Whenever I am asked to write about the state of Australian poetry, I have to admit that I cannot. For one thing, there is not one Australian poetry. There are many poetries, not all of them published or of publishable quality. And there are more people writing it, than there are reading it, or writing about it.
Take that first point: there is not one poetry. No matter how I start to define poetry, I will inevitably exclude some, if not many, poets. I don’t just mean the divisions between rhyming verse and free verse. Nor do I mean the divisions between academic and performance poetries. If I define poetry as the rhythmic evocation of beauty, I have not defined what I mean by beauty; and I have left the matter of rhythm unexpressed, since not all poems are rhythmic in the same or similar ways.
This is because poetry, as a practice, is so vast that any statement about it must throw up large numbers of exceptions. If poetry defined as images, then what of the post-image poem? If poetry is defined as the lyric, what of the other genres? The narrative poem, for example, or the didactic poem, devalued yet still valid. What of satire?
This is the problem with definitions of poetry, and, especially, definitions of what makes the best poetry. We tend to define by taking one aspect of its range, and excluding others. In this way, Poe stated that the long poem did not exist, even if only because it lacked an essential unity of effect in the reader. But what of those longer poems? What if, in eschewing unity of effect they did so because such a unity was not desired?
By Poe’s dictum, Christopher Brennan’s Poems would fail, as it relies on the successive changes of imagery, mood and emotion to create its final effect. But it works, as a poem. It has a final effect, a cumulative one, and this is a result of the variety of poetries within it.
So, then, it is almost impossible to define poetry. It is also almost impossible to define Australian poetry, as it is to define Australianness. Normally we attempt to do so by exclusion; the ease of the term ‘unaustralian’ is witness to this. So, as a poem is not this or that, so to are Australians not that or this. And in doing so we neglect to say what poetry is.
Likewise, if we attempt to define what poetry, and what Australian poetry is, by what it contains, we usually leave unspoken the assumption that, lacking these qualities, it is not poetry, or not Australian poetry. It gets to the point that, if we say Lawson and Patterson are the quintessential Australian poets, we place aside others. We have no room for Brennan, who rarely wrote about Australia explicitly in his verse. We set aside Arthur H. Adams: he rhymed, yes, but he also wrote about his New Zealand. And what of the other expatriate poets, not only those from Australia, but those in Australia? And those in languages other than English?
All of this is not new. It is familiar territory. But it also applies to other nations, nationalities, and cultures. It applies to all of us, since we are more than one type of poet. I am not just an Australian lyric poet, that is, I am more, and the same could be said of all of us.
As a result, what are your thoughts on this matter?
