Chris Wallace-Crabbe

Chris Wallace-Crabbe. Courtesy The Poetry Archive.

Christopher Keith Wallace-Crabbe AO (born 6 May 1934) is an Australian poet and academic, who is Emeritus Professor in The Australian Centre, University of Melbourne. He is also an essayist, a critic of the visual arts, and a notable public reader of his verse.

Life

Wallace-Crabbe was born in the Melbourne suburb of Richmond, and educated at Scotch College, Melbourne, Yale University, and the University of Melbourne.

After leaving school, Wallace-Crabbe set out to be a metallurgist, but was drawn back to his childhood interest in books and art. After training in the RAAF, he worked as an electrical trade journalist while studying for his B.A. in the evenings. He published his first book of poetry while doing his Final Honours year.

In 1961 he became Lockie Fellow in Australian Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne, where he has worked for most of his life since, and where he is now Professor Emeritus in the Australian Centre. He has been Visiting Professor of Australian Studies at Harvard University and at the University of Venice, Ca'Foscari.

Over the next decades he became Reader in English, and then held a Personal Chair from 1988. Thanks to the initiative of H.C. ("Nugget") Coombs, he was a Harkness Fellow at Yale from 1965 to 67, mixing widely with American writers and developing his poetry in new directions. In later years he has spent time in Italy, reading and translating Italian verse.

Wallace-Crabbe's early collections were published in Australia, but in 1985 he began to publish with Oxford University Press, reaching an international public. Although he published some of his criticism and his one novel elsewhere, he remained with Oxford until 1998, after which date the Press ceased publishing live poets. He then took his work to Carcanet Press of Manchester, England. Back in Australia he brought out two books with the Sydney firm of Brandl & Schlesinger. One of these was a highly experimental long poem, or "zany epic", on which he had been working for a dozen years. It would be fair to say that this dense and difficult poem divided the poet's readers.

Reviewers over the years have drawn attention time and again to the energetic mixture of demotic and elevated language which very often marks Wallace-Crabbe's poetry. For the poet this not only testifies to his wide interest in language but also to his sense of the stubborn plurality of our experience. Such mixed diction certainly persists in his very latest books, particularly in his sonnets and in the"Domestic Sublime" sequence of lyrics.

Since his retirement from university teaching he has continued to live in Melbourne, adhering to poetry. He is also Chair of the Australian Poetry Centre.

Recognition

• 1986 - Grace Leven Prize for Poetry
• 1987 - The Dublin Prize for Arts and Science, awarded through the University of Melbourne
• 1992 - Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Poettry Award with Kerry Flattley for From the Republic of Conscience
• 1995 - winner of "The Age" Book of the Year, and the D.J. O'Hearn Prize for Poetry
• 2002 - winner of the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal at the Mildura Writer's Festival
• 2002 - Centenary Medal
• 2006 - Doctor of Letters honoris causa (Melb.)
• 2011 - appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO)

Publications

Poetry

• No Glass Houses. [Melbourne?]: Ravenswood Press, 1955.
• The Music of Division. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1959.
• Eight Metropolitan Poems. Adelaide: Australian Letters, 1962.
• In Light and Darkness. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1963.
• The Rebel General. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1967.
• Where the Wind Came: Poems. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1971.
• Selected Poems. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1973.
• Act in the Noon. Warrandyte, Vic: Cotswold Press, 1974.
• The Shapes of Gallipoli. Warrandyte, Vic: Cotswold Press, 1975.
• The Foundations of Joy. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1976.
• The Emotions Are Not Skilled Workers. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1980.
• The Amorous Cannibal. Oxford, UK, & New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
• I’m Deadly Serious. Oxford, UK, & New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
• Crying Out Loud. Oxford, UK, & New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
• Rungs of Time. Oxford, UK, & New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
• Apprehensions: A suite of six poems (illustrated by Bruno Leti). Melbourne: Centre for the Development of Artists’ Books and Limited Editions, 1994.
• Selected Poems, 1956-1994. Oxford, UK, & New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
• Whirling. Oxford, UK, & New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
• The Alignments (One) & (Two) (collaborations with artist Bruno Leti). Canberra: Canberra School of Art, Edition and Artists Books Studio, 2000.
• By and Large. Rose Bay: Brandl & Schlesinger, 2001.
• A Representative Human: Poems and drawings. Brunswick, Vic: Gungurra Press, 2003.
• Next. Brunswick, Vic: Gungurra Press, 2004.
• The Universe Looks Down. Blackheath, NSW: Brandl & Schlesinger, 2005.
• The Thing Itself, and other poems. Warners Bay, NSW: Picaro Press, 2007.
• Telling a Hawk from a Handsaw. Manchester, UK: Carcanet, 2008.
• Skin, Surfaces and Shadows: A Triptych. (illustrated by Tommaso Durante). Melbourne: Tomasso Durante, 2008.
• The Domestic Sublime. Spit Junction, NSW: River Road Press, 2009.
• Puck. Brunswick, Vic: Gungurra Press, 2010.
• New and Selected Poems. Manchester, UK: Carcanet, 2013.

Novel

• Splinters. Adelaide: Rigby, 1981.

Non-fiction

• Order and Turbulence: The poetry of Francis Webb. Australian National University, 1962.
• Melbourne or the Bush: Essays on Australian literature and society. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1974.
• Toil and Spin: Two directions in modern poetry. Richmond, SA: Hutchinson, 1979.
• Three Absences in Australian Writing. Townsville, Qld: Foundation for Australian Literary Studies, 1983.
• Poetry and Belief. Hobart: University of Tasmania, 1990.
• Falling into Language. Melbourne & New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
• Read It Again. Cambridge, UK: Salt, 2005.

Translated

• Dante, The Flowery Meadow: Being Canto XXVIII of Purgatorio from 'La Divina Commedia'. Malvern East, Vic: Electio Editions, 2005.

Edited

• Six Voices: Contemporary Australian poets, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1963; Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979.
• Australian Poetry 1971, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1971.
• The Australian Nationalists: modern critical essays, Melbourne & New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.
• The Golden Apples of the Sun: Twentieth-century Australian poetry. Carlton, Vic: Melbourne University Press, 1980.
• Clubbing of the Gunfire: 101 Australian war poems. Carlton, Vic: Melbourne University Press, 1984.
• Multicultural Australia: the challenges of change (edited with David Goodman & D.J. O'Hearn). Newham, Vic: Scribe, 1991.
• From the Republic of Conscience: An international anthology of poems (edited with Kerry Flattley and Sigurdur A. Magnusson). Melbourne: Aird Books / Amnesty International; Fredonia, NY: White Pine Press / Amnesty International, 1992.
• Author, Author! Tales of Australian literary life, Melbourne: Oxford University Press,, 1998.
• The Oxford Literary History of Australia (associate editor, with Bruce Bennett and Jennifer Strauss). Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1998.
• Approaching Australia: Papers from the Harvard Australian Studies Symposium (edited with Harold Bolitho). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Committee on Australian Studies, 1998.
• "Imagining Australia: Literature and culture in the new new world" (edited with Judith Ryan). Cambridge MA: Harvard University Committee on Australian Studies, 2004.
• Gwen Harwood, Mappings of the Plain: New selected poems (edited with Gregory C. Katzmann). Manchester, UK: Fyfield / Carcanet, 2009.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

Loving in Truthby Chris Wallace Crabbe

Audio / video

• Chris Wallace-Crabbe: Reads from his own work (45). St. Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 1973.

See also

• List of Australian poets

External links

Poems

• "Erstwhile"
• "Rendition" at Poem of the Week, The Guardian
• Chris Wallace-Crabbe b. 1934 at the Poetry Foundation
• Chris Wallace-Crabbe (1934- ) in the Australian Poetry Library (681 poems).

Audio / video

• Chris Wallace-Crabbe (b. 1934) at The Poetry Archive
• Chris Wallace-Crabbe at YouTube

About

• Chris Wallace-Crabbe at Carcanet Press
• Profile: Chris Wallace-Crabbe at The Age
• Chris Wallace-Crabbe Official website.
• "Starting from Melbourne: The coherence of Chris Wallace-Crabbe" by Michael Sharkey, JASAL 6 (2007)