At the moment I am reading for my PhD various Poetry anthologies of the 1960s and 1970s that helped establish and define new generations of poets. A notable influence on Australian poetry and Australian anthologies was Donald Allen's The New American Poetry (1965) that contains Black Mountain poetry, Beat poetry and work from the New York School. When this anthology landed in Australia, it was for many poets their first opportunity to read across contemporary American poetry from the 50s and 60s that had otherwise been unreleased here or unavailable due to censorship.
The impact of anthologies like this (and Donald Hall's Contemporary American Poetry (1962)) resonated through young Australian poets and this is seen nowhere more obviously than The New Australian Poetry (1979) by John Tranter and also the earlier Australian Poetry Now (1970) ed. by Thomas Shapcott.
Out of these Australian anthologies there emerged in print the 'Generation of '68', at least 24 poets that were looking for alternatives to "the world of Henry Lawson and A.D Hope" (Tranter, 1965, xvii) and being influenced by new American forms, technology, rock and roll music, drugs and "a shift in attitudes to authority" (xvi). Australia's answer to Ginsberg, Kerouac, O'Hara and Ferlinghetti in the form of writers like Bruce Beaver, Michael Dransfield, Nigel Roberts, Robert Adamson and Charles Buckmaster (etc.). It is a fascinating period in Australia's literary history and one that my thesis will revolve around. Here is a poem from one of the '68ers:
| Overdose by Michael Dransfield | |
| Inertia of a warm day: the lassitude that comes of prior opiates and robs my veins of meaningful blood, or posons with perilous narcotics. Falling over a desk, trying to stay awake when to sleep means death. Overdose. Nothing left but the whim of survival. Consciousnes dedmands vigilence, the courage of a beaconing lightship on the wide Sargasso Sea. Drifting unintelligibly through afternoon, across the day's almost endless expanses, wishing for the cool shore of dusk. Becalmed now on Coleridge's painted sea in Rimbaud's drunken boat. High like de Quincey or Vasco I set a course for the Pillars of Hercules, meaning to sail over the edge of the world |
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