On prizes and poetry
December 13, 2010
‘I had rather be a kitten and cry mew Than one of these same metre ballad-mongers’ (Shakespeare, Henry IV part 1)
Poetry long ago lost its place as the most respected form of writing in our society; poets may be the legislators of the soul, but the number of souls within poetry’s jurisdiction is comparatively small. You write poems, and you hope they make someone’s mind quake a little, or at least experience a bit of a shadowy quiver. Poets are become the sherbet of the soul, it seems, if not the fruit tingles. (Fruit Frisson, anyone?)
Prizes for poetry are important in that they show that (a) at least one other person has read your work and (b) they liked it. To be selected for an award judged by a ‘panel of experts’, all of whom must have preferences and peccadilloes (or armatures and armadillos) is sweet, as it means that your idiosyncratic words have touched more than one mind; perhaps even surprised people into forgetting that they are working their way through a pile of poetry taller than the average skyscraper.
I just heard that I have been awarded a prize called the David Campbell Prize (shared with another poet called Robyn Lance) administered by ArtsACT . The poem, called ‘Visitation’ was very bleak indeed; a mediated response to stories that we read in the newspapers of parents who kill their children, stories which can haunt the reader for days. I wanted to haunt the reader in the same way, to move well beyond sherbet.
Winning a prize for such a poem conjures forth ambiguous reactions: nothing could be further from my mind when I was working on the piece than the concept of winning. Writing a poem about the murder of children to win a prize would be sick indeed. (You’d be worse than a hack ‘ballad-monger’, regardless of whether the poem rhymed or not.) But I am glad that a poem on a subject outside the usual palette of subject matter won the prize.
More poetic ornithology
November 23, 2010
The poem ‘Currawongs’ below was recently highly commended in the Ipswich Poetry Feast. Incidentally, I just judged the adult sections at the unrelated Cooma Feast of Poetry. Some wonderful poems were entered, making my first foray into judging rewarding but difficult. It’s much easier to write ‘the stuff’ than to judge other people’s.
Seems there’s a lot of word-feasting going on.
Currawongs
Weaving nets of strong noise in the air,
the electric weft and warp alarming,
they swoop down, direct as any stare.
They are nobody’s favourite bird,
brunching on bright blue wrens
or snacking on smorgasbords
of tenderised olive silvereyes.
They watch us watching them,
estimate our worth, and dismiss us
from their mental menu: Too big,
head too tough to spear with beak.
This is why we dislike these
sharp-gazed moving funerals.
They don’t sing for us, or plume for us,
and reduce us to something at the edge.
Currawongs’ natures know no flattery,
offer nothing to our mountainous vanity.
Beyond cute, below eagle’s sky-high beauty,
they care only for their meat, song and nest.
They tell us that we are not the centre,
the be-all, the crux; the inarguable best.
PS Cottier 