.....free verse stuff.I think it is an invaluable learning practice for people like us who pursue the humble bush poetry regime to nevertheless read widely and include contemporary stuff.
After doing a lot of research and thinking about good writing, I have come to the belief that a most valuable exercise is to read contemporary poetry with the purpose of learning how they show and not tell. Their flexible approach to rhyme and metre I guess grates on bush poetry afficionados, and bush poets have already decided that they won't accommodate that approach. Doesn't matter, for the purpose of my suggested exercise you can ignore that feature.
But what I suggest and urge is that you read contemporary poetry and see how they make vivid and strong images without relying as much on adjectives and adverbs as bush poetry seems to do. On that score, the good contemporary poets ( Kevin Hart, Jamie Grant, Les Murray, Judith Beveridge) have a lot that we can learn from.
Despite the accolades for bush poetry winners on their adept use of colourful adjectives, the over reliance on adjectives and adverbs tends to weaken the power of poetic expression. All poets put them in as far as I can see, but I have come to believe that good poetry writing happens when these parts of speech are pruned to a minimum in favour of metaphor, similes and plain direct nouns and verbs. In other words, things doing things make more powerful images than just sentiments about things.
" I had written him a letter " says Banjo, and everybody remembers that line.
" Tall and freckled and sandy, face of a country lout, this was the picture of Andy, Middleton's rouseabout " Just a few words from Henry Lawson, and we get the picture !
One day I might begin to be able to do it.
