AustLit NewsPoetry

Blake Prize Win for WA’s Graham Kershaw

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 01:48:14 GMT

The judges for this year’s Blake Poetry Prize — Martin Langford, Peter Minter and Amelia Walker — have awarded first place to Graham Kershaw’s three-part sequence 'Altar Rock'.

In their comments, the judges observed that '"Altar Rock" is a profound meditation on human life amidst a cosmos that is both nourishing and poignantly indifferent to questions of happiness, love and mortality'. They also noted that the poem 'marks a place where understanding and forgiveness are oases amidst a maelstrom of doubt, where poetry presents the final word'. (Judges’ comments)

Born in England, Kershaw is now a resident of Western Australia. 'Altar Rock' incorporates elements of each environment as well as weaving in both Indigenous and European strands.

The Blake Poetry Prize, like the Blake art prizes, challenges creative artists ‘to explore the religious and spiritual’. First offered in 2008, the poetry prize ‘encourages Australian poets to engage in the dialogue between religion, spirituality and poetry’.

More information about the poetry prize is available on the Blake Prize website. There is also a video interview with Kershaw in which the poet discusses the inspiration behind ‘Altar Rock — priest and architect John Hawes.

'Australian Poetry since 1788' Now an e-Book

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 02:07:58 GMT

With around 1,000 poems and more than 1,000 pages, Australian Poetry since 1788 is a weighty tome. Now, thanks in part to support from the Australia Council’s Literature Board, this impressive volume will soon be available as an e-book.

First published as a hardcover book by NewSouthBooks in 2011, the collection opens with Erasmus Darwin’s 1789 ‘Visit of Hope to Sydney Cove, near Botany Bay’ and ‘Two Aboriginal Songs’; it ends with the work of poets Elizabeth Campbell, L. K. Holt and Josephine Rowe (all born in the 1980s).

Joanne Simpson, of the Australia Council’s Artery magazine, writes that the availability of an e-book ‘means that the content can now be enjoyed more widely. Portability is of course a bonus and an audio component adds another dimension to the way the works can be experienced. Poets like Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Judith Beveridge, Anthony Lawrence, Jan Owen and Geoff Page can now be heard, read and contemplated in the park and on the bus or ferry.’ (2 November 2012)

The e-book will initially be made available on iTunes and will then be released through Amazon. The e-book will retail for $24.99, less than half the price of the hardcover edition.

Come Poets and Essayists

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 21:57:38 GMT

Poets are welcome to apply now for the Australian Book Review's Poetry Prize. This is the ninth annual ABR Poetry Prize, which is named after the late Australian poet, Peter Porter (pictured, at left). The first prize winner will take home $4,000 and his or her winning poem will be published in ABR. Poets who make the shortlist will receive $400. The closing date for applications is 30 November.

ABR has recently awarded the 2012 Calibre Prize for an Outstanding Essay. The winner was 'Body and Soul: Copyright and Law Enforcement in the Age of the Electronic Book' by Matt Rubinstein.

Rubinstein said: 'The idea of the Calibre Prize kept me working and reworking what might have been a series of blog posts and pub monologues into something more, and taught me a great deal about writing and thinking.' Applications for the 2013 essay are now open.

A Month in Ireland

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 22:55:15 GMT

Poets keen to travel should consider applying for the 2013 International Poetry Tour of Ireland, a one-month tour funded by the Australia Council in conjunction with Australian Poetry.

Applications close Friday 26 October 2012. The tour, which lasts for a month, gives poets the opportunity of holding readings and workshops at leading festivals, events and venues around Ireland.

And once that application is under your belt, think about entering for the Martha Richardson Poetry Prize, offered in memory of the poet. Entries are now open for the 2012 Prize, offered by Ballarat Writers Inc. The winner will receive $1,000 for a poem to 40 lines. Entries must be unpublished. For full submission guidelines, visit the Ballarat Writers Inc website. Entries close on 15 October, 2012 and the winner will be announced in December.

National Poetry Week 2012

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 04:28:31 GMT

It's National Poetry Week. See Australian Poetry's web site for details of events near you, such as 'cafe poet' readings, open poetry readings and performances at the Write Around the Murray festival in Albury. Follow @AusPoetry on Twitter for more.

To celebrate the week, last Saturday's Poetica program on ABC Radio National sampled writing by poets around the country. Writers featured included Michelle Dicinoski, Anthony Lynch and Fiona Wright as well as veterans like Bruce Dawe and the late Rosemary Dobson. The program is still available for listening or download.

A Big Weekend in Brisbane

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 22:26:38 GMT

The 2012 Queensland Poetry Festival gets underway in Brisbane today for three days (24-26 August) of poetry and related events. This is the 16th annual festival and its theme is 'spoken in one strange word'. Held at the Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts, in Brisbane's Fortitude Valley, the festival will feature poets, musicians, performers, and multidisciplinary artists. Appearing at the opening showcase, Tongues of Flame, will be Robert Adamson, L. E. Scott and Canadian poet a.rawlings. Rawlings is currently doing a three-month stint as Arts Queensland's Poet-in-Residence. The full festival program is here.

It's a big weekend for writing - the State Library of Queensland will host a night of intimate readings, on Saturday, 25 August, from 7.30 pm-9 pm, in the Red Box, level 2, SLQ. Appearing will be Venero Armanno, Sue McPherson, Krissy Kneen and Phoebe Hart, discussing the age-old woes of love, lust and loathing. Hart, a writer/director/producer, will MC the evening.

This event will raise funds for the Indigenous Literacy Foundation. Attendees can bid in an auction to win a 'date' with Anita Heiss. The event is free. Space is limited so please book via slq.eventbrite.com or phone 07 3840 7768. The event is part of SLQ's support for the National Year of Reading 2012.

Making His Mark

Sun, 05 Aug 2012 23:08:42 GMT

Mark Tredinnick is the 2012 winner of the Cardiff International Poetry Competition. He was awarded the First Prize (worth £5,000) for his poem 'Margaret River Sestets'. The full text of the poem can be seen here.

Tredinnick is the winner of many Australian poetry awards, including the Blake and Newcastle Prizes. In 2011, he won the Montreal International Poetry Prize.

Fellow poet Judith Beveridge described Tredinnick as 'one of our great poets of place - not just of geographic place, but of the spiritual and moral landscape as well'.

The top three winning poems in the Cardiff competition will appear digitally and in print in New Welsh Review 97, to be published on Saturday, 1 September, 2012. Click here to find out more about the 2012 winners and to read their prize-winning poems.

Olympic Tales III

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 00:16:59 GMT

Charles Wiltens Andree Hayward may not be a name on the tip of today’s literary tongues, but the English-born poet who arrived in Australia in 1894 holds the record for greatest number of poems by a single author on AustLit. Of Hayward’s 2,939 poems, largely published in the Bulletin, eight relate to the Olympic Games.

In 1924, Hayward (using the pseudonym ‘T. the R.’) addressed the issue of funding for Australia’s Olympic team after the team’s manager said: ‘They had as much as they wanted – or, at any rate, as much as was good for them’. Hayward began his poem ‘Ballade of Sufficient Boodle’ with the following stanza:

They went for their lives and laughed at odds,
Won or were walloped, fair and square,
Charlton and Carr and the Murray ‘Cods,’
Eve and Winter and Beaurepaire;
Gathered – or reached for – over there
Laurel and bay for a diadem,
Who was it hinted at pockets bare?
They’d all the dough that was good for them.

Twenty-four years later, during the 1948 London Olympic Games, Hayward (writing as ‘Iford’) cast his mind back to the origins of the Olympics in ‘Then and Now’. Referring to the earliest Games, Hayward concluded:

They ran their miles, their hundreds and their quarters,
Propelled their javelins and hurled their weights,
Heartened no doubt by clamorous exhorters,
Those tough antagonists from Hellene States.
Lastly, they got along without reporters
And none collected money at the gates,
Which, when those old Olympics you recall,
May well appear the strangest of them all.

We can only guess what Hayward would have made of the media and financing arrangements for the Games of the XXXth Olympiad.

Olympic Tales: I

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 00:20:22 GMT

London’s Olympic Park is not only the major site for the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, it is also home to a new poetry installation. An initiative of William Sieghart, founder of the UK’s National Poetry Day, the Winning Words installation aims to ‘celebrate and promote poetry’.

One of the poems animating Olympic Park is David Malouf’s ‘At a School Athletics Day’.

Sieghart hopes that Winning Words will, in the future, ‘carpet the nation in poetry’ by encouraging villages, towns and cities across the UK to create their own poetry installations.

More information on Winning Words can be found here.

Plan a Date with Poetica

Thu, 26 Jul 2012 01:18:05 GMT

Poetica, the poetry program on ABC Radio National, has some upcoming treats you might want to mark on your calendar.

On 4 August, Jennifer Harrison, Michael Sharkey and Philip Salom discuss 'How to Inhabit a Poem'. This was recorded live at an Australian Poetry National Symposium in Newcastle, home of the Newcastle Poetry Prize.

On 1 September, to celebrate National Poetry Week 2012, Poetica will feature a round-the-nation sampling of recent Australian poetry. On 8 September, the program will present a retrospective on the life and work of the late Dorothy Porter. A week later, Christopher Brennan’s classic poem, 'The Wanderer', will feature, in a recording by Sir Robert Menzies.

The poetry of Tim Thorne, originator of the Tasmanian Poetry Festival, will feature on 20 October. The following week's program, 27 October, will discuss new and selected poems drawn from 20 years of Gig Ryan's writing.

Older programs can still be heard by streaming or downloading the audio. Recent highlights include The Land’s Meaning: The Poetry of Randolph Stow, and Shining with Meaning: The Poetry of Judith Wright.

Poetica is first broadcast on Saturdays at 3.05pm, and repeated the following Wednesday at 9.05 pm.

From the Archives

Sun, 22 Jul 2012 23:44:56 GMT

The ABC has gone to great lengths to keep older broadcasts accessible - whether as podcasts, radio transcripts or television streaming via iView.

For those who like to listen to poetry, as well as read it, Radio National's Poetica still has on file a series of eleven recordings called A Pod of Poets. The 40-minute podcasts, some of which are dedicated to the work of a single writer, feature poets reading their own writings. Some of the poets are well-established names, like John Kinsella and Les Murray. Others are new writers. A surprise inclusion is John Clarke, probably better known as a satirist. In his interview, Clarke shows he is a superb parodist of other writers' styles.

The audio is available to download. Additional related material comprises transcripts, photographs, and interviews. You can subscribe to the series to get the lot. In addition to Kinsella, Murray and Clarke, the featured poets include Robert Adamson, Joanne Burns, Josephine Rowe, Craig Billingham, L.K. Holt, Aidan Coleman, Jayne Fenton Keane, Martin Harrison, Sam Wagan Watson, Kathryn Lomer, Esther Ottaway and Jordie Albiston.

Also still available for download is the recent Love Poetry program, in which a number of Australians nominated their favourite love poem. John Clarke features there too, along with Mem Fox, David Williamson and Robert Dessaix.

Up-Hill Tussle for the Forward Prize

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 22:29:22 GMT

He may not be the bookies' favourite but Barry Hill is in contention for the UK's Forward Prize for Poetry. Oddly enough, two other people named Hill have also been shortlisted this year: Selima Hill, and Geoffrey Hill, who was also shortlisted last year. Beverley Bie Brahic and Jorie Graham round out the list.

The Forward Prize was 'created in 1991 to bring contemporary poetry to a wider audience'. The competition is open to both established and emerging poets, and the winner in the best collection category will take home £10,000 in prize money. Hill's collection of poems, Naked Clay: Drawing from Lucian Freud, was inspired by Freud's paintings.

The announcement of the winner will take place in London, on 3 October, the eve of the UK's National Poetry Day. Previous winners of the best collection category include Seamus Heaney, Carol Ann Duffy and Ted Hughes.

Other awards include a £5,000 prize for best first collection, and a £1,000 prize for best single poem. John Kinsella has been shortlisted for the single poem award, for his work 'Mea Culpa: Cleaning the Gutters'.

(Image credit for photograph of Barry Hill, above: Susan Gordon-Brown, Barry Hill. Photograph, gelatin silver, 2004. Courtesy of Digital Collections, National Library of Australia.)