Cirrus@Austlit

'The new millennium has witnessed a resurgence in poetry as its condensed form, attention to feeling, and capacity to capture the zeitgeist attracts more readers than ever before. Australia has been at the forefront of experimenting with emergent and hybrid forms such as the verse novel, prose poetry, digital poetries, and poetic biography. Among the first to realise the potential of the Internet to create a vibrant cross-cultural dialogue around poetry and poetics, Australians initiated online journals that reached out globally like Jacket and Cordite Poetry Review. Australia’s poets have increasingly garnered international recognition. Les Murray was dubbed “one of the superleague that includes Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and Joseph Brodsky” by the Independent on Sunday (quoted in Davie) while Dan Chiasson discerned in The New Yorker that Murray was “routinely mentioned among the three of four leading-English language poets.” In 2017, Australian poet Ali Cobby Eckermann was the first Indigenous writer worldwide to be awarded Yale University’s prestigious Windham Campbell Prize.'

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'This chapter considers how understandings of poet and nation in Australia are divided between the settler institutions of literature and poetry and Indigenous traditions. For white Australia, nation functions as a mythic and political collective, while for First Nations people, it is an alien, oppressive framework that ignores sovereignty and is of short historical duration. The chapter considers how colonial and early Federation poets conceived of Australia as a nation in relation to the global North while post-Federation poets like A. D. Hope and Ania Walwicz identify and critique a national consciousness from quite different standpoints. The chapter includes an analysis of a proposed poetic preamble to the Australian Constitution that was defeated by referendum, along with a move to become a republic. The chapter outlines the recognition of Indigenous land rights through the Mabo decision (1992) and its impact on literature. Lastly, it considers how contemporary Aboriginal writer Evelyn Araluen satirically rejects ongoing national mythologies in her recent work, Dropbear (2021).'

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' This chapter contextualises Australia’s involvement in major conflicts in light of the European invasion of Australia and the settler-colonial imaginary. It considers how poetry shaped the ANZAC myth extended settler masculinities and portrayed the soldier as both ordinary and extraordinary. The chapter considers divergent trajectories in World War II poetry, including the work of Kenneth Slessor, J. S. Manifold, James McAuley, and Douglas Stewart. It also considers responses to the Vietnam War, such as Bruce Dawe’s “Homecoming.” While the chapter investigates the dismantling of the soldier myth in late twentieth-century poetry, it also notes colonial presumptions persisting in works like Les Murray’s “Visiting Anzac in the Year of Metrification.” It then outlines the emergence of Indigenous counter-narratives to the violence of settler colonialism.'

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'This chapter discusses the importance of periodicals in the development of Australian poetry. It discusses the centrality of the Bulletin to an emergent nationalist tradition, before considering the Vitalist movement through Vision and the encouragement of modernism in Stream and Angry Penguins. It argues that the academic journal Southerly reinforced an early canon of Australian poetry in the 1940s while the establishment of Overland and Quadrant represented differing political poles in the 1950s. It maps a growing sense of regional diversity through magazines like Westerly, Island, and LINQ, which would supplement Meanjin’s early focus. The chapter then outlines the support of a new generation of writers in the 1970s through Poetry Magazine, later New Poetry, and Poetry Australia. While arguing for Scripsi’s crucial role in the 1980s, the chapter points to the emergence of specialist little magazines around work, multiculturalism, and feminism. The chapter discusses how this diversity would be strengthened in the 1990s, while the emergence of online journals like Jacket and Cordite Poetry Review provided renewed vibrancy and global recognition for Australian poetry.'

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‘This chapter considers how nineteenth-century poetry in Australia adapted European conceptualisations of the sublime and the gothic to articulate a literal inability to settle on the land. It argues that settler poetry has a difficulty with being grounded: its representations have a tendency to hover, sublimely, above the surface of the earth; or, if forced under, they refuse to simply die: but live on, as gothic, revenant, voices. It draws on popular and canonical examples like A. B. (Banjo) Paterson’s “The Man from Snowy River” and “Waltzing Matilda,” Adam Lindsay Gordon’s “The Sick Stockrider,” and Mary Gilmore’s “Old Botany Bay,” as well as examples that have been sourced from historical archives.’

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' This chapter investigates how Australian women poets mobilised Romantic sensibility and the figure of the poetess to navigate the complex dynamic between liminality and voice. It proposes a transnational extension of a female Romantic tradition to advocate for the rights of those disempowered in colonial and patriarchal structures. The chapter explores how writers like Eliza Hamilton Dunlop, Mary Bailey, and Caroline Leakey linked themes of exile and transportation with Romantic tropes such as the ‘fallen woman.’ It demonstrates how their poetry reveals an emotional range that extends the domestic affections into expressions of anger and distress at injustices. It also considers how religion informed their responses to regimes of regulation. The chapter also analyses Ada Cambridge’s critique of marriage in the suppressed volume Unspoken Thoughts, as well as her amplification of a broader gendering of harm and shame. ' 

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'This chapter outlines how Christopher Brennan ushered in an experimental strand of Australian poetry through his engagement with French Symbolism, which was followed by John Shaw Nielson’s celebration of intuition and the more-than-human. It considers Nietzschean vitalism in Kenneth Slessor’s representation of urban Sydney and analyses the beauty and nihilism of his “Five Bells.” The chapter also argues that Lesbia Harford’s poetry was modernist in its radical openness about female sexuality and the female body, its minimalist representation of the working life of modern women, and lack of Romantic assumptions in her treatment of the natural world. It further considers the rhetorical force and frankness of queer desire in the work of Anna Wickham, before addressing the hoax poet Ern Malley.'

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'This chapter outlines how the 1970s brought radical expression, new explorations of poetic persona, and increasing belief in the poet’s role to advocate for rights and freedoms. It argues that anthologies seeking to capture the zeitgeist failed to do so, sometimes due to using frameworks borrowed from North America that elided local diversity. The chapter asserts that small press culture constituted a provisional, heterogeneous commons that undid traditional definitions of authorship and form, and offered a space to air the previously taboo. It traces the turn to America as well as to popular culture, other media, and documentary. Through an examination of Michael Dransfield’s reception, it demonstrates how umbrella terms delimit complex individual poetics while demonstrating affiliations in Dransfield’s self-examination with contemporaries like Pam Brown, Nigel Roberts, and Vicki Viidkikas. The chapter also considers the impact of the first anthology of women’s poetry, Mother, I’m Rooted. It redresses the elision of its editor, Kate Jennings, from other anthologies and critical framings of the period, as well as the marginalisation of Kevin Gilbert.'

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'This chapter traces the development of Judith Wright’s poetics, outlining her early focus on specific places and their legacies rather than on ideas of nation. It offers close readings of poems like “South of My Days,” “Bullocky,” and “Bora Ring.” The chapter then identifies mid-career attention to interpersonal relations before considering Wright’s growing awareness of settler-colonial privilege, Aboriginal sovereignty, different orders of temporality, and a continued expression of love for the land. The chapter reflects on the impact of Wright’s friendship with Aboriginal poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal and analyses “Two Dreamtimes.” It also examines Wright’s decision in 1990 to forego writing poetry in order to embrace environmental activism.' 

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‘This chapter investigates Gwen Harwood’s subversion of gendered presumptions of authorship and style. After discussing her skilful redress of a male-dominant literary culture through hoax poetry, it considers how Harwood mobilised male personae to critique the cultural valuing of science and reason, explore sexual immorality, and address women’s experience of domesticity. It discusses how Harwood celebrated motherhood but was also one of the earliest writers to articulate its associated realities of exhaustion, loss of self, and feelings of despair and rage. The chapter argues that Harwood lays important groundwork for second-wave feminism while representing the ambiguities of care and connection. The chapter also engages with Harwood’s later exploration of death and the dynamic between sex and spirituality.’ 

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'The chapter attends to Les Murray’s fusion of ancient and modern frameworks, forms and, subject matter. It provides an analysis of “The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Cycle” in light of his desire to draw together the three strands he viewed as shaping Australian culture: Aboriginal, rural, and urban. The chapter also discusses Murray’s formal inventiveness and comic playfulness with language, and his interest in the relationship between poetry and the divine. The chapter reads Murray’s self-definition as an outsider in light of his valuing of a pastoral-georgic tradition and a focus on subjects and settings beyond the metropolitan. The chapter argues that while Murray engaged with the vernacular and was anti-modernist in outlook, his style is, nevertheless, sophisticated and neo-modernist in its technical innovation.'

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'The chapter argues that Fogarty’s lyric “I” emerges out of questioning and inverting the institutional and political forces that define his work. It traces the development of his poetry as political dialogue through the context of his childhood at Cherbourg Aboriginal Reserve, his participation in community programs, the National Black Theatre, and the emergent Australian Black Panther Party. It includes his role in the Aboriginal land rights movement, the Black Resource Centre collective, and his engagement with Black Studies courses. The chapter also outlines the reception of Fogarty’s poetry and the challenges that his resistant poetics poses to the field of ‘Australian literature.’ The chapter investigates how Fogarty creates an ecology of connections between the human and non-human, distinguishes his writing from a prior generation of Aboriginal writers, fostered inter-Indigenous and cross-cultural connections internationally, and has many intimate addresses, including poems to his brother, whose death in custody triggered political marches and has tragic resonance today.'

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'Taking Kerry Reed-Gilbert’s anthology The Strength of Us as Women: Black Women Speak (2000) as touchstone, the chapter undertakes a conversation between two Aboriginal women poets from Narungga and Wiradjuri standpoints about the transformative power of Indigenous poetry and its significant contribution to literature in the world. Offering an alternative to the essay, the authors discuss embodied engagements with the colonial archive and the theme of relationality that informs so much of Aboriginal writing. The chapter considers the potential of poetry to be both an affective tool and literary intervention. It outlines the methods of Gathering and Archival-Poetic praxis as ways to explore the counter-narrative potential of poetry. In considering the role of memory work and memory-making, the authors also discuss blood memory and body memory.'

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'Identifying a predominant focus in spatial poetics in Asian Australian poetries, this chapter suggests that diasporic self-mapping is often ambivalent as poets navigate shifting or liminal spaces. The chapter argues that geopolitical differences distinguish Asian Australian experiences from those of their Asian American counterparts. It examines the mediation of migration and understanding of past and present in the work of Ee Tiang Hong, and how transnational mobility informs the hybrid and spliced practice of Ouyang Yu and Merlinda Bobis. The chapter analyses an intergenerational feminist interest in borders and journeys in the work of Bobis and Eunice Andrada. It then examines how later-generation poets may face quite different challenges in navigating ancestral homeland and the search for connections, or, alternatively, find a freedom in travelling and uncertainty. The chapter also considers transcultural and translational strategies, and discusses Omar Sakr’s mapping of “unbelonging.” The chapter concludes by asserting that the rich heterogeneity of poetries cannot be reduced to a single term, even in such a disruptor term as “Asian Australian.”'

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'The chapter outlines the mid-twentieth century debate over an Athenian-Boeotian divide in Australian literature, which extended an earlier false dichotomy between city and the bush through distinguishing between the expatriate and the writer who stays at home. Despite a global dispersion of Australian writers, it argues that most scholarship has tended to focus on those in Britain. The chapter discerns that the racialisation underscoring who is generally considered ‘expatriate’ renders the term problematic and that many Australian diasporic poets define themselves through other means. It also finds that many experience feelings of shame, anger, and guilt over the colonial violence shaping Australia. The chapter considers the development of Lola Ridge’s poetics while in Australia before considering Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s poem “Yussef (Hi-Jack),” written during a hijacking of her plane by Palestinian militants, and the poetry Oodgeroo wrote in China. The chapter foregrounds the significance of First Nations mobility, engaging with the London writing of Aboriginal activist A. M. Fernando in the 1920s and writing of recent poets like Ellen Van Neerven.'

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'This chapter discusses how writing emerging out of Gay Liberation in the 1970s offered an alternative to the masculine heteronormativity that dominated the Australian literary tradition. Emphasised that the personal was political, it foregrounded private sensuality, an exploration of the everyday, and a critique of gay discrimination. The chapter traces the development of a diversifying community in the 1980s through writing collectives, anthologies, and journals. A broadening of the spectrum of LGBTQ+ poetry in the 1990s and 2000s was informed by queer understandings of sexuality. It saw lesbian writers test the limits of lyrical poetry and an era of mainstream popularity, as exemplified in Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask. The chapter considers how LGBTQ+ poets of colour have critiqued ideas of national belonging and white subjecthood. It then discusses the exploration of embodiment, including the turn to autotheory by contemporary trans and genderqueer writers, resistance of ableist discourses, and the navigation of illness, such as AIDS, mental illness, and chronic pain.'

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'This chapter argues that ecopoetry is too easily absorbed back into the logics of capitalism and colonialism. Aware of the delimiting forces surrounding its own context, the chapter argues to be taken not as an essay but as an action. It argues that for a poem to bring about environmental change, it must be part of connected interventions. The chapter outlines the poetic yarning between John Kinsella and Charmaine Papertalk Green, a member of the Wajarri, Badimaya, and Nhanagardi people of the Yamaji Nation, as a means of generative protest. It also provides an example of poems written in medias res in the collective resistance to a proposal to build bike trails on Walwalinj, a mountain sacred to the Ballardong Noongar people. This example demonstrates a poem is shaped by the particular situation and how the poem is one part of a network of actions that formed a campaign that was led by Aboriginal elders. The chapter also includes collaborative poetry written during the Roe 8 Highway protests in 2016 and poetry protesting the proposed destruction of the Julimar Forest by mining companies.'

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'Tracing the verse novel back to C. J. Dennis’s The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke (1909–15), the chapter argues that the form has been particularly vibrant and popular in Australia, including among children and young adults. It then examines prose poetry, including microliterature, arguing for its significance in addressing the quotidian, questions of identity, and feminism. The chapter considers how prose poetry accommodates engagements with other forms and systems of knowledge, such as art, music, science, and mathematics, and its capacity for defamiliarisation and the uncanny. Lastly, the chapter considers poetic or verse biography, from the explorer narratives of the mid twentieth century to experimentation with life-writing more recently. It foregrounds intersections with documentary poetry and creative engagements with the archive, including scope to critique and resist colonial histories.'

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