Dorothy Porter, Australian poet, inspiration and mentor, has died of cancer aged 54.
Dorothy, I first met you when I was 18. I was a young poet, bright and shiny-eyed, desperate to impress you. You were my new poetry teacher at the University of Technology, Sydney, and you asked us all why we wrote. I remember saying, "because I can’t imagine not writing". At the time, I wrote something every day. Most of it was crap. You were writing Akhenaten back then. You brought in your drafts and we were burned to a crisp with their intensity. I tried to match you. I was being drawn in various directions, by Komninos and his concrete craziness, by Drusilla Modjeska, who also taught us, with forms like sestina discovered for the first time and cradled like a demanding lover, by postmodernism and non-narrative meanderings, open-ended deferred meaning. And your sparseness and clarity. I came second in a few poetry competitions thanks to your dedication, helping me work through drafts. And finally, painstakingly, came first in one. Thank you.
We lost touch. I became an editor and a journalist, saw you occasionally at poetry gigs. You, apparently, moved to Melbourne, but I didn’t know that until I saw you at a poetry gig after I’d moved here too. Then I bumped into you on the street one day. You lived around the corner from me, it seemed, in Fenwick St. We caught up. I was still intimidated by you: I might have been published and become known in my own right, but you had gone even further, Monkey’s Mask winning awards and then made into a film! My god, what poetry books are made into films these days? I wrote poems about how you intimidated me. What irony…
But I still chatted with you whenever I saw you. Mostly, recently, it’s been at Café Quince, down the road, when I’ve been marking papers and you’ve been reading or writing. We always said hi. I had no idea you were sick. We were never that close. You changed Australian poetry, Dot. You were too young to die. Thank you for the gifts of your words and your time. I am a better poet because of you. I’m only sorry that I barely write poetry any more. Apparently, this is what it’s like not to write…