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.
Science and Poetry
September 1, 2010
Three poetry books were recently launched containing poems on scientific themes. They are called Law and Impulse (maths and chemistry) Earthly Matters (biology and geology) and Holding Patterns (physics and engineering). The project was called Science Made Marvellous, and organised by the Poets Union Inc as part of National Science Week. All three books were edited by Brook Emery and Victoria Haritos, and the whole project was organised by Carol Jenkins.
I have a poem about Galileo in Holding Patterns and two about the Darwins (Emma and Charles) in Earthly Matters. As an innumerate, I found the fact that I have a poem in the physics and engineering book more than funny.
For a limited time the books can be also downloaded as free PDFs from the Poets Union website at http://www.poetsunion.com/node/806 . (Sorry, you’ll have to copy and paste.)
Here’s my Galileo poem to whet (or blunt) your appetite.
Galileo’s dance
Liquid turned hard, glass turned to heaven
and you saw that we must be mutable;
changed the rock sure eye of earth
into a speck, one amongst the masses,
all moving. They locked you down,
house-bound, a threat to galactic security;
to a solidity that had already mutated,
as they might have melted you on fire,
a terrorist of unrepentant reason.
So silly to say you were a still centre
from which ideas flowed. No, no,
you went far further; questioning the
questioner’s position, pulling security
blankets away from under fatty,
fixated minds of certainty.
Focusing,
describing detail,
you precisely put an end
to the lie that we are the answer to all.
Others would follow in the ark of wonder;
Charles waltzing hand in hand with Albert;
broad ramp providing access to genius
on wheels. Moving, always moving,
accelerating now in race-track science,
or rockets sifting star-flour for other, further Earths.
But you, with your glass, your eyes,
your paints, you showed the way.
Your gravity can still be detected,
for four hundred years is barely a blink,
a twitch in this dance without choreography.
Swinging on, we too shift, stare, move and parry
and recall long leaps first performed in Tuscany.
P.S. Cottier
Voices, internal and external
August 17, 2009
I have been doing a few poetry readings lately, at a number of different venues. In some ways, the reading of poetry aloud strikes me as a strange practice. No doubt rhymes evolved to make things easier to remember where the written word did not exist, or was jealously guarded by a chosen few. But those days are long past, and rhyme has often been abandoned, or, if used, is no longer a substitute for literacy.
The performance poet or slammer lives and writes for the spoken (or shouted) word. This is not, in general, my favourite type of poetry. Many crude faults are hidden behind the energetic or frenetic delivery. I saw one particularly bad example a couple of years ago which inspired this piece:
Waste of a good microphone
A decade since I saw him, this performance poet,
and the act is still the same, ten years in the faking.
World’s oldest adolescent, wings flailing, flirty windmill
hoping to attract stray Quixotes of attention.
Under that boil of a hat (one small step from beret)
his chin now quivers in time to his shout, as he revs
through a thick tarmac of prose. He calls it a poem.
(It is poetry in the sense that Bathurst is ballet.)
Fascinated, I watch the skin wattle sway,
muscle-less metronome catching winds
of his own indignation; a crashing fleshy kite.
A one miss wonder, he raises his frantic voice
and chops the air with blunt inadequacy.
The words skim like fatty stones, drowning.
Such dumb slabs to whet a frolicsome pen.
P.S. Cottier
But the reading out loud of poems that were written to be read from the page is the phenomenon I am dealing with here. When I write, I tend to read the poetry back to myself in my head, rather than out loud. It is a delight to me to hear others appreciating the word-play and musical aspects of my poetry when I read it out loud to an audience. But my ‘ideal reader’ is definitely an individual, reading from the book at his or her own home (or library).
Nevertheless, I like to think I am quite a good reader, with a decent appreciation of the needs of the audience. Some poets, contra the performance poet, see, to think that a mangled, quiet delivery adds a certain piquancy to the words. IT DOESN”T. Or that reading twenty pages of angst-filled obscurely referenced screed to a non-academic audience is appropriate. IT ISN’T. This shows a lack of respect, and does poetry no good at all, cementing into place the brickheaded equation of poetry = boredom. At least most slam poetry keeps the audience awake.
Between Shout Mountain and the Slough of Mumble lies the pleasant Valley of Appropriateness. Let’s all set our compasses and go in search of that verdant realm.
Had we but world enough and time
April 3, 2009
How long to wait before assuming a piece has been rejected? When do bad manners or sloppy practices or simple overwork slide over into the world of too long, allowing a conscientious writer or poet to submit her work elsewhere? How do we decide where to send our poetry?
As to the latter, well, I went through a stage of deciding merely by name. I thought that if a journal had an imaginative title, it was probably likely to publish interesting work. Sometimes I did this sight unseen, and have been very pleased. Shakespeare’s Monkey Revue, for example, attracted just because of that title, and the journal didn’t disappoint when I saw it.
I have been advised to take a more sensible approach to where I try and place work. I am grateful for that advice, from a very well-respected and, more importantly, accomplished poet. There is a definite hierarchy of literary journals in my homeland Australia (and elsewhere of course). But I am not a poet because I want to build a career, or because I want a sparkling CV. On the contrary; poetry should be an escape from that type of world. I love the idea of people who like poetry reading my work, rather than worrying about status.
A similar question is: how much time should one put into trying to receive funding for one’s artistic endeavours? Some poets seem to spend as much time writing applications as sonnets. They might as well get ‘a real job’ and write in their spare time, so relentlessly do they work at chasing the Government dollar. And the whingeing! It’s as if they think they’re Shostakovich and the funding body is run directly by Uncle Joe, when they lack both talent and any real cause for grievance. (For my mythical foreign reader, most funding in Oz is public, not philanthropic.)
One would be mad to ignore the possibility of assistance in pursuing one’s art, but equally insane to sacrifice art for the pursuit of money.
But here’s a funny little one about the way poets often work for free:
Will work for print
I can do sarcastic.
I can do elegaic,
but controlled, you know,
no red hearts or roses
strewing graves.
I am indeed bereft
of the word bereft.
I’ve dabbled in spiritual.
I do a very good dog:
snuffling, truffling, worshipping
at a scented shrine, one leg cocked.
I can even do decent rhymes
if pushed. And if there were time
I’m sure I could run to a novel
in verse. (But that might be cheating.)
So for all your poetic needs
call the number on the little
paper tags fringing the bottom
of this hula page. And ask for me.
P.S. Cottier
Joy (or at least a certain satisfaction) should be the poet’s main reward. If one is lucky enough to have enough, why complain? People write poetry in jails and where there is virtually no hope of publication. This, surely, is what any art should be about? Something that even the sloppiest journal editor can never steal? (Let’s end where we started, with a bracing question mark.)
PS Cottier 