90 Counter-Poetics Lyn McCredden M ichel Foucault dened history as ‘the discourse of power’ (Foucault, Society 68), arguing that the function of a ‘counter- history’ is ‘to show that laws deceive, that kings wear masks, that power creates illusions, and the historians tell lies’ (Bainbridge 58). Writing on the relationship of poetry to power, critic Simon Bainbridge argues, citing Byron’s Don Juan, that in ‘ the face of a model of “History” which can only take “things in the gross”, Foucault oers a counter history which enables us to “ know them in detail.”’ (Bainbridge 50). By disciplinary analogy, I will argue that the poetry of Indigenous Australian Tony Birch can best be read not only as a counter-history, but as a ‘counter-poetics.’ However, I will also ask whether this notion of poetic ‘countering’ is inherently oxymoronic, given that poetry is highly performative, writerly and readerly; at its best always a self-questioning and critical art. 6 6 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in Touching Feeling: aect, pedagogy, performativity presents a succinct genealogy of the dierent uses of the term ‘performativity’ in contemporary Humanities discourses. Sedgwick outlines the uses of the term which were inaugurated by J. L. Austin’s speech act theory, and his 1955 Harvard lectures on speech utterances, but which bifurcate into theatrical and deconstructive uses of the term ‘performativity’ (Sedgwick, Touching 3–8). See also Sedgwick and Parker’s earlier volume, Performativity and Performance (1995). ere has been a lively, three-decade long discussion about poetry as performance, and the links between theatre and poetry. However, the current essay uses the term ‘performativity’ in the context of poetry not in this sense of the public presentation of poetic texts, but in a way which is closer to Sedgwick’s broadly deconstructive uses of the term: to indicate the complex and often contradictory ideological processes of coming into being and identity. In poetry this may entail the construction of internalised voices which are at odds with the literal or supposed meanings of their utterances, or of their supposed ideological position. For discussions of the performativity of poetry in this sense, and what poetry interpretation requires from its readers, see Peter Middleton’s Distant reading: performance, readership, and consumption in contemporary poetry (Tuscaloosa, AL: U of Alabama P, 2005).