The Written Word - approaches to creative use of text

The Angry Penguins, an Australian Modernist artistic and literature movement , controversially shook the conservative Australian art scene in the 1940s. Artists Sydney Nolan, Joy Hester, Arthur Boyd and Albert Tucker were influenced by the European modernists trends of more emotionally expressive creativity, such as surrealism, expressionism and French Symbolism.

A literary journal of the same name, published from 1940 through to 1946, espoused modernism and internationalism, poetry by Dylan Thomas, Mallarme, Proust, Kafka and Faulkner, and was championed by the Angry Penguin poets, such as Charles Jury, Max Harris, Paul G. Pfeiffer and D.B. 'Sam' Kerr.

In 1944 Angry Penguins published Ern Malley's poetry, sparking greatest literary hoax of the Twentieth Century. Read the full story here.

Ernest Malley was a fictional poet born out of two Sydeny poet's, James McAuley and Harold Stewart, loathing and disdain of modernist and surreal poetry, such as that published in the Max Harris edited Angry Penguin journal. McAuley and Stewart's approach of haphazardly lifting random lines or words from books and papers, deliberate bad verse and confusion, resulted 16 nonsense poems, 'written' by Malley. Three of his works can be found here.

The premise of this 'experiment' was to expose whether the Angry Penguins had any literary credentials, and could distinguish between real poetry and absolute drivel. Evidently, in McAuley and Stewart's eyes, they failed when they published The Darkening Ecliptic, the life work of poet Ern Malley.

This was later exposed as a hoax, and resulted in the widespread humiliation of Harris, the Angry Penguins and was a major setback for modernism in the Australian arts.

However, it is now acknowledged that Malley's poetry has artistic merit, and perhaps the interventionist act of Malley's creators was in fact one of the greatest pieces of modernist art of all time; which in turn just proved themselves 'wrong'.