One of literature's greats loses battle with cancer

 December 15, 2008

Farewell for poet Porter, life celebrant

Julie-Anne Davies

JUST two weeks before she died from breast cancer, Dorothy Porter wrote her last poem from her hospital bed.

Dorothy Porter

Titled View from 417 it had its first public reading at Porter's funeral in Melbourne yesterday, when her partner of 15 years, novelist Andrea Goldsmith, recited it from the poet's handwritten copy to the 300 mourners who gathered to pay homage to a woman widely recognised as a force of nature. Its last lines give a clue to Porter's lust for life right till the end, when she wrote:

Something in me
despite everything
can't believe my luck.

A writer who made poetry sexy and who broke all the rules when she refused to adopt the drab life of a reclusive literary figure by daring to revel in her own celebrity, Porter's death at 54 has shocked the literary world; most did not see it coming.

Private about the gravity of her illness to the end, Porter did not for a moment in the past few months think she would pass away, her old friend Mark Tedeschi told the congregation.

He probably best summed up the magnitude of the personal and cultural loss by saying that Porter should have had another 30 years with her partner and for her writing.

Writers, poets, musicians, painters, family and friends packed the Boyd Chapel at the Springvale Botanical cemetery.

Musician Tim Finn, with whom she had been collaborating on a rock musical to be called January until her death, sang during the service two of the songs they wrote together. Humorist and writer John Clarke, poet Chris Wallace-Crabbe and writer Sophie Cunningham were among the mourners.

Porter was not Jewish although her life often intersected with Judaism, but Goldsmith was. And so once, purely hypothetically, she suggested that if she were to die, she wanted her friend, Rabbi Fred Morgan, to lead her funeral service. And so he did, describing Porter as a pagan Jew who was truly unique.

"She lived out her uniqueness, she never tried to be anyone else other than Dorothy Porter (or Dot as she was known) - poet, wordsmith of the imagination, entertainer, performer, earthy and airy at the same time."

It was her mother Jean who probably best captured Porter. She told a story about her daughter, just 10 years old, staring down a group of hooligans who were throwing rocks at ducks in a pond. Porter confronted the group and said: "Before you throw another stone, you will have to kill me."

Her two sisters, Mary Porter and Josie McSkimming, talked about a sibling who was fiercely loyal, their rescuer and who could be relied on to always come to the family Christmas lunch with a bag of chips. Cooking and domestic work in general was not her thing and she was unashamed about this.

Her nephew, Sam McSkimming, was just 14 when she handed him Vikram Seth's epic The Golden Gate, a novel composed entirely of rhyming sonnets - 690 in all. She had a passion for Spanish, Jane Austen, Test cricket and most of all, she liked to tell friends, "the two blues in my life", her blue Burmese cat, Winstin, and blue-eyed Goldsmith. A graduate of Sydney University, Porter wrote six collections of poetry, two novels for young adults and three previous verse novels, Akhenaten, The Monkey's Mask and What a Piece of Work.

It is for The Monkey's Mask, with its plot about a lesbian private detective who falls in love with a suspect, that Porter will be best remembered.

Porter was first diagnosed with breast cancer four years ago, and many friends believed she had, in typical Porter fashion, beaten the disease.

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The Age ~~ Melbourne ~~ December 12, 2008

Poet pushed boundaries and encouraged others

DOROTHY FEATHERSTONE PORTER, POET
26-3-1954 ­ 10-12-2008

IT MAY have been a circuitous route for someone who earlier in her life as a visitor to Israel worked as a bus conductress, but Dorothy Porter arrived at her station in life as a poet of national prominence after her return to Australia.

Porter ­ Dot to her friends ­ was still a student in 1975 when she published her first collection of poetry, Little Hoodlum, after the advent of the generation of 1968, when a revolution in Australian poetry occurred: the styles of the post- modernist poet Charles Olson, free verse and open form poetry displaced rhyme and closed form. Poetic wars started.

She quickly became an accomplished poetry reader on the Sydney scene, and appeared in the pioneering Australian gay and lesbian anthology Edge City: on two different plans.

In 1992, she published the verse novel Akhenaten, based on the ancient Egyptian androgynous pharaoh. The following year she moved to Melbourne.

However, until her breakthrough 1994 lesbian verse novel The Monkey's Mask, she was mainly known to fellow poets. In 2000, it was made into a film starring Susie Porter and Abbie Cornish.

Porter, who has died of complications from breast cancer at St Vincent's Hospital in Fitzroy, aged 54, was born in Sydney. Her mother, Jean, was a chemistry teacher, and father Chester a leading Queen's Counsel. (His admirers regard him so highly that it is said "Chester Porter walks on water".)

His daughter was educated at Queenwood School on the lower north shore and at Sydney University, from where she graduated with a BA, majoring in English and history. A diploma of education followed, and a series of lowly paid jobs, including the bus conductressing and work on a kibbutz. Later, she taught creative writing part-time at the University of Technology; they were great days for creative writing at UTS following Paul Keating's mantra of "creative nation".

By 1994, Porter was the author of five volumes of poems. Like many fine poets, she was not included in many Australian English-language anthologies, but so rich is Australian poetry, where poems exist in more than 600 languages, that it is practically impossible for one person to read widely even with English ­ not to mention the problem of badly written works. In Porter's words in Selected Verse, "Not even a double scotch/ could get me though/ this f------ poem".

The Monkey's Mask remains her best known work. Set in Sydney it features a lesbian detective, Jill, who falls in love with a doctor, Diana, while investigating the mysterious Mickey who writes poetry. A series of monologues with constantly changing perspectives, it contains some of the finest English-language lesbian love poetry, easily comparable with the American gay poet Adrienne Rich, who never wrote such a sequence: Her breasts are not my breasts/ Under her dress/ they push towards my hands/ … Diana's tongue whirls/ in my mouth/like a dissolving aspro/ like knives on a chariot wheel in Ben Hur.

Like its author, who could be called a lipstick lesbian ­ even if she had occasional lapses ­ The Monkey's Mask is elegant and stylish. It has been translated into German. A novel in verse that takes its name from a haiku of the great Japanese gay poet Basho, it stands in a long line of English narrative poetry from Chaucer on, including Byron's Don Juan and the Russian Pushkin's Eugen Onegin. And like those poems, it constantly parodies itself.

In Australia, such sequences started with Brennan's 1913 volume Poems and C. J. Dennis' The Sentimental Bloke, on which The Monkey's Mask is a sardonic comment.

The generation of '68 wrote copious verse sequences that all come from Charles Olson's Maximus Poems, itself descended from T. S. Eliot's sequence of dramatic monologues The Waste Land. A post-modernist work, The Monkey's Mask reinforces the tenets of modernism and post-modernism ­ as seen in the work of Woolf and Joyce and then in Olson ­ that there is no one way of seeing an object, person or situation.

Four other verse novels followed, the most recent, El Dorado, about a child serial killer. It was translated into Italian.

Porter had a gift for making people feel special; she always spoke kindly about the work of other poets. At the launch of The Best Australian Poems 2006 in Melbourne, she characteristically spoke eloquently of the late Shelton Lea's last book, downplaying her own work.

Yet her work represents both a major contribution to lesbian and women's writing, and beyond that to humanity.

Porter also wrote two libretti for composer Jonathan Mills, The Ghost Wife and The Eternity Man, as well as the lyrics for Paul Grabowsky and Katie Noonan's Before Time Could Change Us. At the time of her death she was collaborating with Tim Finn on a rock opera to be called January.

She was twice shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, with What a Piece of Work (2000), and Wild Surmise ([2003).

She is survived by her partner of 15 years, novelist Andrea Goldsmith, parents Chester and Jean, and sisters Mary and Josie.

By PAUL KNOBEL

Paul Knobel is a Sydney poet.

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London ~~ Tuesday 16 December 2008, page 32

Dorothy Porter

Flamboyant Australian poet renowned for her verse novel The Monkey's Mask

Susan Johnson

Dorothy Porter at the Sydney Opera House in 2005. Photograph: John Fotiadis; Alpha

Dorothy Porter, who has died aged 54 of breast cancer, once said that far too much Australian poetry is "a dramatic cure for insomnia". Porter's flamboyant work was never guilty of that, indeed her fellow poet and countryman David Malouf said that Porter's vitality and grasp of life was everywhere visible: "I think you see that in the way she made her poetry work, in very spare tight verse ... she had enormous energy."

Malouf, who taught Porter in the 1970s at the University of Sydney, from where she graduated with a BA in English and history, was as surprised as the rest of Australia's literary community by news of her death: "I knew she had had her first diagnosis about four years ago, and when I saw her I'd always ask her how she was. I last saw her at the Adelaide Writers' week in March and she said she was all fine. It would seem she was not fine. That was the sort of thing she did not like to make a performance of."

In every other respect, Dorothy, known as Dot to her friends, was a star performer, in the tradition of a rock star rather than a poet. "I think anybody who ever saw Dot perform would not forget the performance," Malouf said. Music was hugely important to her, as she revealed in an interview with Sydney Time Out in June: "Music has been the key for me since I was a teenager ... I wanted to tap into that dark potency of rock'n'roll, and I still write to music every day."

Porter was the eldest of three daughters born in Sydney to a distinguished QC, Chester Porter, and Jean, a high school chemistry teacher. She attended Queenwood school for girls, in the Sydney suburb of Mosman; she later told Time Out that she had "interesting parents and very fertile influences. Our house was full of books." Porter's father, known in legal circles as the "smiling funnel-web" for his famous eyebrows and his ability to produce killer performances (Porter inherited both the eyebrows and the performing talent) sometimes read the Song of Solomon while waiting for verdicts. Upon his retirement, Chester Porter wrote several books of his own, including his memoirs of defending Lindy Chamberlain in the "dingo baby" case, and another about how to shine in public performance.

It was the lure of performance that first attracted Porter to the vibrancy of art: "The poetry scene in Australia is small, querulous, and has always been distinctly unglamorous. The advantage I had early on was that I studied acting, and I was a very good performer at a time when poetry was basically mumbled. I could dramatise and that got me noticed."

But it was a good 20 years of scratching out a living teaching and writing before Porter achieved substantial critical and financial success. In a recent interview she said: "The Monkey's Mask - the book for which I couldn't even find a publisher - suddenly becomes a film, a play, and the BBC has just done a radio dramatisation of it in London. I admit at times I have deliberately done things to make money. But The Monkey's Mask I wrote for the sheer hell of it."

During those hard years, Porter continued to write poetry, as well as two young adult novels, but mostly she supported herself by teaching, and was proud of never having accepted a grant from the arts funding body, the Australia Council. The success of The Monkey's Mask (1994) surprised her, since she had written two previous verse novels which had not attracted much attention: "I thought people would find it strange and confronting and I was wrong. I do think that there is a hunger for poetry in the community."

It was Porter's Australian publisher, Hyland House, which initially created excitement about the book, by marketing it in a unique way: "You are about to do something you have never done before. You are about to read a poem 264 pages long."

And what a poem. It took its name from a haiku by the great Japanese poet Basho and follows in the grand tradition of dramatic and narrative poetry which begins with The Iliad and passes through Euripides via Shakespeare and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh to Vikram Seth. Seth's The Golden Gate is probably still the best known contemporary verse novel, but Porter's was admired internationally for its originality and verve and immediately won both critical acclaim and commercial success.

Shot through with a lively brilliance, The Monkey's Mask is a traditional verse novel told in multiple voices, which also happens to be an erotic lesbian detective romance. Like the archetypal hero of Dashiell Hammett's Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade, Porter's lesbian private eye heroine, Jill Fitzpatrick, is torn between passionate love and professional ethics. But nowhere does Sam Spade speak like this:

Her breasts are not my breasts.

Under her dress

they push

towards my hands ...

The Monkey's Mask won The Age poetry book of the year and the National Book Council's Turnbull Fox Phillips poetry prize (the Banjo). Published by Serpent's Tail in Britain, it received rave reviews and was named one of the books of the year in the Times. In 2000 it was made into a film starring Kelly McGillis.

Porter said it was the verse novels that changed everything for her: "Other artists, particularly musicians, have been drawn to them, so I've had some extraordinary collaborations." She wrote libretti for chamber operas, working with the British director Julien Temple and the composer Jonathan Mills in both London and Sydney, and at the time of her death was working on a rock opera with the former Split Enz musician Tim Finn. Two of her other verse novels were nominated for Australia's most prestigious literary prize, the Miles Franklin (for which both she and her partner, the writer Andrea Goldsmith, were coincidentally shortlisted in 2003).

In 2001, Porter delivered the Judith Wright memorial lecture. She was describing Wright's poetry but she might well have been describing her own: "Lucid. What a lovely word. A word that forms a firm shape with the tongue right behind it - but feels full of light and expansion even as one speaks it - or writes it ... Lucidity does not mean the reams of docile looking-out-the-window poetry that seems to be a staple of the Australian poetry diet. The 'I am a poet and I will write a poem today' school. Lucidity can write with a tongue of fire. Often it's a sense of urgency, a sense of dire times, that can make a poem searingly lucid."

To the end, Porter remained a mesmerising public performer. I appeared on a panel with her on the topic of women, love and sex at the 1996 Brisbane Writers' Festival and she wiped the floor with us, reciting a poem by Allen Ginsberg, largely a yearning paean to his male lover's anus. The other writers and I were boxed into the prim-lipped, marriage-and-monogamy corner before we even opened our mouths. Her last appearance at a writers' conference was as recent as last October.

She is survived by Andrea, her father and mother, sisters Mary and Josie and by her cat, Wystan, named after WH Auden.

• Dorothy Featherstone Porter, poet and novelist, born 26 March 1954; died 10 December 2008

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 London ~~ Friday, 30 January 2009, page 40

Dorothy Porter: Poet who won international acclaim for her verse novel 'The Monkey's Mask'

Porter: 'poetry should be festive, fun and dangerous,' she said

I never knew poetry / could be / as sticky as sex," observes the narrator of The Monkey's Mask (1994), a smooth-flowing, book-length, noirish verse thriller which brought an international audience for Dorothy Porter, who once asserted that: "writing should be seductive. The reader becomes my lover, in a way". Her death at 54 does not end the affair: anybody beguiled by that idiosyncratic volume, which also became a film starring Abbie Cornich and Kelly McGillis, will seek out the others.

Born in 1954 in Australia, she was brought up in Sydney and the Blue Mountains by her parents, Jean and Chester, a chemistry teacher anda criminal lawyer. Soon a keen reader who wrote in margins, heraldingher short lines, she was a classic tomboy, as she admitted in an exuberant interview with Jenny Digby in the book A Woman's Voice, a series of conversations with Australian poets (1996): "I was an odd child and have become an odd adult and I have found that it is the engine of my writing... as an adolescent you like being treated horribly; it is Gothic".

Although "perving" over one schoolteacher's husband, to use the Australian vernacular, she became bisexual and enjoyed various lovers after graduating from Sydney University in 1975 and combining teaching with wide travel. That year also brought a first collection, Little Hoodlum. Her rock'n'roll and gossipy sensibility is a compound of William Carlos Williams and the haiku, with dashes of Bob Dylan: "my catapault / is a sleek / little killer / fitting / snugly / in my smile / as / I pass you / a cocktail".

Subsequent volumes vindicated her comment: "I am a fairly feral feminist. I hate being trapped or restricted by any ideological things at all." She none the less felt that women's nervous systems differ from men's. She often wrote very well, she thought, "just before my menstrual cycle starts and on the first day when I'm feeling terrible". Joyfully forthright, she asserted that "a lot of Australian poetry has been extremely dull and boring and that is one of reasons why it has been unpopular and unread".

A turning point, between two sassy prose novels for teenagers, was Akhenaten (1992). In Berlin she had looked at the famous bust of the ancient Egyptian king's wife Nefertiti; he "put out tentacles to my imagination". She made Akhenaten appear contemporary, Bowiesque, and unleashed scenes of which "the spiked drink / of an erect nipple" is a mere taste.

While teaching in Long Bay Jail, she heard an inmate remark that a haiku thriller would be interesting, and she pinched the notion for The Monkey's Mask, in which the lesbian investigator Jill Fitzpatrick discovers considerably more when trying to trace a missing student. Some pages contain only a single haiku, others rather more, and all crackle along.

The sleeker plots of What a Piece of Work (1999) and Wild Surmise (2002) work to even better effect. In the first, a Sixties psychiatrist proves as troubled as his asylum's patients, finally leaving for private practice – with a kitten who "smells of promise / and sheathed claws / like most pre-conquest women".

In the other, a glamorous astro-nomer is as enthralled by a Jupiter moon as she is by a femalecolleague – which her scholarly husband discovers before cancer's onset ("a razor / from within"). It is a brilliant portrait of uneasy domesticity.

Death and astronomy had also haunted the collection Other Worlds (2001), and Porter turned to several libretti before herself being diagnosed with cancer in 2004. In shaking off what she called poetry's "modernist fatigue", she succeeded in making it "festive, fun, and dangerous", never "daggy": as she explained for English readers in the notes to the English edition of Monkey's Mask, that is "the antithesis of groovy. One of the most common Australian insults. The noun dag originally meant a knotted lump of wool and excrement hanging off a sheep's behind". She is survived by her partner, Andrea Goldsmith.

Christopher Hawtree

Dorothy Porter, poet: born Sydney 26 March 1954; died Melbourne December 10 2008.