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:
Jabberwocky
by LEWIS CARROLL
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”
He took his vorpal sword in hand;
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree
And stood awhile in thought.
And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!
One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.
“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
Doubtless I had encountered ‘Jabberwocky’ ever since I’d accompanied Alice through the looking glass some years before, but the impact it had on me as a poet only blossomed once the language therein was explicated in class around the age of 14. It proved a fabulous challenge with the following as the result.
Wifflepuss
I wiffed a burble in the wold
And fell down dead within my parlth.
A stinny wifflepuss stied by
And then began to glarf
Up in Helvin the daintives screel
And I too joined them screeling out
Another wifflepuss stied by
Some snooty snot from out its snout
Ah then ahmen, all to the fen
We all stood round to watch it flawl.
And then went back to Helvin dear
Like a Goman back to Rawl.
There may have been another stanza between 2 and 3, but after 60 plus years of remembering I’m not sure. I know that ‘The Wifflepuss’ was the basis for an epic (yes an epic!) I started and certainly have lost from memory. Overreaching is always worth the effort, though not necessarily the result. For good or ill, I’ve been often known to overreach ever since.