Jennifer Maiden

Kinsella invited poets to send between ten and a dozen poems to him as a basis for selection. While he, as we shall see, claims not to employ aesthetic, qualitative, canonical standards, many of the poets do the job for him as, one imagines, he hoped they would. Although contemporary, these are generally not new works. Most have been in either one of the poet’s books, a Best Poems from one year or another, or a well-known journal. It feels as if the poets are exercising some objective form of quality control. The process works: what a poet/Kinsella has chosen to represent them, with or without quotation marks, is generally apt – Ken Bolton’s ‘An Australian Suburban Garden’, say, or ‘The Audience’ by Jennifer Maiden, or even Kinsella’s own ‘Goat’.

In his introduction, Kinsella goes to some lengths to disavow any suggestion of what he calls literary canonicity or of national representation. He displays something of a phobia about representation in general: how the poets are represented by their work, how this anthology will represent contemporary Australian poetry in America, whether it represents anything at all. His main defence against undue assumption is to fence in dubious, value-laden terms with inverted commas: ‘aesthetic’; ‘Australian poetry’; ‘represented’; and even ‘needed’. He seems to be saying: ‘Look, I know these words exist, and they are hard to avoid, but I have got their number and won’t be ensnared by them.’

‘Kinsella’s impulses are generous and inclusive, and they shine through his sometimes over-earnest, politically correct prose style’

Kinsella invited poets to send in poems for him to select from, so that their selections would reflect their current practice, or at least their view of it. ‘I wanted then to select “down”, to create the diverse and sometimes contradictory conversations which I feel are necessary to show “outsiders” the complexities of the many aspects and angles of “Australian poetry”.’ He sees himself as a facilitator rather than a canoniser, and all arguments about who should be in or out of an anthology like this as pointless. Given the absence of more than a few notable figures, for whatever reason, it is understandable, and quite reasonable, that he should dismiss the arguments in advance. Besides, he says, ‘there is no hierarchy I acknowledge or believe in at work here’, and what matters is ‘how the poets and readers deal with this community that has been artificially induced’.

Kinsella’s impulses are generous and inclusive, and they shine through his sometimes over-earnest, politically correct prose style. For example, he says that ‘there are no aesthetics at work. I do not select on the basis of beauty: neither do I search for “satisfaction” or “art for art’s sake”. I do, of course, consider the nature of the poem, the attributes that inform it as a creative object, but I profoundly distrust any form of aesthetic distancing.’ He must be perfectly well aware that this is hard to believe, as well as being somewhat contradictory: the attributes that inform a poem as a creative object are aesthetic ones, and it is telling that he sees beauty as ‘aesthetic distancing’.

John Kinsella

At such points, Kinsella has something of the puritan iconoclast about him: it is as if the poems in the anthology have chosen themselves in some predestined way. He could, one might feel, add ‘Calvinist’ to his self-description as an anarchist, vegan, pacifist, and environmental activist. What is disarming is that, while he says that ‘the reader makes the text’, he does so not as an argument-ending party trick but as a reason to make his collection as varied and exploratory as possible – something that has in fact distinguished his attitude to anthologising over the years.

Kinsella says explicitly that he knows many of the poets included would ‘strongly and firmly disagree’ with many of his views on Australian poetry and politics, and that ‘they have offered their poems for this anthology in the spirit of community and respect for difference, and that to me is the bold and exciting thing about this collection’. His distinctive mix of the ingenuous and disingenuous is on display here, because while it may be true, it is hard to imagine many poets, major or minor, conservative or avant-garde, refusing to be in a major anthology because of some perceived intellectual difference with the editor.

‘Kinsella has something of the puritan iconoclast about him: it is as if the poems in the anthology have chosen themselves in some predestined way’

Certainly the more august(an) strand, particularly of older male poets, is comprehensively represented – in fact the impression the anthology leaves is that Australian male poets have a leaning towards a sober-sided, learned perspective, often precisely referential and lyrical, but sometimes surprisingly orotund. Poets of some consequence who would have counterweighed this feeling are mysteriously absent (or not so mysteriously, given Kinsella’s personal history with some of them). The female poets, on the other hand, and I stress this is a general impression, manage to combine innovation, emotion, and intellect with élan and lightness.

Kinsella also makes ethnicity, diversity, and colonialism central to his ‘definition’ of this collection, particularly the assertion that ‘a paranoid reading of Australian literature across the board soon reveals that knowledge and crisis over occupying stolen lands, and the damage inflicted in the ongoing state of dispossession, gnaws at the work of most Australian poets’. As he says, many of the poets he has included might strongly disagree, but the proposition, once stated, will not go away, rather like Humphrey McQueen’s remark about Peter Booth to the effect that his blank abstracts were more frightening than the paintings that actually had grotesque, monstrous figures in them.

There are indigenous poets here, Anita Heiss, for example, and Alf Taylor, but we read them within the ongoing dialogue Kinsella says all poets are part of, as well as with the proposition in mind. It is hard to escape the feeling, though, despite the presence of Ouyang Yu, the Chilean-born Juan Garrido-Salgado, π.O., and a few others, that Australian poetry, for all its formal and intellectual vigour and variety is still solidly monocultural at its core. How ironic that it should be John Kinsella who demonstrates this continuing exclusion to us.