Who you are as a poet

Guthrie Martin agrees. “So many poets I know are so concerned with MFAs and prizes and getting published, making their mark,” she said. “For me, having who you are as a poet live on isn’t about any particular poem you write or your body of work. It’s about how you inspire other people to be interested in poetry. It’s just lovely to see people engaged in open, honest, friendly, generous, brilliant discussions of poetry just because they love it that much.”  (via UW News)

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1. "She had enormous energy and she was a really feisty person. And I think you see that in the way she made her poetry work, in very spare tight verse. And she not only found a readership for her verse novels, she found a very large readership," Malouf said.

   The Australian arts community is mourning the unexpected loss of one its true originals, the writer and poet Dorothy Porter, who died yesterday morning in Melbourne, aged 54, from complications from breast cancer. Porter is best known for her verse novels, among them The Monkey's Mask a thriller about a lesbian detective, published in 1994. It won the National Book Council's Poetry Prize in 1995 and was shortlisted for several other literary awards, before being published in the United States, Canada, Britain and Germany. A film version, directed by Samantha Lang and starring Susie Porter and Kelly McGillis, was released in Australia in 2001. Her verse novels What A Piece Work (1999), and Wild Surmise (2003) were shortlisted for Australia's most prestigious literary prize, the Miles Franklin Award. Porter's most recent publication was El Dorado, her fifth verse novel, about a serial child killer. It was nominated for several awards including the inaugural Prime Minister's Literary Award in 2007, and Best Fiction in the Ned Kelly Awards. "She had such a vitality and a grasp of life," said David Malouf, who remembers teaching Porter at Sydney University when she was a first-year student. "She had enormous energy and she was a really feisty person. And I think you see that in the way she made her poetry work, in very spare tight verse. And she not only found a readership for her verse novels, she found a very large readership," Malouf said. "It's just very sad, and I think there'll be a lot of people out there who admire her, and are fond of her and will miss her very much." Porter, whose talents as a writer found many outlets, including fiction for young adults and libretti for chamber opera, was collaborating on a rock opera called January with Tim Finn at the time of her passing. "I was extremely shocked and saddened," Finn said. "We heard this morning. We knew she was ill but we didn't how ill. She was a very real person, with no bullshit, and this raw honesty. You would want to meet her on that level. Her work was streetwise and sensuous. She could write with heightened language, and never be waffly or precious, and there was always the unexpected image. She was a really great writer." via The Sydney Morning Herald | Matthew Buchanan Dorothy Porter Porter at Poetry International Web Australian Humanities Review
   
2. The same people who are murdered slowly in the mechanized slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing, drinking, dancing, making love, holding the streets, picking up weapons and inventing a new poetry. ~ Raoul Vaneigem
3. With dimmed lights, lace, and masks, the Poetry Brothel is anything but a conventional poetry reading, and maybe that's why it seducing so many New Yorkers. NY1's Stephanie Simon filed the following report on a new kind of poetry party that is downright risqué. via NY1
4. To celebrate National Poetry Day, BBC News website readers have been sending in their poems on the credit crunch. via BBC
5. Poetry Animations via YouTube

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