Peter Porter Research Articles

New York's War of 1812: Politics, Society, and Combat by Richard V. Barbuto

Reviewed by: New York's War of 1812: Politics, Society, and Combat by Richard V. Barbuto Harvey Strum (bio) New York's War of 1812: Politics, Society, and Combat By Richard V. Barbuto. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2021. 364 pages, 6" × 9", 10 b&w illus., 6 maps, 1 table. $39.95 cloth, $24.95 paperback, $32.95 e-book. Richard Barbuto's New York's War of 1812 presents a fascinating account of the military history of New York during the War of 1812 and can be considered the definitive work on the war. We needed a full-length account since we previously had only several regional studies, like Harry Landon's Bugles on the Border: The Story of the War of 1812 in Northern New York, Allan Everest's The War of 1812 in the Champlain Valley, or David Fitz-Enz's Final Invasion: Plattsburgh, the War of 1812's Most Decisive Battle. Richard V. Barbuto fills the need for a comprehensive analysis of the war's military events that has not been provided by any other historians. While the War of 1812, as Barbuto emphasizes, was New York's war, the state's government, unlike Maryland's, has done virtually nothing to commemorate these important historical events. Governor Daniel Tompkins emerges during the war as the best wartime executive. Tompkins succeeded in mobilizing the manpower and resources of the state. He did his best to arm, equip, feed, and shelter the militia called up for service. Tompkins's leadership led to the successful fortification of the approaches to New York City, preventing a repeat of the British occupation of the city during the Revolution. Throughout the war, Tompkins marshaled the resources to send to the frontiers of the state. Barbuto criticizes President Madison and War Department leaders for repeatedly failing to adequately supply and provide effective leadership for the regulars and the militia. In addition, Barbuto blames the Federalists in 1812 and 1813 for their unwillingness to support the governor in his efforts to provide the necessary financial resources to sustain the war effort. An important point raised in this study is the need for cooperation between the state and federal governments to wage the war, and Barbuto gives Governor Tompkins high marks for his consistent actions to foster state-federal cooperation, which President Madison eventually recognized. Tompkins took the initiative because the federal government failed to do its part, crippling the ability of the governor to fully mobilize the state's resources. One of the strengths of [End Page 389] Barbuto's analysis is his emphasis of the relationship between the federal government and state leadership, an issue not necessarily stressed in other military histories of the war. Barbuto evaluates the barriers to military success. Citing Lt. Joseph Hawley Dwight, Barbuto highlights one of the ongoing internal problems—the willingness of younger officers to fight and go on the offensive and the reluctance of senior officers "who appeared cautious to a fault" (135). This occurred during the failed 1812 Niagara campaign and in 1813, too; but this division within the ranks of both the regulars and the militia reappeared throughout the war. The reluctance of senior officers to lead demoralized troops contributed to the unwillingness of the soldiers to risk their lives when they had no faith in their senior officers, like General Smyth. Some of the officers of the regulars, like Smyth, detested the militia, and this prevented effective military cohesion in both offensive and defensive operations. If effective and heroic militia officers, like Jacob Brown and Peter Porter, led their men, the militia performed well. At the opposite end of the spectrum was Brig. Gen. George McClure, who "entered the annals of infamy" (177) by ordering the destruction of Newark, Canada, which led to the British retaliation along the Niagara Frontier. Barbuto also explores the problems of logistics, offering a careful and sophisticated analysis of the difficulties faced by the militia and the regulars, issues often underemphasized in other studies. Divided into eighteen chapters covering every significant battle, raid, and military operation in the state, this study addresses every military campaign and all significant failures and successes. Six chapters concentrate on the Niagara...

‘Colossal Snob’? The Class-Ridden World of Simon Raven

Simon Raven (1927–2001) was a satirical commentator on the foibles, absurdities, and random cruelties of upper-middle-class life in post-war England. As the British empire crumbled, he produced a wealth of novels, articles, and essays that set their stall against technology and progress.2 Instead, he turned his attention to a small but influential world of upper-class and upper-middle-class intrigue, sexual vice, and betrayal that represented the low stakes and scant rewards of those who enjoyed and competed for status and high office from the late 1940s to the 1970s. Peter Porter’s poem expresses the common conception of Raven’s novels as literary works crammed with vice, snobbishness, and folly, as the clay feet of those of high standing and in positions of authority are exposed. But unlike Evelyn Waugh, with whom he is sometimes compared, Raven does not feature in major surveys of the English novel, perhaps because, as John Lucas argued in 1972, ‘For all their show of satire of contemporary social mores, and for all their dedicated right-wing snobbishness, the fact is that one can’t take them seriously. As entertainment they repay reading; as serious novels they do not.’3

Massacre of the Innocents: creating a Holocaust memorial libretto

ABSTRACT Part I of the article looks at the challenge of writing Holocaust poetry and music in the light of Adorno’s revision of his famous pronouncement about poetry after Auschwitz into an acknowledgment that suffering ‘demands the continued existence of art while it prohibits it,’ and goes on to consider how the poets Paul Celan, Karen Gershon, Geoffrey Hill, Primo Levi, Sylvia Plath, Peter Porter, Nelly Sachs and Hilda Schiff, and the composers Harrison Birtwistle, David Lumsdaine, Steve Reich and Arnold Schoenberg make use of their personal distance from their subject matter as they attempt to create art out of atrocity. Part II discusses how the historical source material of the author’s libretto in memory of the child victims of the Holocaust was crafted into the musical forms of recitative, lieder, lullaby and biblical lament.

Solitude

Solitude Damen O'Brien (bio) Out beyond heart attack survivability range,three-bar phone reception territory,the cows will nod at you curtly,renew their deliberations.Engage wheel lock, close the mousetrap of the gatewith a vicious snap.You walk down along the bloated riverwhere the water mocks the pebblesturning them over like speckled eggsand the weeds suspend the sky's relief,twitching with skating spiders and fat mosquitos.That's snake-bite recovery country,clenched teeth and tourniquet.Two bars only and a quicksilver gulp inthe thermos,the boys battering each other withthe bushfire-black stalks of grass treesbecome incomprehensible birds.The cloud presses down, condensinginto a stern drought of mist,strong enough to etch the cardinals from the compass.There is no North.Continue, there and there, a few hundred meters moreand you'll have one bar, air-lift only.Soft biscuit to crumble in your pocket.The rain starts, earnest and inquisitive,finding a sly path through your shirtinsinuating everything, implying nothing,wriggling through the loose teeth of your backpack,beading the camera lens.An ant clambers widdershins out ofthe austere eye of a bird's skull,and that's it for the mobile.Pack rations and a fireman's lift from here.Even the campsite's thin abuse of smokeHanselled and Gretteled this far [End Page 220] is Ti-Tree cleansed,and some unknown birds pinglike a spate of text messages.To go further is the same as going back.To go further is to let the last lifeline go,to find the remaining crags and folds of cliffwithout the phone's mediating square. [End Page 221] Damen O'Brien Damen O'Brien's poetry has won numerous prizes, including the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, the Val Vallis Award for an Unpublished Poem, the New Guard Knightville Poetry Prize, the Moth Poetry Prize, and the Newcastle University International Poetry Competition (2020). He lives in Queensland. Copyright © 2020 Wayne State University Press

Complex Anachronism: Peter Porter's Jonah, Otherkind, Ancient and Contemporary Tempests, and the Divine

Australian poet Peter Porter collaborated with artist Arthur Boyd to produce their collection Jonah (1973) based on the biblical book. Porter writes of the style of the sequence of poems as “complex anachronism,” bringing together biblical resonances with contemporary social, ecological, and political themes. The contemporary context of anthropogenic climate change invites complex questions concerning relations between humans, other species, climate, and the divine. There are no easy correspondences between the biblical Jonah narrative and the contemporary challenges of climate change. But my reading of Jonah 2:1-11 in conversation with Porter’s poetic retelling of Jonah’s sojourn in the whale and Shakespeare’s Caliban, is suggestive for reimagining our own complex hybrid agencies and their implications for divine-human relationships as humans face the contemporary tempests of, and accompanying, anthropogenic climate change.

SARDISMOS: A RHETORICAL TERM FOR BILINGUAL OR PLURILINGUAL INTERACTION?

In his poem ‘The Last Hours of Cassiodorus’, Peter Porter has the Christian sage ask: ‘After me, what further barbarisms?’. Yet, Cassiodorus himself accepted, even valorized, at least one form of barbarism that had been rejected by earlier rhetoricians: sardismos (σαρδισμός), the mixture of multiple languages in close proximity. In its earliest attestation, Quintilian classified it as a type of solecism (Inst. 8.3.59). By contrast, five centuries later Cassiodorus in his Commentary on the Psalms used the term three times to praise the mixture of Greek, Hebrew and Latin in the Latin Psalter. This reversal, from vice to virtue of speech, illustrates some significant changes in attitudes toward language and multilingualism that developed as Christianity reshaped Roman literary culture. For one, Christian preachers, modelling themselves on the plain style of the Gospels, embraced forms of speech that had been regarded as low and stigmatized. In the words of Augustine (In psalm. 36, Serm. 3.6): ‘better you understand us in our barbarism than to have been deserted in our eloquence’ (melius in barbarismo nostro uos intelligitis, quam in nostra disertudine uos deserti eritis).1 Secondly, Hebrew now entered the linguistic consciousness of the Roman literary elite as one of the three languages of Scripture. Even if in-depth knowledge remained rare, it was worthy of being mentioned alongside Greek and Latin, just as it had appeared with them in the inscription on Jesus’ cross (Luke 23:38, John 19:20). Lastly, linguistic variety itself came to be positively valued since it reflected the diversity of a church coming together out of many peoples. Commenting on the bride's appearance in Psalm 45, both Augustine and Cassiodorus saw the variegated adornment of her robe as a reference to the diversity of Christian languages.

Elégiák az 1945 utáni angol költészetben

As has frequently been remarked in poetry criticism, an elegy always suggests that the poet’s own death is inconceivable. What I add is that in many cases the lost person’s death is also inconceivable or, at least, unspeakable; therefore, the poet has to turn to something speakable, meaning repeatable: a form, a motif, etc. This means that there is always something in the poem that admittedly does not belong to the author’s subjectivity. In my study I offer a survey of three British poets’ elegies from the second half of the 20th century: sequences by Douglas Dunn, Peter Porter and Thom Gunn; the former two writing to commemorate their dead wives, and Gunn writing in memory of his lost friends. As I argue, all the three poets follow in the wake of classic examples to repeat and reiterate something that belongs to tradition: Dunn is inspired by the classic dramatic monologue and gaps in medieval ballads, Porter by Henry King’s poem, and Gunn by romantic poetry. All the three can be read as self-elegies: Dunn’s poems through the motif of the wedding rings, Porter’s through the motif of the dead wife waiting for him, and Gunn’s through the image of the dream where the two friends are united. Probably all elegies can be read as self-elegies, signifying that we speak about someone else’s death because we are unable to speak of our own.

The Colonial Baroque in Australia: On Drover Boab Texts, Wiradjuri Clubs, and Charlie Flannigan's Drawings

The Colonial Baroque in Australia:On Drover Boab Texts, Wiradjuri Clubs, and Charlie Flannigan's Drawings Michael Farrell (bio) In this essay, I consider the possibilities for reading some unique colonial Australian texts as a literature of unsettlement and, in conclusion, make a comparison with the counterconquest example of Latin American poetics. This involves a reading of the terms "New World," "neo," or perhaps, rather, "bush baroque," arguing for it as a productive term for Australian postcolonial poetics. ("Bush baroque" as a term has a precedent in a Peter Porter reference to Les Murray; I mean to give it an expanded, historical valence here.1) My aim is to unsettle the colonial poetic in order to make space for a greater range of poetic works—works that because of their grammar, context, or visual nature have so far been excluded from readings of Australian poetics. In Latin American poetics, the neobaroque performs a resistance to closure and an overriding of boundaries. As I will argue, the adoption of this figure, or concept, of the neobaroque involves a literalization in the Australian colonial context. In order to make this argument, I must first read these Australian texts as literature; to do so with regard to writing that is outside of the conventional publication of book and magazine form is itself an unsettling or antisettlement act. The texts I review here are written by nomadic drovers, Indigenous hunters, and an Indigenous stockman: texts incised into the trunk of boab trees and painted on water tanks; typographic lettering of Wiradjuri clubs; and the drawings of jailed Aboriginal stockman Charlie Flannigan. The drover texts are recorded by Darrell Lewis, the clubs and drawings by Penny van Toorn.2 Many other texts are excluded from poetic/critical consideration for a range of aesthetic–ideological reasons. These particular texts, however, show most pertinently the possibilities of this particular argument. [End Page 409] British settlement in Australia was based on two kinds of displacement: of the settlers themselves, who came to find a new home in Australia, and of the Indigenous people who were dispossessed by this process—that is, the advent of settlement produced new forms of homelessness. Although Aboriginal people are popularly seen as nomadic, this Western term applies more aptly to the new settlers: the word "nomad" derives from the Greek "nemo," meaning pasture, and refers to one seeking new pastures for herds.3 Nomadism derives from preagricultural farming culture, "agri" being "field" in Latin.4 There is a sense, then, of a beginning again for European settlers. The "writers" I consider practice forms of literacy other than that of grammatically conventional English—a literacy we might term oral or visual literacy. Whereas Stephen Muecke suggests that it is more correct to refer to Aboriginal people by "the French term analphabete, meaning 'not having the alphabet,'"5 Charles Olson views this matter differently, arguing against literacy and in favor of illiteracy. Eniko Bollobas cites Olson's claim that the literate "don't hear." According to Bollobas, His [Olson's] insistence that "illiteracy" and projectivism should be used to break down the walls of Hellenistic "literacy" (reason, logic, classification, generalization, mechanical systematization, allegory, symbology, etc.) proved to be one of the most recurrent and dominant ideas permeating Olson's work, perhaps the major philosophical ramification of his poetics—one that he supported not only with poetic, literary, and linguistic evidence, but also with philosophical, historical, and scientific evidence. Logic, classification, and symbology are, he insisted, all tools of a cultural tradition that man must "unlearn" so that he may reenter the world.6 This is Olson's attempt to unsettle American literature. In his terms, to begin to practice literacy would be to exit the world. Olson's "Hellenistic literacy" is comparable to what Walter Mignolo terms "Western literacy."7 Mignolo refers to literacy as a "regional writing practice," distinguishing it from (large L) "Literacy," which is the term for the "field of study."8 He cites Roy Harris's formulation of "the tyranny of the alphabet" and the "scriptist bias" of the European tradition,9 arguing against "alphabetic writing [as] conceived as the end of a linear evolutionary process." Mignolo concludes by proposing the...

Seamus Heaney:

In late 1979 and early 1980, the late Seamus Heaney was in a flurry of activity. Employed from 1976 to 1981 as head of the English Department at Carysfort, a teachers' training college in Dublin, in 1979 he spent a semester teaching a poetry workshop at Harvard University where in January 1982 he began a five-year contract teaching one semester a year. Field Work, published by Faber and Faber, was issued on 15 October 1979, and in November, Charlotte Press Publications, based in Newcastle upon Tyne, published Gravities: A Collection of Poems with drawings by Noel Connor. Also in a limited edition in December 1979, the Byron Press produced Heaney's A Family Album.On 5 February 1980, Heaney found time to visit, read his poems, and speak at St. Mary's Catholic teachers' training college, Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, Middlesex. He was interviewed after his reading by a student named Georginia Mills. This subsequently was published in the literary magazine Strawberry Fare produced by the English Department at St. Mary's College. During its short run the magazine published fascinating interviews with leading literary figures, apart from Heaney these included Peter Porter, David Lodge, Beryl Bainbridge, D. J. Enright, Michael Holroyd, Richard Ellmann, Tom Stoppard, and others. Today, copies of the journal are extremely scarce; it ran from the mid-1970s to Autumn 1989. An incomplete run is in the British Library, call mark ZK.9. a. 41. A complete run is held in the archives of the college, which generously sent most of its duplicate copies to the present writer.John Iddon, who lectured at St Mary's College from 1970 to 2000 and edited the Strawberry Fare issue of Autumn 1980 in which Heaney's interview appeared (pp. 14–18), has generously given permission for it to be reprinted as has Faber and Faber permissions department responsible for the publication of Seamus Heaney's writings. The interview is recorded in Rand Brandes and the late Michael J. Durkan's magnificent Seamus Heaney: A Bibliography 1959–2003 as item F 17 (p. 426). It is followed in Strawberry Fare by Heaney's: “Hercules and Antaeus” (Brandes and Durkan: C326). The interview contains some references that need brief explication. “Summer 1969” refers to a poem in the second part of Heaney's collection North, published by Faber and Faber in 1975. Other Heaney poems referred to are “A Constable Calls,” “The Ministry of Fear,” and “Fosterage” found in North, and “Kinship,” appearing in Bog poems, also published in 1975. Georgina Mills [GM] refers to Heaney's experiences at “St Columbus” echoing St Columb's College, in Derry City where Heaney was a boarder from 1951 to 1957. Heaney's close friend Seamus Deane (b. 1940) the novelist, poet, and critic also attended St Columb's at the same time as Seamus Heaney. Ian Crichton Smith (1928–1998) was a prolific Scottish author from a strict Presbyterian background who wrote in English and Scottish Gaelic. Michael McClaverty (1904–1992), “a short story writer” and Heaney's “first headmaster” when he taught in 1962–1963 at St Thomas' Secondary School along the Whiterock Road in the upper Falls Road area of West Belfast, wrote novels and short stories. In this interview there are also references to Joyce, to Tacitus, to W. B. Yeats's poetry, the significance of Antaeus, and Philip Larkin's “Toads.”

TRUMPETS AT SUNSET

1 5 7 R T R U M P E T S A T S U N S E T D A N I E L H A L L When my sister called to tell me that our mother had just died – she’d been dying, horribly, endlessly, of Alzheimer’s – what she said to me was, ‘‘She’s out of all this now.’’ Even in the shock of absorbing the news I’d been waiting weeks to hear, the opening of Robert Frost’s ‘‘Directive’’ came to mind: ‘‘Back out of all this now too much for us.’’ (Not that I was entirely conscious of it at the moment, of course: it was more like a note in the complex chord.) My sister had perhaps never read a Frost poem other than ‘‘Stopping by Woods,’’ I’m guessing, in grade school – certainly nothing on the order of the strange and dreamlike ‘‘Directive.’’ Is this not part of Frost’s achievement, that he could use the language of ordinary people to write a poem they could never understand? I hardly understand it myself. But in that moment, his poem became , for me, a part of my mother’s death, and her death a part of his poem. Every great poem is an afterlife of the experience – or the energy, let’s say – that brought it into being, as well as a recurring P o e t r y N o t e b o o k : R e f l e c t i o n s o n t h e I n t e n s i t y o f L a n g u a g e , by Clive James (Liveright, 256 pp., $24.95) 1 5 8 H A L L Y dream for the reader who remembers it, carries it inside for what begins at some point to seem a lifetime. Clive James’s Poetry Notebook, subtitled ‘‘Reflections on the Intensity of Language,’’ is his tribute to the particular constellation of necessary poems that have sustained him over a lifetime of reading and writing – and writing about – poetry. The stakes for James could hardly be higher: he is now seventy-five and dying of leukemia and emphysema . (He told an interviewer, ‘‘I’m getting near the end,’’ and although this was a few years ago, there’s no reason to doubt the prediction.) He has written and spoken of his imminent death frankly, movingly, and – are only the British capable of this? – without a touch of self-pity. In his ‘‘Spectator Diary,’’ included here, he muses on the death of his friend Christopher Hitchens, whose memorial service in New York he is unable to attend because of his own infirmities. He admits to being envious of the mourners in attendance, and notes the expressions of love in the obituaries. ‘‘What would be said of me when I was gone? I almost was. Why not devote myself to the form of writing that has always mattered to me most?’’ I called him British: he was born in Australia, to be sure, but transplanted himself to England in 1962. This doubleness was to serve him well, or at least to suit him. In one of the so-called ‘‘Interludes,’’ shorter commentaries that serve as hinges between the (often only slightly longer) pieces themselves, he mentions Michael Donaghy, an Irish-American poet who early on settled in London. This observation pinballs to the Australian Peter Porter, who also made his life in London, for which ‘‘Australian critics tended to regard him as a traitor because he went, and British critics as a carpetbagger because he stayed.’’ (An echo of ‘‘Epistle to Miss Blount’’? This book is a cavern of echoes.) And finally to himself: he cultivated something like Porter’s ‘‘nonchalance’’ about such nationalistic pressures, adding, ‘‘I was careful, though, to remember my poetic origins.’’ I would have been grateful for a little more on the subject of his biography – in particular, the e√ects of his expatriation – though his story is told, to the extent that it is, through his taste. He mentions that Frank Kermode had less and less time for theory...

Saint Peter and Macbeth's Porter

Saint Peter and Macbeth's Porter

Integral Music: Languages of African American Innovation by Aldon Lynn Nielsen

220 Reviews by theartificial categories of academic literarystudies, and especially by that strangely selective construct known as 'Thirties Poetry', Auden's reputation is sustained chiefly by poets and by an appreciative general public thatcan still recognize him as thegreat estEnglish-born poet ofhis century.A small band of academic scholars,most of them rounded up by Stan Smith for thisCambridge Companion, also shows an affirming flame. With the centenary ofAuden's birth almost upon us, there is still no academic 'Auden industry' on the scale of those devoted toYeats, Eliot, Pound, and Stevens, although the foundations forone are being laid inEdward Mendelson's ongoing Com plete Works and in an associated series of critical editions. Stan Smith is a serialAudenist who has alreadywritten two short books on thepoet and is now atwork on a critical edition of The Orators. His editorial design in this Companion brings in rathermore contributors than isusual in the series, and within tighter word-limits, so that the strain of compression sometimes tellsupon theiressays as they race through a forty-five-yearliterary career. This plan of contents, though, has thegreatmerit of allowing the full range ofAuden's work tobe considered: notjust thepoems in almost every formand genre but theplays, the libretti, the travelbooks, thecritical essays, and themiscellaneous prose.We startwith a pithily aphoristic sur vey ofAuden's lifeand character by his biographer Richard Davenport-Hines, then move through a trioof essays on the threephases ofAuden's literarycareer-English, American, and European-before we reach a series of generic studies, including a stimulating consideration of theprose works byTony Sharpe and a valuable piece on the light verse by Stan Smith himself, which before long devours thewhole aeuvre. The second part of theCompanion is more various and thematic,with essays by Peter Porter on Auden's styles; JohnLucas on Auden's political positions and theirdebts toE. M. Forster; Rod Mengham on Auden's debts toGeorg Groddeck and Homer Lane and his distance fromFreudian orthodoxy; Richard R. Bozorth on Auden and sexuality (another of those illimitable topics); and Paola Marchetti on Auden's land scapes. Gareth Reeves's essay onAuden and religion isnotable for itscareful analysis of 'Horae Canonicae', while Rainer Emig's account of 'Auden and Ecology' is a good deal more sophisticated than one has a right to expect under such a title.The volume is rounded off in a party spiritwith Ian Sansom's 'Auden and Influence', a lively review of improbableWystan trivia. In an ideal Companion, one would look perhaps formore material on Auden's debts to such figures as T. S. Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and D. H. Lawrence, but otherwise the scope of this book is highly commendable, while its merits in termsof readable prose are enhanced by its inclusion of voices from outside the academy (Davenport-Hines, Porter, Sansom). It deserves to go straight to the top of the reading list forany undergraduate or postgraduate course inwhich Auden's work appears. GOLDSMITHS COLLEGE, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON CHRIS BALDICK IntegralMusic: Languages of African American Innovation. By ALDON LYNN NIELSEN. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. 2004. Xvii+2I8 pp. $26.95. ISBN 978-o-8I73-5I39-7. Undoubtedly, this is an important book. As the second book in a projected trilogy of critical accounts of experimental Black poetry inAmerica (that began with Black Chant: Languages ofAfrican American Postmodernism (Cambridge, Cambridge Uni versity Press, 1997)), itcontinues and develops Aldon Lynn Nielsen's argument that black aesthetics play a central role in the formation ofAmerican modernity and post modernity. Indeed, the book is remarkably successful indefending itsassertion that 'black arts are at the very core of themodern' (p. I90), and itsdetailed examination MLR, 102. I, 2007 22I of thework of fiveexperimental black poets of the twentiethcentury solidly supports itsattempt tomake visible thatblackness which-it argues-modernity has covered over.Of the fivepoets discussed-Russell Atkins, Stephen Jonas,Amiri Baraka, Bob Kaufman, and JayneCortez-only Baraka might be thought of as having any real visibility within American literaryhistory, and that (ironically, perhaps) because of his association with white poetic avant-gardes such as theBlack Mountain and New York 'schools'. But Nielsen's account of thesewriters ismore than a simple attempt tobring the four lesser-known poets into thekind...

Peter Porter at 75

Looking back on my first public expression of interest in Peter Porter and his work – an interview published in Westerly in 1982, based on discussions with him in London the previous year – I notice in some of my questions the gestures of a proto-biographer. Yet I had come to Porter entirely through his work – from teaching poems in Alexander Craig's anthology 12 Poets and reading in London The Cost of Seriousness (1978) and the then newly minted volume English Subtitles (1981). It would be another nine years, with visits by me to London and Peter to Perth before Spirit in Exile: Peter Porter and his Poetry was published by Oxford University Press in 1991.

The Poet as Biographer: Peter Porter

Looking back on my first public expression of interest in Peter Porter and his work – an interview published in Westerly in 1982, based on discussions with him in London the previous year – I notice in some of my questions the gestures of a proto-biographer. Yet I had come to Porter entirely through his work – from teaching poems in Alexander Craig’s anthology 12 Poets and reading in London The Cost of Seriousness (1978) and the then newly minted volume English Subtitles (1981). It would be another nine years, with visits by me to London and Peter to Perth before Spirit in Exile: Peter Porter and his Poetry was published by Oxford University Press in 1991.

The Master of the Sentences: Style and Peter Porter

'The activity of reading, for Peter, is the battleground of virtue and vice.' Such a view of things may seem archaic indeed in times both as poetically sportive and as programmatically sceptical as our own; but I take it that the notion that reading may be an act of engagement still retains some currency. And although it is a long way from twelfth-century France to twenty-first-century England or Australia, it is not hard to see an investment in such engagement in Peter Porter's poetry – as indeed in his prose, and in his conversation; after all, the twinning of urbanity with militancy is not without precedent.

'The Lying Art': Peter Porter's Modest Proposals

I should begin with an apologia for my title. An interesting, entertaining and useful paper might be written about the satirical, Swiftian aspect of Peter Porter's poems. This isn't it. Nor am I concerned here with the imaginative and intellectual brilliance of so many Porter titles, though this too would make a fascinating subject. Rather my interest is in the idea of 'modesty' in relation to art and artists as it is articulated in Peter's work. In his book Spirit in Exile, Bruce Bennett refers to the phrase 'a modest art', which, when used by Porter to describe poetry in an interview, occasioned some controversy. John Lucas took up the cudgels to defend Porter, his beliefs and his work, in a stimulating review of Fast Forward, entitled 'A Claim to Modesty'. In approaching this subject again, I am not intending to reignite past disputations or to engage in polemics. Rather, I'd like to tease out some of the ways in which the word 'modest' might be applied to Porter's vision of poetry and poets, art and artists and to suggest why I think this is important. It is clear that Porter's work is not modest in terms of its scope, ambition or quality. The extraordinary fertility of invention, the wit, the tonal range, the mastery of both free and formal verse, the breadth of subject matter encompassed all mark this formidable body of poetry as the oeuvre of one of the finest, if not the finest, poet writing in English today. But before I am tempted into making further immodest claims or comparisons, which I know would embarrass Peter, I should embark on my proper theme. In what ways, then, might we apply the word 'modest' to Porter's poetic proposals? My contention is that in his portrayal of artists, and in particular of himself as poet, there is an anti-romantic insistence on the human failings, the limitations, the potential for mendacity, the very ordinariness of those who are driven 'howling to their art'. No one could be further from Porter's view of the poet than Shelley's 'Unacknowledged legislator of the world'. And Wordsworth's

The Simple Excellence of Peter Porter

The Simple Excellence of Peter Porter

Winning the Culture Game: Prizes, Awards, and the Rules of Art

There is no form of cultural capital so ubiquitous, so powerful, so widely talked about, and yet so little explored by scholars as the cultural prize. Prizes and awards fairly dominate the cultural landscape these days, literally tens of thousands of them vying for our notice, lists of them appearing in every resume, every promotional blurb, every feature story or obituary of practically anyone connected with the production of art.1 Indeed, the sense that the cultural universe has become super-saturated with prizes, that are more prizes than our collective cultural achievements can possibly justify, is the and recurring theme of prize punditry. Gore Vidal says that in the U.S. are more literary prizes than are writers.2 Peter Porter, the Australian poet, says are so many prizes in his country that there is hardly any writer in Sydney who has not won one.3 A British novelist jokes about attending a great literary function in Bloomsbury where he turned out to be one of only two fiction writers present never to have won a literary award, and where the other such writer was managing to go undetected by laying claim to an award of his own invention?the Pemberton-Frost Memorial Prize.4 The author thus found himself in a perfect comic inversion of the normative prize scenario: a single loser emerging from a congested field of winners. The whole literary awards scene, as numerous commentators have observed, has come to resemble the Caucus-race of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, where the Dodo announces that everybody has won, and all must have prizes.5 This is not a specifically literary circumstance, of course, but a general feature of contemporary cultural life. Woody Allen's character in Annie

Dragons in Their Pleasant Palaces

This collection, its title taken from Isaiah, continues in the same vein of prophecy as Peter Porter's last works, Millennial Fables. This time, however, the poems are lighter in tone, sometimes quirkily humorous, and the detail of the poetry more down-to-earth. The countries he visits include his land of birth, Australia, and his beloved Italy.

Spirit in Exile: Peter Porter and His Poetry

This is a biography and major critical appraisal of Peter Porter, one of Australia's most distinguished and influential writers. Resident in London since the early 1950s, Porter is one of the leading Oxford poets. His Collected Works was awarded the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize in 1983, and The Automatic Oracle won the Whitbread Prize for Poetry in 1988. In addition, Porter has written plays and been a tireless literary, opera and cinema critic. Examining the influence of his nationality and his move to Britain on his life, work and literary methods, this study also considers his relationships with such notable figures as Clive James, D.J.Enright and Gavin Ewart.