Introduction

This book sets out to navigate questions of the future of Australian poetry. Deliberately designed as a dialogue between poets, each of the four clusters presented here—“Indigeneities”; “Political Landscapes”; “Space, Place, Materiality”; “Revising an Australian Mythos”—models how poetic communities in Australia continue to grow in alliance toward certain constellated ideas. Exploring the ethics of creative production in a place that continues to position capital over culture, property over community, each of the twenty essays in this anthology takes the subject of Australian poetry definitively beyond Eurocentrism and white privilege. By pushing back against nationalizing mythologies that have, over the last 200 years since colonization, not only narrativized the logic of instrumentalization but rendered our lands precarious, this book asserts new possibilities of creative responsiveness within the Australian sensorium.