Because there is for poets no equivalent of the Large Hadron Collider – a speculative venture supported by billions of dollars from world governments, with no certainty of outcomes that can be monetised or weaponised – literary magazines exist.
At least, that was my supposition as I assembled a pile of ten Australian literary magazines for reading. How to account for these oddball miscellanies except as buffered delivery systems for that hardest to swallow of literary art forms? Truly, I still can’t say.
“Government has a role to play in enabling us to realise our right to create and express ourselves creatively,” writes Julianne Schultz in Island #132 (‘Towards a National Cultural Policy’). Last year, the Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Arts gave literary magazines around $500,000 in grants to offset writers’ fees and a modicum of production costs. Funding also comes from state and local government arts agencies, universities and philanthropic bodies, and from “curated” advertising that meshes with a magazine’s creative content. Depending wholly on sales and subscriptions would seem to be no way for a literary magazine to thrive.
Conventional wisdom has it that journals are a hatchery for new talent. That partly explains the rationale for government support, as does the view that the genre is a “worthy” one, in the sense of being non-commercial. Back in 2010, the Australia Council set up an online portal, Literary Magazines Australia (litmags.com.au), branding ten leading (and funded) journals as “The Best Australian Writing”. Dennis Haskell, then chair of the literature board, spruiked the product:
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