Interjection from Harry Reid: I have omitted here, for formatting reasons and clarity, a brief email exchange about getting TVs to work and the cricket. Farrell’s doesn’t work and mine only plays Channel 9.

HR: I wanted to ask you something that Gareth Morgan, Ursula Robinson-Shaw and I (Sick Leave) like to yell at each other for hours. I was going to end on this, but I think maybe it’s fine to ask now. Who’s the ‘boss of Australian poetry’?

Bonus question: who was the boss? I think you’re the perfect person to ask this of and tbh, I can’t believe we haven’t roped you into this before. It’s very Family Trees/English canon of course of course.

I will not bias you with our usual suspects…

MF: Ok, so when I was invited to the Queenscliff Writers Festival in 2001 – I stencilled a white t-shirt with ‘Les Murray’ and the ‘number one’, in hot pink, so it was like a sports team t-shirt. I remember Barry Hill admired the other t-shirt I wore that weekend, which was a black Commes des Garcons, with a large white snowball on the front.

And we (my poetry peers) used to joke about who would be the next number 1. And how some bad poet behaviour could be attributed to not being at the top of the heap.

I intended at that time to make a ‘Gig Ryan number two’ t-shirt, but that didn’t mean I thought she was next. The American poet, Andrew Zawacki, said he’d buy it if I made it.

Dorothy Porter was still alive then. Peter Porter, John Tranter, and Robert Adamson were all alive. Jennifer Maiden was still with Giramondo, the Lehmann and Gray anthology hadn’t been published, and David Malouf was primarily thought of as a novelist.

I think Les – his existence as a figure, his reception – fostered the idea that there was, and could be, a ‘number one’, which has probably faded away now. But a ‘number one’ in any case is not the same as ‘the boss’.

‘The boss’ is more like the manager or coach than the top player. Or even the head of the administrative body. despite Australian Poetry’s claim to be the peak body, I don’t think it dominates the landscape, any more than does one magazine/editor or publisher. There is also the laureate concept which is happening soon?

Australia can so often mean the East Coast, but even then, the principalities live in their own dreams. And yet, John Kinsella is ‘number one’ (if not the boss).

There’s a hilarious book by Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin about a fictional town called ‘Glupov’, and the Glupovites’ efforts to maintain a governor. Sometimes there are multiple contenders, but the Glupovites are never happy with any of them.

Australian poetry has no national – or state – governance so there are a lot of little, and less little, structures wielding indefinite power, sometimes through deploying the language of powerlessness. Ultimately, there’s no real powerful poetry figure, or they’d do something about the terrible writer’s festivals and the Wheeler Centre. but then, they’re the only things I used to care about.

Probably it once seemed kind of virtuous to not have a career as such, to not aspire to ‘Murrayness’, in player terms (no one could aspire in writing terms). Now, it mainly seems like a strategy to be a ‘non-careerist’ as much as a ‘careerist’.

I once liked to imagine Martin Harrison as a ‘covert boss’ of Australian poetry, plotting quietly behind the lines, so to speak. But he died after reading the Sydney Morning Herald‘s third review of the Lehmann-Gray anthology.

There seems to be no leadership, for want of a better word (beacon-hood?) from universities, so little interest in what are, for me, very alive questions, regarding form, representation, voice, language, aesthetics, history etc. Even literary conferences seem to suffer from virtue culture versus clickbait.

Partly this malaise is a product of the COVID years, I think, and the residual viciousness of online spats (of which there is now a history). Partly a kind of virtual, or conceptual, streaming of American ‘fake thought’, which we can’t really locate or defend ourselves against. I’m not offering any positive solutions.

Interjection from Harry Ried: The ‘Gig Ryan number two’ football jersey is money in the bank. We leave this to an enterprising individual to manufacture but know you have a ready-made customer base.

HR: Holy shit, the ‘Murray number one’ shirt is amazing. We usually (in our Sick Leave debates) land on Gig Ryan as the boss, and sometimes Lionel Fogarty.

Back to your earlier answer, you say you’re aware of other poets when you have a fix on a mode of your own. How concrete is that fix? I think a lot of poets would be interested in that. I think I only ever got a fix on it once, for about six months when I was writing Leave Me Alone (2022) almost full time (this is, at work when work was dull and easy to ignore). The rest of the time it’s hard to nail down anything – if I’ve got the voice the style goes, got the form and the voice goes…how do you keep locked in a mode?

‘The Big Blue Play’ is great, ending with: “I can taste their teeth”. This is so good. So many times, I have thought how did Michael Farrell get that line to work in a poem and also to end on it…beautiful.

Going back again to your description of the ‘I’ in a poem and finding the line between dominating and being too ‘weaselly’ (the latter of which, I think, is the scourge of my millennial Australian peers). I am so charmed and compelled by the first-person poem, a cliche hangover, perhaps, of being very enamoured and influenced by twentieth-century Australians and Americans, and a push against feeling ‘too pastoral’ or something. There’s a distance in the third-person poem that I struggle with – it feels too ‘still-life’, too ‘bush poem’? You do it well but there’s often someone who can speak in the poem, or a ‘we’ like in ‘Folktales Of The Avant-Garde’. Where’s the line in the third-person poem?

MF: An easy answer would be to refer to my chapbook BREAK ME OUCH, where, once I had started, I started to think in that mode pretty quickly. That’s an exceptional case, however. Mostly what I mean is a strong sense of the form currently operative, anything else is supplementary, or, hopefully, complementary. But those components are also part of the form at that time. They’re not extra-structural.

Re: The ‘I’, I think it’s probably the victory of Frank O’Hara. He made Allen Ginsberg’s ‘I’ bearable, T.S. Eliot’s conceivably juiced. O’Hara made the returns of Whitman’s and Dickinson’s sound natural and modern (as well as duffer-y, and evasive). All the moves away from, and back to, the ‘I’ can probably read in terms of the New York School, to an extent. Here, John Forbes’ use of it balances out the earnestness of Judith Wright, the over-civility of Porter (Peter) and the ‘big-country-meanness’ of Les Murray. This is quite thinly schematic, as there are other forms of ‘I’ all over the place, not least in plays, and songs, which get in first person, too. Though I think a problem is the importation of the novelistic ‘I’, and how that makes it respectable within its descriptive text. I mean a kind of toning down, that would be horrified, like a Proustian guest, to be thought of as pretentious or boring. Luckily, apart from O’Hara, we have Jesus, hip hop, and random ratbags of the public sphere, keeping the ‘I’ gymean (for those who don’t like phalluses). What interests me is bringing the attendant, or surrounding discourse, up to the level of the ‘I’, rather than squashing the ‘I’ down. At least that answers for a slab of my poetry; I move away from the ‘I’ as well sometimes. I’ve pretty much made my peace with it though.