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- Article Title: Questioning the template
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It is pleasing to see the following publishing advice in the report: ‘a book should contain a poet’s best work. It is better to have a good, small collection than a bigger one with weak pieces that are there because of theme or because the poet liked them too much’ (or, maybe, because someone once admired them). First-timers tend to be more careful about this than some poets who have made a name. I know that major poets, in tune with their audience’s level of acceptance, will sometimes rightly present lesser and better work together, to show the spectrum. That aside, there is a myth among poets that a short book doesn’t look good, as if bulk is the proof of something. Yet the buyers of poetry are sensitive to padding – a good book, whether lengthy or not, is as long as there are strong poems for it. Has it been forgotten that such a landmark book as Judith Wright’s The Moving Image (1946) comprised just thirty-one pages of poems?
I have some trouble, however, with the writing advice in the judges’ report, which sends a message to our emerging poets that a major area of the tradition is a wrong turning, as far as this award is concerned. The precept against ‘trying to lift poems through the use of literary references’ is counter-intuitive. This is precisely what much poetry does: all of the Augustans, a fair bit of Dante and Shakespeare, even the work of that cunning popular poet Wendy Cope. It is a presence in our rich history of major first books: Christopher Brennan’s Poems (1913), A.D. Hope’s The Wandering Islands (1955), the very title of The Moving Image, and the famous opening lines of Francis Webb’s A Drum for Ben Boyd (1948).
In turn, there is a warning against ‘seemingly contrived obscurity’, as opposed to ‘imaginative use of language’. Obscurity as a contrivance – taken as a term to cover both a courting of language’s resistances and a use of uncommon reference – has been celebrated and practised by a myriad respectable poets from Charles Baudelaire through to such as T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Paul Celan and Dylan Thomas to Medbh McGuckian. Like contrived lucidity, it can be done excellently or badly. If ‘contrived’ is meant to mean contrived poorly, or not imaginatively, a new generation, thinking towards a first book, still gets the idea that ‘obscurity’ is being wished away. It seems as if the Anne Elder Award is oddly taking sides in a discussion which, in the current critical hiatus, is already simplistic enough.
Flat opening lines are prohibited. But surely they are sometimes just what is wanted – ‘Time present and time past’ is a fair example. Exotic settings are under stricture, and ‘impact words’ are privileged out from ‘process words’. It is close to a template. The restraints, if you take them all together, are encompassing. This is a departure for a venerable award, and my concern is, for this reason, addressed publicly. No one, I am sure, wants a situation where some poets take the hint that it’s not worth submitting their book.
I have no issue at all with the choice or the shortlist, which are worth their recommendation. As a publisher, I can add, it seems to me that the awards system doesn’t greatly affect either way whether good poetry finds readers. The value of awards is to poets, as touching their CV, pocket and self-belief as artists. The country is buzzing with committees everywhere awarding poetry prizes, such that the browsing poetry reader who is not a poet filters much of it out.
The Anne Elder announcement, though, has always been a communal moment for new poets (equally with the biennial Mary Gilmore), rendering it one of Australian poetry’s most important prizes. It depends on the confidence of serious and sophisticated new artists. This is poorly served by a public report that offers no critical insights into the judges’ choices and that limits itself largely to workshop dicta, of a doubtful sort.
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