Poetry

Not Finding Wittgenstein by J. S. Harry

by Peter Porter •

September 2007, no. 294

Giramondo, $24.95 pb, 238 pp

Poetry

Not Finding Wittgenstein by J. S. Harry

by Peter Porter •

September 2007, no. 294

Satire is more than just biting animosity or moral denunciation, though in those shapes it has made its greatest contribution to world literature – from Aristophanes and Juvenal to the first Samuel Butler and Swift. The convention only works in relatively permissive societies. During the worst excesses of censorship in the Cold War, the authorities were seldom worried by satires cleverly concealed as fables or dystopian extravaganzas. Let the cognoscenti exchange winks, their rulers knew that the mob was not interested and the state hardly threatened. The censors themselves may well have enjoyed the ingenuity of their indignant critics – so Zbigniew Herbert, Miroslav Holub and Andrey Voznesensky prospered without having to defect to the West. Meanwhile, satire turned into cabaret in our part of the world.

Peter Porter

Peter Porter was born in Brisbane in 1929 and died in London in 2010; he had lived there since 1951. He published countless poetry collections, anthologies, reviews, and essays for almost half a century. He was a frequent contributor to ABR. His collections include The Cost of Seriousness (1978), Fast Forward (1984), and Collected Poems (1983 and 1999). His many awards included the 1988 Whitbread Poetry Award, the 1990 ALS Gold Medal, the 2002 Forward Poetry Prize, and the 2002 Queen’s Medal for Poetry. He wrote thousands of reviews, essays, lectures, and introductions. His work appeared in Australian Book Review from 1985 to 2010. His fellow poet–critic Peter Steele, who wrote a monograph on Porter, published this tribute in ABR following Peter Porter’s death on 23 April 2010. ABR’s poetry prize was renamed after him to honour his remarkable poetry and generosity to countless Australian poets.