Powerful and Moving

‘We are deeply affected by the stories we tell and those we are told. Stories seep into us and shape our actions. The future is not fixed, and if we want to have a hand in shaping it we need to imagine our way into it. What we write matters.’

Incoherence, along with a lack of methodological rigour, is particularly apparent in most writing (not that there is much of it) about how practitioners in the visual arts in Australia and New Zealand have interacted with each other since James Cook sailed over the horizon in 1770.

Just as certain weather conditions must be present for a rainbow to be visible, so the environment has to be right for literary titles from Aotearoa to be seen and noticed in Australia.

Poems speak to us through panic and fences, closed doors, forests, rivers and distanced days. Their atoms lodge somewhere within us and we carry them close, hoping that, in the inferno of loss and uncertainty, the intensity and ambiguity of poetry can salvage something.

Join us on zoom at 11am on Friday 21 May for an online discussion between Eugen Bacon, Tamryn Bennett, David Carlin and Julienne van Loon on literary value, chaired by SRB’s editor, Catriona Menzies-Pike.

This seminar addresses the changing nature of literary value in 2021, against a movable backdrop of post-COVID Australia. It shares diverse findings from a collaborative project between the Sydney Review of Books and the non/fictionLab at RMIT University in Melbourne. The collaboration seeks to elicit experimental, essayistic approaches to questions of ‘value’ in the literary and cultural sectors.

As with many others, I have been thinking about questions of value in relation to Australian books and writing for some years. I have often pondered how to articulate such value, and also where, when, and to whom we might make an argument for it. Does it even make sense for Australian writers, readers, book industry spokespeople and educators to invest our limited time in making carefully calibrated arguments?

Can poetry make things happen? Can poetry bring about change? Does it hold that power? In the wake of the heaving 2020 chronicle of civil rights protests, a global pandemic and environmental disasters, what role can poetry play towards a recovering world?

A good writer will stay curious, exploratory, immersed in a creative space that is ever redefining itself. A good reader will find affection in deviants, to the wonderment of speculative fiction that offers liberation from the pedantic approach: Is it science fiction? Or fantasy? Or horror?