Category: Visionary Imagination

Greetings and farewell from A/Prof Michael Griffith (Literature: Strathfield)

I am retiring after 45 years at ACU. While it certainly sounds a long time, I remember vividly my first days on Castle Hill Campus in 1977 and then the flow of new literature students, through Castle Hill, then Mount Saint Mary and occasionally MacKillop. Every year a wonderful crop of new faces, new enthusiasms!…

Top of the Class ePortfolios in The Visionary Imagination ENGL329

A Section of Brett Whiteley’s Alchemy on display at the Brett Whiteley Studio, Surry Hills Here are the top 9 ePortfolios presented for marking in Visionary Imagination ENGL329- and again indeed it was very hard to pick between them, although the top 2 in the list scored the maximum marks possible. All are outstanding examples…

William Blake- Grand Finale

Today was the day that our illustrious group of students put their bodies, hearts and souls into dramatizing aspects of William Blake’s life and work. It was a wonderful display of how Blake’s ideas and life stories have touched the hearts of these young students. Their environmentalism, their concern for social justice and their care…

Sacred Silence in Literature and the Arts

ACU students are welcome to attend this event for free on presentation of their student ID on the day. Come and be enlightened as never before and enjoy the company and the good food.  You can find the full program details right here: Sacred Literature Conference Program Final

Visionary Patrick White 2019: Riders in the Chariot

Patrick White: Riders in the Chariot What a wonderful world Patrick White takes us into in this remaking of the Australian social landscape in line with his own prophetic ambition to re-sacralize a spiritually desolate land. As he says in his essay “The Prodigal Son”: Because the void I had to fill was so immense, I…

William Blake’s Job Series juxtaposed against Brett Whiteley’s “Alchemy”

  What an amazing morning and early afternoon was had by us all today, starting in the Print Room in the NSW Art Gallery where we saw the actual, original prints from William Blake’s The Book of Job series. In this transformation Blake tells Job’s story in order to show how religion needs to move…

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

I have also: The Bible of Hell: which the world shall have whether they will or no. For Blake The Marriage of Heaven and Hell occurs when the sanctimonious, commandment-loving Angel finally gives up his/her smug sense of superiority and happily embraces the flames of fire and joins the Devil’s party, a party which believes in the presence…

William Blake Songs of Innocence and Experience- Catch-Up-Week

Please find here the images and the wonderful audio discussions that wove around our exploration of some of Blake’s key songs, especially “London”, “The Divine Image” and “The Human Abstract”. Blog topics arising for this week include the following: CREATIVE: Use the first line of any of Blake’s poems and write your own poem, based…

William Blake The Songs of Innocence- 2 – With The Doors and Patti Smith…

Today we launched into The Doors‘ “Break on Through” and spoke about how this was a Blakean 20thC explosion manifesting musically Blake’s core idea of “cleansing the doors of perception” (from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell). We then plunged right on into Patti Smith’s wonderful “My Blakean Year” in which she sings about her heartfelt sense…

William Blake The Songs of Innocence and Experience 1

HI All, We had a fabulous morning (despite the sound system glitches) on William Blake’s “Contrary States” and then the way this idea is embedded and dramatized in The Songs of Innocence and Experience.  We talked about the ways in which these ideas have been taken up by Allen Ginsberg, by the Rock Group The Doors…

William Blake Visionary Imagination 1

Hi All, this is where I will be posting up a great deal about William Blake and Visionary Imagination… stay tuned: William Blake’s Death Mask: what a powerful face! In today’s lecture we looked at what is meant by “Visionary” imagination, with a special reference to Allen Ginsberg’s epiphany in reading the poem “Ah! Sunflower”. …

A Pome- from a recently discovered Manuscript of a play by W. Shakespeare

Spring is come The grass is riz Oi wonder where the flowers iz But Shakespeare was wrong this time: the flowers are blooming, exploding around Sydney now in the dead of winter!!. This is the amazing aspect of living on the 33rd parallel: the seasons cannot make up their minds: is it winter? is it…

The Visionary Imagination: William Blake, Patrick White, Brett Whiteley, Allen Ginsberg- Celebrating Class of 2018 ePortfolio/Blogs

  BLAKEAN STORIES This was perhaps the most creative component of all the blogs: those many stories about strangers or family members who provided a trigger for seeing the world in a totally new way. Here is Jamie’s wonderful story about his sister from Vietnam in which he “describes a totally ordinary person in such…

William Blake’s “Grain of Sand” Alive and Well in 2018

Performances based around the work of William Blake and his legacy in Australia have taken place today in Strathfield (ACU)! What an amazing collection of young voices celebrating the continuing creative power of William Blake and his impact on such diverse talents as Patrick White, Brett Whiteley and Allen Ginsberg. Here are our pre-performance tutorials…

Riders in the Chariot- Final Classes

Hi All, today was our final excursion into the world of Patrick White, especially his representation of Alf Dubbo, the Aboriginal artist as a ministering priest of a renewed Christianity. Patrick White shows us how Alf Dubbo’s belief is restored through his visionary imagination and in this way illuminates the way in which William Blake’s…

Alf Dubbo (artist), potential redeemer!

Patrick White presents his hero Alf Dubbo -one of the four “Riders” in the Chariot-  as a human being who brings into the present the transformative power of his aboriginal creative heritage. He does this through his deep animation of Christian themes, bringing these back to their true meaning in the sources of Christianity prior…

Some Fabulous Blogs from The Visionary Imagination.

Students completing a unit on The Visionary Imagination with a focus on William Blake, Brett Whiteley and Patrick White have produced their first batch of blogs and there are some wonderful entries. Here are some of the most compelling entries: enjoy. And thank you the creators! CREATIVE TASK- Write a letter to William Blake asking him…

Brett Whiteley & William Blake 2018

Audio Lecture in the Brett Whiteley Studio Audio Lecture 1 in the NSW Art Gallery on Blake’s Job Engravings Audio Lecture 2 in the NSW Art Gallery on Blake’s Job Engravings Brett Whiteley’s “Grain of Sand” in Surry Hills & William Blake in Sydney: Blake’s “Job” in the NSW Art Gallery; What a fabulous connection was made today …

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell segues into The Book of Job, Whiteley’s Alchemy, Chaucer & Patrick White

Today we explore all those sections of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that provide a real insight into Blake’s deepest creative purpose and that also help us to understand where Patrick White was coming from in Riders in the Chariot. So we looked at his subversive “Proverbs of Hell” which sanctify the unsanctifiable (in conventional religion); we…

Patti Smith & The Doors- their celebration of William Blake’s enduring significance.

Today we launched into The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and especially we began by looking at the ways in which William Blake has become a prophetic figure for the Age of Aquarius in the second half of the Twentieth Century and beyond. It was indeed William Blake who coined the phrase “the New Age” .…

Introductions to Innocence and Experience & The Human Abstract

Today we explored the 2 Introductions (to Innocence and Experience) and found that both these works give a clear insight into the motivation behind each of these books. The Introduction to Innocence presents the aspiration that these songs will celebrate the joy, harmony and sense of well-being that children bring with them into the world:…

Literature in Spring 2018

Hi All, this semester I am teaching Australian Literature to first years (with long-time colleague Elaine Lindsay): You can listen to Elaine in an interview she had on ABC radio recently with novelist Tom Keneally: http://www.abc.net.au/sundaynights/stories/s4432426.htm I am also teaching Twentieth Century Literature to second years and The Visionary Imagination (William Blake, Patrick White and Brett…

“Awakening the Sacred: through Literature, the Arts and the Arts of Meditation” Conference July 7/8 2017

Please click on this link to read the latest article on this amazing conference with Laurence Freeman OSB and Miriam-Rose Ungenmerr and a link to the registration page: http://www.eremos.org.au/events/27_May/awakening-the-sacred-conference

BlakeanPineappleCoconutsBBsBlakesoniansBlakettes….

Our Blakean students today created some wonderful drama pieces that captured the life, times and contemporary significance of William Blake. There were dramatizations of some of his greatest poems (e.g “London”) with animations of overcrowded London streets; there were scenes of contemporary life emphasizing the fact that we spend too much time on chasing the dollar…

Remembering Babylon- David Malouf

Whether this is Jerusalem or Babylon we know not: William Blake The Four Zoas. With this epigraph from William Blake, David Malouf challenges us to consider whether the colonial Australian world that he evokes in this beautiful novel is a place in which harmony might evolve, or in which chaos and lamentation might descend. It is…

Patrick White’s Gift of Reconciliation

Patrick White had the extraordinary insight, back in 1961 to write about the amazing creativity inherent in his Aboriginal character Alf Dubbo who plays a leading role in the novel Riders in the Chariot. The novel won the Miles Franklin award in that year and then in 1965 won the Gold Medal of the Australian Literature Society. Patrick White’s…

Highlights from the first trawl through William Blake and the Visionary Imagination.

ACU Students in this unit have produced some awesome entries inspired by their reading of William Blake. Enjoy some of these wonderfully creative expositions of Blake’s continuing relevance to our own times: Johanna Powers description of Blake’s human qualities: https://johannapower.wordpress.com/2016/08/23/week-4-blog-post/ Caitlyn Tuckerman on Job’s Nightmares https://caitlyntuckerman.wordpress.com/2016/09/06/jobs-nightmare/#comments Jesse Ocsan– tales of Experience: the ambulance man. https://ocsanj.wordpress.com/2016/08/23/week-3-tale-of-experience/…