Kevin Hart (born 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]

[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.^[5]

[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.^[6] 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."^[7] 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."^[7]

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."^[8]

Of Hart's newest volume of verse, Young Rain, fellow Australian poet and critic Geoffrey Lehmann writes, "In general I was disappointed by Young Rain and found the religious poems self-indulgent. There were too many generalised symbols such as recurrent clocks and wine and stars. Everything was too smooth and vague, evading meaning." Lehmann managed to find one poem "full of specific detail, that's very funny and also touching" and concludes that perhaps there were "other worthwhile poems in this book I have overlooked."^[9]

His volume Flame Tree was considered, then rejected, for the English Literature Victorian Certificate of Education in Victoria, Australia, on grounds of obscenity. The objectionable line was "My semen hot and wild inside your cunt." In his own defense, Hart claimed, "I was very surprised to think that the line could offend 18-year-olds these days. I suppose there will always be parents who are outraged about something in the curriculum.... In Australia ‘cunt’ is often used by lovers, women and men alike, and no offence need be given or taken. It can be said very tenderly...." Whether the word was used tenderly in this instance was not determined, though most readers agreed that simply dressing up pornography in iambic pentameter did not automatically constitute poetry.^[10]

[edit] Hart and other poets

In his early career Hart was one of a group of poets often referred to as the Canberra Poets^[11]. 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."^[12] 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)."^[13]

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."^[14] 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."^[15]

[edit] Literary Theory and Criticism

Hart has published a number of books on contemporary literary theory, including Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida. Perhaps because his training has been largely in postmodernism, Hart's scholarly foray into Samuel Johnson and the eighteenth century was not particularly successful, nor has it been widely embraced by other scholars.

Writing in the scholarly journal Romanticism, Wolfram Schmidgen of the University of Leeds noted Hart's "loose conceptualization," his "lengthy and half-hearted excursion" into extraneous topics, and the stylistic "tentativeness and indirection" of his prose. Though the book "offers an attractive agenda," it "loses touch a bit with his main topic," makes an "incomplete and imprecise connection" between Johnson and the culture of property, and "is frequently plagued by exasperatingly oblique links between its different concerns and levels of discussion."^[16]

Lisa Berglund of Connecticut College noted in Albion that summarizing Hart's argument was a "frustrating" and "fruitless" experience as his thesis was "so flexible as to become almost meaningless." Though she noted his "creative" and "quick-darting" mind, Berglund concluded that "the almost spasmodic leaps in his argument are often confusing."^[17]

In The Review of English Studies, Katherine Turner of St. Peter's College, Oxford, composed an incisive review, noting that Hart "frequently degenerates into anecdote and speculation," that his approach is "uneven," "inconsistent," and "far-fetched." Most damning of all, Turner notes that the book's "essentialist assumptions" are "rather dubious" and that Hart "performs little more than the function of anecdotal hagiography." As an antidote to the fulsome praise heaped on Hart by Harold Bloom, Turner observes that "An ominous back-jacket puff from Harold Bloom warns of what might lurk within" Samuel Johnson and the Culture of Property.^[18]

[edit] Theology

In the June 2009 edition of the Australian Literary Review, Hart enunciates his theology in a review of two books in an article titled God the radical ^[19] covering a range of issues brought up also by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and considering all four writers part of his argument includes:-

Were Christianty, as it appears in the New Testament, to be put into practice for only a day by all who confess it, the world would be hardly recognisable the following morning

[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)
• Young Rain (2008)

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

• Authors: Kevin Hart Accessed: 2008-01-31
• Kevin Hart at Poetry International Web
• Kevin Hart, Poet, Nonfiction writer Accessed: 2008-01-31
• McCooey, David (1996) In Dialogue with Kevin Hart Accessed: 2008-04-19

[edit] Notes

[edit] References