Inspire: Barbara Temperton brings ancient oral tradition to Folk n’ Shanty festival with Poets at Sea

An award-winning Albany poet is keeping an ancient poetic tradition alive, bringing together a local collective to perform a new feature in the Folk N’ Shanty festival line-up this year. Albany poet Barbara Temperton is the organiser and one of the performers of Poets at Sea, a poetry-reading event set to take place on Sunday morning at Six Degrees. Featuring herself and five poets from Albany and Denmark performing pieces of their work aloud, Temperton said the event was in keeping with the spirit of the festival and the genre. “Poetry, like sea shanties and folk music, has its roots in the ancient oral tradition,” she said. “They both have a lot in common, being that they are both forms of expression that pre-exist written language. “It is a vital part of poetry to read it aloud and bringing a spoken word performance to the festival really fits in well with the general old-fashioned theme of the event.” Performers have been instructed to choose oceanic-themed works from their anthologies, a topic Temperton has a strong affinity for artistically. “My relationship with the sea comes from childhood as I grew up in Port Hedland playing in the sea and reefs and my father was a fisherman — though, as I was a girl, I was never allowed out on his boat,” she said. “The ocean is a compelling place ordinarily, and as artists I think some people are more drawn to the sea — though I’m certainly not a sailor. “I do find it drifts into my work more often than not.” Temperton began her writing career in the 1980s, starting in short fiction before finding her “passion” in poetry in the 1990s. She has since published four poetry collections — about one every decade — since 1994 and had her work featured in magazines, newspapers and online journals. She said her third book, Southern Edge — which delves deeply into the local legends that drift around iconic Albany water features like The Gap, the Old Town Jetty and the Point King Lighthouse Ruins — will likely be the source of one of her readings for Sunday’s event. “I researched legendary stories that circulate in the community, picking up on those, applying the principles of folklore and rewriting them as narrative poems,” she said. “A lot of the stories I heard were about mysterious deaths or vanishings. “In my research, I found most had links in history to actual events and had circulated through the Albany community and been elaborated on until they had become almost fantastical myth. “One is my poem the Lighthouse Keeper’s Wife, which talks about the ghost at Point King, where the myth is actually based on a letter written by a woman called Jenny Smith who saw the ghost there.” Though she has served as poetry editor for Westerly magazine, taught writing courses at the University of Western Australia and Curtin University, and won the WA Premiers Award for Poetry for her second book Going Feral, her career highlight is a little closer to home. “In the Albany Public Library, they have one of my poems written on the staircase,” she said. “I used to work as librarian there and wrote the poem Elegy for Jean for one of my volunteer colleagues. “Getting my poem enshrined in local architecture is a career highlight.” Poets at Sea will showcase Maree Dawes, Warren Flynn, Graham Kershaw, Beth Kirkland, Yann Toussaint alongside Temperton. The event will also include a short open section for individuals to perform a reading of their own work, with participants to put their names down on the day and be chosen on a first-come, first-served basis.