Poetry has been enjoying a renaissance recently with poetry slams and zines making a vast resurgence. And now publishers Puncher & Wattman are about to release the anthology of gay and lesbian poetry that will effortlessly define a generation of writers.
The new anthology Out of the Box is the brainchild of Michael Farrell and Jill Jones, arguably two of our nation’s most exciting queer voices. Together this poetic duo have brought together an impressive number of poets, among them the likes of David Malouf and Dorothy Porter.
‘We wanted a book that presented poetry being written now which is why, by-and-large, the poets are represented by relatively recent work, explained Jones of the process behind creating Out of the Box. ‘It is quite consciously not historical, nor even a survey of the last 20 or 30 years. We hope much of it is fresh, with just a dash of older work.
‘It offers a new way of reading a range of poets,’ added Farrell. ‘It’s not a personal take on the scene or an effort at being representative or canonical.’
The book has two basic underlying structures to it. The first is the equal gender split between editors, with Farrell editing the gay poets and Jones editing the lesbian poets. The second is that the poems appear in alphabetical order of the title, rather than the more traditional format of the author who wrote them.
For Jones, the impetus to create Out of the Box stemmed from her involvement with BlackWattle Press, a gay and lesbian publisher from the late ’80s. ‘BlackWattle published a lot of great novels and anthologies of short stories in the 1990s, a bit of poetry, but I’d secretly longed for a poetry anthology, a joint one, girls and boys together,’ Jones pointed out.
‘I’d even mentioned it in passing to a few people, gay and straight, and they’d thought it a good idea. But idea it remained until I started talking about it again with Michael Farrell and he basically said, let’s do it. It took longer than we thought, these things always do, but here it is.’
Farrell is quick to point out that a number of factors lead him to jumping on board with Jones for this project. ‘One was the feeling that there was virtually no literary culture within gay culture – and what there was was not meaningful to me. A particular trigger was the Penguin Anthology of Gay Writing which – if I remember rightly had no poetry at all. And again, I thought it would offer an interesting perspective on an element within Australian poetry.’
This duo also have high hopes for the anthology. For Farrell, those hopes extend to it finding an audience, but more an importantly an audience that experiences something new from reading the book.
‘That it achieves a gay and lesbian audience – that people who haven’t read much poetry before will be intrigued and excited by what they find,’ explained Farrell.
‘That it extends the bounds of what gay / lesbian writing might be – whether in terms of theme or form. I hope that it might introduce a way of addressing sexuality in Australian critical writing… (and) that it might encourage others to produce anthologies that bring poems together in interesting ways.’
For Jones, the hopes and achievements of the anthology are slightly more political.
‘One of the aims is to see that ‘gay and lesbian’ stays on the agenda especially as successive Australian Federal Governments, no matter what their political stripe, show themselves to be morally conservative, even morally interventionist,’ Jones clarified.
‘A narrower aim, but an important one, is to offer something new and fresh to teachers and students in literary studies, creative writing, cultural and gender studies, which is why we’ve included all the various apparatus in it, introductory essays, reading lists, etc.’
Whatever the end goal, one thing is clear: this is an anthology that is sure to set a new path of what constitutes contemporary queer Australian poetry. After all, it brings together so many compelling voices that it can’t help but turn heads and make others pay attention. But it’s perhaps Jones who best sums up the anthology and the hopes both she and Farrell hold for its future.
‘I hope,’ she explained, ‘people find it sexy… because poetry is.’
Scott-Patrick Mitchell liked Out of the Box so much you can catch his recommendation, along with those of David Malouf and Dorothy Porter, on the anthology’s dust jacket.
Out of the Box is published through Puncher & Wattman and will be available from Planet Books from the last week of November. Pre-ordering is available at Planet Books.
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