Poetry and authenticity. (Letters).(Letter to the Editor)

SIR: I am sorry to inform Alison Croggon (Letters, November 2002) that my objections to Emma Lew's methodology are neither misogynistic nor anti-intellectual. Quite the opposite. I love women, and therefore take their intellectual challenge seriously. The feminisation of Australian literature, particularly poetry, has politicised the art form and produced a crisis of integrity.

Integrity in poetry is vital to all people who maintain an interest in the reading or writing of poems. It maintains our trust in poets and allows their poems the possibility of transforming our lives, no matter how large or small a transformation that may be. All poets, and poetry in general, are brought into disrepute if there is any question of the authenticity or integrity of a poet and their poems, particularly one of some renown who has received public accolades and public funds.

In my opinion, there is really only one basic ground rule left in poetry, and that is that poets are expected to write their own poems. If a poet uses a line from somewhere else then it should be put in quotation marks and the source, publication and date acknowledged at the end of the poem. As far as I know this is the accepted practice. Emma Lew has never acknowledged that every poem in her prizewinning book The Wild Reply was written using other people's words, phrases and lines. Her recent new publication is no doubt written with the same methodology, yet you will find no mention of her process in the start of the book beside the list of literary magazines and newspapers that have already published her work. I suspect that the editors of these magazines and newspapers are not aware of her process either.

This methodology is quite unlike that of Rosalie Gascoigne, whose sculpture-gathering process Croggon tells us is "better compared" to Lew's methodology. First, Gascoigne is not covert about her process. Everybody can see that she has gathered together various found pieces to make a new piece of work. Second, Gascoigne is not making her new sculpture using little bits of other sculptures. Neither does she use the entire back dunny on the old farm, but a piece of old silvered wood that remains from it.

While sculpture and painting may rely entirely on their physical beauty, I expect a more profound and even literal communication from the poem, because the only medium available to the poet is language, and the purpose of language is communication. All poets must use the words available to them in the language of their choice to make their piece of art. Sculptors such as Gascoigne have an enormous range of materials at their disposal to make their sculpture.

Both Croggon and Lew (Letters, November 2002) claim that "an artist's creative process is her own business" and that I have no right to question it. What rubbish. There is nothing anywhere that has a right not to be questioned, particularly when it concerns those who claim with such preciousness to be "the artist" and who live from public funds. Lew's "creative process" is highly questionable, and even more unclear as she now claims that her "final draft would rarely contain even one line or phrase from the original material". I find a lack of authenticity in Lew's process and in her conversation about it. Even if Lew changed every single word in the phrase or line she had commandeered, the poem would still remain in the hands of the original idea.

It is not in fact "only the work that counts", as Croggon claims, but the entire gestalt of the process. In fact, there are many people who will argue that the process is more important than the product, but that is another discussion. Let me simply say that how a poet lives their life requires an authenticity which will certainly affect their poems.