After fifty-seven years as an—often controversial, always prestigious—prize for visual art, The Blake Prize became this year a prize for poetry, too—a prize won by my poem “Have You Seen”. Another of my poems, “Paradise”, which I like rather more, was one of two highly commended poems (and a third poem, “Windflowers”, was one of ten other poems shortlisted). So, I had a good run. Though I wrote none of my poems specifically for the competition, I’d have to say that “bliss, blasphemy and belief”, the theme for the competition, is pretty much my native habitat. Still, no one expects to win, no matter how comfortable he is, or she, in the territory.

Apart from the joy of winning a prize named for William Blake and concerned, as he was, with the divinity of the actual world, the erotics of everyday life, the heaven in a wild flower, it felt nice to win an art prize with a poem. For a poem, like a painting or a sculpture, is a work of art—a thing Blake well knew.

The prize honours the work of William Blake (1757–1827), poet, mystic, engraver, painter, printer, dissenter, madman, and was set up and is still run by The Blake Society, to promote artistic engagement with spiritual matters, broadly understood. Last year, under a new president, Rod Pattenden, the Blake Society approached the NSW Writers Centre to see if they could help run a Blake Poetry Prize. The centre found partners in the literary journal Wet Ink, who judged the prize, all 1032 entries, and the Leichhardt Council, in Sydney, who funded it. Thanks to all of them, especially the judges, Adelaide poets Cameron Fuller and Heather Taylor-Johnson.

Last week, after the awards dinner on 4 September, I wrote, on commission, a note for a magazine about winning the prize, about Blake, his work, its spirituality, and the spirituality, such as it is, of my own work, and you can read that below, if you’re interested. Here’s what the judges said about my two poems:

“Have You Seen” is a beautiful evocation of the Australian landscape seen through a veil of spirituality. Its vivid, sensuous imagery is immediately striking, but also what resonates is the subtle yet powerful suggestion of a presence shaping what we see. Moments of revelation arise from a relentless examination of the spaces between feeling and knowing; between stillness, motion and emotion; between a world in process and one that is in stasis. The material world is brimming with meaning, and there are layers of meaning in each line of the poem. In its focus on the relationships between entities, it recognises the potential for difference and conflict while expressing faith in the communion of shared experience. In its restrained intimations, its gentle tugs at the sleeve of awareness, its poignant observations, the poem affirms that spirituality is implicit in the world.

This contemporary reflection [“Paradise”] on the cyclical nature of existence explores the mysterious, difficult and ultimately undeniable interconnectedness of bliss, pleasure, pain and guilt. The grace and balance of this poem hold life and death together in such tension, the connection could easily snap—and yet it doesn’t. Alongside an unblinking acknowledgment of what might be termed “the facts of life”, there are beautiful, subtle references to such things as the sky “…going nowhere and blaming no-one fast—a vast intelligence canvassing nothing special…”

Read the poems in issue twelve of Wet Ink (http://www.wetink.com.au).

As a sculptor, who won the competition forty years ago, said to me on the night: what have artists ever been concerned with if not looking for ways of saying what we cannot see and cannot quite ever understand or express within the world we can see? That’s the kind of spirituality Blake was concerned with. And I guess my poems are, too. These ones, especially.

Melbourne poet Chloe Wilson wrote the other highly commended poem (“Dorothy Wordsworth, Boiling Turnips”). David Tucker won the major prize for his tender sculpture, “A Local Girl Comes Home”, and Peter Daverington won the prize for an emerging artist for his lovely “Mevlana—the Dervish Series”.

[Insert shot I’ll upload from The Australian]

ON WINNING THE BLAKE POETRY PRIZE

Mark Tredinnick

To write a poem you need to learn how to leave most of the words out. And how to make what remains sing and swing and sway; chant and chat and pray. It’s got to fly, but it must never leave the earth, the heart or the hearth where it began. It’s taken me forty-six years to learn the little I know about any of this that—about losing and loving and keeping it lean; poetry’s a thing I had to grow up to write. If growing up is what you’d call it. But I’ve only been at it hard—poetry, that is, and, some would say, growing up—these past six years, and although I’ve written a lot of poems in that time, most of them bad, many of them about to appear in my first collection, it feels like a miracle, almost like a proof of god, to have won the Blake Poetry Prize the first year it’s been offered.

And I have a confession to make: you won’t find a bust of William Blake in my studio. No only because my studio is a cowshed. He does not look down at me from the wall; he does not visit me in my sleep. Not so far as I know. I have known Blake as a poet most of my life without especially loving any of his poems. When I learned that my poem “Have You Seen” had won the first ever Blake Poetry Prize, I pulled down two biographies from my shelves and I googled the eighteenth century (1757–1827) London dissenter, engraver, printer, publisher and eccentric and I found a man in whose worldview I found something strikingly like my own.

The Blake is one of Australia’s leading art prizes, and, dreamed up by the Blake Society to encourage art that engaged broadly with spiritual issues as William Blake had done in all his work, it has been around for fifty-seven years. Blake’s spirituality was earthy, iconoclastic and robust. Nothing pious about it, even though he drew, in his imagery, his diction and metaphors from the Bible and the Low Church Christianity in which he grew up. I don’t think it’s misrepresenting him to say that he was much more concerned with the creation than the creator. The divinity of the actual world and the divine comedy of mankind within it—this was where he focused his vision. All the deities there ever were, he once wrote, dwell in the human breast.

We are, each of us, an expressions on god’s face, an idea in her teeming mind. The whole world is altogether more mysterious and awesome, and each of us more godly, than any of us, least of all the church had allowed. (“To see a world in a grain of sand/ and a heaven in a Wild Flower/ Hold infinity in the palm of your hand/ and eternity in an hour”) Blake stood outside the established Church, and he raged especially against its invention of sin, as a means to cow us and justify itself. “Energy”—erotic, carnal, intellectual, visceral—made all life, and any decent human achievement possible, thought Blake, and we should indulge in it, harness it and celebrate it. He had no time for shame, but a great deal for delight. “Man was made for Joy and Woe”, he wrote. Not, you notice, for piety, but for the heights and depths of a well lived, a wild, a courageously pursued and rich kind of life. So it is right that the Blake Prize has often, after a conservative start, encouraged and attracted works that challenge the rubrics of middlebrow religion.

“Bliss, blasphemy and belief,” the theme of the first Blake Poetry Prize, cleverly alliterating Blake’s name, nicely glosses most of Blake’s creative output, especially his poems (see “Auguries of Innocence”). It also describes the habitat of my work. So, I have to confess that it wasn’t hard for me to find a dozen poems I’d written over the past year that blasphemed, believed, blissed, blessed and even blamed in a way that might have made them eligible for the prize. With three days to go to the closing date, I printed my Blakean dozen and laid them on my desk and moved them about and rewrote half of them, and after a day and a half, I settled on four. I walked to the house and ate some lunch and then something made me walk back down to the shed to get (and enter) a fifth: “Have You Seen”. The poem I almost left on the desk went on to win the prize.

You don’t get to heaven, Blake believed, by being good. You especially don’t get to heaven by being right. I like this about Blake: his generosity and lack of sanctimony. It might help you—and all of us, I’m pretty sure he would have added—if you were just and kind and merciful. But heaven is not for the pious or the conforming. As a matter of fact, heaven, Blake felt, heaven wasn’t a place you went to anyway, for heaven was here and had been all along. This was it, or the part of it anyway, our souls are capable of seeing and sharing, for a time. But if there were a heaven—that is, if one lived right, not necessarily happily, but well—you got there, Blake, if I may take few liberties with his thinking, by loving much and delighting in the body of the world and one’s own body and the bodies and minds of others; by exulting in the beauty of things; by finding a heaven in a Wild Flower or a wild night or a child; by coming into a deeper and deeper understanding of the nature of the real world and of one’s obligations to and within it; by enjoying and accepting the passage of time; by greeting death as the start of the next bit, or the return to the nothingness where it all always begins; by knowing grief and guilt as part of joy, woe as part of delight; by forgiving one’s self and others just about everything but sanctimony and conformism; by pursuing the exacting disciplines of beauty.

I discovered all this about Blake, as I say, well after I’d written my poems and heard that one of them had won the prize named for him. It pleased me, when I studied up in case someone asked me about Blake, to find that what Blake believed I have believed, or something like it, as long as I have written anything worth calling writing and lived anything worth calling a life. And so it is with delight and joy, and very little woe, and with gratitude and a renewed belief in the magic of reality that I find I have won a prize named for this way of witnessing and living and loving the world and leaving it well enough alone—a prize named for William Blake, who influenced so many other artists who have influenced me, and who followed in his robust and sensuous, frankly sexy mysticism other poets and painters and madmen like Rumi from many cultures in seeing the world in a grain of sand and all eternity in an hour.

I found my poem on the back of Mt Gibraltar, a forested hill that lies between my home and the place where my children go to preschool. It began as a visual and visceral and then, quickly, since I am a poet, a linguistic and metaphorical, response to the way the light was sneaking about one morning among the eucalypts on that mountain as I drove it in the rain, and the particular sensation of being circled by the trees in their various ranks and hierarchies. I found the rest of it when it came to me, a response to my chanting call of “have you seen the way…” later that day and over the next two, as I played with it at my desk. “Paradise”, as is clear if you read it, began in a hammock. 

A friend emailed and asked me when he heard I’d won the prize, what my poem was about. He’s a poet and he should have known better. To tell you what my poem is about is to tell you next to nothing about the poem. “Read it,” I said. But I relented. Mostly I can’t help being nice. Or talking about myself. “Okay, the usual stuff: the divinity of the actual world round here. Oh, and time’s passage, another usual suspect. And carnal love and agape and trees and coincidence, I suppose. And joy and woe. And how nothing much is as it seems. But read it.”