Innocence & Experience
POETRY—indeed right living—may be the dance of innocence and experience, or so William Blake, the mystic poet thought.
Being in the world, and with each other, as if each moment were the first moment, to which one nonetheless turned up readied by a hundred years of apprenticing oneself to what counts—this is one way to understand what William Blake was after across all his visual and textual art. For 67 years, in any case, there has been an Australian prize for spiritually inflected art, named in Blake's honour, and since 2009 that prize has included a category for poetry.
I have judged the prize; I have shortlisted in it; I have spoken at its launch and one year at the awards ceremony. One year, the first year, I won it. And now I am proud to find a poem of mine, "Flat Rock, September," among the six poems shortlisted for the 2021 Blake Poetry Prize. There's me reading it below.
In form, my string of cantilevered couplets owes a debt to one of my Canadian students, the poet Rona Shaffran; thanks Rona. In subject, the poem records the complex joy of swimming the upper reaches of the Kangaroo River in the thick of the contagion one recent September, and downstream of the whole long history of colonial theft and violence, to which I, like so many of us, owe the good fortune of my being here, the grace of our coming to live in one antipodean corner of the besieged and terrifyingly beautiful Earth. Earth is heaven and hell at once, Blake would have said. One's spiritual work may be to doe what one can about the hell and to give thanks with one's whole life for the heaven.
There is a bird (a whipbird, in this case) in the poem, for life has taught me that where birds are, truth is, and because, there was a bird, which my daughter saw first, in the late afternoon; and there are a million flying things in the poem, because there were a million small flying things falling from the dusk into the river, and no one alive could have missed them. The hour or two on the river with the kids were a sustained epiphany, crowded with pretty much everything life can be and mean, and I hope the poem does it all some justice.
You can find your way below to recordings each of us made of our poems; and you can read the poems on the page there, too. My particular congratulations to Simone King, whose poem "Surfing Again," a deft and plainspoken, tender elegy for a relative dead too soon, I encountered in an earlier shape in one of my masterclasses last year. The other poets on the shortlist, as you'll see, are Jennifer Harrison, Kirsten Krauth, Meredith Wattison, and Gershon Maller. We all have to wait now till 12 March to find out which of us takes home the top prize and the dollars. But to have made a short shortlist from among five hundred poems, against so many odds, is already a miracle.
Thanks to the judges for their hard work and good taste. Thanks, also, to WestWords, The Blake Society, the Casula Powerhouse, and the City of Liverpool, who support and sustain this important prize.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmDIZMZ5o1Y&list=PLb8bHCZBRMBh82k2kOMZYaaSa8Hn5JBfM&index=6
