The Poet Eaters

If you choose to write poetry in Australia, your peers will be your publishers, your friends will be your competitors, your contemporaries will be your critics. One way to escape these constraints is to leave the country. For the rest of us, there’s the art of completing a quick check of your periphery before launching into a critique of the latest prize-winning collection. Where I live, we call this move ‘The Melbourne Shoulder’. 

Poets are all too aware of the ways in which this hypervigilance stifles us. At a reading many years ago, a prize-winning poet, then serving as editor for the biggest publication outlet going, put it plainly: ‘The Australian poetry scene is too polite.’ I’ve never forgotten that crisp diagnosis. Because there’s polite, and there’s too polite. ‘Polite’ suggests appropriate respect for others and a willingness to consider their priorities when offering a critique. ‘Too polite’ suggests an over-correction – an environment in which thoughtful criticism is replaced with unnecessary reticence. In its worst interpretation, ‘too polite’ suggests dishonesty.

Given all this, you can perhaps imagine the queasy sense of recognition I had when I first read Ben Etherington’s 2015 essay, ‘The Poet Tasters’. In 2013, I had a few published poems to my name and thought of myself as a budding poetry critic. Then I read this:

My queasiness only intensified when, towards the end of the article, Etherington outlined the pattern he saw after completing the monumental task of reading all 247 reviews published in 2013:

I knew how accurately this described my approach. For me, reviewing was always far more stressful than it was satisfying – an exercise in trying to please the poet, the editor, readers, and myself, in that order. After a few more attempts, I took ‘The Poet Tasters’ as permission to stop writing reviews.

There is a more generous perspective on the way Australian poetry functions than the one I’ve put forward so far. The work that poets do to edit, publish, promote, discuss, judge, and review poetry is – to risk making us sound like soldiers (or cake stall volunteers) – a kind of service. No one is going to get rich. No one is going to get famous. Still, we contribute. We work for each other – long hours, almost always for free – and this is why Australian poetry endures.

Around the time I stopped writing reviews, I bought myself a mediocre USB microphone and started making a podcast about poetry. Poetry Says became my contribution to Australian poetry’s self-sustaining ecosystem. I interviewed around 120 poets across the lifespan of the show, which I concluded in March 2025, and my hope was that each conversation would reveal something about that ecosystem.

Very gradually, the show became subject to the same pressures that might make a critic ‘too polite’. As my audience grew, so did the level of caution exercised by guests and would-be guests. No one wanted to make what a boss of mine used to call ‘a career-limiting statement’.

It was a desire to work against this reticence that prompted me to attempt a recreation of ‘The Poet Tasters’, and measure how accurate Etherington’s statements are today, a little over a decade on. I had no intention of reading every review published – a process Etherington described as akin to ‘[w]atching an entire test match from the perspective of a camera trained on the slips’ – but I could at least update his tally of reviews for both 2023 and 2024 (see below).

As I counted up my totals, I kept asking myself: How much do these numbers actually matter? How much do reviews matter? What are reviews supposed to do? To attempt to answer these and other questions, I caught up with Sydney Review of Books Editor (and poetry reviewer), James Jiang. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

— Alice Allan

James Jiang: This morning I was listening to episode 251 of Poetry Says where you directly address Ben’s essay. It’s now just over 10 years since Ben originally published it as part of his Critic Watch series. Could you say something about why you felt compelled to respond to it on your podcast and now again on its tenth anniversary?

Alice Allan: It worried me. To me, its conclusions have always seemed pretty damning.

But having those conclusions in the back of my mind was one of the things that kept me trying to move towards honesty and directness on Poetry Says, which wasn’t easy. I always felt this really strong pull toward praising the poetry I was talking about, and promoting the work of Australian poets. That’s what I thought would make other people happy, and I never wanted to upset even one person. I had to keep finding ways to move past those impulses in myself, so that I could make a show that was worth listening to.

The desire to return to Ben’s piece was sparked by a conversation I had with a couple of other poets. This article came up, and I think I said: ‘Someone should really update that piece.’ So here we are.

JJ: One of the focal points of Ben’s essay is the question of audience. He diagnoses a problem whereby these reviews – in not fully articulating their context, their allegiances, the kind of discursive and personal networks from which they emerge – are not geared towards addressing an audience not already part of the poetry community. I guess I’m wondering what the audience is for a program like Poetry Says?

AA: I’ve never forgotten how opaque and even unwelcoming the world of poetry felt to me when I started writing. There’s something glamorous about poetry, and something exclusive about it. So my goal was always to demystify – that was the word that I tried to keep in mind, at every point. I always imagined I was talking to myself when I first started writing seriously: ‘What does she need to know so that she doesn’t feel so confused and disenfranchised?’

Making the show was a process of self-education. As I got further in, I became more confident about not taking the novice position. (I also had multiple listeners telling me to please stop taking the novice position, because I clearly wasn’t a novice anymore. It took a long time to put that down.) I wanted my show to be a place where novices were welcome, and treated like they were intelligent and worthwhile people.

JJ: There were some wonderful programs at the start where you got some pretty significant Australian poets and did close readings. But towards the end, you also started bringing people like me onto the program with a focus on reviewing, and there was an episode with Ursula Robinson-Shaw, a well-known reviewer. Was that a conscious decision to expand the scope of the program to include more critical voices?

AA: When you make a show over nine years, you have to keep moving towards what interests you. The minute you’re bored, the audience will leave. I find processes like close reading exceptionally valuable, but at a certain point, I felt I knew enough to spread my wings a bit. I felt I could start interviewing people like yourself and Ursula, and that I would have decent questions to ask you.

JJ: Well, you’re in a sweet spot, as it were, to address some of the concerns in Ben’s piece. Does what Ben say about the Australian poetry scene – that ‘[j]ust about anyone who has decided that poetry is their thing, and who has enough private means and persistence, can be confident of edging their way into [it]’ – still feel true?

AA: I think that’s still true. The size of the country, and the size of the community, are factors. And, honestly, I think it’s true to some degree even of communities in places like Brooklyn, where there’s such a large population of writers. They too have their own microcosms, their own allegiances, their own preferences. I’m sure, to borrow the phrase you used on Poetry Says, that there’s ‘a certain claustrophobia’ in places like Brooklyn as well. 

I think the advantage we have, as Australian poets, is an ability to laugh at ourselves, and to understand that what we are doing isn’t a life-or-death proposition.

JJ: Although sometimes it can feel like that!

When I reread Ben’s essay, I was also struck by the fact that what he says about poetry reviewing could actually be extended to all reviewing in Australia. Some of the things he talks about – the Eurocentrism, the lack of recognition of local literary history, that five-point formula of polite approval – those critiques could also be levelled at OzLitCrit more generally. In any ‘best of’ list, you can be sure to find a recommender recommending their friend’s work. This kind of thing is not totally confined to Australian poetry reviewing.

Ben tallied 247 reviews across a range of publications, newspapers, big literary journals, smaller literary journals, and read through all 247 reviews. You’ve now done a similar tally for the years 2023 and 2024. What are the most obvious trends you’ve noticed, and what’s some of the context around those numbers?

AA: Clearly, there are far fewer reviews overall, and I suspect lack of funding is probably the biggest reason for that. Changing editorial priorities year to year would also play a part, and some journals – Sotto, Southerly, and foam:e – are just gone. I particularly mourn the loss of foam:e, which was a wonderful little online space. Maybe, too, with the rising cost of living, there’s greater pressure on would-be reviewers to go to their paid jobs and make a living.

National newspapers have also become very different beasts, and it’s really heartening to see The Saturday Paper step into the gap they’ve created. But getting a review in The Australian or The Age/Sydney Morning Herald is a major achievement for an Australian poet these days. (Poetry collections are sometimes mentioned in regular columns such as Caroline Overington’s Notable Books or Jason Steger’s Booklist, but I chose not to include these in my totals. These mentions are no doubt highly desirable, but are ultimately promotional rather than critical.)

There are a couple of bright spots that I want to highlight. Cordite did that huge number of reviews in the year Ben tracked – I don’t actually know how they did that! These days, they’re doing many more group reviews. Despite that, I do feel that Cordite has life and interest, and there’s a sense that poets aren’t just giving their friends a tick of approval. Elsewhere, I did see definite instances of mates reviewing mates, and Quadrant was by far the worst example.

JJ: The Cordite figures are probably the starkest, especially because it occupies such an important position in Australian poetry culture generally – not just reviewing, but in publishing new work as well. When I’ve done reviews for Cordite, I noticed a significant editorial shift from shorter to longer reviews. So I went from writing 800-word reviews to two thousand words. I don’t know precisely when that happened, but I think that probably accounts for some part of that drop.

I should also say, as a kind of mea culpa, that 2024 was a bit of a strange year for the SRB with the website redevelopment knocking out a chunk of our usual publishing schedule. But I do want to note that those two reviews – Lucy Van on π.O. and Andy Jackon on Jill Jones – were accompanied by a review of a monograph on Barron Field and by essays on the late Lyn Hejinian’s connections to OzPo, Australian pool poetry, and the idea of an Australian poet laureateship. So there was a dispersal of critical activity across our publishing streams, and this may be the case for other journals as well… 

AA: And in most of these journals, there were personnel changes, with new editors having their own priorities, and their own strategies.

One exception is Australian Poetry Review’s Martin Duwell, who I had the pleasure of interviewing last year. I really want to underscore how consistent and thoughtful he is as Australia’s only long-term non-poet poetry reviewer. Ben quotes the Jacket interview Martin did in 2010, where he says: ‘I really resent criticism which is basically evaluative because, deep down, it’s gatekeeping.’

Martin seemed to still agree with that when I interviewed him, and I understand his point of view. But I don't know if I fully agree. I think even Martin’s reviews are evaluative, in a gentle way.

It is possible to write a review without evaluating. And that’s something I came across in many reviews that I want to draw out here, too. The gravitational pull towards description, which makes it possible for the reviewer to dodge evaluation almost completely. I do think that's a problem.

JJ: That’s a really tricky issue… Ben has this wonderful line later in the piece. He says: ‘The best reviews […] pushed description of the material to the point of disclosing its value. (Perhaps this also characterises Duwell’s approach?)’

I agree with that, but often, when I find myself in a fairly high-pressure evaluative context, like in a judging situation, I find that my point is much more readily embraced if I don’t adopt an aggressively evaluative tone and say, ‘this bad’ or ‘this good’. But if you describe, and say, ‘I think this book is trying to do this’ and go into detail with a kind of energy or vividness, you’re still making an evaluative case, but you’ve stripped the evaluative rhetoric away from it.

It always reminds me of this line in William James’ The Principles of Psychology. He says, ‘To conceive vividly is ipso facto to affirm.’ So, to be able to describe something as intensely and passionately as you can is already to say, ‘Hey, I think this is good.’

AA: The other thing I’d say here is that there’s so much dedicated research and careful thinking that goes into even the shortest poetry review. Poets work hard to make it clear that they’ve done the reading and considered their words. The challenge is that sometimes doing your homework can distract you from that passion you mentioned.

I want to briefly highlight Lucy Van’s work, because over these two years that I’m looking at, she wrote a couple of really stunning reviews – one on π.O.’s The Tour, which you’ve mentioned, and the other on Dom Symes’ I Saw the Best Memes of My Generation and Shastra Deo’s The Exclusion Zone for Cordite.

Lucy does so much research, but she also makes it fun and interesting to read her conclusions. She makes her thinking visible, which allows her to express doubt and hesitation with openness and kindness. I think she’s a model of what good literary criticism could look like in Australia. She’s not the only one who works in this way, but I think she’s one of a handful.

JJ: The π.O. review is a spiky review in many ways, but it’s so funny. Not only does Lucy wear her learning very lightly, she also seems to have metabolised conflict. It’s not necessarily a rearing to fight, but an understanding that sticking to your principles in the face of opposing principles is part and parcel of what it means to be part of a culture. Those lines of disagreement and divergence are visible, as is the contentiousness of the space in which these poems are written and in which she’s writing. She engages with a lot of the other reviews of π.O.’s work and says: ‘Hey, I think you’ve actually misunderstood.’ And that was part of Ben’s original complaint – the way poetry reviews exclude certain readers is through not being explicit about who’s fighting whom and why. That’s a really crucial part of Lucy’s practice.

We’ve talked about the shift from short-form to long-form with Cordite. Were there other qualitative trends that you detected among the reviews – rhetorical or generic patterns that kept cropping up?

AA: I was looking for Ben’s ‘compliment sandwich’, but I didn’t see that as often as I saw paragraphs and paragraphs of careful description and research. As we’ve said, a certain amount of description is necessary, and can even be its own type of evaluation. But sometimes the description took up the entire word count.

When I did see straightforward, evaluative statements, they were almost always positive. And when I saw hesitation and doubt, it was almost always heavily qualified. What I rarely saw was people having fun.

The thing about getting to write a review is, if you have the right assignment, and you feel confident, it can be some of the most fun you get to have as a writer. But I rarely saw poets giving themselves that permission.

JJ: So the tone was primarily quite solemn, kind of serious?

AA: Yes. Because we want to do well by each other! My joke about this is that when you run into a poet who’s writing a review, they have a haunted look. They’re taking it so seriously, and so they should. But it can also be serious play. As you and I covered in our discussion on Poetry Says, we worry about each other, and we worry about each other’s opinions. I think it is important to stay kind, but fun should also be allowed.

JJ: It’s quite surprising, because so much of Australian poetry is fun. It’s loose, it’s messy – it’s ratbaggy, for want of a better word.

One of the things I wanted to ask you was, in comparison to reviews of non-poetry titles, was there a higher level of attention, for example a tendency to employ things like block quotes, and to engage in technical analysis? Was there something about certain reviews that suggested an internalised sense of the Platonic form of what a poetry review should be – a template they were trying to meet?

AA: I think the goal, on the whole, was to show a very deep engagement with and understanding of the work. I can think of a couple of exceptions. One was a less recent example, Laurie Duggan’s review of π.O.’s Heide, which I found in the archived version of foam:e. It’s short, it’s punchy, and doesn’t quote much from the book at all, even though the book is huge.

Another was Jennifer Compton reviewing Alan Fyfe’s G-d, Sleep, and Chaos in Rochford Street Review. She does a wonderful job of saying, ‘I enjoyed this book, but I don’t know how to sum it up.’ That not quite knowing what to say is a completely legitimate response that I think we hardly ever see. 

JJ: On the one hand, it’s a kind of ethical claim to say: ‘I’m being quite sincere with you, because I don’t actually understand what’s going on.’ But then there’s a question about the lowest bar of authority you can claim in order to write a review that’s useful for a reader.

When you say ‘I don’t know’, there are certain critical positions that make themselves available to you. You can say: ‘And that’s a fault of the author’ – Ben talks about the essay on obscurities in contemporary poetry that Geoff Page wrote – that’s one avenue. But if you don’t want to go down that route, what positions are available to you to say: ‘I still know what I’m talking about – I don’t think it’s the fault of the author, but this is where there’s a divergence or a gap that exists, either in me or in the culture at large’? But that’s a very difficult thing to do, because it requires both charity towards the reviewee and a fairly secure sense of where you’re coming from as a reviewer. Off the top of my head, I can only think of one review that pulls this off, and that’s Fay Zwicky’s review of Les Murray, which talks about why Murray’s work locks her out.

AA: I adore that review. There’s a sense that this is someone who’s completely fed up with trying to play by the rules as she sees them, and just wants to speak plainly. It’s a total delight.

On the topic of what we can do when we don’t know how to feel about a particular work, let’s talk about Gareth Morgan’s 2022 review of Petra White’s Cities in Cordite, which takes that position very effectively. Gareth closely reads these poems, and keeps asking questions throughout the review: What is Petra White doing? How is she doing it? Is she successful on her own terms? And why don’t I, Gareth Morgan, connect with this work?

He’s got this fantastic skepticism throughout. It’s not an entirely positive review, but far from turning me away from the book, reading that review sent me to my copy of Cities to see whether I agreed. I think a standard issue, description-heavy, merely positive review isn’t all that likely to prompt somebody to do that. A review like this sparks questions, and sends you to your bookshelf.

JJ: It’s a fascinatingly ambivalent review. In a weird way, it’s quite an inward-looking review, in a positive sense. He’s constantly testing his sensibility against both what this book is – what Cities is getting across – and how other people have framed and evaluated it. In doing that, he lays down such an interesting map.

The review opens with: ‘I wonder what this says about poetry in Australia. Her poems are so good on one metric (studious, “clever”, instructive), and so bad, downright naughty, on another (stylistic and/or political “radicalness”).’ Already it’s saying: ‘I’m going to come at this from a secure vantage point, but there’s a larger context here, and mine isn’t the only position.’

So it’s quite generous, even as it’s largely about himself. It’s also almost self-reflexively Cartesian in asking: ‘Do I like this? Why isn’t this working for me?’ In being so inward-looking, it actually opens things up. He’s saying: ‘Here’s a process that you can replicate on your own terms.’

One of the things I really like is Gareth’s freedom with adjectives. He writes: ‘This poem, like most of the very consistent Cities, trades in familiarity: “darkness”, “sweetness”, “mother[s]”, “ghost[s]”, and the extended universe of Greek myth. It has an aphoristic quality that holds the promise of profundity, wet-eyed, important.’

‘Wet-eyed’ – I love that drop of sensuous detail. It brings to life a certain phenomenology of reading, capturing the experiential element. That can sometimes be tied to a specific passage, but he’s able to capture the overall impression of the book with precision. I don’t know how common that was in the reviews you saw.

AA: Well, when the reviewer is doing very dedicated, careful work to show that they’ve understood and can describe the book completely, that kind of thing can get forgotten. But this review reminds me that a review can be a really wonderful piece of literature on its own. It’s an opportunity to play – to show off a bit, if that’s done thoughtfully.

I love that you’ve used the word ‘secure’. If you can take a secure position – which doesn’t necessarily have to mean a steadfastly confident one – then you’re allowed to spread your wings a bit. But if you are, as I always was, worried to death about the response to your review, then you can’t possibly come up with a good sentence. You can’t possibly have any fun.

JJ: Yeah, what’s really lovely about lines like ‘the promise of profundity, wet-eyed, important’ is that it’s description with an evaluative component, even if it comes across as a slightly diaristic recording of one’s responses. And that’s woven throughout the review.

One of the other interesting things is the clash of sensibilities, or a lack of resonance. Particularly those moments of affective extravagance that sneak through this glossy or ‘honeyed’ exterior of White’s poems that Gareth keeps going back to. ‘And why not go for the big O, and in this slightly guileless fashion?’ he writes. There are moments where the review is a challenge to that aesthetic, at the same time as it offers praise. There is something funny and camp there, and in those moments, it doesn’t really matter to the reviewer whether or not the author intended it – it’s been received that way. It’s been translated, as it were, from one sensibility to the other. I think that’s a marker of a good review – the ability to translate between sensibilities.

AA: I wanted to highlight Gareth’s review of Petra White alongside André Dao’s review of Nam Le’s 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem. Both respond to the ‘claustrophobia’ you described in our Poetry Says conversation – they both acknowledge the airlessness in the room, and work past it. In André Dao’s case, he’s friends with Nam Le, and he acknowledges that up front.

JJ: And it’s quite fraught in André’s case, because of the racial component, which is both worth resisting and inescapable, as he mentions throughout. It’s also worth noting that while André Dao and Nam Le are big important writers in Australian literature, they’re not necessarily at the heart of what we could describe as ‘OzPo Ltd’. 

It occurred to me that Ben’s essay begins by talking about the Geraldine Pascall Prize for Australian Critic of the Year (now the Pascall Prize for Cultural Criticism), and the fact that it’s never been awarded to someone who’s a poetry critic in the main. It’s still really our only award for generalist criticism, so in that sense, it’s quite important as a way of taking the temperature of Australian critical discourse. In the years since Ben’s essay was published, André is the only critic to have been awarded it on the basis of at least one poetry review, and this was the review for which he won last year. So it is being held up as a model for what good poetry reviewing is.

What was it about this review that emerged most starkly as either representative of Australian poetry reviewing, or divergent from the way poetry reviewing is normally done? 

AA: I don’t think it’s representative, really. I chose it because of this paragraph, towards the beginning of the review, where André Dao writes:

I think this is a huge and fascinating issue, and a challenge for reviewing in Australia. This was the only time I saw it acknowledged outright and straightforwardly.

The other thing André acknowledges beautifully is simply that he’s friends with Nam. So, as readers, we have the option to either dismiss the review altogether as not objective, or to be saner, more realistic, and grateful to know the actual nature of the relationship between reviewer and writer. In Australia, there is so often at least some kind of personal relationship – you might have only met somebody once at a book launch, but you could also end up reviewing one of your dear friend’s books, and you may be the only person deemed suitable to write that review.

André manages to make all that really clear before he actually gets into the work of reviewing. I think he does that work quite effectively, though I still wanted more evaluation.

JJ: I think it’s quite a strongly evaluative review, but there’s a slightly Trojan-horse-like matter-of-fact-ness. The verb ‘to be’ is used a lot, but in a way which is both interpretive and quasi-evaluative. His description carries an assertion of value.

I wanted to point to that same moment in the review that you did, because as you say, it’s a moment where the ‘circuit of familiarity’, to use Ben's phrase, is foregrounded quite explicitly. I think it’s very much to André’s credit to both speak with candor about the relationship, and to acknowledge that this review would have happened anyway.

There was a pivotal question for me in the next paragraph, where he says:

There’s an interesting public-private division here, and André makes it powerfully, talking about being a ‘native informant’. But I wonder if there’s a way of respecting this boundary, and at the same time having something to say about the lines of divergence and convergence that constitute the different perspectives and opinions in the field of Vietnamese or Vietnamese diasporic writing. Is there a way of disclosing something about yourself as a writer, not necessarily as a person or a friend, that then says: ‘Because I’m close, and because we’ve had these discussions, here’s what I see as being at stake in both Nam’s writing and my own writing’?

Perhaps there’s a way of refusing that flattening André’s referring to by saying: ‘These internal differentiations – which are presumed not to exist every time you put me on a panel with other Vietnamese or Asian writers, or every time you ask me to review a book by another Vietnamese-Australian writer – those differentiations are important here, for these reasons…’ 

I think that speaks to part of what the original ‘Poet Tasters’ essay is about. We don’t really want to be village explainers, but at the same time, there are significant disagreements, and readers have to understand these disagreements or differences in order to make sense of the work, and put a value on it.

But let’s come back to your point about the balance between evaluation and description in this review.

AA: One of the other things André does here is discuss the formal elements of some of the poems. He compares Le’s poem ‘Matri-immigral’, to Auden’s ‘Lullaby’ in terms of its metre, and it’s fascinating to see that done in a national newspaper. That’s a nerdy discussion that I’d like to have, but I wonder how readers received it.

 I think you’re right that evaluation has been almost snuck in. I perhaps didn’t see it – I was slightly bamboozled by the technical descriptions of what Nam Le is doing. I finished the review thinking: ‘Yes, but what did you think, André? Did you like it??’

JJ: There is that moment towards the end, in the penultimate paragraph, where that restlessness of voice attributed to the poet, that refusal to be boxed in without refusing his public role, becomes a way forward. ‘Reading 36 Ways, thinking with it, I feel the walls recede – just a little.’ That’s probably the most explicit experiential evaluative claim.

AA: It’s almost as if he finishes the review there, with qualified praise. But then – and I saw this done over and over again in reviews, and it’ll be done until the end of time – the reviewer retreats to quotation in the final paragraph, and ends with lines from a poem. If I ever get to be an editor, I’m going to cut those final paragraphs!

JJ: That is one tactic. Another tactic I’ve seen, which Ben points to in his essay, is offering a whole lot of criticism, but then stepping back to say that overall, the collection is still good. So even when a review doesn’t end with the author’s voice, there’s some sort of reaffirmation that it’s good that this book exists, and given a little more editing, it’ll be a perfect version of itself.

On second thought, the most strongly evaluative moment in André’s review is, I think, the analysis of Le’s mastery of prosody. There’s a paragraph where he says: ‘Listen to the music of that.’ That’s a moment where, again, I feel that authority. The ability to say rather explicitly: ‘Hear this, it’s good.’ But a poem’s music is always difficult to transmit to a reader – how do you convey to someone that Nam’s insertion of an extra syllable ‘cracks’ Auden’s trochaic tetrameter? Because of this, prosodic arguments tend to slide into the metaphoric or symbolic in order to justify themselves, especially since terms like ‘rhythm’ or ‘music’ are such ready stand-ins for some kind of authorial signature. Even the word ‘stress’ has a certain ambiguity to it: when André writes, ‘With that one word, [Le] stresses the differences …’, is he saying that the ‘My’ in ‘My mother paints and strips your nails’ is actually rhythmically stressed as well as gesturing towards a more thematic kind of emphasis? 

I was a bit surprised by the intense focus on prosody. But the rationale gets spelled out later on in the review – in the part about Seamus Heaney, where Heaney says that one of the ways to talk about poetic persona, without lapsing into the poet’s actual personhood, is to listen to voice, to listen to music. So the prosodic analysis is an important moment in the review, because it allows us to think about poetic persona as abstracted from person. That’s what a review like this is looking for. Otherwise, there’s a constant sense of: ‘Oh, fuck, I’m writing about my friend again!’

AA: I wonder if people will encounter this conversation and think reviewing is an impossible task, even if they could get past the claustrophobia of this smallish scene. Do you think we’re going to leave people with that impression?

JJ: I think this kind of conversation helps people understand how complicated reading is, but that this way of reading is something we are always already engaging in. And that seems to be a valuable thing …

There was a larger question you put to me when we first started talking about taking up the gauntlet Ben’s essay threw down, and this has to do with imagining a healthy critical culture around Australian poetry. How far away are we from that?

AA: Unfortunately, I think we are further away than we were in 2013. And that comes back to the boring issue of money. The journals on Ben’s list that have closed were important medium-sized opportunities. Sotto, for example, was a great place to get a by-line as a young, emerging reviewer. There are people out there who are recreating those medium-sized opportunities, but this all takes time and money. The people who hold the purse strings in Australia, even if they don’t always have more money to give, could at least make it easier to ask for money.

The other issue is, people who might love to spend some of their free time making a journal, a reading series, or a magazine of some sort – they really have to go to work. It’s very, very difficult to find even a little slice of time and space to do that kind of thing now.

JJ: What are the ways in which you see someone outside the poetry world engaging audiences and readers, who are either on the fringes of this sphere, or totally outside it? Is a healthy critical culture one that actively engages and looks to engage with those people?

AA: I feel I’m big-noting myself by saying this, but something I was often told by listeners was that Poetry Says was the reason they had heard of certain Australian poets, and that they felt welcome in Australian poetry. And I think that’s because I explicitly took that novice perspective. But what else, concretely? I don’t have a good answer. 

JJ: It’s a question for all of us. A subculture like OzPo, if that’s the right way to characterise it, is necessarily precarious and adaptable. There are no institutional barricades. You can force your way in if you want. But by the same token, because there’s such internal pressure being maintained by everyone doing whatever they’re doing, it seems impenetrable.

Reviews are a way to demystify, to use your word, the seemingly closed nature of these spaces, which in the end aren’t really closed. When you think about all these reviews, and Ben’s article, what’s the image of the poetic community that you get? What do these people look like, and what kind of world does it seem like they belong to?

AA: I think serious and studious is the image I come away with – people who take each other and each other’s work very seriously, and who take poetry very seriously. What’s interesting and sort of hilarious to me is that, through doing around 120 interviews and hanging around for 15 years, I now know Australian poets to be absolute ratbags. So the contrast between the seriousness you see in reviews and the reality of going to a reading or getting coffee with someone is huge. If people only looked at our reviews, they wouldn’t know how much fun we have.