Notes on the question of Australia’s Poet Laureate
Or, the first concern of a cultural diplomat
1.
In February 2023, the Australian government launched their new national cultural policy, Revive: a place for every story, a story for every place. As part of their compact with the literature sector, they committed to ‘establish a National Poet Laureate to promote poetry and mentor up and coming poets.’
Little has been said since regarding the finer details of establishing this post. But recently, in Sydney, Australian poet and public humanist, Sarah Holland-Batt, delivered a keynote lecture, titled ‘The Writer in the Public Arena: Implications of a Poet Laureate for Australia’. The lecture examines the long history of such laureateships, while also outlining current iterations in various comparable countries – such as England, Ireland and Scotland, as well as the U.S.A. – and the various models for Poets Laureate, and the different modes of engagement by individual poets in these roles. This is a valuable intervention into, and very much provides a useful framework for, a public discussion around this notion of a Poet Laureate, but also the place of literature more generally in public culture.
The implications for this lecture extend beyond the current debate within Australia and would be of interest to anybody, anywhere; everybody, everywhere.
The full text for this lecture can be accessed here.
2.
Among the various possibilities for a laureateship outlined in this lecture, one that caught my attention was Holland-Batt’s notion of the poet laureate as cultural diplomat, both inside and outside their own country. One example she drew on to develop this notion is the poet, Robert Frost, who was invited to read at John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inauguration. ‘Kennedy’s invitation to Frost extended well beyond writing poetry and into statecraft;’ Holland-Batt explains, ‘the year after JFK’s inauguration, he encouraged Frost to travel to Russia and meet with Khrushchev in an act of cultural diplomacy intended to further Kennedy’s aims to find peace with Russia. After Frost’s death, Kennedy made an eloquent argument for the value of poetry to a nation’s ‘self-comprehension’, as an appeal to our better angels, and a valuable check on power.’
This recalled a situation closer to home. In 1971, while in opposition, Gough Whitlam, as leader of the Australian Labor Party, led a delegation to the People’s Republic of China; he was one of the first Western leaders to do so. The following year, after winning a federal election and becoming Prime Minister, the Whitlam government negotiated with China to establish official diplomatic relations between the two countries – no mean feat during the Cold War. By the early 1980s, cultural diplomacy began with official visits of Australian writers to China, and vice versa.
In 1983, the poet Rosemary Dobson was part of a cultural delegation to China. It was an act of diplomacy that, I would suggest, not only reinforces Sarah Holland-Batt’s argument regarding how a Poet Laureate could be a cultural diplomat, but it also demonstrates a precedent within Australia’s political policy culture upon which we can draw.
Dobson spent three weeks travelling China, meeting with writers, students, academics, and artists. At these meetings she would provide a brief historical overview of Australian literature, read some of her own poems, and – via a translator – answer questions. In her report to the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs, she said that the discussions were ‘stimulating’, although there was a distinct ‘ideological gap’ in which the Chinese accepted (or appeared to accept) restraints, while Western freedom appeared to them as a form of anarchy. She made four recommendations to the department, to fulfill discernible needs: a resident lecturer in Australian literature; reference books and texts on Australian literature, and recent Australian fiction and poetry; an exchange of visual art and touring gallery exhibitions; and the need for future visits to be longer – she felt that the current itinerary was too brief, and allowed for only an exchange of information, and did not necessarily foster deeper understanding.
Dobson also argued that the informal aspects of the visit were as important, if not more so, than the formal aspects. She related an unscheduled meeting with foreign language students that was more informal, and so more open and engaging, for both her and the students. Furthermore, a long, unplanned train journey from Shanghai to Guilan provided the opportunity to see the landscape of the Central Provinces. Dobson reported that these informal aspects of the trip lead to serendipitous experiences, and moments for poetic reflection.
On her return to Australia she wrote a cycle of five poems, “Poems for Friends in China”, which she published, accompanied by her own illustrations, in Hemisphere – an Asian-Australian magazine (Vol 28. No. 5, 1984).
Now half the world’s between us,
The branching floods divide us,
Rice-fields, cities, mountains
Shoulder us apart
With hardly a word between us
Through hazards of translation
We triumphed in exchanges
On literature and art.
(from “5. For Friends in China”, Rosemary Dobson)
3.
In her lecture, Holland-Batt traces the origins of laureates back to Ancient Greece:
‘Laurels – from which the word ‘laureate’ springs – are horseshoe-shaped garlands, fashioned from wild olive, sweet bay, cherry laurel, or mouse thorn wood. Worn on the head or slung around the neck, they find their point of origin in the myth of Daphne and Apollo, in which the god Apollo mocks and offends Cupid. Cupid retaliates by shooting Apollo with a gold arrow that condemns him to become infatuated with Daphne, while simultaneously shooting Daphne with a silver bolt that condemns her to loathe Apollo. The ceaseless chase that ensues drives Daphne mad. She begs her father to set her free from Apollo’s advances, so he transforms her into a laurel tree. This act grieves Apollo so deeply that he uses his powers to make the laurel tree evergreen, and fashions himself a wreath from its branches.’
‘Subsequently bestowed on ancient Olympians in Greece, poets and musicians, and victorious commanders celebrating martial victories in Rome as a symbol of triumph, the laurel wreath more quietly also evokes Daphne’s despair.’
And yet, there is another tradition from Ancient Greece that I would argue prefigures the modern role of Poet Laureate – especially in the form of cultural diplomat as presented by Sarah Holland-Batt – and that is the practice of theoria.
Nowadays we tend to consider the term theoria in relation to the Anglo notion of ‘theory’, particularly in opposition to ‘practice’ (or praxis); a baneful distinction first introduced by philosophers, reducing a rich and worldly experience to a narrow, unworldly form of thinking, mere contemplation. Prior to this, however – as Andrea Wilson Nightingale demonstrates in Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: Theoria in its Cultural Context (2004) – theoria was an important civic institution, whereby a person – the theoros – would travel abroad, to religious festivals, or simply to experience foreign parts, and then would return home and report back to the community. The practice of theoria incorporated this complete cycle of striking out, engaging with new experiences, peoples, and places, then returning, contemplating, and reporting. Its civic function was to enrich and constantly reinvigorate the local culture.
It had its domestic corollary in Greek theatre, whereby theatron is a place of seeing, but also contemplation, while theoreo meant being a member of an audience, comparing or judging. Christopher Rocco, in Tragedy and the Enlightenment (1997), expands on this connection, stating:
The theatre (theatrōn) is a place for seeing or beholding a spectacle, especially dramatic representations; it is also a place of assembly and a collective noun for hoi theatai, the spectators. The Greek theatrōn originates in the feminine noun thea, which signifies “see, sight, gaze, look upon, behold, admire, and contemplate.” From it, Greek derived a field of words having to do with seeing, sight, and spectacle, e.g., to theama (sight, spectacle, play), hē theama (spectacle), and the verb theaomai meaning “to gaze at or behold, to see clearly and with a sense of wonder or admiration.” Theaomai not only designates physical vision, but mental activity as well, especially in the sense of contemplation or a “vision of the mind”.
I would suggest that there is potential for a Poet Laureate to straddle these senses of theoria, both domestic and foreign, within the purview of poetry (or literature writ pure) as a form of cultural diplomacy – predicated upon, but at the same time reconfiguring, cultural difference.
We catch a glimpse of this in the modest experience of Rosemary Dobson, as a modern day theoros, a traveller to China in the 1980s, engaging, then returning to Australia, to report to us citizens, us theoreo, in order to clarify who we take ourselves to be, and how we see our place in this world.
Waves of travellers break at the base of the mountains
Dwindle, fall back, and re-form again, untiring.
(from “4. Written for Professor He at Guilin”, Rosemary Dobson)
It is an experience – and an antidote to provincialism – that Australian literary scholar (and, coincidentally, sinologist), Simon Leys, once described, when he stated:
Culture is born out of exchanges and thrives on differences. In this sense, ‘national culture’ is a self-contradiction, and ‘multiculturalism’ a pleonasm. The death of culture lies in self-centeredness, self-sufficiency and isolation. (Here, for example, the first concern – it seems – should not be to create an Australian culture, but a cultured Australia.)
This is also, I would suggest, upon listening to, and reading, Sarah Holland-Batt’s lecture, the first concern of our future Poet Laureate.
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