A. G. Pettet is an Australian writer and editor. Pettet’s poems and other writings have been published in Australia, U.K, U.S.A, Canada, New Zealand & India, including Antipodes the official journal of the American Association of Australasian Literary Studies (US), Oxford Poetry (UK), 2019 Australian Poetry Anthology (AUS), Island Magazine (AUS), Going Down Swinging (AUS), World Literature Today (US), Dazed and Confused Magazine (International), Broadsheet (N.Z) and The Cortland Review (US). Pettet was chosen by Black Mountain Press as one of the best Poets of 2018. He was a sessional tutor in Poetry and Literary Fiction at the University of Queensland. In 2016 Pettet was commissioned by The Red Room Company to be part of the Poetry Object program. Pettet has performed, chaired panels and been panel member at various festivals including The Brisbane Writers Festival, The National Young Writers Festival and The Queensland Poetry Festival, of which he was Assistant Director from 1997 – 2000. Pettet was a Senior Editor with Bareknuckle Books, editing 4 collections of poetry, two Anthologies and a collection of short stories by author Venero Armanno. His second collection of poetry ‘Improvised Dirges – New and Selected Poems’ was published By Bareknuckle Books in 2016.
“Adam Pettet is a noted and talented poet as well as being one of the foremost worldwide historians of the Beat Generation.
Australian poets have often seen experimentation alone as making them global, or as cosmopolitanism alone making them experimental, Pettet is aware that one has to be both, on more or less separate axes, and then braid those two tendencies into an articulated whole.
Pettet has not only done this but has crystallized these tendencies into an art that is concise, eloquent, and has the self-belief of a poetry that is not just lyricized discursivity but has a pulse of its own.
Pettet’s writing recalls us (as Christopher Brennan might put it) to the source of poetry, in deep feeling and an insistence that the precision of words makes us think in a distinctly poetic but nonetheless cerebral way. Of Pettet’s generation, I think David Musgrave and Felicity Plunkett are achieving these effects as well, although Pettet does the job with particular economy and conviction.”
– Nicholas Birns (New York University) Author of ‘Contemporary Australian Literature: A World Not Yet Dead’