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The following questions were sent to a number of poets, for them to answer individually or to use as a basis for a general statement about the writing of poetry today.

(a) Would poetry be more effective, i.e. interest more people more profoundly, if it were concerned with the issues of our time?

(b) Do you feel your views on politics or religion influence the kind of poetry you write? Alternatively, do you think poetry has uses as well as pleasure?

(c) Do you feel any dissatisfaction with the short lyric as a poetic medium? If so, are there any poems of a longer or non-lyric kind that you visualize yourself writing?

(d) What living poets continue to influence you, English or American?

(e) Are you conscious of any current ‘poeticization’ of language which requires to be broken up in favour of a more ‘natural’ diction? Alternatively, do you feel any undue impoverishment in poetic diction at the moment?

(f) Do you see this as a good or bad period for writing poetry?

JUDITH WRIGHT

     Categorical imperatives drawn up by the intellect are generally the death of poetry, which is an organic growth if it is anything at all, and takes on the colours and shapes and limitations of its time and its writer, whatever his notion of poetry may be. That is, poetry has to be concerned with the issues of our time’, even if only by implication or omission. But then, what are the issues? Not the obvious scarehead issues; not even perhaps the fall-out or the colour-bar or the tear-gas bombs flung over the wall, but something a good deal deeper and less temporal. A reconciliation with ourselves, perhaps? — which implies a reconciliation with the others, who are also ourselves.

     If that is true, poetry has a good chance of becoming once more an influential art-form — if poets take it and themselves seriously and rightly. Poetry, like the significant dream in an analysis, is a reconciling force where self and outer image can come together in understanding. Precisely, poetry only happens when being and image clash and generate a spark — that’s poetry. A way of finding a difficult balance: relating inner and outer.

     That has always been the immediate problem for writing in a new country. The European consciousness, particularly here in Australia, was plunged suddenly, after centuries of growth inside traditions, into a totally new situation where the traditions went ludicrously astray. We have had to discover just what has happened to us, and in discovering, laboriously make the happening true. Even when it has looked from the outside as though we were merely imitating — building mock-English sandcastles — Australian writers have been occupied with something quite other; trying to find a way to make these new pressures, shapes, events mean something to a consciousness trained to expect everything to be other than it was. When East becomes North and West is under you feet, your compass spins frighteningly. To calm it, you must find for yourself a new axis.

     For us, it has not been easy. We have been stripped of a great deal; poetry’s validity was deeply tested, and much that did not apply melted like English snow in an Australian December. What came through intact, what even increased in meaning, was poetry’s assertion of the holiness of being, the relationship of man and man, and of man and his imaged world, created through language.