Cirrus@Austlit

‘Criticism is committed … to helping us to understand poems as significant utterances. But it must ensure that in its desire to produce ultimate meaning it does not purchase intelligibility at the cost of blindness: blindness to the complexity of those non-meaningful features which differentiate poetry from everyday language and make it something other than an external thematic statement about an already-known world.’ (Veronica Forrest-Thomson)

'I take my title and epigraph from Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s separatist manifesto, Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry. First published posthumously in 1978, Poetic Artifice is more than what its unassumingly vague subtitle suggests. In addition to being a ‘theory of twentieth-century poetry’, it is also: an ABC of reading, an extended argument with the critic William Empson, a critical genealogy of technical innovations from John Donne to Dada, and a fanatically clear-sighted insistence that poems use language other than to exchange facts and observations about the world outside themselves. The ‘Artifice’ in Forrest-Thomson’s title is the name for the total process by which a poem marks language – adding emphasis through typography and lineation, rhyme, metrico-rhythmic patterning, etc. – so as to hijack its ordinary communicative usages and arrive at a meaning that is as much about itself as it is about the world at large, a meaning that subsumes thematic content under a larger concern about the efficacy of its own meaning-making structures.' (Bad Naturalisations: James Jiang, Introduction)

'Best of Australian Poems is an annual anthology collecting previously published and unpublished poems to create a poetic snapshot and barometer of the year that was. Capturing the richness and diversity of Australian poetry across a timeframe of 1 July 2022–1 August 2023, the series (now in its third year) will explore how poetic responses to the contemporary moment develop with each passing year.' 

'The 2023 book opens with an introduction by its editors, highly respected poets and editors Gig Ryan and Panda Wong. Gig Ryan is one of the country’s most highly recognised and read poets, with major awards for her poetry over decades, and a prominent publication profile both here and overseas. Panda Wong is on the vanguard of Australian literature as a poet, editor and performer whose work spans the page, stage and digital space. Previous editors of this prestigious series have been Ellen van Neerven and Toby Fitch (2021), and Jeanine Leane and Judith Beveridge (2022).

'The Best of Australian Poems (BoAP) series is published by Australia’s national poetry organisation, Australian Poetry, and will feature two different guest editors each year, to amplify the range of voices selected. It is funded by the Australia Council for the Arts and individual patrons.' (Publication summary)