Welcome to Australian poetry - November 2004

January 18, 2006 Due to some slight changes in the format of Poetry International Web, from this issue onwards, the Australian pages will publish approximately twenty-five new poems each issue, usually including new work from between three to five poets. The third issue of Australian PIW will be out in February 2005 and will include work by Robert Adamson, Judith Beveridge and Ouyang Yu.

In the current issue, the presentation of these five very different poets appears to be timely in the wake of the recent Australian federal election, where the incumbent conservative government was returned with an increase of power, control of the Senate and what appears to be the willingness of at least 51 percent of the Australian population to continue the long walk in the U.S.A.’s shadow while maintaining an inward focus on low interest rates and tight borders. With these deepening changes to how Australia perceives itself and how the world will come to understand what ‘Australia’ and ‘Australian’ come to mean over the course of the next four years, it is a pleasure to be able to offer some counter argument. I hope you will enjoy these five voices from the Australian wilderness, each offering opposition and insight, politics, polemics and poetics.

Lisa Bellear is a Goernpil woman from Stradbroke Island. She is an accomplished academic, performance poet, photographer and filmmaker, broadcaster and activist, and one of the truly independent voices of contemporary Australian poetry. Her work drives the demotic into the desolate heart of contemporary Australia, bringing with it defiance, anger, compassion, love and a sharp satiric wit:

Should I apologise
should I feel guilty
Maybe the solution is to sponsor
a child through world vision.
Yes that’s probably best,
I feel like I could cope with that,
Look, I’d like to do something for our Aborigines
but I haven’t even met one
(Women’s Liberation)

Michael Farrell is one of the emerging voices of Australian poetry. Wired and well-versed, Farrell is an unusual event in Australian poetry, bursting unapologetically in amongst the landscape artists and urbane city-dwellers with a caustic, amphetamine-like generosity of spirit, making connections in a synaptic thunderstorm, allowing the whole thing to spin on Mallarmé’s dice. In the long dark night of contemporary Australia, Farrell’s poetry offers the thump and drive of a good night out, where garbled contemporary rhetoric is purified and re-cut with a healthy dose of poetry, fun and bedevilment.

Gig Ryan’s work may well be a key antecedent to Farrell’s, albeit less given to chance and more vituperative. Ryan and Jennifer Maiden (whose work Ryan guest-edits and introduces for this issue) are two of Australian poetry’s strongest contemporary voices of dissidence and defiance. Their contributions to the political edge of Australian poetry have vitalised the work of their contemporaries and younger emerging poets. Ryan’s satires of suburban lives and her taut, lean lines and Maiden’s long scrutiny of evil and its forms, along with her finely tuned interrogations of CNN and domesticity, show that the political consciousness of Australian poetry is alive and kicking.

Noel Rowe’s quieter poetry is no less puissant for its subtle and meditative approach to the difficult determinations of life in contemporary Australia. Moving through mourning, politics and the differing faces of faith and the human, Rowe’s humour is underwritten by an ability to place and turn the knife at the most deadly moment. All five poets in this second issue of Australian PIW offer vantage points on the state we’re in down south, poetically and politically.

In a recent essay titled “Made in England”, David Malouf ends his study of Australia’s inheritance from England by raising that question mark which seems so often to lurk near and keep company with the term ‘Australian’ if not ‘Australia’ (a term that bears some relevance here in this different though related context of ‘Australian Poetry’). Malouf writes:

This venture we call ‘Australia’ was always an experiment. It has taken us a long time to see it in this light, and even longer to accept the lightness, the freedom, the possibility that offers as a way of being. It keeps us on our toes, as curious observers of oneself. It has made us value quick reflexes and improvisation – lightness in that sense too. It ought to make us sceptical of conclusions, of any belief that where we are now is more than a moment along the way. An experiment is open, all conclusions provisional. Even the conclusiveness of a full stop is no more, so long as there is breath, than a conventional gesture towards pause in a continuing argument.

Malouf’s comments – the coupling of ‘Australia’ with the mobility and fluidity of ‘venture’, ‘lightness’, ‘freedom’, ‘possibility’, ‘improvisation’, ‘experiment’ and the overall sense of a ‘way’ rather than a ‘destination’ – seem to me particularly well suited to ‘Australian’ poetry. The lack of conclusion, the final emphasis on the breath that remains, the generation of this term ‘Australia’ as a moment along the way and a part of a continuing argument, strike me as a pretty good working definition of Australian poetry, suggesting as they do not some grand design but something evolving, changing, moving without so much destination and intention, as hope and desire. That everything remains provisional, a part of a many-tongued argument, in my view is the nature and grace of Australian poetry now. These five ‘sceptical’ but ‘curious observers’ from the deeper south, then, offer a taste of the ongoing argument and experiment of ‘Australia’. This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.