This is surface stuff, but the darker currents run on down deep. A couple of poets told me what they thought about this new issue of Salt before they had even read it. When Ivor lndyk gave Kinsella’s Poems 1980–1994 an unfavourable review in July’s ABR, faxes went flying around the world, phones were abuzz and Kinsella emailed a form letter to friends and foes saying he was ‘withdrawing from the literary community completely’. My first response was ‘what literary community?’ One cannot complain about the standard of the literary debate if you don’t contribute to it. What could be a vital and stimulating exchange of ideas has been poisoned by the fact that the Australia Council’s fellowships have created a couple of generations of poets who are savagely competitive. There is not enough money and there are too many ‘professional poets’. This brings to mind the wisdom of the Chinese tradition where artists were not taken seriously unless they were amateurs. Calligraphic painters did not create works for sale (even the word work in this context reveals the inadequacy of English to deal with the concept). Chinese artists dealt with spiritual matters, the work was contemplative and ritualistic, but with the climate prevailing in this country, poetry coming from such inner resources would be seen as pure whimsy.

The new issue of Salt is worthy of a reading that occurs in the context of the recent history of literary magazines in this country. The first issue appeared in 1990 and ambitiously identified itself as Salt, Volume I, Number 1. Kinsella was canny in not publishing an editorial nor promising regularity in Salt’s appearance. With little backing, Kinsella has pulled it along by will power and his belief in what he is doing. Along the way, six substantial, well-produced books have been published. These volumes constitute ten issues of the journal, the last two co-published with Fremantle Arts Centre Press, which has courageously joined forces with Folio. The new issue is simply called Salt Volume 10. It looks good, over 300 pages on quality paper, the typography has been redesigned and now the whole thing feels better than ever. There is a photograph by Simon Cowling on the cover in full colour and celloglazed. The bookshops will love it.

This venture is a back to front version of what happened with the magazines Kinsella modelled his publication on, New Poetry and Scripsi. When Hale & Iremonger and Oxford University Press respectively came to their rescue, like bodies rejecting heart transplants, New Poetry and Scripsi slowly died. Fremantle Arts Centre Press, with its publishing resources, has relieved Salt of the sheer grind of putting a magazine through the press and left its editor free to actually edit. The result shows in this issue. The improvement, however, creates a higher expectation in the reader for something less tangible than a shiny look. Aside from the wealth of high quality contributions from some of the best poets writing anywhere, there is something about the editorial flow that seems a bit jerky.

There’s an almost indefinable quality in every great literary magazine, running through the pages like a watermark. It’s a combination of book-design, editorial policy, proof­reading style, overall shape. Editorial policies have fluctuating qualities, a good one is tidal, it has governing principles that can vary according to the phases of the moon, the literary climate. The other quality every successful journal needs before it can navigate the oceans of its subscribers’ imaginations is even more mysterious, editorial philosophy.

I think you could say this venture is in the spirit of small press publishing in poetry that goes back to Harriet Monroe and Ezra Pound. In this country, there was Grace Perry, who published a whole issue of previously unpublished work by Pound. Her Poetry Australia also published issues devoted to translations. In the 1970s, New Poetry, the magazine I edited and published, started printing American and English poets and critics. By the time our subscription list hit the two thousand mark,the Lit. Board started complaining about the balance of Australian poets. New Poetry’s ‘internationalist’ editorial policy came under a lot of criticism from everyone except our subscribers.

The idea was to see our poetry in context with international traditions and developments. Instead of sending our poets overseas, we invited poets from other countries to publish in New Poetry. There were no travelling fellowships or studios in Italy or France for Australian poets and it was good value even when New Poetry sponsored Robert Duncan’s Australian tour. Scripsi continued publishing internationally known poets into the 1990s and now we have the excellent HEAT publishing our poets alongside the best from the rest of the world. Salt will do well if it continues on as a poetry magazine. After all we haven’t had one since New Poetry.

There are small magazines that publish poetry (a couple publish only poetry), but without book reviews and critical essays they are simply small anthologies. This is where this new issue of Salt is weakest: there are no book reviews. Poets thrive on the stimulation created by good book reviews. As Charles Olson says, ‘the feed-back proves/feed-back’s the law’. Otherwise, Salt Volume 10 holds up well – internationalist, with a strong component of linguistically innovative poetry along with some traditional work. There is imaginative prose, a conversation between Edgar Allan Poe’s wife Virginia and family friend Marie Louise Shew, written by Brenda Walker; a piece called ‘[Mayapanthe]: a Poetics of the Link, Poetics of the World-Wide Webb from the perspective of the Electronic Poetry Centre wings at Buffalo University’; an essay by Veronica Brady on Judith Wright’s poetic and political ‘translations’; prose by Hélène Cixous in French with a translation by Tracy Ryan; three fine poems by Gunnar Harding with translations from the Swedish by Anselm Hollo, alongside five poems by Pierre Alferi published in their original language (this bilingual publication indicates Kinsella’s editorial generosity). There is also an interesting interview that will delight readers who enjoy the poetry of Kevin Hart.

Some of the best poems are by John Tranter, Jennifer Maiden, Adam Aitken, Peter Minter, Paul Hoover, Zan Ross, and Frances Rouse. There is an extract from a long poem by Alan Wearne, ‘Stubbsy’, that reads well. Craig Stubbs is a failed entrepreneur holed up in one of his former empire’s few remaining properties, Crazy Horse, a bar in a large South-East Asian city. It is like a post-modern version of Francis Webb’s ‘A Drum For Ben Boyd’. The prose foreword with a quote from Christopher Skase makes interesting reading alongside Webb’s foreword about Boyd.

There are some excellent language-based poets in this issue. Lyn Hejinian has an excerpt from ‘A Border Comedy’ – a short quote should give some indication of her powerful voice:

Their hostility is genuine
The battle will be real and I am a man
I am the ‘hero’
The heroine is on my side and she parades along the old wall
           wearing a mask
An enemy warrior from the other side of the wall meets her and
           removes his shirt
He is thin, tall, and aroused
The enemy plans to rape the heroine
I must seek mystical aid among the ferns

It makes me think of Gig Ryan’s new work, with its agile use of irony and controlled poetic tone with a mix of colloquial language and high art. To read poets like Hejinian alongside Ryan and Jennifer Maiden gives us a perspective, and it is stimulating and reassuring to see our poets holding their own in an international context. Here’s a quote from Maiden’s brilliantly sustained ‘Look, I’m Standing On No-Floor’ where her prose syntax juxtaposes the tone of despair carried in the voice’s calm utterance:

hell, when you’re standing on no-floor, you skate
or fall or just stay-put, appreciate
the elevation... and how women...
had gone out to pay/a photographer to give them back their
           bodies.
One works better in all areas, I think, with
a confidence in one’s geography, and if
there’s a vaginal velvet emptiness at centre
studded with that vaginal/diamond mine of nerves,
no-floor is not a life-defining problem.

There is a long poem by Charles Bernstein, ‘Log Rhythms’, that is clever and very funny. It shows how the L =A= N = G = U =A= G = E poets are easing their doctrinaire approach. It almost verges on something like an abstract narrative, making it much more readable than a lot of Bernstein’s work from the eighties. The poems by Rae Armantrout are wonderful surreal lyrics:

‘What’s the worst that could happen? ‘Schools of fish are trapped / In these pools, / say the anchors / Who hang / On nursing home walls.’...We’re the target audience’. There are more poems along these lines from Douglas Messerli and Travis Ortiz. There is a fine long poem by Peter Riley, ‘Alstonefield’, a meditation on walking through real and imaginary landscapes, with a lyrical river that flows through the entire poem.

It is interesting to read John Tranter’s ‘Shelter Bay’ in this company, a new development in Tranter’s work, a cross between the narratives in his The Floor Of Heaven and the dark lyrics of Under Berlin. There’s a description of an artist looking back over his life; it speaks about the difference between success and the quality of the art produced over a lifetime. It concludes:

‘Shark eat shark’

say the sharks. Resigning from the obligations
of your art and craft like that, it was just a gesture,
don’t you know the guys are laughing at you, at your
foolish pride? Sissy, or prig, take your pick,
they can see you waving spitefully from the receding deck,
you, hoping to become distant, if success won’t have you,
hoping to disappear into the deepest water.

In this poem, Tranter demonstrates that it is the poetry, the making of art, that really sustains an artist’s life, not the acceptance by society, or even by Eliot’s concept of an ‘ideal reader’. All through this issue of Salt there is an interesting meltdown of Modernist momentum and Post-modernist result, where language based poetry meets social comment – as in John Kinsella’s contribution, ‘The Visitation’, from his longer work in progress, ‘The Kangaroo Virus Project’, where:

The harmonics of the forest approach
a pure tone, an incestuous object hovering
dangerously over the many corpses.

In this poem and in Paul Hoover’s ‘Actual Occasions’, there is a wonderful blending of the doctrinaire language poetry with old-fashioned Modernism and it makes great reading. A second reading of this issue of Salt proves to be even more rewarding: – Volume 10 establishes this biannual journal as a substantial publication.