SO LONG BULLETIN

THE FULL PORTFOLIO OF LAMENTATION / CHRIS WALLACE-CRABBE ON PETER PORTER

Sat, 15 Dec 2012 14:13:00 +1100

Allow me to begin with a very dark poem by this linguistically rich poet. It was written some time after the suicide of Porter’s first wife. It is called, “The Easiest Room in Hell”, let me add; and very few poets dare to mention Hell, these days. However, its tone is far from being his only register:

At the top of the stairs is a room
one may speak of only in parables.

It is the childhood attic,
the place to go when love has worn away,
the origin of the smell of self.

We came here on a clandestine visit
and in the full fire of indifference.

We sorted out books and let the children
sleep here away from creatures.

From its windows, ruled by willows,
the flatlands of childhood stretched
to the watermeadows.

It was the site of a massacre,
of the running down of the body
to less even than the soul,
the tribe’s revenge on everything.

Once it held all the games,
Inconsequences, Misalliance, Frustration,
even Mendacity, Adultery and Manic Depression.

But that was just its alibi,
all along it was home,
a home away from home.

Having such a sanctuary
we who parted here
will be reunited here.

You asked in an uncharacteristic note,
“Dwell I but in the suburbs
of your good pleasure?”

I replied, “To us has been allowed
the easiest room in hell.”

Once it belonged to you,
now it is only mine.

Indeed, a large question to be asked about his rich oeuvre would be this: is wit a natural companion of sadness, even of some kinds of depression? Can it even stave off the effects of a tragedy? These are no trivial questions.

Peter Porter was a dear friend of mine for decades, who had grown into being a marvellously nimble poet, great talker, rolling wit, and yet all the time he might have quoted that poem which opens, “It is the little stone of unhappiness/ which I keep with me. I had it as a child/ and put it in a drawer.”

In some measure, his brattish (do I mean British?) legerdemain with language continually transformed gloom into an intellectual carnival of high spirits. He wrote then as a smart immigrant in London, the poetry’s worldly glitter half way between admen and Carnaby Street. “Death in the Pergola Tea-Rooms” is such an early gem. So is “The Great Poet Come Here in Winter”.

Every true poet knows that the title of a poem, its proper name, is also an extra flick of its potency, a bonus. Titles are often salvific for a modern poet. Peter’s poems early or late, had the greatest, Epigrammatic titles, hand-crafted barriers to keep dark feelings at bay. I think of “A Huddle of IQs”, “Happening at Sordid Creek”, “Woop Woop”, “Scream and Variations” or in extremis, “Civilization and Its Disney Contents”.

Porter’s early poems shuttled to and fro, yearning intermittently for the poet’s dead mother and lost, sepia Queensland, but also flaunting the brash voice that can assert, “Everyone tries to get as much sex as he can.” This brittle jazz is frequently well done in the early books, generated in the years of his finding London’s tone: amid the supportive pub-going cluster of “The Group” - but ever with our “sunlit plains extended” haunting him in the background, in as much as he ever paid much attention to landscape.

Lacking the Virgin Mary, modern writers make do with sex as a subject. In general, Peter Porter’s world was erotic, as well as deeply musical. The poems imply an artist who has always lived in the Land of Afternoon; although he started out pretty young in chronological fact, our poet seems never quite to have had a youth. It may be that he always intuited the truth of Beckett’s remark on Proust: “the only paradise that is not the dream of a madman, the paradise that has been lost.”

He resembles his antetype, Les Murray, in having been wounded and driven by the early loss of his mother; but in his own case there are also Puccini, Stravinsky and art postcards from Florence, for consolation; also gardens of course, where “we enact the opening of the world”, nicely balanced between civil culture and rampant nature. Perhaps Clive James, a émigré know-all of the same generation, was right in suggesting Porter felt that “even his good luck must be bad luck in disguise. But this does make him sound a little too much like Kafka.

There was never anything of the madman about Porter. He was profoundly sane, yet haunted by that parental loss, which seemingly reinscribed itself in his first wife’s suicide. Yet he wrote on, recovered more and more territory, all the way into Better than God, which politely courted blasphemy: a final Porteresque joke.

The poet Peter Steele, long an admirer of Porter’s metamorphoses, has reminded us (if we ever needed this) of his fascination with Browning as “the talker non pareil”. Fair enough, and Browning had also invented modern poetry’s capacity to be many different voices; in such voices Porter long danced away from his sadnesses. Steele has written, in his Peter Porter (Melbourne: OUP, 1992):

There is another kind of horizon under which all operates in Porter’s poetry, and that is the horizon of death. Death in upper or lower case, is named many times in the poems; it also wears many masks, and the unmasking is a frequent gesture. We are so accustomed to poems that speak, in many traditions, about death, that it is easy to forget that all of these are talking about a “beyond” – not a life beyond death but death itself. None of us has been there : in this respect, we are all like pre-adolescents thinking about sexuality. With Porter one feels as if he has been there, not only in the vicarious sense that he writes often of the dead but the the sense that he knows “Zero at the bone”. And yet it never feels like ‘deathly” poetry … (p.51)

“In the new world happiness is allowed”, he wrote but through the portals of Italian art and the gate of Austro-German music he could find contentment, even in the planet’s mustiest purlieus. But that poem comes from Porter’s most powerful single volume, in which we find his great, original elegies for his first wife, “Non Piangere, Liu” and “The Easiest Room in Hell” as well as his piercingly modest variation on Bishop King’s seventeenth-century exequy, a poem which ends in the gentlest plangency:

I owe a death to you – one day
The time will come for me to pay
When your slim shape from photographs
Stands at my door and gently asks
If I have any work to do
Or will I come to bed with you.

This was the poet’s Plain Style, hardly hinting at his exotic range of forms, idioms and references. Indeed, I sometimes think it no wonder that he favoured painters of the baroque and mannerist periods: he relished stylistic impurity, or as Steele has dubbed it, thickening. The beginning of one late poem goes so far as to yearn for the Bible: that large tome about the unjust God our poet could never believe in at all:

Where are the Science Students? Gone to Media Studies,
so why not take the Bible down and get a high
from old Isaiah? Half of what we mean by poetry
is still the rhetoric Hebrew makes in English.
Phasing in a little modern jargon – The Internet,
Pacific Rim, bi-polar writing – and off we go
back to the full portfolio of lamentation

These lines will further remind us that, despite the clown-suit and spangles, we are dealing with a wisdom writer, with one who cared deeply. When you can feel deeply enough and do it in rhythmical diction, then you are truly a poet. When you can shape a completed poem, you have conquered the minute, or even that dark hour.

How deeply the poet would have concurred in the Reverend Sidney Smith’s opinion that the third age of man “should be lived in great cities”. London, Rome, Sydney and Melbourne, these were the fields of his comfort, precisely because “everything stays forever foreign/which settles down in Rome”. Urbanity, in the fullest sense, stood behind his luscious vocabulary.

Urbane wit is the greatest anti-depressant, more effective even than shiraz or cabernet. And Porter’s tough wit was that of an agent, not of a patient, despite everything that life confronted him with. He was indeed what muscular critics used to call a Strong Poet. We respond to his inner strength in such poems as “The Farewell State”, which ends like this:

What then
of wrath and politics at 9,
the shouting and the banging-down
of spoons? The discontent, the poor
gas pressure in the bathroom,
the sky of angled slate beyond
the window – these are commas
of the working day, not needed in
the seamless punctuation
of your dreams, those parables
of Emperor and worm. Make the most
of anger and discomfort then,
and people’s grating voices:
today or some other likely day
the cats will wake and feel they’re cold
and seek a warmer contiguity.

There is much to be said for our making the most of things, and events. Such an achievement as Porter’s returns us to the climate of hope.

Originally part of ‘Hope and Despair in the Poetry of Peter Porter and Sylvia Plath’, The Dax Centre, November 29th 2012

'INTERFERON PSALMS' BY LUKE DAVIES / PHILIP SALOM

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 09:02:00 +1100

Open Interferon Psalms towards the front and you encounter this kind of writing:

The blade of my happiness broke at the hilt. I flailed
without balance, at air. A break in the hilt is a bad break
to fix. Life in search of a blacksmith. Of bellows and tongs
I knew little.

The rumpled magazines of waiting rooms.

The great lakes came and went. Winter rolled in for ten
thousand years. I dreamed of heat, in lethargy.

All life became a leaving behind. There weren’t alternative
fullnesses.

There were stories written on calfskin, though I had no
capacity for concentration. The lost would be found, on
land, and by water.

It was never going to be a long love affair, but in my
yielding I became a mystic.

The poems in this collection perform archaic imagery, Old Testament references, Psalmic notes in the margins of the poems, and from a unexpected variety of melodramatic and spiritual claims (encounters with God, with millennia) (and being a mystic) the poet makes lyrical trips within a context which is often implied rather than stated. To know the literal place you must do so by inference, to infer, enfer, Interferon..? Unless, of course, you know Luke Davies’ personal history of drug-taking from his other books and therefore accommodate this book as the latest installment in what seems to be a self-examination/self-mythologising project of his, of himself, book by book.

Ice-age, eons passing, denudation, re-growth, millennia and metaphors of grand geomorphic dimension mixed with film imagery and hints of addiction and the wasteland a mind might become. These are immediately present as the stand-ins for the poet’s conditions of addiction and (later) extreme liver treatment with interferon. Within all this voicing there is a voice of more personal kind, one less grand, more self-ironic and which, without the metaphoric dramas, reads as the poet. The Poetic style mentioned too often relies on the big effects; but the saving grace is in the lesser effects; the result is wildly weird, at sometimes strangely likeable, but is ultimately uneven.

The poetry has a wildness to it that is quite appealing. It has a good-natured archness too, I mean arch with a kind of boyish enthusiasm and couldn’t-care-less (but knowingly roguish) abandon. This leads to a deeper kind of outrageousness, to big sweeps of feeling, or claims, that a reader is supposed to swept up in and might well enjoy, for the wild ride. A happiness, almost, despite the literal extremity of the poet’s state and a kind of Biblical wretchedness. A seductive otherness, too, given its religious engulfment. And a bit of – those trite and ubiquitous catch-alls – ‘energy’ and ‘passion’, though there is, for all the reaching, a kind of lassitude in all this which leads to my final thoughts on the enterprise. Also struck from within the poetic phrasing is a frequent reminder – with so much pastiche and appropriation how could there not be – of the Biblical cadences and influences that continue to live in much of English poetry, and the remembering echo (if that’s not tautological) of actual psalms, sayings, entreaties to God and the like, and the rhythms and musical soundings of the same.

Within genre considerations Interferon Psalms also belongs within trauma-memoir and, if we accept it literally, conversion-memoir. Religious. It rises and falls at times in very bipolar fashion and yet its distress never feels like despair or degradation exactly – because the rhetoric is so high-flown. It is therefore almost comic, in this, its paradoxical (is it?) tone-deafness. Trauma writing is one of the most publisher-supported and reader-indulged forms of memoir, so after Davies’ Candy, the book, the film, and his previous book of ‘love poems’ this kind of trauma-memoir seems another good fit with readers, especially when it’s published by Allen & Unwin. They are a large publisher of fiction/non-fiction and can expect big sales and a readership that is therefore expected to include, and perhaps be dominated by, readers whose main reading interest is not poetry. A more suggestible audience. An audience more likely to be ‘swept up’ and to enjoy… So I am sure there are people who will like this poetry.

The book opens with these lines:

Lift up your hearts.
Lift up your hearts. So then, lift up your hearts.

It is a flooded world: every available flood.
It is a flooded world: such floods of good.
Everything present, as it always was.
A flooded world: I’m sick with shallow corpuscle.

Isn’t this too easy? Quasi-Biblical for effect and then repetitive (chant) in phrasing and floods and every available flood (what does that actually mean?). And the pat or posed such floods of good..? Not the ones the Bible (and we) normally associate with flood. These lines are soon followed by:

To have said Go! to the bees. To have said Disperse.
To have understood a taxonomy of honey-gatherers.

Reading this book, I realise there is a question of proportion. I could like this as contemporary pastiche, but there is so much of it. I hear it less in the book’s many prose paragraphs – which often speak more plainly altogether:

Still, surrender had to be offset with ‘slowly’, which for an entire night,
universes of it, was your catchphrase, even as you enacted great tenderness,
even as yearning beckoned you gently.

This is subtle, delicate even, and yet ‘universes of it’ is there quietly reminding us of the dimensions and references everywhere in nearby pages. This quote with almost no leaping took a while to find. The larger rhetorical pattern always returns. I search for presence, even for the more sustained argument of the poet’s voice, but find everywhere pastiche and a form of reaching whereby the self and ‘big’ nature must be invoked concurrently to represent the self. And the ‘Biblical’ makes me wonder how much of this is stolen thunder. Take away the value-laden signifying tone and diction and style and you have archaism and – very much to the point in such a discussion – glibness.

Mohammed said: speaking of the Truth is like passing on a kiss by messenger. Few poets are great kissers. Some imagine themselves to be. For those whose main interest is poetry, kissing may not help, more rigour is required. All writing of so-called mystical insight is bang up against the same problem any poet faces: the inadequacy of words, of language, to ‘accurately represent’ the experience, or be constitutive of it, especially any insights beyond the normal. Hence the use of suggestion and especially allegory in so much spiritual writing, for an experience or knowing which is itself a form. Pastiching the Old Testament is a possibly effective strategy but to do it throughout this work and to conflate the Psalms of the Bible with the medicated symptoms in mind and body of the poet being treated for hepatitis does seem to be drawing a long bow (or wielding a heavy blade) along the way.

And what ‘way’ is this? The Sufi way – the great mystic and love poet Jalaluddin Rumi was a Sufi – seeks to separate out from the seeking mind all the attachments and illusions and delusions of self and ego. They practice a science of keen-sightedness rising to states and investigations beyond words. Their view of the mystic is of a mind being led through rigorous exercises towards an evolution of consciousness. It is not grandiose, it cannot be egotistical (an absolute contradiction of states, and purposes). The Way involves being subject to ferocious scrutiny by masters who are bullshit detectors even for those ecstatics who practice among them. Interestingly, the Sufis have been known to say dervishes who spend too long in dance and ecstasy have lost the way and have succumbed to personal emotionalism. We imagine poetry is different.

Poets choose their words. Poetry for the page is the form least arbitrary because it has let go the spoken and the looseness of life and character for the forms it has inherited or has chosen to innovate within. Not arbitrary and not merely the naive flow of feeling, of ‘expressiveness’ that many imagine it to be. That delusion of writing as first thought, best thought. A draft, yes, a book, no. Poets choose the order and rigour of word and phrase, to make representation of the world and, simultaneously, and sometimes contradictorily, to let the poem be its own fact. Truth and integrity, discernment and provocation, all together. The experience of language and its meanings as one, a multiple, its texture. Its repeating now-ness. That is a poem. And endless varieties of poem are that. Whereas Rhetoric seeks to persuade, to manipulate, to sweep us up and close down the critical response and to convince the reader of the impressiveness of … well, the poet. And this poetry feels far too much like that. Which feeds back on the reader’s perception of the validity of the experience (as found in the poetry, and in response to the poetry) and what undermines any such claim.

[…] I’d wake each morning, my
blood mid-percolate, the day’s hair triggers of desire and
chaos hovering as always as yet unborn, and some days
it’s all radio K-FUCK blaring inside me, so I turn down the
dial on that one, O God of Hosts.

Despite the awkward tense shift (which is just OK, but was it necessary?) this is acute and focused until that sudden and gratuitous (and silly) O God of Hosts. A sudden address. And how much better without it, to have stayed in the sober, resigned self of the phrasing before it? You can almost imagine the poet writing O God of Hosts in afterwards as a tag. God and me, we go way back.

Then the archaic or ‘other’ imagery continues:

The panthers and jaguars came in from the jungle. They prowled the bollards where the ships once waited. All buckled concrete and thistles now. When the sluices have silted and the rain broken through, the rain-catch holes will disappear. The world will be silent for thousands of years.

‘Where’ is this? This seems a fair way from the self?

Savingly, and coming often, is Davies’ humour and, in Old Testament context, the ‘leavening’ effect of it. Humour, quiet enough to miss at times, such is its mix with inflation, but a real pleasure to read – here, say, as the poet makes both rhetorical and then level-headed fun of himself.

I admired, from my deckchair, the green hills of my peripheral turbulence.

I needed to weep, or watch football, so I chose football because my instinct was to stay blank until further notice.

If only there were more if it. And less constant, self-aggrandising rhetoric like this:

All over the planet the olive trees shook. The mountains and the buildings dripped with age. The little tales distorted through the years. The centuries piled up. Millennia. The battles ran with blood. I knew nothing. I gave up everything.

And then there is this:

A needle tunnels into the thigh. This is what you’ll do now. But alternate the thighs, to avoid rash. Nurse says I’ll teach you how to use the syringe. You say that sounds good. She says jack back to make sure there’s no spume of blood. You say No spume of blood. Eyebrows arched.

Direct, unflinching, almost scary, the irony of the blood spume… and no resort to any rhetoric of otherness.

If nausea is an ocean the bed is a ship, adrift on it.

Saliva rankling like acid.

The blood is gone from me today.

This is winningly exact and visceral enough in both these quotes to feel it ‘in the body’, and especially the queasiness of the nausea metaphor. This is a reliance on observation and physicality as a reality not as posture and rhetoric. There is a gritty and open kind of self-scrutiny as seen on/in the body and as imagined through linguistic representation.

I had the vapours. I looked inwards. I didn’t read the physics of matter. I
stopped short of awe because now I didn’t have the breath for awe. I had a debt of gratitude but I stopped short of being stabbed by the now. Nothing was here. It was all panting.

This kind of writing, which begins in Section II, and lasts for several chapters, and which recurs within some of the later chapters, seems to produce the most settled and ‘authentic’ poetry in the book. But the book overall is sadly uneven: in sections before this and after this there are many passages of similar achievement but they are caught everywhere throughout in the over-reaching: the grandiose poet, and I say poet not poetry because of an emphatic concentration on ‘I’ and (to a lesser extent) ‘he’ organising the point of view:

I began to pray, for all of us, each morning. O Witness, O Word: how gladly we enter this life where the living crumble.

[…]

I had not fallen into water where I could not swim; I swam in those waters with ease. This made me, apparently, a mystic.

In fact, these poems address a great many spectral presences: O Diadem of Beauty, Holy One of Being, O Gasoline of Gods (a better one, this), O Infinite One, O Restorer, O Enricher, O Provider of Mountains, O Horn of Salvation, and many many more. And in other words:

I climbed up and above myself, like a tree. Then I climbed above the tree.

I was ‘gifted’, in one way only, but in many more ways than one.

Does this make convincing poetry? Or is it merely a rhapsody of the self? A kind of metaphoric fantasy? I can understand readers getting excited by the bravura of this book, the crazy reach towards wider and wider and time-unlimited significance. It almost feels as if the poet has injected himself with himself and got high on it. But now, as Verlaine is supposed to have said to Rimbaud: “We must take rhetoric and wring its neck.” That was a century ago. And what this book suffers from is the same bravura being in the service of one insignificant ego. By that I mean – just another person. This idiom is not one that sounds in any way familiar to contemporary speakers or poetic styles, it is consciously archaic. Therefore it is often hard to be sure of Davies’ tone – is this knowing (as I had suggested earlier) and self-ironising (as I’d hoped) or not?

Poets are faced all the time with the fact of language as a semiotic system. One such as the Symbolic Order which Lacan says we are born into and which after early infancy we are defined by; and in Heidegger’s term of geworfenheit, the life we are thrown into and are thus cast adrift in. So in some ways Davies’ book can be said to exemplify being cast adrift in language and in the wild chemistries of his own body, and his poetry is the attempt to describe this drama within not only language as a working system but as a system therefore including the set/received/traditional/Biblical and religious semiotics of the past. The Biblical echo spreads everywhere in this collection, and it claims this serious poetry and ‘holy’ resonance for its own ends, to seem more substantial, to sound full of portent. The risk in this is sounding something much less – portentous. The truthfulness of such use is also central to what this poetry might seem to be claiming, and then – lacking sufficiently extra invention, insight, personal revelation – seem to be fudging. Whether, and which, will depend on the reader. While seeming to state his smallness and wretchedness, Davies actually aligns himself with nothing less than the grand authority of the Psalms, King David no less.

So authenticity and self and even convincing-ness are themselves constructs to take or leave as relative, as not immediately or naively ‘true’; the problem then is how we write and read sufficiently openly and rigorously to make decisions on the value of what we write or read. And the point remains: whatever trace the mind may have experienced and the poet began representing, the final collection of poems is the meditated, considered and edited evidence and expression of that trace. It is not spontaneous. And with such emphasis on the autobiographical this book cannot but stand in for the poetics – and the self-values of its maker.

Poetry is enthralling and paradoxical because poetry prioritises language to such an extent that words and phrases are themselves made extraordinarily present, and make us register them away from the automatic reading, from the pat acceptance of phrasing that ‘makes message’ – as per much public language. This exceptional presence of poetic language is a virtue (almost!) and it is a privilege for a poet to be engaged in this level of aesthetic work. Using it as an over-blown personal, as over-inflated Romantic voicing – long past the Romantic era and rigour (and they were rigorous) of Shelley and Keats – is a worry. But their poetry attests to a gathering perception within, and into, a subtle register of sensibility. It is characterised by openness, awareness and high associations between sensory alertness and abstraction, beauty and rapture and longing.

I often cried at night in dreams, those private myths of plaintive distress. On the other hand, O Consolation of Israel, I was happy to be a multidimensional participant.

May I bless also the utter desolation which fell upon me.
And even my ruination was one of God’s names.

This is very hard to take convincingly: it begins in bathos, gets silly and then ends in this (un)holy conceit. Surely O Lord it raises the wreck of oneself too high… Ruination (itself a fairly grand term) certainly is raised – to the level of spectacle. A kind of voyeurism the reader may well find pleasure in; this is one of the repressed motives of much, if not all, lyric poetry.

But given the literal base is of heroin addiction, then lost-love, then interferon, where is the social/personal grounding and representation of such in the poems? After several references to she and her – eventually, after 25 pages here is the lover he has lost:

Belly to belly I rammed you, your little whimper like a sounding sea.

She said she wanted to be like an interior designer – but inside people’s souls.
She had the radiance of California to back her up.

Her stupidity was all her own, though.

[…]

She was blossoming into her sillihood. She became the queen of that land.

Her doe-wide eyes were mild.

I came on her like a ton of bricks. You what?

So, this is the woman who has so distressed him that only cosmic references to galaxies (not even the minor scale of planets) can represent the distances of his estrangement. This woman, now signified by ‘rammed’, ‘whimper’ (little whimper), ‘stupid’, ‘silly’, ‘doe-eyed’, ‘mild’… and he, by that final line.

It is something important elided, surely, not having characterised the lover in more rounded fashion? And maybe justify somewhat the grandiosity. The psychology of loss and the poems would be stronger for it, along with more detailed representations of the rituals of fetishised body acts, like hunger, finding the drugs, the time and place and rituals of injections – increasing the later dramatic counter-point of the interferon injections, awful as they are.

Instead the poems float in rhetorical currents of the subject, the impossible-to-get-away-from self of the melodrama. I began to feel as if nothing was too huge – or even huge enough – to describe or represent the speaker’s self; but in this relentless geomorphic and cosmic reach the actual self is very hard to locate; that is, other than as voice… I mean a self as more literal, and psychological. When the poetic-self is expanded so poetically and egotistically it displaces the speaker’s agency onto a metaphysical reaching – and the reader’s response onto a similar ‘reading’. This has the effect of ghosting the poet’s actual deliberations and, instead, foregrounding/privileging the larger claim of spiritual significance, an experience much more elevated and ‘other’ than the stronger and tougher representations of addiction and hepatitis medication. Well, medication might produce mystical visions. It is said to produce a variety of side effects, including depression and anxiety. Do oddities of side-effect and or melodrama constitute insight – or insight that changes, revolutionises the person, as spiritual practices can?

Finally, there is a kind of contradictory lightness in Davies’ overall technique that makes me wonder at times if the whole thing isn’t a kind of whacky comic turn. I’m sure this isn’t intended. The writing is too deliberate. The eccentric religiosity feels linguistic rather than a conversion of any sort, and if so then it is spectacle with no moral or emotional currency. I kept wanting a more explorative poetry and – for the ever-present but suffering or effervescent ‘I’ – a more characterised representation. Not to be. The speaking voice is forever reaching into abstracts and echoes.

Luke Davies, Mark Tredinnick and John Kinsella are three poets who have attracted many shortlistings and prizes and, presumably, readers, with their recent books of poetry. They are talented and very different poets but in these latest works they place their poet-persona in the foreground and intensify different degrees and kinds of rhetoric on both sides of the mediating ‘I’ – to a striking degree. Despite each poet originating from an era of poetics and theoretical discourses which have questioned the lyric ‘I’ in terms of the unstable self, they present a performance of unaccountable self-mythologising. The poems can, just as easily, present each poet in a counter-reading: Davies from an extremity of gritty and ironic self-scrutiny into a species of religious inflation; Tredinnick from seductively lyrical landscape writing and a wryness of speaking into a smoothly philosophical narcissism; and Kinsella, who in many ways is the opposite of the other two in writing from a deliberately flattened poetic of radical landscape positioning (neo-modernist) and a sparse metaphorical-gestural linguistics, coming across as seen-it-all politically self-righteous. Regardless of their other qualities, their books inscribe each poet as a rhetorician of the self.

So what in this gestural poetic is attracting readers? Is it the boldness itself? Are readers tired of a more sober or cooler or ‘trickier’ stylistics and hungering for this Romanticism? I suspect poetry judges have a pull towards the extremities themselves, but specifically, here, on the spectrum of the ‘I’, to its form and representation. At one end of this spectrum they award the quiet, modest art, poetry of exactness and detail; and, in contrast, are also seduced by the bold and hubristic, the gloriously ambitious rhetorical expansiveness of say, Davies’ two recent books. It isn’t a rational response if this big-gesture poetry is lacking in rigour and shifting vainly from portent to portentous, whereas for one of the awards won by, for instance, Sarah Day, the judges commented on her understatement and her poetry being ‘urgent and moving without the need for flamboyance’. It might even infer a different and further worry: modesty for women, big display for men? I hope I’m wrong.

And finally from the Interferon poems (noting the awkwardness of ‘got cleansed’)

Luke’s mind got cleansed by the Salinas River
Now everyone follows, saying Luke Luke

This was how religion began.

'SOUTHERN BARBARIANS' BY JOHN MATEER / ELIZABETH CAMPBELL

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 12:39:00 +1100

To be a poet is not my ambition,
It’s my way of being alone.

            Alberto Caeiro (Fernando Pessoa), trans. Richard Zenith

To travel! To change countries!
To be forever someone else,
With a soul that has no roots,
Living only off what it sees!

            Alvaro de Campos (Fernando Pessoa), trans. Richard Zenith



You spoke my name in King Joao Library,
the hall closing in around us, the gilt-lined tomb
of a sinking carrack …

                           … You spoke
JOHN MATEER into the dark of King Jaoa Library
and were closer to my name than I will ever be.

            from ‘Eduardo,’ Southern Barbarians, p 48

Many contemporary Australian poems tour foreign locations, throwing in place names and foreign words, often in a decorative manner. This vein of poetry may set out to signal the poet’s own well-travelled cosmopolitanism and appropriate post-colonial modesty but sadly mostly ranges between the merely dull, and the dully Orientalist. The politics and psychology of foreignness, of otherness, of empire, is rarely touched in any but the most gestural ways. Those matters, in all their real complexity, form the core concerns of Mateer’s oeuvre . With Mateer, travel seems continuous, and continues in the various countries of his residence. His last book, The West, collects Mateer’s ‘Australian poems’ together, presenting a body of work which thinks about ‘Australia’ as a concept, or at the least to trace the trajectory of Mateer’s consideration of ‘Australia’. Born in South Africa, Mateer (as configured in the poems) is outsider in Australia, enabling the poems to question what insiders might be, and what they might be inside. This critical focus on the idea of a nation could, and, for some poets, does, lead to a self-righteousness which erases dialogue and elides the error-strewn and never-ending journey which any conscious approach to questions of politics or identity must take. Leads, in other words, to preaching. Mateer’s poetry mostly avoids this through its intelligence, its specificities, and its internal focus. Mateer’s interest is not only in the outer cultural manifestations and fallouts of imperialism, but personal and psychological ones. The phenomena revealed in the ‘Australian’ poems are often uncomfortable, but anger and indictment are deepened by an honesty about the complexity of our responses to our personal implications and entanglements in empire.

Southern Barbarians traces remnants and leftovers of the Portugese exploration, travel, trading and empire in Japan, Brazil, Angola and Portugal itself. Invoking and ventriloquising the great Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, its soundtrack is Fado, and its governing spirit is of saudade. This Portuguese idea – feeling, rather than word – is difficult to capture within the sceptical spirit of contemporary poetic or critical language in English. It entails nostalgia and longing, for something, someone, someplace absent or lost, and is both a sad and a hopeful feeling, which reaches into past and future at once. Like the darker, neighbouring Spanish duende, it’s an invaluable term, and similarly difficult to translate: the words that carry saudade into English can inject a negative or suspect connotation of delusion, self-indulgence, sentimentality or melodrama that does not exist in the Portuguese. Or rather, the Portuguese does not regard these nostalgic modes with such scepticism. Southern Barbarians is infused with saudades, for Portugal, the Portuguese language, for friends, and for possibilities of belonging, to people, to places, to language, to oneself.

The title invokes ‘Nanban’: a Japanese word referring to uncouth foreigners. The term, as I understand it, shifted in its usage from South Asians, to the Portuguese, the Dutch, the English – it signified those traders whose approach to Japan was usually from the south, regardless of their origin. The broad dismissiveness of the Japan-centric term, its reversal of the Anglo-centric vision of what civilisation and barbarity are, could be ironically applied to Australians, South Africans: those whose use of English far from England and whose relationship to the geography, the seasons, etc, all entail a de-centring from the place where our culture and language originated, with its inapplicable ‘East,’ ‘West,’ ‘Continental’ and ‘trans-atlantic’. It insists on the oddness of Australia’s, and white Africa’s position within the global south, whose very name is invoked as a rebuke to the continuing economic imperialism of European cultures. In Southern Barbarians there is a de-centring too of the idea of Empire – away from the Dutch and British colonies in South Africa and Australia, toward colonies less pawed-over by writing in English: Brasil, Makassar, Macau, Angola.

Writing the paragraphs above, my memory suddenly threw up an odd incident which I had almost forgotten and in which the reader must indulge me in an uncharacteristic gonzo moment: I don’t know John Mateer but I did meet him once, by coincidence, almost ten years ago, on a train between Chartres and Paris. I have no idea how I knew it was him but, as I was very young, I decided I must say hello. Shy and excited, I formulated the words of my approach. I remember very clearly deciding that I would greet him with the exact words, ‘Are you the Australian poet John Mateer?’

Why am I telling you this story? The randomness – as the kids would so inaccurately say – of the encounter and the peculiarity of the words which my memory suggests that I chose to address to the poet have taken on an odd Mateerean shape in my memory. What was I thinking in addressing him in such a manner? Why ‘Australian’? why ‘poet?’ I suppose it was a combination of shyness, uncertainty, and a desire to assure immediately that my interest was professional and therefore not creepy. It seemed almost aggressive to steal the poet’s anonymity, so I suppose a sense of politeness made me contextualise my question – the qualifications ‘Australian,’ and ‘poet,’ could help instantly let him know that I was not: a long-long French cousin/ passport control/someone who had just found his wallet. I think, now, of a more grandly orchestrated moment: Auden’s apocalyptic interrogation from above in ‘Under Sirius:’

            And out of the open sky
            The pantocratic riddle breaks -
            ‘Who are you and why?’

In the end I don’t know what I shyly said, probably ‘Are you John Mateer?’ with lots of mumbled ‘ums’ and blushes. Understandably surprised, he agreed that he was, and my friend and I – scruffy, enthusiastic young backpackers – chatted to him cheerfully all the way to Paris, the lucky man.

On The Train from Cascais to Lisbon

The scripito continua of the graffiti
on the walls and houses running along the railway line,
like the blur of Portuguese conversations
half-heard, is interrupted by my waking
to glimpse, between the teeth of collapsing roofless buildings
and weather-besmirched mansions,
a silent eucalyptus grove,
and by the wonder of whether in my abrupt forgetfulness
I should ask

Where am I? or, being the poet, Who am I?

Southern Barbarians, p. 38

We are dealing, in all these poems that I have quoted so far, and in my own miniature Mateerean scene on the train, with a moment of recognition from outside, which insists on an act of internal self-recognition. We are asked to say who we are, and the question is magnified in a moment of dramatic uncertainty. This vital drama is seeded throughout the poetry of John Mateer, where questions of identity are inextricably linked to questions of language, revelation and recognition. The sight of unexpected eucalypts in Europe is familiar to Australian travellers (and South Africans – there are eucalypts there too). ‘Silent,’ illegible outside what we had taken as their ‘natural’ context – for me, they are always destabilising and unwanted, intruding home – if that is what Australia is – onto the liberty of travel.

In ‘Eduardo,’ the poem I quoted at the beginning, the reader and the unknown ‘Eduardo’, both stand ‘close’ to the name of the poet, speaking it, or reading it, while the poet himself seems startled up from some other world. Is this an Edenic self, deep inside, integrated too organically with a pre-linguistic whole to be summed up in a name? Or is it a left-over self somehow corralled in the corner of the consciousness, unintegrated, and alienated from the name? In both trains, the question of ‘where’ in the sense of origin, nationality and belonging is folded into the question of ‘who’. The part of ‘Eduardo’ I elided above also contained biography and geography, detail and implied accusation:

… According to my translator
in the preamble to reading you poems you envied me:
He is a white African; I am desterrado. I imagined you asking
how many slaves were transmuted into the gold embellishments
curling baroque and serpentine around us …

‘Eduardo,’ p. 48

To suggest that, in Mateer’s poems, the voice’s ghostliness is fundamentally a matter of nationality, ethnicity, culture, imperialism, would probably award such things too much weight. The revelation of identity is an archetypal moment whose variousness is pursued throughout much myth and literature. Aristotle isolates as crucial to tragedy, the moment of anagnorisis, which translates serviceably enough as ‘recognition’. It is the moment in which a character becomes conscious of their true nature, and through this understanding, recognises the nature of their predicament, or vice-versa. A giant example is the moment when both Oedipus and the community of Thebes finally recognise him as the son of Laos and Jocasta and as the regicide; the unclean thing. This recognition, catastrophic as it is, is fundamentally correct, as is the revelation of Odysseus’ identity when he returns to Ithaka, and claims his kingdom, his slave, dog, son, father and wife. But the penalties of misrecognition and failed recognitions range between the unfortunate and the disastrous. In the Bacchae, Pentheus’ refusal or inability to recognise the god in Dionysus leads to Pentheus’ mother’s fatal misrecognition of her son: she kills him, believing him to be a wild beast. When Odysseus returns to Ithaka, failure of recognition is fatal for Penelope’s suitors, but successful recognition kills Odysseus’ father, overwhelmed at the sight of the son he had believed dead.

The Christians give us echoes too, in the joyous recognition of the risen Christ at Emmaus, the doubt of Thomas and, perhaps most subtly, in Peter’s denials in the Garden. For what Peter denies is not merely recognising Christ but his own identity as the man who recognises and follows Christ. Peter Steele’s weird and wonderful book Expatriates takes Adam and Eve, exiled from Eden, as its central figure and their wandering expatriation as poetry’s topos.

There are more sinister exempla: ‘Are you now, or have you ever… ?’ or the oath-taking or name-as-identity dramas of Rumpelstiltskin, A Man for All Seasons, The Crucible, The Wife of Martin Guerre or Olivier Olivier. Shakespeare’s comedies are recognition dramas, plausible in their ridiculous wife-swapping, mask-wooing, false accusations and girls in pants only through the audience’s instinctive understanding that the recognition of identity is more than recognising someone as you might on a train, by their face, or their voice, or any other of their outer accidents. There are more innocent versions too – the great hilarity which kids find in swapping names, Spartacus style, when a relief teacher calls the roll: ‘Nah miss, he’s Jackson, I’m Sean!’ is, I believe, more profound than simple conspiracy and pleasure at her gullibility. They are trying on a new identity and feeling, in its poor fit, or its easy fit, the noisy little gulfs that are among and between our selves and our names – what Mateer refers to when he writes ‘that Atlantic between a name and its yawning person.’(Pessoa as Photographed Child p. 27).

But where Pessoa created multiple heteronyms, with their own imaginary lives, personalities and poetic styles, Mateer has created the poet JOHN MATEER, this vacant and self-estranged speaker. There is a remarkable hollowing-out of the voice, the creation of a no-place to write from, perhaps in response to the weight of complex origin: ‘Exile and Jew, blue-skinned, silver-tongued stranger, I have/ arrived too late.’ (The Book of Namban Arts, p. 57). I wondered, a couple of books back, if this urge to self-erasure was becoming a mannerism. Perhaps it is, but in this case at least, mannerism is what is otherwise called style – and it’s what makes the poet worth reading. The ‘I’ is persistent, in the biographical detail and the harping on JOHN MATEER, but Mateer’s poems are polyvocal too, using quotation and phrases by characters and interlocutors, and are filled with stuff; with specifics of place. The ‘I’ becomes, in the persistence of a self writing, a way of articulating voids and problems in the whole question of self-hood. There is a continuous refusal to self-identify, a deferring of identification, or the experience of fleeting moments of identification as a kind of horror; the evocation of a ‘monster’ self. There is a self-hatred, or at least a self-deprecation, whose other face is a kind of autotheistic hubris. The ‘jew’ is not only exiled, but entails the angel or the prophet Elijah who, in Jewish tradition, tramps disguised from house to house, rewarding those who feed and shelter him, punishing those who drive him away.

Sometimes this refusal to recognise the self can be a flight from the weight of outside insistence on identity. Southern Barbarians, foreign devils: embracing an identity as ‘barbarian’ can be a way of being liberated from a responsibility towards cultural traditions, as many Australian expatriate artists have discovered in Europe and elsewhere. By shucking off the details cited in ‘Eduardo,’ the poet reuses his potential identification as ‘white African.’ Or else the speaker fears a disastrous misrecognition - torn apart figuratively by one who identifies him as the wild beast, the colonialist. The interlocutors in Mateer’s poems are also cast in a role of inquisitor, like I was on the train, or as a more wholly-selved foil to Mateer’s insistently homeless gaze: ‘You fuckers kept invading my country, the Angolan says/ … I say that’s one of the reasons I left my country’ (In A Bar, p. 77). Recognition can, as in Christ’s case, lead to transfiguration. In the case of the devil, or Jean Val-Jean, it is an unmasking which robs the speaker of power. But even in a small poem like this, things are not simple: who are ‘you fuckers,’? White people? Or South Africans? Or the Portuguese?

Pessoa was, like Yeats, and other Modernists obsessed with the occult. Poems about Pessoa capture a Faustian ventriloquism:

Pessoa as Photographed Child

There is no addressee, only this photo
in which you, as much as I, proliferate.

You, Pessoa, eyes lowered like those of the Virgin
in Sao Roque, are always gazing off

into what they call ‘the middle distance’,
that Atlantic between a name and its yawning person.

Pessoa, you are neither an addressee
nor the subject of this childhood photo.

You are my Self captured in this photograph
and I am your sole surviving heteronym.

p.27

By choosing, or discovering his queer elective affinity with Pessoa, a man who lived almost entirely through and for poetry, Mateer affirms that inescapable vocation, or vacation. Pessoa’s self-erasure as Pessoa and self-creation as any or all of his more than seventy heteronyms, can be read as playful, ironic, riddling like Rumpelstiltskin. This tricksiness is present in Mateer’s poems, but they seem closer in spirit to the sadness that also pervades all of Pessoa’s writing. Even as they declare their independence of normal ideas of happiness, Pessoa’s heteronyms’ way of being is primarily negative, asserting their own non-existence; even the pantheistic writings of Alberto Caeiro seem at some reactive, existing to assert a denial of readerly expectation.

Many of Pessoa’s heteronyms were translators or were translated by other heteronyms. Reading Pessoa in concert with Southern Barbarians was a ghostly experience, or a Platonic one. The poems have absorbed Pessoa, digested and transformed his life and work. Not just nostalgic in their subject-matter, they perform a nostalgia in their saudade for Pessoa – they are a great homage and witness to that poet. Made sadder, more nostalgic by their only partial intelligibility as glosses, they erase their making, as they stand independent of all the specificities of their reference. Mateer is translator too, in these poems, of Portuguese words and culture, and of Pessoa, and there is a sense of all speech being translation:

Translators are Angels

Translators are angels, I whispered
into the ear of my guardian-angel in King Joao Library.
They stand beside us, hearing our thoughts,
only muttering what’s necessary. Smiling slightly,
listening carefully to the speaker who’d mentioned my name,
she said: We are perfect nobodies; nameless
voiceless, winged incandescence, except when we’re bad.
Then she turned to me: Like now, if I don’t tell you what he said –

p.29

In one section of the book, Mateer translates fragments of Os Luciadas, Portuguese poet Luis de Camoes’ fabulous seafaring epic of the 16^th Century. In these short poems, much is lost, or present in a ghostly way, and that loss is part of what the poems are talking about. Mateer, in all these Portuguese poems, is a kind of cuckoo in another culture – the depth of identification with Portugal fascinates me. This kind of interpretation and translation of a culture seems impudent, risky and liberating. In another part of the book, Camoes becomes another avatar of the poet:

After Returning From a Journey of Exploration

On the pillow John Mateer’s sleepy head
is a goldfish bowl aswirl with Venetian water,
and on that galleon, that luminous toy,
he is at the helm, telescope to his eye,
         swearing he can’t see Australia.

And when his caravel glides into the Tejo,
         as poised and cerebral as a black swan
he calls for a glass of port and a pastel de nata,
         then takes to his bed in a quiet hotel in Alfama,

and dreams the dream:
         that one day there will be a poet
named John Mateer, just as there was once,
         off the edges of maps, a monster
called Australia.

           p.41

‘The poet’ would seem to be the thing. The poet protests too much, and too often, and the declarations of selflessness, emitting paradoxically from a speaking self, insist on the presence of that self and its searching desire. As ‘the poet,’ Mateer lays claim to an identity which has been repeatedly defined by its hollowness: that hollowness which allows it to speak. I think of DH Lawrence’s ‘not I but the wind through me’ and its logical parallel, Alvaro de Campos’ (Pessoa’s) ‘Pantheistic cavalcade of me inside all things’. Vacancy presents an opportunity for self-fashioning, as Pessoa did in the obsessional creation of alter-egos so consuming they intruded on his own time, tastes, opinions and relationships.

I think of Jorge Luis Borges, another great latin Modernist, and his short essay ‘Borges and I,’ in which the famous man ‘Borges’ is ‘the other one who things happen to,’ who makes literature and seems somehow parasitic and sinister in the life or existence of whoever is writing. The essay itself ends ‘I do not know which of us has written this page’. (Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, New York: New Directions, 1964, pp. 246-47.)

Place is paradoxical too in these poems – specific and material, it is also capable of being hollowed out. Eucalypts, and later and African bird intrude the absence from Australia and Africa into Portugal, Portugal intrudes its absence into Japan:

Homelessness

Striving after the gentle among the sleeping homeless
stretched out on every bench in Ueno Park,
I am not in zazen, not in the polluted heart of a mega-city,
not patiently inhaling, rising from the murky depths
of Shinobazu Pond,
the blurry leaves and white butterflies thoughtful on
my blind eyes.

I am a soul, golden, elongating, ten metres high,
a flame hurtling down the hills towards Canberra.
No, I’m God, flaring up briefly in the dark mind of Fernando Pessoa,
that poet ensconced here on the bench among his homeless brothers.

The poem lurches between the kind of ‘gentle’ stillness, which it is ‘striving after’ and the utterly ungentle hyperbole of the last lines. Playful and shifting as the poem may be, there is something Romantic, Promethean in the vacillation between a conception of the self as limited and ‘blind’ and of a self liberated from the flesh, as flame-spirit, and then as kind of incubus ‘in the dark mind’: this is the self as mystery and potentiality, rather than nothingness. I love the audacity of this demonic image – the poet as bushfire, taking a malicious relish in the destruction of Australia’s surreal capital. The hubris of ‘No, I’m God,’ dampens in an instant to a kind of ambivalent humility – we are back to ‘homelessness’ as a levelling virtue, by which the poet (which poet?) becomes a ‘perfect nobody’ (Translators are Angels, p.29).

The desiring self, which asks ‘who am I?’ keeps melancholic company with the saudade. But the yearning spirit of the saudade seems to assume a kind of self-recognition. Desire is often configured as a loss or a vacancy, but it can also very easily be understood an assertion of existence. In order to long for a person, place or point in the past, some present point, and some self at that present, doing the longing, must exist. When others are involved, the self is pinned further – for vacant as the speaker may feel, others persist in identifying us with our names and our stories, as we saw in ‘Eduardo’. Desire for others, and even for places, is the desire to be ‘held in mind’; to be acknowledged and recognised by those people and places. In Mateer, the spirit of saudade provides relief from scepticism, and from the kind of self-disciplining irony about the self which informs much contemporary poetry in English, or all least the consciously critical vein which informs Mateer’s. ‘The gentle’ is not his natural mode, being the poet who lashes Australian complacency with uncompromising view of colonial privilege. But in Southern Barbarians, ‘poeticising shelter is a way of speaking loss’ (Angela, p.50). Several poems refer to ‘exile,’ but exile suggests the possibility of return, and there is a sense, in Mateer, of no origin to return to. There is perhaps only, ‘The Empire of Nostalgia,/ inhabited by inebriated poets,’ (An Essay on Sweetness, p. 40). Even here, Mateer is a poet of consciousness as much as he is of culture: of consciousness’ negotiations with culture. Significantly, the ‘Empire of Nostalgia,’ is characterised by ‘laneways and tiny late-night bars/ manifold and luminous as the cells of the brain.’ Mateer continuously, ambivalently reaffirms that he is, strangely, John Mateer, a poet. And those luminous and numerous turnings within the Empires of nostalgia and poetry are as overdetermined and complex as the fallout of empires in the world and in the mind. Mateer as poet, is witness to complexity.

In the section ‘The Humanism of Friends,’ he paints a series of portraits, mostly longer-lined, packed with names and places, meals and conversations. Humanism, some might argue, belongs in the Empire of Nostalgia: the poet skates close to envy of many of his subjects. There is a peculiar, paradoxical whiff of nostalgia for a possibility of belonging more wholly to a national identity. Relief from history and from self-hood, is yearning, saudade, and seems to exist only in its absence, in expatriation:

There Remains another Place

Years before I would walk in Lisbon’s cobbled streets
and over uma bica wink at myself in the mirror
behind the bar in Café Brasileira

Years before, on discovering in a bookshop
in Kyoto Pessoa’s Lisboa:
what the Tourist should see, I almost wept

I almost wept I was so happy
that others in the Old Capital
were dreaming of the Empire of Nostalgia

so happy that in all our minds
there remains another place
and in that a trapdoor: the human voice: Saudade

Southern Barbarians often had me reaching for Google. I adore information in poetry and I love explanatory notes. In Southern Barbarians there are none – the poet does the same thing his translator threatens in ‘Translators are Angels,’ withholding what he could tell us; but that seems right. The lack of notes is another silence, highlighting a kind of absence: something lost in the deliberate de-centring of this book away from Anglo-centric cultural and literary tradition and towards another tradition with its own history of reference, translation and gloss. Many silences are empty: Mateer’s are teeming. Searching for notes, I understood that worlds of cultural reference and history existed, of which words, places, phrases, form a ghostly net, behind the writing. My lack of recognition here, where seems recognition would be possible, had I the necessary cultural knowledge, makes me feel a very great ignorance and curiosity. The poems sent me back to spend some time with Pessoa and Camoes, with both of whose work I previously had only a nodding acquaintance. This ambitious, confident and utterly natural reaching-out into fields of knowledge and literature is one of the marks of the exceptional depth of Mateer’s poetry. It is very sad that poetry which does this, in Australia, is often greeted with feelings of fear and inadequacy, rather than interest and joy.

THE WORLD IS BUT A WORD (IN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION, WHAT IS YOUR POETRY ABOUT?) / SIMON WEST

Thu, 13 Sep 2012 07:42:41 +1000

Steward: O my good Lord, the world is but a word.
Were it all yours to give it in a breath,
How quickly were it gone.

Timon: You tell me true.
[Timon of Athens]

As a rule poets find it very difficult to describe what they write about. In answering similar questions the novelist will happily tell you about the characters who inhabit his worlds. But unless he composes epic verse the poet finds himself at a loss. If he invokes anything to do with his own feelings, or way of experiencing the world, he fears he will be dismissed as a neo-romantic. If he mentions the words ‘love’, and ‘nature’, he is certain people will start throwing stones. For a long time I tried to avoid this predicament by declaring curtly that I wrote about language. Like Timon and his Steward in the exchange above, it seemed that poetry was primarily, almost exclusively, a question of words, and that reality was as fragile as the language we use to describe it. This may well be true. But I now believe it to be too reductive a notion, and potentially dangerous.

Contemporary reckonings of the world see us under the spell of a culture of nihilism, in which facts have given way to interpretations. In this realm all art that is not primarily entertainment struggles against its own inessential nature. It struggles to be more than a document of the patina of subjective existence of the artist, and it struggles to conceive of ourselves, our community, and reality more widely as other than groundless. If we live in a culture that oscillates between total relativism and the substitute for transcendental metaphysics offered us by science, then our use of language betrays this same schizoid nature. On the one hand we encounter writing that is so swayed by the author’s subjectivity it looses touch with reality and readers. On the other hand, like Polonius who insists on speaking by the card, we are constantly tempted to consider language a tool for keeping things, ideas and ourselves distinct and fixed in place. How can poetry find a way to sing memorably in such a context? What might poetry be about?

To my mind the task of the poet is to scrutinize the actual world. As Proust says, any mental activity is easy if it need not take into account reality. Where we proclaim the world is but a word, or a dream, or an interpretation, our literature quickly risks losing a sight of its relations to other individuals and to things. A healthy relationship with the world is a two-way circuit, in which a common reality both enriches and checks the perspective of the individual. As a form of communication poetry is animated by this sense of encounter. Such encounters include Timon’s turbulent social arena of competing individuals and their language, but also their common experiences of the natural world.

The natural world when treated in poetry, despite popular stereotyping, is not an idyllic escape from or simplication of our social existences. Rather, it offers a reality check. Timon in the wilderness is continually intruded on by human interests, just as his problems in the city had stemmed from a loss of perspective on the human realm. In poetry this perspective has long been granted by focussing the gaze on Nature. In our encounters with Demeter we are further from our comfort zones and that of our language. We are also further from our competing subjective points of view. Instead we are forced to see things as they are. Nature, as Apemanus reminds Timon, is that which doesn’t flatter man or heed his self-importance:

… What thinks’t
that the bleak air, thy boisterous chamberlain
will put thy shirt on warm? Will these moist trees,
that have out-lived the eagle, page thy heels
and skip when thou point’st out? Will the cold brook
candied with ice, caudle thy morning taste
to cure thy o’er-night’s surfeit? Call the creatures,
whose naked natures live in all the spite
of wreakful Heaven, whose bare unhoused trunks,
to the conflicting elements expos’d
answer mere Nature: bid them flatter thee.

Heraclitus is recorded as having said that there is a single common universe for those who are awake. It is in sleep that each of us turns away into our own private worlds. The nature I have been invoking so imprecisely is that common or objective universe of things and facts. I have portrayed it as distinct from the human realm in order to delimit all that which is socially determined and subjective. On some level, of course, this is a misconception, and yet we continue to isolate ourselves. It’s not simply a trace of our cultural heritage, in which man was the measure of all things, and at the top of a God-given hierarchy. There is no denying we are a singular creation within Gaia’s realm. As individuals, however, we tend in two directions: towards detatchment, in order to see ourselves more clearly; and towards unity, in order not to be alone. In our quest to be authentic and integral individuals, the perspective of nature keeps our subjective selves rooted in wider realities. There is something of this in Wordsworth’s notion of sense sublime:

… And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

If it was the instability of relations with other individuals that drove Timon out of the city and after a tree-change, what he then struggles to find is a corrective to a self out of kilter. For Wordsworth it is the commonality of things which the repeated adjective ‘all’ emphasises in this passage from ‘Tintern Abbey’. As Apemantus points out, however, Timon oscillates too wildly between polarities, ‘The middle of Humanity thou never knewest, but the extremity of both ends’.

The other extreme, of course, is that of reducing humanity to the beastly, or to mere staffage in the broad canvas of science:

Timon: What woulds’t thou do with the world Apemantus, if it lay in thy power?

Apemantus: Give it the beasts, to be rid of the men.

Timon: Woulds’t thou have thyself fall in the confusion of men, and remain a beast with the beasts?

Apemantus: Ay Timon.

Timon: A beastly ambition, which the Gods grant thee t’attain to. If thou wert the Lion, the Fox would beguile thee, if thou were the Lamb, the Fox would eat thee: if thou wert the Fox, the Lion would suspect thee, when peradventure thou wert accus’d by the Ass: If thou wert the Ass, thy dullness would torment thee; and still thou liv’dst but as a breakfast to the Wolf. … What Beast could’st thou be, that were not subject to a Beast: and what a Beast thou art already, that seest not thy loss in transformation.

Humility, then, but not survival of the fittest. ‘The Commonwealth of Athens is become a Forest of Beasts’, says Apemantus. It has lost a sense of the common-weal summed up by Auden in ‘Precious 5’: ‘There is a world to see: / Look outward, eyes, and love / Those eyes you cannot be.’

Writing poetry is a way of questioning and positing our being in the world. It is a difficult and open quest, for we are interrogated by external realities and our dealings with other people. It is ironic that the word individual has its etymology in a term meaning ‘that which cannot be divided’. It is not, however, as widely perceived, a self-centred activity. True, a stubborn focus on one’s own subjectivity can certainly be a defence against the external world. The individual’s sense of self is never checked against reality, and becomes impoverished. But this should not be corrected by a shunning of all personal sentiment. The denial of the self altogether is equally fruitless for poetry. Two more interesting ways are the fragmentary style of Celan; and the divorce of body and self that occurs in Guido Cavalcanti. As Cavalcanti is the lesser known, it is to his poetry that I turn for a brief example. Sbigottimento is Cavalcanti’s term for the shock and disorientation that the individual experiences when encountering Love (and for love we might include any strong experience of the external world that destabilizes us). The experience of sbigottimento is the fulcrum of many of his poems, including the sonnet ‘Tu m’hai sì piena di dolor la mente’, the sestet of which is as follows:

I’ vo come colui ch’è fuor di vita,
che pare, a chi lo sguarda, ch’omo sia
fatto di rame o di pietra o di legno,
che si conduca sol per maestria
e porti ne lo core una ferita
che sia, com’ egli è morto, aperto segno.

I am held in a state of lifelessness
as one who seems to be of human kind,
likened from stuff of copper, wood, or stone,
moved to semblance by man’s artifice,
who bears a wound within his heart as sign
that how he died be ever after known.

In his poetry Cavalcanti often expresses a schizoid experience of the world that is common to our own era: a lack of temporal continuity, an identity which is continuously under threat of dissolving in its encounters with other people; an individuality that is subject to division. Calvino describes something similar in the following passage from chapter two of his novel Il cavaliere inesistente:

A quell’ora dell’alba, Agilulfo aveva sempre bisogno d’applicarsi a un esercizio d’esattezza: contare oggetti, ordinarli in figure geometriche, risolvere problemi d’aritmetica. è l’ora in cui le cose perdono la consistenza d’ombra che le ha accompagnate nella notte e riacquistono poco a poco i colori, ma intanto attraversano come un limbo incerto, appena sfiorate e quasi alonate dalla luce: l’ora in cui meno si è sicuri dell’esistenza del mondo. Agilulfo, lui, aveva sempre bisogno di sentirsi di fronte le cose come un muro massiccio al quale contrapporre la tensione della sua volontà, e solo così riusciva a mantenere una sicura coscienza di sé. Se invece il mondo intorno sfumava nell’incerto, nell’ambiguo, anch’egli si sentiva annegare in questa morbida penombra, non riusciva più a far affiorare dal vuoto un pensiero distinto, uno scatto di decisione, un puntiglio. Stava male: erano quelli i momenti in cui si sentiva venir meno; alle volte solo a costo di uno sforzo estremo riusciva a non dissolversi. Allora si metteva a contare …

Each dawn Agilulfo found he needed to apply himself to some exercise in exactitude: counting objects, ordering them in geometric shapes, solving mathematical problems. Dawn is the moment in which things lose the shadowy consistency they held during the night, and begin to take on colour. But before they do so, they must cross a sort of limbo where they seem merely brushed by light, or its halo. This is the moment when one is least sure of the existence of the world. Agilulfo needed to know that things before him were there like a thick wall to which he could oppose his straining will. So when the world around him clouded with uncertainty, he too felt engulfed in this soft half-light, this void from which he was unable to give rise to a single thought, or set his mind to anything. He was tormented. These were the moments when he felt least real. At times it was only through an extreme effort of will that he kept himself from dissolving. And so he set to counting …

Counting, or ordering, are both activities associated with writing. Like Calvino, Cavalcanti was very aware of what lies behind or beyond the ordering of reality in a poem. Yet they both remind us that there is no escaping responsibility for the voice or voices of that composition. The most interesting poems are occasions, passionate encounters with the here and now of the world, rooms of language where others may dwell briefly. Of course the vision of poetry is an imperfect one. The objects around us are continually changing, as is the language we use to make connections. We are never whole. Or, as Timon declares while stoically musing on death late in the play, only ‘nothing brings me all things’.

POETRY AND ITS KEEPERS / PETRA WHITE

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 13:53:00 +1000

Poetry may be a (sob!) neglected art, but it can still attract devotees who are as scary as Collingwood supporters. It was wonderful to visit the Laurel Villa guesthouse in Margherafelt, Northern Ireland, ‘Heaney country’. Laurel Villa is a shrine to twentieth-century Irish poetry, with poems by Irish poets (particularly Seamus Heaney) on Belfast linen framed on the walls. Each room was devoted to a particular poet – I stayed in the MacNeice room. Our host, Eugene, took us on a tour of Heaney country, showing us sites and objects that feature in Heaney’s poems, including the forge of ‘Door into the Dark’, the original rusted turnip snedder in the back of a paddock, and the place the railway line of ‘The Railway Children’ used to be. Eugene’s knowledge of Heaney was considerable. We stood there as he read us the applicable poems, evoking the object or place that still existed or had changed or vanished. It was a curious layering, poem upon place, presence upon absence, history upon memory. Heaney is very much a poet of place, so it worked particularly well. I was fascinated by this custodianship of poetry, this keeping of its places and objects, and Eugene’s knowledge not only of the poetry, but external world from which it is drawn, read, as it were, through the poetry.

The following weekend I went to see Paul Durcan read at Listowel Writers Week. There were easily 300 people in the audience. At such moments one naturally springs to thinking, why don’t poets get audiences like that in Australia? But perhaps this is beside the point. All practitioners of this neglected art are themselves neglected. Some poets are superstars by poetry standards, but an audience of three hundred would be nothing for a minor popstar. Trotting around Ireland doing poetry readings, my audiences have been between 3 and 50 (clearly I am not a superstar!). If one person is moved by a poem, that seems like a lot to me.

For Celan, writing was an act of faith: he likened it to throwing a message in a bottle out to sea, hoping it would wash up ‘on the shoreline of a heart’. Milton famously wished for ‘fit audience though few’. A lot of us worry about poetry not being popular enough, but I think it’s possible that good poetry eventually finds its readers, perhaps within minutes of a poem being written; perhaps decades. What we need perhaps more than large audiences are keepers: those who read us, those who publish us; those who keep our poems in some way in the world.

THE POET CRITICS / PETRA WHITE

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 14:38:10 +1000

So Long Bulletin salutes Southerly for the broad approach to poetry reviewing outlined in its new statement. Reviews editor Toby Fitch aims to cut across ‘cliques and coteries’ and ‘transcend the comforts of pack mentality’ by encouraging ‘the rabbits to review the monkeys, the monkeys to review the elephants, and the elephants to review the dinosaurs’. I admire Fitch’s intent to shake up the reviewing scene and to increase the number of reviews that are published.

I suspect, however, that the problem is not people reviewing only those to whom they are sympathetic – though that certainly happens sometimes. I think the problem is more that poets, writing as critics, feel they have to be nice to each other. Perhaps it is tempting, when you are reviewing a fellow poet’s book, to be careful what you say, in case they end up reviewing your book, or perhaps they will one day sit on the Literature Board or judge you in a premier’s prize. Most of us would want to preserve critical integrity and strike out that thought immediately, in favour of writing a clear, honest and unbiased review that puts readers ahead of poets: but it is something that has to be thought through, and it requires courage. In an ideal literary world, there would be enough non-poet critics, and poets wouldn’t have to get involved; but I can only think of two or three of these wonderful beasts and they can’t cover everything. In our world, poets are the reviewers, the judges, the editors, the funding assessors. And this is a fragile world. I have heard of reviewers being advised to ‘go gently’ on a first book; to avoid being ‘negative’ about poets in general. It is like a system of entitlement: at some stage, everyone gets a review, a grant and a premier’s prize. The problem with this system is that it disenfranchises readers in favour of looking after poets’ careers.

I’m not sure what the solution is. I write criticism because I think somebody has to do it – and I draw on my background in literary studies and on my knowledge of contemporary Australian poetry. I try to be a critic first and a poet second. I’m sure a lot of people attempt this. Perhaps there is a role for our editors here – to encourage us to write open and honest criticism that may not always be favourable. Readers of poetry need the guidance of critics, and this should be our first duty. I agree with Fitch’s refusal of ‘hatchet jobs’, but I am uneasy with his insistence on ‘positivity’.

I wonder why we are all afraid of the ‘negative review’. Is this timidity really doing poets any favours? I would have been appalled if I heard that a reviewer had ‘gone easy’ on my first book, and I’m sure any poet would feel the same way. It is possible that a poet can learn something from intelligent criticism. Or, that an interesting debate can be generated. I didn’t agree with the views of a critic who wrote about my second book, but I was glad that he was free to express them and that people were able to comment, and critique the critique – this seemed like a rare moment in Australian poetry criticism. A ‘negative’ review can be positive: clarifying what is wrong with a book, why the poems aren’t working as poetry, and leading to a discussion of what poetry is.

We are in a good position right now for our critical culture to flourish, with major journals such as Heat and Southerly both committed to expanding into online formats and stimulating genuine debate. Let’s hope they will be as bold as they need to be.

BEST OF 2011

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 16:08:00 +1000

Well, SLoBs, it’s April, so it is now time to comment on the year that has passed. 2011 was a most poetic year. Australian Poetry Limited launched its first international tour, to Ireland in 2012. Much poetry written in Australia is world class, but it rarely gets the chance to travel to wider audiences. Congratulations to Petra White and Paul Hetherington, who will be touring Ireland. SLB hopes this inaugural tour opens a series of many more. APLtd also launched its flagship journal, ‘Australian Poetry’. Congratulations to editor Bronwyn Lea on an excellent first issue.

The institution of a Poetry Chair at the University of Technology in Sydney is excellent news. And as the inaugural Chair, Robert Adamson is the perfect choice, both in his own illustrious publishing record, and also in his role as an editor of Anthologies and as a visible and benevolent actor upon the poetry scene. He knows the terrain of Australian poetry, and his tastes are broad. SLB will be fascinated to see what the chair can do to promote the reading and study of poetry. UTS also launched the City Poet Program – congratulations to the first Sydney City Poet, Kate Middleton. SLB has been enjoying her blog.

In December, SLB was deeply satisfied to hear that poetry will now be honoured among the Prime Minister’s 2012 Literary Awards, alongside another newcomer, Australian History, and the pre-existing categories of Fiction, Non-fiction and Children’s Literature. This inclusion of poetry is overdue: it’s a measure of poetry’s status in Australia that it was not originally included in the prizes. I can’t imagine this happening in many other countries, and it must have been particularly lowering for organisations such as the various poets’ unions, poetry festivals, websites and APLtd, which all work hard to raise the profile of poetry, to have the art so loftily ignored. The prize of $80,000 (and the $5,000 for four shortlisted books) makes it by far the richest for poetry in this country. We have in the past on SLB commented on the varied quality of judgements in poetry prizes. Prizes don’t always go to the best books, and I have heard the opinion in the poetry world that it would be better to abolish prizes altogether. The gold medal on the cover can certainly be very misleading. But, as we all know, poetry does not pay, in fact it mostly actively impoverishes and, like a grant, prize money can make a massive difference in a poet’s life and their purely practical ability to write. A round of applause to the lobbyists who achieved this inclusion, whoever they may be.

SLB was saddened in 2011 by the deaths of some of our best poets: Aileen Kelly in Australia and Peter Reading in the UK.

2011 also saw the publication of new Australian poetry. Here are our favourite books of 2011:

Collected Poems by Francis Webb (edited by Toby Davidson, UWAP)

The Collected Poems of Francis Webb is without a doubt the publishing event of the year. Prior to this Webb had been out of print for some years; University of Western Australia Press is to be congratulated for bringing Webb up out of obscurity. Editor Toby Davidson has done an excellent job of bringing together a seamless and very well referenced collection. My only dissatisfaction with the book is the introduction: Davidson mostly talks about his editorial decisions, while I was hoping for something more detailed and explorative about Webb. Webb is a great, and to my mind, terrifying poet, writing about madness, religion, loss, innocence and memory with an eye almost Shakespearean in its unwavering focus on realities. The poetry is always elegant and richly textured and visual. Take this stanza, from ‘Melville at Woods Hole’:

It is an illusion, a dream then, that these are still

And always yours, the sculptured shadows of the coves

Crocketed with weathered houses

And wharves askew; that the falling glass arouses

Your voice, dazing the clouds; that your antique will

Whitens into sail and is ever outward bound,

While over lifting waves

Come skipping like thin stones the spinet voices of the drowned.

This forces you to read it slowly and take it in at its own pace, culminating in a sudden speeding up in the long last line. The book can be opened anywhere and poetry of this quality found. His greatest poems include ‘A Drum for Ben Boyd’, ‘Ward Two’, ‘Eyre All Alone’, ‘Leichardt in Theatre’ and the fascinating verse play ‘Birthday’, among many others. More on Francis Webb here. PW

Southern Barbarians by John Mateer (Giramondo)

In Southern Barbarians, John Mateer follows his abiding interest in the history of empires, and in post-colonial identities. Internal and lyrical, but also polyvocal, Mateer’s poems investigate the ways in which national and ethnic factors shape identity, and widen out to more metaphysical questions about how we define and recognise ourselves. The poems’ music is unfailing, and the politics challenging – provoking thought, more than mere agreement.

I’ll be posting an essay on Mateer’s poetry very soon. EC

The Brokenness Sonnets by Mal McKimmie (Five Islands)

Mal McKimmie’s second book picks up very explicitly where his first ended – republishing and extending his sonnet sequence begun in the first, alongside various new poems with similar concerns about illness, disability, madness and, conversely, of wholeness and normality. The poems wrestle with all these categories, arguing their porousness and dramatising the violence they do when they are used on us or by us. McKimmie’s work is complexly metaphorical, its risky and intensely-thought abstractions sung through the rhymes, half-rhymes, repetitions and reversals of his language. A grim humour takes pleasure throughout in dark and riddling punning and wordplay.

Watch out for a link to my review of The Brokenness Sonnets, appearing soon in Southerly’s Long Paddock. EC

The Keeper of Fish by Alan Fish and Keeping Carter by M A Carter (both edited by Philip Salom, Puncher and Wattmann)

Philip Salom is that rare thing in Australian poetry: a true avant-gardist, subverting the ‘lyrical I’ (or perhaps the lyrical narcissist) with Pessoa-like heteronyms who have no time for the niceties of contemporary poetry. Though he keeps a handle on his heteronyms (the ‘offensive’ M A Carter and the ‘love and death’ fixated Alan Fish) by having his own name on the cover as ‘editor’, Salom expands from his own identity as a poet and succeeds in producing two new, different styles and kinds of poetry for each heteronym – which he may not have written as Salom, yet paradoxically are unmistakably his own. Perhaps the function of the heteronym is that it severs not only the poet from the ‘I’, but also the reader from the poet – challenging our readerly habits of attachment to a ‘voice’ (and some readers may find this off-putting). The books are presented with piss-taking blurbs, bios and introductions to the ‘poets’ who, like Ern Malley, seem tantalisingly real and fully-formed. Salom has fun with his heteronyms, but this is not a self-indulgent or whimsical exercise: the poems are real and this is more than just an exercise. The poems present a challenge both to readers and to poets (and poetry). They don’t set out to charm the reader: take MA Carter’s ‘Poetry and Beauty’, with its concluding lines ‘Playing honest? Yes? In our hearts we are all fakes,/ which is something not said by the sentimentalists’. These are the final two volumes of the ‘Keepers’ trilogy – the first of which was written by Philip Salom. PW

The Yellow Gum’s Conversion by Simon West (Puncher and Wattmann)

The Yellow Gum’s Conversion is Simon West’s second book. His poetry is lyrical and sometimes hermetic. A myth-like forest is present in many of the poems; trees are a source of metaphor but also of the mysterious and the possible, a repository of thought and feeling from which the poems draw. Often there is a sense of transformation, as in the title poem: ‘how time saw the invader’s miraculous flight, /and the tree came back with a flourish all its own’. I particularly like the sequence ‘A Valley’, which is perhaps the most hermetic in the book, meditating the strangeness of language and our place in/ experience of the natural world. This is a beautiful, elegant book. PW

And then when the by Dan Disney (John Leonard Press)

And then when the is Dan Disney’s first book. Surreal, philosophical and playful, this book is engaging, challenging and entertaining. Disney is wonderfully at home in the realms of literature and philosophy, locating it in the world of the mundane. My favourite poem is the extended sequence ‘epigraph poems’ in which each short poem springs from epigraphs taken from everywhere, from Anne Carson to Orhan Pamuk to Immanuel Kant; I like the line ‘The golden means of production/ exhaust and then make real … the clangour of us imperfect/ as sensoria awaiting the succour/ of authenticity’. More on Dan Disney here. PW

The Wing Collection: New and Selected Poems by Diane Fahey (Puncher and Wattmann)

The Wing Collection is a substantial selection of Fahey’s work, starting with her first book, Small Wonders, a book which establishes her poetic interest in insects and birds. I am told by the poet that some of the earlier poems are substantially revised – a temptation few poets can resist – and in most cases the poems are improved. Her poems are quiet, with a quality of slowly soaking in, her images immediate and often surprising. I like the selection from ‘The Sixth Swan’ which reinvents classic fairy tales – something I would normally hate, but Fahey does it with some irony and urgency, as well as compassion for the mythical figures. Likewise her versions of ancient myths are fresh and interesting, activated by her fascination with metamorphosis. The late poems about her mother are moving and surprisingly sensual, particularly ‘Before the Heat’. PW

New and Selected Poems by Gig Ryan (Giramondo)

New and Selected Poems is Gig Ryan’s first book since Heroic Money (2002). It includes generous selections from all of her previous books, and 26 new poems. Her work always has an edge of the satirical and self-mocking, and often a quality of randomness and attitude, but within this there is an austerity and a formality, as in ‘Success’: ‘The phone clatters shut/ Sticking wind winds around the house/ She stares ‘I got the injections with the pedicure and wax’/ self-absorbed like a columnist/ The committed tea-towel and toy clothes bang/ I take the cake of sadness/ Mice slide on dust’. The world of a Gig Ryan poem is often surreal and unsettling: nothing in the poem is inanimate, everything speaks and jars. In the new poems, Ryan is as on form as ever. Launching the John Leonard Press Young Poets anthology, Paul Magee stated that there are only ‘young poets’ – and this strikes me as particularly true of Ryan: her poetry doesn’t ‘grow up’ and become sober or quieter, it keeps a restlessly youthful energy, observing everything and accepting little, and remains true to the tight-rhythmed style she found very early and continues to perfect. PW

WONDROUS CAULD / BONNY CASSIDY

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 10:02:00 +1100

An artist made a drawing
           A base was built in Antarctica
                                   fuel tanks   laboratories
warehousing   accommodation.
that another artist rubbed out
Now they are dismantling that base
                       shipping it piece by piece
                                                         to Australia.
entitled Rauschenberg’s Erased De Kooning
It has been remarked
that no human should live   in wilderness
                       the poems be written
                                        from photographs.
but that’s another story.

(Caroline Caddy, Picture this)

Uniquely, Antarctica seems to attract artists and scientists towards direct cohabitation; and often the two disciplines inhabit the same bodies. Historically, figures such as naturalist and artist Joseph Dalton Hooker accompanied early explorers; and more recently, in Werner Herzog’s documentary, Encounters at the End of the World (2007), this duality of roles is revealed through Herzog’s quasi-naturalistic investigation of the humans inhabiting the USA’s McMurdo station. In that film, a tractor operator is a philosopher; and divers end their day by noodling away at guitars on the roof of their hut.

The USA runs an Antarctic creative fellowship program through the National Science Foundation. In fact, one of its forerunners in the 1960s was an expedition taken by Sidney Nolan and Alan Moorhead to McMurdo as guests of the USA. They were continuing a tradition of expedition artists that was established in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by Hooker, William Hodges and Edward Wilson. In our century, the tradition carries on with fellows such as Utah poet Katharine Coles, who writes that:

… the aims of poetry have never been as distinct from those of science as most people believe. The methods are often strikingly different, yes. But the goals overlap… Truth, of course. Cheek-to-cheek contact with the sublime. Insight into the nature of reality. The most precise language possible to depict that reality… a continually repeated experiment… (2011).

And, as expected of the nation with the largest territorial claim to Antarctica, Australia has its own Antarctic Arts Fellowship, administered by the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD) and funded by the federal government. Poet Caroline Caddy, novelist Nicki Gemmel and artist Jan Senbergs, to name a few, have participated in summer expeditions over the years. In addition, numerous Australian writers including Helen Garner, Thomas Keneally and Peter FitzSimons have found their own ways to Antarctica on assignment or for research. This summer, I joined their ranks onboard the Spirit of Enderby, a tourist ship bound for eastern Antarctica via Australia’s and New Zealand’s sub-Antarctic islands.

During four weeks of crashing southern seas, I had plenty of time to ponder the artist’s place in Antarctica, which was ratified by the Antarctic Treaty as the continent of science. Art and science’s shared occupation of Antarctica reflects both disciplines’ attraction to extremity. Putting the clichés of nutty professors and hermetic poets aside, it seems to me that they are equally drawn to Antarctica by stimuli that they cannot find elsewhere. The immediacy of their work is very important for both: because of the uniqueness of Antarctica’s ecology and location, their business cannot be conducted from afar; and perhaps this is a siren’s song that promises original discoveries and solutions for both disciplines.

For a writer, this means discovering images, ideas and language that originate in such an inhuman and specialised environment, and narratives that challenge the scenarios, settings and characters of less extreme, non-polar lives. One finds that Antarctic writers are often described in the same terms as explorers and scientists, for instance, the blurb to Caddy’s collection of poems, Antarctica (1996) states that the poet “is at full stretch in her exploration of an extreme environment and the resources of language and poetry.” There seems to be a popular expectation of the “nature writer” as journalist, reporter of facts. When I tell fellow passengers that I am onboard the expedition to write, they often ask, “Who for?” I think the Antarctic writer is (mis)attracted by this experience as a quasi-scientist, or at least as if they are writing from outside of culture. But is that the only kind of Antarctic nature writing?

Elizabeth Leane, a scholar at the University of Tasmania, takes a more cynical view of Antarctic literature. As she puts it, the Antarctic writer’s approach has traditionally been “imaginative colonizing” of a place (2007, 4). We’d like to think of Antarctic writers as pioneers, and hence:

… that there should be a body of imaginative expression… an accretion of tropes, motifs and narratives attempting to give human shape to the most shapeless of continents… is often resisted and denied. This is an environment so pure that words themselves become a form of pollution (2007, 1).

But what responsibility, if any, does art have to the continent for science? To whom or what does my writing owe authentic information; and what kind of authenticity would that be? Thinking back to the blurb on Caddy’s book, I have to wonder what “resources” poetry could provide to scurvy, hypothermia or even an ice-jam. While art and science have co-existed extremely closely in Antarctica, that art does not simply supplement or replicate the role of science. It has a different job.

E A Wilson, Aurora Australis 1901-1904, watercolour.
Source: Scott Polar Research Institute

Indeed, when we survey the fruit of Antarctic arts, we are not presented with creative works that reflect “pure”, acultural and naturalistic observations of the continent but a web of interlinked connections, influences and representations between one artist and another: a refracted Antarctica. Rose Lucas describes this process as “a snowflake of possibilities for interpretation” (1997, 160). This is beautifully explained in her discussion of Dorothy Porter’s sequence titled “Auroral Corona with Two Figures”, which represents fragments of Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated 1911 expedition:

Antarctic winter
is eternal night;
with its invisible enchantments
holding us
            face to face—

the aurora
                        drops
            like a Martian necklace;
in the clearest, stillest cold
we lie on our backs
and watch
                        swinging in the black sky
                                  curtains
                                                ghost-green, touched with red—

and forget our journey
            with its broken sledge-runners
                        and hours
                                    of walking frost-bitten
                                                in ice-stiff boots —
how soft are the mountains
            in the dark!
both of us
            know they’re above us
                        around us
                        beyond us
for this tranced instant
            we’re allured by the lovely danger
                        of their glimmering blue spurs
                                                                                                                                                            (Porter, Antarctic winter)

As far as I can deduce, Porter never visited the Ross Ice Shelf that she describes - rather, she composed her poems from a watercolour by the expedition’s artist, Edward Wilson. Lucas writes that:

“Auroral Corona with Two Figures” juxtaposes and explores images and voices of and about the past - in particular, offering a consideration of what the interweaving discourses of history, memory and of a subjectivity etched against the template of a specific geography, suggests about the function of poetry and of poetic language, and its relation to the past and to the concomitant processes of remembering… There are shifts in tone from the personal to the historical, from the ordinary and the vernacular to the fantastical, as well as across internal and external landscapes (161-164).

By naming and describing Antarctica in such a way, Porter has, as Leane argues, undertaken a cartographical act. She occupies the place through language and image, communicating it in a consumable way to her reader, and ultimately trying to bring some kind of order or identification (narrative, image, comparison) to its perceived extremes and mysteries. Like all Antarctic artists, Porter brings the continent home.

Like Porter, Coleridge never came anywhere near Antarctica, yet “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” contains some uncannily accurate details about its setting: “Mist and Snow / And it grew wondrous cauld: / And ice mast-high came floating by / As green as emerauld.” Coleridge was partly informed by Captain Cook’s journey of 1772, via his tutor William Wales, who had worked as Cook’s astronomer. Cook’s journey had circumnavigated Antarctica but didn’t land on the continent. Publishing his poem first in 1798, perhaps Coleridge had even seen some of William Hodges’ paintings. In spite of its second-hand inspiration, however, the poem works and goes on working for countless readers. Would those readers remain so enthralled by the poem if more of them were familiar with Antarctica? Or would they be able to happily reconcile the poem’s fleeting scientific detail with its gripping psychedelic narrative?

It seems we have always been satisfied by Antarctic literature’s tenuous links to science. Even Cook’s journals, which document such an original southern expedition, provide us with only the margins of Antarctica - a fog-bound, ice-moated presence that sits just beyond his vision and horizon. In particular, science fiction has ruled the canon of Antarctic literature. According to Leane, the Antarctica of sci-fi is a place of “abjection and border-crossing” (2005, 232). The quintessential sci-fi setting, it’s unsettling, uncontrollable and unknowable - ultimately a place where earthly science has not reached or has failed. Like Porter’s sequence, it draws the category of “Antarctic literature” away from work produced on the continent, and toward writing that simply makes use of its presence.

Gustave Doré, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” 1870, engraving

I’m starting to wonder what use at all art has for science. As the Screaming Sixties threaten to punch in our portholes, I lie in my cot devouring one episode after another of Breaking Bad. Centred on an unlikely premise in which a high school chemistry teacher becomes a successful methamphetamine or “ice” cook, the series writers use science as a dramatic function but are willing to dispense with authenticity for the sake of the drama. Specifically, Breaking Bad makes use of the “uncertainty principle”, a quantum theory formulated by the theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg in the 1920s. The series gestures towards a vague idea of “uncertainty” more generally, using this theme to underpin its rather trashy elements of dramatic irony and domestic conflict. Walter White, the protagonist, uses the name “Heisenberg” as an alter ego when making and dealing the drug. This, too, is merely a cute gesture. Science, like ice, becomes mostly metaphorical.

Oddly enough, Leane also refers to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Examining the representation of quantum theory in literature and criticism, she talks about the way that in the past thirty years it has been co-opted by writers to provide simplified or simply bungled analogies. In her view, the metaphorical use of scientific ideas and terms such as “string theory” and the “uncertainty principle” usually lead to misuse. So does the creative use of science have any benefits? There is a danger, perhaps, that by reducing very specific scientific material to metaphorical clichés - such as “Heisenberg” standing in for “uncertainty” - writers block its original meaning and prevent popular audiences from understanding science. As Leane writes, “there is an accepted difference in the way [literary and scientific] discourses are received”, whereby scientific writing has to “rely on tacit agreements with a projected readership to a degree that literature evades” (Beer, qtd in 2001, 427). In other words, scientific writing is understood by “constraints on reception” - narrow limits to the way its terminology and ideas can be used - whereas the opposite purpose is claimed by literature.

As Jan Senbergs commented after his 1987 visit, “in the end the subject doesn’t really matter… Artists use whatever they can - whether it be travel or introspection… to make their particular statement” (1988, 21). As for my writing, it will fit Antarctica to its purposes of lyricism and narrative. Partly, it observes and explores natural phenomena; partly, it discards, amplifies or just redefines them to suit its structure and rhythm. It has its own uncertainty principles, after all: metaphors of shifts, rifts, floes and tongues; the language of ice and tectonic movement; and the relationships between Antarctica and its neighbours which are not just physical but also industrial, economic and cultural.

Judy Horacek. Source: The Age 11/01/12

The questions for the Antarctic writer are, how to find a new way of writing through the popular image of the continent; and how to write about the things that science cannot reveal to us? For me, science has been useful in steering away from the canon of Antarctic literature to provide a way of seeing this environment in broader contexts - climate change, tectonic shifts, mineral exploitation… Rather than only offering us a sense of distance from our society and culture, Antarctic literature might also offer a reflection of things un-Antarctic.

It is the writer’s work to confound or at least provoke accepted understanding and perception; to create effects that can simply frog-leap rational or documented relationships. And, as our journey progressed a funny thing happened. The ship’s pin-board began to fill with original poems penned by anonymous passengers. Without warning, and to my surprise, poetry had become the form in which our expedition group noted, recalled and shared Antarctica.

After all, according to the Antarctic Treaty, it is the continent of peace as well as science. Peace is conversation. It balances facts and hypotheses with the needs of communication and imagination:

Beset by plane and convolution

hummocks are the riddling she speaks inside,

blowing her monotone; their filigree,

the smacks and muddles around her tongue.

Sun swings through her brash -

neon faces, angular glance -

she shrivels prismic, still sailing but scraping through

sputtering sounds at lifted ice.

In bergy soup

ocean expands and fuses its rhythm to the chips and plugs.

Shapes hang dimly from the floes;

on top, lie buried corms.

Her noises stop - inklings spin off

these tilted plains and gently

form cones of sense.

In the seltzer she sees

petrified all the things she’s touched:

weed whips, tiny cliffs and frozen rails of light

set transparent and buzzing in the ocean, easing out air.

Every floating fraction seems familiar

plosion, gust

stem

quilt

rooted in a ground below the mind.

She’s looking into rooms: hollow wrecks of room

sunken floors, immolated

rents and corridors opening

into walls.

They screw to a halt. Quietly falling.

As she bobs

in a runnel between them

now and only once, she sees herself -

a face in profile

in the floe’s submerged skirt, dipping -

or a bit like it, what she imagines of it, when she does.

And behind her face

one white cell

beyond her feet, beaming

on and on and down.

Sources

Caddy, C 1996, Antarctica, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Perth

Coles, K 2011, “The art of science”, The Antarctic Sun, August 19, accessed January 19, 2012: http://antarcticsun.usap.gov/features/contenthandler.cfm?id=2494

Senbergs, J, et al 1988, Antarctic Journey: Three Artists in Antarctica, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra

Leane, E 2001, “Knowing Quanta: The Ambiguous Metaphors of Popular Physics”, The Review of English Studies, 52.201

—-. 2005, “Locating the Thing” The Antarctic as Alien Space in John W Campbell’s ‘Who Goes There?’”, Science Fiction Studies 32.2

—-. 2007, “‘A Place of Ideals in Conflict’: Images of Antarctica in Australian Literature”, in Cranston, CA, ed. Littoral Zone: Australian Contexts and their Writers, Rodopi, Amsterdam

Lucas, R 1997 “Ancient Continents: A Poetics of Place in Dorothy Porters’s ‘Auroral Corona with Two Figures’”, Southern Review 30.2

Porter, D 1984, The Night Parrot, Black Lightning Press, Wentworth Falls

to read poems, click above

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 14:30:39 +1100

to read poems, click above

AILEEN KELLY / CATHERINE BATESON

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 19:34:59 +1100

I first met Aileen Kelly when I ran La Mama Poetica in the early 1990s. She was one of our featured readers and I can still remember my delight in her poems, in particular, ‘My Brother’s Piano’. This is a persona poem written from the point of view of Sigmund Freud’s sister, a promising concert pianist, who was forced to practise on a silenced piano so she didn’t disturb his writing. The poem contains many of the tropes I associate with Aileen’s powerful voice. There’s the characteristic sly humour, the barbed word play and a fierce poetic intelligence and humanist feminism behind the measured lines:

If I were to write in real day
the book I assemble nightly
in the darkened library
his drive would be described as piano envy.

(‘My Brother’s Piano’)

Other poems paid homage to an abiding spirituality that is ever-present, ‘an unidentified thumbprint in the margin/that leaves the text untouched.’ (‘On the Edge’)

And then, of course, there are Aileen’s marvelously evocative compound words, revealing a sharp observer of the exterior and interior landscapes beneath their lyricism:

At dawn over the ridge I circled with the wedge-tail and her mate
sunpowered at spin-brain height. I woke in my skull
headed for the hills where the monk mind can buzz in its cell
or lie quiet, looking down and back over smog and burglar alarms,
or soar into bone space, hanging on the cold attentive air…

(‘Cross Country’)

and from the same poem:

Pun-scutted, chrome-eyed, the city’s rodent peeps
from its burrow reamed in the heart’s right chamber
and tucks its back legs ready for a practised skitter
under the pounding traffics of wheel and dealer.

If anything Aileen’s work becomes even more fearless in the later books – though all those hallmarks remain – there’s a sense that the poet trusts her readers to follow her into the heart of the poems, often with only a thread of narrative to guide them. But I think, also, her own poetic preoccupations are presented unapologetically. In this sense, Book Three in The Passion Paintings, Poems 1983 – 2006, John Leonard Press, reminds me of W S Merwin’s luminescent collection, The Shadow of Sirius.

Aileen Kelly was born in England and educated at Cambridge, where she met her husband, Paul Grundy. In Paul’s eulogy he spoke movingly of a woman who was always alert to the power and play of words. He told a story of her at two or three, holding a colander to her face and declaring to her mother, ‘Look! I am straining my eyes.’

Aileen found her professional life in adult education, teaching at the Council of Adult Education. Her poetry reading students returned year after year to participate in Aileen’s class. She was a generous teacher, always able to nudge the most unwilling voice into an opinion or halting thought. She gave students the means to find their own way into a poem and begin that bewitching task of unravelling the parts to find out how and why it was made.

I was fortunate to take a workshop series with Aileen at the Victorian Writer’s Centre and, years later, to replace briefly an absent student in the poetry reading group, which by then met at Aileen’s house. The poems she shared with us were always surprising and her passion to introduce new poets was fuelled by her own wide reading and her place in the international poetry community. As a poet I left these meetings feeling enriched; as an educator I left them in awe of Aileen’s patient grace and her ability to listen, neither of which compromised her own detailed and sharp reading of the material.

For an important period of my writing life, Aileen and I swapped poems, workshopping each other’s work by phone or fax. I look back on those years with gratitude, not just for the sense of poetic companionship I felt, but for the lessons in life I received observing the way Aileen lived. She was a fiercely compassionate woman – and that quality rings out in the poems, which slip so easily into the voices of the disenfranchised and lost. She was a woman of complete integrity, who examined her inner life and spirituality with intellectual rigour. She was generous with her time and knowledge and was a keenly sensitive mentor. It was an honour to have known and worked with her and I, and others, will miss her presence in the world. It is some consolation to be able to return to the poems and hear her voice so clearly lifting from the pages in all its timbres and subtle nuances, edged with that characteristic dry, dark wit.

Aileen Kelly...

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 19:40:00 +1100

Aileen Kelly 1939-2011

Click above for poems.

ON BAKER AND BANTICK / PETRA WHITE

Sat, 22 Oct 2011 18:47:00 +1100

There seems to be an idea afoot that ‘slam’ can make all poetry popular. In The Age, slam poet Emilie Zoey Baker wistfully imagines poetry having its own reality tv show – MasterPoet perhaps – promising viewers the ecstasy of having ‘your soul unravelled like a ribbon’. This is the kind of hype that is often used by promoters of poetry; we don’t just want it on peoples’ bookshelves, we want it in the living room, in the kitchen, on pillow cases, on the iPhone; we want it to tickle them in the shower and write itself onto their steamy mirrors and appear in their porridge for the sake of their souls.

The reflex to populism is common among people wish to mainstream a non-mainstream art like poetry or literary fiction. In trying to popularise an art, people seem inevitably to try and represent it with something ‘readable’, or ‘accessible’ as hook. Like trying to popularise cricket with a less complex, less masterful, more accessible Shane Warne. The problem is that this patronises readers and excludes them from poetry at its best. There is a kind of cringe involved in assuming that readers only want poetry lite. We can’t force people to read poetry by throwing something simple at them; if people are going to come to poetry, it will be of their own free will, and they’ll be looking for the best.

Promoting slam poetry won’t generate a wider audience for poetry; it seems unlikely that enjoying a slam performance might make somebody want to rush home and read Lorca or Les Murray. And how popular is performance poetry anyway? The poetry slam occupies a tiny stage compared with, say, live music; if it can popularise itself and get a few crowds, all very well. And all right, have MasterPoet too. But it won’t popularise poetry. And why should it? Written poetry and slam poetry may have things in common, such as the use of words, but one is not likely to be a hook into the other.

The 2011 Booker Prize shortlist is a case in point: critics world wide have been shocked by the appearance of ‘low brow’ titles. The judges argue that these are ‘readable’. Andrew Motion observes that this “opens up a completely false divide between what is high end and what is readable, as if they are somehow in opposition to one other, which is patently not true”. The debate around the Booker opens up the question of what is ‘readable’. I would argue that good poetry is always readable; but not if ‘readable’ means simple and unchallenging. The judges stated that their aim was to appeal to the ‘average intelligent reader’; all very well, but perhaps there is too much emphasis, both here and in poetryland, on ‘appeal’ and not enough on literary merit and quality. We should expect our readers to be as intelligent as we are.

Of course, it would be nice if poetry could reach a wider audience. But is it necessary to the art? Poetry is thriving in Australia; there are more good poets living now than at perhaps any other time. Eventually we all sell out our tiny print runs – somebody is reading us. I’m not suggesting that we should ‘content ourselves with the admiration of a few’, as they say. I believe that the readership for poetry can and should be grown: but we should think about what kind of readership we want, and what we have to offer.

Perhaps it is a question of what place we might expect poetry to occupy in our culture. In the Australian, writing in direct opposition to Baker, Christopher Bantick states that ‘What needs to be grasped is that not all poetry has the capacity to move us. Great poetry does.’ Bantick argues against a populist approach which would promote poetry for poetry’s sake, but still believes that great poetry can be central – indeed necessary – to us. He quotes Pierre Ryckmans’ observation: “That a man may survive for quite a while without food, but cannot live one day without poetry, is a notion … we tend to dismiss too lightly, as a sort of 19th-century romantic hyperbole.” Bantick laments the fact that poetry is no longer internalised in our culture; we no longer know ‘great poems’ by heart; poetry isn’t taught. I agree with this, but I’d also add that the experience of poetry needn’t merely consist of knowing a few ‘great poems’; rather, readers could be exposed to a range of contemporary poetry that is in many cases brilliant, complex, diverse and rich – where ‘greatness’ has not yet been tested, but where there is much to offer to the coveted ‘intelligent reader’.

YOUNG POETS: A PREFACE / JOHN LEONARD

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 08:35:00 +1100

Readers of poetry have a weather eye for the new, young talents whose work ensures the serious continuance of an art that is possibly vulnerable from being too little read. Slightly surprisingly, it always arrives, robust with the strange fusion of ambitious intent and self-effacement that serious artistry requires. It is true that, occasionally, there is premature praise from critics and committees of judges, if eagerness at some newness overtakes more lasting considerations of artistic reach and achievement. This is of course unhelpful as feedback, and it patronises the reading public, some of whom might (out of the corner of an eye) already be seeing a fair amount of puffery across the poetry industry. Still, that said, the poems in this anthology impress me as having a true distinction in quality and, personally, they move me.

Seven poets are presented, each with a large sample of poems: Elizabeth Campbell, Bonny Cassidy, Sarah Holland-Batt, LK Holt, Graeme Miles, Simon West and Petra White. They have either published their second book, or are in the late stages of writing their second manuscript. That is, they all possess what begins to be an oeuvre. As we went to press, six were aged between twenty-eight and thirty-five. The latter figure would be a tidy, arbitrary cut-off, but Simon West, pushing it by about eighteen months, rounds off as the eldest. It could be asked: why an age-bracket? There is an intrinsic interest in the question as to what ways the poets of a new generation take into their hands an art whose history is so amazingly rich and various. This choice of poets and poems is a starter for discussion.

Generational groupings of poets are often self-selected around defined reading interests. In this case it’s the inclination to devour as much of poetry’s past and present traditions as possible, for the wide craft and spirit of the art. This seems to have fed a particular, persistent élan in their works: intelligence that is free to be daring, with a practised suppleness of free-verse lines. That is a very broad affinity, however. Open this book and seven remarkably different sensibilities come in view. Each of these poets in fact knows the work of most or all of the others, and some friendly dialogue exists among them, but their poetry shows little trace of group-mindedness. They clearly are disposed by their reading to gather an individual array of influences to act as muse.

For decades, the way of populist appeal has been pushed by some as the future for this art, with only rare successes. The strategy misses poetry’s most likely audience. The thing about good poetry, as with other serious art, is that you take it in with an excited patience – a pleasure of art is that it responds hugely if you give it time. Whilst this truth remains well understood for art generally, has it perhaps become fudged somewhere along the way with regard to the reading of poetry? It happens that much of the excellent, serious poetry being written in Australia would naturally speak to the large body of lovers of books and particular arts who are used to the double-play of immediate attraction and slow immersion in a work. Perhaps a way to reconnect is to remind ourselves of the kind of immediacy that poetry has. A suggestion to those who might pick up this book is to try reading its poems boldly aloud, to the furniture or a friend – the sea can be particularly receptive if you have one near. The experience can be galvanising. The strong shades of feeling that exist in every poem on these pages come alive in the head’s resonance. Meanings and under-meanings appear unexpectedly – first, second, or third time through; and any obscurities that hang around can be suddenly acceptable in the music of language.

The richness of a good poem is such that you can love it without looking up all its references. I’m not absolutely sure that the few footnotes here add more than a little. On the other hand, these days the dive into Google has for many become a part of poetic enjoyment. Isis and Osiris, Drummond and Jonson, Galen, and even Medusa as jellyfish are easy items to find. One note here about medieval tapestries gives a useful nudge, perhaps, but readers will already be recognising a contemporary meditation on love.

The eclecticism instated by the modernists almost a century ago permeates the work of each poet here. They are great celebrators of ordinary particularities, in context with the world’s larger patchwork of ideas and histories. And this is compatibly postmodern, a term that is still useful to designate how the characteristic mingling of perspectives in modern arts is now general across all manner of media. A flexibility of attitudes typifies many of the best contemporary artists, and it comes out in poetry that often is boldly individuated in voice, style and point of view. Among older Australian contemporaries, consider for example the variousness between these: Wallace-Crabbe, Murray, Owen, Fahey, Adamson, Gray, Wearne, Salom, Polain, Albiston and Jennifer Harrison; and add the late Peter Porter. The writing of each is beautifully idiosyncratic, indeed mercurial.

The poets anthologised here have grown up with the effects of instant global communication. The raw pressures and creative potentials in diversity are their psyche’s home territory. Dialogical nimbleness is, as you would expect, prominent in their poetry. And quite as potent here is a confidence in art’s other pole, of being still. It is served by a kind of unselving. In these poems, even when part of the topic is personal identity, the personal pronouns that hold sets of emotion and thought together tend to do so very lightly. The momentum of the poem is not so much inward, towards a presented self, as outward to a world and its mysteries, of being and of language.

A number of coevals (and younger) whose first work is currently being deservedly noticed have been working in similar directions. Talent is tricky, of course: in a concentrated art like poetry, readers generally like it to appear full-on, playful but not mucking around. However, a fortunate contagion is always likely in an art when strong, different talents arrive together. Peer awareness has clearly been inspiring quite a few poets to ask the hard questions of their own writing.

Prose chopped conveniently into lines has always been the easily-written surrogate for free verse. It is easily knowable by its effect: it draws us to flick through it by eye. The line breaks nowhere special, being a mere load-bearer for bright talk and polished-up images in procession, as if those contents were the poetry. In truth, an ability to write with the full, tensile resources of free verse can only come from intimacy with the manifold traditions of this lovely mode. New creators in jazz, or in many another art, would instantly recognise a like imperative. In free verse or metre, every line of a poem is an audible dance, dancing with other lines. This is where poetry presses us to read it out loud – or, if silently, to sub-vocalise. The dance of free verse has always been consciously reassessed and reinvigorated by its best writers in succeeding generations.

Young Poets: An Australian Anthology, ed. John Leonard, will be released by JLP at the end of the month.

To our readers in Hungary: Australian poet Jennifer Harrison will be reading in Hungary with András...

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 14:22:00 +1000

To our readers in Hungary:

Australian poet Jennifer Harrison will be reading in Hungary with András Imreh

at Massolit Books and Café
Budapest VII
Nagy Diófa 30

Tuesday, 13 September at 7pm

Melbourne poet and child psychiatrist, Dr Jennifer Harrison, has written five poetry collections, the most recent being Colombine New & Selected Poems (Black Pepper 2010), which is currently short-listed for the Western Australia Premier’s Prize. Among other awards, she has won the Anne Elder Poetry Prize and the Martha Richardson Poetry Medal. She recently co-edited Motherlode: Australian Women’s Poetry 1986-2008 (Puncher & Wattmann 2009). She holds Honorary Fellowships at Monash University and the University of Melbourne and is a board member for the international journal of creative practice, Axon. She runs the Neuropsychiatry Clinic and Developmental Assessment Program for youth and children at the Alfred Hospital, Melbourne.

Jennifer will be reading and discussing poems from Colombine New & Selected Poems.

András Imreh was born in Budapest in 1966 where he still lives. After working as a language teacher and living in Mexico for a year he is now a free-lance poet and translator. He translates poetry from English, French and Spanish including the work of Robert Frost, W. B. Yeats, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney, Shakespeare and J. L. Borges among others. His own books of poetry include That Which Has Two Names (Hungarian), Canción de cuna (Spanish) and Salut poètes (French). His poems have been translated into several languages and he has received a number of literary awards for his poetry and translations, including the József Attila, the Vas István and the Graves awards. He works as editor of Nagyvilág (Big World) literary magazine which publishes contemporary literature translated into Hungarian. He gives classes on poetry and translation and has recently started publishing essays.

DAN DISNEY'S 'AND THEN WHEN THE' / KEVIN BROPHY

Fri, 12 Aug 2011 16:01:00 +1000

Mallarmé apparently said something to the effect that the purpose of all life is to find itself one day in a book. We here at Collected Works, which is the centre of the universe of books, know that to be true, but it is wise to keep this from all those out on the street who think life begins and ends out there. In the first poem in this glowing object, and then when the, Dan Disney brings the world into the classroom:

Coats wet, we come
Fog-breathed
to hear how we might come to know the world through pure reflection
               without recourse

to experience

rain on our foreheads, little fists from the tremendum, we wait
at the doors of an unlocked lecture hall.
Coughing has been falling from a cold man’s mouth. A huddle of minds in
                the dark morning

apprehend. The trees

are wearing the shape of trees.

                                   (‘Standing among the philosophy class’)

That tree is the troublesome tree of Eden, of Calvary, of Saussure’s notes (with his little sketch of a tree) on how language works, of Lacan’s doubts about how Saussurean language works. And it is the actual world being taken into a book.

And the tremendum is the Mysterium tremendum et fascinans (“fearful and fascinating mystery”) that a German theologian wrote of in a book titled, The Idea of the Holy, in the 1920s. Typically, Dan’s raindrops are tiny theologians searching for our souls.

Dan Disney is an East Gippsland boy educated at Nagle College Bairnsdale, a school that that produced two sublime poets, Dan Disney himself, and Lucy Williams. Bairnsdale itself has been home to the late Hal Porter, the contemporary haiku master Myron Lysenko and Marie Pitt, a poet from the 1940’s who coined the phrase, ‘O Bairnsdale, Bairnsdale’. Gippsland has the right weather for raising writers, poets and cows. The poets tend to leave, the cows tend to stay.

When writing of country folk (and ‘folk’ is a word Dan Disney makes his own) in her luminous novel, Silas Marner (1861), George Eliot explained that the idea of leaving the local village area was ‘a course as dark and dubious as a balloon journey’ (20). Well, Dan, along with most other Bairnsdale poets, has taken the balloon journey, not just to Melbourne and its university, but all the way to Korea via Italy. When Dan writes about the local folk: about the small towns of Gippsland, he has the authority of the exile, the kind of authority that can bring a harsh vision to its deep intimacy and love: Ensay is a town ‘clenched around its highway’ and Bairnsdale is marked by ‘the abattoir scent curling at town’s edge’, while at Benambra mute scarecrows survey ‘the wild churchyard/long empty of its song’. These towns are destitute, though no more destitute perhaps than the rest of the planet in these destitute times.

‘What are poets for in this destitute time?’ asked the German romantic poet Friedrich Holderdlin ( 1770-1834) at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In the middle of the twentieth century, Heidegger returned to this question, writing, ‘In the age of the world’s night, the abyss of the world must be experienced and endured. But for this it is necessary that there be those who reach into the abyss’ (90)—and Dan Disney does plenty of that. God and the gods have abandoned his universe, but not without trace, you only have to read the poem that begins with a fragment of Heidegger: ‘… never come to thoughts. They come to us’ (p. 36).

Isaac Newton (1642-1727), perhaps the most wondrous genius physics has known, thought poetry ‘a kind of ingenious nonsense’ and of course this is what Dan Disney makes of the abyss—of poetry’s encounter with all those philosophers still dog-paddling their way through metaphors because don’t philosophers become poets once they begin to take themselves seriously, just as poets quickly become boring philosophers as soon as they take themselves seriously. This exposure of fragility, this awareness of traps, is what Dan Disney is so good at. Dan Disney is the man who decided to go and live as a hermit in a shed in the forests above Omeo for three months—the man who savoured a carton of milk over several days, draining it finally right down to the dead mouse in the bottom of the carton. He has faced the abyss, or as much of it as can be found in East Gippsland, and come back with its essence in his veins.

He is one of our interesting poets, you might say, or more accurately, one of our astounding poets. This poet is a reader, and you’ll find sentences here from Jean Paul Sartre, Wallace Stevens, Anne Carson, Umberto Eco, Immanuel Kant, Mary Shelley, Horace, Primo Levi, Martin Heidegger, Hermann Hesse, Orhan Pamuk, Michel Houellebecq, Plotinus, Kurt Vonnegut, Siddhartha Gaudama the Buddha, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Sentences, phrases, fragments of thought and speech, each one with enough grit in it to keep our boots from slipping off the next greasy step we must negotiate on our way up into the place where, as Holderlin put it, we must ‘dwell’. Poetry measures its way forward in speech, and poetry measures us, and our final measurement will be the measurement of a mortal body. Dan Disney does not shy from this task of measuring, but like a comic Edgar Allen Poet (sic), he finds in it a source of energy, wit, wonder and weirdly disengaged amusement at the way language can work like a mechanism just at the moment it’s needed for the most sensitive probing of sensitive feelings: read, for instance, ‘It all began with me trying to open a small wooden box’ (p. 29).

Dan Disney’s reading of books has not left us with bookish poems, or drily language-driven poetry, but with a poetry that swirls with ideas and swirls through ideas, with a sharp, contemporary awareness of ideas as performances, nearly always paradoxically entangled with technologies:

There will be mystagogues
yes and lawn mowed on weekends ….

(from ‘Man with missing antithesis’, pp 34-5)

This poetry is bristling with detail, it flits from the vast to the mundane, from desperation to tennis, from a quasi-biblical prophetic tone, to schoolboy huzzahs, absurd wordplays impossible to paraphrase. It holds the attractions of alliteration (‘they will nuzzle at night’) and across it all a tone that’s complex enough to let us know that this poetry is both urgent and a performance that invites the reader to find their own purchase on Primo Levi’s apparent even-handedness regarding the monstrous balance of opposites humankind is. This poetry’s thinking is not thinking that explains, but thinking that responds (cf. Heidegger p. 179). When it comes to the craft of thinking, Dan Disney is more sailor than whittler.

The poetry in this book is compelling. This reader wanted to go on with this poet into the next poem and the next. Dan Disney’s ingenious nonsense does help us understand what poets are for in a destitute time.

I understand now that when that young man arrived in my office at Melbourne University more than a decade ago, with brightly painted fingernails, hair down over his shoulders, on his own dark and dubious balloon journey, announcing himself as a poet, he was the real thing, allowing me now to declare that and then when the is.

Heidegger, Martin (1971) Poetry, Language, Thought. NY: Harper & Row

REFLECTIONS ON TEACHING POETRY / ELIZABETH CAMPBELL

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 19:04:57 +1000

I am a poet and a secondary school teacher. For me, one of the most funnest – as the kids might say – things in the world, is working with senior secondary students who care, to read poetry. I have been immensely lucky in working at a school where a large proportion of the students care very much indeed. I also work as a freelance presenter of poetry workshops and – my most favouritest thing – professional development for teachers on teaching poetry.

But, after six years, I am on my way out of teaching, at least for the moment. There are various reasons for this, but the fundamental reason is that it is simply very difficult for a single person to live on a teacher’s part time wage. And working full time as a teacher, particularly an English teacher, is incompatible with sanity, let alone the writing of poetry (not that the two necessarily go together).

I feel sad about this, because I love working with kids and with the dynamic and committed colleagues I have had the privilege to know. But I’m making a different plan. I know that I can earn more, and work less, in another job. Does that sound selfish and mercenary? Our culture expects teachers to be martyrs. The job is hard, but the ‘rewards’ are supposed to be enough. Perhaps this is one of the reasons that most teachers are women. Women are conditioned to put others first and even for me, there’s a sense of revolution when a woman or a teacher says ‘no’ to the needs of children. No, I am no longer prepared to give up my weekends, my evenings, my writing time, to marking and planning, or the avoidance of marking and planning. No, most of all, I’m not prepared to keep living with the guilt and anxiety that comes from a sense that I am not doing enough – that my daily human capacity does not match the vision of educational excellence which I hold in my mind. I’m no longer prepared to compromise my health, and watch my colleagues suffer from stress and illness. And I am one of the lucky ones. I work an excellent school, and never had to languish on a short-term contract or in a school with low standards or endemically low morale.

English teachers work particularly hard. In English, there is no textbook that can cover all the outcomes satisfactorily – you write the curriculum yourself, continuously, and you change it as you go along, according to how it goes down in the classroom. I’m not complaining. Writing curriculum is one of the most stimulating parts of the job: it’s glorious! Any model of teaching that doesn’t allow time for it bores me senseless and frustrates the will to excellence and precision which is the mark of all good teachers. But it’s damned time-consuming. And it makes governments nervous, because it highlights again the fundamental idea that they can’t handle: teaching is done by individual humans, with personalities and values.

Teaching and learning can be measured by various imprecise, imperfect and intersectional yardsticks, but when you legislate to remove the human, you end up with the narrowness and mind-numbing prescription of National Curriculums like that of the UK. Let’s hope the Australian National Curriculum is better – from what I gather, it will be.

I did my teacher training in 2005 at the University of Melbourne. I went there by default rather than any particular belief in the excellence or otherwise of the course: it was the university at which I had done my undergraduate degree. Still, you would expect that what is meant to be a prestigious institution would attract and select an elite cohort in a graduate education course. In fact, I was rather shocked at the low levels of literacy among my fellow graduates.

The overwhelming, almost universal majority of the people I encountered were fired with enthusiasm, compassion for students and a general vocational zeal. Those politicians who like to make continuous insinuations about teachers being lazy, should get down to an education faculty or a school and get a load of the idealism and enthusiasm of young teachers. However, many in the English and History streams – particularly English, had an alarmingly loose grip on the discipline, the content, and the skills. Poetry, in particular, was daunting for the English graduates – few felt comfortable to teach it, and though many were interested, many were not. They never learned it at school, and they never learned it at university. They don’t read it.

At school couple of years ago, I enquired of a student English teacher, how he was enjoying his course. It was ok, he said, except that they had to read, like, ‘literature,’ and stuff. My blood ran cold. He was an extreme example, but he probably has a job somewhere.

Let me be very clear: I don’t not believe that there was a golden age, in which teachers were cleverer. I am sure we all remember our own experience at school as very mixed. And I do not believe that all good teachers must be intellectuals. We need lots of different kinds of teachers, with different strengths and different expertise to offer. There are vast hectares of human experience and wisdom which teachers need which have nothing to do with content knowledge or academic brilliance. Knowing the content is not enough. But in every school, in every faculty, you need a number of people who know the content well enough to guide and mentor others, to write the courses, the curriculum and the assessments, particularly at the senior levels.

The older generation of my colleagues had commonwealth scholarships. I have a HECS debt. They had a starting salary that allowed them to obtain home loans, buy houses. I struggle to pay the rent on my small flat. They were often the best graduates, particularly the women, who at that time, had fewer alternative career options. Teaching was a ‘good job’. One colleague who recently retired assured me that ‘back then, teaching was fun!’. It still is – kind of – for about five years.

People often ask me if I would gain better money and conditions at a private school. Very likely, but I believe in equal access for all to education. I probably can’t beat the government-driven exodus of middle class families from public schools, but I’m not going to join them, either.

It worries me that people like me leave the system. It worries me that many like me don’t enter it. Just anecdotally, I can think of several of my friends, outstanding professionals in the performing arts, in literature and film, with postgraduate qualifications, who have seriously considered becoming teachers and decided against it, at least partially through watching me. These are the people who bring academic rigour and broad professional and cultural vision into schools, and into the education system. Except that they don’t. Of my own young colleagues, many of the best teachers I know are working on their exit strategy, simply exhausted by workload and systemic pressures.

Governments, state and federal, like to whine on about teachers. Conservative commentators like to moan about declining standards, and political bias in the curriculum. The government responses are always punitive, suspicious and politicising. Initiatives like the suggested performance pay, and the recent registration hurdles for teachers reflect this anxiety. Silly stunts like the MySchool website are a symptom of a government and departmental attitude that the last people who should be trusted with the educational wellbeing of our kids are teachers – even those remarkably enthusiastic young teachers with whom I studied and work.

The most obvious solution, least popular among politicians, is making teaching a profession which could attract and retain excellent candidates. They should increase the pay, raise the entry requirements for teaching degrees and, most crucially, improve conditions, so that the workload is sustainable beyond five years of burnout. There are plenty of models for this approach, particularly in Scandinavia and the spectacularly successful Finland, where schools have freedom and autonomy in their curricula, and teachers are well paid, respected and encouraged to pursue further study.

The situation of our education system presents a terribly complex set of problems. One of the things that six years at a public school has taught me is to pronounce less, and less definitely. My views on education are far more flexible now than they were when I started, because I have been forced to experience the complexity of the issues firsthand. But I will confidently assert this simple equation: when teachers’ pay and conditions improve, better candidates will apply for teaching degrees, and poetry will be taught better and more often. A new generation of readers will be given at least the opportunity to develop an interest. A cohort of students will enter the universities, demanding, on their ubiquitous feedback forms, that poetry is taught, and the cycle will renew the readership of poetry, a least a little.

So if you care about poetry, you should care about teachers.

Teachers will be negotiating their industrial agreement with the state government this year, fighting to make pay and conditions decent and sustainable. Please support us.

THE INCREDIBLE VANISHING POET / BONNY CASSIDY

Sat, 16 Jul 2011 15:24:51 +1000

You need only think back to the discrepancies between versions of classical myths, to notice the way that mythology tends to sprawl rather than contain itself or anything else. The thing about mythology is that it is unwieldy and uncontainable; conflicted and inconsistent. We create myths to give order to the world – its origins, its events, its future, our experiences and expectations – and yet they do precisely the opposite. Those myths took the shape of poems, and rightly: their quality of sprawl reflects the nature of poetry itself; the way it establishes forms of sequence and containment to hold questions, processes and meditations.

Any glance at mythologies in Australian poetry will exceed itself, its poets and poems. If you wanted to explore the theme further, you might also find yourself looking at any number of mythological categories: Australian poetry’s gender mythologies; the myth of the generation of ’68; myths of the city and the bush; appropriation and pastiche of myth; and so on. Does Australian poetry possess an especially rich tradition of mythologies? It’s possible; but maybe that’s an argument for another time. What interests me is the absence of the poet on this continent.

I don’t mean that the poets are missing; but that they are…away. Everyone under forty has studied our Gwen Harwood at some point; it’s practically become part of the citizenship exam. I say “our Gwen” because it conjours up a sense of possessive and affectionate feeling for a poet who, one gets the impression, might have done anything to elude that kind of response to herself and her writing. These days, the researching of Harwood’s life and publishing record has mostly been done for us; although it was as late as 2004 – almost a decade after her death - that yet another of Harwood’s many pseudonyms or pen-names was uncovered (See Kratzmann 2004). This discovery brought the total to ten false literary identities cooked up by the Brisbane-born, Hobart poet and mother of four. Are we still counting?

Knowing what we know, each of her major pseudonyms bore biographical details that reflect true parts of Harwood’s life and personality; and yet she resisted claiming them for herself. Timothy Kline, the Tasmanian drinker, tinkerer and conscientious objector, like Harwood, loved boating and had a deeply rebellious streak – yet Harwood never came out as a pacifist. Francis Geyer, Eastern European wanderer, was, like Harwood, a musical soul with a certain Germanic wistfulness – though Harwood never visited Europe. Miriam Stone, Sydney housewife, echoed Harwood’s claim that she was “eaten alive” by her children – but Harwood denied that she was a feminist. And Walter Lehmann told The Bulletin exactly what Harwood was thinking – but which she could never have managed to get published under the name of “Mrs Harwood”.

Harwood’s poetry itself is as much a journey through masks and characters as it is through memories and lyrical emotion. Dennis Douglas has written two articles linking the characters in some of Harwood’s poems to her own experiences: he calls them her “doppelgangers” or twins (See Douglas 1969; 1973). While I have said that Harwood created masks that bore some resemblance to herself, she nevertheless chose to falsify and imagine them as other faces, voices and lives. Harwood was acutely aware of how her appearance and biography betrayed the depths of her thought and the possibilities in her work. Its irony lies in the extent to which she played on that disconnect. She once said, “The ‘I’ that writes down the things on the page is certainly not the one who sits talking about writing the things on the page” (1996, p51). With what she called the look of an “aging choirboy”, Mrs William Harwood of Sandy Bay, Hobart, used the suspended, fictive possibilities of poetry to touch on raw nerves, particularly feminist sentiments. Harwood had had to wait until her children were grown and she was in her forties before she could publish; the early work she produced expressed the frustrations of domestic life, such as the overused “In the Park” published under the name of Miriam Stone. And yet she resisted identifying the difficulties of being a female writer, stating that, “I have never really felt I have a difficult relationship with anything”. She agreed that Miriam Stone was a “ferocious” feminist, yet added the paradox: “it’s not possible for me to think back now and really remember how little time I had to myself in those days with four children and a household to run”. She sent her rude acrostics to Vincent Buckley but denied that writing into a male literary culture “was ever a personal problem” (1996, pp47-51).

Whether or not Harwood was attacking that culture, her hoaxes added to an existing history of attacks on poetry editors. Harwood challenged the myth of the poetess – gendered, agenda’d, innocently inspired, earnest – by undermining the myth of the modern editor – critically impeccable, fostering of experiment and avant-gardism, distinguishing of fad from significant new form. In the same way, the figure of poetry editor was sabotaged by Ern Malley in 1944. Perhaps the most astonishing thing about the poet dreamed up by James McAuley and Harold Stewart, is the way that he has become reality over the last sixty years.

A 1988 celebration of Ern Malley, Adelaide. Max Harris (centre) is flanked by actors Henry Salter as Ern and Emma Salter as Ethel Malley. Image: ernmalley.com

McAuley and Stewart tried to debunk the myth of the charlatan avant-garde poet, but Ern has taken on dimensions of his own. He has become accepted as a posthumously loved and respected member of twentieth century poetic tradition. Malley is now included in mainstream anthologies of Australian poetry. Not only local writers like Tranter, Peter Carey and John Kinsella have used the Malley poems as starting points for their own work, but internationally, John Ashbery, John Betjeman and Kenneth Koch have also underlined the genius of Ern. Sidney Nolan and Gary Shead have made portraits of Malley, and the Malley oeuvre itself has been compared to those of the American Outsider artist, Henry Darger. Just last year, the Sydney poet Adrian Wiggins named his baby son Malley.

In his terrific essay on the Malley hoax, “Poetry and the police”, Philip Mead suggests that, “We can now see clearly that 1944 was the beginning of literary postmodernity in Australia…The fact that Malley and his oeuvre are both fake seems to mean, paradoxically, they are extendable” because there is no individual, dead or alive, to limit their associations (2008, 88). Tranter has even collaborated with Malley, creating The Malley Variations using the Break Down computer program. As Mead writes, such projects “are all driven by the desire for more Malley poems or, the impulse to re-validate ‘Malley’ as a significant cultural figure rather than a spurious one” (2008, 90).

This idea of the “spurious” poet is interesting. After all, why are we bothered by inauthenticity; by the idea that, behind the poems we like, there is a faceless being? The contemporary project to validate a nobody such as Malley, is a modern project of reifying the poet. When we look back further into Australia’s poetic mythologies, however, we find that the poet-as-myth is perhaps the earliest poetic to have existed in this land. Indigenous song cycles not only undercut the myth that Australia was “unsung” at the time of European exploration, as McAuley’s own “Captain Quiros” suggests. They also do something more radical – they continue to throw the white and modern myth of poetic authorship and voice into question.

We could think about Indigenous songs, as we consider classical oral tradition, in relation to poetry: that is, one does not directly evolve into the other, but they are familiarly related. The ownership, transmission and function of songs differ amongst Indigenous languages and clans; and, of course, these songs are accessible to most Australians only in translation and in print – a long way from their original form. However they share reference to Dreaming, to create legends of mythic heroes and ancestors that are drawn into the present. As Penny van Toorn writes:

Oral songs and narratives are traditionally an embodied and emplaced form of knowledge. Information is stored in people’s minds in various narrative forms which, at the appropriate time, are transmitted from the mouths of the older generation to the ears of the young (2000, 19).

Mudrooroo (Colin Johnston), whose own Aboriginality has been challenged, explains that:

The translating of such an epic…would necessitate spending years in traveling the song line and exploring the verses…as well as getting to know the details of the land about which it sings…for these epics do not belong to a single community or clan, but pass on from clan country to clan country and from custodian to custodian (19-20).

From the 1930s to the 60s, the linguist, TGH Strehlow recorded, translated and interpreted a number of songs from the Aranda people of Central Australia. Strehlow’s gathering and deciphering of these songs has been both criticized and praised, which Barry Hill has charted this complex story in his excellent Broken Song: TGH Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession. Strehlow was an initiated Aranda man, having been born and brought up in the language, culture and country, and yet he revealed secret-sacred material that was neither owned by him nor, arguably, intended for the audience of his book, Songs of Central Australia. Ultimately, it can be argued that Strehlow recorded a language that he believed would be lost – it has not been – and songs he anticipated would be subordinated to Christian missionary education.

At the same time, Songs of Central Australia is widely regarded as one of the most sympathetic interpretations of Indigenous secret-sacred material, with uniquely detailed explanations of the cultural framework that gives meaning to the songs. A significant part of that explication involves the mythic presence of the songs’ composers. In his characteristic past tense, Strehlow writes that, “the Central Australian natives believed that [their songs] were composed not by men but by the totemic ancestors themselves.” So, for example, “the greater part of the Ilbalintja Song was regarded as having been composed by the bandicoot ancestors”, as well as “the sun ancestor”, the “bandicoot-chief” and “the honey-suckle ancestor” (1970, 244-246). The song identifies an increase site for yams, a soak of colored sands during the wet season. The bandicoot ancestor, Karora, emerges from the soak later in the song.

Songs such as this contain the ancestors’ explanations of how they became “the immortal rocks or trees or tjurunga [sacred objects] that are still to be viewed” at the ceremonial site where the song may be sung (Strehlow 1970, 141).

Ruark Lewis, ‘Transcription of Aranda Love Charms, from T.G.H. Strehlow, Songs of Central Australia’, 1971 (1990), pencil and ink on paper, 28 x 17 cm. Copyright: Ruark Lewis. Image: Charles Nodrum Gallery

Because the original composers of the Aranda sacred verses are unknown, and believed to be the “totemic ancestors themselves”, the songs lack the dimension of artifice with which European culture mythologises human creativity and imagination:

There was hence no taint of human fabrication or of illusory poetic dreaminess associated with the sacred songs. To the natives their poetry was the absolute expression of both Truth and Beauty (Strehlow 1970, 244-46).

This statement explodes the Western ‘problem’ of art as summed up by Keats: “Truth is Beauty, and Beauty is Truth”. Modern and Romantic anxieties about the gap between the real and the ideal, are dispelled by the absent-yet-present voice of the Aranda ancestors. Consequently, definition of “artistic enjoyment” as an abstract set of aesthetic values is non-existent within Aranda tradition: “‘Poetry for Poetry’s sake’” is meaningless (Strehlow 1970, 244-46). If Strehlow’s understanding is correct, the Aranda songs flood any boundaries we may have set up between reality and the poetic work; whereby notions of an insurmountable, irreconcilable absence between language and things/language and thought, seem but flimsy myths.

And yet, the songs are clearly defined, enriched and driven by Dreaming mythologies. Who, then, possesses the voice of the songline? It remains a manifestation of “the doctrine of reincarnation”, and of “a personal link with supernatural beings” which might be compared with the power of “royal birth” in Europe. Only certain individuals may receive and sing the songline, but that is not because those individuals are poetically inspired: rather, the song’s “magic” is contained in the singer. As Strehlow puts it: “Poetry then was not something unreal or remote or unpractical to the Central Australian tribesmen: it was rather the finest, most useful, most personal heritage”:

It follows that the native love of sacred verse was not based primarily on an appreciation of its special poetic forms or ornamental devices. The whole attitude towards art was dominated by religious ideas and thoughts of magical virtue. The concept that art must be practical and instructive, that it must deal with realities and not with the empty fancies of a poetical imagination (to a native such fancies would only have appeared as ‘lies’), was always present in all native discussions on the good and bad qualities of such objects or forms of art as they possessed.

By composing various couplets in a single series, the ancestors left behind a collection of independent namings “loosely associated by time, space, and story”. This, Strehlow suggests, “explains the disjointedness that characterizes the structure of every native song. Each couplet is independent of its fellows, since it is a separate ‘name’ coined for a single occasion”. Singing these fragments is a collective voice that represents more than one perspective. The descendents of an ancestor see as “sacrilegious” that they should “reveal their own features while impersonating supernatural beings” (1970, 244-46).

One of the other major collections of Indigenous song cycle translations into English and verse form was by Catherine and Ronald Berndt. They worked particularly in northern Arnhem Land, where the song cycles are especially epic in length. The observations made by Strehlow may be applied to the ancestral presence in their transcription and translation of the “Moon-bone song” from the Wonguri language group of the Mandjigai tribe in north-east Arnhem Land. The song has been made famous to white audiences via Les Murray’s appropriation for his “Bulladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle”. He used a similarly anonymous, collective voice; the incantatory listing or parataxis; and referenced the ritual travel of suburban Australians to holidays on the north coast of NSW. But it was still Les Murray, inescapably and obviously. Mudrooroo suggests of the Arnhem Land epic song that, because of its divine origin, it has kept to its form and content, “in that to change a song or verse, in effect, is to render it ineffective and false” (19-20). In fact, the performative and subjective self is negated by the act of these songs; a difficult idea for Western poets to come to terms with. Similarly, in Central Australian song there is “virtually no verse giving expression to personal emotion, and accordingly no body of true lyric verse”. This phenomenon is due to the lack of emotional ascription to totemic ancestors – they seem to act, observe and name but not to self-reflect – and to the presence of a vision which sees verse not as “a vehicle for the expression of the poet’s own sentiments” (Strehlow 1970, 657-59).

In a strange way, this impersonality takes us back to the chance techniques of Dada and Surrealism that were unwittingly undertaken by McAuley and Stewart in writing Ern Malley. There, the absent-yet-present Uncle Malley appeared from a collage of university textbooks. It is hardly surprising to recall that lead Dadaist Tristan Tzara appeared at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, singing Aranda songs from Strehlow’s translations into the German. Tzara had no interest in the provenance of the songs or their original significance; as Ann Stephen writes, “The idea of authenticity was meaningless to the inventor of sound poems with no specific cultural source” (2009, 154). It is odd, indeed, to consider that both the Aranda songs and Dada’s appropriation of them achieve the affect of demythologizing the subject of the poet. And yet, in their essential mythological function – and in the fundamental usefulness – the Aranda songs undercut Tzara’s efforts to expel meaning from poetry. At the same time, as soon as Tzara removed the songs from Strehlow’s careful contextualization, he punctured the myth of ancestral continuity and, arguably, reclaimed the performance of authorial genius.

Tristan Tzara (b. Samuel or Samy Rozenstock, also known by the pen-names S. Samyro, Tristan, Tristan Ruia, Tristan Ţara, Tr. Tzara).

In turn, the dissemination of Indigenous songs has generated new myths about the accessibility of Indigenous culture, such as the forgetting of where and who belong to certain songs, the ignoring or confusing of who has the authority to dictate, edit and publish them, and indeed the ignorance of who has the right to consume them. The reader must become a sort of editor, and the poet a figment of the imagination. The poem, as always, is an act of belief.

Douglas, D 1973. “A Prodigious Dilemma: Gwen Harwood’s Professor Eisenbart and

the Vices of the Intellect”, ALS 6.3, pp77-82.

—-. 1969. “Gwen Harwood – Poet as Doppelganger”, Quadrant, March 1969, pp15-

19.

Stephen, A 2009. “Blackfellows and Modernists: Not Just Black and White” in

Pacific Rim Modernisms, eds Gillies, MA, Sword, H and Yeo, S, Toronto University Press, Toronto, pp151-72.

Harwood, G 1996. “The Evanescent Things”, A Woman’s Voice, J Digby (ed.), UQP,

St Lucia, pp45-65.

Hill, B 2002. TGH Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession, Random House, Sydney.

Kratzmann, G 2004. “Who was Alan Carvosso?”, Meanjin 63.1, pp177-184.

McAuley, J 1985. Selected Poems, Angus & Robertson, Sydney.

Mead, P 2008. Networked Language, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne,

pp87-185.

Mudrooroo 1997. The Indigenous Literature of Australia, Hyland House,

Melbourne.

Strehlow, TGH 1970. Songs of Central Australia, Sydney, Angus & Robertson.

Van Toorn, Penny 2000. “Indigenous texts and narratives” in The Cambridge

Companion to Australian Literature, ed. E Webby, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp19-49.

BEYOND THE READING / ELIZABETH CAMPBELL

Wed, 06 Jul 2011 08:59:00 +1000

So Long Bulletin congratulates the Melbourne Poets’ Union for recent events which go beyond the poetry reading. A couple of months ago, we spent a wonderful evening with Alex Skovron, as he reflected on his life, his writing and his influences. On Friday 24th, we fulfilled a long-held ambition to hear Michael Farrell discuss the meanings, intentions, influences and purposes of his work. On July 29, we’ll hear Philip Salom and Ben Pobjie read (and we hope discuss) their satirical poems.

Whilst the venue was not superb, the turnout was excellent, and the audience attentive, if a little reluctant to ask questions. Panellists Kevin Brophy and Jennifer Harrison commented briefly on the poems and asked some open and generous questions – the answers were not very enlightening. Or perhaps they were. One audience member commented on MF’s striking lack of verbal clarity or articulacy, contrasting this to the poetry, which she described as appearing to have been written very quickly.

MF’s poetry, to take a guess, seems to rely heavily on elaborations of the idea of the death of the author: on assertions about language, its materiality and its inherent or embedded ideologies.

These days the death of the author is a given for readers – most people read, I would argue, using an intersection of critical approaches, conscious or not; with some reference to the author’s historical and cultural context or apparent intentions, balanced within a basic assumption of readerly agency, to interpret and use the text as desired.

But for the writer, the death of the author is a peculiar thing. Whilst we may accept it in our reading, most writers attempt furiously to limit, contain or ignore it in their writing. If the author is no longer an authority to be referred to in interpreting their texts, the texts themselves must be carefully constructed to embody as closely as possible, all the possible effects and meanings which the author wishes to embrace, and to exclude those she rejects. This leads to the ubiquity of ‘not X, but Y’ clarificatory phrasings. Even when the point of the poem is to demonstrate an illegibility of some sort, it is intentionally constructed to do so. The American poet Susan Howe has constructed reams of basically unintelligible poetry in order to assert the unintelligibility of history. Collage takes editing too. Think of the difference between the collage of FLARF:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flarf_poetry

and the nostalgic, gothic and musical collages of the Melbourne poet Emma Lew:

http://jacketmagazine.com/04/lew.html

The only artists in any field who can be said to have escaped their own intentionality, are those naives who are sold to the world by a clever manager, or curator. Like the elephants who paint. Any writer who says otherwise is being disingenuous.

The writers who work hardest at the destabilisation or refusal of the ‘author-as authority,’ ‘poem-as-the-expression-of-a-subjectivity’ model, have often been some of the most actively theoretical in their poetics, and often the authors of much critical, or meta-poetic material. Think of the capacious critical writings of Paul Muldoon , Lyn Hejinian, John Kinsella, etc.

The death of the author, for the author, becomes more the creation of the author as separate from themself, as in Jorge Luis Borges’ famous ‘Borges and I’ in which Borges-the-author, the voice that writes, is a peculiar doppelganger, an interloper and a kind of monster in the life of the ‘I’. The very paradox and irony of this circular relationship gets to the heart of the writer’s pact with his own death.

So there was something peculiar about MF’s inability to present any clear theoretical or methodological basis of his work – its purpose or production, its deployment in the cultural field. (‘Fields’ are mentioned a lot in Farrell).

My favourite moments:

When Kevin Brophy asked whether detail in MF’s work ‘obscures as much as it reveals’.

MF: Detail, detail … I mean, yeah.

KB: But does the detail actually cohere?

MF: …

When Jennifer Harrison quoted the critic Frederick Pollack on the poetics of late capitalism:

Endlessly eclectic, it thrives on attempts to anticipate it, and creates an atmosphere of unfocused irony which dissolves satire and corrodes values. It destroys the past by sentimentalising it until memory itself becomes first questionable , then laughable. Finally, when there is no value, anything can be equated with (sold for) anything. I am describing, among other things, a poetic. …..The above may sound harsh; if Ashbery is about shopping, one of his grander efforts like “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror” is like a really great mall....

MF: Well, the critic just doesn’t like Ashbery. Whatever.

And then, though the question is lost to me (I was taking notes by hand):

MF: I think poets in this culture can’t speak clearly because they are caught between two mincing machines.

SLB was left with the sense of a poetic genius so old-fashioned that, like mad John Clare, it was unable to translate into mortal prose the gnomic and mystical workings of its art, which somehow is not artful.

The poems, we must conclude, spring from a place so deep in the consciousness of the poet that their intention cannot be paraphrased. They must be interpreted as either the intimate and direct expression of a naive visionary – one of those ‘geniuses’ whose existence much of the critical theory of the 20th Century was aimed at disproving – or the sound of wind through an Aeolian harp. Either way, the poet doesn’t seem to know, he just produces. Rather like one of those elephants that paint. But who is selling the paintings to us?

Once again, thanks and congratulations to MPU for a curiously satisfying evening.

The quote above is from Frederick Pollack, ‘Poetry and Politics’. In Poetry After Modernism , ed. Robert McDowell, (Storyline Press 1991, Brownsville, Oregon)

Dear SLoB readers: we draw your attention to Philip Salom's new blog...

Sat, 25 Jun 2011 16:25:14 +1000

Dear SLoB readers: we draw your attention to Philip Salom's new blog...

ON YOUR BACKCOVER / PETRA WHITE

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 10:29:00 +1000

So Long Bulletin has been perusing the various blurbs on the back covers of poetry books lately, and sees a niche in the market for the services of our own blurb writers, our eminent poets-in-residence, Mr Old-High-Kudos and Ms Young-Powerful. Our prestigious fully-emerged and most name-droppable poets will write up to 100 ecstatic words per cover of absolutely any book regardless of quality, and for their fee, require that a minimum of three poems in the book be dedicated to them, at least one of which should be an epistolary address expressing oedipal admiration and struggle. (Examples of such poetry will be posted here in the near future.) Here are some of their latest, fully-customisable blurb models:

‘The poetry of X ushers me into the penumbra of sublime summers every time I read it, which is often. She takes the ringing bell of love and tips it firmly on its side. Hers is a voice I taste in the rain and hear in the stars. With every poem she pulls back the drawbridge of assumption and shoves the reader into unknown territory. This is transcendent poetry, best enjoyed with a 2006 Cab Merlot Grenache on a dusky porch with the dog.’

‘This is a poetry of watchfulness and bold suspicion. Nobody can read this book and retain false notions of comfort and bourgeois ease. To quote the concluding lines of his penultimate satire: “shut up, all of you”.’

‘Muscular wit in a devillish slant lurks behind the quiet facade of these poems. This is a poet of hard-won grit, and a sandy expanse of vision to match. Each lyric begins as quietly as a whirring swallow, before broadening out into the powerful hoot of an owl, then swooping like an eagle onto the crest of what turns out to be a modern-day psalm. Read this book.’

Interested poets and publishers may submit manuscripts to Their Eminences, 1007 Amazing Street, Bliss, 1955.