>http://www.litline.org/ABR/PDF/Volume24/miller.pdf
>
>Roger.
Hi Roger - thanks for posting that. It ricocheted off some thoughts
I was having last night about Australian poetry, which seems to be
currently going through a peculiarly rich time, perhaps even some
kind of explosion. What sparked this was a comment from the NSW
Premiers Prize, which remarked on the rich field of poetry published
in the past year: in number terms entries were 25 per cent up from
last year. Given that a few years ago practically all of the
mainstream publishers - Penguin, OUP, A &R - dropped their poetry
lists, this level of energy seems fairly astounding, and makes me
wonder if they didn't do poetry the biggest favour it's had for
years, by decentralising it and stimulating the creation of a bunch
of small presses and alternative networks.
Not only that, but when I look around me, and I don't have to look
very far, I see a lot of people producing intelligent, literate,
aware poetry stemming from and developing a bewildering variety of
traditions and formalities. They are poets aware of modernism and
post modernity and their responses and differences are really
impossible to generalise into a "school" or "movement", though it may
be possible to stand back eventually and see more general tendencies.
I may well be wrong, and I'd be glad to know if I am; but I'm not
sure that anyone has really commented on this phenomenon as a whole,
or even really noticed it; and I wonder if perhaps Australian poets
are perversely profiting from the relative lack of critical interest,
because no one has tried to classify or name them. And so they've
just got on with writing their poems without worrying too much about
which literary tendency they belong to or if, as a group, they ought
to be called anything; which does seem a central worry about this
article. Mid 20C presumptions about classifying poetry don't really
fit, and nobody has really invented new terms; there are a few noises
about "diversity" or "emerging poets" and that's it. Apart of course
from the braindead reactionaries, who perhaps _have_ noticed
something, and call it modernism or the feminisation of Australian
literature (alot of these writers are women) and are seeking some
kind of polarisation which they can work to their own benefit. But
of course, that is the reverse of illuminating.
Best
A
--
Alison Croggon
Editor
Masthead Online
http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/
Home page
http://www.users.bigpond.com/acroggon/
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