Speaker 1 00:02
This is a Vision Australia Radio podcast.
Speaker 2 00:18
I'm Vision Australia Radio, welcome to our conversations on the work and experiences of emerging writers. I'm Kate Cooper, and our guest on today's program is Rory Harris - one of Adelaide's best known poets and teachers, and as I said on last week's program, very much an experienced rather than an emerging writer. We spoke with Rory last week about his early days as a poet about his involvement in Friendly Street poets since virtually the very beginning and how poems of his have appeared in all of the Friendly Street anthologies from the very first time he had a poem published and we also talked about Rory's experiences in the Solomon Islands and what drew him to teaching.
Welcome to the program again Rory, and I wanted to pick up on our conversation about your experiences as a teacher. Teaching is as we know always a two-way interaction, so would you share with us some of your reflections on working with young people and what you've learned from the young people themselves?
Speaker 3 01:27
All right. I don't think there's anything finer than a 14- or 15-year-old student in year 9 or 10. I went into teaching as a result of the decade working in schools, because it creates some sort of legacy. And I'm still in schools now at the age of 70 and I'm exhausted doing three days a week work. It's a good thing to do and you have some grand days and you have some challenging days. But the school I'm in at the moment, my daughter teaches there. There are two staff members I taught way back and there are kids there whose siblings I taught.
So how cool is that? You're a 70 -year -old dinosaur still getting up in the morning, still teaching seven lessons a day in a yard duty, feeling exhausted by it, but you're getting something from the kids and hopefully they're getting something back from you. I did start there as a volunteer and six years ago I was going in two days a week to volunteer and I went into school and the deputy came up and said, you're not volunteering today, we need you as a relief teacher. And I said okay. So I took, it might have been a year 8, 9 art class and in another life I was head of English in the arts for a decade.
So I knew something about art and the task was to do some research on a couple of artists and I was trying to get the the lasses and lads to think about the historical period that these these artists came out of and I was talking about images of the Spanish Civil War, World War I, the Russian Revolution and World War II and there were some gaps in their humanities curriculum that they they knew all these events but they didn't know the geography or the suffering of those. So we had laptops, so full groups looking up the images of these horrendous times. One girl in the class stood up when the kids were getting a bit ratty and said Shut up, he's trying to make us think.
And I said I've been in school since 78 and it's now 2020 something. I've waited a lifetime to hear that and it's gold. That is absolute gold. If I believed in getting tattoos I think that I'd have that one across my heart.
Speaker 2 03:55
That's a gorgeous, gorgeous story. And I can see from talking with you previously how much joy you get out of the interaction with young people and particularly encouraging their love for poetry.
Speaker 3 04:08
As an English teacher you cover poetry, so you're teaching Year 12 English, you've got to do some poetry, kids write. I used to get excited when we could bundle up their work and send it off to Spring Poetry Festival when the Cesarine English teacher sent me an anthology. Now, sure I teach poetry in English but I'm also teaching the recount, the argument, the debate and stuff like that.
Speaker 2 04:35
Rory, you've also worked teaching poetry in prisons. Your Justice poems show a deep sense of empathy with people who are not in positions of power. Would you tell us about how your experiences teaching in prisons have influenced your own writing and how you see the power of poetry?
Speaker 3 04:55
Sometime in the early 80s, it might have been about '84, '85, there was a bunch of money. I think it came out of Karklu Centre for Performing Arts for Young People, and they had these things up, artists in residence, and the trial one, they gave you an X amount of dollars over 10 half days, no 20 half days, I think they were 10 full days, and two of us, a muralist, and I worked at the South Australian Youth Training Centre, and I forgot the bloke's name, but he put up the thing with the murals, with the kids in art, and I did the poetry workshops and reading and what have you. In those days, Lynn Arnall was the Minister for Education, so the money was coming out of Karklu, he had really brilliant people in education supporting this.
There was a secondary school in South Australian Youth Detention Centre up at McGill, so he had this sympathetic group, and you were getting paid, which was wonderful, so these kids wrote, and we couldn't take photographs of them, except from behind, very much a profile, so they're going to be recognised, and we put out these dayglo sheets of street poetry throwaways, and Lynn Arnall had the good grace to come down and launch it, and so you had support funding through Karklu, you had the Minister of Ed come down to the South Australian Youth Training Centre, and you had all these kids writing and performing their own work, well only good things could come from that.
Speaker 2 06:37
What a powerful way to support those kids' sense of their own dignity. That in itself is a real reward. What are some of the other rewards and what are some of the challenges for you in working with others to support their writing?
Speaker 3 06:52
I said this at a job interview once, the one consistent thing from being in schools for all these years is the concern with the voice. And during periods where things like youth participation in education was an umbrella organisation for everything way, way back with this alternate school programs. And they're all offering kids a degree of autonomy within either a business model or a creative model. And that year I was working at Woodrow High for 12 months as a poet in residence. Now that's a long time ago, but at the time it was a big deal. There was federal money from the school's commission innovations funding. And there was money from what is now ArtsSA. And they worked it together.
And I was in that school for a school year of 41 weeks taking classes. I think they gave me enough lesson every day, but you weren't a teacher. So you had this bloke in this case, working with kids in a school, writing poetry, workshopping poetry, doing the little magazine that came out 13 issues, getting some more funding to do the greatest hits of that magazine, and then getting these kids in school uniform to go to a workshop called Youth Participation in Education. I think we are at Karklu for the venue, but there are all that showing and telling of these alternate programs. And it was a fantastic way to share stuff, look at alternatives, but more importantly, to hear these kids talking up their own autonomy.
And there's there the Woody High kids talking about the poems, talking about the small magazine they were making, not knowing that at the end of the year, the Central Western Regional Director of Education gave me enough money to do Poetry Pi's greatest hits. And those days, we were publishing a thousand copies, which is amazing. No small press would be doing that these days. But there was a Commonwealth Book Bounty, which meant the federal government paid a fifth of your printing bill. This is pre-computer, so it was type seven. I pasted up the book. And I think we had a launch at Woodville High the following year. We sold it for $2. Every kid in it got a free copy. And with those numbers, there were 500 or 600 left over. We sold it for $4. So that's the way you did it.
So it was liberating for the kids. It was liberating for me because it was giving me culture to get another grant and get on the road. And it was liberating that in most cases, the books balanced because we had the numbers.
Speaker 2 09:43
Fantastic. You said earlier about teaching siblings or children of people you'd taught. Do you have people coming up to you randomly and just saying, Mr Harris, you taught me or you showed me this?
Speaker 3 09:59
Two accounts on that. I was at the year 10 night in a school I was teaching at and year 10 was that big leap into doing work experience community service and you're, you know, you're advancing into the senior secondary stuff. This is way way before a research project and personal learning plan, but we wanted to make the year 10 night significant. Anyway I was locking up the joint about 8 9 o 'clock and there was a dad and a kid hanging around the steps at the bottom and he yelled out to me, Rory, you taught me well - you hear that a lot, and I went down and shook his hand... this year 10 somewhere's next to him and, look, I'm old and I don't remember stuff, and I said where did I teach you? And he said at the South Australian Youth Training Centre.
So he's a dad who way back in the day was either on remand waiting to be sentenced or had been sentenced - and now had a 15 year old kid... and I was knocked out, and the kid knew his dad's history - he certainly knew it after that that exchange - but I reckon he knew it beforehand. That was... phenomenal for a couple of reasons, but the record, and my kids used to hate this when my kids were teenagers, you'd go into town and shop and carry on and we walked from the stair hotel to the balls in Rundle Mall and we bumped into 17 ex-students, and my kids hated being in the city with me for that very reason, and they used to kick me in the shins because they'd have two responses to them...
If they were current students in the current school I was teaching at, I'd say Go home and do your homework, and if they werer ex-students I looked them in the eye and say When did you get out of jail? And if you say that 17 times with two pre-teenage kids they just pissed off with the whole thing!
Speaker 2 12:14
On that note, Rory, would you read another of your poems for us?
Speaker 3 12:18
Schools are great repositories for writing. [?Lyricy] Friday I had the good grace in the last minutes of the week to shoot baskets with an eight-year-old rather than perform some arms-crossed heavy breathing standoff when he brought his basketball into the library. Much more effective than telling somebody off for doing the wrong thing - hey, there are positive ways of getting lessons across.
Speaker 2 12:43
On Vision Australia Radio, you're listening to our conversation program Emerging Writers. Our guest today is the poet and teacher Rory Harris. Rory, I have another question that I've been asking guests on this program. How do you go about creating your works? Do you have a favourite place where you like to write or do you write anywhere and everywhere?
Speaker 3 13:18
I stopped keeping the journal years and years ago, but the journal was that great thing for young people to make you right write, and then from those bits and pieces that you cut out the good stuff and get rid of the bad stuff and sustain something. I admire people like Helen Garner who's kept the journal going for most of her writing life. Years ago I kept a long journal on an extended period overseas and I loved writing it, but I loved going back to it, to cut up the stuff to make the piece. And that's the most I've ever felt like a real writer working with material. I think it was Robert Graves he said, you experience something and it feels like the aspirin dissolving under your tongue and there's enough juice there to create something. And it's those moments where you can furnish that and do something with it, that you can create the piece, in this case the poem.
Other people get the aspirin dissolving under the tongue and ignore it. One of my party tricks in performance with a year level of kids in a school or so community group was to talk about the times the hairs on the back of your neck stood up... and it might have been through something you read, something you saw, something you tasted or a sensory response and I said that's what Robert Graves was talking about, turning that thing into the poem. And then I used to say, you know, everyone's a poet, everyone has got those, that's a response but only so many people write it down and then once you've got it down you refine it and then edit it and try it out and what have you.
But the days when you're going to schools teaching poetry, you've got a couple of things going on. You've got the poetry, the poet, you've got the community of writers that are supportive of each other, blemishes and all and they can have that conversation about why it works or why it doesn't work. Like you imagine what goes on in creative writing classes at university, it's not cheesecake and bloody jaffas, you know, there'd be some pretty tough decisions being made. Well those conversations I began in 1978 and so if you've got the kids on side and the kids are on side with each other, they're there to write, then I think only good things can happen.
If you're in a school, you're not a teacher, you get permission to take them out. I had excursions way, way back, of walking down North Terrace, getting the year eights to hug the plane trees and I'd yell out along North Terrace, Shelton Lee's poem, have you ever felt so lonely that you wanted to hug a tree or go down to Elder Park, put our elbows into our inside of our legs and try and raise our faces down to the grass and kiss the grass, going to the eastern market at dawn, going to the central market, going on top of the old AMP building and looking over our lead.
So the methodology was the kids and you are getting on all right, they trust you, they trust each other, take them out and kiss the grass, go to the market, go to the AMP building and start getting those experiences into them so that they can write. I think it goes back to the characteristics of the poet, the trust you can develop and how far you want to push it.
Speaker 2 17:02
And also your ability as a guide for these young people to see a poem and absolutely everything that's around us, not just in a book or in something printed, but you can look at any object and you can see a poem or you can help somebody else to see a poem in it.
Speaker 3 17:21
That was the push for the textbooks. When AAT let me put together Take A Chance, they were all the poems from all those years running around of kids' work. And then that very question came up and said, well, how are you getting this stuff set up? And Peter McFarland, a brilliant teacher, he and I put together a manuscript called A Book to Write Poems By, using models from published poets and our own work with kids' examples. And that became like the recipe book. And that came out in the 80s. And then we did a book to perform poems by using models from known performance poets alongside the kids' work. And then we did Making the Magic, which was a combination of both.
But what it was doing, two things. You had the Australian Association of English Teachers publishing it. You had kids published alongside poets and getting paid for their work. And so you had the dignity of an education publisher. You had Witten Carlos Williams against a year 19.
Speaker 2 18:30
And you mentioned the English Teachers Association before and Saita, the South Australian English Teachers Association, describes you as insightfully unpacking the most cherished yet difficult parts of human existence. Jory Ryan writes in Eureka Street of sparks of light and small arrows of distress that knit together in such seemingly simple shapes in your work. You mentioned your friend and author Peter Goldsworthy earlier on. He writes that your deceptively simple, short, imagist poems ring like clear bells. So, Rory, tell us about the feeling or feelings that you have when you've just finished a poem and what do you do? Do you read it to someone you're close to or take it to a friendly street session? What happens when you've got a poem, you've edited it and it's ready?
Speaker 3 19:28
The process, I'm reading it and reading it aloud off the screen these days, I write on a piece of paper to start the show off and then get it onto the screen as much as possible and just read and read and get until my mantras, until it sings... look, I've got no patience, I send it off straight away, and sometimes they they work, sometimes they don't work - but in the grand old days with the self-addressed envelope, you finally type up a good copy, take it down to the local real estate agent and photocopy it and then send it off... I send them off quickly, and this there's a couple of small magazines, the journals that are still sympathetic to me , and to get a laugh then they might find something wrong with it and then tell me and I'll change it or negotiate something although they'll put it out.
I don't, I've never had a lot of stamina, of drafting and drafting and drafting and drafting - if I think it sings and I'll send it off. When it comes to putting them together in a book then you might fine-tune stuff as well, which means a lot of stuff never gets out and published, but there's another like that gets out and published. And sometimes you need the pragmatism of a good editor - and Graeme Rollins has edited a lot of the books, saying Yes-No-Maybe, and you can't get terribly precious about the Nos, the Maybes you might want to fight, and you're just happy that he's separated enough Yeses.
Speaker 2 20:58
Rory, when we spoke last week about Friendly Street, you mentioned about the community of poets there... and I wanted to ask you, what words or images come to mind when I say the word community?
Speaker 3 21:14
The Poet Union, a hundred years ago, the Poet Union was set up to cost you a dollar to join, and people joined because way, way back then, there weren't that many people running around schools doing the workshops. As soon as there was an element of money in it, that you could do that and get $40 for reading or whatever it was, people realised, you know, there was the potential to not make a living but to have a, what do they call it now, a side hustle. There might be only four poets running around South Australia in the 70s doing the schools, and a school wants ten poems, ten poets. And to talk about the community, I got a call many years ago from a wonderful Head of English advisor, and he said, I want ten poets for the Year 12 English Conference.
And I said, I'll go get you ten poets. So I phoned up nine poets because I wanted myself in that. And I said, you've got to pay us 50 bucks for the reading in the workshop, and he said, fine. Anyway, so I phoned nine poets, uh-oh, I've got a car, and six of the other poets didn't have a car. The other three did, or four did. So the day of the workshop and the reading, I get up early, I pick up the poets, and it was a Volkswagen '68 Beetle, so it was pretty cramped. And we go out and do the reading, and they're fine. We got the loud ones, the soft ones, and it was a smothering of poets. And then the advisor realised somewhere before we started that he'd forgotten the budget for our reading fees. So he got teachers to hand out bags to the audience, as they were coming in, to drop 50 cents each into these bags, a change, and teachers put in a bit of change.
At the end of the reading, and we had the workshop, we had recess, then we had the workshops with 20 or 30 kids, each poet. We finished up, the kids went to lunch, the advisor presented the 10 poets with paper bags in change with $40 or $50 in volume. So that community was well paid. On the strength of that, I said, This is ridiculous, let's publish a Poets Union directory of South Australian poets available to work in schools so the teachers institution can make the choice. Believe it or not, the Schools Commission Innovations funding gave us $360 to do this, because they valued writers in schools.
So each writer, and again, who was advertised with the Poets Union, produced an A4 sheet, typed up, name, address, phone number, blah, blah, blah, and on the back, a couple of poems. And that was the taster. And at the time, Richard Tipping, a poet and outlet who was very, very popular, did the graphic, which was a 50s male throwing cement into a concrete mixer. And it was poetry, a good mixer. So it was great. So we printed off as many copies of this journal as we could, the directory as we could, laid a rule out at the Experimental Art Foundation, put the three staples on it.
And I had budgeted for enough rolls of electrical tape just to put down the spine so people don't let it cut their fingers for going through it, because everything in those days was A4 landscape or portrait, three staples or two staples or whatever. So we got a few hundred of these things. How do you get them into schools? Well, you contact Garth Boomer and he'd say, Garth, give us 300 envelopes, because we've done the budget. And we sat down with the white pages and addressed them to schools, getting further and further out from Adelaide. So, Adelaide High did a right, Aboriginal Park did a right. By the time we got down to Seaford, we might have run out of the journals. And Garth had the love and the presence to put him in the courier for us because we got 350 bucks and that was it.
So, you have a community, you're trying to get the community out and about and access to institutions. The highlight was the Australian Poets Union used the same model and brought out a simple, might have been 300 or 200 pages of a Poets Union directory nationally based on that model of getting poets into institutions.
Speaker 2 26:25
In listening to you talk this week and in last week's program, the love, the passion and the creativity that come through, and particularly the willingness of people to work together to create something special for the children in our state. It's been wonderful to speak with you, Rory. Thank you so much for coming in and speaking with us. I guest on Emerging Writers today was the poet and teacher of Rory Harris.
This program is produced in our Adelaide studios and can be heard at the same time each week here on Vision Australia Radio, VA Radio on Digital, online at varadio.org and also on Vision Australia Radio podcasts where you can catch up on earlier episodes. Thanks for listening to this Vision Australia Radio Podcast. Don't forget to subscribe on your preferred podcast platform. Visit vairadio.org for more.
Speaker ? 27:35
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