Indigo

More than a journal, Indigo represents a vibrant creative writing movement based around the Fremantle Arts Centre. Submissions are accepted from those who currently reside in Western Australia or who have lived there for at least ten years. But why start a journal for Western Australian writing alone? Is there something distinctive about Western Australian experience? Certainly, the way sandgropers see themselves in relation to the rest of Australia suggests this, and editor Donna Ward’s claim that there is ‘something distinctively Western Australian filtering through the short stories in this volume’ appears true, difficult though it is to quantify.

This book, says Geoff Page in his introduction, should ‘cheer up those who are prone to lament the passing of “form” from contemporary poetry’. Speaking as one who does employ the f-word now and again, I’m very glad to hear it, though I catch the note of sardonicism and think that Page rather misses the point when he writes, again a little satirically, that some ‘may complain that fourteen lines “do not a sonnet always make”‘. I, for one, am more likely to complain that a poem of roughly sonnet proportions ‘does not a decent poem make’; the sonnet (I’d say) is a means, not an end. Apart from the obvious cases of ‘straitjacketing’, of forcing a form upon such content as may be naturally resistant to it, there is the fact that too smooth a rehashing of forms is one of the things – just think of Kipling – that announces a poet as irretrievably minor. Take the Shakespearean sonnet, for example: in poets of only moderate skill, its closing couplet will tend to betray a cluck of self-congratulation.