An abridged version of this report,‘They will oxidise before you even finish reading’, first appeared in Overland 227. It is reproduced here with kind permission from the editor. It is an ur-follow-up to ‘Australian Print Poetry and the Small Press: Who’s Doing the Books?’ published in this journal in 2012.
I begin with cosmic censorship conjecture, a formally observed tête-à-tête that coils between astrophysicists whenever they get worked up over space and matter. Einstein’s theory of general relativity predicts that matter can cataclysmically implode to a state where a given density and the space-time curvature split towards infinite values. This is referred to as a singularity, and is, for our purposes, a distillation of how a black hole forms. If our sun were compressed to have a radius of 3 km, instead of its roomier 695,700 km, yet sporting the same oomph, then here we’d be. Extending out from a black hole’s near-unfathomably dense centre and extraordinary gravity is a finite volume of space that ends in an event horizon: a demarcation – a line in the cosmic sands – from which nothing inside can escape: rock, metal, Judas Priest, photons, alliteration, and so on. The closer that matter gets to a singularity, the more the laws of physics (as humans have defined them) fail, no longer compute, or completely dissipate. It has been proposed that a grip of physical governance must be afoot, defining how much this volume is and why it’s there at all. Hence … the conjecture.
Now, to superimpose my rudimentary take on astrophysics onto the heavens of Australian poetry, there have been a number of singularities – literary black holes, far from vacuous, and dense with the churning storms of career prestige and literary recognition – of late: John Kinsella’s The turnrow Anthology of Contemporary Australian Poetry; the Langford, Beveridge, Johnson and Musgrave firm’s Contemporary Australian Poetry; John Leonard’s The Puncher and Wattmann Anthology of Australian Poetry; Tracy Ryan and John Kinsella’s The Fremantle Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry; annual tractor beams of Best Australian Poetry; the perplexingly unsung Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry, edited by Bonny Cassidy and Jessica Wilkinson; and Cordite Publishing Inc.’s own 20 Poets. These are the tomes that Australia’s trade market masses will assume as benchmarks. No set of publishing laws govern them. Their commonality is that they are zeitgeist end zones – even if some of these publications suffer from hyperopia or are plainly myopic, their recent creation still necessitated creators to reverse engineer who were the special young poets in 1993, what was best-of in 2007, who was Wheat Belt – worthy and, ostensibly, why – that attempt to plot the wending trajectory of our national poetic at qualified intervals. They are the literary apotheoses – tumbling batteries of black holes and resultant event horizons – proffered by small press publishers. These anthologies have one lever of (literary) physics that matter does not: editors. Yes, this is an important variable. Yet, blithely, I set aside this distinction henceforth. To keep things simpler, I aggregate these anthologies into one meta-singularity, a cluster of literary black holes, for a primary reference point. Make no mistake, the gravity of these anthologies is required and important. How does their power pull on creative intention and professional function? Where does that begin, and in what format?
