Australia will get a poet laureate next year. Here’s what needs to change first

Poet Sarah Holland-Batt says poetry has a duty to provoke, to invite argument as much as praise. ‘An anodyne laureate is of no use to anyone.’ Photograph: Carly Earl/The Guardian

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.