This chapter discusses the songlines of First Nations people as living song emerging from the land and vehicle of cultural knowledge. It then analyses engagements with an international avant-garde in the twentieth century, through the transnational performances of Amanda Stewart and Chris Mann, Jas H. Duke’s Dada-inspired sound poems, Javant Biarujia’s created language, and the performance poetry of Ania Walwicz and Ouyang Yu. The chapter also investigates visual poetry in Australia, including the techniques of cryptographic symbols and icons, comic strip narratives, and collage. Using the sonnet poems of Alex Selenitsch and Cath Vidler as examples, it asserts the value of comparative readings of visual and concrete poetry. The chapter suggests that concrete poetry of the 1970s, hypermedia experiments of the 1980s, and Language art all typically fall outside institutional histories and often unsettle the constitution of a national literature. It distinguishes conceptual poetry from electronic poetry, arguing that the conceptual poem questions the ground of the work while electronic poetry tests new environments and makes poetry through the test.

The new millennium has witnessed a resurgence in poetry as its condensed form, attention to feeling, and capacity to capture the zeitgeist attracts more readers than ever before. Australia has been at the forefront of experimenting with emergent and hybrid forms such as the verse novel, prose poetry, digital poetries, and poetic biography. Among the first to realise the potential of the Internet to create a vibrant cross-cultural dialogue around poetry and poetics, Australians initiated online journals that reached out globally like Jacket and Cordite Poetry Review. Australia’s poets have increasingly garnered international recognition. Les Murray was dubbed “one of the superleague that includes Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and Joseph Brodsky” by the Independent on Sunday (quoted in Davie) while Dan Chiasson discerned in The New Yorker that Murray was “routinely mentioned among the three of four leading-English language poets.” In 2017, Australian poet Ali Cobby Eckermann was the first Indigenous writer worldwide to be awarded Yale University’s prestigious Windham Campbell Prize.

This chapter contextualises Australia’s involvement in major conflicts in light of the European invasion of Australia and the settler-colonial imaginary. It considers how poetry shaped the ANZAC myth extended settler masculinities and portrayed the soldier as both ordinary and extraordinary. The chapter considers divergent trajectories in World War II poetry, including the work of Kenneth Slessor, J. S. Manifold, James McAuley, and Douglas Stewart. It also considers responses to the Vietnam War, such as Bruce Dawe’s “Homecoming.” While the chapter investigates the dismantling of the soldier myth in late twentieth-century poetry, it also notes colonial presumptions persisting in works like Les Murray’s “Visiting Anzac in the Year of Metrification.” It then outlines the emergence of Indigenous counter-narratives to the violence of settler colonialism.

This chapter discusses the importance of periodicals in the development of Australian poetry. It discusses the centrality of the Bulletin to an emergent nationalist tradition, before considering the Vitalist movement through Vision and the encouragement of modernism in Stream and Angry Penguins. It argues that the academic journal Southerly reinforced an early canon of Australian poetry in the 1940s while the establishment of Overland and Quadrant represented differing political poles in the 1950s. It maps a growing sense of regional diversity through magazines like Westerly, Island, and LINQ, which would supplement Meanjin’s early focus. The chapter then outlines the support of a new generation of writers in the 1970s through Poetry Magazine, later New Poetry, and Poetry Australia. While arguing for Scripsi’s crucial role in the 1980s, the chapter points to the emergence of specialist little magazines around work, multiculturalism, and feminism. The chapter discusses how this diversity would be strengthened in the 1990s, while the emergence of online journals like Jacket and Cordite Poetry Review provided renewed vibrancy and global recognition for Australian poetry.

This chapter argues that ecopoetry is too easily absorbed back into the logics of capitalism and colonialism. Aware of the delimiting forces surrounding its own context, the chapter argues to be taken not as an essay but as an action. It argues that for a poem to bring about environmental change, it must be part of connected interventions. The chapter outlines the poetic yarning between John Kinsella and Charmaine Papertalk Green, a member of the Wajarri, Badimaya, and Nhanagardi people of the Yamaji Nation, as a means of generative protest. It also provides an example of poems written in medias res in the collective resistance to a proposal to build bike trails on Walwalinj, a mountain sacred to the Ballardong Noongar people. This example demonstrates a poem is shaped by the particular situation and how the poem is one part of a network of actions that formed a campaign that was led by Aboriginal elders. The chapter also includes collaborative poetry written during the Roe 8 Highway protests in 2016 and poetry protesting the proposed destruction of the Julimar Forest by mining companies.

This chapter investigates Gwen Harwood’s subversion of gendered presumptions of authorship and style. After discussing her skilful redress of a male-dominant literary culture through hoax poetry, it considers how Harwood mobilised male personae to critique the cultural valuing of science and reason, explore sexual immorality, and address women’s experience of domesticity. It discusses how Harwood celebrated motherhood but was also one of the earliest writers to articulate its associated realities of exhaustion, loss of self, and feelings of despair and rage. The chapter argues that Harwood lays important groundwork for second-wave feminism while representing the ambiguities of care and connection. The chapter also engages with Harwood’s later exploration of death and the dynamic between sex and spirituality.

The chapter attends to Les Murray’s fusion of ancient and modern frameworks, forms and, subject matter. It provides an analysis of “The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Cycle” in light of his desire to draw together the three strands he viewed as shaping Australian culture: Aboriginal, rural, and urban. The chapter also discusses Murray’s formal inventiveness and comic playfulness with language, and his interest in the relationship between poetry and the divine. The chapter reads Murray’s self-definition as an outsider in light of his valuing of a pastoral-georgic tradition and a focus on subjects and settings beyond the metropolitan. The chapter argues that while Murray engaged with the vernacular and was anti-modernist in outlook, his style is, nevertheless, sophisticated and neo-modernist in its technical innovation.

This chapter outlines how the 1970s brought radical expression, new explorations of poetic persona, and increasing belief in the poet’s role to advocate for rights and freedoms. It argues that anthologies seeking to capture the zeitgeist failed to do so, sometimes due to using frameworks borrowed from North America that elided local diversity. The chapter asserts that small press culture constituted a provisional, heterogeneous commons that undid traditional definitions of authorship and form, and offered a space to air the previously taboo. It traces the turn to America as well as to popular culture, other media, and documentary. Through an examination of Michael Dransfield’s reception, it demonstrates how umbrella terms delimit complex individual poetics while demonstrating affiliations in Dransfield’s self-examination with contemporaries like Pam Brown, Nigel Roberts, and Vicki Viidkikas. The chapter also considers the impact of the first anthology of women’s poetry, Mother, I’m Rooted. It redresses the elision of its editor, Kate Jennings, from other anthologies and critical framings of the period, as well as the marginalisation of Kevin Gilbert.

Taking Kerry Reed-Gilbert’s anthology The Strength of Us as Women: Black Women Speak (2000) as touchstone, the chapter undertakes a conversation between two Aboriginal women poets from Narungga and Wiradjuri standpoints about the transformative power of Indigenous poetry and its significant contribution to literature in the world. Offering an alternative to the essay, the authors discuss embodied engagements with the colonial archive and the theme of relationality that informs so much of Aboriginal writing. The chapter considers the potential of poetry to be both an affective tool and literary intervention. It outlines the methods of Gathering and Archival-Poetic praxis as ways to explore the counter-narrative potential of poetry. In considering the role of memory work and memory-making, the authors also discuss blood memory and body memory.