National Poetry Week article
Posted: Sun Sep 11, 2011 12:17 pm
Last week (September 5-11) was National Poetry Week so I wrote an article for the Age (http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/societ ... 1js5r.html) arguing (in a deliberately provocative style) that, overall, poetry doesn’t get anywhere near the public recognition that it did in the days of Dennis, Paterson, and Lawson. Then I looked at a few of the possible reasons why, some of which have already been discussed in various contexts on this website.
In particular I concentrated on one given by poet and critic Ian McFarlane who wrote last year that “poetry today is unread because much of it is unreadable”…and pretty much agreed with him. In The Best Australian Poems 2010 (Black Inc.) there are 110 poets, with 129 poems. Only three of the poems could be called traditional rhyming verse and not one of those three would get much recognition in a bush poetry competition. Most of the poems had been published previously, but the editor clearly didn’t read anything where bush poetry might have appeared. However that’s hardly surprising.
In the June 2010 edition of Writers Voice, the magazine of the NSW Fellowship of Australian Writers, the then poetry editor was taken to task by one of the FAW branches for not publishing any traditional verse. Her response was that her mission was to “…try to reflect the predominant form of poetry written by millions of people worldwide…” Tellingly, she added that she was trying to attract “new and perhaps younger people” by “making sure that the magazine contains modern poetry recognisable as such by educated readers”. Make of that what you will.
It’s a very broad generalisation, but we seem to have two distinct poetry genres…traditional verse and non-traditional verse…and there’s not much crossover. You’re either in one camp or the other. The non-traditional group dominates publications like The Best Australian Poems, and its followers are mainly located in cities. The traditional or bush verse people usually live in country towns and rural areas and self-publish their books. Stephen and I are running (in conjunction with the Henry Lawson Society) a bush poetry workshop here in Melbourne on October 22, and most of the interest expressed so far has come from outside the metropolitan area, including some from country NSW.
The book scene is about to change slightly because Melbourne Books will begin to publish early next year an annual collection of bush verse and bush stories (selected from winning competition entries) edited by well-known poet Max Merckenschlager. That’s both good news and bad news. It’s good because it provides a significant outlet for bush poetry and yarns, but it’s bad in that it further entrenches the divide between the two groups. For the last few years Melbourne Books has produced an anthology that mixed bush verse with all types of short stories. That book is continuing, but it will now combine those short stories with non-traditional verse. So there will be two books, probably with two quite distinct readerships.
And that bothers me because, as I’ve argued elsewhere, each group has much to learn from the other. Manfred has asked whether bush poetry is becoming boring, and it’s an excellent question because that’s a big danger. The great strength of bush verse is that it is not obscure…it actually tells a story. But good bush poetry requires much more than just a story if it is to remain interesting. It needs to borrow something from the non-traditional area, which is awash with metaphor and simile. But it doesn’t want to take too much, because non-traditional verse often disappears into a boggy swamp of impenetrable imagery. Somewhere in between is a happy medium.
There are glimmers of light. Stephen has had success writing poems publicising C. J. Dennis and the logging in Toolangi, and has been interviewed by the ABC as a result. I was interviewed about the Bronze Swagman by the ABC in Queensland, and that interview was published along with the poem on their website. Part of the audio broadcast then made its way to the ABC radio news here in Melbourne. That, in turn, was picked up by The Senior newspaper which conducted another interview, resulting in a good article in the September issue. (http://www.thesenior.com.au/news.asp?pu ... cleID=2607) Following on from that there has been contact from a number of people who want to use the poem in one way or another. It’s fascinating to watch the ripples spread.
But now that Poetry Week’s over…what happened? Were there any special poetry events held in your area to mark the occasion?
I was talking to a senior English teacher at a large local school and she didn’t know it was Poetry Week. I visited four bookshops and only one had a reasonable selection of poetry books. Two had less than a dozen, with three or four Australian poets represented. And the fourth didn’t carry any poetry books. Why? “Because nobody buys them.”
I attended two poetry events, one (about Henry Lawson) as an audience member and one as guest poet. There were about 15-20 people at each, hardly anyone under the age of 50. Remember that this is in the suburbs of a big city, with both events advertised widely through local libraries. (Then I read about 300 turning up to a poets’ breakfast in Camooweal!)
Anyhow, perhaps naively, I’m going to continue trying to bridge the divide. I’ll take bush verse into non-traditional areas, as I did last Friday night by presenting ‘Wasteland’ and ‘The Wisdom of a Child’ (among others) to a suburban writing group. And I’ll use prose and free verse in bush poetry workshops as a springboard to discussing metre and rhyme. It’d be great to see poetry considerably more front and centre in terms of general public recognition, and more attention to rhythm and rhyme might just be the way to get there.
As I wrote in the article: “Good poetry can be a still, small voice in a complex world, a reminder that someone has seen into the very heart of an emotion or experience and translated it into words that, even if only for an instant, make us pause and think. Surely that moment is worth preserving.”
Cheers
David
In particular I concentrated on one given by poet and critic Ian McFarlane who wrote last year that “poetry today is unread because much of it is unreadable”…and pretty much agreed with him. In The Best Australian Poems 2010 (Black Inc.) there are 110 poets, with 129 poems. Only three of the poems could be called traditional rhyming verse and not one of those three would get much recognition in a bush poetry competition. Most of the poems had been published previously, but the editor clearly didn’t read anything where bush poetry might have appeared. However that’s hardly surprising.
In the June 2010 edition of Writers Voice, the magazine of the NSW Fellowship of Australian Writers, the then poetry editor was taken to task by one of the FAW branches for not publishing any traditional verse. Her response was that her mission was to “…try to reflect the predominant form of poetry written by millions of people worldwide…” Tellingly, she added that she was trying to attract “new and perhaps younger people” by “making sure that the magazine contains modern poetry recognisable as such by educated readers”. Make of that what you will.
It’s a very broad generalisation, but we seem to have two distinct poetry genres…traditional verse and non-traditional verse…and there’s not much crossover. You’re either in one camp or the other. The non-traditional group dominates publications like The Best Australian Poems, and its followers are mainly located in cities. The traditional or bush verse people usually live in country towns and rural areas and self-publish their books. Stephen and I are running (in conjunction with the Henry Lawson Society) a bush poetry workshop here in Melbourne on October 22, and most of the interest expressed so far has come from outside the metropolitan area, including some from country NSW.
The book scene is about to change slightly because Melbourne Books will begin to publish early next year an annual collection of bush verse and bush stories (selected from winning competition entries) edited by well-known poet Max Merckenschlager. That’s both good news and bad news. It’s good because it provides a significant outlet for bush poetry and yarns, but it’s bad in that it further entrenches the divide between the two groups. For the last few years Melbourne Books has produced an anthology that mixed bush verse with all types of short stories. That book is continuing, but it will now combine those short stories with non-traditional verse. So there will be two books, probably with two quite distinct readerships.
And that bothers me because, as I’ve argued elsewhere, each group has much to learn from the other. Manfred has asked whether bush poetry is becoming boring, and it’s an excellent question because that’s a big danger. The great strength of bush verse is that it is not obscure…it actually tells a story. But good bush poetry requires much more than just a story if it is to remain interesting. It needs to borrow something from the non-traditional area, which is awash with metaphor and simile. But it doesn’t want to take too much, because non-traditional verse often disappears into a boggy swamp of impenetrable imagery. Somewhere in between is a happy medium.
There are glimmers of light. Stephen has had success writing poems publicising C. J. Dennis and the logging in Toolangi, and has been interviewed by the ABC as a result. I was interviewed about the Bronze Swagman by the ABC in Queensland, and that interview was published along with the poem on their website. Part of the audio broadcast then made its way to the ABC radio news here in Melbourne. That, in turn, was picked up by The Senior newspaper which conducted another interview, resulting in a good article in the September issue. (http://www.thesenior.com.au/news.asp?pu ... cleID=2607) Following on from that there has been contact from a number of people who want to use the poem in one way or another. It’s fascinating to watch the ripples spread.
But now that Poetry Week’s over…what happened? Were there any special poetry events held in your area to mark the occasion?
I was talking to a senior English teacher at a large local school and she didn’t know it was Poetry Week. I visited four bookshops and only one had a reasonable selection of poetry books. Two had less than a dozen, with three or four Australian poets represented. And the fourth didn’t carry any poetry books. Why? “Because nobody buys them.”
I attended two poetry events, one (about Henry Lawson) as an audience member and one as guest poet. There were about 15-20 people at each, hardly anyone under the age of 50. Remember that this is in the suburbs of a big city, with both events advertised widely through local libraries. (Then I read about 300 turning up to a poets’ breakfast in Camooweal!)
Anyhow, perhaps naively, I’m going to continue trying to bridge the divide. I’ll take bush verse into non-traditional areas, as I did last Friday night by presenting ‘Wasteland’ and ‘The Wisdom of a Child’ (among others) to a suburban writing group. And I’ll use prose and free verse in bush poetry workshops as a springboard to discussing metre and rhyme. It’d be great to see poetry considerably more front and centre in terms of general public recognition, and more attention to rhythm and rhyme might just be the way to get there.
As I wrote in the article: “Good poetry can be a still, small voice in a complex world, a reminder that someone has seen into the very heart of an emotion or experience and translated it into words that, even if only for an instant, make us pause and think. Surely that moment is worth preserving.”
Cheers
David
