ABPA - Australian Bush Poets Association

Yes, the us and them thing is self-defeating. Most importantly I think is for, not just kids, but anyone who writes, to write for the love and enjoyment of it irregardless of who inevitably will label it "good", "bad" or "incorrect". As Matt said, to enjoy "just muckin' around with words" is all it is. Rejoice in the fact that they are writing.

Unfortunately my internet is too slow to have a look at the winning kids' poems but i will when i can. I remember reading the Dorothea Mackellar winners last year and was very impressed.

When my daughter was in primary school she entered a short story competition. Her story was a very well crafted piece but didn't win. I think her story was about suicide and although i thought it was the best written story, the judges obviously didn't like the topic or want to publish it.

Bob I think a lot of teenagers write poems but would never share them. It's a bit like a diary, very private, and a way of expressing their inner most feelings and thoughts. It's a phase they go through. Quite a few men have admitted to me that they wrote soppy love poems when they were teenagers and had lost the love of their lives. They are not men who write poetry now.

And like Matt and Marty, i just like words - reading a beautifully crafted piece - whether it be poetry, a line, or a paragraph can make my heart skip a beat. Writing and arranging words, being able to convey a message, and being happy with the result is a natural high and I don't care who else does or doesn't like it (it's my high not anyone else's).

And the way to get kids to love words is read to them - a lot. It's a life long gift to be able to read and write.

Heather

warooa wrote:the us and them thing is self-defeating

It sure is.

Unless it's Mozart v Eric Clapton. That's different.

Very good Nev, glad to see you've cheered up, and realised that Clapton is God

Heather's comment about the judges not being able to cope with her daughter's short story about suicide is interesting. One of the organisers at Ipswich referred to an earlier year when many of the awarded poems were particularly dark in terms of their subject matter, and it's worth going back to the question of what we expect young people to write about. For example, according to the Australian Research Council, it's estimated that the suicide rates in Australia for children under 15 increased by about 90% between the 1960s and 1990s. There could be all sorts of reasons for this...a greater incidence of family breakdowns, more awareness of national and global events via access to modern technology, changing social and peer pressure, and so on. Today's kids certainly live a vastly different life to my relatively cloistered upbringing in the years after the war.

But do we still expect them to write cheery little verses about sunsets, pets, family holidays and the like? The unreality of this hit me when reading "Underage Marriages" from the Dorothea Mackellar Awards, particularly the final few lines:

I should have known better
He was older
He came to me
And stripped me of my clothes and my innocence

I am Parvana
I am nine years old
I am married

This is a junior secondary student's work and we can only wonder at her (presumably) background and what motivated her to write the poem. As the judge said: "This work astounds me."

David

I haven't had a look at the poems, only these comments (which I've also speed read), so I might be off the mark, but there one point I think might be worth making, and that is that I do believe there is a large gulf between primary and secondary students in this regard. I know that rhyming verse has much more appeal for primary than for secondary students. This is also reflected in the entries of bush verse competitions, I believe Toolangi, for example, has, for several years, had at least a few entries from primary students, but virtually nothing from secondary. I also know from my own experience visiting schools that primary school students are much more receptive to rhyming verse.

Interesting comment David about the pem written by that young 9 year old lass - one of the young girls from the Afghan Womens Writing Project is 'Seeta' for security reasons not her real name and she shared a poem with the TAT magazine It really touched my heart - here it is - a dark subject indeed

Interesting comment Stephen about children from primary to secondary.

One person has advanced the theory that small children are creative and imaginative naturally, when they get older they are taught to be " correct " which dampens their interest in creative efforts.

My theory is that children as they move from primary to secondary come under the pervasive influence of the rock music culture, which focuses on the supposed superiority of the contemporary ( it's all about todays top ten hits, everything else is SO yesterday ) which, I believe kills their appreciation of culture. I think that to appreciate something like poetry we need to be able to look back in order to move forward. Looking at some of the publicised antics of todays rock " stars " it seems that the rock music youth culture is mainly pushed by venal and narcissistic pretention, not the impulse for creative reflection.

A few are blessed with the insight to overcome.

Stephen: In the case of these two competitions, hardly any of the awarded primary entries were rhyming verse. Of course, a lot of the other entries (there were about 500 from children altogether, about the same as the adult numbers from memory) might have been, in which case the question would be why so few of them won prizes. One of the big unknowns in a competition which accepts any form of poetry is the attitude of the judge(s) towards rhyming verse...it may be something which he/she is not comfortable with. At least in a bush poetry competition you know that the judge enjoys rhyming verse, and the major unknown is what biases might exist in terms of subject-matter.

Maureen: Although the subject of the poem was only nine, the author was a junior secondary student, so was probably about fourteen. And yes, Seeta's poem does indeed deal with another disturbing issue. Children are clearly not afraid to tackle topics that many adults would shy away from.

Neville: One of the interesting things about today's music culture is the prevalence of rap music, which is all about rhyming lyrics (often very rough!), so you might expect secondary kids to be right into creative attempts at rhyming poetry. But as Stephen indicates, in this year's Toolangi competition there wasn't a single secondary entry, and last year I think there was only one.

Cheers
David