On 28/3/06 2:40 PM, "Mark Weiss" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Actually, I'd be interested in hearing from Australians about the
> politics of the poetry world there. What are the fault lines?
How the hell did we get from my enjoying both Pound and Eliot to Australia
as an Elysian paradise?
Mark, you know perfectly well that I care enough to argue passionately about
a lot of things. The place of feeling in poetry, for example. I don't accept
the received war plans, in practically any of these divides, because they
seem to me to distort the field. There's always a lot more going on than
such binaries would admit and often everybody's so busy shouting they forget
why poetry interests them in the first place. But since you ask:
I don't have a lot of time for such matrices of representation, but I do
know something of these histories. I expect you're quite aware of the bitter
poetry wars of the 70s (John Forbes' "knife fight in a phone box"). Here the
pattern is a little different from the UK, the US and Ireland, because many
of the nexes of literary political power (editorship of the major publisher
of poetry A&R, editorship of the Australian newspaper's poetry, editorship
of Poetry Australia, etc etc) were won in the 1980s by the self-labelled
radicals. That didn't happen elsewhere, and perhaps as a result the
possibilities are a little more open here. Also we have the issue of
colonialisation in our contemporary culture, which led to an aggressive
nationalism behind Australian literature that was, I believe, self defeating
in many ways. Many poets of my age and younger - MTC Cronin, Emma Lew, John
Kinsella, Peter Minter, Kate Fagan and others - tend to respond to a
different kind of politics - those concerned with environmentalism or
feminism or so on. The failure of the left/right binaries in all western
democracies - is there any country with an actual opposition? - might
demonstrate that kind of disillusion: there is another kind of politics
happening now. It's very divided and amorphous, but it's definitely
happening and ever more urgent, and it's not happening in ways that the old
20C binaries really cover. Amanda Lohrey had an excellent essay on this new
politics in Quarterly Essay a couple of years back.
Personally, I was not interested at all as a young poet in the
inward-directed viciousness and bitterness that goes with these literary
wars. This has, somewhat disingenuously, been called political apathy, but I
always remember Kenneth Rexroth's essay on the young people of the 60s, who
were accused of the same thing by their elders and betters, because the
mainstream refused to recognise the axis of their dissent. I suspect
something similar might be going on here.
These days the accepted contesting seems to be between the "academics" who
like complex poetry and those who think poetry ought to be simple-mindedly
"accessible". I'm on record as an "academic" on that one, which demonstrates
the idiocy of the argument pretty comprehensively.
All best
A
Alison Croggon
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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