At the Tuesday November 3rd Friendly Street meeting the editor of New Poets 15, Tom Sullivan, asked the entrants present to stand up and be congratulated by the Friendly Street Poets community for their skill in creating a manuscript and for having the courage to enter this important publishing competition.
Then he introduced award winning poet and Creative Writing academic from the University of Adelaide, Jill Jones who was our judge this year.
Jill spoke briefly before naming the three manuscripts to be published in New Poets 15
- Lesson in Being Mortal by poet Louise McKenna
- A Pause in the Conversation by poet Lynette Arden
- Natural Intervention by poet Sher’ee Furtak-Ellis
NEW POETS 15 Judge’s report
Making choices amongst these manuscripts involved all the usual difficulties in deciding between the many different approaches, styles, and preoccupations of the poems and how they finally came together in a manuscript that I thought was striking enough, and realised enough, to put forward for the New Poets 15 book. My final list of three was certainly not the same as my initial list of three.
Most of the manuscripts submitted this year dealt with the experiences of relationships, and place, with matters of the heart and the spirit, though there were political and philosophical edges here and there. In terms of address, most poems were either in the lyric or the narrative form, the former in a mostly a singular ‘voice’, and the latter in accessible phrasing and sequence. Of course, I took all these works on their own merits, but did wonder why there was little linguistic experiment in the mix of submissions, considering that experiment and challenge is often the territory of the ‘new’ poet, whether through form or through content, or both.
There were pleasures in these manuscripts, in those that did not make the cut as well as those that did. There was an open-ness, a kind of confessional that resonated; there was immediacy, if not always controlled; there was emotion, some of it too sentimental, but in other poems, emotion worked successfully through language; there was striking imagery; there were honest stabs at using formalist modes, that, even if they did not always come off, showed an engagement with poetry that took it beyond either the ‘cut-up prose’ way of writing or the simplistic thump of too obvious rhyme and metre.
There was a lot of what appeared to be reminiscence and memoir, which was often touching, even courageous, though I sometimes felt the poet was not sure what else to do with it apart from recounting it, that the experience had become so domesticated, so mulled over, that it belonged more in a family album or picture frame than in a poem. We all have memories, life has often been unkind to us, or to our family and friends – and …?
There were a lot of birds in the poems. What is it about poets and birds, I wonder? And a lot of cats, and various other animals.
The task at hand was a tough one. I approached the manuscripts looking beyond just the ‘good poem’ for works that:
• had an element of surprise and freshness in them, whether through imagery, narrative, wit, syntax, or all the resources of form;
• that showed an awareness of how language works for a poet, an idea of style as well as craft, no matter how loose the poet’s own conception of that might be, or how dense or light, open or formed, their work is;
• that showed some awareness of where the poet stood within the ‘new’ and also the traditions, however they conceived these.
I wanted to see poems that were not willed into some kind of concept, but showed evidence of poetry as exploration, thinking as writing, writing as thinking.
Too often poems these days are built around some ‘lesson from my life’, with an inbuilt reveal that is asking the reader (or audience) to go ‘ah’, or ‘yes, of course, that’s the way life is – gosh’. It’s as if this poem really wants you to know that it is directly communicating the beliefs or intentions of the writer/speaker without any ambivalence, and no room for a reader. These can be easy effects to produce, usually relying on a univocal voice (the ‘I’ of poem seeming to also stand for the ‘I’ of its writer), moving to closure, a summing up, a neat tag line. We’ve all done it. The contrived metaphor is often a part of this way of writing, the laboured or obvious symbol.
But, in judging for work that moves beyond this, I was looking for writers interesting in working with, and offering the reader, something more dynamic in language, so that below the last line of the poem something is still happening, that when you read it again something will still be happening for you. In other words, poetry that leaves something for the reader, that is not so overly familiar that it seems same-old same-old, nor so overly strange that it lets nothing and no-one in. As I said before: surprise, freshness!
I also, of course, wanted to see whole works that had some concept of ‘book’ or ‘collection’, not in a narrow thematic or unitary fashion, but which offered the reader the satisfaction of having read something that worked as a whole, and showed that the poet had thought about how to make something that had some ‘wholeness’ to it.
In the end I chose the following three manuscripts, all quite different in tone, form and preoccupation. These were the ones that stayed in the mind, that insisted, the ones that I could not let go. Therefore, I congratulate the writers of the following works, in no particular order:
A Lesson in Being Mortal Louise McKenna
This is the work of a writer who revels in language and what it can do, who is aware of poem making. As the last line of the last poem in this manuscript says: “what remain, are words”. There is something wise (but, thankfully, not too wise) in this work. The poems take journeys, they move, they are aware of their geography as poems as well as the world’s geography, its noise and silence, its little and large histories. This poet uses the traditional resources of rhyme, sparingly and thoughtfully, and works a free-er line also with attention, fluency and confidence.
A Pause in the Conversation Lynette Arden
These insightful and alert poems deal with the everyday – in its beguiling mix of mundanity and strangeness, through voices of family and neighbours, of people in streets and malls, of the media – as well as with the pull of natural forces and the animal world. The poems scrutinise experience with skill and elegance, using a mix of forms and more free verse styles, and a twist of humour. There is also a sense here of something hard-won, of a courage in living and writing that can face “the end game” while digging for “a new beginning”.
Natural Intervention Sher’ee Furtak-Ellis
These poems are challenging and immediate, and very raw. There is no getting around that; they pull no punches. They are full of jagged energy, of rhyme and beat, but also lyric imagery that comes out of both city and country places. This is about some hard experience, about choices you make and live with, about anger and grace, despair and celebration, some tough stuff. It also about what you don’t choose, about exploitation of land, resources and people, some more tough stuff. You know this writer will have more to say, about a lot of the bad news, for sure, but also believing that ”the cascades will be bursting”.
I would also like to note the following three manuscripts, which I also highly regarded and were on the final short list that I chose from:
Credit by Jo Dey
A Slip of the Tongue by Belinda Broughton
Tightrope Dancing by John Pfitzner
I would like to congratulate all the writers who submitted manuscripts to this award, whether finally selected or not, for having the motivation to put something together and the resolve to put it forward. I wish them ongoing pleasure in their writing and ongoing success in offering their best work to readers and audiences, here and elsewhere.
Jill Jones, Adelaide, October, 2009
