Ruby Street

Much to ponder on in Kris Hemensley's discussion of the current swag of Australian poetry anthologies , in a broader context of contemporary Australian poetry. Kris and I talked about some of this when I was in the Collected Works shop in February, whilst on a flying visit to Melbourne. I still have not fully digested all he has raised now, especially the preamble and history, the stuff that gets forgotten when the new and recent are discussed. I know Kris has been pondering this awhile. There was some brief commentary on his Facebook page, but this post of his is the product of lengthy thinking. Kris points to one interesting fact - Dorothy Porter is the one poet that appears in all the anthologies under discussion.

Best Australian Poems 2009 is fresh. See Robert Adamson's take on what is happening here and now.

There’s a new anthology of Australian poetry just hit the decks. I think the official publication date was early January, but there were plenty copies in bookshops before Christmas. I bought one in one of my favourite bookshops, Kinokuniya, in Sydney, in December. There’s some discussion about it going on Laurie Duggan’s blog , especially about the cover. I’m not so keen on the cover but others I know think that it’s fine. And there is always going to be the usual argument about who is in and who is out, and why. I've been left out of enough anthologies and been in a few (I'm in this one, for instance), and have said my piece on that a few times too many in the past, so perhaps it's not the place to join that discussion for the moment. I’m more interested in John Kinsella’s comment in one of his introductory essays (you can read all of this essay on the Penguin website ): “The publication or presentation of innovative verse-novels, prose poetry, hypertextual poetry, multim...

A second hay(na)ku anthology has hit the shops while I’ve been fluttering around the new job/new city thing. Edited by Jean Vengua and Mark Young , The Hay(na)ku Anthology Vol II is now available from Meritage Press. The volume is a joint production of Meritage Press (St. Helena & San Francisco) and xPress(ed) (Puhos, Finland). As most of you probably know by now, the hay(na)ku form consist of a tercet comprised of one-, two- and three-word lines. As you’ll see in the book, and possibly even on this and other blogs, many poets have also created variations from the basic form. The anthology contains work from 51 poets, including one (ah-hem) newly based in Adelaide. The form has got around the world and the National Autonomous University of Mexico/Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) is now preparing a full Spanish translation of The First Hay(na)ku Anthology for future release.

Barry Hill does the rounds with two recent Australian poetry anthologies . A mention of JJ amongst the other new and notable.

Left field musing. Reading Ron's discussion of a reading he did with Jessica Smith . Being intrigued I checked out the references he gave about Smith. I'll follow up on her work, indeed, and her blog is worth reading, especially on what Ron was discussing, which was 'the poetry reading' . But ... here's my sideways not-to-do-with-any-of-this thought. Smith is involved in a press that is, among other things, publishing an anthology of 'younger' poets (ie under 40). Fair enuff, a publisher needs to be publishing whatever. To state the obvious, it's their passion, especially in a profit-free zone such as poetry. But ... ... the implication is that only 'young/er' equals 'emerging'. There are those who emerge 'older' and, thus, never get to engage with such projects. And there's an assumption that 'older' somehow means either you've made it, or your way of writing is 'set' and that you don't continue to ...

Some of the many interesting things Brendan Lorber of LUNGFULL has to say . The Weightlessness of any Anthology in the Last Few Decades: Their sheer abundance negates any anthology’s authority to define a movement. Each new anthology is like the person on The Price Is Right who bids $1 higher than the last guy on the dinette set. To the extent an anthology is successful, it points to the decentralization of poetry and the impossibility of any one boss or singular vision. It rides the air between poems, placing the extreme connection ahead of being a supreme collection. He won't remember but I met him many years ago when he was here. I still have a very old copy of LUNGFULL somewhere around here.