I’ve not yet been investigated by the Department of Taxation, and with an income like mine perhaps never will be. Still, I don’t anticipate the prospect with any pleasure. How, for example, would I persuade a dry from the Department that the possession of a James Brown CD was of vital importance to my work (‘Waitaminute! ... Uh! ... Good God!’)? What about a two-week drive through the wheat belt (with photography expenses), or a membership ticket to a Regional Art Gallery, an afternoon at the movies, or a map of the Gibson Desert?

Whether you are a plumber or a medical practitioner, a professional footballer or a violin teacher it’s relatively clear what kind of things you can claim as professional expenses on a tax form. But if you are a writer, and in particular a poetry writer, your requirements to continue the practice may become an accountant’s nightmare. I have seen hardnosed bureaucrats weep when I attempt to unravel the relationship between my poems and their origins.

The difficulty seems to lie in the way our activities are compartmentalised. Arts bodies often have trouble coming to grips with a medium’s prerequisites. A while back the Literature Board was worried that a magazine they’d funded took up too much of its space with art reviews (and I’m sure the Visual Arts Board would have wanted to cut the poetry). Yet the great virtue of the magazine Otis Rush was that it combined the two ‘areas’ seamlessly.

I know what an alien I really am if and when I fill in an application form for a Literature Board grant. The forms are obviously designed for people like novelists and playwrights with completely mapped out notions of what they are going to be doing for a whole year several months away. It’s particularly hard for a poetry writer to make his or her ‘project’ (to write more poems?) sound important, which is probably why some poets end up positioning themselves as freewheeling cultural ambassadors. Once I said that I was going to write a series of sonnets on the lives of the great anarchists. That year I didn’t get a grant.

And I’m often made to feel like an unnecessary cog when I deal with those middle managers of the arts: the academics.

I’ll weigh in here on those arguments over the transformation of English Departments to Cultural Studies units. I don’t mind. Since as a practising artist I’ve never drawn sharp lines between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture (or between different media) this recent configuration doesn’t disturb me particularly, though I hear a distant Heavenly Choir of Leavisites chanting ‘what about the ten best books?!’

(Aside: I was once involved in a literary radio program whose originators failed to understand why I wanted to play surfing instrumentals in between their grabs of Joyce and Shakespeare. I was interested in sounds and tones and what could be done with them and opposed to the idea of providing an aural;cushion of ‘high culture’. I had also noticed that these Epigoni of the Great Tradition weren’t listening to Joyce’s Voices or The Bard’s Bytes themselves yet their attentions were instantly focused on the airwaves when ‘Bombora’ or ‘Pipeline’ broke the spell.)

I’d argue with the current setup mostly because it doesn’t really go far enough. Poetry, since it doesn’t lend itself so well to the talk-show or the blockbuster movie adaptation, has a bleak future in the hallowed halls when the slippages between media are of more interest than the products themselves. After all nobody is likely to unleash a poem on the screen unless it’s The Iliad featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and Tom Cruise.

The ‘Space of Poetry’ conference, held fast year at Melbourne University, did cover some distance in trying to bridge the gap between poetry and the rest of life-though it was notable that the kind of verse which benefited most from the detente was the narrative variety (two whole papers dealt with John Tranter’s recent The Floor of Heaven). One speaker proposed an ingenious method of using computer technology to create new poems out of poems of the past (Coleridge and Frost in the example given), though this seemed on reflection simply a technological updating of the worst kinds of ‘academic’ poetry, certainly not the brave new venture into cyberspace and hyperreality which it claimed to be.

It’s a pain in the arse for poets but a virtue for poetry that, as an art, it is not really a part of the cash flow nexus. Even Les Murray who has benefited from patronage more than . most realises that poetry can’t be tied to the GNP. After all, he did call one of his books Poems Against Economics. As an art, poetry is something else. Even the performance oriented writers realise this. Some of the ones I know, however, have even had long service leave.

I bet they don’t have any problems with their tax forms.