Ignorant new puritans are out to purge our poetry

It was the by-line that caught my eye “The whole canon is being erased”, or at least that’s how I first read it. It actually read ‘The whole canon is being reappraised: how the #MeToo movement upended Australian poetry”

It’s not often poetry gets into the press and when it does it’s normally for something terrible, like slander, or someone’s run off with someone’s work or worse. So it was with some trepidation that I pushed off from the shore of the first paragraph, compass firmly adjusted to Guardian reality.

The article is based around input from two poetry politicians, Jacinta Le Plastrier (poet, editor, publisher and CEO of Australian Poetry, the peak body meant to represent poets and poetry nationally)…