Just to clarify a point Hugh Tolhurst made about Readers' Reports:
Hugh: "Even without it being published, what was quoted from a Les Murray
reader's report (by the publisher in a rejection letter) would seem
certainly to have deeply hurt young Martin Johnson. And I'm not making a
linkage there... See John Tranter's introduction to the UQP selected Martin
Johnson."
Here's what I said about Angus & Robertson's decision not to publish Martin
Johnston's To The Innate Island MS (excuse HTML code):
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Christopher Pollnitz, reviewing <i>The Sea-Cucumber</i> in <i>Southerly</i>
magazine, said that "the title poem. . . is one of the handful of
major Australian poems this decade. About the volume as a whole there is a
professionalism, a sense of rigorous intellectual training, which makes
most other current Australian poetry seem amateur by comparison. . ."
But not everybody liked Martin's poetry, or the way it was developing.
Early in 1979 the manuscript of "To the Innate Island" was
rejected by Richard Walsh, Publisher of Angus & Robertson; the firm's
poetry advisers were Les Murray and Vivian Smith. Walsh's letter reads in
part ". . . we. . . find something lacking -- what one reader
described as 'the still centre, the core of repose from which poetry
springs'."
Les Murray commented on the manuscript to Martin, in an aside written by
hand as one of two postscripts to a photocopied circular letter, a request
to Martin to submit work for an American magazine. Les said, among other
comments: "It's wonderfully rich, evocative and vivacious, but I fear
you've left the poetry out."
These two responses -- Pollnitz's and Murray's -- point to one of the
categorisation problems poetry-readers faced in the 1970s. Martin's
interest in writers like John Berryman and Jorge Luis Borges linked him to
the younger Australian poets of the time, many of whom were his friends,
who were responding vigorously to the work of some North American and
Latin-American poets. The writers collected in Donald Hall's
<i>Contemporary American Poetry</i> (1962) and in Donald Allen's <i>The New
American Poetry</i> (1960) had a notable influence on the development of
poetry in Australia for two decades or more, as did translations from the
work of writers like Borges and Octavio Paz. Some readers saw Martin as
belonging to a group of pro-American experimental writers, though they
should have noted these lines from his poem "Gradus Ad
Parnassum": "And the groovier modern Americans? They seem to be
the context / I'm supposed to work in, though I mostly haven't read them."
John Tranter, Sydney
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