Note: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that this tribute contains the name of a person who has died.

Dashiell Moore and Philip Morrissey’s collection on Lionel Fogarty in Poetry and Politics, launched last September, contains some valuable essays and is also – remarkably – the very first volume dedicated to the study of one of the greatest poets this country has ever produced.¹ That poet passed away on 12 February 2026; his family have requested as part of cultural protocol around mourning that he be known for the next year as Dhoompoo Lionel Fogarty. Whenever I read this poetry, I am always struck by Dhoompoo Lionel Fogarty’s capacity to use words to craft something radically new and capable of taking powerful effect in the world. Reading Moore and Morrissey’s edited volume, I started to think about what it might mean to describe such performances as “magic”. In his essay for the volume, for example, Peter Minter wrote of this poetry as “shamanic murri magic”.² And the poet himself wrote: “It’s black man’s magic / poetry”.³ While magic tends not to be what literary criticism was designed to deal with, Dhoompoo Lionel Fogarty was a poet who so clearly demanded of us that criticism undergo some redesigning. In my view, one of the ambitions of Moore and Morrissey’s edited collection was to embark on that task of reformulating our critical language to address the seemingly otherworldly powers and effects so in evidence in this astonishing body of work.

Critics of the last few decades have often seemed wary of tracing poetry’s magical affiliations. One issue has been the model of ethnopoetics that was influentially presented in Jerome Rothenberg’s Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia, Europe and Oceania, first published in 1969 and again in an expanded edition in 1985.⁴ As his title indicates, Rothenberg anthologised ritual chants, incantations and other magical texts from all over the world. These were drawn mostly from diverse Indigenous communities and largely sourced in translation from the published archive of anthropology. And they were collectively presented and duly received primarily as a means to re-energise contemporary American poetry, which, by comparison, appeared anaemic, disembodied and abstruse. It is not hard to see how that project might now be conceived as an act of culturally imperial appropriation on a grand scale, as Brendan Casey has discussed.⁵

Moore and Morrissey’s volume on Dhoompoo Lionel Fogarty takes a very different approach. It signals an emerging reconsideration of the relationship between contemporary poetics and magic that avoids the all too evident pitfalls of ethnopoetic enthusiasm. Alongside it can now also be set Daniel Pilkington’s Magic and the Occult in Contemporary Poetry, published late last year, which presents a study of three US poets, C.A. Conrad, Will Alexander and Ariana Reines.⁶ Robert Eric Shoemaker’s Magical Poetics: The Power of Language and Effective Poetry, forthcoming this year from Bloomsbury, may provide a further addition to this new section of the critical bookshelf. These projects share a commitment to developing a critical language for poetry that escapes our conventional sense of what poetry is, how it works, and what it is capable of – an art of escape that, at least provisionally, must appear to bear the name “magic”.

Links between magic and poetry are not new, of course. As Pilkington points out, their ancient correspondence remains embedded in our language. He notes, for instance, that the Latin word carmen, meaning poem or song but also spell, is the origin of our word charm. The word chant comes from a related Latin root and ends up in the magic of incantation as well as in the poetic canto. In many places around the world, poets traditionally doubled as prophets and spellcasters. Well into 19th century, the curse poems of Irish bards, for example, were widely held to be capable of fatal effects. Piss off a poet at your peril: their words could kill.

In the 20th century, too, anthropologists frequently remarked on the many similarities between the languages of magic and poetry – ethnographic accounts that would later enable efforts like that of Rothenberg to revivify European and American poetic traditions with exotic ethnopoetic vigour. Writing in 1935, Bronislaw Malinowski noted that “the language of magic, with its richness of phonetic, rhythmic, metaphorical and alliterative effects, with its weird cadences and repetitions, has a prosodic character.”⁷ Magical words were, he thought, untranslatable and magical sentences unparaphrasable, for they involved a “very considerable coefficient of weirdness, strangeness and unusualness.”⁸ Malinowski was writing specifically about Trobriand Islands magic. But it would be possible to cut and paste his descriptions into mid-20th century accounts of literary language – of the poeticalness of poetry – almost word for word. Indeed, when he states that “most magic… is chanted in a sing-song which makes it from the outset profoundly different from ordinary utterances”, he might well have been describing what happens at your local poetry reading – although there, all too often, the effect can be anything but magical.⁹