T. S. Eliot, 1921, 'The Sacred Wood', Tradition and the Individual Talent

'Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.'

'Scenes from Provincial Life'

'There is another and more brutal way of saying the same thing. In fact there are hundreds of ways: he could spend the rest of his life listing them. But the most brutal way is to say that he is afraid: afraid of writing, afraid of women. He may pull faces at the poems he reads in Ambit and Agenda, but at least they are there, in print, in the world. How is he to know that the men who wrote them did not spend years squirming as fastidiously as he in front of the blank page? They squirmed, but then finally they pulled themselves together and wrote as best they could what had to be written, and mailed it out, and suffered the humiliation of rejection or the equal humiliation of seeing their effusions in cold print, in all their poverty. In the same way these men would have found an excuse, however lame, for speaking to some or other beautiful girl in the Underground, and if she turned her head away or passed a scornful remark in Italian to a friend, well, they would have found a way of suffering the rebuff in silence and the next day would have tried again with another girl. That is how it is done, that is how the world works. And one day they, these men, these poets, these lovers, would be lucky, the girl, no matter how exaltedly beautiful, would speak back, and one thing would lead to another and their lives would be transformed, both their lives, and that would be that. What more is required than a kind of stupid, insensitive doggedness, as lover, as writer, together with a readiness to fail and fail again?'
J. M. Coetzee, 2011, Scenes from Provincial Life, Vintage, Sydney.

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