Posts tagged 'poetry'

As 2011 ends and 2012 begins, we’ve invited our resident organisations to consider the year gone by and to share their plans for the year to come.

Australian Poetry has had an exciting inaugural year, launching as an organisation in January 2011 with a charter to promote and support Australian poets and poetry.

Some of its successes have been to deliver a high level publication, the Australian Poetry Journal, establish a website where poets and poetry organisations around the country can upload and promote their own events, run a National Symposium in Newcastle inviting poets from all over Australia to attend, manage a national Poet in Residence, Sandra Thibodeaux, and organise a poetry tour to Ireland for two established poets in 2012, Paul Hetherington and Petra White.

We initiated a Geek in Residence to develop phone applications, online activities and e-publications, established more than 70 Cafe Poets in Residence around the country, sent poets regionally to run workshops and give readings as part of the Omnibus Mobile Poetry program, organised poems on the pillows of the Sebel Pier One Sydney for the duration of the Sydney Writers Festival and run a teen team spoken word competition for high school students, culminating in an electric performance at the Melbourne Writers Festival. What a year!

Poetry in Australia has opened its doors to new poets, audiences and readers and in 2012, AP (the organisation) is excited to provide more opportunities for Australian poets and poetry, developing new partnerships and programs. This will include working with Life Without Barriers to run a poetry program for refugees and Asylum Seekers in various states and territories, building on its publications program, events program and education program.

We will continue to use technology to build the national and international market for Australian poetry and nurture our relationships with partners overseas.

Paul Kooperman National Director

The literary world has always been riddled with controversy. There’s a couple of controversies doing the rounds that we found of interest for what they say about about a new anthology of American poetry has brought to the fore age-old controversies about the vagaries of taste. A review in the New York Review of Books of the Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry has taken the anthology’s editor to task on several grounds. In reply, the anthology’s editor, prominent poet Rita Dove, has dubbed the criticism, penned by noted poetry critic Helen Vendler, as “sad”. The snarky exchange highlights the challenges of arriving at a literary canon.

Meanwhile, have you ever scanned Amazon book reviews before buying a book and wondered how reliable they are? Have you ever wondered how Amazon comes up with its bestseller lists? Here’s an article on how both the reader reviews and the bestseller lists can be manipulated by those in the know. Another Amazon-related controversy relates to the deal it’s done with public libraries in the US on lending ebooks. Penguin is so unhappy with the deal it recently withdrew ebooks from libraries.

Western countries pride themselves on publishing cultures based on free speech – but is there a case to be made that a kind of self-imposed, market-based censorship exists? The question comes to mind while viewing this comparison of the covers of Time magazine’s US edition to those of its international edition.

Poetry’s fortunes in the wider world can seem grim at times but for lovers of poetry – its writers and readers – the form is more often than not little less than an obsession. As such, the poetry community can be deeply divided.

Last month, local slam poet Emilie Zoey Baker came into the Wheeler Centre to deliver an impassioned defence of slam poetry. She began by defining slam poetry: “Slam, if you’re not sure, is a short form usually only a few minutes long. It’s a good-natured poetry battle where poets perform their work individually or in teams … It works on the idea that poetry is for the people, that you don’t need a degree or a doctorate to judge poetry. It’s about what you like, what you feel, what inspires you to whoop and cheer.”

In June, Emilie was the subject of a feature published in The Age on how slam poetry might make for good television. The piece provoked Christopher Bantick to pen an op-ed in The Australian in reply, suggesting that slam poetry was a low form of poetry.

As a testament to the levels of passion in the poetry community, Emilie’s Lunchbox/Soapbox video has triggered more comments (14 at the time of writing) than videos we would consider far more controversial. Yesterday, a blog post by Australian poet Alan Wearne published by Wheeler Centre resident organisation SPUNC takes up the cudgels again. Alan is publisher at a new poetry imprint, Grand Parade Poets, whose first publication features the poetry of Benjamin Frater and Pete Spence.

Next year’s National Poetry Festival is to be held in Darwin from 10 to 13 May. The festival will be held in conjunction with Wordstorm, the Festival of Australasian Writing, which will kick off on 13 May until 16 May. Australian Poetry and the Northern Territory Writers' Centre are seeking an image and a poetic phrase, or a few appropriate words, to describe and promote this national literary event.

The image and phrase will both be used on all promotional material, from program and posters to T-shirts and badges, from websites and Facebook to banners and signage, and will be included in all aspects of thefestival’s national advertising campaign. Original artwork and poetry will remain the property of the artist and poet respectively. Both artist and poet will be credited for their work. Winners will receive $250 each, plus a goodie bag of all promotional material and a handful of free festival passes.

The competition closes Monday, 14 November. Entries must be submitted electronically to: executive@ntwriters.com.au (where you can also request more information) with the subject header ‘Festival Competition’ and include contact details in the body of the email. Entries can be submitted in both categories and can be considered for use together if requested.

Last week we reported on the betting frenzy surrounding the lead-up to the announcement of the Nobel Prize for Literature. The frontrunner was the Syrian poet Adonis, although there were serious pushes for Philip Roth and Bob Dylan too. In the end, the actual winner, announced on Thursday, surprised everyone. Swede Tomas Tranströmer, a psychologist by profession, known for the still, crystalline quality of his verse, is the first poet Nobel laureate since the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska won 15 years ago. Several of his titles are available in English, and – perhaps not entirely uncoincidentally – a new edition of his Collected Poems has only recently been published. In 1990, a stroke left him mute and able to use only one hand. A lifelong pianist, he continued to play the piano one-handed and will perform on the piano, instead of delivering the usual oration, when he accepts the prize in December.

The poet’s win has seen the hype machine kick into overdrive, delivering lavish panegyrics about a poet who, until last Thursday, was largely unknown outside Sweden. In the New York Review of Books, Tim Parks explains how the Nobel Prize for Literature works, reminding us along the way of “the essential silliness of the prize and our own foolishness at taking it seriously”. In a comparative review essay in the same publication, Helen Vendler finds parallels between the two most recent poet Nobel laureates, Tranströmer and Szymborska.

By Lisa Dempster

In addition to being a celebration of all things literary, one of the most exciting things about Melbourne being a UNESCO City of Literature is the potential for us to connect with a network of writers and thinkers from our sister literary cities around the globe. Currently there are five Cities of Literature – Edinburgh, Melbourne, Iowa City, Dublin and Reykjavik – and recently England’s Norwich put in a bid to join them.

Writing is alive and well in Norwich, home to the oldest and best creative writing course in England as well as the world-leading British Centre for Literary Translation. It is also a City of Refuge for persecuted writers and has the busiest public library in the country. And excitingly for us, arising from their bid to join the City of Literature network, there is currently a delegation of poets from Writers’ Centre Norwich spending time in Melbourne.

The three spoken word poets, Tim Clare, Hannah Jane Walker and Luke Wright, are well known in the UK and are in Melbourne following a busy summer performing solo shows at Edinburgh Fringe. Since arriving, they have appeared at the Melbourne Writers Festival and The Red Room Company in Sydney, and have also been getting some writing done at the writers’ hot desks at the Wheeler Centre. In the last few days of their mostly-Melbourne visit they will be performing and running workshops at the upcoming Overload Poetry Festival.

The Norwich poets’ visit to Melbourne is just one of a series of connections and events that Melbourne has benefited from as a City of Literature. During the recent Melbourne Writers’ Festival there was an Edinburgh Unbound event showcasing writers and poets who work from, and are inspired by, the very first City of Literature; a rollicking great night of discussion and performance. And, in a different vein, earlier this year a delegation of Aussies, including Zoe Dattner from SPUNC, were invited to Dublin Writers’ Festival to talk at a seminar on all things independent publishing.

The impact of the connections we have with our sister cities of literature are varied and far-reaching, and the opportunities for learning and exchange immense. I passionately believe that Melbourne, so far geographically from much of the world, should enthusiastically explore the avenues opened up to us by our UNESCO delegation. The opportunity to take our conversations about books, writing and ideas outside of Melbourne and Australia to like-minded friends in far-flung places is something that we should grab with both hands, and cherish.

Overload Poetry Festival is proud to be including the Norwich poets in their program, including the UK Triple Bill at the Wheeler Centre on Sunday 11 September.

Lisa Dempster is the author of Neon Pilgrim and editor of the Australian Veg Food Guide. She is also the Director of the Emerging Writers’ Festival. www.lisadempster.com.au

Image of a Lego WB Yeats via Dunechaser/Flickr

Poetry – even poets don’t always like it. Marianne Moore, a major 20th-century American poet, wrote a poem, appropriately called ‘Poetry’, that began, “I, too, dislike it…” But in the same poem she gave us a metaphor for poetry that has become a justification for an entire form: poems, she wrote, are “imaginary gardens with real toads in them”. And that’s the point. Sometimes, there’s nothing more real than a poem.

It’s National Poetry Week this week, and we conducted a straw poll around the office, asking people to nominate their favourite poems. Here are a few nominations:

• ‘Forgetfulness’, Billy Collins

• ‘Dover Beach’, Matthew Arnold

• ‘Musee des Beaux Arts’, WH Auden

• ‘Bullocky’, Judith Wright

• ‘This Be the Verse’, Philip Larkin

• ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, TS Eliot

• ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’, WB Yeats

• ‘Dreamer’, Libby Hart (from the collection, This Floating World)

• ‘The Seventh’, Attila Jozsef

• ‘Encyclopedia of Rhythm and Blues’, Anthony Walton (we couldn’t find it online, but it’s a ripper)

• ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’, Dylan Thomas

• ‘Totem’, Luke Davies

• ‘Thinking the room empty’, Cate Kennedy (from the collection, The Taste of River Water)

Wheeler Centre resident organisation Australian Poetry is celebrating National Poetry Week with a different theme every weekday this week. Today’s theme was ‘write’, tomorrow’s is ‘buy’, then there’s ‘share’, ‘live’ and ‘celebrate’.

Australian Poetry has announced plans to produce an anthology of poems by its members. The Wheeler Centre resident organisation is planning to make the publication a annual event as part of the suite of benefits it offers members.

The anthology will be edited by a team of volunteers that will include David Adès, Libby Hart, Heather Taylor Johnson, Vanessa Jones, Danny Lovecraft, Tim Metcalf, John Pfitzner, Susie Utting, Lyn Vellins and Oliver Quinn Walnn. Eventually, it will be available as both an ebook and print-on-demand publication.

Submissions can be made here and full terms and conditions can be found here.

Every day this week we’ll be publishing reviews of each of the Premier’s 21 titles shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. These reviews are not written by professional reviewers though – they’re written by librarians from across the state. Today, we’re publishing reviews of the three nominees for the CJ Dennis Prize for Poetry: Claire Potter’s Swallow, Libby Hart’s This Floating World and Cate Kennedy’s The Taste of River Water. The reviews have been written by Debra Trayler of Casey-Cardinia Libraries, Leonie Clark of Eastern Regional Libraries and Emma Bruty of Darebin Libraries, respectively.

If you’ve read any of the Premier’s 21 titles, we’d like to hear from you too: leave us a snapshot of what you thought of the book, or vote for the book you think should win the overall prize and it might just win the People’s Choice award on awards night, Tuesday, 6 September.

Advertising agency George Patterson/Y&R are claiming to be the first to create a poem in the form of a website URL. The poem was devised to promote the Byron Bay Writers' Festival, which begins Friday week at Australia’s most easterly point.

Once disentangled from its webby format, the poem reads:

Words like hang out in creepy places. Beware, you can find them skulking around ancient Maya temples, the belltower of Notre Dame, or the belly of GIANT sandworms.

You’ll catch them in a Victorian orphanage filled with dirty clothes, cracked smiles, on wild horses wilder women.

Words LOVE the smell of napalm and the taste of sweat that trickles down your back when you’re knee-deep in ENEMY territory.

They’re passionate about grime, slime and the STENCH of a thousand DEAD rats. Words haunt the nastiest places – just like this.

The poem was written by copywriter Kate Burt, but the line breaks are our own.

Highlights of the festival (which also has the more conventional URL http://www.byronbaywritersfestival.com.au/v2/index.php) include Paul Kelly, MJ Hyland, Richard Glover and Louis de Bernières. The keynote speaker is John Pilger.

In ‘A Defence of Poetry’, an essay written in 1821 and published posthumously in 1840, English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley defined poets as “the unacknowledged legislators of the world”. Since then, one might say poets have become the legislators of the unacknowledged world. As part of its Poem of the Week series, Wheeler Centre resident organisation Australian Poetry is currently taking submissions from members for poetry of 20 lines or less about changing the world. What would you legislate, given the opportunity? Submissions will be accepted until 5pm Wednesday. Email paul@australianpoetry.org – see the guidelines for submissions. Here’s a 2006 essay by US poet Adrienne Rich on how the world needs poetry more than ever.

Sydney Opera House 1975, image by Gregory Melle, via Flickr

Sydney is appointing a city poet to sing the virtues of the city in verse. For $20,000 over 12 months, the poet will be required to write six publishable poems. The poet will be based at the University of Technology Sydney in the inner-city suburb of Ultimo. Here’s the call for expressions of interest.

Australia’s most famous city has already been the subject of much poetry, including this by Les Murray. Peter Boyle’s ‘On Sydney’s South-West Line’ is a neat summation of that unique blend of dazzle and tack so emblematic of the silver city.

We applaud the scheme and hope it will be extended. We envisage a poet for every city, every town and even every suburb, or at least selected suburbs (we imagine suburbs like Carlton and Brunswick are already well-versed). However, we do fear the appointed poet will have their work cut out finding words that rhyme with Sydney: other than kidney, the alternatives are pretty much all proper nouns. The Oxford Rhyming Dictionary lists them as Rodney, Sidney (the alternate spelling, probably ruling it out), Adeney (a Shropshire village, very hard to include in a poem about Sydney, although maybe Sydney’s city poet will relish the challenge), Evadne (the name of some rather tortured Greek mythological characters, and also of Wonder Woman’s cousin) and our favourite Ariadne. Good luck!

Incidentally, if Melbourne has an unofficial poet laureate, it may well be Chris Wallace-Crabbe. Congratulations to Chris for his AM, announced on the Queen’s birthday honours list last weekend.

Here’s a video of Les Murray reading from his collection, Taller When Prone, at the Wheeler Centre.

Liao Yiwu, photographed in Cologne last year, via Wikipedia

Meet Liao Yiwu, an author and musician from China’s Sichuan province, which borders Tibet in central China. In his guise as musician, he plays the Chinese flute. In his guise as a writer, he’s a poet, novelist and reporter of some distinction. Not to mention courage. A poem he wrote following the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 – simply entitled ‘Massacre’ – landed him in prison for four years. While in prison, he earned the nickname ‘the Big Idiot’ from fellow inmates for his stubborn defiance of prison authorities. On the 20th anniversary of the massacre, the Paris Review published an essay called ‘Nineteen Days’, in which Liao chronicles how he’d spent the day of the massacre and each of its anniversaries since.

A collection of interviews he recorded with 27 Chinese people on the fringes of society – The Corpse Walker – was a best-seller in Germany (here’s an excerpt, and here’s a review). It was published in Australia by Text last week. Liao had been scheduled to visit Australia to appear in the Sydney Writers' Festival, but has been prevented from travelling to Sydney by Chinese authorities. Festival director Chip Rolley was quoted as saying in The Age’s report that, in addition, Liao has been ordered to desist from publishing his works internationally.

In March 2010, Liao was on his way to a literary festival in Cologne when he was dragged off a plane in Chengdu and placed under house arrest. (After 14 attempts, Liao was eventually permitted to travel to Germany in September, where the above photograph was taken.) Chinese authorities seem to have a thing for airport drama. As we’ve covered before, leading artist Ai Weiwei was arrested at an airport on April 3 this year before he disappeared. He is still missing. After his release from house arrest last year, Liao sent out an email which read, in part:

“Words alone cannot express my outrage. I never considered myself to be a political dissident. I had no interest in politics or in drafting any political manifestos, but my friend Liu Xiaobo was right when he said, ‘To gain and preserve your freedom and dignity, there is no other way except to fight.’

“I will continue to write, document, and broadcast the stories of people living at the bottom rung of society, despite the fact that my stories won’t please the Communist Party of China. I have the responsibility to make people understand the true spirit of the Chinese, which will outlast the rule of the totalitarian government.”

Liu Xiaobo was prevented from travelling to Norway last year to accept his Nobel Prize for Peace, and China has demanded Norway issue an apology for awarding the prize to the writer.

Lord Byron in Albanian dress, by Thomas Phillips, 1813, collection of the British Embassy, Athens, via Wikipedia

The History channel’s website has a neat feature: a day-by-day ‘This Day in History’ that you can filter for literary events. On this day in 1810, for example, a young Englishman called George Gordon, better remembered as romantic poet Lord Byron, swam the Hellespont. The 22 year-old Byron was on his Grand Tour, and the Napoleonic Wars plaguing Europe prevented him from following the usual routes across the continent, forcing him to concentrate on the Mediterranean world. He failed the swim on his first attempt, but succeeded on the second, in one hour and ten minutes, swimming breast-stroke.

Now better known as the Dardanelles, site of a World War One campaign that included Gallipoli, the Hellespont is a strait – 4km wide at its narrowest point – that connects the Aegean Sea with the Sea of Marmara. It’s not to be confused with the Bosphorus, further north and around which Istanbul sprawls, that links the Sea of Marmara with the Black Sea. Byzantine legend has it that Leander swam the Hellespont every night to be with his lover, the priestess Hero. Byron, who would have been familiar with Christopher Marlowe’s poem relating the story of the amorous couple, swam the strait to prove it was possible. He was a passionate swimmer on account of his club foot.

Byron’s swim is historically significant because, six years later, Byron would be forced to go into exile for reasons that may have something to do with his voracious sexual proclivities. At this point, he resumed his love affair with the eastern Mediterranean, travelling widely through the region and in the process becoming an influential political figure in the birth of modern Greece. His interest and influence in what was then known as the Levant (a French word dating back to the Crusades meaning ‘rising’) was a milestone in Europe’s cultural and political history. It also marked another chapter in the decline of the Ottoman Empire (aka the Sublime Porte), which would ultimately crumble during World War One. His swim has since been replicated by others.

In the US, National Poetry Month is drawing to a close. Does its timing have anything to do the famous first line of TS Eliot’s ‘The Wasteland’? Not according to Wikipedia, but we have our suspicions.

The New York Review of Books has been celebrating the occasion with a selection of 30 of the best poems ever to have been published in its pages – a poem for every April day, published daily. Today’s – ‘Cat in an Empty Apartment’ – is by Nobel laureate, Polish poet Wisława Szymborska. Included are two poems by Les Murray – ‘Mercurial September’ (“Dams glitter like house roofs again”) and ‘Max Fabre’s Yachts’.

Undoubtedly the Australian poet with the highest international profile, Murray has recently garnered critical praise for Killing the Black Dog, his memoir of living with depression. Conventionally, literature – especially poetry, and especially ‘The Wasteland’ – is considered a catalyst for depression. But we were happy to see this New Yorker piece suggesting that, contrary to popular opinion, bookish teens are probably less prone to depression than teens who don’t read.

There has been much speculation about social media’s potential in bringing about social change. The discussion has been brought to the fore by the upheavals sweeping the Arab world. As previously reported in the Dailies, social media has played a central role in organising protests in Egypt – to the extent that the parents of one little girl born during the revolution named their daughter Facebook. In 2010, Malcolm Gladwell was doubtful about social media’s potential as an agent for change, but other commentators disagree.

But in today’s The Conversation, UNSW Professor in Modern Film and Literature Julian Murphet writes that social media wasn’t the catalyst for change. If anything, he argues, social media is simply the endpoint of a process that begins with literature: “What appears simple and “in the moment” — the inexplicable imperative to act — has in fact been elaborately prepared for by generations of writers.”

We’ve previously looked at the role poetry has played in the events that toppled Hosni Mubarak’s regime, and Murphet develops the theme. To illustrate his point, he reminds us of the Iraqi journalist who hurled a shoe at George W. Bush as an act of political protest – Murphet calls him “the famous shoe-thrower of Baghdad”. Quoting a 20 year-old poem by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, Murphet writes, “The spontaneous hurling of footwear, and the polished cadences of Darwish’s sombre yet defiant elegy, are two aspects, two velocities, two moments, of the same fundamental movement.”

Murphet argues that the light of political liberation is one that is passed down from one generation to the next: “This is a labour of infinite patience, often life-long obscurity, of thankless and punishing self-scrutiny and criticism … But it waits its time. And when that time comes, suddenly those shadowy, indefensible, whispering words are shouted in the streets to topple tyrants and install the basic conditions of human decency.”

In the 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac, the eponymous hero – a brilliant poet with an extremely large nose – improvises romantic poetry to help his friend seduce the woman they both love. With an entrepreneurial panache arguably untypical of poets, Australian Poetry have taken this idea to a whole new level. The Australian Poetry website is putting out a call to poets with the gift of writing memorably wedding vows. The idea behind Wow Vows is to replace off-the-shelf vows – “for richer, for poorer; in sickness and in health”, et cetera – with bespoke wedding vows crafted by an expert. The plan, says the website, “is to develop a register of poets, who live in various locations in Australia, come from a variety of backgrounds and cultures, speak languages other than English, in order to market the service ‘Wow Vows’ to those who may want it.”

Today is World Poetry Day. To mark the occasion, we found this list of the 10 best American poems, this story of an animated screen adaptation of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, we swooned at this collection of poetic graffiti, we discovered digital poetry, we got an update on Australian Poetry’s cafe poets, and we remembered a recent Daily on poetry in the Egyptian revolution.

Wheeler Centre resident organisation Australian Poetry has launched its own iPhone app. The app aims to be a one-stop shop for Australian poetry: “We would like to list all leading Australian poets, poetry organisations, poetry publishers, poetry prizes and all relevant associated entities and resources.” Poets and organisations not currently listed in the app can apply to be included with the next update. The app, developed by Sutro Media, can be purchased for $2.99.

A banner that reads ‘Leave!’ during protests in Tahrir Square last month in Cairo. Image via WikiCommons

While the ripples of a 24-year-old Tunisian grocer’s self-immolation continue to extend across the Middle East, we were reminded of the role that poetry played – in sung and spoken form – in the Egyptian crisis. There’s been some excellent coverage on the topic, such as here, here, here and here. Of course, protest poetry and song are not exclusive to the Middle East – here’s a piece on the role song played during the Freedom Rides.

Readers familiar with the Middle East may have noticed how passionate many in the region tend to be about their verse. The Quran is prized for its poetic qualities, and many of the languages of the region have rich literary traditions – not least among them Arabic and Persian. It is not uncommon for someone to be able to recite a host of poems from memory, and conversation is frequently peppered with poetic allusions. In Abu Dhabi, there’s even a television show based on the ‘American Idol’ format called ‘The Prince of Poets’. Rather than singing or dancing, contestants write and recite poems.

Thursday’s Talking Point at the Wheeler Centre will be on the topic, ‘Egypt and Beyond’.

Update: here’s a link to an article on the invisibility of Arabic literature – “Given the importance of the Arabic language in the world (320 million estimated speakers), the fact that this literature is still considered as marginal is unsettling. International publishers may be curious about this literature, but they rarely go as far as acquiring rights. This makes you wonder whether it is the quality of the Arabic literature that is at stake, or if there are external reasons to its marginalization.”

Last night the Wheeler Centre hosted the launch of Australian Poetry. The event’s evocative title, ‘A Thousand Sails’, was taken from a poem by Chinese-Australian poet Ouyang Yu, who used the image to describe the diversity of Australian poetry. Australian Poetry is the result of the merger between the Australian Poetry Centre and the NSW-based Poets Union.

Featuring poets Yvette Holt, Dagmar Leupold, Chris Wallace-Crabbe and Ouyang Yu, the evening was presided over by Australian Poetry’s national director, Paul Kooperman. Here’s an excerpt of his address: “Our goals for the organisation are to support and promote the existing Australian poetry community, build new audiences for poetry, provide access to poetry to people who might not ordinarily or easily have access and raise the profile of Australian poets and poetry regionally, nationally, online and overseas. Australian poetry (the organisation and art form) is always going to be many things to many people, an ocean of possibility, a platform for exploration and discovery, thousands of sails. We’re excited to join the journey.”

From July to October 2010, Iowa City poet David Morice set himself a daunting task: to write a 100-page poem every day for 100 days. Entitled ‘Poetry City Marathon’, the poem was written as part of events to celebrate the naming of Iowa City as a City of literature by UNESCO (just like Melbourne).

The poet, who also goes by the name Dr Alphabet, completed the challenge he set himself, which is an amazing achievement in itself. Finding himself with a 10,000 page poem manuscript, he then set himself an even more unlikely goal: to get it published. An unlikely prospect, one might think, but the University of Iowa Libraries was up for it. Binding the book took 24 hours, and the result is a book 2 feet thick that can only be read with supporting blocks.

The University of Iowa Libraries website has an interesting piece on how they set about meeting the technical challenges of publishing such a book. Readers wishing to purchase their own copy can just forget about it already – there’s just one copy – but they can preview the poem (in 100-page increments) here.

There are many writers who have found literary fame late in life. None, however, can match the late-career bloom that is Toyo Shibata. At the age of 99, she’s become one of Japan’s bestselling authors. What’s more, Reuters reports, she’s only been writing for the past 7 years, since back pain forced her to abandon her previous love, dancing.

Toyo Shibata was one of Japan’s top ten bestselling authors in 2010. With sales boosted by the screening of a television documentary on the poet last week, there are currently 1.5 million copies of her books in print, in a country where poetry collections only need to sell 10,000 copies to be deemed a success. Toyo Shibata plans to publish another collection of poems for her hundredth birthday in June.

Music writer Mark Mordue

When I think about poetry, about my need to read it and reflect on it and even express the odd poem here and there as if there were a more pure or direct voice in me that had somehow been switched on for a moment I recall that it arrived in my life through pop music and rock ‘n’ roll when I was barely more than a boy.

The sounds of popular culture were never just a beat to me. They became a form of melodic literature as vital as Shakespeare’s sonnets and plays, or the poetry of John Keats, WH Auden, Robert Lowell and Kenneth Slessor that I was schooled in and ‘learnt’ to love so profoundly.

Indeed I see now that rock ‘n’ roll primed me for Keats’ romanticism and Auden’s rhymes, as well as Lowell’s confessional devastations and Slessor’s alienated urban shades. That I became so involved with Hamlet precisely because it was Shakespeare’s most rock ‘n’ roll work – for behind its iambic pentameters lies the rhythmic appeals of a young man in black, a grieving rebel who might well have been an Elizabethan James Dean in his day.

Flip forward to England in 1965 and what was Bob Dylan, really, but an electrified Hamlet come to life on those same old theatre stages, a hot soliloquist with a bad attitude and an acoustic guitar instead of a sword sheathed at his side? As the DA Pennebaker documentary Don’t Look Back reveals, Dylan even had his loyal Horatio (friend Bob Neuwirth) and an Ophelia that he tormented (lover Joan Baez), as well as a Polonius whispering in his ear (manager Albert Grossman).

Despite Dylan’s typically elusive response to a question at the time as to whether he was poet – “I think of myself more as a song-and-dance man” – the Beat writer Allen Ginsberg immediately recognized the young artist’s importance. In the Martin Scorcese documentary, No Direction Home, Ginsberg talks of Dylan’s arrival on the scene and what the older poet witnessed about his performing presence: “He [Dylan] became identified with his breath, like a shaman, with all his intelligence and consciousness focused on his breath.”

It’s a brilliant evocation of what Dylan personified from the very beginnings of his startling career: a shift in poetic life away from the page back into the ether of song. In Ginsberg’s word, Dylan transformed himself into “a column of air”.

Dylan himself was influenced by this same singing awareness – by what he called the ‘fearless’ rhyming of Cole Porter, by the archetypal power and conviction of Woody Guthrie’s folk ballads, by country music and the blues as much as the literary work of the Beats or TS Eliot or Rimbaud. And yet despite this history and ‘breath’, an idiot wind invariably continues to blow in from another direction, debating whether lyrics can ever be regarded as true poetry? As if everyone from Dylan to Leonard Cohen and Lou Reed must submit, cap-in-hand, to the demand their songs work silently and alone on the page if they are to qualify. A matter not helped by those hard-cover editions of lyrics from rock stars that, yes, all too often, read as lifeless if not a little pretentious and gaudy in their packaging. ‘Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy’: And Other Misheard Lyrics by Gavin Edwards and Chris Kalb probably hitting a truer note than most when it comes to the reality of how we appreciate lyrics day-to-day.

Mark Mordue is one of Australia’s most respected critics and was awarded the Pascall Prize for critical writing earlier this year. This is an extract from an essay he originally published in the Griffith Review, which appears in full on his blog, The Basement Tapes.

Novelist Andrea Goldsmith shared her life with the late Dorothy Porter

Dorothy Porter was known for her brilliant performance. She studied acting in her teen years and actually toyed with a career in the theatre. At one of her classes each student had to prepare a monologue and perform it to the group.

Dot’s piece was “Survivor of the Auto da Fé”. When she was finished her teacher asked who had written the script. “I did,” she said. To which the teacher replied: “You may one day be an actor, but you are already a poet.”

Dot combined two rare talents: she was a brilliant poet and she was a remarkable performer. We have her poems but we have lost her wonderful performances. I have loved each of the Poet’s Voice events I have attended: the poetry, the diverse performers, the dramatisation. These events remind us of the oral tradition of poetry, remind us that poetry is alive and dramatic and emotional and speaks to you. Dorothy’s performances had the same effect. These events also provide an opportunity to plunge into a particular poet’s work. For an hour or so we are removed from the cacophony of our mad lives and immersed deep into the poetic imagination.

This is a great privilege. There is little to compare. This is why I approached the Poet’s Voice to make tribute to Dot and celebrate the release of the collection, Love Poems.

Les Murray’s latest, Taller When Prone

Poet Les Murray is favourite Australian in the race for the Nobel Prize according to British bookmakers Ladbrokes.

The bookies put Les Murray at an equal seventh in the running for the prize at 11/1 along with Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami. The current frontrunner is Swedish poet and translator Tomas Transtromer at 5/1. Two other Australian authors made the list – David Malouf at 50/1 and Peter Carey, out of favour with the punters at 100/1. But if you’re looking to back an outside chance the longest odds are for Bob Dylan at 150/1.

Before you go blowing your winnings, it’s worth noting that the bookies rarely hit the mark. As Galleycat points out last year’s prize was looking like a cert for Amos Oz at 4/1 odds, but ended up going to Romanian-born German author Herta Müller.

In partnership with RMIT, the Australian Poetry Centre is bringing a poet in residence to the Wheeler Centre.

The program will mean that poets have the opportunity to write but also be available for workshops and weekly Meet the Poet sessions, which allow aspiring poets to talk about their writing with the poet in residence.

Lisa Gorton is the first poet in residence and brings with her an impressive writing CV. Her first collection, Press Release, won the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry and was shortlisted for the Melbourne Best Writing Prize. She’s gone on to complete a Doctorate at Oxford University on John Donne’s poetry and prose, and won the John Donne Society Award for Distinguished Publication in Donne Studies.

While at the Wheeler Centre, Gorton will be working on a collection of poems set in the future and she’ll post portions of her work here for you to discuss and explore. But if you want to talk directly in person Gorton will be available on 16th of September in her first Meet the Poet session.

Cordite editor David Prater

Why do Creative Commons? Why now?

Well, we were initially inspired by the Remix My Lit project which was carried out by Creative Commons Australia last year. They invited people to remix prose stories; we thought we could do the same for poetry. And thus Cordite 33: Creative Commons was born.

Can you explain the download and remix idea behind this issue?

Just as a remix of a song takes elements of the song and rearranges them, so too with this issue we’re asking people to play with the lines of poems. You can download a document from our website containing all of the poems in the issue, and then all you have to do is start playing with the poems, cutting and pasting, shifting, rearranging – heck, even run them through a machine translator a few times, just to see how it turns out. We’re also asking people to send us their remixes, and we’ll publish a selection of these on the Cordite site later this year.

Remixing is an idea borrowed from music – how do you see music differing from text?

Well unlike music, words need to be activated in some way. You can’t put a book “on” in the corner of a room to set the mood for a romantic evening. Unless it’s a talking book but that’s cheating.

Cordite has long been at the vanguard of writing online – is it a contradiction to long be at the vanguard?

The truth is, we’ve been guarding the van for so long that we’ve given up hope that the original owner will ever come back and claim it. In that sense there’s no contradiction in your statement. Thank you for making it.

What does it mean to be an online journal? How is it better than print?

I don’t think it’s either/or in terms of online versus print. Website owners can point the finger at print publishers and criticise them for chopping down trees to print books; but on the other hand, print publishers can throw the example of the US military at Internet-glorifying website owners any time they like. After all, the Internet was initially designed with a military purpose in mind, and the amounts of waste generated by the communications and computing industries are indeed vast. It’s easier for a poetry magazine like Cordite to reach a worldwide audience, that’s for sure – but that audience is still incredibly small. The one good thing about editing an online magazine is that when you make a mistake, or a typo, you can fix it immediately. You can afford to be more relaxed, in that sense. Then again, I seem to be fixing typos and coding problems every minute of the day. But enough about me. I’m just glad to have an opportunity to show off Australian poets to the world. Code is poetry.

The passing of Peter Porter in April created an absence in Australian poetry that many are still mourning.

His obituary in the Guardian quoted Porter’s poetic maxim from the 1960s “What I have written, I have written, and I do the best I can.” which was followed-up by reader’s letters.

The Australian ran their obituary which created several inspiring responses. Alex Miller wrote of his memory of Porter as “generous to his fellow poets and writers and modest about the force of his own richly gifted voice”. Novelist James Bradley captures the moment when he heard the news of the poet’s death and reminds us of the “haunting simplicity” of particularly from his poem ‘Last Words’: “Death Has only one true rhyme”

The Wheeler Centre and the Australian Poetry Centre offer their own memorial to one of Australia’s greatest poets, A Tribute to Peter Porter with poets, musicians, actors and critics.