Dorothy Porter: 1954 - 2008

"Dorothy Porter was yesterday remembered by friends and colleagues as the woman whose sensual, frank and fast-paced verse novels put poetry on to the bestseller lists.

Porter's friend and agent, Jenny Darling, said the poet succumbed on Monday morning to complications from cancer. She was 54.

Publisher Andrew Wilkins said: "I saw her reading at the National Word Festival in Canberra in 1993, and I was captivated.

"It wasn't just the quality of the work, which was bloody good, but also the way she read it. I immediately decided she needed a bigger audience than the poetry section."

source(s) - theaustraliannews.com.au & news.com.au

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Tags:

• dorothy porter
• poet
• australia
• australian
• writer
• author
• lesbian
• lesbians
• adelaide festival
• FEAST

[RoccoB64]

The fact that you edited parts out of the "Objectum Sexuality" video, one of the most fascinating documentary clips on Youtube, makes me happy this bitch died. Quit thinking you're righteous in your actions and put the original clip back up, and stop being a stuck-up dipshit.

[lesbiandotpro]

RoccoB64: you are happy a writer, poet died (& human being) died? Does it make you happy when others die?

How would you feel if her family members & friends come across your comment? All b/c you objected to a video (that I provided for you to see anyway) was partly edited for sensitivity.

I just don't understand I guess.

[lesbiandotpro]

Perhaps given your urgency and emotions around OS, it would appear you may identify as OS yourself or have a family member etc and that is why you need to urgently know more?

I would encourage you to follow those links on that page.

[lesbiandotpro]

additionally another good support resource:

(web url) beyondblue(dot)org(dot)au

[spunkzoid]

An unbearable loss. An unfair end. I am grateful for this unique spirit who lived so courageously.

DP taught me long ago and her influence has been deeply a part of me ever since.

[chitchant]

reading dp,

i would feel swept up in her parental arms

and taken on a thrill-filled ride.

[RonPrice9]

I like the way Porter said things about the writing of poetry and, in the process and inevitably, about poetry itself. She refered to her poetic method as magpie-like. She saw herself as a thief, a plagiariser in the best sense of the word, in the sense that T.S. Eliot once expressed this oft-practised art. Eliot once said that what makes a great poet is their capacity to steal stuff from others and call it their own. This,of course, is not a popular comment among the plagiariser-worriers.

[RonPrice9]

Her very neurones were abuzz when she wrote poetry, wrote one literary critic. The question of influence, Porter once said, is always a personal thing. An influence has to become literally a part of you, a part of you on an intuitive rather than a popular level.

[RonPrice9]

Live life as an epiphany, is one of the sentences one could draw on to convey the spirit in which this Australian poet, Dorothy Porter, wrote and lived. She also wrote on her nerve, as she once put it in an interview. Such phrases as these, of course, cannot possibly capture in total the fleeting but, paradoxically and subtley enduring experience that is writing. These words convey a tone, a manner, a mode, indeed, a motive, in Porters poetic oeuvre.

[banksiasong]

Dorothy Porter's death is deeply sad.

My favourite work is Crete.

She gave me the words that helped me to understand and feel in this world.