Peter Neville Frederick Porter, OAM (16 February 1929 â€" 23 April 2010) was a British-based Australian poet.
Life
Porter was born in Brisbane, Australia, in 1929. His mother, Marion, died of a burst gall-bladder in 1938. He was educated at the Anglican Church Grammar School (then known as the Church of England Grammar School) and left school at eighteen to work as a trainee journalist at The Courier-Mail. However, he only lasted a year with the paper before he was dismissed. He emigrated to England in 1951. On the boat he met the future novelist Jill Neville. Porter was portrayed in Neville's first book "The Fall Girl" (1966). After two suicide attempts, he returned to Brisbane. Ten months later he was back in England. In 1955 he began attending meetings of "The Group." It was his association with "The Group" that allowed him to publish his first collection in 1961.
He married in 1961 and had two daughters (born in 1962 and 1965). Porter's wife, the former Shirley Jannice Henry, committed suicide in 1974, and was found dead in her parents' house in Marlow, Buckinghamshire. In 1991 Porter married Christine Berg, a child psychologist. In 2001, he was named Poet in Residence at the Royal Albert Hall. In 2004 he was a candidate for the position of Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. In 2007, he was made a Royal Society of Literature Companion of Literature, an honour bestowed on a maximum of ten living writers.
Porter died on 23 April 2010, aged 81, after suffering from liver cancer for a year. After news of Porter's death in 2010, the Australian Book Review announced it would rename its ABR Poetry Prize the Peter Porter Poetry Prize in honour of Porter.
Work
His poems first appeared in the Summer 1958 and October 1959 issues of Delta. The publication of his poem Metamorphosis in the Times Literary Supplement in January 1960 brought his work to a wider audience. His first collection Once Bitten Twice Bitten was published by Scorpion Press in 1961. Influences on his work include: W. H. Auden, John Ashbery, and Wallace Stevens.. He went through distinct poetic stages, from the epigrams and satires of his early works Once Bitten Twice Bitten, to the elegiac mode of his later ones; The Cost of Seriousness and English Subtitles. In a recorded conversation with his friend Clive James he stated that the "glory of present-day English writing in America, in Australia and in Britain, is what is left over of the old regular metrical pattern and how that can be adapted to the new sense that the main element, the main fixture of poetry is no longer the foot (you know, the iambus or the trochee) but the cadence. It seems that what is very important is to get the best of the old authority, the best of the old discipline along with the best of the new freedom of expression."
In 1983 Porter was a judge in the Man Booker Prize.
Awards
- 1983 Duff Cooper Memorial Prize for his first Collected Poems
- 1988 Whitbread Poetry Award for Automatic Oracle
- 1990 Australian Literature Society Gold Medal for Possible Worlds
- 1997 Age Book of the Year Poetry Prize Co-winner for Dragons in their Pleasant Places
- 1998 The First King's Lynn Award for Merit in Poetry
- 2000 Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal at the Mildura Writer's Festival
- 2002 Forward Poetry Prize for Max Is Missing
- 2002 Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry
- 2004 Medal of the Order of Australia
- 2004 Honorary Fellow of the English Association, UK
- 2007 Royal Society of Literature Companion of Literature
- 2009 Honorary Doctorate, Nottingham Trent University
- 2009 Age Book of the Year Poetry Prize for Better Than God
Books
In other media
- In 1981, Scottish Post-punk band Scars recorded a song of Porter's poem Your Attention Please on their studio album, Author! Author!
Notes
Sources
- When London Calls: The Expatriation of Australian Creative Artists to Britain, Cambridge University Press, 1999
- Kaiser, John R: Peter Porter: A Bibliography 1954 â€" 1986 Mansell, London and New York, 1990. ISBN 0-7201-2032-2.
- Steele, Peter, Peter Porter: Oxford Australian Writers Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1992. ISBN 0-19-553282-1
External links
- Interview of Peter Porter by Ramona Koval, audio and transcript of The Book Show on ABC Radio National, on his last collection, Better than God, 15 April 2009
- Obituary in The Independent
- Guardian obituary 23 April 2010
- Obituary in the Oxonian Review
- Poetry Foundation profile
- Profile at Poetry Archive
- Oxonian Review. 24 May, 2010, Issue 12.3 memorial essay