Dennis Haskell

Australian Poet and Literary Scholar

News & Events

Recent events

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In October Dennis joined Annamaria Weldon in reading a selection of their poetry in Valletta for the University of Malta.

Later in October he spoke on a panel at the Australian Short Story Festival, held at the Centre for Stories in Northbridge, Perth. The Panel with Marcella Polain and Rosemary Sayer, all Committee members of the Perth PEN Centre, concerned the power of the word and its conflicts with the sword.

 

In early November Dennis was Distinguished Visiting Professor at the International Islamic University in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He gave talks, met members of the English Department as well as the Rector and Deputy Rector of the University, conducted a poetry workshop and judged a poetry competition.

Perth PEN Centre

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With a number of other Perth writers, Dennis is working to create a Perth Centre of PEN International. Founded in the 1920s, with John Galsworthy as its first President. PEN International is a writers organisation which works to promote literature and responsible freedom of expression, including activities to free writers imprisoned under unjust censorship laws. Almost 150 PEN centres exist in 100 countries, including in Sydney and Melbourne.

 

We had an empty chair on stage, symbolising a writer in prison, at four sessions of the Perth Writers Festival, and have received over 80 expressions of interest. If you wish to join us or learn more, please email perthpen@gmail.com

We have a fundraiser with Priya Basil (Berlin) and Sisonke Msimang (South Africa) at 6.30pm on Thursday 5 April at the Centre for Stories, 100 Aberdeen St, Northbridge; cost $20/$16 unwaged. Please feel very welcome to come but register at www.centreforstories.com/events

Bards in Bars

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With Lucy Dougan, Matt Norman, and Annamaria Weldon, Dennis will be giving a reading of his work at the annual conference of the national English and Literacy Teachers Association – 6pm on 9 July in Wolf Lane, Perth CBD.

From Beats to the Summer of Love

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On 31 January at South Perth Library Dennis was participating Chair on a panel with Maggie van Puten, Mar Bucknell and Andrew Burke about poetry from the Beats to the Summer of Love. The panel discussed poetry from the 1950s and 1960s in the USA, the UK, and Australia, particularly Western Australia.

Shakespeare Club of WA

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Dennis will be talking to the Shakespeare Club of WA at 2.15 on Saturday 17 June, 2017 about the importance of Elizabethan and Jacobean poetry to contemporary poets and about differences between their situations and ours.

In an influential essay of 1921 T S Eliot praised “the later Elizabethan and early Jacobean poets” for the way that “their mode of feeling was directly and freshly altered by their reading and thought” and for their “direct sensuous apprehension of thought” . Eliot’s ideas provided the foundation of modern poetry and all poets since have been affected by it. Elizabethan poetry is notable for its intelligence (as is Eliot’s) and its wrestling with ideas and use of paradox has accorded with contemporary poets’ sense of the complexity of the world and the uncertainty of any philosophical beliefs. On the other hand, much has happened in the four centuries since the Elizabethans wrote, most importantly I think, the revolution of Romanticism, which Eliot was largely reacting against. Some aspects of Elizabethan thought and poetic technique have much to offer contemporary poets but other aspects seem unworkable today.
I will explore these ideas through a reading of a few Elizabethan and Romantic poems plus one of Eliot’s, and through comments on some of my own poetry. I will bring copies of my own poems to the meeting but it would be helpful if those attending could read in advance the following poems (which are readily available in poetry anthologies):
Shakespeare’s sonnet “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day”; Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnet no. 1 in “Astrophil and Stella”; Donne’s “The Good Morrow”; Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight”; and Eliot’s “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock”.

Perth Poetry Festival

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Dennis Haskell will be one of the featured poets at the Perth Poetry Festival for 2017. For Festival details see: https://wapoets.wordpress.com/perth-poetry-festival/2017-festival-poets-biographies/

Amongst other activities Dennis will conduct a workshop on “The Possibilities of Rhyme”:

The Possibilities of Rhyme

This workshop follows my talk for the 2016 Poetry Festival and looks at the possibilities of rhyme for contemporary poets. Rhyme over the last one hundred years has had a checkered career; it was abjured during the Modernist period and afterwards, beginning with T S Eliot and Ezra Pound’s call for a revolution in the writing of verse. Eliot wrote, “it is possible that excessive devotion to rhyme has thickened the English ear” and that “When the comforting echo of rhyme is removed, success or failure in the choice of words, in the sentence structure, in the order, is at once more apparent”. Eliot and Pound later tried to turn back the tide but couldn’t, so that free verse has been the dominant form of English poetry for over a century.

This has been less true in English verse than in American and Australian, suggesting that social conditions have an effect on the usability of rhyme. We live in an age of pop music and advertising slogans, which help make strong rhymes jingle in our ears. Rhyme is prominent in rap and in slam poetry but this workshop is concerned with poetry written principally to be read on the page. Rhyme is part of the music of language and has possibilities beyond strong rhyme, in part-rhyme, internal rhyme and assonance that can add significantly to the power of a contemporary poem.

The workshop will begin with consideration of what some recent and contemporary poets have done with rhyme, and then consider participants’ work. You are asked to submit (beforehand if possible) one short poem that does not rhyme and/or one short poem that does.