SWF: More poets



I'd planned to go to quite a few things at the Festival yesterday. I was going to listen to Chloe Hooper, David Marr, Benjamin Gilmour, and have another dose of Norman Doidge. But life and work got in the way. I did sneak off for the 10 o'clock Poetry Reading in the intimate Bangarra Mezzanine room, and the Harbour outside the louvres turned on a reasonably lovely downpour, a sweet accompaniment to the poems about storms that one of the readers treated us to.

Anthony Lawrence kicked off the session by telling us about the three men on the panel -- Lawrence, Bob Adamson and the younger US poet Devin Johnston -- going out fishing in the Hawkesbury last weekend in Adamson's boat, talking about poetry and butcher birds, throwing a piece of squid to a passing osprey, only to be regally ignored. My woman companion was delighted and touched by the obvious camaraderie and affection among the three of them. In fact, she commented on it during the brief question time at the end and asked if this was characteristic of poets, as opposed to, say, novelists. The reply had to acknowledge the famous feuds among poets including a recent one in which two of the members of our panel actually had an AVO taken out against them. But even that, Anthony Lawrence said, was fun, even if they were sending 80 harassing emails a day.

Back to the reading. If J S Harry cut a fine crone-like figure on Thursday morning, Bob Adamson has to be a male equivalent. He is an excellent performer, very natural and relaxed, and serving the poetry beautifully. Anthony Lawrence, apart from telling of the fishing trip, read us some notes about his take on nature poetry: he doesn't aim to describe things, animals, birds observed closely, but to write poetry in which (and I wrote this down as he said it) 'the subject is forced into the service of language'. He then read some intensely personal nature poems that made me realise I had no idea what he meant by that. Devin Johnson might have seemed like a ring-in, being from the USA and all, but he was clearly a huge fan of Adamson as well as a friend, and his poems about places like Chattanooga and the Wabash were in sweet harmony with the others. As he read, one of his hands would rise up as if of its own accord and conduct, sketching the rhythms of his lines in the air. He read a wonderful poem, 'Marco Polo', that moved seamlessly from his infant daughter babbling at the night sky to Marco Polo wandering the Mongolian desert. I can't find it on the web, and I didn't catch the name of the book it's in -- sorry!

I'm writing this on Saturday night after a full day at the Festival. But my report on today will have to wait. it's tiring work being a punter at an event like this.

Posted: Sat - May 23, 2009 at 09:05 PM           |

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