Newspaper poetry article

[Stephen Whiteside]

That's the other thing I wanted to say. I attended the state final of the Poetry Slam run by the National Library last year or the year before, because Geoffrey Graham was in it. All of the competitors impressed as being good people. They were talented and enthusiastic. The audience loved them. People around me were cheering wildly, but I felt rather flat about it all. And it took me a while to work out why. It eventually struck me that the show I was watching could have been held in New York, London, Vancouver, Auckland or Johannesburg, and it wouldn't have looked very different. There was nothing identifiably Australian about it. Or at least, to my eye there wasn't.

There was no real sense that either the performers (with the exception of Geoffrey) or the audience had any real understanding or appreciation of Australia's literary heritage. It was not referred to in any way. It was as though Paterson, Lawson, Dennis, Mary Gilmore, Miles Franklin, Henry Handel Richardson and Aeneas Gunn (to name a few) had simply never existed. As though they were of no relevance or interest whatever to contemporary Australia. And perhaps they're not. Perhaps that's just the simple fact of the matter. But I don't have to like it.

I sometimes think that the bush poetry fraternity are a bit like the monks in the Dark Ages - keepers of secret knowledge that society will one day come to value again. It'll be the bush poets they turn to then to recover all that had so nearly been lost. But perhaps I'm just being naive and romantic.

[Neville Briggs]

That's a fascinating analogy Stephen. monks in the Dark Ages. I suspect that the only secret knowledge that mediaeval monks possessed was literacy. In that case I hope you are right.

Do you know who coined the phrase " snatch defeat from the jaws of victory " ?

[keats]

Do you know who coined the phrase " snatch defeat from the jaws of victory " ?

Umm I'll hazard a guess and say the NSW State Of Origin Team?

[Neville Briggs]

Close keats it could also be the Newcastle Knights RL team. but no it was Abraham Lincoln speaking about his Civil War General, George McClellan who lost the battle of Antietam . McClellan was later sacked, which is what might be needed for failing RL teams.