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This piece was first published in Poetry Ireland, Spring 2004.
It is 2,400 words or about 8 printed pages long.
The New Australian Poetry, an anthology of 1979, edited by John Tranter, was consciously modeled after its namesake, Donald Allen’s New American Poetry (of 1960) — for the good reason that it sought to mark the achievement of the revolution in Australian poetry that the American anthology had sparked. It was, in the parlance of the time, an ‘active’ anthology: not a survey of what was best but the advocacy of a certain group of tendencies and an attempt to announce that this movement had arrived and had a history. This latter function meant that, by the time of publication, some of the anthology’s practitioners were already past the apex of their development and attainment. And, as with many active anthologies, some of what it presented was soon to be deemed dull, forced or whatever. But demonstrating that the numbers could be mustered was important for establishing the phenomenon’s bona fides. The major names stood up well and, interestingly, much of the energy was in the tail: younger writers like Forbes and Duggan now seem, along with the editor, to be the major voices associated with the collection — at the expense of names that had got in on the ground floor, the actual ‘generation of ’68’, as the publicity would have it.
This new poetry differed from that in the American anthology in being far narrower and more selective, as befits something coming after. The chief influences were the poetics (if not the actual style) of the Projectivists — Olson and Creeley — and the New York School — O’Hara, Ashbery, Koch, and, increasingly, Ted Berrigan. The Beats had some attention but seemed to lack an aesthetic program. Maybe Whalen was an influence — and, for a while, Robert Duncan. The New York influence continued longer through subsequent Australian poets in this lineage. This is particularly true in Sydney. Two cities dominate Australian poetry, Sydney and Melbourne, an effect of population size.
As the poets have got older the best have continued to grow, and to grow more distinctly individual — so that description in terms of (American) ‘open form’, free verse, and ironic, urban cerebration (and celebration: ‘I’m-in-love-with-the-modern-world’ sort of thing, to quote Jonathon Richman), seems true enough but not to say a great deal about them. (The binary proposed in the 1970s was that of a new, more with-it, urban, American-derived poetic opposed to a more traditional range of forms and diction much attuned to a ‘rural’ Australia and Anglo-Australian values: Les Murray, AD Hope, Robert Gray, say. The polarization bracketed out many writers younger than Hope but older than Murray, who had been closer to the New Criticism’s Americans, Berryman, Lowell, Roethke, Bishop.
The poets I discuss here are at the centre of this ‘new’ writing: John Tranter, Laurie Duggan, John Forbes; or they are related to it — in Pam Brown’s case, an outsider (and not in the anthology) who has seemed to become central, as if supplying a missing term in the equation; or they are, at different distances, inheritors — Cath Kenneally, Cassie Lewis (or Peter Minter, Kate Lilley, Kate Fagan, Adam Aitken and others) — who might draw on the work of Forbes, Tranter and others, but draw as well on other aspects of new writing (subsequent US poetry, the different inflections wrought by ‘theory’ etc.).
In describing these poets to a new audience I feel I’m straying at one moment into hyperbole and another into understatement. The poets themselves will undoubtedly feel that I’m describing someone who is not quite them, or alternatively describing virtual über poets — manifesto versions of themselves — apparently able to work great but rather programmatically worthy feats. Discussing individual poems would be more to the point — but I don’t think space allows.
John Forbes’ work has been the most influential to date. This is attributable to a mixture of the vitality of his writing — a very heady intellection that is exhilarating to follow, possessing great verbal compression and wit — and his seeming to (willingly) typify the ‘problem of the poet’, or of ‘poetry’. This, and the high level of self-consciousness and criticality Forbes brought to bear on the ‘idea’ of Australia — and of Australia vis-à-vis the West, the Old World, Globalization — are central to his appeal. He observes closely a failing liberalism and failing Left, and remarks the diminished role of art, and poetry in particular, in a media-dominated and politically ill world.
Forbes routinely enacts a kind of dark comedy in relation to these themes and in relation to the idea of aesthetic routine itself; a double-edged and amusing mix of idealism and bad conscience, of optimism, foreboding and regret. In terms of influences the obvious ones behind him are Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery and Ted Berrigan. But they don’t explain him. There is a curiously formal, Horatian quality, for one thing, and an air of scholasticism in the marshalling of categories. At the same time his work is invariably singled out as ‘Australian’ in its language and attitudes. Australian nervousness as to our ‘status’ — vis-à-vis the wider world, high or important culture, postcolonialism — is a central preoccupation for a few generations of Australian intellectuals and artists. Forbes torments the idea — when he is not energized by it.
Pam Brown’s writing appeared on the radar in the mid 70s registering at first (from some illusory normative position) as ‘on the margin’. Its mixture of anarchist attitude and enthusiasm for things as non-canonical as Tom Clark, Patti Smith, Jimi Hendrix, Rimbaud, Prévert and Woody Guthrie suggested mere radical-feminist, hip-left enthusiasm to some. A contender? But through the 70s and 80s her work continued to grow in density and authority and to gain strength from the diversity of its tap-roots into energy, ideology and critique outside the tiredly available central sources. Brown seems to have been ‘coming from’ (in one parlance) where others of necessity found they had to be going — towards a more fundamental critique of, and opposition to, the administered world of culture industry and of suppressed conflict and the politics of the middle ground.
Brown’s work has moved from the aphoristic, to chancing a manner more discursive, and in recent books, 50-50 and Text thing, on to an amused, comfortless investigation of language and representation. The work is usually funny, amusing, but finally not-amused, and very contemporary in feel, dealing with what we experience as a fractured, multiplicit cultural present. Brown’s language is spare, always off-centre, jangly, halting and quick. The experience is of an eye, and of a voice that is not charmed by itself. A selected poems, Dear Deliria, is available in the UK from Salt. It has just — as I write — won the NSW Premier’s Award for Poetry.
John Tranter has been the most culturally effective of what has sometimes seemed to outsiders to be his own movement. The movement has refused to materialize, but in cultural mapping he is routinely posited as the counterposing term to that of Les Murray. Tranter’s influence as poet has yet to surface strongly. It is partly that, outside parody (see Forbes’ and Duggan’s essays in his manner), he is not very imitable.
His work has some of the same themes, but is typically veiled and self-effacing, never seeming to speak directly in the poet’s own voice. It tends to have its worries and ironies, and perspectives on contemporary Australia and the contemporary world, yet to offer them as if in lieu of direct statement. The animus can usually be inferred, but not strictly attributed. Tranter’s so far undisputed influence has been as anthologist, an apologist for the new, and as publisher. His web magazine Jacket (at http://jacketmagazine.com/) is one of the most read in the English language. His anthologies have been successful and have established reputations and written part of the history of contemporary Australian poetry. (The Bloodaxe Anthology of Modern Australian Poetry — published in 1991 by Penguin in Australia — is available in the UK and Ireland. It is edited by John Tranter and Philip Mead.) Tranter’s major collections are eagerly awaited and read closely by a large number of Australian poets. Critics treat him unreservedly as major. Tranter’s style is regularly re-tooled, re-invented, so that subsequent titles have tended to push previous high-water marks into the background. Crying in Early Infancy (one hundred sonnets) did this to the earlier Alphabet Murders and Blast Area volumes. Under Berlin seemed to move on again. Tranter’s determined exercise in David Lynch-style schlock genre, The Floor Of Heaven, was a further move. At The Florida seemed to ratchet up some gears further than Under Berlin. Currently Tranter’s work is being promoted in the UK and internationally through volumes published by Salt. A study of Tranter’s work by Cambridge writer Rod Mengham is due in 2006.
There are constants in Tranter’s poetry — a voice that is formidably impersonal yet familiar in tone and nearly always certain. It views a cosmopolitan contemporary West but a West viewed with the eye of an old-fashioned historian, a Gibbon, say. The perspectives drawn are long, the society is regarded with detachment and fatalism. For this reason Tranter’s poetry seems stoical, bleak, or darkly comic. But the suspicion must be that — whether congenial or not — these things are adopted for their effects of authoritative finality of statement, of inevitability, and cliché. It’s a kind of classicism — a vocabulary of signs, tones, gestures, myth in Roland Barthes’ sense. The humour that underlies all this, that comes from it, is that we can enjoy what is offered at a surface level — and do, because the poems are entertaining — yet it is illusion, a perfection of form, a counterfeit so good but that we dare not cash it in. In a sense then the poems demonstrate form — or semiotics. The withdrawal of this so closely observed reality is signalled at the very surface level of the poems: humanist optimism is always undercut, denied, disappointed. If the poems are expressivist it is via the mechanism of presenting, as straw-men, replicas of what the poems do deal with: hidden behind that simulated disappointment at, say, the failure of love (or whatever) is ... the failure of love? Or it may be that the overall falsity is offered as synechdoche for the specular real world and its unconsoling fictions?
Laurie Duggan has examined Australian history and its present through attention to public language, its demotic manifestations, and the manners of daily life. The personal is framed by and contrasted against this. His work has great humour, nearly always understated, and a sort of scrupulous accuracy both as to historical fact and the charting of mental life.
Duggan’s influences and orientation centred on American poetry (and general writing) on ‘place’, on Beats like Whalen, and some English writing like that of Roy Fisher and Gael Turnbull — and further back Pound and Williams. His name used, for years, to be regularly paired with that of his friend John Forbes — probably to Duggan’s disadvantage. But while Forbes was undeniably — and sometimes flashily — brilliant, Duggan’s claim to serious attention can never have been in doubt. Additionally, it now seems to me that Duggan, Forbes, Pam Brown and, say, Alan Wearne, may have supplied some of the best accounts of, and responses to, the last quarter of the twentieth century that Australia has produced.
Duggan’s early work loosened up and flowered into the booklength Under The Weather, a poem of journal and process, geography and quasi-hippy doldrums and angst. It gained greater force and focus in The Great Divide — in which were poems that set out the parameters of much of his later endeavour: serious attention to politics and history as they unravel in the detail of everyday life and public life. ‘The New England Ode’, for example, stands as a corrective and riposte to much of Les Murray’s enshrining of rural Australia. The Ash Range was an epic history poem looking at, and working with and recasting, documentary evidence from the settling of the Gippsland area of the state of Victoria. Memorials is again a book-length poem, elegiac in tone, farewelling Duggan’s recent past: a youth lost gradually to age, and friends departed and departing. It returns to the style of Under The Weather, though by this stage Duggan’s ‘chops’ as he might say, were better. ‘Adventures In Paradise’ (a tongue-in-cheek autobiographical poem telling the life of layabout young poet), his versions of Martial, and his many gnomic two and three-liners, are in Duggan’s alternative, more purely satirical vein. They owe something, originally, to Ed Dorn’s poetry of the late 70s. His recent Mangroves won the Victorian Premier’s poetry award. A New and Selected is to be published in the UK by Shearsman publications. His poetry is capable of great reserve, devastating wit and intelligence, and a kind of goofing-off.
Cath Kenneally — a journalist, reviewer and, lately, novelist — first began publishing poetry in the 90s, making a late start. Her work moves within the parameters associated with the New Australian Poetry without her being a direct inheritor. It is the available style: open, free verse, sometimes using detail collaged together or otherwise juxtaposed, and examining of representations and of the fit of the private and public worlds. But, while the style might be regarded as ‘available’, it is resisted enough by some critics still, her work attacked on occasion for lacking the more traditional beauties of regular verse. Around Here, her first large collection, won the largest of the state poetry awards in Australia. Her second, All Day, All Night was published in the UK by Salt this year.
Cassie Lewis is a poet confessedly, but not obviously, indebted to John Forbes. She knew him as a poetry tutor and took a number of lessons to heart. The work is different from Forbes’ but Lewis identifies qualities and desiderata in her writing attributable to him. Forbes has not always been a good influence on poets — a few have been too in his thrall and reduced to imitation and emulation. Lewis works a quite different territory. It is typically a poetry that seems impacted, tensed, and then to break forth from that bounded state with an assertive or declarative energy. Its content is more avowedly emotional, its attention less focused on the discourse of power. Her work bears little relation, I think, to the US writing that helped Tranter’s ‘generation of ’68’ into being. Lewis lives now in America.
http://april.edu.au/bolton-k/mod-aust-po.shtml