Grammar Gazette- Issue 2, 2016

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NOT AVERSE TO VERSE: POETRY RENASCENT!

Megha Prasad (11M) performing her poem ‘Fair & Lovely’ dealing with skin colour

‘prose, words in their best order — poetry, the best words in their best order’. Coleridge, he will no doubt be pleased to hear, was right. Precision is essential in poetry-writing, whether it’s a sonnet or a slam. The prolific Pulitzer prize- winning American writer William Stanley Merwin has a useful analogy to which most of us can relate: ‘poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end, you’ve lost the whole thing’. I would like to think that alongside the brain-expanding training they get almost every year in their English classes in the rigorous analysis of poetry, the girls acquire an appreciation for its aesthetics. Good poetry is beautiful language, and that rare thing is worth savouring just for what foodies might call its ‘mouth-feel’, to which I would clumsily add ‘ear-feel’ (trust me, we call it ‘euphony’ in class). In English classes we do a good job of producing educated spectators — perhaps even connoisseurs — of poetry, but to return to my main theme, for some of our girls, poetry is more than something to unravel or enjoy — it is something they want to take part in. Poetry by the girls themselves is enjoying something of a renaissance at Girls Grammar. For seven years now, the start of each academic calendar has seen many of them getting poetic for the Valentine’s Day Love Poetry Competition. Testament to the many-splendored nature of love, and the considerable differences in ages among our students, the entries encompass the broadest possible range of loves, from the passionate embrace of

AUTHOR Mr Stephen Woods Director of English

POETRY BY THE GIRLS PARENTHESISES THE SCHOOL YEAR AT BRISBANE GIRLS GRAMMAR SCHOOL. THE VALENTINE’S DAY LOVE POETRY COMPETITION HAS BECOME A REGULAR FIXTURE AT THE START OF EACH YEAR, AND THE SCHOOL’S ANNUAL POETRY SLAM HAS FOUND AN ENTHUSIASTIC AND POPULAR FOLLOWING IN TERM IV. It is, of course, a pleasing aspect of this poetic bookending of the year that the girls are expressing themselves; they have ideas, opinions, and feelings that warrant expression and deserve an audience. For me though, the most gratifying aspect is that they are willing to have a go at expressing these thoughts in verse. With the esoteric exception of Rupert the Bear, nobody I know talks or thinks in poetry; it doesn’t come naturally. Verse is hard to write, and hard writing is worth doing. Noted Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge insisted that young poets heed his definitions of prose and poetry:

GRAMMAR GAZETTE