Tag: Mike Ladd

A gift adrift: what the loss of RN’s Poetica means to poets

Australia’s long-running literary flagship program – Poetica on Radio National (RN) – is slated for axing in 2015. It’s one more casualty of the cuts to the ABC budget, announced last week.

For the first time since 1946, ABC Radio will be without a dedicated poetry program.

Barry Hill, a poet and radio critic for The Age from 1978 to 1990, placed the blame not with the Government but squarely on the broadcaster’s shoulders: “Shamelessly,” he wrote in The Age, “the Australian Broadcasting Corporation beheaded poetry”.

Hill points beyond the budget to what he sees as the “mega culprits”. These include the ABC’s “managerial corporate ethos” and its “insipid grasp of what might be called a critical culture”.

Even if true, it hasn’t always been the case.

Poetry has had a safe home on radio since the ABC’s inception on July 1 1932 – as Mike Ladd details in his 75th anniversary of ABC Radio – when the bells of Sydney’s General Post Office first were broadcast to the nation.

Prime Minister Joseph Lyons issued the station with a charter to “provide information and entertainment, culture and gaiety” while serving “all sections and to satisfy the diversified tastes of the public”.

Early on, as Ladd recounts, poetry appeared on ABC radio in the form of (usually Shakespearean) dramas. Douglas Stewart was the first Australian author to have his verse dramas broadcast – beginning with The Fire on the Snow in 1941 and Ned Kelly in 1942 – followed by Colin Thiele, Rosemary Dobson and others.

In 1946 John Thompson – poet, editor and moreover the father of actor Jack Thompson – founded Australia’s first weekly program dedicated to poetry. Quality Street ran for an impressive 27 years before being replaced by Sunday Night Radio 2 in 1973.

Founded by Richard Connelly, Julie Anne Ford, and Rodney Wetherell, Sunday Night Radio 2 ran regular, full-length features on poetry, as did its 1981 successor, Radio Helicon, whose executive producer was at one time the poet John Tranter.

Another long-running program, The Poet’s Tongue, appeared in 1957 and ran until 1986. In the early days the producers drew on actors, Judy Davis among them, to perform the poems. Soon the program employed the more contemporary idea of featuring the poets themselves to read and discuss their work.

In 1986 the Poet’s Tongue was replaced by Richard Buckham’s The Poetry Feature, a 30-minute segment slotted into the Sunday Fictions, which ran until 1994. After a brief poetry-free stint following the axing of Sunday Fictions, a program called Box Seat ran for a couple of years before morphing into Poetica in 1997.

Airing every Saturday afternoon since 1997, Poetica has produced more than 900 programs, 60% of which have featured Australian poets. At its peak it reached 90,000 listeners per week. According to some sources it currently attracts as many as 60,000 listeners per week, with more on the internet.

Produced by Mike Ladd, Poetica draws on live readings, studio-based poetry features and on-location recordings. It is admired in the English-speaking world for the way it presents poetry, embedded in rich soundscapes, carefully crafted to enhance comprehension and heighten the listener’s experience of the poem.

Not only has Poetica brought poetry to a broad audience, it has also amassed a free online archive from which past programs can be downloaded by researchers and the general public. And not to be overstated, it has provided much-needed exposure for poetry publishers and a source of income for poets in the form of copyright fees.

A freelance radio producer, Prithvi Varatharajan, described the axing of Poetica to me as “a huge loss to Australian audiences”. He elaborates:

George Orwell, in his essay Poetry and the Microphone, spoke about the ‘possibilities of the radio as a means of popularising poetry’. Poetica was doing just this in Australia, and the overwhelming majority of online feedback shows just how appreciative audiences have been of the program. We can only hope that there is some room for poetry on the ABC in the future, after Poetica is gone.

It has been suggested that RN will replace Poetica – along with its axed cousins, Bush Telegraph, Into the Music, Hindsight and 360 Documentaries – with a multi-purpose, weekday feature-slot that will run commissioned 28-minute radio documentaries from freelance producers.

Certainly a new program offers consolation, but in its contraction of scope and expertise the successor looks to be far from commensurate with the cultural gift that was Poetica.The Conversation

*

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Foreword: australian poetry journal 2.2 #art

Not surprisingly – poets being aural creatures – the #art issue of Australian Poetry Journal thrums with music. In Philip Hammial’s ‘Walk that Walk’ Afro-Cuban jazz-king Machito (Crowded Fingers) Smith thinks, along with Zelda Fitzgerald, that ‘Al Jolson is greater than Jesus’. In Philip Salom’s ‘Counterpoint with Red’ Glenn Gould guns through Bach in a triptych of waltzes showcasing the pianist’s architectural tics and copious pharmaceutical predilections. ‘The purpose of art’, Gould wrote in 1962, ‘is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity’. Always more concerned with the effects of art than the product itself, Gould argued that art’s ‘justification’ (should it need one) is ‘the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men’.

Screen Shot 2012-11-27 at 12.57.24 PM

issue 2 volume 2 2012

Not surprisingly – poets being aural creatures – the #art issue of Australian Poetry Journal thrums with music. In Philip Hammial’s ‘Walk that Walk’ Afro-Cuban jazz-king Machito (Crowded Fingers) Smith thinks, along with Zelda Fitzgerald, that ‘Al Jolson is greater than Jesus’. In Philip Salom’s ‘Counterpoint with Red’ Glenn Gould guns through Bach in a triptych of waltzes showcasing the pianist’s architectural tics and copious pharmaceutical predilections. ‘The purpose of art’, Gould wrote in 1962, ‘is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity’. Always more concerned with the effects of art than the product itself, Gould argued that art’s ‘justification’ (should it need one) is ‘the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men’ – a fire that Peter Lach-Newinsky’s poem, ‘Ode to Joy’, extends to the hearts of women who hummed, in solidarity, Beethoven’s ‘bright other half of humanity’s dream’ in Tiananmen Square and outside the gates of Pinochet’s prisons.

‘Phrases hungering for another’s art’ – as Kevin Gillam calls the ekphrastic impulse in ‘Figue’ – stand at the heart of many poems gathered here. In ‘Gallery’ Mike Ladd wants to step into a painting by Camille Pissaro, circa 1901, to walk through a foggy morning, pink and blue, along the Seine. He’d warn women in black shawls that ‘the Wars were coming’ but ‘no one would listen’. Dispensing proprieties Brenda Saunders plonks herself inside Edward Hopper’s Room in New York and ‘tinkles a few notes’ on the piano, while Mark Tredinnick settles behind Matisse’s eyes to study ‘the lazy phrase’ of his model displayed across the sofa: ‘Every piece of the carnal world’, he observes, ‘takes the shape of a question’. Meanwhile in ‘Schmerz: An Exhibition’ Susanne Gannon interrogates the artsy idea that ‘pain builds community’ as she walks through a Berlin gallery housing, among other horrors, Marina Abramović’s ‘cutting edge’ performance in which she carves a star into her belly. Interleafed among European greats, the shock of the local arrives in Caitlin Maling’s ‘At the Ballarat Art Gallery’ – yet even Nolan’s Leda, it must be said,has its origins in the elsewhere.

As for the state of our art form – poetry – it appears to be marked, at least by these poems, by a sense of absenteeism: Davina Allison laments the absence of poets in her distressed address to the abused boys of St Joseph’s Industrial School in Ireland’s Letterfrack; Rosanna Licari finds Umberto Saba locked in silence on a footpath he once walked in Trieste; and Andy Jackson’s ‘Edith’ shrinks poets to something we talk about when ‘the dreadful silence’ presses in. With ‘The Perfect Malware’ Christian Bök returns to the pages of APJ with a tour de force that splits the nucleus: ‘What can poetry imagine’, he asks, ‘when poetry itself has gone extinct?’ But Bök’s black view gleams in the dark – ‘Let the death of verse be dated by the half-life of uranium-238’ – advancing a calculation that grants the poem another 4.47 billion years.

In ‘Francis Webb at Balls Head’ Robert Adamson constructs an arresting portrait of one of Australia’s greatest poets, whom Sir Herbert Read also deemed ‘one of the most unjustly neglected poets of the [last] century’ – an unhappy charge Adamson is bent on remedying in his ‘Spotlight on Francis Webb’ here and his criticism beyond these pages. In ‘Framing the Scene’ Kate Lilley looks at new books by Julie Chevalier and David McCooey; while in Stuart Cooke’s ‘Bright Nodes of Colour’, Lilley – through an unavoidable reshuffling – finds herself under review alongside Peter Rose. APJ’s resident critic, Martin Duwell, returns with a study of the ‘towering’ if ‘uncomfortable’ presence of John Shaw Neilson and finds Australian poetry’s most famous orange tree as luminous as ever.

In the previous issue of APJ David McCooey surveyed the digital world of poetry apps: in this issue Kerry Kilner and Angela Gardner look at the more tangible and fragrant world of artist’s books – from William Blake to Chris Wallace-Crabbe – as embodying the twin concepts of the book as text and the book as object. Fiona Scotney’s interview rounds out the issue with Laurie Duggan’s frank recollection of his poetry-writing days in Ken Bolton’s dilapidated cottage in Coalcliffe, New South Wales – which links serendipitously to Iman Mersal’s gorgeous poem, ‘The Idea of Houses’: ‘Let a house be a place whose bad lighting you do not notice’, she writes making a case for poetic vision, ‘a wall whose cracks widen until one day you begin to think of them as a substitute for doors’.

♦

Order a copy

you might also like

Australian Poetry Journal forewords
The Best Australian Poetry forewords

%d bloggers like this: