The Canadians of course do have something to worry about: thousands of watts of Americana irradiating the hundred miles or so of significant population north of the border. But any attempt on their part to resist this flow is doomed to artificiality because big C culture can’t simply be fenced off while there’s a wholesale free-trade of the small C variety going on. I saw the fruit of this artificial process in 1987 at a Harbourside reading in Toronto when the noted ‘outlaw’ poet Patrick Lane launched his selected poems. I was expecting something good, a genuine surprise. What I got was po-faced and grinding sincerity barging its way through a tangle of mixed metaphors. Is this, I thought, what the Canadians wish to protect ... or is it the result of their cultural protectionism? With a large ocean in the way we have less to worry about. Even at the current rate of transmission cultural properties undergo change before they get here. As of 1992 (when I spent three months in Washington D.C.) the most ‘American’ of Australian writings still seemed exotic and in need of the odd footnote to Statesiders.

Let’s go back to the seventies though and see what happened to all those fears. You must remember that nobody at the time would have blinked if a poet sounded like Philip Larkin, so it wasn’t a matter simply of losing our Jindyworobaksheesh. (In fact the position with Britain was the reverse of the American thing: we sneered at the horse-guards and the Oxbridge accents but lifted their poetics shamelessly.)

So what did America have to offer? Mostly an anglophone culture which wasn’t at the mercy of its prehistory: where the writers weren’t merely curators with feather dusters. There was also that expansiveness deriving from Whitman which could serve very different ends (viz. Hart Crane, Allen Ginsberg, and Frank O’Hara), but this hasn’t translated into Australian poetry for a very good reason (and it’s the reason I prefer our situation to the American one): Australia (I’m talking here of the immigrant construction) began its life as a prison of doubtful economic value, not a utopia with cash crops. Americans, we mustn’t forget, have trouble with irony.

What’s the position now? I’d argue that current American practices haven’t really got much to show us; that there has been a general falling off in American poetry over the last couple of decades. This is not to say that there aren’t any good poems or poets: there are things to admire rather than things to learn from. Take for example the anthology Up Late, edited by Andrei Codrescu. It refers back some thirty years to Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry which it rightly views as a benchmark. Yet, for all its protestations, despite its long overdue representation of women, and despite the many good poems Up Late contains, it seems pretty flimsy material after Allen’s opus. The anti-academic stance of Up Late doesn’t ring true either. For all their hang-looseness its poems might as well be the products of the new-look creative writing professariat. The New American Poetry for all its iconoclasm seems now a mine of formal invention against its successor’s general flabbiness (a counterpart to the flabbiness of academia if it isn’t academia itself). It has its failures of course – whatever happened to Stuart Z. Perkoff? – but that’s inevitable in such a grand scheme.

If human nature changed (for Virginia Woolf) in 1910, American poetry changed (for the worse) for me around 1975. Although I continue to read a number of American poets with admiration, I don’t feel that need for American poetry any more. It isn’t that Australia (or Sydney, or Fitzroy for that matter) has become the new centre (just as London, Paris, New York, and San Francisco have been for English language writing). There are no centres of this kind any more. They were the products of a culture and communication network which no longer exist. If Pound had stayed in Idaho, who knows what might have happened to his work (for some it would have been an improvement). But now it doesn’t seem to matter whether you operate from Bismarck, North Dakota, or Manjimup, W.A. There’ll still be a migration to the cities (they are, after all, where the bookshops are). But the poets won’t just peer out from the ferries, jumbo jets, and buses thinking ‘Wow! New York (or read wherever)’. They’ll more likely be looking out for the ‘set’ of Hill Street Blues.