ABPA - Australian Bush Poets Association

Well done Marty look forward to reading your poem.

Also a special congratulation to Peter Blyth who was the overall performance champion as well.

Cheers Terry

Quite remiss of me.
Congratulations to David Brenda and Irene.

Marty huge congratulations. Can you send the poem through to me at <halenda@live.com.au> for inclusion on the ABPA website in Award Winning Poety?
Then I'll get the required permission etc.
Again, sincere congratulations to you and also to David, Terry and Irene.
Brenda

Terry has reproduced the judges report from the WABP written competition.

I did not enter this competition myself but the Report is of interest to me as an amateur poet who is trying to learn from the experts ... and I guess judges are experts.?

Hmmm.. firstly I am amazed that "profanity" is acceptable in any way or form! Personally I strongly believe profanity does not belong in the noble world of bush poetry, be it done in the name of art, effect, or whatever. It is always inappropriate. It brings our craft down.

Trying to excuse it by saying a poem is brutal and thus justifies it is to be an apologist for profanity... and that is not a medal I would personally care to wear with pride. Judge or no judge.

Profanity belongs on the garbage dump. There is simply NO justification or excuse for it. Never ever in Bush Poetry. Don't we encourage our children to read bush poetry?

If one needs to use profane language, by all means go down to the pub with your mates, have a few drinks and in MALE company do your worst!... but keep profanity out of Bush Poetry and for heaven sake do not reward it with a First Prize.!

Oops! quite remiss of me, I forgot to pass on Congratulations to David, Brenda & Irene,
but have now amended my original post.

Probably still in holiday mode after the trip down south.

Terry

Well done everyone.

I shall not comment on the strident criticism.......ooops...I guess I did.. BUGGER!



Mal

Nuthin Happened ??????? anyway you are the one who commented about Martins lack of DRESS sense.


Bob

Matty.....

From a purely personal viewpoint I can understand Gary’s objection to profanity. I don’t use the common four-letter words in conversation, and never have, and I loathe the swearing-as-punctuation habits that have developed in films and in the general public arena (check out any schoolyard!).

But, from a poetic point of view, there is a paradox. The language of the people and places we commonly write about is naturally profane. To pretend that cattlemen (and women…profanity isn’t exclusively a male domain), drovers, shearers, stockmen et.al. don’t (and didn’t) swear is simply absurd. And yet we are expected to sanitise our verse and create a strange world where nobody says anything stronger than ‘bloody’, even in extreme situations. We write about history as if it had been magically wiped clean of the harshness at the heart of a significant part of its language. That particularly applies to the theatre of war. What does it say about truth if we are only depicting an illusion of reality?

The worry, of course, is that it will become what some have criticised in free verse…poetry that relies too much on crudity to achieve an effect. If the floodgates are opened, how do we control what happens? I guess that depends on the common sense of everyone involved, and it’d be nice to think that there’s enough of that to go around.

Because it’s important to realise that we face a situation that isn’t clearly defined and restricts the legitimacy of what we write. A few years ago I wrote a poem about a shearer in which I described in some detail the actual physical shearing process. I entered it in a competition and was subsequently contacted by an organiser and asked to change two of the words in the poem. To do so I would have had to describe the shearer as being covered in urine and excrement, which would have been quite ludicrous in the circumstances, not to mention difficult in terms of metre. So I refused, and the poem was excluded. This wasn’t gratuitous swearing, it was simply using the most appropriate words to describe a dirty, messy occupation. Yet it was frowned upon.

I don’t think it’s pushing things too far here to say that there is a question of credibility at stake. The problem comes, as with any artistic endeavour, in deciding when something is used legitimately in context as opposed to being exploited for shallow sensationalism. In competitions, that means it comes down to a judge’s decision. As has happened in this instance.

David (and thanks to all for the congrats)

Thank you David for your statements about swearing. And yes being a bushman like myself and many others we do swear but not foul words as some of you may think, mind you there are exceptions like when your hand or body parts get jammed, but in our common speech we do use swear words as these word do portray what we are saying descriptively. But we still speak with respect to the opposite sex, unlike the often heard school yard kids and adults


bill the old battler

As per usual, David Campbell has eloquently put the issue into context, and congratulations to you, Brenda, Terry and Irene.

Marty