Angie Hart and co turn poetry to music in Borrowed Verse

A Dorothy Porter poem resonated with the singer following the death of a friend.

The book arrived by post: a gift from a friend, beeswax reading candle included. Yes, post. The weight of a song is one thing, but poetry is obviously another level. The Bee Hut by Dorothy Porter remained unopened for a week.

"It was scary and I didn't wanna touch it," Angie Hart says. "I just wanted to control everything. Get drunk for a few nights, do a few little personal ceremonies, tell this grief how it's gonna be. Of course that didn't work."

Like the close friend the Frente singer had recently lost, Porter died of breast cancer in 2008. The Bee Hut was her last testament. "I opened it one day and it was on," Hart says. "It was so visible. She didn't flinch … It felt so alive and so joyous, sharing this art form that got her through."

For the grieving songwriter, it was a turning point. Set to her own tune and arrangement, two of those poems appear on Borrowed Verse, a new multi-artist album of poems made songs. "The melody and the meter, they're in there," Hart says. You just have to be in tune with them.

That's kind of how it works for Simon Munro, too. Whatever tune arrives on first reading is hard to shake, he says. Borrowed Verse has been his baby for around three years of sporadic touring, with a snowballing roster of musicians, from Tinpan Orange's Emily Lubitz to classical singer and composer Paul Bonetti.

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"The poet that I have done the most adaptations of is Judith Wright," says the Brisbane songwriter, who sings her Silence as the last track on the album. It's hard for him to quantify why her particular words get his melodies flowing. "I just find her poetry incredible. The language she uses, the phrasing… I find it easy to respond to.

"Those elements won't necessarily produce a good song. I like to think that the songs I create lift up the words; stay in the spirit of the poem. That's the intention.

"The worst scenario is to feel that … you've just kind of used the words as fodder. You want to feel like it's a valuable process, to make music that stays in the landscape of that poem."

Esoteric ruminations abound, but you might need to be Leonard Cohen to define exactly what distinguishes the words of a poem from the lyrics of a song. On Borrowed Verse, the lines are tangled.

With and without Augie March, the always-described-as-"literary" songwriter Glenn Richards has been blurring them for decades. On this collection, he and his band find a swirling orchestration and muttering Greek chorus in a sardonic Kenneth Slessor fable about a king and a flea.

But that's an exception to a more introverted rule. Unlike pop singers, poets are mostly found whispering to an audience of one. The connections they make are intimate, forged by secret understanding.

Munro's original thought was to curate these conversations, to connect living poets with musicians he admired. That bore fruit in a few instances, like when he introduced Ben Salter to Uncle Herb Wharton, an octogenarian Murri stockman from Cunnamulla.

But the poem, Tracks, was the singer's choice, and his other selection could hardly be more different. Where Corals Lie is a 19th Century seafarer's farewell by Richard Garnett, turned into a minor key lament by Sir Edward Elgar 130 years ago.

"One of my fears was putting together something that was too disparate, which is one of the dangers of any kind of compilation," Munro says. "The trick was choosing songwriters that would be complementary; getting musicians that love poetry and also poets… that had some connection to music."

Those threads make a loop on Borrowed Verse when Pascalle Burton, the author of Tom Cooney's song Morbid Fascination, turns up later playing keyboards in Brisbane band The Stress of Leisure.

Dorothy Porter, as it happened, collaborated with Tim Finn a decade or so before her passing. Hart doesn't pretend to have done that research. For her, the connection existed purely in her own circle of candlelight.

"It taught me a lot because you do rely on the chorus as a songwriter," she says. Finding a musical arrangement for a poem is more like "following a piece of string. It's got to relate from the top end to the bottom. You've got to stay in the same world.

"I might have thought I was writing poetry all this time but the more I read, the more I realise I've got a long way to go. So I retract every statement about ever having written any poetry. It's a whole other league."

Borrowed Verse is out June 15. The live launch is at Dark Mofo in Hobart on June 22.

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