As a result of the article in The Age (see below) Christopher Bantick wrote this ‘response’ in The Australian. I have since given a talk in ‘response’ to this article at The Wheeler Centre for books writing & ideas during the Lunchbox/Soapbox series as well as delivering the same talk at The National Australian Poetry Symposium just a few days ago. I will publish the full transcript here shortly, but for a lookie of the talk you can watch the live stream of the Symposium here for part 1 and here for part two…
Only greatness, not popular appeal, can restore poetry as the nation’s memory
IN case you didn’t know, Australian performance poet Emilie Zoey Baker is the international poetry slam champion. Slam is a form of spoken-word performance and competition. But to assume that slam is poetry is enough to make the muse mute
Still, it’s not Baker’s slam success we should be worried about. It is her suggestion that poetry should be on prime-time television and replace programs such as MasterChef. What Baker and her fellow versifiers have failed to understand is that celebrity poets do more harm than good.
According to Baker, poetry needs to be slammed into us: “I would love it to be on prime-time television. It is such a fantastic way to get into people’s lounge rooms. Imagine having your soul unravelled like a ribbon at 7.30 on Thursday night, rather than learning the contents of Matt Preston’s stomach.”
Whether you like MasterChef isn’t the point here. The Baker vision of a show, perhaps So You Think You’re a Poet or Master Poet, is about celebrity, impact and not a lot more. But poetry will not regain its place in the national conscience by our reducing it to a public mosh pit.
According to Baker, Australia rejects poetry and hence her evangelism for pop poetry extravaganzas. But the problem with poetry is not that it is overlooked. Rather, it depends what kind of poetry we’re talking about.
Those who know what great poetry is covet its place in the culture. Pop poems may pull the punters to pubs, but that’s all.
In the same week that Baker was awarded her slam title, arguably one of Australia’s finest living poets, Christopher Wallace Crabbe, was awarded an Order of Australia. This was, so the citation noted, “For service to the arts as a leading poet, critic and educator.”
What needs to be grasped is that not all poetry has the capacity to move us. Great poetry does. To this end, American poet Randall Jarrell was right when he said: “A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.”
In his 1996 Boyer lectures, The View from the Bridge: Aspects of Culture, Pierre Ryckmans observed: “That a man may survive for quite a while without food, but cannot live one day without poetry, is a notion … we tend to dismiss too lightly, as a sort of 19th-century romantic hyperbole.”
How can we explain that, when the new app for T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land – which had Eliot reading the poem – was, according to the eBookNewser site, “The top-grossing iPad book app in the Apple App Store,” earlier this month? What this tells us is that great poems live and last.
Poets such as Baker who want to give us wham and slam need to face this reality. Their poetry depends on personality pyrotechnics, but as poetry it does not scan. Good poetry takes time to understand. It takes emotional and intellectual investment. The buy-in is something more enduring than a bright flare of words.
This goes some way to explain why, on a wet and miserable June night, the University of Melbourne’s Newman College oratory hall was packed as people came to listen to Peter Steele read and reflect on his verse. It was an evening of illumination and edification, but there were few young people. Part of this is due to education – even so, I defy any spotty 16-year-old not to be arrested by Sylvia Plath reading her poem Daddy – but part of it is also due to the poverty of the poetry post-baby boomers know. Gens X and Y are impoverished and have no storehouse of verse to call on.
The art of committing great poems to memory is lost. Whether one likes A.B. “Banjo” Paterson’s The Man from Snowy River is immaterial. Many of us can recite the first verse at least. After the devastation of floods and fire this past summer, Dorothea Mackellar’s My Country was suddenly entirely apt with her references to “flood and fire and famine”. But who knew it?
There is more than a passing truth in the acerbic comment by poet Bruce Dawe in his essay Recent Trends in Australian Poetry. He notes: “If our poetry is indicative of the life-force of our country, then we’re moribund.”
What has been lost is the place of poetry in national memory. While Dawe may say that the Henry Lawson and Paterson bush tradition’s “creek bed’s panned out”, where is the wellspring of our knowing the verse of James McAuley, A.D. Hope, Judith Wright and Les Murray, among others?
The loss of a once vibrant oral tradition of knowing poems in the heart, and not just by heart, has been devalued. Indigenous Australians can tell us much about the importance of knowing the song lines of a culture. Yes, it’s education’s role, but also a cultural responsibility.
Why should we know great poems? They can be a comfort and inspiration, not to mention sustaining when we hunger for meaning and solace.
Christopher Bantick is a Melbourne writer and senior English teacher at Trinity Grammar, Kew.
Oh Hai world! I was in The Age
talking about how poetry should be on TV, and ya’know what? It just may be…
Rhyme time
Michael Short
June 13, 2011
Comments 37
There is much to be gained by having poetry competitions on television. Photo: Justin McManus
[WHO] Emilie Zoey Baker, poet and international slam champ
[WHAT] Australia neglects poetry, depriving young people of a powerful outlet
[HOW] Launch performance poetry competitions on prime time TV
Forget MasterChef, Emilie Zoey Baker says there is much to be gained by having poetry competitions on television.
POETRY can be one of the simplest, most malleable forms of writing. It is accessible art, for composer and consumer alike. It is a ready, rollicking outlet for many of the emotions and ideas and feelings that flay us or fling us into joyful trajectories.
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Emilie Zoey Baker. Photo: Justin McManus
There can be rules, if you want, or none, should you prefer. The form presents no barriers to writers, readers and listeners; there is no monster at the gate to the poetic universe.
Poetry is painting with words. The palette is a possibility picnic laden with images, metaphors, screams, sighs, verbs, nouns, adjectival strings, intimation, exclamation, exasperation, delight. Words unshackled, words unleashed in pursuit of perfection.
All it takes to get started is desire – or encouragement. We lack not the means to create a little time and space in which to create; that, after all, is what our schools do so well. And it is young people who stand, perhaps, to gain the most from a few facilitated encounters with poetry.
Teenage years can deliver wonderful times, but they can also be littered with trauma, confusion, trial, turbulence, emotional volatility, dilemmas. Expressing such things is a way to help understand them, to instil resilience, to negotiate the route to maturity, to promote awareness of self and others and the resonances of life.
So it seems curious that such a potentially powerful partner in cosmic comprehension is not made more available, particularly to young people. Some teachers have a passion for poetry and an ability to inspire interest, and the pupils of such educators are lucky. But most of our students, primary and secondary, generally do not get much exposure to this timeless form of literature. They are not being led to write poetry.
Perhaps this is because poetry in its classical form can seem difficult and daunting, a little turgid and opaque, foreign and irrelevant. Certainly, traditional publishers find it devilishly difficult to profit from poetry books.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. We might just be thinking about poetry too narrowly. The classroom is but one arena in which poetic exploration could be happening more. Another is mainstream media.
One of Australia’s most active and successful poets is Emilie Zoey Baker. ”Poetry is a great stage for your voice. It’s a vehicle for what young people need to say. Poetry is a fantastic way of saying it. You can really experiment with language. You can draw from yourself. You can draw from outside of yourself. You can express yourself using poetry.”
Poetry can be presented on the page and on the stage and Baker does both. She was a star act at the Emerging Writers Festival, which has just ended in Melbourne.
She is an international champion of slam, a form of spoken-word performance and competition. Slam started in Chicago more than a quarter of a century ago and is huge in the United States, Britain and Europe, stuffing venues with raucous, celebratory gatherings.
But it is almost unheard of here; there is a thriving underground slam movement, but in mainstream media it is all but mute.
Here’s how slam works: 10 poets are invited to present a piece. There are generally just a bare stage and a microphone – no props permitted. Members of the audience are selected to be judges. Each recital is scored.
”It’s just them and their voice. And the audience, the random judges, give them a score out of 10. It’s immediate. It’s live. It’s raw. There is booing. There is cheering. There is jeering. And at the end the poet with the highest score is the winner.”
At the end of the 2010 International Slam Review, part of the Berlin International Literature Festival, Baker had the highest score. She is also a former winner of the Nimbin Performance Poetry World Cup. She is a slam champion from festivals the world over, performing in the past two years in Paris, London, Singapore, Bali, Montreal, New York, Chicago and elsewhere.
Emilie Zoey Baker has a slightly subversive idea to help move poetry from the cultural shadows into the glare enjoyed by, for example, cooking or dancing or gardening.
Her idea is to get slam onto prime-time television. Australian television audiences evidently relish competitions and reality settings. Think of the culinary combat of MasterChef, the excruciating encounters of So You Think You Can Dance and The Biggest Loser, the voyeuristic inanity of Big Brother, the serendipity and cruelty of Australia’s Got Talent.
”I would love it to be on prime-time television. It is such a fantastic way to get it into people’s lounge rooms. Imagine having your soul unravelled like a ribbon at 7.30 on Thursday night, rather than learning the contents of Matt Preston’s stomach. Imagine young people’s voices, having that explode into people’s lounge rooms. That would be magnificent.
”Let’s have something real, not just something you can sink your teeth into, but something you can rip a bite out of. Poetry has the ability to cut through the bullshit, like soapsuds on oil. I want to be challenged, touched, moved, shaped and changed.
”How about a talent show where it is about original ideas and new, fresh voices, not just reciting the lyrics of dull pop songs for douche muffins like Kyle Sandilands? Let’s make art. Let’s explode our hearts at 7.30pm on a Thursday evening, take risks, wake up and shake this reality TV black hole.”
Maybe it would work. It would not be an expensive experiment – film a gig at a venue. Comedy festivals do it all the time. SBS created a wonderful hit with a similar format, the spoken and sung live-performance-based RocKwiz. The Melbourne Writers festival is doing its bit by holding a Poetry Idol event.
Baker would like to see at 7.30pm a show called something like So You Think You’re a Poet, or MasterPoet.
Poet and Age poetry editor Gig Ryan fully agrees that poetry needs to have a bigger place in our world. She feels the education system is to blame. ”It is shocking it is not taught more in schools,” she says.
Baker is trying to fix this, too. As national education officer at Australian Poetry and co-ordinator of Out Loud, Victoria’s first teen team slam event, she goes into schools. She goes alone, or she takes a troupe with her, the Superpoets (see link below). At first, she often meets resistance, but not for long. Once the young people start experimenting – often by having to turn a cliche into something with considered meaning – they can become enthusiastic and more.
”They were almost angry that they didn’t know this existed at all, all this potential to express themselves, but they didn’t have it.”
The thing is to just get started. Explore online (see links below.) Write down some thoughts and feelings. Dictate them into a smartphone. Poetry is not a rule-bound, forbidding morass. Are not song lyrics poetry? Is not rap? What about graffiti?
Baker cites as poetry a sign photographed in a paddock that, for some marvellous reason, was strewn with tyres cut in half and planted into the soil. The sign read ”Used Rainbows”.
So, what is poetry? You might want to generate your own definition. Perhaps in free verse. This is what Baker reckons it feels like:
Poetry has the power to shift the way you see the world with a single line.
To twist what you know, mince what you believe in a couple of stanzas.
It uses words like paint, making pictures you can swallow, art you can eat.
It’s music, literature, theatre, sculpture, all in a single bite.
It’s the things you really want to say, and it’s making words into shapes, making donkeys into dolphins, parking inspectors into princes, stones into castles.
It’s what you are really saying, the pointed point, the underscore.
This piece was originally published in A View From Here, 19 Perspectives On Feminism as part of the 2009 Next Wave Festival commissioned by curators Victoria Bennet and Clare Rae. The publication went with an exhibition exploring modern feminism which was held at West Space in Melbourne. I re-published here just before Slutwalk as it explained perfectly why I was attending.
As Part of the project an Australian Feminist Art Timeline was also set up as a Wiki, this may be my first wiki. I like being inside a Wiki.
We were told it was a party,
that there’d be heaps of people there. We were stoked ’cause they said the whole team was putting it on.
Me and Michelle follow Carlton.
We went with Brett and Joe. We’d seen them at the beach that day. Michelle thought Brett was pretty cute,
I kinda liked Joe. He had a sandy smile and a freckled nose.
They weren’t from town, you could tell.
At the pub that night they said that there was a party back at the house.
We were playing pool and it was pretty dead
for a Saturday.
Michelle said, Great. I gave her a look,
an I-wish-you’d-consult-me-first-before-you-agree-what-we-are-doing
look.
The boys had rented a house on the beach, just near my dad’s old place. I knew it, one of those massive family places where different towels always hung from the balcony.
With a new packet of cigarettes and a six pack each of cider, we went through the glass sliding doors into the lounge room.
There were about sixteen boys sitting round watching ’70s porn, laughing at the
pubic hair.
Girls don’t look like that anymore.
Me and Michelle had spent ages getting ready for the pub that night.
We were kinda hoping the boys would be there.
I dyed my hair fresh, Michelle got a wax.
Girls don’t look like that anymore.
It took ages to decide what to wear, Michelle turns up the song
Let’s get this party star-ar-ar-ted.
We didn’t expect to end up at a party.
The boys whistled when we arrived.
The one with facial hair said, Snout to tail, not one bit of fail.
Michelle asked, Where’s the rest of the party?
Brett said, This is it.
We sat down and lit cigarettes. I could feel the couch under my legs,
rough, sandy and rented.
I touched Michelle’s hand with my little finger.
They didn’t turn off the movie – it was pretty hilarious, she’d be someone’s gran by now.
Michelle said, You got any music?
Maybe upstairs, said Brett.
Most of the crew got up and a few went into the kitchen, which was full of stubbies and pizza boxes. They took us on a tour of the house. There was hair in the bathroom
Gary shaved his ‘fro, Joe said.
The top bedroom had a big bed with a floral bedspread. It looked like something the woman in the movie would sleep on – the pillows were a dirty beige,
like Barbie doll skin.
There was a balcony with a view to the beach and a BBQ with a rusted lid.
Michelle sat on the bed and bounced up and down.
When I turned around
her dress was off, all the boys came into the room,
my hands were held and
my skirt
dropped to the floor
down near my new pumps.
I’ve started to call heels pumps; it sounds better.
It wasn’t that we screamed or anything, it all happened in silence at first, till they blocked the doors, then we knew
this was happening to us.
This was happening.
Taking it in turns.
The one with facial hair standing on the BBQ with the rusted lid,
watching through the window.
Later that night it was over, like a storm. Michelle and I left through the glass
sliding doors into the wet darkness.
Brett watched us go, Joe watched TV.
I wanted to collapse, to vomit, I was limp with confession but Michelle didn’t want to say anything to anyone. It wasn’t raining inside her eyes. She just looked hard and colourless, like a government building, a bank vault in a movie. The next night she wanted to go out again. Don’t let this ruin the whole holidays, she said. I was sore with disbelief.
Wrapped in a blanket in her kitchen while she did her hair.
I’ll text you if it’s any good, she said.
At the same pub at the same time on the next night they were there playing pool.
I heard two beeps It’s aright, Brett’s here, they didn’t know what they were doing.
And the rain stopped falling for a moment. Anger exploded into my throat like an airbag in a crash. I dialled the number.
The police asked so many questions. They wanted to know what we were wearing.
My top was new. I got it on sale. It had blue sequins in the shape of a bird. Its wings were spread, which made up the neckline. I got my skirt online. It was gold with green beads sewn into the hemline.
Michelle had worn a dress she got for her birthday. We all put in for it. I was there when she first tried it on; it was short and ruffled at the back, and it was blue too. It had gold trim around the neckline, which, when you looked closely, was actually tiny little flowers. We matched.
The house looked different in the paper, with arrows pointing in the windows.
Two girls. Incident. Football team. Shamed.
The BBQ with the rusty lid was in the picture.
It wasn’t raining inside Michelle’s eyes; she didn’t press charges.
There were letters in the paper for days afterwards.
Take it easy.
They
didn’t
know
what
they
were
doing.
Thunder only happens when it’s raining, and nights like this only happen in Melbourne.
A stellar cast will take on Fleetwood Mac’s colossus of cool, Rumours, as the literary cabaret night Liner Notes returns to the Melbourne Writers Festival.
Following last year’s sell-out tribute to Michael Jackson’s Thriller, producers Babble turn to the 1977 classic for their latest instalment of one of Melbourne’s best-loved spoken word events. Special guests Charlie Pickering, Clare Bowditch and Hannie Rayson will join Emilie Zoey Baker, Sean M Whelan, Alicia Sometimes, Ben Pobjie, Omar Musa, Josh Earl, George Dunford, Eva Johansen and host Michael Nolan to poetically re-interpret Rumours, track by track.
In the late ‘70s, to what use could hirsute chests and permed ‘fros, flowing gold locks and wispy lace, drug binges and three marital break-ups be put, other than to take too long to record the greatest AOR album of all time? Beloved of Boomers, listened to secretly by Gen X and now karaoked by Gen Y, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours is the quintessential overblown masterpiece, where the money spent on getting the hi-hat sound just right could have fed millions.
With a live band ripping through the likes of Go Your Own Way and The Chain, and a line-up of stellar guests joining some of Melbourne’s finest spoken word performers and comedians, Liner Notes: Rumours promises to be an unforgettable night of words and music, as the Writers Festival lets its hair down and whips out an air guitar.
It’s tambourines and tule at the Toff so don’t stop thinking about tomorrow – it’ll soon be here!
Side 1
1. ‘Second Hand News’ JOSH EARL
2. ‘Dreams’ CLARE BOWDITCH
3. ‘Never Going Back Again’ ALICIA SOMETIMES
4. ‘Don’t Stop’ CHARLIE PICKERING
5. ‘Go Your Own Way’ EZB
6. ‘Songbird’ GEORGE DUNFORD
Side 2
7. ‘The Chain’ HANNIE RAYSON
8. ‘You Make Loving Fun’ BEN POBJIE
9. ‘I Don’t Want to Know’ SEAN M WHELAN
10. ‘Oh Daddy’ EVA JOHANSEN
11. ‘Gold Dust Woman’ OMAR MUSA
Liner Notes: Rumours
Melbourne Writers Festival
Saturday 4 September
Toff in Town Deakin House, Swanston St
Tickets: http://www.mwf.com.au/2010/content/mwf-2010-events.asp?name=20100904-2000-Liner-Notes-Fleetwood-Macs-Rumours
It’s festival season and I’m feeling very festive. To kick off I started with The Australian Poetry Centre’s national festival in the SA town of Goolwa. There was alot on and it was great to fill my ears with as much poetry as humanly possible,it’s never a bad thing to fill a town ENTIRELY FULL OF POETS. I ran the Goolwa slam where PIO was named The-Greatest-Poet-In-All-The-Land. Video coming soon. Check out this podcast filled with recorded highlights taken by the uber coolJenJen. It’s a poetry postcard to stick to your ear fridge. Next Was the Next Wave festival where I was part of The View From Here, 19 perspectives on feminism. I contributed a piece about sport players and rape (happy, happy, joy, joy) to a publication that went with an exhibition. All the writers from the book were paired with an artist, it was a great project seeding discussions on feminism in 19 exciting new voices. I worked with artist Jessie Scott The festival was brimming with ideas and made me feel sweaty with possibilities. Next was The Sydney Writers Festival and the Emerging writers Festival in Melbourne, they are on at the same time and I managed to squeeze in a performance at both. I was really impressed with the SWF, there were large buzzing crowds, crispy sunshine, the Sydney biennale was on! They put us up at the Sofitel on the wharf, smack bang inside all the action. I performed on the Sat night with Morganics, Charlie Dark (UK) Miles Merril and Sarah Taylor. Winner of the 2009 Australian Poetry Slam. I then made it to Melbs for the end of the EWF performing in Wordstock, a poetic tribute to AC/DC. Wordstock is kinda like Liner Notes in that it asks performers to respond to a specific track however they see fit. I got Hells Bells and wore a Collingwood jersey to perfect my 11 year old bogan character. I have never looked so horrid in the name of art. * yells dramatically*
I did it for poetry!
Discaliamer
*I do not, and will not, ever say the words ‘go pies’*
Crowds at the SWF
The very cool Charlie Dark
Being interviewed for the telly!
The pointy thing
performing ACDC poetry at the EWF
The fabulous Clem Bastow dressed as Bon Scott complete with package…
all the beautiful people of Sydney
‘It’s Sandra about the Biennale’
A shot from Cockatoo Island, noice.
Sean M Whelan performing his AC/DC poem
little red ridin’in tha hood
Sydney stuff
Downtown Goolwa
An impromptu poetry performance in the rotunda, Goolwa, 1am.
Here are some of the videos I mentioned in the talk
