Celebration Poetry

At the special poetry luncheon with the Society of Women's Writers NSW, I listened to selected members' poems and then heard an erudite address by award-winning poet Judith Beveridge on the ways in which poetry involves us, mentioning many poets:- Keats to Rilke, Neruda to Les Murray and Michael Longley, among them. I loved the way Judith talked of the way in which poets, real poets write firstly for themselves, and of the "high seriousness" of real poetry and its resistance to often degraded language of mass media - and its eventual 'soul-making' function.