I write in response to AJ Carruthers in ‘Four perspectives on race and racism in Australian poetry’ (Overland 222). Aside from noting that his characterisation of what seems to be the undefined majority of Australian poetry as ‘conventional verse culture’, which simply imports and slightly renames ‘official verse culture’, that term of dismissal used by US experimental against what used to be called ‘academic’ or ‘confessional’ poets, I thought I should say something about the way he portrays part of my poetry.