Shut Up, Nobody Wants to Hear Your Poems!: Painter Versus Poet

Abstract

This piece stages a friendly title bout between two male artists of my generation, painter Adam Cullen and poet Ted Nielsen. While my chosen exemplars share a ‘turn of the century’ cultural moment, there is also a large disparity in their respective levels of success (hence one possible reading of the ‘shut up, nobody wants to hear your poems!’ title). Though roughly the same age, Cullen is currently one of Australia’s most collectable artists and Nielsen is considered in poetry circles to be an ‘emerging’ poet (in a potentially ‘submerging’ art form). While I may
fall sway to the ‘glamour’ of a famous painter, one of the central investigations remains a questioning of how poetry sits within the montage effect of placing both artists’ work side by side, rather than, as the title suggests, simply squaring them off against each other.