AustLit

'Contemporary Australian poetry, as with many other forms of contemporary cultural production, has often been viewed as a postmodern phenomenon. In his influential 2007 essay “Surviving Australian Poetry: The New Lyricism”, for example, the poet and critic David McCooey has described the dominant mode of new Australian poetry as a hybrid negotiation of innovation (‘new’) with tradition (‘lyricism’) that deconstructs the oppositional drive of past avant-gardisms. But this perspective, whilst persuasive in discussing the work of a number of dominant poetic voices, appears insufficient in accounting for the complex work of the newer Australian poets whose poems break with thematic, aesthetic, and conceptual tenets of a postmodernist poetic doxa. This paper argues that the work of such contemporary poets can be best viewed through the prism of philosopher Alain Badiou’s notion of inaesthetics.' (Publication abstract)