Why poetry matters: A conversation between Rob Adamson and Tony Barnstone, 20/3/2013

Coming up: "Why Poetry Matters" -- A conversation between two multi award-winning poets, followed by readings from their latest books.

* Robert Adamson, UTS CAL Chair of Poetry and
* Tony Barnstone, the Albert Upton Professor and Chair of English at Whittier College, California.

Chair: Kate Middleton, the first City of Sydney Poet

Date: Wednesday, 20 March
Time: 5.30 p.m.

Venue: Metcalfe Auditorium, Macquarie Building,
State Library of New South Wales
Macquarie Street, Sydney

Presented by the UTS Centre for New Writing
RSVP: Veronica.Scicluna@uts.edu.au by 18 March 2013

(Source: Robert Adamson's Facebook page, viewed 8 March 2013)

Everyday heroes

For the past week, I have been honoured to have been the poet in residence at a conference of emergency physicians. The EDs as they call themselves, held their annual scientific meeting in Hobart. http://www.cdesign.com.au/acem2012/ 

The convenor and professor of emergency medicine at UTAS, Prof. Geoff Couser, 

@GeoffCouser titled the event, the Art and Science of Emergency Medicine. 

It's hard to describe the effect on me: the deeply moving themes that the conference gave rise to have left me exhausted. 

The delegates shared their photography and writings about their daily lives (private and professional), and by the end of the conference, a rich tapestry of the happiness, grief, trauma and frustration of their lives was on full display in the conference foyer. 

The interactive art display allowed delegates to explore the conference theme through an interactive art project that included photos, poems, handwritten doodles, comments, sticky notes, hospital gloves scrawled with words and images, you name it. The doctors shared snapshots of their lives mountain-climbing, playing rock music, growing their own vegetables, nurturing their families, alongside their acerbic comments expressing passionate concerns about policy issues and the constraints imposed on their profession by forces outside their hospitals' four walls. All these jostled for space on the interactive art display's surfaces.

The art project was jointly curated by Dr. Farida Khawaj, an Emergency Registrar at the Royal Hobart Hospital, and Sara Wright, Artist Consultant at Silver Lining Projects in Hobart. Farida and Sara had invited me into their artistic space to provide a quiet area for reflection for the delegates, which I peopled with poetry books on loan from poets in Hobart including some from my own collection. 

It was thrilling to see people pick up James Charlton's collection, Luminous Bodies, along with Blake and John Donne. To be asked to find particular poems like Robert Frost's "The Road less travelled". To be told how much a delegate had enjoyed discovering the poetry of Tasmanian poet Kathryn Lomer.  

I had printed out some poems by a wide variety of poets for the display but my goal was to see these overtaken by delegates' writing – eventually, this began to happen, as delegates either emailed their contributions to the art project curators, or brought along newly penned, hand-written poems to share.

Encounters with grief and loss are frequent; the pressure of expectations, time and life-and-death issues fill these professionals' lives. In one of the conference sessions, one of the art project curators Sarah Wright recounted her own story of loss, moving the audience to tears. This opened the way for  delegates to use the interactive artistic space to share their own experiences in emergency departments. As the four days progressed, delegates' submissions of poetry began to be submitted. Some were submitted anonymously, some were proudly named, and some found their way into the "wrap up" at the end of the conference given by Dr Farida Khawaj.

Some delegates had loaned their own precious hand-made poetry notebooks for the exhibition area, notebooks where their favourite poems had carefully been pasted in; a doodle book with drawings in ink and coloured pen accompanied aphorisms to make powerful statements about a life deeply lived. A life deeply lived: this is the crucible for doctors of emergency medicine. In the opening plenary session, Jane Clark,  a Curatorial Consultant from MONA, made the important point that those engaged in the arts share one crucial thing in common with those engaged in the sciences: a deep appreciation of the human condition.

(Also see http://demted.com/2012/11/art-and-science-of-em-back-to-leonardo-and-to-our-patients/
and http://goo.gl/iHcSw )

I was aware that for many delegates, attending the conference, and visiting Hobart was a respite of a kind, and was careful not to overwhelm them with my own enthusiasm for writing: often I felt it best to stand aside and allow the delegate to enter the poetry space, find a chair and relax in the quiet atmosphere surrounded by poetry books. Perhaps I was too reticent, but I felt it was important to allow the delegates to own the space. However I tried to engage as many of the delegates in conversation as I could without being a pest. Some were determinedly unwilling to make eye-contact with a poet. Others sought me out. I respected both attitudes equally.

When we talked about poetry, all too often I heard stories about negative experiences at school, where poetry is often taught ineptly, sadly leaving people with a life-long aversion for poetry, or at the very least, a notion that it is hard to understand.

I also heard of their inner doubts about their own writing's validity, or about their difficulties with switching from the rigours of academic writing to the freedom of creative writing. Others were keen to begin their journey in writing.

How such busy people as doctors of emergency medicine find any time at all time to write, let alone reflect, meditate or do any kind of writing or journalling is a mystery to me. Ira Progoff's journalling method to help people in all walks of life access creativity, and James Pennebaker's research on the health benefits of writing, were some of the resources I felt I could share with these brilliant minds.

We needed more time to deal with issues raised in these conversations and only skimmed the surface, but a start has been made for many, I hope, to explore writing as a valid process for reflection and a tool for creative expression.

Writing, and engaging with the writing process, cannot be hurried: four days is not enough to engender in a person a love of writing. However, sitting here at home tonight, staring at my screen and looking at the Twitter feed for #ACEM2012, I feel thankful that I could participate, and that for some a start in writing has been made, and that for others, an affirmation of their private writing lives has been achieved. 

Thank you #ACEM2012 for involving me in your wonderful conference.

You are all everyday heroes ...

http://journals.elsevierhealth.com/periodicals/ymem/article/S0196-0644(05)01653-7/fulltext

P-QUEUE: Essays and extensions from poetry to prose

About  P-QUEUE

If you are a computer nerd, you will know what PERL regular expressions are.

If you are a poet, you might have realised you are at times writing code.

In an article, "Regular expressions as a system of poetic notation" Dan Waber puts the two together. Despite not being a computer nerd I was able to read it and was intrigued to read more about the journal P-QUEUE. It's been around since 2003.

Its editorial focus is to "investigate the overlaps and departures between the prose line and that of verse."

"For the last three years, P-QUEUE has tried to prepare a place for the anxious object -- that which can’t decide if it’s poem or prose, text or image, spoken or written, found, made, or given, essay about or itself a poetics. We especially privilege work that through this anxiety asks us, shows us, or turns us to the questions of how to live in, live among, and live as human subjects. Which is to say, what we look for -- what we do -- is care. (Andrew Rippeon,  P-QUEUE editorial, 2008)

A journal for non-fiction poetry

I REALLY like the idea of non-fiction poetry and find RABBITPOETRY an interesting enterprise.

"RABBIT publishes all things poetry, including reviews, essays and interviews. The inaugural issue of RABBIT was launched in Melbourne on Saturday, 9th July 2011 at Bella Union as part of the Poetry & the Contemporary Symposium. The issue is available for purchase online through the Melbourne University Bookshop website, and will be distributed throughout all good Melbourne and Australian bookshops ..." More please.

Andrew Burke: Undercover of lightness, New and Selected Poems (Walleah Press)

WA poet and academic Andrew Burke's latest collection, Undercover of lightness, New and Selected Poems, is the first cab off the rank for Ralph Wessman's new-look Walleah Press poetry series. It was launched in Tasmania last night at the Hobart Bookshop.

"Here is a poet to hail and to treasure" says Thomas Shapcott in the cover notes, which also have tributes from poets as diverse as Geoff Page, Jill Jones and Kit Kelen.

Now that Ralph Wessman is no longer going to be editing the valiant small magazine, famous reporter, he's focusing on poetry books and his list already sounds pretty full. This is an excellent start to his new endeavour. http://walleahpress.com.au/

Vale Adrienne Rich

Sadly, Adrienne Rich has died. I heard this from poet Andrew Burke last night.

One of my most favourite books on writing is her book, "What is found there: Notebooks on poetry and politics" ... of which Nadine Gordimer had said:
 

"In her vision of warning and her celebration of life, Adrienne Rich is the Blake of American letters"

 I must confess I did not like her final collection, Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth: Poems 2004-2006, Norton (New York, NY 2007)  But perhaps that is just my taste. It felt unfinished, as if I were reading unedited notebooks. Maybe that was her intention. I need to find that out.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/adrienne-rich

"When I was a poet"

"When I was a poet" by David Meltzer, charmingly reviewed at:  
http://htmlgiant.com/author-spotlight/when-i-was-a-poet/#more-86317

Poetry interludes on Mondays and Saturdays at The Afterword Cafe, Fullers Bookshop

On Mondays and Saturdays I am cafe poet at the Afterword Cafe (inside Fullers Bookshop) and welcome interruptions and questions: I will be sitting there writing and hoping that some poetry question(er)s come my way from 9:30 until about 12:30 (Sometimes I leave earlier if the cafe needs more table-space :)

An update to my post about Vladislavic's The Loss Library

An update to my earlier post about Ivan Vladislavic's new book,
The Loss Library and Other Unfinished Stories

Also see his "Labour of Moles" http://bit.ly/AkVPSW

Ron Slate's written a good article on The Loss Library, at:

http://www.ronslate.com/loss_library_and_other_unfinished_stories_ivan_vladislavi_seagull_books_university_chicago_press

"The Loss Library is a beautifully made book. Illustrations by Sunandini Bannerjee are tipped into the opening pages of chapters – their distortions, suggestions and incompletions complement the author’s intent and style. There is a sly slightness to the book, an airiness that inspires wonder about the elusive narratives all around us."

The Loss Library is published by the University of Chicago Press and by Umuzi, Randomstruik in South Africa

A lesson in line breaks

The written poem: Semiotic Conventions from Old to Modern English by Rosemary Huisman uses a poem of mine, "For Z, under house arrest in Johannesburg 1988" to exemplify "graphic iconicity" and now I think I know what that might mean through an error I made when including the poem a decade later in a collection of mine.

The poem deals with the personal horror that I imagined someone might go through in political detention through house-arrest in the apartheid years. "Banning orders" were imposed on people to silence them and were one of the ways the then nationalist government sought to suppress the anti-apartheid movement within South Africa.

Here's how the poem appears in both Huisman's book, and how it had originally appeared in Island (n.40, 1989, under Andrew Sant's editorship).


Z, under house arrest in Johannesburg, 1988.

I take
my prison with me
any
four walls


any old town will do.


You
may come to me
one at a time.
That's
the game.


I don't do crowd scenes.

No words
I write
may reach you.
And these
are banning orders


stripes of shadow across your path.

For reasons known only to an earlier version of myself, I changed the poem ten years later when I put it into my second book. I realise now that those changes I made undid the very thing that Rosemary Huisman had praised the poem for.  


Here's the later Isolated States version (as published in Isolated States in 2001)


Poem for Z, under house arrest
Johannesburg, 1988.


I take my prison with me.
Any four walls,


any old town
will do.


You may come to me
one at a time.


That's the game.
I don't do crowd scenes.


I define myself
endlessly.


I put my prison down and rest.
No words I write may reach you.


And these are what banning orders look like:
stripes of shadow across your path.


Looking at the two versions today, I believe the first version is right, and not only because an academic judged it to be so. I feel that the weariness of someone in detention and something of the haphazard chaos that has befallen them are better captured in the original version, with its broken lines and odd "shape".

This really makes me wonder at the difference between the "poet's mind" and the "editor's mind" and at the blindness that can come when one has worked at a poem for too long: how to keep to the original vision and not flinch from the logical corrections that spring to mind ...?

The Sun Fish

The Sun Fish by Irish poet Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin has a special place in my study.

A gift from my Queensland poet friend Pam Schindler, it's a book I return to again and again. In reading her work, I feel as if I have held in my hands some rare and marvellous thing. I don't get that feeling very often. It's perfect poem-stuff.

Matthew Sweeney's right when he says in his review of The Sun Fish, that there is no one else in Irish poetry or poetry elsewhere, writing like this. She is unique.

What I treasure in her is her integrity in sticking to her own vision, in trusting her reader to come to her poems in their own space and to understand the symbols of her world without the poet having to step in with words of explanation, context, and all the gravitas of "situation".

"In order for the poem to get written, something has to happen."
(Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin paraphrased by Matthew Sweeney in his review of The Sun Fish)
We can feel that something has happened and that this is deeply felt experience, but transmuted.

Her poems are alive with a strange light from another world, and yet they are also pegged down to a reality that one can feel and experience like a taste on the roof of one's mouth.

Her work epitomises for me the dictum that poetry has to change something.
Otherwise, why write it at all?

Congratulations to Karen Knight for her entry in Villanelles ( Everyman Library Pocket Poets series)

Hearty congratulations to Karen Knight: a villanelle from her collection, Postcards from the Asylum, has been included in a collection of villanelles edited by Annie Finch and Marie-Elizabeth Mali, due to be  published by Random House in the prestigious Everyman Library Pocket Poets series in March 2012.

Postcards from the Asylum's publisher Lyn Reeves of Pardalote Press writes:

Karen’s poem appears in the lofty company of poets such as Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney, Elizabeth Bishop, Rita Dove and Paul Muldoon.

Source: Lyn Reeves's Pardalote Press blog, Fortyspot 

Conversations in the mountains

I really thought I had posted a piece about Paul Celan here, but apparently not. In attempting to rewrite what I thought I had written I have come across far better appraisals of his work than I could ever hope to write: so here they are:

Translating Paul Celan from Poetry International

How can one translate something that is untranslatable?  Paul Celan has often been accused of being hermetic in his poetry.  He himself said that was not the case.  His writing is pregnant with incomprehensible grief and longing.  One who reads Celan is left feeling the pain of Celan’s experience living through the Holocaust, his survivor’s guilt, and his anger toward Germany for her silence over the atrocities that occurred during the war.

Someone commenting on the above writes: "great poets deserve many translators" and so for me the best collection is this:

Paul Celan: Selections, edited by Pierre Joris

This is one of the most compelling books of poetry I have read for a long long time and thank you Hobart poet Benny Walter for pointing this edition out to me. I have long been a fan of Celan and for those not familiar with his work, this small collection is described as the "best introduction to the work of Paul Celan". It "offers a broad collection of his writing in unsurpassed English translations along with a wealth of commentaries by major writers and philosophers.

"(Selections is based on Celan's own 1968 selected poems, though enlarged to include both earlier and later poems, as well as two prose works, The Meridian, Celan's core statement on poetics, and the narrative Conversation in the Mountains. This volume also includes letters to Celan's wife, the artist Gisèle Celan-Lestrange; to his friend Erich Einhorn; and to René Char and Jean-Paul Sartre—all appearing here for the first time in English." (University of California Press website).

This collection is also included in an elite listing of "Books for the Millennium" on the University of California press website

JM Coetzee's review of a biography of Celan (from the NY review of books)

Review of Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew  by John Felstiner.

(I'll be adding to this post in a short while)

Ads

I have decided to add a Google adsense feature to this blog. However it seems I have attracted the strangest of adverts. I hope this won't put readers off.

Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther

Last night I finished reading Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther. It had been on my bedside reading table for ages. Well, it was just as heavy as I had anticipated it would be.

It's interesting that, as his literary career progressed, Goethe had distanced himself from the Sorrows of Young Werther, and that towards the end of his life,  he was saddened to find that the many of those who  came to visit him as an old man had only ever read his Werther.

Werthe had catapulted Goethe to fame at the age of 24 and had made him one of the world's first international literary celebrities. As a literary work, it heralded the "Sturm und Drang" movement, and influenced the later Romantic literary movement.

It was also responsible for a lot of young people going about with an air of romantic yearning and sporting blue jackets like the novel's hero, and, alas, tragically copying his suicide. On that score, I was alarmed at the young Goethe's approach to this subject matter and his apparently cavalier attitude to his hero, and at how graphically he describes Werther's end. It's an utterly ruthless portrayal of youth suicide, but one has to remember, it's also a portrayal of his own very emotional torment as a young man in love with someone who would never be his.

The novel includes a long passage where Goethe translates a portion of James Macpherson's Ossian cycle of poems (which were originally presented as translations of ancient works, but were later found to have been written by Macpherson himself, according to Wikipedia).

Next cafe poet day: Saturday at 11

I won't be at the cafe on Wednesday 22nd February after all ....

It is quite amazing how much work I am getting done being a cafe poet. It just shows how putting in some dedicated time yields good fruit.

I am also enjoying the poetry conversations that the program enables, and hope there will be more of them.

From my conversations with people, it seems time is the biggest enemy of reading. Sadly.

Saturday poems at Fullers Bookshop's Afterword cafe

On Saturday I'll be at Fullers Bookshop's Afterword cafe from 11 until 2 p.m.  I'd be happy to share a poem in progress (yours or mine) over a cup of coffee, or to help you find a good poetry book to buy from the very tempting poetry shelves in the bookshop.  http://www.fullersbookshop.com.au/events

John Kinsella: 'What I do and don't look for in a poem when selecting for a literary journal'

The latest edition of Island contains an interesting “Manifesto” from the Australian poet John Kinsella, who now lives abroad.

In his short essay, Kinsella outlines what he believes about poetry, what he thinks about poetry competitions, and what he believes it is that makes a poem worthy of consideration by a journal editor.

As John Kinsella is now Island's poetry editor, his article will be of great interest to those poets intending to submit poems to that magazine – but to say as much is to go against the main point of Kinsella's manifesto: he argues for a more rigorous approach by poets as to how they decide on what to journal editors. He urges poets simply to send the poems they have faith in, not the poems they think will suit a particular editor. But he has a lot more to say than that. You can read Kinsella's manifesto online on the Island website.
 [PDF]
 John Kinsella - 'What I do and don't look for in a poem when selecting for a literary journal' (Manifesto)

A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology

As I sit in Fullers Bookshop writing as Cafe Poet, there are many temptations around me.

Here is one very special book: A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry

This collection of 300 poems from writers around the world is selected and edited by the poet and Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz. He brings together poets from poets all over the world and places poets who are very different from each other in terms of their geography, culture, and time period alongside each other. The 11th Century Chinese poet Su Tung P'o sits alongsids 20th Century American poet Robert Morgan for instance. Milosz uses broad themes as an organisation structure for the anthology: I don't especially like this "organising" but educators might find it useful: the broad categories representing the themes he finds in the poems are, for example, “Nature,” “People among People,” “The Secret of a Thing”, “Travel”, “History” ...

Milosz’s introduction, and his notes that head each section of the anthology, make the anthology very informative. He also explains how he arrived at the poets he selected for the anthology:

“My proposition consists in presenting poems, whether contemporary or a thousand years old, that are, with few exceptions, short, clear, readable, and, to use a compromised term, realist, that is, loyal toward reality and attempting to describe it as concisely as possible. This they undermine the widely held opinion that poetry is a misty domain eluding understanding. I act like an art collector who, to spite the devotees of abstract art, arranges an exhibition of figurative painting, putting together canvases from various epochs to prove, since those from the past and from the present meet in an unexpected way, that certain lines of development, different from those now universally accepted, can be traced.”

Some of the poets included are: Philip Levine (currently US poet laureate), Walt Whitman, W. S. Merwin, Elizabeth Bishop, Denise Levertov, Wang Wei, Tu Fu, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Seamus Heaney, Antonio Machado, Franz Wright, Linda Gregg, Constantine Cavafy, May Swenson, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson – and many many more.

(Review adapted by Anne Kellas from the Poet.org webpage about this anthology.)

A Labour of Moles, by Ivan Vladislavic

A Labour of Moles
by Ivan Vladislavic

" A Labour of Moles takes the reader into a realm utterly alien and at the same time as familiar as the letters forming the words on the page and the very building-blocks of fiction."

To say more is to spoil a very very special reading experience.
I read this today in one sitting
I showed it to my son as I sat writing in the cafe today and he instantly wanted to borrow it .. Now I can't wait to get it back and read it again.
More please, Ivan, more ...

More about this publisher and the Cahiers series:

Sylph editions, based in London, are publishers of

"fiction, monographs, theoretical essays, limited-edition art and photo-graphy books, and different forms of experimental writing. The publications are presented either as individual books or as an ongoing series. The emphasis is on works in which image and text coexist, conceived as one. Every work is meticulously produced, care given equally to content and to form."

The Cahiers series is published jointly by Sylph Editions and The Center for Writers &  Translators at the American University of Paris.

The goal of this series is to make available new explorations in writing, in translating, and in the areas linking these two activities.

Cahiers can be bought individually or in a boxed set of six at a reduced price. 

Ivan Vladislavic's The Loss Library

“Not writing is always a relief and sometimes a pleasure. Writing about what cannot be written, by contrast, is the devil’s own job.”

In this unusual text, a blend of essay, fiction, and literary genealogy, South African novelist Ivan Vladislavic shares with us his notebooks from the last 2 decades, where he's recorded his ideas for stories or, as he calls them, "unsettled accounts" and in the process he has written "an extraordinary book about both the nature of novels and the process of writing.


" The Loss Library will appeal to anyone seeking to understand the almost magical and mythical experience of breathing life into a new work of fiction." 

"At the heart of the text, like a brightly lit room in a field of debris, stands Vladislavic’s Loss Library itself, the shelves laden with books that have never been written. On the page, Vladislavic tells us, every loss may yet be recovered."

Vladislavic's prose "is stunning. It gives the impression of the words and the phrases having been caught from the inside—as though the author lives on the other side of language, where every word is strange and dancing, and the way they are put together produces complicated patterned exchanges like minuets.”—Tony Morphet

“In the tradition of Elias Canetti, a tour de force of the imagination.”—André Brink.


The above text is adapted from the University of Chicago Press books page at: 
http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/L/bo12359500.html


I first met Ivan Vladislavic in the home of Lionel Abrahams, when we were all part of a reading group called The Circle of Eight in the mid- to late 1970s. Each person would read their work in progress. I can still vividly recall the first time Vladislavic, then a very young man, walked in the room. He did not say much. He had a kind of brooding, James Dean air and the quietest of voices. Then he read the most exquisitely funny short story ... We were instant fans.

Australian Poetry's cafe poet program

As part of Australian Poetry's cafe poet program, I am going to be writing at the Afterwords cafe at Fullers Bookshop for the first half of this year.

I am there from 11 a.m. until 2 p.m.

on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

I welcome interruptions!

AP features the Blake Prize shortlisted poems

Australian Poetry has decided to feature the Blake Prize's shortlisted poems as their poems of the week for the next six weeks.

Robert Adamson has won this year's Blake Prize for poetry

The 2011 Blake Poetry Prize for poetry ($5,000) has been awarded to

Robert Adamson for his poem Via Negativa, The Divine Dark


From the judges' report (Brook Emery, Bronwyn Lee and Judith  Beveridge)
 [Source: Blake Society's Facebook page]
"This is a powerful, visually striking, intelligent poem which explores complex ideas associated with negative theology in a humble but resonant way. The poem beautifully manages the movement between the immediacy of the present and difficult concepts such as time, suffering and the existence and nature of the soul; between the trivial ordinariness of the world and the large abstractions; between what can be knowable and precisely observed and what remains unknowable and concealed."

You can read the poem by downloading* the poem from the Blake Societys website. 

*Why don't they use the web medium for what it is intended for -- displaying text -- instead of using it to store PDFs that have to be downloaded then viewed. How arcane in this day of electronic publishing to bury the gold in a PDF.

Judge's report, King Island Poetry competition 2011

King Island Poetry competition 2011 – Results (also see http://www.fawtas.org.au/results.html)

1st Prize: 'Behold the Lamb'  by Janeen Samuel

2nd Prize: 'Death in Venice'  by Graeme Hetherington, Czech Republic.

King Island resident prize: no award.

Highly commended: no award.

Commended poems by David Campbell (2), Mike Cooper, Phillippa Cordwell and Lorraine Haig.


Judge's reportAnne Kellas13 August 2011

I'd like to start with a question: are poetry competitions a lottery? Are judges biased about what they pick as winners? I used to think so but I have come across a simple mathematical ratio that explains things: on average, in any poetry competition, by and large, there'll be five to ten percent of entries that are going to be in the running for the prize, and about 90 to 95 percent flawed pieces of writing in the judge's opinion. This poetry competition was no exception: there were 37 poems, from which two poems, right from the start, stood out as the contenders for the winning places.

What made me choose them? I could say, well, their execution was more adept, or their form more polished, but it's because, after a first reading of all the entries, those two poems stayed in my mind. They piqued my curiosity. I walked about with their images in my head. Stray lines came back to me unbidden. I had to find these two poems and read them again.

The cathedral's domes look feathery when wet,
like birds without the use of wings.

I had to find the lemon-ribbed image at the core of the other that had drawn me to it.

I wanted to go back to read them again, and when I read them a second time, my opinion that these were the winners was confirmed. (By the way, I read all the entries a several times.) A poem has to stand up to a second and a third reading -- and still please. Why else do we go back to read poems from the past? What attracts us to our favourite poets? Besides achieving the status of being what I would call a poem and not a piece of narrative, as many entries were, these two poems succeeded in their marrying of idea and image with a certain necessary grace and effortlessness. They also had that something that transforms a piece of writing on a page into something new that has not existed before. All this using only words.

In a poem, everything happens at the surface. The poet has the surface of the page as his or her canvas, onto which words and punctuation marks are sprinkled, in patterns delineated by white space and paragraph marks. But it's not the ragged right margin that makes a piece of writing a poem, it's not the breaking words and lines at the margin that makes a poem, it's not stretching out the lines and concertinaing them in again that makes a poem. The mere use of rhyme does not make a poem. A poem employs a reasoning of its own in its use of many things: metaphor, image, musicality, colour, tone. If there is no meaning behind the use of these "tools" of poetry then the poem too easily collapses back into being a collection of words on a page.

The breaking up of a word or a line on that surface of white space, if done at the wrong place, or for no apparent reason, is like an awkward trip in rhyme or meter, drawing attention to the author's pen instead of drawing the reader into another dimension of meaning: words encode meaning. The words a poet chooses either suit or clash with the music and breath of the poem when it is spoken out aloud. For we don't only read poems off a page or screen, we also hear them in our mind; poetry is an aural medium, a musical medium. It is the musical joining of image to meaning to rhyme makes the poem a poem.

Some of the entries were the start of poems and I'd encourage their authors to go back to them and complete them. The end result might be a protest poem, or a philosophical poem or a nature poem. Some entries never got beyond being the description of an event. The story in a poem can be strong, but the form might need to be a prose poem then, and not a prose poem chopped into lines. An event might ignite the poet into action, and a narrative might weave its way through a poem, but in the course of the poem, something must shift, change. That event, that narrative, must help take both the reader and the poet somewhere new. Let imagination work to find what that is¹.

Poems are often ruined because of how they end. Too often, the poem itself had already ended, but the poet put in a final appearance, rounding it off with “an ending" ... It's the poet's job to let the poem work its magic and get out of the way.

Some poems were ruined because, although they used rhyme and meter cleverly and even pleasingly, at some point the writer resorted to a contortion for the sake of rhyme or metrical foot: and like Churchill, that is something "up with which I cannot put".

In his judge's report for the 2005 Write Stuff poetry competition, Stephen Edgar said it all comes down to how a poet uses language.

Language. Not just sentiment. Not just plot. One poem found its way into the list of commended poems purely on this score -- because so few poems in this competition dared to let the tiger of language out of its cage. It's a poem called Sitting in the bush, a veritable thicket of stick-like words that bristle and battle their way as if through thorny undergrowth and it even invents a word or two to claw its way to a new meaning. It's not a perfect poem but it is striking because it does battle with words. Poems can be imperfect and still work. Like a crack in a glaze, a fault can let the light of meaning in (to paraphrase Leonard Cohen).

Another poem in the commended list, Dance, describes a relationship. It's an off-hand, slightly off-balance poem whose theme is matched by its off-balance line endings. Yet another, Tumblehome, uses that seafaring image as it allows the words to roll and sway while it keeps its balance thanks to its own inner kind of tumblehome. Both Greyface, with its kindly dramatic tone, and Hitch-hiker tell a story interestingly within a poem's frame and sustain the reader's interest to the end.

Finally it is the use of metaphor and imagery, in a way that is integral to the poem's meaning, that made me settle on "Death in Venice" and "Behold the lamb" as the two winners. "Death in Venice" gets second place, for its wonderful evocation of the atmosphere of decaying, sad-angel European city, and first goes to "Behold the lamb" -- it wins for its sheer simplicity and its use of imagery. I was slightly repelled by the poem's subject matter at first, but the poem won me over. I will never forget it for its lemon-ribbed core, for the way the hooves of the little dead lamb are described as butter curls / innocent of earth. It lies there under the pines, unmourned by its mother:

Already, the merciful crows
have taken away the eyes
(no need to see your way
into darkness you do not comprehend)
have pierced the side
into a chest no larger
than a ribbed lemon, lung
dark and dense as liver,
where no air has been.

In the penultimate issue of Five Bells, Ron Pretty cites poet publisher John Leonard as saying that "poetry reading circles -- poetry book clubs -- should be established -- and that writers' centres and poetry organisations should consider setting these up². I think this simple idea is excellent for an age of meagre opportunities and in cases where writers work in isolation both physical and geographic: especially writers on King Island would benefit from the adoption of Leonard's idea. Well, we all need to "hear" good poetry read aloud. I'd encourage the entrants in this competition whose poems didn't get a mention today -- and in fact everyone -- to read more poetry. I encourage poets to make the effort to read poems outside their usual comfort zone. There's still the public library -- the Visigoths of our dark ages have not yet confined all books to the tip. As long as we still have electricity to fire up the new Alexandria Library that our friends at Google and all the poets on YouTube are building, there's the plethora of poetry online to read, and to inspire us all.

Notes:

1. On the topic of imagination, see Unless it moves the human heart, by Roger Rosenblatt. Rosenblatt who says great writing is often less about what happens than about how it happens. He encourages poets to strive for imagination rather than invention, for anticipation rather than surprise, and to write with precision and restraint.

2. Five Bells, v.17, n.1-2, Summer/Autumn 2010, p.53. (Contact the new non-government peak body, Australian Poetry Ltd. for copies.)