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Well, goodbye then!

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I think I see where you're coming from there. I would have to agree about your conversationalist nature. I've noticed that you often write asides to the reader, such as "for we hate euphemisms as you would expect", and often draw the reader into the narrative movements of your poems through personal pronouns. You are quite the conversationalist indeed, but I'm afraid this conversation must end (as all good ones must). Bye bye Mr Porter...

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Some people say that there is something of a narrative quality to my poetry - perhaps that is the case to the modern reader. I like to keep my poems free to develop their own shape, I'm not a stickler for traditional forms like sonnets and rigid rhyme patterns, though I have used them and can work within these bounds without difficulty. My most effective poetry, though, is free verse - uncontained, enjambment styled lines that catch your breath and make you hold it. 'The Sadness of the Creatures' is good for this. Like you mentioned before, there is a playfulness in my writing too, a way of reproaching desire in a desirous voice. Maybe a more suited term than playfulness, though, would be conversational. I've often heard my poetry described as conversationalist, including the reader in almost-dialogic structures within poems.

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I see what you mean. All through your poetry, that I can see, is a kind of oscialliaton between playful indulgences (somewhat reproached), and replacements of the God sentamentality with the "Alpha and the Omega of Delight". This being the case, how do you do it? How do you craft such messages?

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Well Bec, 'Non Piangere, Liu' would be a good place to start, after all, "the whole thing is a comedy and comedies end happily". You can read this poem however you like, but to me it captures the shape of my voice, my best poetical voice, which really emerged after my first wife Christine's suicide. It was published 4 years after her death. There's a kind of disillusionment in grief that I think matches the disillusionment of society at the time of writing. We wanted to move - we had protests to pull our soldiers out of Vietnam, radical controversies in a Whitlam Government, new policies and socially accepted behaviour - but alas, still there was no 'drop of soccour'. You might see this also in 'How important is sex?', with the "bold and changeable" way that we seemed to numb ourselves from maybe too much pleasure in the 60s and 70s. Maybe that's the point. You see we loved the desirous - the "wank magazine" of our hearts, but I think such pleasure driven activity is less so an act of pure desire than an act of revenge towards the disillusionments we established between religion, the Church, God and our hearts. God is outside the frame, you might remember from 'Basta Sangue'. TV probably had something to do with it, transparency between political policy and political action surely contributed, especially with the Vietnam War. We saw with our own eyes, or at least the sole eye of a black and white television, the atrocities and evils of humanity. We felt in control almost. But what to do with such control? Push God out to start off with, clearly Death rules and there's no place for God, remember, indulge in the sensual and sensational, turn off the search for succour, it's a comedy after all - it has to end happily.

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I guess that's true. So Peter, let's say that I know roughly who you are. What I don't know, is what you can say - what's so special about your poetical voice?

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Perhaps, I was still finding my feet in London. Besides, you can't break the rules without knowing them to begin with.

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I thought these meetings were strict - formal, rigid even? Hardly the scene of a humourous character like you describe yourself to be?

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That's right. It was fantastic you see. That was the beginning of my career as a writer, many would say.

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Of course I have. You all met in London, a poetry group, men like Martin Bell, George Macbeth, Edward Lucie-Smith. You would circulate a poet's work each week and critique, analyse, and deconstruct it.

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No, I'm Peter. Have you ever heard of the Group?

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You're bluffing.

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I like to think on top of those highly concrete biographical details (that you clearly reworded from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biographies) that I'm a funny kind of guy, self-deprecating at times, definitely acerbic - I wouldn't say I'm a clean cut off the slab, a deviant at times you might say.

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Don't worry I'm not the stalker, I leave that up to the professionals. So Peter, besides the fact that you were born in 1929, died in 2010, lived with your grandparents from the age of 9 because your Mum had died, loved England, had a wife Christine who also died, raised your two daughters to Christine by yourself, remarried in 1991 and had a weird back and forth relationship with Australia over your life time, what else can you tell me about yourself?

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Fantastic. I'm so glad to have a stalker as my first tinder match.

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Do I know you?

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Probs not tbh. But I know about you...

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Hey hey Mr Porter ;)