Thanks Roger,

I have to be careful here as I can't be seen to be making pronouncements about 
Australian poetry (I mean this seriously, it's job-related) but am interested 
in how others see.

> Mostly it's
> poets I've met at conferences or who've published over here or who I
> talk to on email lists, so it's not a deep sample. I would be
> interested in any pointers deeper.

Deeper pointers? I don't know how close you live to London but there's a place 
there called the Poetry Library in the Southbank Centre which, among many of 
its holdings, keeps some Australian poetry journals (and also has books by 
Australian poets). I know because I've seen them there. Of course, the 
journals would be a scatter gun approach at best.

> In part it's due to my travel, I've been to Australia a couple of
> times back in the 80s. I have have memory of Flinders Square, the
> Stockmans bar, sailing up the long lanky coast for days on end. So,
> nostaligia, and travel-memories. Another part, it's due to the
> qualities that I think Australian poets exhibit, a confidence, a
> feeling for words that speaks of not so much exoticism (although that
> plays it's part, the experiences of the Pacific rim, a relatively new
> land, also it's an exoticism that seems to speak to me in a way that
> others do not), a way of putting things that made them strange without
> unduly being constrained by the kind of circumstances I see around me,
> or having the edge of ideology without the need to swing at it heavy
> handed. Turning a neat phrase with punch and twist (leafing thru the
> Ern Malley Affair, I come across the phrase, "the duke of dark
> corners"), also a hardness, a toughness, a fuck-you-ness yet a
> fragility, an underlying neurosis, possibly, a history of fake poets
> which seems to me to rival the great Ossian. The Ern Malley affair
> fascinated me for a long while, in all its small-mindedness yet
> acheiving the wrong ends. In part it tuned to the fakeness I didn't
> know I was going through at the time, a marraige about to break apart.


So far as I know, Ern was our only 'fake' poet - though his sons and daughters 
are still writing :-) - http://www.cordite.org.au/index_23.html. I was just 
reading an essay by David Brooks (who appeared on the list Alison put up - 
that list would be a good starting point, by the way, but not the only one) 
where he said "it might be hypothesised that a kind of ontological anxiety - 
uncertainty as to the nature/status of one's own being - might well be the 
long-sought trademark of the Australian line." Brooks then goes on to 
undermine his own argument, in typical Australian fashion, but it's an 
interesting thought. His essay appears in a journal called Agenda, published 
on your shores, in its recent Australian issue. I don't know the politics of 
your scene there and where Agenda stands in the spectrum but this particular 
volume is chockers with Australian poets from all the many mansions (names 
include Croggon, Brooks, Brown, Cronin, Dobson, Duggan, Fogarty, James (as in 
Clive - I kid you not!), Kinsella, Lew, Papertalk-Green, Porter (both of 'em, 
Pete 'n Dot), Skrzynecki, Tranter, Wallace-Crabbe, Yasbincek). It may well be 
a better starting point than all the officially designated anthologies and may 
(or may not) be readily available to you. It was published mid this year.

One person's exoticism is another's quotidian. The Pacific seems old to me, 
not young, and this continent is way old, flat and weather-worn in many 
places. I don't know the Stockman's Bar but, yes, Flinders St Station is now 
competing with Federation Square in Melbourne. All we've got in Sydney is an 
opera house and a harbour bridge thingie.

> Yes, I know Oz is a monarchy (*rolls eyes) but still there's a kind of
> I know no masters, independance about your poetry, a willingness to go
> to the edge of syntax and expect or not care that we follow. There are
> also darker edges, pain, harshness, cruelty.  A lyric which is new. If
> I blindtasted a number of poets, I reckon I'd pick an Australian poet.

This fascinates me but maybe I could pick a New Zealand or British etc poet 
blind. Maybe.

> For a while I've been trying to emulate some Australian poets without
> much success. There's something elusive about how poets down there
> weld abstraction and concrete without it becoming wooley. OTOH, poetry
> that comes from every day speech yet is plainly poetry, but not,
> somehow, conversational poetry.
> 
> Sorry, not many technical reasons, mostly from the heart.
> 
> If I were to do a mashup, this is what it might look like:
> 
>                                                    I am still
> the black swan of tresspass on alien waters
> as they place a small bundle wrapped
> in linen inside a hessian sack - the red stamp
> of ASW wheat glowing like the stamp
> of death
> hushed to inaudible sound
> the deepening rain closed around me
> on those ridges where the road
> has led me to hunger and darkness and again
> pain grabbed me cruelly and tossed me
> into the violent land of my body
> 
> Yrs
> Roger

I'll get out the welder right now. But seriously, I think you may have a point 
here.

From the heart is best place to come from.  Many thanks for your response and 
I'll think on it some more. Today not good. I'm trying to get outta da orifice 
for a few weeks (and across the ditch to NZ) but 'stuff' keeps cropping up. If 
I mention the words 'Andrew Bolt', Alison and other Melbournites will know 
exactly what I mean.

Must dash,
J