Porter was born inBrisbane, Australia, in 1929. His mother, Marion, died of a burst gall-bladder in 1938. He was educated at theAnglican Church Grammar School (then known as the Church of England Grammar School)[1] and left school at 18 to work as a trainee journalist atThe Courier-Mail. However, he only lasted a year with the paper before he was dismissed.[2] He emigrated to England in 1951. On the boat he met the future novelistJill Neville. Porter was portrayed in Neville's first book,The Fall Girl (1966). After two suicide attempts, he returned to Brisbane. Ten months later he was back in England. In 1955, he began attending meetings of "The Group". It was his association with "The Group" that allowed him to publish his first collection in 1961.[2]
He married Jannice Henry, fromMarlow, Buckinghamshire, in 1961 and they had two daughters (born in 1962 and 1965).[3] During this period he worked in advertising, and was beginning to find work in the literary press.[3][4] Jannice took her life in 1974, greatly affecting Porter's work, in particularThe Cost of Seriousness.[5] In 1991 Porter married Christine Berg.
Porter died on 23 April 2010, aged 81, after suffering fromliver cancer for a year.[6] After news of Porter's death in 2010, theAustralian Book Review (ABR) announced that, in his honour, it would rename its ABR Poetry Prize as the Peter Porter Poetry Prize.[7] He was buried on the eastern side ofHighgate Cemetery.
His poems first appeared in the Summer 1958 and October 1959 issues ofDelta.[8] The publication of his poemMetamorphosis inThe Times Literary Supplement in January 1960 brought his work to a wider audience.[9] His first collectionOnce Bitten Twice Bitten was published byScorpion Press in 1961. Influences on his work includeW. H. Auden,John Ashbery andWallace Stevens.[citation needed]. He went through distinct poetic stages, from the epigrams and satires of his early worksOnce Bitten Twice Bitten, to the elegiac mode of his later ones;The Cost of Seriousness andEnglish Subtitles. In a recorded conversation with his friendClive James he stated that the
glory of present-day English writing in America, in Australia and in Britain, is what is left over of the old regular metrical pattern and how that can be adapted to the new sense that the main element, the main fixture of poetry is no longer the foot (you know, the iambus or the trochee) but the cadence. It seems that what is very important is to get the best of the old authority, the best of the old discipline along with the best of the new freedom of expression.
^Lea, Richard (23 April 2010)."Poet Peter Porter dies".The Guardian. London. Retrieved25 April 2013.
^"The latest literary news from the Editor's desk ..."Australian Book Review. Archived fromthe original on 14 August 2014. Retrieved25 April 2013.There were no such stylistic difficulties in Peter Porter's posthumously published poem 'Hermit Crab' ... one of the last poems that [he] wrote before his death in April 2010.ABR renamed its poetry prize in his honour later that year.
