Poet
Recipient of major national awards across the last four decades, Alan Wearne is now a major figure in Australian poetry.
Editor & Critic
The 1980s-90s saw Alan Wearne’s distinctive poetic voice in Poetry Reviews for Australia’s major newspapers and literary journals.
Publisher
Alan Wearne’s Grand Parade Poets published 14 volumes of Australian poetry including new poets as well as Selected Poems from more established poets.
Performances
Archived highlights of Alan Wearne’s performances reading his own works; being interviewed for radio; and appearing in podcasts and documentaries.
LATEST RELEASE
MIXED BUSINESS
A sequence of inter-connected narratives from pre–World War One to the 2020s, Mixed Business is Alan Wearne’s latest contribution to the verse novel genre. With a cast of over one hundred characters, this book is a risky, imaginative, large-scale history of 20th and 21st Century urban Australia.
POEM OF THE MONTH:
Permanently
by KENNETH KOCH
Wishing to have this wonderful near-to-70-years-old poem as a Poem of the Month I approached the Permissions Administrator at Kenneth Koch’s publishers Penguin Random House in New York. They replied: ‘We regret to inform you that your permission request of 09/08/2023 to use the above material has been denied. We do not allow full selections to be used on unsecure websites.’ However, after a spot of negotiating I received the following: ‘Yes, you can link to the Poetry Foundation’s posting on your website, so long as you do not post the full text itself on your website.’
So here it is: ‘Permanently’ by the truly one-off Kenneth Koch:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=27146
Alan’s Notes:
Not that my early poetry education was devoid of great, entertaining works, far from it, but I do wish that I had discovered ‘Permanently’ around the age of 12 or 13, for it sure would have ignited, being on a par with, for starters, ‘Jabberwocky’! Though not, per se, written for those in early adolescence the impact on those coming to grips with the grammatical concepts could be fabulously educational: let us take Nouns, Adjectives, Verbs, Conjunctions and Sentences and imagine them as living beings. Now we’ll see where this can lead… why it ends up with ‘Permanently’ as a love poem!
Next month’s poem will be of course ‘Jabberwocky’.