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Peter Neville Frederick Porter OAM (16 February 1929 – 23 April 2010) was a British-based Australian poet.

Peter Porter OAM
Porter in 2007
Born	Peter Neville Frederick Porter (1929-02-16)16 February 1929 Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
Died	23 April 2010(2010-04-23) (aged 81) London, United Kingdom
Resting place	Highgate Cemetery
Occupation	Poet
Nationality	Australian British
Spouse	Jannice Henry (died 1974), Christine Berg

Life

Porter was born in Brisbane, Australia, in 1929. His mother, Marion, died of a burst gall-bladder in 1938. He was educated at the Anglican Church Grammar School (then known as the Church of England Grammar School)[1] and left school at eighteen to work as a trainee journalist at The Courier-Mail. However, he only lasted a year with the paper before he was dismissed.[2] He emigrated to England in 1951. On the boat he met the future novelist Jill Neville. Porter was portrayed in Neville's first book, The Fall Girl (1966). After two suicide attempts, he returned to Brisbane. Ten months later he was back in England. In 1955 he began attending meetings of "The Group". It was his association with "The Group" that allowed him to publish his first collection in 1961.[2]

He married Jannice Henry, a nurse from Marlow, Buckinghamshire, in 1961 and they had two daughters (born in 1962 and 1965).[3] During this period he worked in advertising, and was beginning to find work in the literary press.[3][4] Jannice committed suicide in 1974, greatly affecting Porter's work, in particular The Cost of Seriousness.[5] In 1991 Porter married Christine Berg, a child psychologist.[2]

In 2001, he was named Poet in Residence at the Royal Albert Hall. In 2004 he was a candidate for the position of Professor of Poetry at Oxford University.[2] In 2007, he was made a Royal Society of Literature Companion of Literature, an honour bestowed on a maximum of ten living writers.

Porter died on 23 April 2010, aged 81, after suffering from liver cancer for a year.[6] After news of Porter's death in 2010, the Australian Book Review (ABR) announced that, in his honour, it would rename its ABR Poetry Prize as the Peter Porter Poetry Prize.[7] He was buried on the eastern side of Highgate Cemetery.

Work

His poems first appeared in the Summer 1958 and October 1959 issues of Delta.[8] The publication of his poem Metamorphosis in The Times Literary Supplement in January 1960 brought his work to a wider audience.[9] His first collection Once Bitten Twice Bitten was published by Scorpion Press in 1961. Influences on his work include W. H. Auden, John Ashbery and Wallace Stevens. ^{[citation needed]}. He went through distinct poetic stages, from the epigrams and satires of his early works Once Bitten Twice Bitten, to the elegiac mode of his later ones; The Cost of Seriousness and English Subtitles. In a recorded conversation with his friend Clive James he stated that the

glory of present-day English writing in America, in Australia and in Britain, is what is left over of the old regular metrical pattern and how that can be adapted to the new sense that the main element, the main fixture of poetry is no longer the foot (you know, the iambus or the trochee) but the cadence. It seems that what is very important is to get the best of the old authority, the best of the old discipline along with the best of the new freedom of expression.

In 1983 Porter was a judge in the Booker–McConnell Prize.[10]

Awards

• 1983: Duff Cooper Memorial Prize for his first Collected Poems
• 1988: Whitbread Poetry Award for Automatic Oracle
• 1990: Australian Literature Society Gold Medal for Possible Worlds
• 1997: Age Book of the Year Poetry Prize Co-winner for Dragons in their Pleasant Palaces
• 1998: The First King's Lynn Award for Merit in Poetry
• 2000: Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal at the Mildura Writer's Festival[11]
• 2002: Forward Poetry Prize for Max Is Missing
• 2002: Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry
• 2004: Medal of the Order of Australia[12]
• 2004: Honorary Fellow of the English Association, UK
• 2007: Royal Society of Literature Companion of Literature
• 2009: Honorary Doctorate, Nottingham Trent University
• 2009: Age Book of the Year Poetry Prize for Better Than God

Books

In other media

• In 1981, Scottish post-punk band Scars recorded a song of Porter's poem "Your Attention Please" on their studio album Author! Author!.

Notes

Sources

• When London Calls: The Expatriation of Australian Creative Artists to Britain, Cambridge University Press, 1999
• Kaiser, John R: Peter Porter: A Bibliography 1954 – 1986 Mansell, London and New York, 1990. ISBN 0-7201-2032-2.
• Steele, Peter, Peter Porter: Oxford Australian Writers Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1992. ISBN 0-19-553282-1

External links

• Interview of Peter Porter by Ramona Koval, audio and transcript of The Book Show on ABC Radio National, on his last collection, Better than God, 15 April 2009
• Anthony Thwaite, "Peter Porter: Poet celebrated as among the finest of the second half of the 20th century", The Independent, 24 April 2010.
• Robert Potts, "Peter Porter obituary", The Guardian, 23 April 2010.
• Obituary in the Oxonian Review
• Poetry Foundation profile
• Profile at Poetry Archive
• Oxonian Review. 24 May, 2010, Issue 12.3 memorial essay

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