One of the highlights of 2009 was attending the BB Writers Festival to present prizes to the winners of the poetry competition. This short article was published, along with the winning poem by Max Ryan, in ‘Write Stuff’- the Northern Rivers Writers Centre magazine for Oct 09 

             When recently invited to co-judge the Byron Bay Writers Festival Poetry Prize, I felt simultaneously honoured and daunted. Would I be able to sufficiently grade more than two hundred and fifty entries in the allotted time – mightn’t my eyes start to glaze over, my judgment falter? And in the end, might my choices be steamrolled by a far more eminent and experienced co-judge? Actually, if I’d been asked to do this a year ago, I would probably have turned it down. After writing and publishing dozens of poems in the eighties and nineties, about ten years ago I turned away from poetry. I had a young family, more than a full-time job, university…it was just too much; and I had too much appreciation of poetry as an art form to only devote scraps of time to it. Then, a year and a half ago I escaped Sydney’s satanic mills and moved to the mid-north coast, regaining time, reading and thinking space. Poetry began to live and matter again.

I began to read the entries, placing work into tentative piles. Such a community of literate voices, featuring many poems of a high standard. What was I looking for in the winners? In some ways it’s easier to say what I wasn’t looking for: poetry that bowed down before tradition, or tried to be poetic (butterflies flitting towards golden sunsets); poems that adopt a comfortable ‘stance,’ that parrot homilies or assert clichés; that mistake strong emotion for poetry.

I thought back on people and ideas that inspired me and came…to Ezra Pound. Whatever you might think of his later, obscure cantos and questionable politics, in the earlier part of the twentieth century he single-handedly dragged a generation of ultra-refined decadent Victorian versifiers screaming into the modern age. He condensed his approach into three words: make it new. “The artist is always beginning,” he once wrote. “Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth. The very name Troubadour means a ‘finder,’ one who discovers.”

For me, this is one of the essences of great poetry: I don’t mean innovation for its own sake – but a feeling for discovery and the new in everyday individual experience; poems in which language, image and rhythm combine to capture the sometimes astonishing experience of being alive. All of the commended and winning entries do this.

I needed to have no concern about my fellow-judge, Peter Bishop. He is almost an ideal judge, with a discerning eye, a profound love of poetry, and an ego-less ability to immerse himself into a work’s qualities. There were no real quarrels between us – many of our shortlisted poems were the same – the real problem we faced was to discern winners from many poems of near equal rank.

All three winners could have been first, but ‘Black Bat Burn’ was both technically accomplished and emotionally resonant, with wonderful images evocative of the Australian landscape under stress. ‘Jim’ is very moving, its imagery staying with you for a long time, and it traverses time and space effortlessly. ‘junction’ has a marvellous American energy and imagistic conciseness – and great humour! Strangely enough, ‘death’ is a central theme of three of the five winning and commended entries; but it’s never treated in a maudlin way, but with courage and a clear-eye. This is especially true of ‘Going to Ground’ – heartbreaking and courageous, and deserving its commendation.