Homework Jan. 11: Techie-wreckie Jottings

[Neville Briggs]

Well done Shelley.

By the way, the can of worms here now is the suggestion that a poem which is by a world renowned poet and has been highly acclaimed for a hundred years or so could be considered inferior to some "long and complex narrative " in a bush poetry comp. How quaint.

[Maureen K Clifford]

I reckon with a few minor alterations this classic poem will fit right in to the Bush Poetry scene -


I met a traveller from a southern land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
are in the gibber desert. Near them on the sand,
Half tanked, a shatter'd ringer lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on those empty cans,
The hand that raised them and the thirst that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Aussiemandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
The booze has all been drunk - more's on the way.
Now we are out of beer - it's dry and bare,
it was your shout - but that was yesterday.

[Neville Briggs]

It's not long enough to win a bush poetry comp Maureen. Check out all the award winners.

[David Campbell]

Thank you, Neville! There are well over 200 award-winning poems in the Poetry section of the home page. Any sonnets among them? What's the shortest poem listed? So maybe there are some implications we should be looking at?

Maureen, your "Aussiefied" version is about as true-blue as you can get!

Cheers
David

[Shelley Hansen]

Love it Maureen Now you've got my imagination running on as well! This is almost turning into a second session of homework!! Here's my effort with a distinctly local Fraser Coast flavour ... and it is a subject I've wanted to address in a poem for quite some time. Who knows ... the parody may lead on to something more substantial on this topic!

I met a traveller from the Great South Land
who said: A vast decayed ship stands alone
beached on island. Near it, on the sand,
half sunk, remains of anchor lie, whose prone
recline, and chain once pulled by sailor's hand
Tell of a time and industry now dead
which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things
whose stories wild imaginations fed!
And on the side of her these words appear -
"SS Maheno". So her name yet rings.
Look upon her ruin ye mighty and despair.
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
the Fraser Island sands stretch far away.

(c) Shelley Hansen 2015

[Neville Briggs]

Very good Shelley See what you started David

David, 200 poems is a lot to check out but from what I see around the traps, long seems to be the preference. I suppose I can't really say for certain what the implications are.

Just a few random musings.

It is a common reaction , I am told, by people viewing the famous painting Mona Lisa that they say they are surprised by how small it is. Some seem to equate significance in art with size.
Over the years the portrait entries in the Archibald Prize have grown bigger and bigger, I suppose there's an element of being noticed. There are so many entries to judge that the judges might only take notice of something that is " in your face " in size.
Poetry size is not applicable only to bush poetry comps, in the Newcastle Poetry comp a couple of years ago, Mark Treddinick's winning entry " Wombat Vedas" was several pages long. Yet, one year at the Tenterfield, Brush with Verse competition, the winning entry was a sort of Haiku ( I thought it was rot )
The Quadrant magazine have published a book edited by Les Murray , of the best poetry from Quadrant for a ten year period. This book is not an anthology of competition winners but still has pieces of high quality. The variation is striking, there a long poems, short poems, formal verse, informal verse. humorous, tragic , Haiku, sonnets, sestinas, rhyming, non rhyming, the lot. A great read.
I looked through that book of award winning bush poems and it didn't seem to have that sort of variety, it just looked to be a bit daunting with lots of quite lengthy pieces to wade through, and that's a reason why I didn't buy it.
Also, I think that awarding the lengthy bush verse relates to a preference for story telling, that's a matter of tradition I suppose.

It's a hard call. You can have long verse of great impact or long verse which just seems to tramp on and on in no certain direction. You can have short verse which is succinct and pithy or short verse which says nothing much at all.

Oh well, where do we go from here.

[Maureen K Clifford]

Love Shelleys take on a classic - - nicely done - we could have so much fun with this - anyone up for an Uluru takeoff?

With reference to Nevilles comment re the length of poems that win - just sharing some feedback I have received from the TAT readers - the longer poems aren't greatly appreciated. If I can get or make something to fit onto 2 face to face pages with a bit of illustration or a point of interest it seems to be accepted well - but go to three pages and they seem to be unread by many. The rhyming poems are well liked by a fair % of readers and the bush poetry has been well received.

Personally I like a poem the length of a sonnet to share with readers - but then again I am trying to make the mag also appeal to the people out there who 'don't do poetry' as that is a huge untapped audience.

[Shelley Hansen]

Maureen and Neville - you both make very good points.

I can see that (in a bush poetry comp especially), a judge would look with favour on a longer poem as being evidence of more effort - particularly if it is a narrative. Of course it's not necessarily true that a shorter poem takes less effort - often it is the reverse. Our great bush poets have never been afraid to write fine examples of both short and long poems.

I agree that to just go on and on for the sake of it defeats the whole purpose. As a friend of ours used to say, "If you haven't got any more to say, stop talking!" Surely, when judging a competition, once poems have been deemed to meet all criteria, it should then come down to "wow" factor, rather than length or other "cosmetic" aspects. Of course on the other hand, to unnecessarily truncate a poem just to "keep it short" also defeats the purpose.

Interestingly, Maureen, my recent Ipswich champion poem "A Lesson in Life" is the longest poem I have yet written. A friend who heard about my prize asked for a copy of the poem, but when I gave it to her she gave it one glance and said: "Oh, it's so long! I don't want to read all that!" It bears out your point about what appeals to readers of TAT magazine. I think diversity is the key - and I think you succeed with that. Oh, and if you're looking for Australian sonnets, I'm happy to spam you with a few of mine

Cheers, Shelley

[David Campbell]

You’re right, Neville, the storytelling tradition is probably a significant factor. TMFSR, arguably the iconic bush poem, comes in at 104 lines, and that may well have established a pattern.

But this problem of length links with a question Zondrae has asked in another thread (and Shelley's comments above) about the amount of detail needed in poems. There is sometimes a tendency to hammer the reader over the head with explanation/detail in bush poetry, and that leaves us wide open to accusations of banality. The one thing a sonnet like Ozymandias does is leave a great deal to the reader’s imagination. It could so easily have been a much longer poem, thrashing out the history of the kingdom and the statue, and what led to its destruction. Instead, we are left to create our own scenario, and that can be very powerful. As another example, in The Babies of Walloon (20 lines), Lawson says nothing about the actual drowning of the two sisters…all we get is the reference to the water-lilies. So the question we have to ask constantly with our poetry is: does the reader need to know that?

I think Mal’s Mistress of My Seasons-New England Autumn, also 20 lines, is the shortest in our poetry awards list, and that’s significant because it’s not so much a story in the traditional sense as an evocation of mood and emotion. We could do with more of that, more of the writing Matt also does so well. As Maureen says, frugality with words can work to the poet’s advantage. It goes back to the issue often discussed before, that of broadening horizons and expectations. Shorter sometimes, rather than longer. Hinting rather than explaining. Subtlety as an alternative to detail. Variation of setting and content, which ties in with the earlier reference to poems about the sea. We hear a lot about Burke, Wills and Co., but not much about the likes of Bass and Flinders. It’s as if the pioneering days stopped at the coastline.

Anyway, maybe this thread will encourage a bit more interest in the sonnet as a viable form. Maureen introduced us to the Kyrielle Sonnet last month, and a few of us had a go. And back in October 2013 we had “A Space in Time” as one of the homework prompts and I wrote the one below. No detail, it’s left to the reader to imagine what happened.

A Space in Time

At night he’s there, a shadow in my dreams
that tears the heart from innocence and beauty,
for men can worship God, or so it seems,
yet plunder childhood, pleading love and duty.
I am but one of many down the years
from whom the spark of youth was harshly taken,
who know the awful guilt and bitter tears
that stem from future hopes which they’ve forsaken
in moments ripped from life. Who pities them?
Who sees the price they’ve paid and offers kindness?
Who stands with moral courage to condemn
this evil buried deep in pious blindness?
Although long years have passed, that dreadful crime
remains within my soul, a space in time.

© David Campbell, October 5, 2013.

[Shelley Hansen]

Outstanding sonnet, David - and you're right, no further detail needed. It is all the more powerful for not being spelled out.

As an example (and as you well know), I first wrote an earlier version of "A Lesson in Life" which I entered into competitions without success. There was one difference - I spelled out the details of the tragic drowning of the wife and son. It was you who suggested to me that I might be better to leave that aspect to the imagination and talk instead about the effect that the telling of the tale had on the old man. I saw your point immediately, and revised that section of the poem. The rest is history!

Of course when you get "action/adventure" poems like "Snowy River", it's a bit different. Obviously in those cases the whole tale has to be told. But so often - in poetry, in prose, and in conversation - we ask the questions and then answer them as well. We fall into the trap of handing everything to our readers/listeners on a platter - thus denying them the privilege of thinking for themselves!

Oh, by the way - interesting that you should mention Bass and Flinders. I have a "bucket list" of subjects I dearly want to write about - and Matthew Flinders is right up there at the top. He has always fascinated me. I've just got to get the right angle to approach it, which I'm sure will come to me in its own good time

Cheers, Shelley