| LARRY SCHWARTZ |
| MARIETTA ELLIOTT was out of the room. Someone went in search of her. She came back, lugging a blue mug and settled down to read from typed sheets of paper. The language education consultant was among 11 local poets chosen by the London-based Australian poet Peter Porter for an eight-hour coaching session. They had been given each other’s work in advance. Each had an opportunity to read a few poems before discussion, led by Porter.”Your chance to be pilloried,” he teased someone else in the class. It was a grim and grey day in inner Melbourne. Faces were flushed from heaters fixed high on the walls. Participants sat about a large, square table, hunched over lines of poetry. Florid in a bright green corduroy jacket, Porter looked less a bard than a skilled veterinary surgeon of a kind he cites when describing his occasional role as writer-in-residence. “You sit there and they bring in their wounded sonnets and their spastic sestinas and their collapsed blank verses, et cetera,” he says, “and you help them.” But this was a very different situation. Here was an experienced and widely published group of practitioners he had selected on merit. Their lines would surely not be wounded, spastic, collapsed. This was a masterclass. It is a term most often associated with seminars conducted by musicians for advanced students but gaining currency in the literary community. Some of the group had attended such classes in recent months by Australian poets Kevin Hart and Les Murray. At 70, Porter is among the most respected of contemporary writers, as much a master poet as any. Such is his standing, there had been strong interest when the Victorian Writers’ Centre called for submissions. Porter had chosen nine women and two men from more than 20 who had submitted examples of their work. They’d come from as far afield as Hepburn Springs, paying $70 (plus membership, in some cases) for his counsel. To an outsider it might seem a tedious affair. But so solitary an endeavor is poetry, one in the class likened such a session to a semi-illicit pleasure, “like gorging yourself on chocolates”. Doris Brett and Lisa Jacobson were the most familiar names; Elliott, Connie Barber and Carla Sari take part in a Wednesday poetry group at the centre in George Street, Fitzroy; others there were: Susan Kruss, Wendy Brumley, Philip Harvey, Peter O’Mara, Tric O’Heare and Paola Bilbrough. “You always learn something from someone who is good at what they do,” one said. “When you send stuff out to magazines, it’s looked at by competent editors, but you don’t get any feedback. If you go to a class at that level, you are tapping into the current level of acceptance of that kind of writing.” Even those who confessed quietly to having little taste for Porter’s work valued his judgment. They appreciated his demeanor as much as his candor; one later noted a gentleness even in his dismissal of aspects of a poem that displeased him. Elliott read from a work in progress. She has translated her father’s diaries written until 1942, mostly on board ship while he was serving with the Dutch navy. He’d left his family behind in Holland and, because they were Jewish, feared they had been killed. She reminisces in some poems about years in hiding during the Nazi occupation. Elsewhere, she writes about growing up in Australia. There are poems in which her own experiences seem to parallel her father’s: accounts of remorse at sexual misadventure, for instance. The project is partly “a way of discovering him”. Porter was intrigued. Elliott was cared for by a devout Christian while in hiding in Holland during the Nazi occupation. “I call him `Uncle’/ He calls me/ not without tenderness/ his `little heathen’/… He tells me when the Revelation comes,/ all Jews will become Christian/ just like that.” “Very beautiful poetry, but very terrifying poetry,” Porter said, not of her verse but the Book of Revelations. “I was absolutely terrified,” Elliott said, remembering early childhood. Porter had agreed weeks earlier to my request to report on the masterclass. I was to be the proverbial fly on the wall, quietly noting the master’s lessons. Poetry is often elusive to outsiders, but I gained some inkling of the fine attention to detail in the creative process. Much of the work was still in progress, and, far from defensive, most had come in the hope that Porter might help them along to completion. “I think a good teacher of creative writing doesn’t try to impose his or her own vision of poetry on to the person who comes to be taught,” he says, “but tries to assess as quickly as possible, as a doctor does in diagnosis, where the talent, where the interest, where the difficulties, in that person’s work lie. And that will help the person. For that to be done effectively, it has to be done over a long period.” Throughout the session, Porter was candid about his likes and dislikes. “The trouble with automatic writing is once you’ve started it,” he told one of the poets, “there’s no reason you should stop it.” In hindsight and out of context, some remarks might seem harsh. “It’s like you’d been to see the Maharishi and he was having one of his off moments,” for instance. He told another that a cricket might burp instead of chirp to maintain the rhyme but avoid a cliche. He dealt with a sureness. `Tell him I disagree with it,” he said when one woman pointed out that his advice on a particular poem was contrary to that received from another literary figure. He had little time for the more self-conscious lines. “It’s a good poem. But I would purge it of anything excessively poetic.” He offered general comment as well as observation on the fine detail. The initial idea or impetus might be discarded. “A lot of poems are like skyrockets going up. What appears to be essential is often the booster…” Porter is wary of some topics. “I’m worried about the concept of what I call posthumous or retrospective indignation,” he said, commenting on a poem by Jacobson on the death of Holocaust diarist Anne Frank’s sister Margot, “getting worked up over what the Carthaginians did in 402…” He spiced his class with anecdotes. When the BBC paid poets per line for reading their work, poems “became very threadbare”. When the corporation took to paying per minute, they responded by taking their time reading their work. Porter pulled his punches and made sure to express appreciation as well as disapproval for particular lines and images. People took his criticism well; no one’s confidence would have been overly undermined. “It comes to me in confusion,” said the poet whose work was the butt of the Maharishi jibe. “There’s a lot the reader doesn’t understand and I don’t understand. I don’t think all art has to be consistent. It’s the journey.” He took the criticism in good humor and did not seemed discouraged. Porter quoted from St John. “The Bible said, `In my Father’s house are many mansions’. I’m not opposed to this way of writing but I think it’s too easy.” Can creative writing be taught? In a recent issue of Southerly, novelist Adib Khan argued against the academic teaching of creative writing. “You cannot teach imagination or creativity and what works for you doesn’t necessarily work for anyone else,” Khan said. “…Writing must always be shaped by the individual personality.” But Kate Grenville, on the other hand, said: “It’s like drawing or any other skill … I teach freeing strategies.” Porter is wary of university poetry courses and suspects they have more to do with the expression of opinions than the practicalities of writing verse. He’d like to see the founding of a Royal College of Poetry along the lines of institutions devoted to music or fine art. He sees virtue in rigorous rewriting and editing. “King Herod ought to be considered the patron saint of poets,” he suggested at one point. “He massacred the innocent. Many an innocent adjective deserves to be put to the sword.” And later: “Igor Stravinsky said, `Always be niggardly with your notes’.” He may have specific ideas on what he likes and does not, but he is not averse to hearing the opposite view. He did not see the need for Geelong poet Susan Kruss to spell out the colors of the rainbow: “… Bright pink,/ then yellow, greens and/ blues shading to purple.” But when Philip Harvey expressed his liking for those lines in her poem Rainbow, Porter conceded he may have a point. It was good, he said, for an author to choose from among diverse views, “or ignore all of them”. While Porter was considering another of her poems, Pear Tree, Kruss noted he was recommending severe editing at precisely the points where Ron Pretty, of Five Island Press, had told her she should expand. But a few days after the session, Kruss conceded that what she had written was “perhaps not what Ron intended”. While she believed she had gained from attending the masterclass she wondered why she had been selected when Porter clearly did not like this particular poem. Connie Barber had brought along copies of Enter Your House With Care, the latest of her three books of verse, and was interested to see the difference between Porter’s approach from that of Kevin Hart. Porter’s primary concern, she said, seemed to be with technique. Hart related to the “intuitive world” and seemed to be more interested in imagery, rhythm and music, she said. While he understood “the edge or the surreal”, Porter had indicated during the class that he had reservations about the interpretation of dreams. Homer, Shakespeare, Milton, Henry Vaughan, Ben Jonson and William Wordsworth; Porter cited the masters to illustrate one point or another. W.B. Yeats, Wilfred Owen, Samuel Beckett, Sylvia Plath and Wallace Stephens were also brought into service. Though he has never had the benefit of a university education, Porter gained much from the London writing group he attended from the mid-1950s to mid-1960s that briefly included Ted Hughes and Adrian Mitchell and, more regularly, Peter Redgrove, Alan Brownjohn and Edward Lucie-Smith. “It was called the Group,” he said, “Each week, we had a Roneoed sheet of poems and the individual poet would read a poem at a time. He was not allowed to intervene and say what he meant. He had to shut up until the end. All around everybody would discuss the poem. Nobody was allowed to drink while it was going on. “It sounded to some people frightfully puritanical but it worked really well. There was no restriction on what you said. You could say anything. Sometimes the criticism was extremely brutal but it was very interesting for the poet to find out what intelligent people made of his work.” Porter considered the balance between narratives in Marietta Elliott’s poems. He wondered if she had not placed too much emphasis on her father’s writing. Doris Brett, on the other hand, found herself “wanting more of him”. Elliott has struggled with her words. She wished she could be more expansive. “I think he writes better than me,” she said, of her father. The Age, 17-Jul-1999 |
Larry Schwartz Writer 