Banjo Paterson

[billy]

i think like artists or some artists, they get discovered either before or after death. in the old days they got fame through patronage. a bit like the old masters. now days it's often the art critics who make a painter famous. i think it's the same with poetry. the critics and publishers predominantly choose who will be famous of not. like most things someone sets up a supply and demand scenario. jmo

back to banjo and co some of the sung words are remembered because they're easy to remember, they stick in the mind, everyone knows a mulga bill, banbang the man with the keys who shoots the buses in dublin. they're about us the people.

[grannyjill]

I've a friend, a Black Country poet (Black Country is the name of the area near Birmingham where I am living - named for its industrial heritage) who writes reams of poetry like this. His work is usually to be found in the Black Country Bugle which is widely read - so, for your average man in the street, it is the only poetry they will ever hear once they've left school.

I agree on the comparison with Kipling, but at times, for me he veers into McGonagall.

[billy]

pam ayres springs to mind again. i just love colloquial poetry and for me pattersons australian twang adds that extra something.
he also makes me smile. i don't know any poets from that region but if they're there, i hope they write like him.

[abu nuwas]

I've a friend, a Black Country poet (Black Country is the name of the area near Birmingham where I am living - named for its industrial heritage) who writes reams of poetry like this. His work is usually to be found in the Black Country Bugle which is widely read - so, for your average man in the street, it is the only poetry they will ever hear once they've left school.

I agree on the comparison with Kipling, but at times, for me he veers into McGonagall.

Jill -- I admire your candour. But I think he (and Kipling, for the matter of that) do something really essential: they write stuff which is good, yet the ordinary bloke or blokess, can latch onto. This, of Kipling, for example (not spoken perhaps as Kipling intended) would have resonated with many people when service in the Armed Forces was quite the thing -- and when a Court-Martial might have drastic effects. Naturally, if you choose to do this, you run the risk of writing the odd crass or jarring line; but for me, the prize is well worth it.

I read reams of poetry which seems almost terrified of being comprehensible, and it does not surprise me that the population is turned off. It turns me off.

This is Kipling's 'Danny Deever' (until removed by someone).

http://content.loudlit.org/audio/deever/...deever.htm


PS I thought the Black Country had to do with the earth?