Katharine Coles
In September 2015, I was at the University of Canberra for the International Poetry Studies Institute’s annual Poetry on the Move conference, where I attended a reading by Australian poets Cassandra Atherton, Owen Bullock, Monica Carroll, Jen Crawford, Paul Munden, Shane Strange, and Jen Webb (all of whom appear in this issue of Western Humanities Review), who had been participating in the Prose Poem Project, an on-line call-and-response collaboration comprising over 20 poets mostly from Australia. A little jet-lagged still, I was jolted awake by the energy and variety of the poems being performed, recently gathered into a book called Seam, published by Recent Work Press and shepherded into print by Shane Strange. Seam was the first of three books so far produced out of the collaboration.
At that point, I had for a while been mulling over the idea of putting together a portfolio for WHR featuring Australian poets, but an organizing principle or point of inquiry had yet to come to me— and I admit that it didn’t occur to me that day, or indeed begin to take shape until the following summer. On a train from Oxford to London, I had the Prose Poem Project’s second slim volume, Pulse, in hand, and I began to consider whether there might be an issue of Australian prose poetry in my future. In 2017 came Tract; during that summer, I was hearing from poets Paul Hetherington and Cassandra Atherton early rumblings of a book they were planning about prose poetry. It was this larger scholarly project that confirmed my intuition that, even beyond the lively group I already knew about, there was an enormous resurgence of interest in prose poetry occurring across Australia, by which I mean a surge with a history behind it.
Australia is vast, and I am not. At this point, I turned to Shane, knowing how deeply rooted he was in the project that so interested me and also how connected he is to poets across Australia. With the generous additional help of Cassandra Atherton, Shane sent out a call for submissions, and the poems came in, many of them, and far more varied than I had hoped, representing poetry from across the continent and also across diverse social and ethnic groups.
It isn’t difficult to go to Australia and meet a number of really good poets. More unusual is to find poets who are speaking to each other from a distance, in a shared form but in very different voices, from which, when they appear together, a reader on the other side of the world might construct something like a sense of poetic community and identity. Paul Hetherington and Cassandra Atherton speak to the reasons for this eloquently in their introductory essay. It’s my pleasure to have worked alongside Shane to bring you some sense of it here.
Shane Strange
National boundaries—artificial constructs with all too real consequences—are felt keenly in so-called ‘settler cultures’ like Australia. Here, under the banner of ‘bringing civilisation to unknown frontiers,’ hostile erasures of those more ancient understandings of place and being have occurred, while ‘new’ ways of life are endlessly proclaimed in an attempt to focus certainty around somewhat flimsy constructions of national identity. One of the endemic features of this process in Australian cultural life has been the ‘cultural cringe.’ That is, not only the strong desire by Australians to know what others think of our country, but a feeling that ‘real’ life and culture are elsewhere: in England, or Europe, or the United States, where it seems that real people create and participate in culture, while we on the margins, on the other side of the globe, merely imitate it, or overcompensate for its lack.
In a sense the request from Katharine Coles to help compile this portfolio of Australian prose poetry for Western Humanities Review activated some of these complexes. Why would anyone from the US be interested in Australian poetry, let alone prose poetry? Was there something that could be identified as an ‘Australian’ prose poem? What did she see there that we couldn’t?
It is to Katharine’s credit that the request came from a genuine desire, having visited and engaged with Australia’s poets and writers over a number of years, to know more about Australian poetry and to bring what she saw as a particular poetic to another audience—her audience, if you like. That she chose prose poetry as the form by which to do it, recognised that what might be called a national poetry is always resistant to partial soundings that represent the whole. It indicated an understanding of the complexity of a robust poetic culture that, yes, engaged with broader Anglophone concerns, but was rich enough and deep enough to have its own traditions and practitioners in a variety of forms and fields.
Right now, Australian poetry is in rude good health with prose poetry enjoying not only a revival but with it a reappraisal of its value as poetry. Poets who may never have dealt in the form before are writing and experimenting with prose poems, in some cases as a novelty, in some cases with a palpable sense of relief if not a newfound freedom. The prose poets gathered here, however, are all known in Australia to greater or lesser degrees as practitioners of the form for itself.
They come from two sources. Cassandra Atherton has a vast knowledge of prose poetry, and of the Australian scene particularly. It was with her great assistance that we were able to identify, contact, and obtain new work from this diverse range of esteemed poets.
The second source of this work is what has come to be known as the Prose Poetry Project. Established by Paul Hetherington in late 2014, it initially involved three poets from the University of Canberra who promised to email each other prose poems by way of experimentation with both the form and the form of collaboration. Within months, the project came to include some 20 poets from three different countries and produced, over its two-year lifespan, some 2,700 prose poems.
Katharine has mentioned some of the more tangible outcomes of this project. But all of us who participated in it have remarked at one stage or another on the sheer vibrancy and inclusiveness that formed around this seemingly simple idea. Engagement with prose poetry has significantly changed the way that some of us work, has refocused our attentions, given us new paths for creation and collaboration, and new understandings of poetry. It is a rare thing to be given the opportunity to participate in such a creatively transformational endeavour.
The following compilation makes no claims to be a comprehensive or definitive survey of what might be called the Australian prose poem. You may leave reading this portfolio none the wiser about what makes these writings ‘Australian’ or not. Or you may discern something that we who are in it cannot see or hear: a common list of concerns, perhaps, or echoes of the familiar and the strange. I leave those judgements to you.
This portfolio does deliberately, however, seek to show a diverse range of what might be called a ‘prose poem’ from an equally diverse range of poets working in Australia right now. I thank Katharine for taking that interest, recognising its value, and offering the opportunity to work with her and with WHR.