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.
News & Events
From Beats to the Summer of Love
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
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
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.
Big Morning Tea
Dennis will be reading from Ahead of Us at Fremantle Council’s Big Morning Tea on Thursday 25 May at 10.45am in King’s Square, Fremantle (or the Library if the weather is bad). The Morning Tea raises money for cancer research.
Dennis will also be speaking at Fremantle Council’s Book Club on Saturday 27 May, from 1.00-2.30pm.
Making Poems Out of Place
Dennis and a number of other acclaimed Western Australian poets will be joining John Kinsella on Thursday, April 20, to celebrate his work and the influence it has had on the poetry and politics of place in this region.
The event will be held at the Orient Hotel in Fremantle, opposite New Edition bookstore.
In the first part of the evening, Dr Tony Hughes-d’Aeth, author of the magnificent newly released study of the literature of the WA wheatbelt, Like Nothing on this Earth, will launch some of John’s books that have been released in the recent past. These include, Firebreaks: Poems (W. W. Norton), Graphology: Poems 1955-2015 (Five Islands Press), Drowning in Wheat: Selected Poems (Picador), The Fremantle Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry(edited with Tracy Ryan), Old Growth (Transit Lounge), and Polysituatedness (Manchester University Press). John will read a selection of poems and passages from these publications.
In the second part of the evening, some of WA’s most acclaimed poets will join together with John to read selections of their work from the new Fremantle press anthology. Poets include Tracy Ryan, Lucy Dougan, Kim Scott, Dennis Haskell, Wendy Jenkins, James Quinton, Scott-Patrick Mitchell, and Siobhan Hodge.
This is a unique and free event which is not to be missed. For further details, and to register, please visit the Eventbrite booking page.
Books will be available for sale from a Crow Books/New Edition Stall.
