Cirrus@Austlit

'Last year, at a lively town hall forum at James Cook University examining the question of gender bias in Australian literature, I was asked a question which astonished me. Did I, my interlocutor asked, personally feel “doubly marginalised as a female poet,” due to poetry’s marginal status in Australian literature, and women’s marginal status as writers in general? My answer—with the caveat that I was speaking for myself—was an unequivocal no. Poetry undoubtedly occupies a peripheral position in Australian literary culture if column inches or literary festival stages are the measure of hitting the mainstream; as Ivor Indyk (2015) wrote recently in the Sydney Review of Books, “the prejudice against poetry goes deep” (para. 3) in Australia. Nevertheless, Australian poetry persists, and stubbornly flourishes. If the number of poems published annually is anything to go by, Australian poetry is positively burgeoning. Thousands of poems are published annually, alongside a Hydra-like sprouting of anthologies that shows no sign of slowing. There is a healthy stable of mostly small independent and university publishers who produce numerous individual volumes a year, alongside larger publishers such as Hachette, Scribe and Penguin and others who occasionally produce volumes by poet-novelists on their lists such as Cate Kennedy, Maxine Beneba Clarke and others. A healthy, albeit sometimes rancorous, debate about schools and modes of poetics accompanies these publications. A relatively large volume of reviews—if not, as Ben Etherington has noted, many especially critical ones—engages with these publications. From inside this maelstrom of activity, poetry hardly feels marginal.' (Introduction)