How do poets participating in a Black poetry community navigate between collective purpose and creative individuality, with respect to both political and artistic goals? This chapter engages this and related questions, offering an account of Cave Canem as a resource and force within contemporary Black poetry – but not in an institutional history. My focus here is not the foundation that has been an engine of empowerment and an influential player in the world of twenty-first-century American literature, but rather the ongoing, dynamic gathering of writers that describes itself as “a home for Black poetry.” What can we learn by constructing an aesthetic history of this organization? This effort will lay the groundwork for future scholarship that can more thoroughly explore what Cave Canem demonstrates about the power of collective action and mutual support to change culture, as well as the gravitational pull of the culturally familiar.

This chapter considers the role of periodicals, little magazines and literary clubs in fostering communities of Australian poets in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It discusses the importance of such communities in encouraging debate, circulating new poetries and encouraging generative connections between poets. The chapter discusses periodicals such as The Bulletin as a hub for what came to be known as the Bush School of poetry, and Vision that became an instrument for the poetics of the Lindsay circle. Yet it also discusses other little magazines such as The Heart of the Rose, The Triad and Stream. It considers the proliferation of literary clubs, which began as bastions of male homosociality but also began to include women writers or were for women only. It also discusses how periodicals and little magazines drew attention to and encouraged experimentation with new forms and concepts such as Symbolism and Vitalism. The chapter also includes the significance of literary magazines, some of which were supported by or emerged out of universities.

This chapter synthesises empirical methodology with detailed contextual analysis to reflect on the ways in which anthologies of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century constructed or de-prioritised national, canonical and generational frames. Noting previous interpretative frameworks such as ‘new lyricism’, this chapter argues that a number of anthologies during this era reflected an ethical turn in Australian poetry and emerged out of or postulated literary communities and networks. The chapter includes an analysis of the two Best Australian anthology series and an analysis of anthologies with canonical impetus. Lastly, it considers the shift in definitional terms from the ‘modern’, ‘new’ or ‘now’ to the ‘contemporary’, as well as forms of discontent with such a term.

This chapter analyses the role of anthologies in the documentation and shaping of feminist poetries. It considers how they perform cultural, political and aesthetic work for communities of writers and readers, and exist both within and beyond institutions. The chapter considers the engagement with feminism as developing in different generations but also as having important inter-generational connections. The chapter also undertakes close readings of major feminist poets in the late twentieth century to today.