The battleground of Australian poetry

Trading art for animosity.

Poetry in Australia seems to be enjoying something of a boom. Mainstream Australian cultural agents, such as they are, pay scant attention to the work of the country’s contemporary poets-I can’t recall a book of poetry ever being discussed on ABC TV’s The Book Club-and the view of Australia as a relatively anti-intellectual, unliterary milieu persists, and yet thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of people regularly participate in the writing, performance, publication and teaching of poetry in today’s Australia. Attempts at commercialising poetry have, for better or for worse, failed to turn this field into a tangible culture industry, but this failure has not dissuaded countless writers, readers, publishers, students and teachers from actively taking part in producing and propagating the most ancient of literary arts in our post-industrial, hyper-postmodern cultural scenes.