Peter Porter (poet)
British-based Australian poet (1929– 2010)
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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 18 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 Jannice Henry, from Marlow, Buckinghamshire, in 1961 and they had two daughters (born in 1962 and 1965). During this period he worked in advertising, and was beginning to find work in the literary press. Jannice took her life in 1974, greatly affecting Porter's work, in particular The Cost of Seriousness. In 1991 Porter married Christine Berg.
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 (ABR) announced that, in his honour, it would rename its ABR Poetry Prize as the Peter Porter Poetry Prize. He was buried on the eastern side of Highgate Cemetery.
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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 Booker–McConnell 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: The Age Book of the Year Award – Dinny O'Hearn Poetry Prize, joint-winner for Dragons in Their Pleasant Palaces
- 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