from McKenzie Wark:
>here's the column i wrote for the Australian (newspaper)-- more 'gossamer'
>than 'camps', i think. Forward it to austlit ot poetryetc if
>you think it relevant.
>Sydney Writers Festival
Monday, 22 May 2000
McKenzie Wark
>For some strange reason, the 'Best Young Writers' award, announced each
year at the Sydney Writers' Festival, is always exclusively for novelists.
By some unexplained slippage, novelist gets equated with writer.
A pity, particularly when there is so much good poetry currently being
written in Australia. Peter Minter, author of Empty Texas (Paperbark
Press) chaired a session at which eight contemporary poets read. The work
was superb, a real mix of linguistic poise, conceptual daring and chainsaw
wit.
Michael Brennan, who co-publishes beautiful little poetry chapbooks under
the imprint Vagabond Press, had the audience spellbound with a short lyric
about the TV show Get Smart. Like Brennan, I too was more fond of KAOS
when it was a TV spy organisation, not a scientific theory. Brennan neatly
captured the irony of a post cold war world that turned out to be so much
less stable or intelligible now that the white hats beat the black hats
than it was when they were always so symmetrically opposed.
"I dream of your mouth and wonder what death has to recommend it." As
usual, MTC Cronin was poised, intelligent, subtle and supple. Kate Lilley
managed to compress the whole dialectic of love into a line: "If its not
your fault its irrelevant." That one lit up the hall like a pinball
machine.
Kate Fagin read extracts from two long series of short poems, both
exquisite. I had not heard of her before, but apparently some of her work
is forthcoming in the next Meanjin. The line, or part line "the time of
cells" still has me thinking -- just exactly what is time at the cellular
level. Images of film shot through microscopes flashes in back of the
retina. "Its all about detail", Fagin assured us. Her writing seems to
yearn for the infinitesimal units of sound and sense.
There's been something of an upsurge of new poetry. I asked Peter Minter
why this might be. Reluctant to specify any reason at the level of an
aesthetic trend, he explained it in terms of the spaces poetry could
occupy. Minter produced a broadsheet for a while, called Cordite. Besides
the Vagabond Press, there's a handful of other small presses, John
Tranter's internet poetry journal Jacket, John Kinsella's poetryetc email
list -- in short, poetry is working as communication.
Australian poetry always struck me as an intensely factional world. This
is what was revealing about Minter's reluctance to make any aesthetic
statement on anyone's behalf other than his own. Rather than warring
factions, poetry now seems more like a network of peculiarities. Perhaps
that's fitting in a world without a given moral order, in which all is a
chaotic fluctuating world of grey and silver.
Take a look at John Kinsella's anthology Landbridge (Fremantle Arts
Centre Press) and you find Minter rubbing shoulders with that most erudite
reactionary, Les Murray. The volume is dedicated to the late John Forbes.
While reviewers quibbled about who was in it and who was not, there's a
strikingly broad approach to taste implied in Kinsella's selection. Its as
if, rather than see poetry in terms of the opposition of this
understanding of poetics to that, what matters is to put differences in
communication.
Differences in communication might stand as a way of summing up the new
aesthetic in Australian poetry. Despite the reticence of Minter and others
to describe it, I think that's what is going on. Only it is not something
that can be characterised as a particular style of poetry. Rather, its a
style of co-existence between poetics. That is what has changed.
For all the hand writing about the demise of poetry lists among the
mainstream publishers, poetry seems to be doing quite nicely without them.
Independents like Brandl and Schlessinger, who have a new Adam Aitken
volume out, Five Islands Press and Paperbark Press are putting out some
great stuff. Brennan and Minter are editing a new anthology for Paperbark,
called Calyx, which promises to be an inclusive document of the new
networks of communication in difference that are flourishing in Australian
poetry.
I don't know why the book is named after the green outer part of the
flower. Its certainly a great word to put on a cover, the outer part of a
book. Perhaps it's from Mallarme: "I say: A flower! and outside the
oblivion to which my voice relegates any shape, in so far as it is
anything other than a calyx, there arises musically, as the very idea and
delicate, the one absent from every bouquet."
This sense of poetry's connection, not just to the unsaid, but to the
unsayable, might not be unconnected to the spirit of coexistence in
Australian poetry as a culture.
"Content is a slippery glimpse", writes Minter. "Even birdshit creates an
open figure, composition by field marking out / what one might,
essentially, know, the syllable / counting every movement."
There's a meditative sense of what it is that poetry announces as present
in its absence, absence in its presence, that seems to have caught on.
Strangely, the judges of this year's Best Young Writer award chose to
highlight a perceived lack of quality in this year's novels. Julia Leigh
and James Bradley shared the honours, for their books The Hunter (Penguin)
and The Deep Field (Hodder Headline). Surely both are worthy titles for
celebrating. But this, we were told, was the pick of a slim crop.
What I found remarkable about this is the sense of entitlement this
judgement implies. As if book reviewers had a right to expect product of
consistent quality, like any other consumer. A similar complaint found its
way into The Eye, shortly before its demise.
But perhaps its not that book reviewers lack good Australian novels, but
that Australian novels lack good book reviewers. The weekend papers are
full of smug reports on minor failings, barely disguised resentments, and
marketing tips for book consumers. There's little by way of a conversation
about what it is that's to be valued in fiction.
Its hard to resist the thought that because it happened outside the
mainstream publishing and publicity circuit that poetry has found ways to
renew itself. Meanwhile fiction lumbers under the weight of inflated
expectations, consumerist rhetoric, nationalist aspirations.
And yet, despite what the Herald thinks, there's plenty of good fiction
out there. It might suit the marketing apparatus for the product to be as
consistent year to year, unit to unit, as corn flakes or cola, but this
seems at odds with what writing is all about.
Sometimes the good books offer different pleasures to those the readers of
the weekend papers expect. Sometimes the reviewer's job is to explain what
those new pleasures might be, rather than merely measure books by existing
market expectations. Good books like Chris Cyrill's Hymns for the Drowning
(Allen & Unwin) or Tony Macris' Capital Volume One (Allen & Unwin), for
example, might require a different conversation about what writing can do
in order to flourish.
McKenzie Wark
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