In conversation with Rob Harle

Abstract

The versatile Nimbin Valley-based Australian thinker, painter, sculptor, writer, reviewer, cover-page designer and a re-born, restive poet, the much-in-demand Rob Harle is rapidly getting global critical attention for the consistency of his works animated by a deep-rooted liberal humanism. The humanist poet regrets the decline in moral values and calls the current society, post-human. He feels that the high-tech and supermarket culture are taking toll on human personality and rendering it defunct or-almost. His digital art works, essays, poems and recent fun fiction pieces---minis---provide a relentless critique of such a reified society where machines are becoming more sacrosanct than the human agency. His two collections of poems, Scratches and deeper wounds (1996) and Mechanisms of desire (2012), are Swiftian in their satiric tone and his minis resemble the literary tradition inaugurated by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Rob's cover designs and cerebral reviews of global poetry anthologies are earning him the respect of the poets, editors and critics. An interview of Sunil Sharma by Rob Harle is available at Boloji.com http://www.boloji.com/index.cfm?md=Content&sd=Articles&ArticleID=15062