‘I think my poetry is about passion and extremes. Curiosity and a verbal exhilaration fuel it. When it works, it has a theme and a charge that some readers have forgotten poetry can have.’
So said Dorothy Porter when I interviewed her back in 2000 for the Perth Writers Festival she was attending here in Perth. She was an abrupt woman. Determined. Concise. As a young writer I was intimidated by her, but so in awe of her majesty, of the language she created and commanded.
That’s why her sudden death on Wednesday December 10 came as shock – not only to myself but the Australian writing community at large. She passed away from complications from to breast cancer. At the age of 54. It’s an incredibly young age in today’s society, but an age by which Porter had already written seven collections of poetry and published five verse novels, these latter endeavours the yardstick by which she’d not only proven her worth but through which she’d breathed fresh life into poetry itself.
Dorothy Porter’s goal back in 1990 was to put poetry back on the bestseller list. She achieved this in 1994 with her second verse novel, The Monkey’s Mask, which was later released as a movie and a dramatization in London. She was then short-listed for the prestigious Miles Franklin Award, again with another two of her verse novels: What a Piece of Work in 2000 and the interstellar adventure that was Wild Surmise in 2003 (which also won the Premier’s Award in South Australia).
Her latest verse novel, El Dorado, was released last year and had been short-listed for a number of prizes. These included the Dinny O’Hearn Poetry Prize (which The Monkey’s Mask won in 1994) and the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature. True to her form – and her ability to cross-genres with all the success and gusto of the skilled writer she was – the verse novel had even been short-listed for Best Fiction in the Ned Kelly Awards and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award… for fiction, naturally.
The beauty of Porter’s poetry is that each poem in each book is a compact nucleus of energy and echo. Emotion is evoked through her almost frugal use of language, which in turn elicits introspection from the reader as concepts unfold via tiny, concise phrases. At the time I interviewed her I wrote in my notes that ‘her poetry is filled with white hot lines, little tripwires which readers stumble over or pivot across’. Her work still contains this magma, this glow, this exuberance. When she wrote, she did so with magnitude. She wrote as though performing diathermy, searing through the skin and letting nothing weep or bleed or spill over or away from the body whose inner workings she was revealing. In her writing, she segments with the skill of a surgeon.
‘I think people are losing grasp of the idea of the imagination, and the idea that the writer uses his or her imagination,’ Porter said of her book What a Piece of Work and how she transgressed boundaries of character and voice, at times even attempting triple somersaults, like a woman adopting a man’s voice who then imagines he’s a woman.
‘We are getting absolutely constricted by the idea of writing as authenticity i.e. autobiography,’ she added. ‘And I’m clearly not a mad male psychiatrist or even Gil from The Monkey’s Mask, or an Egyptian pharaoh, or the character in my next book who is an astrobiologist. I’m none of these people. I think that for me that the most wonderful aspect of the imagination and the most pertinent aspect of feminism – likewise with the gay and lesbian movement – is liberty and freedom. It’s not waving the flag of authenticity the whole time. And for me that is my authenticity, the power of my imagination.
‘I have to be honest with you though’ she confided at the time, ‘I find the voice of a straight woman tough. Frequently I’ve done a gay man or a bisexual man. I’ve done lesbian women, bisexual women, and even straight men. Straight women? That is something I haven’t explored. There’s a little of it in my lyrical poetry from my own erotic experiences with men, but it’s not something I’ve let rip with in my dramatic poetry.’
Each of Porter’s verse novels took about four years to complete. They were each written completely out of sequence, and written in a more intuitive way as things became apparent or illuminated themselves to her. At one point during the course of the interview with her, Porter compared herself and her writing process to that of a mad scientist or, more aptly, Mr Hyde. A very succinct comparison, particularly since she so often delved into the dark depths of the human psyche, toying with the perverse and immense while illustrating more delicate moments, like love and longing.
‘I think characterisation can be a form of alchemy,’ Porter explained, ‘and the laboratory is your own personality, and the experiments you make with what you know about yourself to create something different, and the different parts of yourself you put in test-tubes to mix and see if you can come up with a separate personality. A Mr Hyde if you like. And I think I created a Mr Hyde in my latest book. And of course he is my own creation so he has a tenuous plasmic connection to me, but he is not me. So the whole thing can be quite serious, and quite addictive too.’
Even as I write this I can feel myself well. I can feel myself tip slightly. Why? Because I admire the economy that is Dorothy Porter, and as a poet I aspire to be as concise as she is. She is not only an inspiration, but a role model. Who else among the poetry community sits down and decides that yes, poetry needs to be back on the bestseller list… and then achieves said goal. That constitutes a role model. Dorothy Porter is that role model.
Scott-Patrick Mitchell
Dorothy Porter’s Bibliography
Poetry
Little Hoodlum (1975)
Bison (1979)
The Night Parrot (1984)
Driving Too Fast (1989)
Crete (1996)
Other Worlds (2001)
Poems January-August 2004 (2004)
Verse-Novels
Akhenaten (1991)
The Monkey’s Mask (1994)
what a piece of work (1999)
Wild Surmise (2002)
El Dorado (2007)
Libretti
The Ghost Wife
The Eternity Man
Young Adult Fiction
Rookwood (1991)
The Witch Number (1993)
What are you memories of Dorothy Porter, or your favourite poems of hers. Please, feel free to leave a comment, especially if it’s a tribute to Ms Porter herself….
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