I do like poetry, but I have to be in the mood to read it, and I admit that I haven’t read much Australian poetry since I left school. I like serious poetry, rich in allusion and metaphor, and I do re-read the ones I know best: Paradise Lost, Four Quartets, and Spenser’s Faerie Queene. I think I like these ones because we studied them in depth at Uni so they are familiar and comprehensible to me, yet rich enough for me to discover new insights each time I read them. But they’re not Australian…
At left and right you can see the sum total of my Oz Poetry shelf: Favourite Australian Poems and The Penguin Book of Australian Poetry. However the good news is that the Australian Poetry Library has just been launched and it is a brilliant treasure trove of beaut Australian poetry. I’ve always wanted to read A.D. Hope and he’s one of four featured poets on the home page at the moment, so I’ll be dipping into the site from time to time.
Oh, thanks for this Lisa … I’m out of touch after 3 weeks in Japan, 1 week at home and now my first of two weeks in Newman. I’ll dip into this site too. I’ve been wanting to feature more poetry on Monday musings so I might use this site for one of those posts.
By: whisperinggums on June 12, 2011
at 11:46 am
Welcome home, Sue! I’ll look forward to your musing about this…it’s a terrific resource.
By: Lisa Hill on June 12, 2011
at 6:46 pm
That’s brilliant. It’s good to see they’ve finally done this — the Americans have had some good poetry sites out for years. On the subject of ink-and-paper anthologies, my own Australian favourite is the 1996 New Oxford Book of Australian Verse, edited by Les Murray. He’s an intelligent editor.
By: DKS on June 13, 2011
at 3:21 am
Hello Deane, it’s good to hear from you.
That sounds like a good collection to look out for, but what I’d really like is for someone to do a sort of ‘poem of the week or month’ maybe in the weekend papers and/or on line. Our weekend papers publish one a week, and I read most of them, but it’s just the poem,it’s only contemporary poetry and there’s no commentary about it, and (correct me if I’m wrong, readers) it’s not online.
The Guardian does poetry really well: They have a dedicated Poetry page, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/poetry and each week they feature a poem and tease out some of its features and meanings for amateur readers who don’t know too much about poetry i.e. people like me. They also run a Poetry workshop http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/series/poetryworkshop for people who fancy themselves as poets. I’d love it if someone like Peter Craven did this featuring only Australian and New Zealand poetry. He writes an occasional series about the grand old classics (this week it was War and Peace) and they are a joy to read.
By: Lisa Hill on June 13, 2011
at 7:41 am
The poetry site is very impressive… I was pointed in its direction by someone’s tweet a couple of weeks ago. It’s very clever, too, in terms of not allowing you to cut and paste the copy, you have to pay for it, thereby generating income for the poets. It’s only a dollar or two per poem, and if you really wanted to you could type them out yourself, but anything that makes it difficult for people to “steal” copyrighted work earns a thumbs up in my eyes.
By: kimbofo on June 13, 2011
at 7:35 am
Hello Kim – yes, that is smart, and the best thing about it IMO is that opportunity for an income stream. Publishers rarely publish poems any more because, let’s face it, it doesn’t sell enough to cover their costs. So a site like this is a brilliant solution.
And – I’ve only just thought of this – another way for poets to market their work would be for them to self-publish them for the Kindle and other eBook readers. I keep reading about authors who are selling their novels for about $3 for the Kindle, bypassing the traditional publishers entirely and making more money than they would out of royalties. They still have to get their work professionally edited and that costs money and of course they have to do the marketing, but it’s not a bad solution when publishers don’t want to know about your work.
The only problem with this kind of self-publishing that I can see is the loss of the filtering process. When a reader buys a professionally published book, at least you know that the dross has been filtered out, and the publisher signposts what kind of book it is with the cover art and a professionally written blurb.
By: Lisa Hill on June 13, 2011
at 7:53 am
Agree… Although I recently put a disclaimer on my blog to say I would no longer review self-published work. It was in reaction to several bad experiences, but also a sudden onslaught for requests in my inbox. Honestly, I was getting a dozen or more a week, and it is heartbreaking to tell people I simply don’t have the bandwidth/time/energy to read their works of art, but I have to look after my sanity, hence the new policy.
By: kimbofo on June 14, 2011
at 3:55 am
I’ve had the same disclaimer in my review policy for a while, but I still got caught with one recently. I feel bad about it because I know authors work hard and sometimes very good writers just don’t make it through the slushpile, but like you, I’ve got limited time for reading and my experience with self-published novels hasn’t been a happy one.
Also, I feel that editors deserve my support for the work they do. I know that I’ve given some of them a hard time here on this blog, but overall I value the work they do in bringing good production values to the works I read. Bypassing them to read self-published works is like admitting that the role of editor isn’t necessary when in fact my POV is that it’s crucial. I want publishing houses to value it too, to pay for good staff, to give them time to do their job properly and to credit them on the verso page too!
By: Lisa Hill on June 14, 2011
at 9:36 pm
[...] thanks to Lisa of ANZLitLovers for drawing my attention to this [...]
By: Monday musings on Australian literature: Australian Poetry Library (online) « Whispering Gums on July 11, 2011
at 11:35 pm