Welcome to Inventing the Tradition the seventh Australian Poetry Festival to be presented by the Poets Union.

Inventing the Tradition is designed to be challenging and, above all, to be entertaining and stimulating. It is a festival not a conference but it has the serious aim of investigating the relationship between the mainstream and the margins, between tradition and the avant-garde. Poets will be reading from their own work but they will be contextualising their readings by reference to poets whom they admire and by briefly mentioning the theories, traditions (or anti-traditions) from which they write. Readings will mix ‘n match poets from different aesthetic theories and practices to expose the audience to different ways of thinking about poetry. It is hoped you will hear poets and ideas that you may not have met before in Sydney.

We are pleased that the Judith Wright Memorial Lecture will be delivered this year by Chris Wallace-Crabbe. Chris is one of Australia’s most respected poets and academics. He is also Chair of the Australian Poetry Centre and Interim Co-Chair of Australian Poetry.

Papers from the festival will be published in a special edition of Five Bells towards the end of the year. They will make a significant contribution to discussions about the nature and scope of contemporary poetry in Australia and spread the ideas beyond the festival’s specific time and place.

The festival this year is being presented in collaboration with our sister organisation in Melbourne, the Australian Poetry Centre. From January 2011, the Poets Union and the Australian Poetry Centre will merge to form a new national poetry organisation, Australian Poetry. This is an exciting development which has been supported by the Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Arts. Australian Poetry will be an Emerging Key Organisation and, for the first time, will receive national program funding which will allow a more professional delivery of services. We are determined that the new organisation will be genuinely national and will provide and support programs in all states and territories in ways that neither the Poets Union nor the Australian Poetry Centre could do alone.

My personal thanks to all the people who made the festival possible, especially to the volunteer members of the committee of the Poets Union.

Enjoy the poetry!

Brook Emery,
Chairperson, Poets Union
Festival Director, Inventing the Tradition