A Strange Magic: Australian Prose Poetry

A general and wide-ranging anthology of Australian prose poetry is long overdue, especially at this time in the early twenty-first century, when various forms of micro literature are fourishing. Until now, and despite the excellence of prose poetry in Australia, there has never been such an anthology, although poets since 2002—including Thomas Shapcott, Kevin Brophy and Dominique Hecq—have called for one to be published. This situation is presumably the result of the relative neglect of prose poetry by critics and editors in Australia—as has also been the case in many countries, including in the United Kingdom until recently, and in the United States until the 1990s. Indeed, some readers and poets have been inclined to dismiss the legitimacy of prose poetry as a poetic form because it is not lineated—or not in the usual way one fnds in more conventional poetry, whether these are works in free verse or traditional verse—and does not employ stanzas. Instead, prose poetry makes use of sentences and paragraphs, literary resources that are usually associated with the mode of prose.