Mundane Comedy

Background: Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’ has inspired and influenced writers, artists and thinkers for centuries. Beyond the many translations of this epic poetic narrative, the work has also inspired numerous rewrites, in which authors confront, recycle or challenge the original’s themes and structures to address contemporary issues. John Kinsella’s ‘Divine Comedy’ (2009), for example, draws on the original in order to confront ecological exploitation and explore the interconnections of text and place. Wilkinson and Pang intervene in this ‘tradition’ of Dantean rewrites - their long poem offers a collaboratively-written, multi-persona foray towards a COVID-era, secular understanding of what drives us as poet-creatives. Contribution: Paying homage to both structural features of Dante’s work (terza rima; the hendecasyllabic or decasyllabic lines; iambic tercets) as well as narrative and stylistic features (the Easter weekend timeline, imagery, ‘vernacular’, everyday characters), this long poem offers a collaborative reimagining of Dante’s journey – through the inferno, purgatory and paradise – for the contemporary moment. The poem reconfigures the epic solo journey of a ‘male genius’ as a journey of multiple figures across different geographical and imaginative terrains. Significance: Wilkinson and Pang were commissioned by esteemed Australian publication Meanjin (est. 1940) to write this poem for a special performance in conjunction with The University of Melbourne’s Archives and Special Collections’ ‘Epic and Divine: Dante’s World’ exhibition at the Noel Shaw Gallery in the Baillieu Library in 2022, marking 700 years since Dante’s death. The poem was also published in Meanjin online. Recent essay contributors to Meanjin have included highly respected writers John Kinsella, Bruce Pascoe, Kate Holden, Alice Pung, Jeff Sparrow, Christos Tsiolkas, Tony Birch and Maria Tumarkin.