The Best Australian Poems 2012

Black Inc., Collingwood, Australia
http://www.blackincbooks.com/books/subject/poetry 

Editor: John Tranter
From Introduction, p. xiv

"Readers like to become involved in a good story, and many poems work like stories, only of course in a briefer compass. There was a time when poems were longer: much longer. They needed to be. If you were stuck in a cave all winter long, sitting around the campfire at night with a few smelly sheep for company, you would want the visiting storyteller to spin his stories out for several months. So the ancient epics were suitably long and dramatic to ensure that the travelling bard got dozens of good feeds before his audience grew tired of his tale.

That was before the mass-produced printed novel was developed, bringing huge audiences with it. Most people in Europe could read, by then, so novels became widely popular. Then the movies arrived to entertain everybody. You didn't need to be able to read, even, with radio, or the movies, or television. So as the decades passed, long narrative poetry, as the best means of reciting a memorised story, quietly faded away. 

But somehow, poetry hung on, in its niche. I was struck, in reading through over a thousand entries for this year's Best Australian Poems, by just how many poems depended on the ancient devices of the storyteller."