Jas Heriot Duke (1939–1992) was a cult figure in the Australian performance poetry scene. He worked much of his life in Melbourne Board of Works and began writing poetry in 1966. He was influenced by

Dada Dada () or Dadaism was an anti-establishment art movement that developed in 1915 in the context of the Great War and the earlier anti-art movement. Early centers for dadaism included Zürich and Berlin. Within a few years, the movement had s ...

Expressionism Expressionism is a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Northern Europe around the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it rad ...

and experimental movements. He writes "I started performing poems as a timid person with a stutter but the spirit of the times soon converted me into a bellowing bull." During the 1960s he travelled to the UK and Europe and participated in the underground publishing and filmmaking scenes in

Brighton Brighton ( ) is a seaside resort in the city status in the United Kingdom, city of Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, England, south of London. Archaeological evidence of settlement in the area dates back to the Bronze Age Britain, Bronze Age, R ...

and London. Returning to Australia in 1972 he worked as a draughtsman and continued publishing and performing, writing a novel about his travels entitled ''Destiny Wood''. Duke's writings included translations of French and Eastern European Modernist poets but he is best remembered for his sound poems. Nicholas Zurbrugg describes his work as "the voice played like a human saxophone". His collected poems are published by Collective Effort press in Melbourne as ''Poems of War and Peace''. Duke died in Melbourne, Victoria on 19 June 1992.

Bibliography

Poetry

*''Poems of War and Peace'' (Collective Effort, 1989) *''Dada kampfen um leben und tod: A prose poem'' ada fight for life and death(Wayzgoose, 1996) *''Alekhine und Junge in Prag'' German translation by Gabi Malotras (

Gangway A gangway is a passageway through which to enter or leave. Gangway may also refer to: Passageways * Gangway (nautical), a passage between the quarterdeck and the forecastle of a ship, and by extension, a passage through the side of a ship, an ope ...

, 1996)

Novel

*''Destiny Wood'' (1978)

Readings

*''The Best of Jas H Duke'' (audio cassette, NMA Publications 1989)

External links

Poems Of Life And Death
16

mp3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany under the lead of Karlheinz Brandenburg. It was designed to greatly reduce the amount ...

s at

UbuWeb UbuWeb is a "a pirate shadow library consisting of hundreds of thousands of freely downloadable avant-garde artifacts." It offers visual, concrete and sound poetry, expanding to include film and sound art mp3 archives. The site was created by ...

Alehkine and Junge at Prague
poem with

German German(s) may refer to: * Germany, the country of the Germans and German things **Germania (Roman era) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizenship in Germany, see also Ge ...

translation
False consciousness
hypertext poem

concrete poems

essay on 'Sound poetry'

References

1939 births 1992 deaths Poets from Melbourne 20th-century Australian poets Australian male poets 20th-century Australian male writers Visual poets {{Australia-poet-stub