Post
by David Campbell » Wed Sep 25, 2013 12:07 pm
Thanks, Manfred…I appreciate being ”up there” in such company!
Marty makes a very good point when he says that “Different times require different ways of getting the message across.” And I wonder what those ways might be.
Newspapers, which Paterson, Lawson and Dennis regularly used, don’t publish bush poetry. Radio and TV? A few local radio stations include some bush poetry, and then there’s Macca, but that’s about it as far as I know. The internet? There doesn’t seem to be much interest…bush verse isn’t exactly going viral (unless somebody’s going to strip down and start twerking, although, given our average age, that might not have the desired effect).
Then there’s the work being done by performers in schools, pubs, nursing homes, at festivals, professional gigs, and in entertaining the grey nomads in caravan parks up north.
As a writer, I’d like to think that poetry books might cut through (as they did for Dennis in particular), but recent personal experience hasn’t exactly been encouraging.
So what other options are there? How is that “Someone with that something that people WANT to listen to, someone who has something to say and says it in an individually brilliant way that is undeniably accurate and appreciated by everyone” going to get his or her message across to a mass audience?
In other words, what’s missing? Here I have to echo Manfred’s words: “let’s appreciate each other while we can”. There are 22 bush poets and 43 of their poems in Award Winning Bush Verse and Stories 2013. So buy a copy (or several!), read poems as different as (for example) Mal Beveridge’s Mistress of My Seasons-New England Autumn and Graham Fredriksen’s The Only War We Had and ask yourselves what extra has to be added in order to spark this renaissance of interest from the general public. I’d really like to know.
Maybe a good starting point is to promote as widely as possible what we already have.
Cheers
David
We might just have the game sewn up
