The chapter outlines the mid-twentieth century debate over an Athenian-Boeotian divide in Australian literature, which extended an earlier false dichotomy between city and the bush through distinguishing between the expatriate and the writer who stays at home. Despite a global dispersion of Australian writers, it argues that most scholarship has tended to focus on those in Britain. The chapter discerns that the racialisation underscoring who is generally considered ‘expatriate’ renders the term problematic and that many Australian diasporic poets define themselves through other means. It also finds that many experience feelings of shame, anger, and guilt over the colonial violence shaping Australia. The chapter considers the development of Lola Ridge’s poetics while in Australia before considering Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s poem “Yussef (Hi-Jack),” written during a hijacking of her plane by Palestinian militants, and the poetry Oodgeroo wrote in China. The chapter foregrounds the significance of First Nations mobility, engaging with the London writing of Aboriginal activist A. M. Fernando in the 1920s and writing of recent poets like Ellen Van Neerven.

This chapter outlines how Christopher Brennan ushered in an experimental strand of Australian poetry through his engagement with French Symbolism, which was followed by John Shaw Nielson’s celebration of intuition and the more-than-human. It considers Nietzschean vitalism in Kenneth Slessor’s representation of urban Sydney and analyses the beauty and nihilism of his “Five Bells.” The chapter also argues that Lesbia Harford’s poetry was modernist in its radical openness about female sexuality and the female body, its minimalist representation of the working life of modern women, and lack of Romantic assumptions in her treatment of the natural world. It further considers the rhetorical force and frankness of queer desire in the work of Anna Wickham, before addressing the hoax poet Ern Malley.

The chapter argues that Fogarty’s lyric “I” emerges out of questioning and inverting the institutional and political forces that define his work. It traces the development of his poetry as political dialogue through the context of his childhood at Cherbourg Aboriginal Reserve, his participation in community programs, the National Black Theatre, and the emergent Australian Black Panther Party. It includes his role in the Aboriginal land rights movement, the Black Resource Centre collective, and his engagement with Black Studies courses. The chapter also outlines the reception of Fogarty’s poetry and the challenges that his resistant poetics poses to the field of ‘Australian literature.’ The chapter investigates how Fogarty creates an ecology of connections between the human and non-human, distinguishes his writing from a prior generation of Aboriginal writers, fostered inter-Indigenous and cross-cultural connections internationally, and has many intimate addresses, including poems to his brother, whose death in custody triggered political marches and has tragic resonance today.

Tracing the verse novel back to C. J. Dennis’s The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke (1909–15), the chapter argues that the form has been particularly vibrant and popular in Australia, including among children and young adults. It then examines prose poetry, including microliterature, arguing for its significance in addressing the quotidian, questions of identity, and feminism. The chapter considers how prose poetry accommodates engagements with other forms and systems of knowledge, such as art, music, science, and mathematics, and its capacity for defamiliarisation and the uncanny. Lastly, the chapter considers poetic or verse biography, from the explorer narratives of the mid twentieth century to experimentation with life-writing more recently. It foregrounds intersections with documentary poetry and creative engagements with the archive, including scope to critique and resist colonial histories.

The image is at once easy to identify and difficult to define. If the image is, in a basic sense, the visual language of poems, the concept also extends to modes of meaning making which sometimes have little to do with visuality, as well as to related concepts such as metaphor and conceit. This chapter explores this complex conceptual field by considering examples by Amy Clampitt, Bernadette Meyer, Hope Mirrlees, Sylvia Plath, and others. It shows that the image serves often to unify a poem or structure its narrative, and it proposes that we approach the image as both procedural and constructed. A single poem's presentation of an image in process or the repetition of an image across multiple poems may, in this way, represent a psychological drama or a narrative of intellectual understanding. From this perspective, images are not merely found; they are made.

Introducing the concept of verse history and adapting Roman Jakobson's distinction between verse design and verse instance, this chapter considers a sequence of brief case studies drawn from the work of multiple writers: the Beowulf poet, William Langland, the Gawain poet, John Gower, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Willis, Victoria Chang, and André 3000. The chapter proposes that, even after free verse, reading poetry historically still must involve a consideration of the relationship of rhythm to meter. The potential for friction between verse instance and verse design, and more broadly between poems and poetry, implies a need for relations of supplementarity. Moments of rhythmical disturbance disclose how what one had located outside the lone poem – a metrical template, a political ideal, or a historical event – comes rushing into it and through it.

This chapter begins by arguing that debates about whether a poem can be translated reflect debates about the nature of the poem itself. Those who assert that poetry is untranslatable, for example, tend to believe that every poem is a unique event in a specific language. Conversely, those who assert the importance of translation tend to see poems as existing, and as having their meanings, only in relation to other poems or art forms. Considering examples from Roy Fisher, Friedrich Hölderlin, Vittorio Sereni, Jean-Joseph Rabéarivelo, César Vallejo, Donald Justice, Elizabeth Bishop, and Frank O’Hara, the chapter demonstrates that in practice, both these conceptual positions are essential. It explores how the practice of translation generates networks of mutually referential identities over time, and it suggests that, more broadly, the emergence of the abstraction known as “the poem” depends on its relation to such interconnections between poems, poets, and translations, ones that may be shaped by imitation, parody, homage, and adaptation.

This chapter examines the relationship between poems and the commodities that structure both our intimate lives and the vast social geographies of the globe. If the content of a poem must often be discovered through interpretative work, reading between the lines of its figurative expressions and other such devices, the commodity, too, is a form of appearance which conceals its origins in labor and the exploitation of that labor. Beginning with this correspondence, and analyzing examples by Bernadette Mayer, Claude McKay, Keston Sutherland, and others, the chapter maps out several ways in which poems both present and negate the commodity. It discusses the poetic representation of labor itself as a commodity, of nonremunerative care work, of the factory and global commodity chains, and of the circulation of commodities through colonial networks. In conclusion, the chapter argues that learning to read the poem is inseparable from learning to read the commodity, for in both cases, the reader's success lies in the ability to re-suture the text to, rather than rescue it from, its worldly net.

This Introduction explores what it means to encounter a poem. What is involved when we read a poem in a book, hear a poem at a poetry slam, or translate a poem for readers of another language? What ideas about “the poem” inform such encounters, shaping what readers and audiences want from poems and what they do with them? This chapter examines the conceptual relation between the terms “poem” and “poetry,” as well as the shifting relations between “poem,” “song,” “hymn,” and other related terms. The Introduction considers how ideas about the poem have changed over history and how they differ between cultures. It then addresses several influential ideas about the poem, especially the notion of the individual poem as a unified whole and the notion of the poem as singular, as valuable in its difference from other poems. This chapter concludes that to encounter a poem is necessarily to encounter a work which, whether as object or experience, is always already entangled with other poems and with ideas of the poem as such.

This chapter explores the concept of voice, both as the marker of an individual poet and as a poem's specific configuration of form and content. Taking as its chief case study the work of Ishwar Gupta, the chapter examines voice as vocal utterance and as the representation of identity. It shows how Ishwar Gupta's singular and innovative voice, epitomizing a shift in the history of Bengali poetry from an oral to a written poetics, is characterized both by intricate sound play and by its politically charged representation of the modern city in colonial India. The chapter concludes by demonstrating that, even when encountered as text on the page, the voice of Ishwar Gupta's poems remains living and material: this is a vernacular voice, sensitive to the everyday, the local, and the urban. In this way, the voice of the poem conveys the lived materiality of a specific historical moment.

This chapter examines the opposition between, on the one hand, an approach to diction as the index of broader poetic, historical, and social formations (e.g., genre, period, and class) and, on the other hand, an approach to diction as the expression of an individual poem's singularity, whereby the choice and the meaning of every word is specific to that poem. The chapter then considers two nineteenth-century examples, neither of which neatly fits this dichotomy: George Gordon Byron's Don Juan and Catherine Fanshawe's “Lord Byron's Enigma.” The first of these subversively amalgamates multiple, generally available vocabularies into its own idiosyncratic vernacular, while the second produces singular effects out of an entirely formulaic lyrical diction. The chapter thereby proposes that diction reveals in the individual poem a constitutive tension between singularity and exemplarity.

This chapter begins with a familiar antithesis: the opposition between the lyric poem and the novel. If the former seems to be characterized by the capture of a single instant, the expression of subjective thoughts and emotions, and a reaching after eternal truths, the latter seems instead to move through time, to fictionalize the objective world, and to be caught in the social and political webs of real life. This chapter challenges this received wisdom by considering the hybrid genre of the verse-novel and by taking as its chief case study George Meredith's 1862 verse-novel Modern Love. Meredith's work simultaneously dissolves and highlights the borders of the single poem, forcing readers to reconsider the relationship of the individual lyric to a larger whole, to the narrative threads running through that whole, to other individual poems, and to other generic alternatives. The chapter concludes by arguing that, because the act of reading verse-novels is often so self-conscious, the genre productively questions ideas of singularity and of self-sufficiency.

This chapter approaches the concept of the poem through the recitation of oral praise poetry in interpersonal exchanges and in an increasingly textual world. Blending literary history, textual analysis, and autoethnography, the chapter illuminates a decolonial approach to the poem, shifting from an emphasis on the individually authored work to the value of shared practice. Through a close analysis of nhetembo dzemadzinza, a genre of oral clan praise poetry central to Shona-speaking people in Zimbabwe and its environs, the chapter considers the function of poems in rites of passage, affirmations of kinship, and erotic exchanges, while also affirming the interpretive acumen of collectives rather than individuals. The chapter then addresses the reimagination of nhetembo by poets who, living in the diaspora, seek nevertheless to claim a nonhierarchical, decolonializing set of social relations.