Accessing Australian Poetry:
What Schools Need

Warrick Wynne

Secondary school English Departments are busy places. In many state curriculum systems English is the only compulsory study right up until the final year. English classrooms must cater for a great deal of individual difference, mixed abilities and attitudes; from students who are passionate about the subject to those who wouldn't be there if they didn't have to be.

In the new curriculum structures, English, as distinct from the more specialised subject called Literature, is also the vehicle for a broader and more divergent body of knowledge than the study of texts. In the Victorian system, and my remarks are mostly drawn from experience there, Senior English must include text study, incorporating some Australian writing, but must also include writing in a variety of forms, oral communication and the analysis of language of issues in the media.

In Senior English, schools must choose from a set of approved texts. In 2005 the only book of Australian poetry on the mainstream English list in Victoria is Philip Hodgin's verse-novel Dispossessed. The only other poetry of any kind to include in the final year of English is Jon Silkin's anthology The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry.

In the less widely undertaken Literature subject, alongside poets such as John Keats, Alexander Pope, Geoffrey Chaucer, W.B. Yeats and William Shakespeare, teachers can select from the work of Australian poets Philip Neilsen, Dorothy Porter. Robert Adamson, John Forbes, Gwen Harwood, Judith Wright or look at a variety of poets from Tranter and Meads 1991 anthology, The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry.

I am focusing on senior English in this opening because to some extent the senior curriculum drives what's considered important elsewhere in the school. More contemporary Australian poetry on the senior curriculum would almost guarantee that such writing found itself in English classrooms in the Middle Years.

Poetry is taught in schools, and often taught very well by teachers who are passionate about the subject and expert in facilitating environments where students are engaged actively in the learning and where student's own lives and own responses to writing are validated. Poetry is read for its wonder and its complexity, for what it can tell us about the world and ourselves, and very often to help students formulate their own personal responses, based on forms they have been exposed to in the classroom, extending from ideas in the poems they read to new writing of their own.

If you know where to find a good poem, and how students might work with it, poetry is one of the most powerful communication tools possible. Poetry tells us things we didn't know we knew, and things we never knew and can lead into new student writing. I have often used the opening of Kevin Hart's 'A History of the Future' as a writing exercise with students who follow on from Hart's opening:

There will be cities and mountains
As there are now,

After students have written their poems we then read the rest of the Hart poem together and look for connections. Sometimes it might only be the title that sparks students going. I have just finished John Jenkins's latest book of poetry, Dark River, and am looking forward to using 'The Museum of Wishes' as the starting point for a piece. Jenkins' opening invites responses:

In the Museum of Wishes,
are things that never were,
forgotten things, love unspoken.

The power of the poem from the living poet can be immeasurable. I seek out new poems in new collections from poets who I admire, or new names that appear in literary journals like Famous Reporter which regularly features haiku, Salt-Lick or online in magazines such as Thylazine. There are poems out there if you know where to look. I've often used Pablo Neruda's odes to common things as models for student writing but I recently heard Melbourne poet Kevin Brophy read some small 'object' poems which would work just as well, if not better. Brophy's poems build on the object poems of Charles Simic and the quirky humour and clever brevity may not be suited to an old style anthology of iconic poems but would work extremely well with students in schools. This is one in its entirety:

Peg

the one idea
you have
is to deny
your double life

But it is difficult sometimes to find such work, and even if you can find the latest book by an Australian poet, it's hard to guarantee you could booklist it for a year level of students (say 100 students) or eve an individual class. The direct result of major publishers like Oxford University Press and Penguin Books moving away from the publication of contemporary Australian poetry is that poetry publishing is mostly left to small, niche publishers who might consider 1000 copies a good print run and who aren't always able to guarantee that their books will always be in print. Schools are reluctant to booklist texts if they can't be guaranteed supply. Publishers are reluctant to undertake large print runs if they haven't got any certainty about sales. Currently, teachers who want to access contemporary Australian writing can photocopy chunks from new texts literary magazines, if they have access to them, or work with Australian anthologies which seem few and far between and in any case almost always cater for senior students. In the Middle Years, teachers mostly tend to work with single poems or small groups of poems from a single author, or around a single theme, rather than work through a whole poetry text. And, even if a whole book is chosen for purchase around August the year before, can stock be guaranteed six months later when the book is to be distributed to students?

No wonder poetry sometimes gets put into the 'too hard' basket. With no critical system imperatives to teach contemporary poetry, which is often difficult to access anyway, a busy and sometimes frenetic schedule (English classes in secondary schools are often the largest, and the assessment workload of English teachers arguably the heaviest) and with English teachers having a special responsibility to cater for all, it's not surprising that it's simple to put another film study on the curriculum rather than try to search out a body of contemporary Australian poetry.

What English teachers need is simpler, more direct and flexible access to the best work of Australia's best poets. Schools need to be able to access the talents and expertise of contemporary poets in speaking and reading to students, in workshopping writing with students, and with providing professional development and master classes to refresh the skills of current English teachers.

An integrated approach is required and there are several practical strategies that could be adopted that would make a significant difference. These are outlined below under the broad headings of access. Central to most is the emergence of new technologies that have the potential to revolutionise access to digital and printed works. Real change is now possible.

Access to poems

The most basic way to ensure that Australian poetry gets into schools is to give teachers reliable, convenient access to quality contemporary poetry.

Traditionally, this has often been achieved sporadically, through a top-down approach, evident in the release, ever few years or so, of an Australian 'anthology' by one of the major publishers, usually with school sales in senior years firmly in mind, with the poems on the literature course well represented, and little else. Alternatively, texts with more of a survey emphasis concentrated on the 'iconic' Australian poems, felt a need to represent important strands and eras of Australian poetry but were still aimed at the senior end of the secondary school.

It is now possible for new technologies to provide new modes of delivery that are
more immediate, less expensive, easier for teachers and students to access and which can be constantly updated.

Texts which have been previously scanned and can be printed and bound in any quantity in a final product that is almost indistinguishable from the original are now available. Already such technology is helping university courses to set classic Australian fiction that has fallen out of print in the old sense. Much more can come of this approach.

Another concept worth exploring further is enhanced support for the production and promotion of very low cost mini-collections of contemporary Australian poets. I'm thinking here of the kind of thing that Wagtail (Picaro Press) have been doing with their small monthly collections that intend to represent a small selection of a single poet's work. Each issue is 16 pages in length, more than enough room for a dozen poems or more and costs around $3 including GST. With over 20 already released it would be a good way for a teacher to set up a study of a contemporary poet or perhaps students could choose from the range of titles themselves.

Beth Spencer's innovative new collection is another way forward. Body of Words / Box of Words is an audio CD and a CD-ROM of her collected writing. Spencer worked to develop her collected works with schools firmly in mind, with the work able to be heard aloud, viewed on the screen, or printed out for classroom use.

Imagine a CD-ROM called Australian Poetry Now, updated every year with perhaps 500 or more contemporary Australian poems searchable by title, author, theme, approximate age level, viewable, printable and audible? Imagine the copyright issues had been sought out and solved, and the publishers were happy, and the various English organizations had worked together to provide notes and class exercises. Now that would be a resource.

Or take the logical next step. An online searchable database of Australian contemporary poetry, perhaps accessed by a fee, where all of the above and more could be delivered in an ongoing and evolving way. Click here for contemporary Australian poems about NATURE that might suit a Year 8 class. Click here to bring up all contemporary poems about, or by, refugees. Click here to submit a lesson plan that worked about this poem. Click here to submit a student work in response to this poem.

It would be in the interests of publishers (click here to order the book this poem came from) and in the interests of writers (click here to email the poet, or ask the poet a question, or know more about how to access this writer's work. Most importantly, it would deliver contemporary Australian poetry to teachers and students in classrooms now, poetry delivered at the point of need.

Perhaps this where some of the Australia Council or Copyright funds could be going.
The Copyright Agency Limited has already put a toe in the water with its support for Sydney University Press and the Classic Australian Works project where currently twenty-five Australian texts that 'should always be available for readers and students as part of our national cultural heritage. These works retain their influence and impact, the richness and quality of their writing, and their importance as a record and reflection of Australian life and perspectives, but have disappeared from traditional publication.' It is significant perhaps that among the twenty-five is only one book of poetry: Bruce Beaver's Letters to Live Poets. Its an ironic title in this context given that live poets aren't well represented here and despite it's use of technology it's still something of a backward looking response; preserving the artifacts of the past and making them available in their original unalterable format for us take as a whole. That approach is due to change.

Access to poets

I want to conclude by speaking briefly about the importance of access to live poets. In my teaching whenever I have the opportunity I always include a book on a course where I have some reasonable chance of getting the author to speak to my students.

Twice in the last few years I've been able to get poet Jennifer Strauss to speak to my Literature students and in both occasions the effect has been to intensify and clarify student responses to her poetry and to evoke a deeper interest and understanding. Similarly, this year novelist Rosalie Ham spoke to my students about The Dressmaker and the result was a more detailed understanding of her book.

Poets who are willing and able to speak to students about their work could be searchable alongside the poems. Or perhaps a simple icon next to the poem would indicate that the writer of this work was available to schools for a certain fee. In the case of poetry, with is relatively low sales, a couple of school sessions is likely to be more financially beneficial to the poet than the sales of books, and more memorable for the student. Poets could be searchable, like the poems, under themes, ideas but also what areas they live in and their contact details.

As well as speaking to students, there is an enormous untapped role in poets providing professional development for teachers in the teaching of poetry. It is easy to lose confidence and a sense of expertise in an area with which you are unfamiliar and 'refresher courses' on contemporary poetry, run by practising poets in liaison with English teacher associations like VATE (Victorian Association of Teachers of English) could also play a big part in getting poems into schools.

Poetry is important. The people sitting around this room know that. Students will benefit from access to quality contemporary Australian poetry. The challenge is to make that access simple for teachers and schools.

Warrick Wynne teaches English and Literature at Toorak College, Mt Eliza. He is also a poet and convenor of the Education Committee of the Poetry Australia Foundation. His website is http://www.warrickwyne.org

NOTES

Brophy, Kevin. "Peg Poems." E-mail to Warrick Wynne. 31 2004.

"Classic Australian Works." 2002. Sydney University Press. 30 Aug 2004 <http://www.sup.usyd.edu.au/projects_cal_about.html>.

"Copyright Agency Limited." 26 Aug 2004. Licenced Copying and Communications. Copyright Agency Limited. 30 Aug 2004 <http://www.copyright.com.au/home.htm>.

Famous Reporter Home Page. Famous Reporter. 30 Aug 2004 <http://www.famousreporter.the-write-stuff.com.au/index.html>.

Hart, Kevin. Flame Tree - Selected Poems. Sydney: Paper Bark Press, 2002.

Jenkins, John. Dark River. Wollongong: Five Islands Press, 2003.

POD (Print on Demand). University of Queensland. 30 Aug 2004 <http://pod.uq.edu.au/index.php>.

Salt-Lick New Poetry. 30 Aug 2004 <http://saltlickpoetry.com/>.

Simic, Charles. Selected Poems (1963-1983). : NY: Norton Publishing Co., 1990.

Spencer, Beth. "Adding Value to the Classroom Experience: Beth Spencer in Conversation with Warrick Wynne." 2004. Interview about Body of Words and Box of Words CDs. 30 Aug 2004 <http://dogmedia.com.au/warrickandbeth.htm>.

The Thylazine Foundation: Homepage. The Thylazine Foundation: Arts, Ethics and Literature. 30 Aug 2004 <http://www.thylazine.org/>.