Against representation: Louis Armand and the limits of new Australian poetry

(ProQuest: ... denotes "strike-through" in the original text omitted.)A NOSTALGIA FOR THE AVANT-GARDE?Being a poet in Australia can be a thankless chore. For any number of socio-cultural, historical, psychological and other reasons, the difficulties of writing poetry in Australia often outweigh whatever personal, artistic or vocational benefits one may derive from the activity. My own attempts as a socalled emerging poet- and an immigrant one at that- to produce work that I myself am satisfied with and to have this work made public have been, and will more likely than not continue to be, arduous, due to more or less generic challenges facing any so-called struggling writer.But during the mid-late 1990s and early 200Os, as I studied poetry and poetics at two Australian universities, I came to observe that some poets struggle less than others, particularly when I first encountered Calyx: 30 Contemporary Austraiian Poets (2000). This was an anthology published by a prestigious press and edited by two rising stars of Australian poetry, Peter Minier and Michael Brennan. The anthology which, in Minter's words, collected work by the "leading" "younger or newer poets" (par. 2; par. 4) seemed itself influential in determining which of the "younger or newer poets" would go on to become "leading." As Minter has observed retrospectively, "almost 75% of the 30 Calyx poets have gone on to produce substantial books of poetry, win poetry prizes and make strong and committed contributions to Australian poetry in general" (par. 8). Whether or not these poets would have produced their books, won their awards and so on without the exposure provided by this anthology strikes me as a pertinent, albeit unanswerable, question.The purpose of this essay is not to critique the politics and hierarchies of the Australian poetry scene. That some artists will have more success than others is a given. What is specific about the editorial method that produced the above-mentioned anthology is that the poets included in the publication were, as hinted at by the editors and noted by the reviewers at the time, new. Kevin Hart, reviewing in Sydney Morning Herald, commented that the collection belonged to a group of anthologies that "want to present the new" (6), while Douglas Barbour, writing in Jacket, began his review by describing the work as an anthology "of poetry newer writers are producing in Australia today" (par. 1). Significantly, this emphasis on newness was not a generational criterion- Hart noted that one of his favorite poets in the anthology, Peter Boyle, was nearly 50 years old at the time (6)- and it was, therefore, a signifier of a discursive and/or aesthetic predilection. The poems included in Calyx were neither new in terms of their authors' ages nor their authors' publication histories (all the poets included had been previously published in journals and some had already published collections), which indicates that these poets could only be properly new in terms of their poetics.This essay aims to interrogate this new Australian poeticswhich in my view has come to dominate key parts of Australia's contemporary poetic landscape- by discussing the work of the poet, visual artist and theorist Louis Armand, perhaps the least conventional author included in Calyx. In Hart's review of the anthology, Armand is more or less dismissed for showing "a nostalgia for the avant-garde" (6) while in Barbour 's more appreciative view the poet is noted for his contributions' "caustic music" and the "astringent pleasures" his poems offer the reader (par.5; par. 7). Although since Calyx Armand has published five collections (among many other publications) and has been a constant presence in Australian literary periodicals and the like, his work has not received the same level of recognition and approval afforded to some other new Australian poets. He is not, for example, included in David McCooey's 2007 essay "Surviving Australian Poetry: the New Lyricism" among "the Calyx poets [who] are currently central to contemporary Australian poetry" (par. …