I have before me a random selection of three recent issues of local magazines – Imago, Coppertales, and Meanjin – those that happened to be on the editor’s desk in time for this month’s deadline. Two, as it happens, are from Queensland. Imago is published by UQP, through the Queensland University of Technology, with support from Arts Queensland. Coppertales bears the seal of the University of Southern Queensland and is also supported by Arts Queensland. Meanjin, of course, has its association with the University of Melbourne and is supported by Arts Victoria and the Australia Council.

The point of recalling these institutional links is not to suggest that the magazines are therefore hopelessly compromised or that they can no longer work at what’s new in our culture. But they do function now as part of state-subsidised ‘public culture’ (and just as well). Their situation within the contemporary print economy is very different from that of their famous modernist forebears. Their ‘minority’ status has altogether different meanings.

I must admit I find it hard to know what to do with Imago – how to read it. It is a collection of more or less interesting bits of ‘new writing’, but I can’t find any particular reason for them to be brought together in this magazine, at this time and place, except for the fact that they happened to be there. The authors are from Australia, the USA, and Europe; usually, only one piece per author is printed. Some stand out, of course: Ashley Morgan-Shae’s story about insane conclusions and extreme desires; poems by Jan Owen and Geraldine McKenzie; perhaps John Kinsella’s strange verse drama about salinity, haunting but claustrophobic (almost a characteristic of the genre). Kinsella takes up about half the magazine. The overseas work doesn’t leave much impression.

Perhaps it’s enough just to give new work an airing. Perhaps it’s just my nostalgia wanting something more, some kind of engagement, even an argument. I find the magazine rather passive, the work predictably ‘literary’. The poems and stories sit on the page discretely, in both senses of the word, divided up neatly into generic categories. The magazine lacks any active sense of its audience. There is little sense of it working to position itself in a market, in a culture.

Imago and Coppertales share stunning cover images, by Rebecca Edwards and Libby Woodhams respectively. Other­wise, in terms of design and typography, they’re very respectable, as if they had first of all to establish their ‘seriousness’ for their patrons. Coppertales subtitles itself ‘a journal of rural arts’ and this issue as a ‘Country Women’s Edition’. Now, you’d never get that from a Melbourne journal!

In fact, its strong identification with its region is what gives Coppertales its energy and sense of purpose. Region is not interpreted in any homespun sense nor ‘country women’ to mean the CWA. It’s sometimes more about country, sometimes more about women. One review (of Rebecca Edwards’s poems) is called ‘Big Brazen Women with Strong Thighs’.

If the poetry and fiction is sometimes more amateur than that in Imago, the reviews are more professional. Robert Dixon’s review of Patricia Clarke’s biography of Rosa Praed is informative and interrogative, a mini-essay itself in understanding colonial lives. Caroline Flood just about brings off that most difficult mini-genre, the surfing poem; Alison Daniel writes a nicely bleak, almost funny grunge lyric.

Both these magazines seem thin next to Meanjin. I’m sure the comparison is an unfair one in terms of everything Meanjin has to draw on (its history, its bank of contributors, its institutional location), but this issue of Meanjin really does seem to be bursting its boundaries. I don’t just mean that it’s fatter (224 pages). It also seems to be bursting out of genre constraints, the ‘literary’, and, by including a CD of readings, bursting out of the bounds of the magazine itself. If Imago and Coppertales surround their poems and stories with respectful quiet, this Meanjin is crowded and noisy.

There’s a real sense of energy and conversation, punctuated by more meditative moments such as Martin Harrison’s essay on Australian poetry. This is as pure a piece of literary criticism as you’re likely to find today – and in that sense I guess rather unfashionable – but it’s a reminder of how good criticism always was good ‘cultural history’. Harrison poses a stunningly simple question: ‘why is recent Australian poetry different from the poetry of English and American poets writing now?’ He focuses on the Australian sense of ‘country’ (definitely not ‘countryside’ and yet not quite the European/American sense of ‘landscape’ either).

The theme of the issue is ‘Poetics’. As well as poems and criticism, it includes a series of statements by poets, a section of visual poetry, another scanning a range of views about the poetic in other-than-print modalities. Some of this seems to come from another planet, some of it I find unreadable, but the array, from Harrison’s criticism to mez, netwurker@hotkey, makes poetry something robust, savvy, philosophical, bodily, media-wise, and utterly part of contemporary ways of being, living and thinking – something old and new.

I don’t really have a clue what Gig Ryan’s poems are about, but I’m a sucker every time for their deadly tone. Tim Richards writes a wickedly implicating meta-story about writers and readings, Craig Cormick a haunting rewrite of Cook writing his journals. Dominique Hecq’s tale about the anxieties of influence undoes the solid grounds of land and language with a few twists of phrase (est-elle Estelle?). There’s a terrific article by Alison Ravenscroft about all that got lost in the translation of Working Hot into its new edition, and two substantial interviews: Fiona Probyn with Adam Aitken, and John Kinsella with Les Murray.

When the ‘new’ Meanjin began to appear, I was irritated by the difficulty I had navigating my way through its mixed contents. Complacently, I wanted the poems quarantined from the essays (and so on). Over time, I learnt how to read it, how to enjoy the moments of generic uncertainty it produced. The juxtaposing and blurring of genres is crucial to the effect of the ‘Poetics’ issue. As well as generating the sense of noisy conversation, the contents often force us to ask: is this a poem? An essay? A short story? Is this literature? – not something we have to ask with Imago or Coppertales.

Meanjin, too, has understood something of the unique, messy, contemporary situation of literature and, thus, of the kind of cultural thinking that traditionally belongs to the ‘literary quarterly’. This means understanding literature as indeed arbitrary and contingent, at once ‘minor’ and pervasive, generically impure, unavoidable and thoroughly inside a ‘post-media’ world. Meanjin has reinvented itself as a response. It has found a way of ‘making it new’. There’s a challenge for a new editor!

We are accustomed to gloom stories about poetry in the modern world. Reading the bio-notes at the back of this Meanjin suggests something different, although it’s almost cruel to struggling poets to say so. The recurrence of ‘forth­coming’ novels and books of verse in the notes is striking – twenty or so new books on the way, and that’s without counting John Kinsella, Les Murray or websites! Something’s going on, something that hasn’t yet quite been noticed or explained, and we need to be careful not to become victims of our own stories of gloom.