In 2008 Melbourne became UNESCO’s second “City of Literature” after Edinburgh. The announcement at the State Library in Melbourne was celebrated with various speeches to about 200 people involved in the literature industry. What was astonishing about the announcement was Louise Adler from Melbourne University Press was saying that it was such a great honour for Melbourne, and would showcase at the Writers Festival the best that Melbourne had to offer, such as Writers, and Novelists, and Essayists, and … [o ho ho ho] “if We have to … POETS!!!!!” [a Hahahahaha].

In 1920 Kenneth Slessor said that “The remorseless fact is that dialect of any description is fatal to poetry […] It kills it […] There is no half-way house […] when CJ Dennis’s characters are made to speak in metrical slang and rhymed dialect it can never be allowed [my italics] that the result is poetry” [to continue] “It is true that the hawker of Woolloomooloo talks [his italics] in the peculiar dialect of the locality; but I entirely deny that he thinks [his italics] in slang.” When i first read about that in Geofrrey Dutton’s book on Slessor my instant reaction was to shout F*/%#{@ BBB*%@#t!!!! This braindead attitude towards working class people and language being inadmissible i.e. “never be allowed”, and from Australia’s great “Modernist poet”, has poisoned Australian literature since from Colonial times up until to and including the present. Creating a divide, between popularist attitudes and the established academic canon. It seems that whenever or wherever poetry strikes root, it can “never be allowed” it must be rendered “inadmissible”.

When Oodgeroo Noonuccal struck her first poems they too were deemed inadmissible; “She has no feeling for words” [Leon Cantrell] (he couldn’t hear the dawning of a new age of Aboriginal Australian poetry at all). Some reviewers even refused to put their names to their reviews of her book, yet were happy to diminish her poetry, or else … pat her on the head patronisingly for at least trying, claiming the words were ruling and running her and not her the words. They couldn’t hear the simple fractured pauses and rhymes in her poetry putting a lie to the whole Jindyworobak Movement. This divide between the public and the authorised gatekeepers of literature has diminished our ability as poets to communicate with the broader community. If it is inadmissible [“never be allowed”] to script the language as it is spoken then it becomes nigh on impossible to speak up or to draw oneself.

This war against the lower orders of society in literature was presaged by The Bulletin who used “dialect” in their cartoons to lampoon and belittle all those that were / are, considered not of the right stock. AC Stephens (who Judith Wright kindly regarded as the preeminent critic in Australia in her time) even said Robbie Burns wasn’t a “real” poet, but a “lively, hearty fellow with a knack for rhyming” who “blew others’ sparks to fire” and “ploughed with other men’s ploughs” — Bang! — there goes all the Scots out of the audience! But why such an attitude? Because after Burns wrote his first book of poetry in the dialect-tongue, he was given access to a whole library of Scottish folk songs to work through, which he did. Most of which was in the various dialects of Scotland, and in the vernacular of the folk tradition; the “oral” relegated to the classics, the “vernacular” to the rabble.

In fact we see this with the advent of “performance poetry” in the late 70s in Australia, that it deemed its poetry inadmissible, a “performance” in fact, in much the same way as an actor might put it across on a stage in front of an audience. Audiences flocked to “performance poetry” initially, when it was taken onto the street, and bars, and clubs, and festivals … but the gatekeepers tarred ’n feathered the movement with the adjective “performance” and deemed it unworthy of consideration. Performance poetry has been the biggest movement in Australian literature since the Jindyworobaks and barely a sensible word has been spoken or written about it.

The poverty of academic scholarship is nowhere more stark. The notion that “utterance” is what is driving performance poetry is virtually antithetical to their academic training per se. They want to “see NOT hear”. Let the record show, that the “orality” of Homer, Chaucer, Virgil … is all well and good, when it comes to them in the form of the “printed page” AND from Europe [the motherland], but the advent of the modern “oral literates” is deemed instantly “inadmissible” — too trite to be taken as important. If you are NOT allowed to raise your VOICE above the PAGE then you can’t be properly heard in the STRAITJACKET of language that they insist you WRITE in.

Anthologies of Australian poetry are by and large the product of publishing houses, along with the gatekeepers of the Academy, ditto the Awards, Prizes, Reviews, access to Programs on air, or digital magazines, etc. pushing THEIR stable of writers & poets. They don’t ask shmucks like me to edit them. In 1985 when Penguin books wasn’t publishing any more poetry i convinced them to publish “Off The Record” [with an EP in the back of the book]. They were excited, and decided that yes they should publish “performance poetry” so instead of getting me who was right in the middle of it and who goaded them on in that direction, they decided Judith Rodriguez [from La Trobe University] should be the arbiter, to edit and select. She had NO connection to “performance poetry” either as a poet, or an academic — but i guess she was appropriate because she was “credentialed”.

A lot [if not allllll] the poetry from and by these gatekeepers, and “degreed” academics (as evidenced at “readings”) are in the main [90% by my reckoning] absolutely boring!!!! and their audiences are characterized by a platitude of ))))) ! clapping; their “gentle” pre-poem banter full of their own “sensitive” importance!!! Not that everything that is “difficult” shouldn’t get a clap, or that anything that is “easy” should, or that anything difficult is “better” etc. I often say, that every time “they” read in public (be it at uni or otherwise) we have to work four times as hard to get the audience back. [Nay, not “us” in realty, but “they” are the one who should be criticised for being “performers” at “readings”, as my experience with them on tour in the States testified in my book The Tour]. On tour (in other parts) they don’t have their “platitude mates” or “peer review markers” to pat them on the back.

You’d think that perhaps “The Generation of 68” poets who came into their own with the election of the Whitlam Government and literature grant system would be more sympathetic. But becoming the new gatekeepers, their concerns made them vie instead for positions in the hierarchy, that allowed them to dictate what-was or what-wasn’t poetry, enabling them to control anthologies, the airwaves [radio] and debates for over four decades, and they assured us, and ensured us that what they presented was on par with trends overseas, priding themselves as some kind of serious Modernists or seriously??? avantgarde! NO, neither in the words of John Tranter and John Forbes [and all those other Johns] would “performance poetry” be let in, and in truth it was to be side-lined, lampooned, and caricatured as  a “knife fight in a telephone box”, and or a “blood sport”. I think it would be safe for me to say that i’ve had more “cartoons” of me, depicted as a “performance poet” up on stage in front of a mic in front of a wild audience than any other poet in Australia; this attitude from a generation of poets who took to the streets and cafes during the Vietnam War, and where they truly did sharpen their teeth on the “utterance” and the “small magazine explosion”. The very notion that poetry had to be, is / was / could be / or had to be “tamed” was in full swing!!! Tameable, sensible, and or worthy of a literate education with all its associated hidden nuances, ibids, sics, and footnotes began to flourish in their endnotes, and the reviews they wrote of each other’s books!!! In fact, for over 40 years you could follow me and my journey in poetry through so many of those footnotes, articles, mentions and reviews.

It is a common [almost universal] mistake people make, that when one wants to talk about “poetry” it is assumed that everyone “knows” what it means, or looks like, and that we are all on “the same page”. They of course, don’t think that poetry could possibly be a “sound” poem, or a “visual” poem, or a “conceptual” poem … or a poem in dialect, or an utterance … or a mathematical equation for that matter … what they generally think of instead, is something like a song or “lyric” or “words” behaving themselves i.e. proper [without the treble clef, and stave] or something that starts with a capital letter and ends in a fullstop, something akin to “prose” or a regiment marching instep down the page. They are comfortable with that! “Performance poets”, when they hit their mark, are often considered “clever” [not poets] and such comments are heard often, in the foyer after the gig. But they would never dream of using such a description on Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Whitman, or Sappho … CJ Dennis from his book of poems The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke is very rarely anthologised with the serious pedigree of Australian poets. He is inadmissible, cos as one critic put it he was a “phenomenon”. Presumable if you’re a “phenomenon” you can’t be a “poet”. They even disparage the notion that he actually “did” write in dialect i.e. that it was “his creation” — well blow me down!!! “anthropology” to the rescue!!!! For that matter NO POET EVER wrote in dialect not even Dante, cos they INVENTED that dialect, not TAPE-RECORDED it!

The advent of “visual poetry” [concrete poetry, as it’s also known] was an important historical development in poetry [+ art] since the 50s, and it has been continually sidelined as inadmissible also, and dismissed as “infantile”, yet its importance can never be overstated. It’s importance can be seen on the computer screen everywhere, where the “language” is no longer static, and no longer just in black and white, or silent, and where it can be stretched, or shrunk, or damaged at will, if not totally obliterated, ditto the use of the various fonts now available, spacings, and sizes, … etc., yet even [dare i say] able to accommodate hypertextual forays. Without some understanding of “concrete poetry” you get a lot of puerile academic trained Artists + Poets feigning “meaningful” post-modern garble, in words, forms and letters, no better than PDF [a photocopy]. The importance of visual poetry is diminished and ignored and once more deemed inadmissible. It seems every time poetry becomes useful or effective somewhere it is deemed inadmissible as poetry. Ironically enough, the advertising agencies themselves don’t find concrete poetry “trite” — they plough millions of dollars into it, to get us to spend our money. Somebody out there is DUMB!!! It’s “inadmissible”!!??? And we are somehow conditioned to only “understand” that, when the “poem” is presented to us, or is married to the “commodity” in it, and pasted up on a big billboard or presented to us on our TVs c/o some company — as these magnificent “sound poems” for two soft drinks can attest “Spaaaaarkalarkalarkaling”, or “Schweeeeeeeeeeepssssss”. Yet confronted by a visual or sound poem, such as “chicken / chaken / checken / chycken / chucken” they stand there perplexed by the notion that … this … is “poetry”? You often see them squirming at the suggestion. Labelling it not their thing, they accept that it be left in the hands of others wiser than themselves. The horrible truth is that marrying the “poem” to the “commodity” seems to relax them. The lack of training and acceptance of visual poetry as a genre has severely restricted the possibilities of digital expression, and what a poem can do in that environment. What passes as “visual poetry” or concrete poetry on the net at the moment is abysmal. Having “done one”, they don’t hang around. The horrible truth is that the general people including academics DON’T KNOW HOW TO READ !!! The academy and schools are only interested in you being able to “read” a “form”, and to “fill” out the gaps in a questionnaire, and they think their job is done — that’s it for education, now back to the military i.e. the novel! [or prose] and its soldiers marching in step.

Using rhyme, patterning, utterance, visual nomenclature, etc. is the poet’s palette, they are all the tricks of the art, yet are continuously demeaned, curtailed, or deemed [on “sight”] as “inadmissible”. It’s like looking at a Picasso and saying, “but you got the nose in the wrong place”. The poetry world in reality still doesn’t know who Schwitters was or for that matter Schwerner is or was, and or their importance in poetry. It is often the case that the art world is more informed about poetry than the poets themselves. Yes, people belittle poetry, treat it as a joke, a lark, even hate it, or consider it trite, or irrelevant, but not a lot of them in reality have been exposed to its better examples or practitioners. There are lots of “poetries” at the intersections of many disciplines, an idea which Dick Higgins [of Something Else press] labelled “intermedia” — poetry & music, poetry & film, poetry & language, poetry & coding, poetry & theatre, poetry & body, poetry & mathematics, poetry & biology, and i’m not using the word “poetry” here just as an “adjective” but part and parcel of the nouns that post-state the noun “poetry”. Not all “performance poetry” is great i grant you. But then, not all “sonnets” are great either! Lots of people still laugh at Cubism for example, and there is a lot of “bad” examples of it, but “habituation” and “training” changes all that, and admittedly has now turned it into a frozen icy pole, which is another problem, but as John von Neumann of Los Alamos fame once said, “In mathematics you don’t understand things. You just get used to it.” Ditto poetry.