Competition captures Burns

By Charmian Smith, Otago Daily Times, Thu, 26 Jan 2012

Dunedin has a special relationship with Scottish poet Robert Burns, so it's not surprising the city celebrates his birthday with an annual poetry competition. Charmian Smith talks to one of the judges, 2011 Otago University Burns Fellow Fiona Farrell.

Robbie Burns (1759-96) was one of the rare poets who encapsulated the mood of his time, Fiona Farrell says. She and Michael Harlow judged this year's Robert Burns Poetry Competition, which is a collaboration between the Dunedin Public Libraries and the Dunedin Burns Club.
"They become the voice of that time and they encapsulate that time - he obviously did that, and he spoke to people, and still does, in a way that has enormous emotional power. I think that's what poetry does, at its best, it gathers up the mood of the time, the mood of people and expresses it through the individual but it speaks to the whole. I suppose I was looking for poems that were heading in that direction," Farrell says.
In judging the competition, she and Harlow were looking for poems that followed the spirit of Burns but were not pastiche, that did not just mimic Burns' Scots dialect or where the impulse to write the poem was not clear, she says.
"What we were looking for, I suppose, was poetry that took the qualities that made Burns' poetry vivid for his contemporaries, so it would be written from a strong passionate feeling, it would have a sense of place, it would have passion, and not poetry that is a kind of fake tartan phoney Scots written in 21st-century New Zealand."
Full story at the Otago Daily Times today.  

Judge Fiona Farrell and published-poet winner Lynne Hill at the Robert Burns Poetry Competition prizegiving yesterday. Photo by Craig Baxter.