Louise Oxley and Ron Pretty read at the Lark in Hobart on March 17th, a quiet event, possibly due to it being St Patrick's Day.
Ron read a number of poems from a forthcoming collection entitled 'Postcards from the Centre', along with new work written during
his residency at the Writers' Cottage in Hobart. 'If some of these seem a little raw you'll know why it is.' The new poems
include a series of eight sonnets going by the title of 'No. 1 Kelly Street'.
Sonnets seem the order of the evening, Louise shared some too – though she opened with a poem of a trip she'd made with Ron
Pretty and other members of the Five Islands New Poets' Series some years ago. 'We travelled across much of the country, on
a trip between Adelaide and Perth we were averaging 900 kilometres a day. It's a whale poem....' Other pieces include 'Sitting
with Cezanne', with Louise mentioning she's travelled to Canberra recently to see the post-impressionists 'in the flesh', so to
speak: 'Cezanne's always been important'. A suite of new poems follow, written in response to the journals of the Fench naturalist
Labillardière.
There's time for questions following the reading, and Ron speaks of his plans to establish a poetry imprint entitled 'Profile
Poetry': a couple of titles a year, and probably by invitation. He notes that while he's committed to poetry and its publication,
he's well aware of the problems facing the industry, particularly with distribution. Support for the multitude of very good poets
in this country is poor, he says; in consequence, we have a situation where poets see poetry as its own reward – not bad in
itself – but with publication not being sought because it's just too difficult. 'At present as poets we're merely writing to one
another; and that's selling poetry short'. Ron mentions the positives – groups such as Red Room 'who are doing lots of good things,
poetry on pigeons, for instance' – and the negatives: the festivals designed for poets but not for audiences.
Conversation turns to the loss of poetry publishing opportunities; Ron points out that when Penguin withdrew its Support for
poetry, it also meant the loss of the company's poetry publicists. 'Thus the resources for getting poetry out into the mainstream
were also lost'.