Langford seems to view poetry as part of a humanist project ‘to disarm and countermand the determinism of biology’. His bêtes noires are hierarchies and power. ‘The biological narrative constitutes others as threats to or allies of the self; the poem and its equivalents constitute others as presences equal to the self.’ As I read Microtexts, a poem’s ‘equivalents’ might include drawings, paintings and musical forms enabling dance. ‘Dance’ is perhaps overused (nineteen times) in Microtexts as a metaphor for how poetry works and what reading is. But it serves to remind us that we are being invited, and provoked, to respond to Langford’s text.

A poem’s non-‘equivalents’ would, Langford suggests, include ‘national anthems ... football songs, punk, heavy metal’, advertising copy, and sport: ‘Sport is the simplest form of drama. Its only meaning is success.’ This differs from the ancient Greeks’ view that ‘all the ... games of art’ are sacred, including what we now call sport. It differs also from the twentieth-century philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer who argues that ‘what holds the player in its spell ... is the game itself’. Nonetheless, the Greeks held the game of poetry sacred and, in Microtexts, Martin Langford addresses the spirit of poetry: how it moves, what it does.

Poetry can invoke our experience of the forces of the world such that we say: yes, that is what the various gravities feel like. This articulation of the relative weight of things is important: it is a way of coming to an appreciation of their interactions, which we must do before we can discover what we really feel about them.

This is serious and fine. The following lines from Rilke’s remarkable poem ‘The Merry-go-round’ might illustrate it: ‘the stud of horses, variously bright, / all from that land that long remains in sight / before it ultimately disappears’ (from R.M. Leishman’s translation).

Yet Alexander Pope’s line, ‘And wretches hang, that jurymen may dine’ (from The Rape of the Lock) is, in my reading, as attentive to ‘the relative weight of things’ as Rilke’s poem. I think Langford would endorse Rilke’s subtlety and tenderness, but what would he have to say about the iconoclasm, irony and narrative skills of Pope? Langford interrogates all three with some severity: for example, ‘The ironic voice invokes the aid of a witness to validate its self-pity.’ But it would take a very reductive argument to make that aphorism stick to Pope. Microtexts doesn’t quote any poetry at us, which is its misfortune and ours.

One of the difficulties of Microtexts is its expenditure of balanced phrases (the prose rhythms may evoke Dr Johnson to some ears) on not-unfamiliar themes: ‘It is difficult to trust writers who do not acknowledge the emotions driving their perspectives. One immediately wants to know whether such omissions are matters of calculation or ignorance.’ The late Vicki Viidikas often lectured her friends about the same thing, though not in such formal phrasing. Viidikas is not mentioned in Langford’s discussion of Australian literary autodidacts, though she was one (‘they all seem to be men’). Many of Langford’s remarks are, as Viidikas’s often were, dogmatic but informed practical observations: ‘the core of any artwork is the emotion it enacts, and if it is questionable – if it is self-pitying ... or enchanted by pain or power – no amount of skill or inventiveness can redeem it.’

‘Aphorism’ comes from the Greek ‘aphorismos’, meaning ‘definition’. ‘Aphorismos’ is from ‘aphorizo’, which also holds the meanings ‘boundary’ (‘horos’) and horizon. Langford draws a decisive boundary between lyric poetry, which ‘seeks the moment out ... wants to enact it in words’, and ‘narratives of the enlargement of the self’ which ‘[evoke] travail from the safety of the loungeroom’ and ‘manipulate’ the reader or viewer ‘by false trails and withheld information’, keeping us ‘addicted to vicarious triumphs’. It is a clear distinction: on one side, the lyric – ‘an attempt to transcend the gestures of power out of which it is constructed’; on the other, the enlargement narrative, ‘a function of the discourse of power’ that ‘places the self at the centre of the universe’ and offers, as emotional satisfactions, ‘release-from-anxiety, or ... triumph’. No surprise that the latter ‘is exemplified by most of the popular genres – romance, thrillers, crime, and by almost everything that comes out of Hollywood’.

Yet Microtexts may seem to generate a narrative of its own. It commences with a question, ‘What can save us from our passion for the narrative enlargements of the self?’, and begins its closure, alas, with a trivialisation from Romantic aesthetics: ‘There is no such thing as art. There is only taste.’ But at least it hints at a Promised Land, a poetry that ‘gets the balance right between what is owed to the self, and what is owed to the other’. Readers may like to consider this book an invitation – to scribble in the margins, to look things up, to write back.