Poet
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Dorothy Porter 1954-... country: Australia language: English |
was born in Sydney, Australia, and it is ‘Australia’ which lives and breathes in her images and language. Its riches adds a new dimension to English literature. Yet her main strength is sensuality, and the voice of a woman, female, not feminine. In her poetry, starting from her theory that men and women have different experiences and even speak different languages because their bodies are different, she explores erotic relations between people in the widest sense. What she looks for is jouissance, enjoying the body, as did the classics, notably Sappho and Catullus. Her great Romanctic model is Wuthering Heights. ‘(...) the sexual metaphor [is] the most potent language we have but also the most frustratingly limited. Sex itself can range from the mechanical mutual masturbation of habit to something more akin to nuclear fusion. No on forgets the latter (...)’ This intensity makes itself felt throughout her work. Why this choice? ‘I really do hold with that idea of the Romantics that in some ways the poet is quite passive; subjects and themes and voices choose you.’ Dorothy Porter has published eight volumes of poetry. Her latest collection, Other Worlds, which she finished recently, is soon to appear in print. She will be reading a selection of poems from this at the festival. Dorothy Porter is the author of two novels for young adults and three verse novels, Akhenaten, The Monkey’s Mask and What a Piece of Work (1998). The Monkey’s Mask, a detective story, brought her international fame. It has the form of an interior monologue. Jill, the narrator, a lesbian, is a private detective who solves a murder by strangulation, the clue to which can be found in poems. Jill does not like poetry, which lends a particular tension to the text. In and by language stripped of all frills and deceptively light in tone, the reader is drawn into a labyrinth of love and desire, of passion and betrayal. Porter does not judge, but awakens the reader’s own moral consciousness by making him or her part of the experience. Porter’s work is full of references to music and song lyrics. And to birds (she is a keen bird watcher). Author: Maria van Daalen Poets: |
