Who's Afraid of Poetic Invention? Anthologising Australian Poetry in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

There has been a rich history of anthologising Australian poetry this far into the twenty-first century. This article claims that contemporary poetics, with a renewed focus on the recoprocal relation between cultural and linguistic inquiry, can rediscover alternative ways of reading the history of Australian avant-garde, inventive and experimental work. Considering several key anthologies published after the turn of last century, the article provides readings of both the frameworks the anthology-makers provide and the poems themselves, claiming that mark, trace and lexical segmentivities can already be read as social. It then proposes a new possibility for an experimental anthology that might bring these facets into lived praxis: the chrestomathy.