A good friend of mine, a Tasmanian writer with bone dry wit, says the federal government missed a trick in announcing its intention to establish a poet laureate. He jokes that an Australian poet laureate should rightfully be called a poet lorikeet.
It’s a quintessentially Australian joke, inherently suspicious of anything that might dare to take itself too seriously. But it also speaks to an anxiety that Australia may not be able to stick the landing of a laureateship with appropriate gravitas.
Poetry in Australia has long been an afterthought in the broader afterthought of literary policymaking, and an artform that – despite its quality, diversity and pig-headed endurance – has largely failed to attract a dedicated general readership.
Will a poet laureate help? I think it will, with a caveat: the laureateship requires an array of literary and cultural infrastructure that is presently either eroded or lacking entirely – so the existence of a laureateship will demand we make other important changes too.
A poet laureateship is first and foremost a national honour given to an eminent poet; their role is to encourage and champion the reading and writing of poetry. And next year, Australia is set to get its first.
While historically poet laureates have had a role in celebrating and aggrandising monarchs, contemporary laureates in the UK including Andrew Motion, Carol Ann Duffy and Simon Armitage have used their position to collaborate with charities and offer commentary, writing poems about bullying, suicide, homelessness, the Scottish independence referendum, conservation and climate change.
They have also frequently shared the spotlight with their peers. To mark Prince William and Catherine’s wedding, Duffy didn’t write about the royals directly, but instead commissioned 17 poems about weddings, or epithalamia, creating a body of new poetry that the public might use in their own lives.
Similar roles in Scotland and Wales – founded, in part, to celebrate poetry written in Scots and Welsh – have helped preserve not only what is distinctive about a nation’s literature, but also its languages, which in Australia may prove a vital charge for First Nations poets who take up the role.
And in America, recent laureates such as Maxine Kumin, Kay Ryan and Billy Collins have supported literacy initiatives and encouraged the public to write their own poetry, while others have brought poetry to unexpected places: Joseph Brodsky smuggled anthologies into hospitals, airports and supermarkets, and the current U.S. laureate, Ada Limòn, has commissioned nature poems which have been installed in national parks.
So what will a poet laureateship look like in Australia? And is the nation ready for it?
How the government intends to handle the position – from the appointment process, the criteria, the honorarium, and any attached conditions – remains unknown, and there is anxiety and speculation in literary corners about how it will work and who it might be. Of course, there is no dearth of talent – but not all poets will want to serve as laureate, and many may view it as a poison chalice. For starters, the laureate will be under intense scrutiny, not least from other poets. (John Forbes didn’t describe Australian poetry as a “knife fight in a phone booth” for nothing.) Then there’s the unease that may be felt by some poets about representing the nation.
But while a laureateship is irretrievably a nationalist project, that doesn’t mean it must be a jingoistic one. Poetry has a duty to provoke, to invite argument as much as praise. An anodyne laureate is of no use to anyone.
Regardless of who takes up the position, I believe the laureateship will be a force of good; it will find the form more readers, naturalise poetry’s presence in ordinary spaces, and give Australian writing an important presence on the world stage – as well as a prominent advocate at home.
Less comfortably, the laureateship will put enormous pressure on governmental, literary and educational institutions to rectify the wilful neglect that poetry has been subjected to in this country, in order to foster and sustain poetic careers to the extent that one can qualify for the role.
Australian poetry publishing has been redlining over the past two decades. It receives a minuscule share of literary funding, which itself receives a minuscule share of arts funding. In its heyday, major publishers had poetry lists, but now, Australian poetry is published almost entirely by small presses that struggle to survive. In time, the laureateship should drive poetry sales, help revive the poetry lists of major publishers, and encourage writers festivals to integrate poetry more meaningfully into their programming too.
Likewise, while several laudable organisations promote and support Australian poetry, many existing initiatives are oriented towards new and emerging poets. In other words, we presently have relatively favourable conditions to start poetic careers, but not necessarily to sustain them.
Too many significant Australian poets have fallen into obscurity, without structural and cultural supports to sustain their momentum. Amid shrinking arts pages, most volumes of Australian poetry struggle to get reviewed in a major outlet; even the national broadcaster has left the building, axing its poetry program, Poetica, in 2014. And in academia, literature chairs and entire departments have dwindled or ceased to exist altogether.
To support a laureateship, it’s likely Australian poetry itself will also need to evolve. It has, for some decades now, been an essentially closed system, a coterie publishing itself, reading itself and talking to itself. Critical honesty has suffered too – perhaps unsurprisingly, given poetry feels itself to be under siege, and the fact that the critics writing about poetry tend to be poets themselves. What this moment will demand is a poetry of confidence, that shucks its defensive crouch and speaks outwards again to find its public.
Most importantly, the laureateship will also force us to confront the dire conditions in which poets write. As a recent national survey revealed, Australian poets earn a paltry average annual salary of $5,700 from their art (most poetry print runs are between 500 and 1,000 copies). Above all, a laureateship infers that Australian poetry is stable and sustainable, which of course it is not and has not been for a long time.
A laureateship holds up poetry as the pinnacle of literary achievement, or, as the great poet Joseph Brodsky describes it, “the supreme form of locution in any culture.” And it is right that the artform that venerates and refreshes language and seeks to rescue it from its degradation should be literature’s emissary. At this time of mass attention deficit, where we habitually outsource our brains to machines, we are at genuine risk of losing the ability to interpret the meaning and nuances of language. We are at risk of forgetting how to properly read. We are also at risk of losing the ability to feel the sheer joy of what our language is capable of, pushed to its limits.
If it’s true that poetry is not yet ready to play this redeeming role in Australian culture, then it’s also true that Australian culture is not yet ready to be redeemed by poetry – so now the work on both sides must begin.
This article is extracted from a keynote address delivered at the University of Technology Sydney on 20 September 2024
