Cirrus@Austlit

'I had never thought that much about how poems looked until I read Rosemary Huisman’s The Written Poem. The appearance of the poem was something I pretty well took for granted. Maybe that was the heritage of my English puritan background, a distrust of keeping up appearances – the sort of thing that provoked Luke Slattery, when he was editing the now defunct Australian Literary Review, to ask me if I ever ironed my shirts. I explained that I was following the New York crumpled look, redolent of the New York poets of the 1970s; or the Beat look, of the Beat poets of the 1950s and 60s, in their beaten-up and down-beaten aspect more than in the beatitude associations.' (Introduction)