian.

In addition to his poetry volumes, he has published studies of Jacques Derrida, Samuel Johnson, A. D. Hope and most recently French literary critic and philosopher Maurice Blanchot.[1] He has also translated, from Italian, Giuseppe Ungaretti's Buried Harbour.[2]

Contents

[edit] Life and academic career

Hart was born in England, and grew up in London until he was 11 when his family migrated to Brisbane, Australia,[3] where he attended primary school.[4]

He graduated from the Australian National University with an honours degree in philosophy, and in 1977-78 he went to Stanford University in California on a writing scholarship.[2] In 1986, he earned his PhD from the University of Melbourne.[2]

Hart taught philosophy and English at the University of Melbourne, and English at Deakin University,[2] before moving to Monash University, where he taught in the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, as well as the English Department. In 2001 he left Australia to take up a position at the University of Notre Dame. In 2007, he accepted a position at the University of Virginia.

[edit] Poetry

Hart's poetry has won a number of Australian prizes, including the C. J. Dennis Prize for Poetry and the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry for his 1984 book, Your Shadow. He has also won the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for poetry, the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry, the Harri Jones Prize, the New South Wales Premier's Literary Award, the Mattara Award, and the Wesley Michel Wright Award.[5] In addition, Hart has been awarded the Christopher Brennan Award by the Fellowship of Australian Writers.

Hart's poetry has also generated a great deal of attention from critics and reviewers. American scholar Harold Bloom has praised Hart as "The most outstanding Australian poet of his generation…." He calls him "One of the major living poets in the English language" and asserts that "Hart is an erudite poet, but converts his learning into passion. He is a visionary of desire and its limits."[6] Poet Charles Simic has said: "Kevin Hart is one of the finest poets writing in English today. I admire his erudition, and his imagination, the way history, art, myth, literature and many things come together in his poetry.... An absolutely original and indispensable poet."[6]

Reception of his work has been mixed, however. Reviewer Pam Brown writes of Hart's 1999 Wicked Heat, "It’s as if these poems were written by a very serious old man and, apart from a recognisable poetic compulsion to write, it’s sometimes hard to grasp the point of this transparent yet obtuse set. Kevin Hart once wrote ‘Good poems lead us from certainty to uncertainty’. So, in his own terms Wicked Heat succeeds."[4]

Reviewing Hart's New and Selected Poems in Social Alternatives, John Leonard noted that Hart is "a consistently accomplished Romantic lyrist" who maintains "command of tone, subject-matter, thought or language." Nevertheless, Leonard notes that Hart "is writing uncritically a kind of poem that is incredibly dated." Leonard substantiates this with textual analysis, pointing to Hart's reliance upon "a familiar Romantic desire for unity and transcendence, and a mish-mash of other dialectical oppositions, such as death and desire, the particular and the absolute, and so forth, all stirred up into a sickly brew with a generous dash of Christian mysticism." Quoting Hart's poems, Leonard perceives in Hart a tendency to make contradictory poetic statements: "For, despite his claim in one poem to exist within 'the whole of language' (73), Hart's desire for the absolute impoverishes and falsifies; when, for example, the absolute is figured it is inevitably 'nameless' (117) or speaks 'a meaning we cannot count' (185)." Leonard concludes that Hart's poems make a false equation: "The blurb of this volume quotes Hart to the effect that 'a theory of poetry is a theory of life'. Fortunately, this is not true, a theory of poetry is theory of poetry. Fortunately too, there are other kinds of poetry."[7]

[edit] Hart and other poets

In his early career Hart was one of a group of poets often referred to as the Canberra Poets. In addition to Hart, they included Alan Gould, Mark O’Connor, Geoff Page, and Les Murray.

As an active poet and critic, Hart engages other poets, especially his fellow Australian and religious poets, in close dialogue. He has acknoweldged A. D. Hope as Australia's finest poet, authoring a study of Hope early in his career. To Hart, Hope is "an Orphic poet, someone who, like Rilke, believes that poetry is the celebratory transformation of nature into song."[8] Another important influence and poetic relationship with Hart is the poet Judith Wright. According to Gerald Hall, Hart "says that her poems taught him how to see the country for what it is and its people for who they are. He adds, 'whether we know it or not, we all live inside her poems' (Sydney Morning Herald, 29th June)."[9]

Hart's poetic relations with fellow Catholic poet Les Murray have been more problematic. Hart faults Murray for restricting and reducing Hart's personal conception of "Australian poetry." He accuses Murray of a narrow and patriarchal view of Australian identity and of a backward poetics wherein "modernity is cast as the enemy" and then reduces Murray to a "sermoniser and polemicist, the man who talks chillingly of how society cannot survive without male blood sacrifices." Hart concludes with a dismissal of Murray's poetry as ideological: "Although he [Murray] laments that Australia has 'vanished into ideology', he has transformed himself into the most ideological of our poets, and to the detriment of his verse. Over the last decade his work has turned increasingly entete [translated as "pig-headed"], animated more by linguistic dexterity than by feeling, and given to indulge hobbyhorse theories of poetry. While he has occasionally regained form, sometimes with considerable verve, his later work often seems more like material for poetry rather than finished poems."[10] Ironically, Kevin Hart has been seen as a follower of Les Murray. Nicholas Birns writes that "the complicated poetic-critical project of Kevin Hart is powerfully influenced by Murray's example."[11]

[edit] Bibliography

Poetry

  • The Departure (1978)
  • The Lines of Your Hand (1981)
  • Your Shadow (1984)
  • Peniel (1991)
  • New and Selected Poems (1994)
  • Dark Angel (1996)
  • Nineteen Songs (1999)
  • Wicked Heat (1999)
  • Madonna (2000)
  • Flame Tree (2002)
  • Night Music (2004)

Criticism

  • The Trespass of the Sign (1989)
  • A.D. Hope (1992)
  • Losing the Power to Say ‘I’ (1996)
  • Samuel Johnson and the Culture of Property (1999)
  • How to Read a Page of Boswell (2000)
  • The Impossible (2004)
  • Nowhere Without No: In Memory of Maurice Blanchot (editor; 2004)
  • Postmodernism: A Beginner’s Guide (2004)
  • The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred (2004)
  • Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments (with Yvonne Sherwood, 2004)
  • The Experience of God (Editor, with Barbara Wall), 2005)
  • Counter-Experiences: Reading Jean-Luc Marion (editor; 2007)

[edit] External links

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Brennan
  2. ^ a b c d Wilde et al (1994) p. 348
  3. ^ Mitchell (2006)
  4. ^ a b Brown (1999)
  5. ^ Thylazine: Kevin Hart
  6. ^ a b Paper Bark Press
  7. ^ Leonard
  8. ^ Hart (1992)
  9. ^ Hall
  10. ^ Hart (1993)
  11. ^ Birns

[edit] References

Languages