15th May 2010
Recent comments on Facebook concerning poetry and poetry prizes have made
me realise how static and homogeneous poetry published in Australia is. Free verse -
unmetred, unrhymed poetry of varying line length - still reigns supreme. Yet the briefest
of glances at the world's top literary magazines, such as
The London Magazine, which has
been going since 1732, shows the much greater variety of poetry published in the rest of
the world. The last editor of
The London Magazine, Sebastian Barker, for example, writes
both free verse and traditional lyrics (see his collection
Guarding the Border).
In my recent interview in
IP News 46 I suggested that the incestuous peer review
process, which extends all the way to the Literature Board of the Australia Council and
controls which writers receive money and get published, is stifling Australian writing.
Parochial writers are entrenched and are rewarding others of their kind. It is hard not to
conclude that this observation applies particularly to Australian poetry. The seeker after
variety and richness in Australian poetry will be disappointed to find, on the one hand,
overly imagistic rhapsodies and, on the other, the poetic equivalent of the Rorschach Test
(both tendencies coming together, egregiously, in the verse of Kinsella).
Free verse is a form of modernism; and all modernism has a reactionary value.
Free verse was originally a reaction against the traditional rhymed and metrical kind of
poetry, just as a filmmaker will sometimes film in black and white to make a reactionary
comment about films shot in colour. But with poetry in Australia the revolution, absurdly,
has become the establishment. Metrical, rhymed verse (or verse that employs it) is seldom
published. Yet free verse no longer has anything to fight against! It is paralysed force,
gesture without motion (to quote TS Eliot); and the Hollow Men who control our literary
magazines apparently never think to question
why poetry is being written exclusively this
way.
A film maker who shoots in black and white would never deny the rich signifying
power of colour. So poets should not turn their backs on the immense signifying
possibilities of structured word sound. What is needed is a new kind of poetry - a
postmodern poetry - that is free to draw on both the devices of free verse and the devices
(rhyme, meter, etc) of traditional poetry.
