The Poet in the Public Arena

A good friend of mine, a Tasmanian writer with bone dry wit, has been telling me over the past year that the federal government has 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 my friend’s impulse to kitschify – or perhaps Kath-and-Kimify – the word laureate also speaks to our domestic anxiety that somehow Australia may not be able to stick the landing of a laureateship with appropriate gravitas. Perhaps the lorikeet – a gaudy emissary of Australiana – is a more a more suitable avatar of our poetry than the lofty laurels of Ancient Greece.

My friend’s joke about the poet lorikeet put me in mind of another conversation I’d had, about fourteen years ago, when I was living in New York and working at an American publishing house. One day, a senior editor asked me what I’d been reading. After telling her about Helen Garner’s The First Stone, she replied magnanimously, with total confidence: ‘Oh, I love Australian writers. My favourite Australian writer is Doris Lessing.’

Yes, Doris Lessing. The Doris Lessing who was born to British parents in Iran, grew up in what was then Southern Rhodesia, and then moved to London where she lived for the rest of her life, writing a magnificent body of work which ultimately earnt her a Nobel Prize in 2007. The Doris Lessing who never lived in Australia. That Doris Lessing.

Together, these anecdotes open up two possible arguments in support of the federal government’s decision to establish a poet laureateship as part of its Revive National Cultural Policy platform in 2023. On the one hand, there’s the problem of the lowly stature of poetry in Australia: long an afterthought in the broader afterthought that has been literary policymaking, and an artform that despite its quality, diversity, and sheer pig-headed endurance, has failed on the whole to attract a dedicated general readership. On the other hand, there’s the problem of the lowly stature of Australian literature abroad, where our greatest writers struggle to achieve the international readership they deserve.

Or, put another way, there’s the problem of Australian poetry not being seen at all, but also the problem of Australian poetry being mis-seen and misunderstood.

Will having a poet laureate help? I’d argue that it will – with the caveat that the laureateship itself implies the existence of an array of literary and cultural infrastructure that is presently either eroding or lacking entirely. The existence of a laureateship invites a necessary conversation about the preconditions required to make the laureateship a success, because ultimately the laureateship is the beginning, not the end, of the conversation about the shifts required to address the state of poetry in Australia.

In establishing the laureateship, we’ve created the cart – now, we need to rustle up a horse.

But first, a correction. I said that the federal government is about to establish a poet laureateship. In truth, Australia’s already had a poet laureate, so it’s more accurate to say that – conveniently in line with the federal government’s chosen policy title – we’re about to revive our poet laureate from its long dormancy. So it’s worth contemplating our first poet laureate for a moment, as his story offers some insights into our present.

In an ominous portent, Australia’s first poet laureate was a convict – worse, an extortionist. Michael Massey Robinson, an Oxford-educated lawyer, was sentenced to death in 1796 for writing a defamatory poem which falsely implied that a London alderman named James Oldham was a murderer. Adding insult to injury, Robinson then attempted to blackmail Oldham into paying to suppress the poem’s publication. During his transportation to Australia in 1798, Robinson proved adept at talking himself out of trouble: he ingratiated himself with the ship’s captain and crew, wangling a bottle of wine a day and a dinner invitation to sit with the officers; he also befriended the deputy judge advocate of New South Wales, Richard Dore, and a mere two weeks after landing, was miraculously granted a conditional pardon, and offered a role as Dore’s secretary.

But Robinson learnt nothing from his reprieve. As soon as Dore retired, Robinson promptly started embezzling from his successor, and was eventually convicted a second time for perjury, and sentenced to a term on Norfolk Island. Robinson then bamboozled some useful gentry, who successfully petitioned for him to be pardoned. Then, he was caught forging documents again, and sent to Norfolk Island to serve his sentence. Once again, the poet’s charms prevailed over his clear criminality. The commandant at Norfolk Island liked him enough to let Robinson return to Sydney, where he married, and was given a role as chief clerk to the secretary’s office under Governor Lachlan Macquarie. Soon thereafter he also became our first and only poet laureate, composing clunky and obsequious birthday odes praising the King and Queen which were published in the Gazette. He was paid for his services with two cows.

Robinson ultimately fell out of favour, and was dismissed from his post by Sir Thomas Brisbane, at which point the odes ceased – and the disgruntled ballads lambasting Sir Thomas Brisbane began.

There are a few salutary lessons we can take from this tale. First, never trust a poet. Second, never offend one, or you might find yourself reflected in an unflattering light in their poetry. And finally: if you’re after good poems, consider paying in a denomination other than cows.

But the comic case of Michael Massey Robinson also poses serious questions about the relationship between the poet and the state, and the precarity of the laureate position, auspiced as it is by the idea of the nation. It exposes the position to be vulnerable to personal bias, manipulation, and the arts of flattery and persuasion as any other political appointment. Robinson’s story also encourages us to ask whether poetry – inherently a contrarian artform that thrives precisely because it isn’t subjected to utilitarian demands – may necessarily become perverted and shrunk down to sycophantic size when asked to serve a civic function. A laureateship in the mould that Robinson inhabited also invites us to see poetry’s function not primarily as art, but rather as some unholy mixture of history and hagiography. Crucially, Robinson’s story shows that while a laureateship confers esteem on a poet’s work, it also places them under an intense scrutiny they would otherwise never receive. It invites us to evaluate poetry with an eye to its usefulness, its social and public functions. By suggesting that poetry in some way serves the people, a laureateship may set unachievable and unreasonable standards that no single poem, held up to the light, could hope to fulfill.

None of these problems or anxieties are new. They recur across time, wherever laureates have existed. So it’s worth looking a little further back before looking forward.

Laurels – from which the word ‘laureate’ springs – are horseshoe-shaped garlands, fashioned from wild olive, sweet bay, cherry laurel, or mouse thorn wood. Worn on the head or slung around the neck, they find their point of origin in the myth of Daphne and Apollo, in which the god Apollo mocks and offends Cupid. Cupid retaliates by shooting Apollo with a gold arrow that condemns him to become infatuated with Daphne, while simultaneously shooting Daphne with a silver bolt that condemns her to loathe Apollo. The ceaseless chase that ensues drives Daphne mad. She begs her father to set her free from Apollo’s advances, so he transforms her into a laurel tree. This act grieves Apollo so deeply that he uses his powers to make the laurel tree evergreen, and fashions himself a wreath from its branches.

Subsequently bestowed on ancient Olympians in Greece, poets and musicians, and victorious commanders celebrating martial victories in Rome as a symbol of triumph, the laurel wreath more quietly also evokes Daphne’s despair. It’s an emblem of a muted voice, of a woman who has sacrificed everything to be freed from male pursuit, and is eternally punished and silenced for it. Historically, of course, laurels are an honour overwhelmingly given to men.

Setting aside this unsettling symbolism for a moment, some history. The year is 1341. The Italian poet Petrarch arranges for himself to be named as a laureate in the Capitol. This act revives the practice of conferring laureates after a period of decline. Petrarch is pilloried by his peers for his pretension. Nonetheless, for the first time, the emperor becomes poetry’s ‘supreme patron’, whose imperial favour brings him praise and aggrandisement in return. Laureates in the Holy Roman Empire had no requirements imposed on them. The title came with vague privileges, including the right to call yourself an author and editor, to teach and perform as an orator, and to take a chair at a university. So far, so good. But the system wasn’t without its flaws. Not all laureates were anointed by the emperor; in fact, most were not. Poets could apply to become a laureate by sending a fee and a beseeching letter to the Capitol, or they could receive the honour from a university, or from a Count Palatine. A laureateship wasn’t a singular honour with a single arbiter; instead, it was a money spinner generating revenue for an empire that paid little heed to the calibre of the poets it recognised. This loose system resulted in scores of poet laureates accumulated across the sprawling empire simultaneously, reaching a high tide in the early seventeenth century, when a ludicrous (and surely unwise) 346 documented laureates were shelled out in a mere twenty-four-year stretch.

From the Holy Roman Empire to the present, one question has been constant for poets: how to get paid. The emperor was not forthcoming in this regard. As John L. Flood recounts in his wonderful scholarship on the period, the poet Johann Stigel learnt this the hard way after writing an obsequious panegyric about Charles V, and receiving the following message in response: ‘The Emperor is pleased with the poem; the poet may have what he wants; if he wants to be ennobled he shall be, if he wants to be a Poet Laureate he shall be, but if he asks for money, he shan’t have it’ (emphasis added). It fell to laureates to cultivate their own patrons, which they mostly did by writing flattering paeans. This produced an explosion of occasional verse in the seventeenth century: events like marriages, births, and deaths were all accompanied by custom-written poems, which became a key means by which laureates supplemented their earnings – and a feature of laureateships in the English language tradition, too. To put it politely, these occasional poems were of variable quality. To put it more bluntly, they were mostly sentiment-ridden doggerel. As Robert Graves once wisely said, ‘if there’s no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money’. To which I might add, poetry written for money alone is no poetry at all.

In the English language tradition, the relationship between poetry and power has been much more closely yoked. The precursors to laureates – poet-singers like Anglo Saxon scops, bards, medieval minstrels, and troubadours – all shared the objective of pleasing and entertaining an audience, and serving a celebratory role in recounting heroic deeds. The troubadour was the first poet to become an official singer at court, a title which then morphed into the versificator regis, making a poet a member of the Royal household for the first time. The versificator regis was also gifted a lifetime grant of wine, or, to be specific, two tuns of wine, made up of one tun of vintage, and one tun of less enticing-sounding ‘rack’ or ‘de recko’. (I note here that one tun equates to around 954 litres in today’s measurements, so we are talking about almost 2,000 litres in total). This brings me to poets’ second constant concern: their alcohol entitlements. Hold that thought.

After the versificator regis role died out, relationships between poets and monarchs formed organically for around two centuries. John Skelton, Chaucer, Sir Edmund Spenser, and Ben Jonson each forged close relationships to monarchs on their own individual terms, generally receiving a small annuity or patent and a pension in exchange for dedications, masques and occasional verse – and, in Chaucer’s case, a daily pitcher of wine from Edward III.

The first poet laureate proper in the English language tradition was Dryden, who had no interest in writing occasional poems, and fulfilled no formal duties. Nonetheless, he was given £200 for his troubles, and a ‘butt of Canary wine’, that is to say, a cask of sherry. The next consequential laureate was Robert Southey – who served contemporaneously with Michael Massey Robinson – followed by Queen Victoria’s appointments, Wordsworth and Tennyson. Wordsworth initially refused the post, and only agreed to serve in the role once he’d been assured by Prime Minister Robert Peel that nothing would be required of him. Wordsworth was silent on royal subjects during his laureateship, which established some independence in the office. Following on from Wordsworth’s death in 1850, Tennyson’s tenure signalled a shift in emphasis from satisfying the monarchy to speaking for and to the nation, and the idea that the laureateship was a form of public rather than royal recognition took root.

Across the twentieth century, poets have adopted a range of approaches to the laureateship as the focus and meaning of the honour has evolved. They’ve also had varying feelings about the office and its weight of expectation. Cecil Day Lewis famously called the position ‘the kiss of death’. John Betjeman, beloved by the public, in private intensely loathed the role, writing to his friend Mary Wilson, ‘Oh God, the Royal poem!! Send the H[oly] G[host] to help me over that fence’. Betjeman also told Larkin at Auden’s funeral that he wanted to abandon the laureateship just over a year in. A monarchist, Ted Hughes had less difficulty summoning royal poems, although he likewise worried that they were being mocked by other poets behind his back. Importantly, Hughes also focussed his service on children and writing verse for them, cementing the idea of public outreach at the heart of the laureateship. Hughes also revitalised the tradition – long lapsed – of the laureate receiving a butt of sherry as part of his fee, equating to around 720 bottles.

Andrew Motion, appointed during the Blair era, was the first poet to serve a fixed term of ten years rather than a life sentence, and signalled another important turning point in the UK laureateship’s focus away from the royals, which came on the heels of some blistering public scrutiny of Motion’s output. Up to that point a relatively introverted lyric poet, Motion tried his hand at royal poems and was viciously mocked for them, including by The Guardian, in an article called ‘Is Motion any Good?’ (The consensus was that, broadly, he wasn’t.) This situation reached its apogee with Motion’s wedding poem for Charles and Camilla, about which various detractors including the New York Times were scornfully joking before it was even published, unhelpfully speculating about what rhyme Motion might find for ‘Camilla’. (Chinchilla? gorilla? Godzilla?) This spurred Motion to refocus on ‘clearing a wider path to poetry’ by collaborating with charities and causes outside the monarchy. Over his term, Motion wrote poems about bullying, homelessness, the foot-and-mouth outbreak, the Paddington rail disaster, 9/11, shellshock for the charity Combat Stress, and climate change.

Carol Ann Duffy, following Motion, was the first female poet in the role’s 341-year history. She continued to champion the reading and writing of poetry to the public, and commented on contemporary issues such as the Scottish independence referendum and the National Trust’s acquisition of a stretch of the Dover coastline, while also frequently commissioning her peers to contribute to her initiatives. She also explicitly rejected the idea of writing commemorative poems, saying she would never ‘write a poem for Edward and Sophie – no self-respecting poet should have to’. In a reversal of the concept of royal patronage, Duffy opted to send some of her bottles of sherry over to the Queen at Christmastime each year. When major royal events such as the wedding between Prince William and Catherine arose, Duffy didn’t write about the royals directly, but instead commissioned seventeen poems by her peers about weddings, or epithalamia, which were published in The Guardian, with the objective of creating a body of new poetry that the public might use in their own lives.

The current UK Laureate, the prolific and charismatic Simon Armitage, continues to view the remit of the role as an opportunity to generate more interest in poetry among readers, and has both written poems to commemorate major events, such as the Queen’s Platinum jubilee and her death, and collaborated with organisations to support causes including suicide prevention, conservation, and cancer research. He has also hosted a podcast, The Poet in his Shed, from the shed in his garden in West Yorkshire – cosily equipped with a settee, pizza oven, a harmonium, and the obligatory sherry – where he chats to public figures from both inside and outside poetry, including Prince Charles, Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr, J.K. Rowling, and Sir Ian McKellen, suggesting that the laureateship can also be a form of domestic as well as international cultural diplomacy. Presently, the UK laureateship is still appointed by the monarch on advice of the Prime Minister. Money remains elusive: for recent UK laureates, the honorarium has been just shy of £6,000 annually, along with the barrel of sherry, which is wisely rationed out to the laureate across the decade-long tenure at an average of 72 bottles a year rather than delivered all at once. Recent laureates have travelled to Spain to select their sherry and sign the barrel, and designed their own labels.

Because the UK poet laureateship has been widely perceived as being linked intimately with English concerns and to be speaking for the English people – after all, as T.S. Eliot once said, ‘No art is more stubbornly national than poetry’ – other roles have been established across the UK and Ireland in recent decades to address this perceived exclusionary nationalism. The Ireland Chair of Poetry – notably sponsored by both Northern Ireland’s arts body and that of the Republic, an important geopolitical détente – was inaugurated in 1998 to celebrate Seamus Heaney’s Nobel Prize, and is more of an academic position than a political appointment. Overseen by a charitable trust, the Ireland Chair accords the poet an honorarium of £20,000 and an attachment to three universities in rotation across three years: Trinity Dublin, Queen’s Belfast, and University College Dublin. The Chair gives readings and workshops, engages with students, and offers an annual lecture.

In Scotland, the position of Scots Makar was established in 2004 to ‘represent poetry in the public consciousness, promote poetic creativity in Scotland, and to be an ambassador for Scottish Poetry’. Accompanied by a £10,000 stipend and the expectation that the poet will produce poetry commenting on significant national events, the Makar gives readings in Scotland and internationally, and encourages the reading and writing of poetry, particularly by young people. Recent Makars Liz Lochhead and Jackie Kay have both offered a poem to mark opening sessions of a new parliament. The writing of poems in Scots has also been an important aspect of the post, serving to celebrate the national language. Wales followed suit a year later, establishing the National Poet of Wales as a position of an initial one-year term followed by reappointments, with a modest annual £5,000 stipend. This role was likewise created in part to celebrate poetry in the Welsh language, and comes with modest expectations to participate in at least four events and write four poems during the year.

Across the pond, in the United States, the Poet Laureate – officially now known as the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress – was established in 1937, and has been occupied by poets including Lowell, Bishop, Frost, Merwin, Louise Glück, Charles Simic, Joy Harjo, and Rita Dove. The Librarian of Congress – itself a presidential appointment – makes the selection, informed by nominations from current and former laureates, and 100 distinguished scholars, critics, booksellers, editors and other figures with expertise in poetry. Historically, the role was that of a reference librarian and resident scholar assisting the Library with its poetry and literature collections, and initially called the ‘Consultant in Poetry’. In 1986, the position was renamed to include the term ‘Poet Laureate’, and has morphed into the present role which has a greater emphasis on outreach. Formal requirements are kept to a minimum to give laureates maximal freedom to shape the role according to their own passions and interests. Terms are typically one year, with the possibility of one renewal, and only require the laureate to give an annual lecture and reading. In recent decades, a profusion of additional laureate roles has been established in America, including state and even city laureates, and a Youth Poet Laureate. The US Poet Laureate is relatively well-remunerated compared to equivalent roles in the UK, with an annual $60,000 stipend intended to enable focus on the role.

The US laureateship comes with no expectation to mark public occasions; however, there’s been a sporadic but notable tradition of some poets – notably, not necessarily poet laureates – being invited to read poems to mark presidential inaugurations. This began with Robert Frost and his patriotic 1961 poem ‘The Gift Outright’, read at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration at the height of the Cold War. Frost’s poem celebrates an America that is ‘unstoried, artless, unenhanced / Such as she was, such as she would become’, though it has subsequently been critiqued for its blinkered view of history. The tradition of inaugural poets has continued sporadically through to the present, but only adopted thus far by Democratic presidents. Kennedy’s invitation to Frost extended well beyond writing poetry and into statecraft; the year after JFK’s inauguration, he encouraged Frost to travel to Russia and meet with Khrushchev in an act of cultural diplomacy intended to further Kennedy’s aims to find peace with Russia. After Frost’s death, Kennedy made an eloquent argument for the value of poetry to a nation’s ‘self-comprehension’, as an appeal to our better angels, and a valuable check on power:

Frost is perhaps alone in having been invited to play a direct role in American foreign policy by a sitting president, though some other laureates have sought to engage politics, including Maxine Kumin, who bravely delivered writing workshops for America’s politicians. Others focussed on more traditional educational settings: Kay Ryan focussed on community colleges, and Billy Collins on high schools. Other laureates have tried to increase access to poetry in unexpected places: Brodsky undertook a guerilla campaign to smuggle poetry anthologies into hospitals, airports, hotel rooms, and supermarkets, and the current US laureate Ada Limòn has commissioned nature poems which have been installed in national parks. Charged with the broad remit to promote public interest in poetry, each Laureate has made the role distinctively their own.

Closer to home, New Zealand also has a poet laureate appointed by a similar process to the American one and likewise overseen by the National Library. New Zealand’s laureate is funded at $150,000 across a three-year period, and is more rigidly prescriptive, imposing an obligation on the poet to work towards a new collection, participate in poetry-related activities, maintain an online presence, and give some materials to the National Library’s archives – along with the general obligation to ‘raise national awareness of the value of reading and writing poetry’. There are more models elsewhere, including in Canada and South Africa, but rather than delving further, I’d like to turn now the question of what this all means for Australia, and how we might frame our own laureateship in relation to all these precursors, with their historical and nationalistic freight.

First and foremost, a poet laureateship is an exercise in the public humanities, and a lever for democratising appreciation and understanding of poetry. It should open the door for readers who might not otherwise be interested in the artform, and importantly, as some of the previous American and UK laureates have demonstrated, it can help naturalise poetry’s presence in ordinary spaces, marking it not as a special and cossetted category of writing for cognoscenti, but rather as a living and mobile form for all readers. The laureate will give Australian writing an important presence on the world stage, a prominent advocate at home, and may help attract more cultural philanthropy to the literature sector too.

Importantly, the contemporary laureateship – as conceived of by Motion, Armitage, Limón and others – makes civic contributions, enhancing public awareness and understanding of causes like conservation or mental health. In other words, a laureateship is a form of teaching – an engaged form of it, outside the bounds of the usual settings such as universities or schools, as well as, occasionally, inside them. It’s telling that recent laureates in the UK and the US have all expended significant effort celebrating the work of their peers and that of the country’s poetic history as much as their own body of work. This spirit of generosity would seem fundamental to the role, as would be a commitment to enhancing appreciation of Australian poetry of the past as well as the present. The challenge, of course, is that to be a poet laureate is to teach a course to the nation that nobody’s signed up for.

As the Scottish and Welsh examples show us, a laureateship can also play an important role in celebrating and preserving what is distinctive about a place and its rhythms of thought, vernacular and speech, and, importantly its languages, which in an Australian context may prove a vital charge for First Nations poets who go on to take up the role. A laureateship is therefore inevitably and necessarily both cosmopolitan and local. It’s irretrievably a nationalistic project – but that’s not to say it has to be a jingoistic one. Poetry may be ‘the most provincial of the arts’, as Auden said, but there’s no reason a laureate shouldn’t see their role as a means of interrogating ideas of the nation, and a nation’s own self-satisfied myths, as the magnificent Irish poet Eavan Boland did in her body of work. A poet laureate can only speak from one individual’s perspective, rather than a collective one; a laureate can’t hope to please everybody, and is doomed to fail if they try. An anodyne laureate is of no use to anyone.

Countries with laureateships in their relative maturity will understand this. But there will likely be a lower degree of tolerance for differing approaches in Australia, at least initially, and a particular pressure on whoever comes first to set the tone. There will also be considerable anxiety on the part of bureaucrats to ensure there are no snafus: no 720 bottles of sherry, no 2,000 litres of wine – or, god forbid, Bundy rum. But it’s worth underscoring that the role is earmarked for poets, not statesmen. Poets are constitutionally contrarian, because to be a poet is to insist on doing something that is of little social value and no financial value. So a little anarchy is likely and welcome.

In a nation constitutionally committed to mowing down tall poppies, it’s also inevitable that the poet laureate will attract opprobrium both from within and outside the literary world. This is expected, and not necessarily a bad thing. John Forbes didn’t describe Australian poetry as a ‘knife fight in a phone booth’ for nothing; the enmity and hostilities are enduring and real. The laureateship will prompt useful conversations about our cultural cringe and how poetry is valued both inside the world of poetry and outside it. Just as literary prizes each year prompt a predictable glut of opining about literary merit, a laureateship will also serve as a barometer of public taste and value. Given the internecine nature of Australia’s poetry wars, it’s likely a good deal of the flak may be friendly fire. But these are not ipso facto good reasons not to have a laureate. They’re dyspeptic side effects.

How the government intends to handle the position – from the appointment process, the criteria, the honorarium, and any attached conditions – is currently unknown, so there’s a tenor of anxiety in the literary sector about the laureate, with the question of who it might be being the main subject of speculation, always with a tinge of fear that perhaps we may not have the right person at hand. I’ve heard it said more than once that many of the forerunners who might have fulfilled the role have passed away: Les Murray, John Tranter, J.S. Harry, Robert Adamson, or Dorothy Porter, to name a few. But of course there’s no dearth of qualified poets. Australia’s never been short of poets; it’s short only of poetry readers. Then there’s the anxiety about whether the poet who is invited to serve as laureate might decline the honour. Even if this proves to be the case, that would be healthy and entirely in keeping with precedent. Not all poets want to be a laureate or think it’s a good thing. Many view it as a poisoned chalice, or feel uneasy about representing the nation. By nature such a role must be, in some respects, self-selecting. Philip Larkin famously turned it down, so the U.K. got Ted Hughes instead – in every respect, a poet better suited for the role. Laureateships have tended to attract poets already engaged in some form of relationship with the public, and who have an appetite – or at least, not a total aversion – to playing a role of cultural diplomacy, along with a relatively thick skin. With time, as we acclimatise to the laureateship, there may be more scope for poets who have a quieter relationship with the role.

Most important, in my view, is that the role is afforded the dignity of few expectations: less prescription, and more latitude given to the disposition and inclination of each individual laureate. Like poetry itself, the laureateship should permit many forms. The worst thing that could happen to the role is that it could go the way of an arts grant, and become overly integrated into the arts bureaucratic edifice, or overly fixed in its expectations, or lacking the freedom for each poet to reenvisage it afresh.

Despite these prospective pitfalls, as I’ve thought more about the laureateship, I’ve come to the firm position that it will do more good for the cause of poetry in Australia than harm. And to explain why, I want to return to the idea I opened with, which is that the laureateship exposes, once and for all, the wilful neglect that poetry has been subjected to in this country, and the precarity of Australian literature more generally. The laureateship puts enormous pressure on various institutions within government, the literary field, and the university sector to rectify that neglect. Because to foster and sustain poetic careers to the extent that poets can create a body of work of sufficient stature, depth, and scope to qualify for a laureateship, a range of other changes will need to take place too. And in return, Australian poetry itself will need to adapt to the laureateship as well.

Australian poetry publishing has been redlining over the past two decades. In its heyday, major presses had poetry lists, recognising that lucrative genres such as fiction should subsidise a poetry list because poetry is a necessary cornerstone of a nation’s literature. Now, several decades after these lists have evaporated, poetry publishing is undertaken wholly by boutique, independent, and university presses – but in time, the laureateship should serve to drive poetry sales and help generate an expectation that major publishers should publish it to be taken seriously. This change will also need to be reflected in bookshops, which typically treat poetry as a fringe affair, tucking it away on a very high or very low shelf. Likewise, most large literary festivals in this country have tended not to treat poetry as a central and integrated part of their programming, but rather segregated it from other literary genres – so there will be fresh motivation to facilitate meaningful and informed conversations about poetry outside those silos.

Likewise, while various laudable organisations and grants promote and support poetry, most initiatives are oriented towards new and emerging poets. Very few are directed at mid-career or established poets. In other words, we presently have relatively favourable conditions to start poetic careers, but not necessarily to sustain them. Much of this focus has been predicated on the idea that newness and eternal positivity will somehow save poetry. The trouble is, alongside valuing the new, we don’t sufficiently value longevity – nor do we acknowledge or even fully understand what is required to sustain a poetic career across decades. Too many Australian poets have been allowed to fall into obscurity or out of print because there have been insufficient structural and cultural supports to maintain momentum and interest in their work. Most newspapers don’t review much poetry at all, and certainly not in a timely fashion. Many or even most volumes of Australian poetry would struggle to get a single review in a major outlet, a situation made more acute each year as arts pages shrink. Even the national broadcaster has left the building; Radio National once had an excellent regular dedicated poetry program, Poetica, but no longer. We might rightly look around at the husks of what once passed for institutional support for poetry and despair. But a laureateship implies that poetic longevity and contributions to a culture over time are inherently valuable, respectable, and even laudatory. This will require some reorientation among the literary institutions that have been busy giving support to emerging poets, but doing little to sustain mid- and late-career ones.

The corollary of institutions vacating their support for poetry is that Australian poetry has, for some decades now, been an essentially closed system, a coterie publishing itself, reading itself and talking to itself. Within this niche, we have also largely lost a sense of critical honesty. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the extent poetry feels itself to be under siege, there’s a dearth of honest or negative criticism, because the critics writing about poetry are poets themselves – and yet this situation contributes to the problem of poetry’s diminishing readership. If poetry isn’t honest with itself, readers will be. While the Revive policy document itself – misguidedly, in my view – places a strong emphasis on the laureate mentoring ‘up and coming’ poets, this is an activity already occurring at scale elsewhere, and not aligned to the core function of poet laureates through history. In reality, the laureate’s objective first and foremost must be to champion the reading of poetry, because it’s readers and readers alone who can make poetry more sustainable in the long term. What this moment will demand is a poetry that regains that confidence, shucks its defensive crouch and speaks outwards again, reaching towards readers, and finding what the American poet and critic Dana Gioia calls a ‘public idiom’.

As the humanities continue to be rationalised within universities, the laureateship takes on a new and urgent meaning, insofar as it’s also replacing work that, several decades ago, might have been done by scholars who taught Australian poetry and helped to consolidate its significance. By the sheer fact of its existence, a laureateship goads us to ask what universities and schools are doing to value and champion Australian poetry. It invites us to reflect on the sorry state of Australian literature within the academy more broadly, which used to be led by Chairs in Australian Literature or Poetry: positions which have subsequently dwindled or ceased to exist altogether. It also forces us to squarely confront the dire conditions in which poets write. As a recent National Survey of Australian Book Authors by researchers at Macquarie revealed, Australian poets earn a paltry average salary of $5,700 from their art, which is an unsurprising figure given that most poetry print runs are between a meagre 500-1,000 copies. A laureateship demands we comprehensively review our existing infrastructure everywhere and adjust it until it’s fit for purpose. Above all, a laureateship suggests that Australian poetry is stable and sustainable, which of course it isn’t, and hasn’t been for a long time. There’ll be a necessary period in which the rhetoric lags behind the reality, but the laureateship offers the impetus and imprimatur for change.

Finally, and most importantly, my argument in favour of the laureateship is this: a laureateship insists that poetry is the pinnacle of literary achievement – or, as Brodsky rightly put it, ‘the supreme form of locution in any culture’. It’s right that the artform that venerates and refreshes language, and seeks to rescue it from its degradation and atrophy from chatbots, algorithms, clickbait, dogma, partisan rhetoric and politicking, and restore it to conscious and artful use should be literature’s emissary. At this time of mass attention deficit where we habitually and willingly outsource our brains to machines, we are at genuine risk, more than at any other point in human history, 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 isn’t yet ready to play this redeeming role in Australian culture, then it’s also true that Australian culture isn’t yet ready to be redeemed by poetry – so now the work on both sides must begin.

This was originally delivered as a keynote titled ‘The Writer in the Public Arena: Implications of a Poet Laureate for Australia’ at the University of Technology, Sydney on 20 September 2024.