Article
Welcome to Australian poetry - June 2004
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January 18, 2006
The key aim of the Australian magazine on PIW is to provide the reader with a good and varied, pleasurable read. Pleasure, that is, in its many forms: from the lucid to the ludic, the political, polemical and peripatetic, from the eviscerating to the consoling, the intellectual to the purely experiential, from sensuality to linguistics and back again. Equally, my intention is to present established and emerging, experimental and traditional, lyric and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, urban and rural poets from a range of ethnic, demographic, linguistic and cultural backgrounds, writing inside and outside Australia.
Australian poetry is at present thriving. Even while the current Australian government tightens the borders and dreams of the 1950s, culturally Australia remains what it is, and what wiser Australian governments sought to embrace: an independent multicultural society looking not simply toward America, but equally to indigenous Australia, to Asia-Pacific as a whole, to Europe, to the old Commonwealth, and to the Middle-East. Australian poetry, like Australia itself, has multiple origins and orientations, many tongues and much to say.
For the June 2004 issue, I have drawn together a small sample of several well-known voices, established and emerging, from the contemporary Australian poetry scene. I have attempted to suggest the range of Australian poetry by bringing together such apposite poetries as the razor-sharp enchantment of J.S. Harry’s Peter Henri Lepus in Iraq; Dorothy Porter’s sensual, lucid and generous song; the finely tuned, dark praise of Kevin Hart; the heat and fluidity of Martin Harrison’s meditations and recollections; John Tranter’s computer-generated refinements and refractions of capital ‘L’ Literature; the arresting and sophisticated primitivism of MTC Cronin; the finely wrought, ‘well-made’ poems of Vivian Smith; the exactly worded and exacting ‘misquotations’ of Christopher Edwards; the highly-charged wit and atomized insights of Pam Brown; and Emma Lew’s stark and muscular illuminations of troubled contemporary consciousness.
Over the course of the next year, it is our aim to include more of each poet’s work and to include critical material and links to further resources on each poet, along with updates on each poet’s new releases, readings and writings. I hope this first selection will inspire curiousity in readers and set them on the path to discover the remarkable bodies of work behind the poems presented here.
For now, I hope you enjoy the current offering. If Australia is the "geographical unconscious", as Robert Hughes once commented, Australian poetry is very much the dream stuff of terror and beauty, imagination, intuition and intellect, at once struggling with and embracing life at the end of the world and the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Impossible to represent, contemporary Australia is blessed with an ever-ranging poetry being written by many hands, in numerous voices, from divergent poetics, politics and cultures. As an editor, it would be a difficult task to represent Australian Poetry, but what a wonderful task to introduce and welcome the reader to a selection of paths, that wind and interconnect, diverge and sometimes contest the uncertain territories Australian poetry inhabits and borders, steals and borrows, experiences and writes, lives and imagines.
Not easily satisfied or convinced, prone to trickery and deception as much as to straight and openhearted talk, Australian poetry is not so much "the many in one" as the many in the multiple. There is a feast of possibilities and impossibilities to be found gathering in the antipodes.The key aim of the Australian magazine on PIW is to provide the reader with a good and varied, pleasurable read. Pleasure, that is, in its many forms: from the lucid to the ludic, the political, polemical and peripatetic, from the eviscerating to the consoling, the intellectual to the purely experiential, from sensuality to linguistics and back again. Equally, my intention is to present established and emerging, experimental and traditional, lyric and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, urban and rural poets from a range of ethnic, demographic, linguistic and cultural backgrounds, writing inside and outside Australia.
Australian poetry is at present thriving. Even while the current Australian government tightens the borders and dreams of the 1950s, culturally Australia remains what it is, and what wiser Australian governments sought to embrace: an independent multicultural society looking not simply toward America, but equally to indigenous Australia, to Asia-Pacific as a whole, to Europe, to the old Commonwealth, and to the Middle-East. Australian poetry, like Australia itself, has multiple origins and orientations, many tongues and much to say.
For the June 2004 issue, I have drawn together a small sample of several well-known voices, established and emerging, from the contemporary Australian poetry scene. I have attempted to suggest the range of Australian poetry by bringing together such apposite poetries as the razor-sharp enchantment of J.S. Harry’s Peter Henri Lepus in Iraq; Dorothy Porter’s sensual, lucid and generous song; the finely tuned, dark praise of Kevin Hart; the heat and fluidity of Martin Harrison’s meditations and recollections; John Tranter’s computer-generated refinements and refractions of capital ‘L’ Literature; the arresting and sophisticated primitivism of MTC Cronin; the finely wrought, ‘well-made’ poems of Vivian Smith; the exactly worded and exacting ‘misquotations’ of Christopher Edwards; the highly-charged wit and atomized insights of Pam Brown; and Emma Lew’s stark and muscular illuminations of troubled contemporary consciousness.
Over the course of the next year, it is our aim to include more of each poet’s work and to include critical material and links to further resources on each poet, along with updates on each poet’s new releases, readings and writings. I hope this first selection will inspire curiousity in readers and set them on the path to discover the remarkable bodies of work behind the poems presented here.
For now, I hope you enjoy the current offering. If Australia is the "geographical unconscious", as Robert Hughes once commented, Australian poetry is very much the dream stuff of terror and beauty, imagination, intuition and intellect, at once struggling with and embracing life at the end of the world and the beginning of the twenty-first century.
© Michael Brennan
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