Steve Smart, President, Melbourne Poets Union

"Melbourne Poets Union is a representative organisation. We don't fit ourselves into one style or one definition of what poetry is. We're for poets, but what are poets for if we're not for people who aren't poets? I would like to focus on that idea in 2016 and and I would like you to think carefully about it too, as a serious question. Never forget that poetry is a responsibility as well as a joy."
poam, Feb/Mar #353

Martin Duwell

'Anyway, for reasons that I don’t fully understand but which may involve the fact that I come from an academic background or that I am one of the few reviewers of poetry who is not a poet himself, I resist the idea that reviews should be evaluative. This irritates friends who are poets because they would like to see what they are inclined to call undergrowth being torched by the flamethrower of critical truth (it’s amazing how consistent their metaphors are). But of course their real reason for wanting the “undergrowth” cleared away is so that they themselves can be seen to better advantage and the precious book-buyers’ dollars will be more likely to be spent on them. They also often quote Yeats’s famous comment at the Rhymers’ Club, “The one thing certain is that we are too many”. All I can say is that, in my view of creativity, there can never be too many genuine poets.

Also, I really resent criticism which is basically evaluative because, deep down, it’s gatekeeping. It thinks that the function of writing about literature is a matter of standing guard and deciding who is allowed in and what sort of riff-raff is to be kept out. I know that I’m shifting notions of nationality around in a very dubious way here, but this seems un-Australian to me. It seems like the kind of thing I would expect to occur in, say, England (though I admit that my notions of that country’s class system are probably based on little more than Australian prejudice).'

Martin Duwell in conversation with Jeffrey Poacher
Jacket 40, 2010
http://jacketmagazine.com/40/iv-duwell-ivb-poacher.shtml