The Poetic Eye: Occasional Writings 1982-2012 9004336435, 9789004336438

Table of contents :
The Poetic Eye: Occasional Writings 1982–2012: Michael Sharkey
Copyright
Table of Contents
Editor’s Preface
Introduction
PART 1 (1979–90)
Romantic Hangover in Australian Poetry?
Out of Time
New Zealand City Streets and Gipsies on the Road
Interview with Alan Wearne
Pulling in a Trojan Horse
The Politics of Poetry
Beyond the Jindyworobaks
Storming the Teacups (Again)
Fading Shadows
Clear, Timeless Opus
Minority Groups Like the Living
Imperial Nigrescences
The Persistence of Mallarmé
Starting from Ulverstone
The Myth of the New and Others
Interview with Geoff Goodfellow
Something to Contribute: A Conversation
Cold Turkey in the Cantina
Poetry: The Melbourne Alternative
Old Tricks Transformed
First Thoughts on Everyday Rhetoric
An Interview with Eric Beach
VIP and Business-Class Poetry
The Great Singer, Icon, and Enigma
A Caution to Reviewers
The Australian Fascisti
The Jokes Just Get Verse and Verse
An Interview with Shelton Lea
Poetical Atlas of Political Diversity
Passionate Complexity Among the Loco-Poetic
Diverse Flights, Ethereal and Grounded
You’re Imagining It
PART 2 (1990–2003)
Stepping Back: A Word of (Auto)Biography
Zora Cross’s Entry into Australian Literature
From Duty to Tribute
The Poetry of Gwen Harwood
David McKee Wright, Maorilander
Mudrooroo Narogin and William Hart–Smith
The Province of Every Person
Cheer Up and Take It Lightly
McCuaig Made Poetry Talk
A Salom Course
Ern Burial
Black Stump or Burning Bush?
This is Not a Review
Celebrating the Poetry of the Ballad
Voyaging Through Depths and Shallows
In Celebration of Gwen Harwood
Harris’s Pavane
Compassionate Intensity
Goodfellow’s Semaphore and Other Messages
L’Chaim to Life
Far Away From How it Looks at Home
Dransfield Among the Biographers
New Music
Reviewing Now
Parody and Co.
Defending the Line of Wit
More About Wit
Poetic Voice
The Ventriloquial Muse
How Poetry Lines Up
PART 3 (2004–2012)
The Question in Poetry
Poetry and the Human Comedy
The Poetry of Lauren Williams
Byron’s ‘Deluge’
John Tranter’s “Australia Day”
How Poets Work: A Personal Note (Because I Was Asked)
How Do Poems Sound?
“But Who Considers Woman Day by Day?”
Starting from Melbourne
A Touchstone in Auckland
After Jerusalem
Subtle Conversation
Page’s Primer
Moving and Memorable
Inhabiting a Poem
Trans-Tasman Literary Relations
The Rapture Endures
PART 4 (THE PHOTOGRAPH AS POEM)
“Something of Value”: An Introduction to John Fields’ ‘Signature’ Photographs
Onomastic Index

Citation preview

The Poetic Eye: Occasional Writings 1982–2012

Cross/Cultures Readings in Post/Colonial Literatures and Cultures in English

Edited by Gordon Collier Geoffrey Davis Bénédicte Ledent Co-founding editor †Hena Maes-Jelinek

VOLUME 194

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/cc





The Poetic Eye: Occasional Writings 1982–2012 Michael Sharkey Edited by

Gordon Collier

LEIDEN | BOSTON

 Cover Illustration: Winifred Belmont, Magnetic Landscape (1996). Library of Congress Control Number: 2016957113

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 0924-1426 isbn 978-90-04-33643-8 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-33647-6 (e-book) Copyright 2017 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Table of Contents ————————————————

Editor’s Preface Introduction

ix xiii

P A R T 1 ( 197 9 – 9 0 ) Romantic Hangover in Australian Poetry? Out of Time New Zealand City Streets and Gipsies on the Road Interview with Alan Wearne Pulling in a Trojan Horse The Politics of Poetry Beyond the Jindyworobaks Storming the Teacups (Again) Fading Shadows Clear, Timeless Opus Minority Groups Like the Living Imperial Nigrescences The Persistence of Mallarmé Starting from Ulverstone The Myth of the New and Others Interview with Geoff Goodfellow Something to Contribute: A Conversation Cold Turkey in the Cantina Poetry: The Melbourne Alternative Old Tricks Transformed First Thoughts on Everyday Rhetoric An Interview with Eric Beach VI P and Business-Class Poetry The Great Singer, Icon, and Enigma A Caution to Reviewers

3 8 15 28 42 48 54 62 68 70 72 82 89 102 118 129 142 156 166 172 173 187 202 204 207

The Australian Fascisti The Jokes Just Get Verse and Verse An Interview with Shelton Lea Poetical Atlas of Political Diversity Passionate Complexity Among the Loco-Poetic Diverse Flights, Ethereal and Grounded You’re Imagining It

209 211 213 232 235 239 240

P A R T 2 ( 199 0 – 2 003 ) Stepping Back: A Word of (Auto)Biography Zora Cross’s Entry into Australian Literature From Duty to Tribute The Poetry of Gwen Harwood David McKee Wright, Maorilander Mudrooroo Narogin and William Hart–Smith The Province of Every Person Cheer Up and Take It Lightly McCuaig Made Poetry Talk A Salom Course Ern Burial Black Stump or Burning Bush? This is Not a Review Celebrating the Poetry of the Ballad Voyaging Through Depths and Shallows In Celebration of Gwen Harwood Harris’s Pavane Compassionate Intensity Goodfellow’s Semaphore and Other Messages L’Chaim to Life Far Away From How it Looks at Home Dransfield Among the Biographers New Music Reviewing Now Parody and Co. Defending the Line of Wit More About Wit

247 250 277 281 283 302 305 308 311 315 317 321 326 328 330 339 345 348 350 352 356 359 365 367 373 389 395

Poetic Voice The Ventriloquial Muse How Poetry Lines Up

407 419 426

P A R T 3 ( 200 4 – 2 012 ) The Question in Poetry Poetry and the Human Comedy The Poetry of Lauren Williams Byron’s ‘Deluge’ John Tranter’s “Australia Day” How Poets Work: A Personal Note (Because I Was Asked) How Do Poems Sound? “But Who Considers Woman Day by Day?” Starting from Melbourne A Touchstone in Auckland After Jerusalem Subtle Conversation Page’s Primer Moving and Memorable Inhabiting a Poem Trans-Tasman Literary Relations The Rapture Endures

P A R T 4 (T H E P HOTOGR APH

AS

445 455 464 474 491 494 498 510 530 546 553 558 563 569 572 575 584

P OE M )

“Something of Value”: An Introduction to John Fields’ ‘Signature’ Photographs

591

Onomastic Index

609

Editor’s Preface —————————————————

M

M I C H A E L S H A R K E Y was in early October 1994, when we both took part in the Second Autumn Summer School on the New Literatures in English at the RhenishWestphalian Technical University in Aachen. It was a fortuitous meeting; we happened to be sitting contiguously during a coffee-break in the university canteen, and probably with half our mind on our afternoon teaching sessions with our students. The rest of our mental faculties intersected amiably, desultorily. I can’t remember what we chatted about, but I do recall the particular impress of Michael’s personality. He wasn’t dry and cautious and academic, but lighthearted almost to a fault (I thought then), quick with jokey wordplay, evanescently ironical without any acidulous shredding of personalities. No hearty backslapping edge, no sexist complicitous mateship (but, as Michael himself once observed, “during the ensuing days, we did talk a hell of a lot, and that’s where we started out being buddies”). And I noticed how, if the topic took a more problematic turn, his expression would half-withdraw, his gaze casting to the side for the exact words to do justice to the seriousness of life underlying the surface levity, and with absolute respect for democratic equality in dialogue. I thought even then what a gift he must be to students. For my part – and this is something curious that I have never succeeded in decoding – I was spurred in our talk to try my own hand at wordplay, angular and sometimes juvenile humour, as though we were somehow engaged in a mild, updated version of a medieval flyting match. This shared tone of communication between us has persisted to this day. Further Summer Schools followed, at which we always met up, with increasing collaborative involvement – at Osnabrück in 1996 and 1998 (and, in September 1998, the Twentieth Annual Conference there of the Association for the Study of the New English Literatures); at Christian-Albrechts University, Kiel, in 2000; at Humboldt University, Berlin, in 2002; again in Berlin, at the Free University, in 2005. I had always given readings from postcolonial authors at these Schools, and Michael had, of course, always been planned in with his own Y FIRST ENC OUNTER WITH

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poetry, so we began to organize our readings as a two-man act. At Kiel and Osnabrück we shared accommodation in student digs, with close convivial contact with vital young people, and explored the streets and tasted the takeaway food together. At the Humboldt gathering, we had graduated to shared domesticity, with my wife Heather and Michael’s partner, the teacher and artist Winifred Belmont, shaping contrapuntal lines in a harmonious quartet. ‘Harmonious’ in a complementary or, rather, corrective sense: both women were well-grounded and, without cutting us off at the knees, tended to cast a sceptical eye on any wayward flights of fancy we might attempt. This complementarity, without the panoptical presence of Winifred and in the silent chamber of both literary creation and literary-critical reflection and evaluation, is a constant dynamic in Michael. Where does it come from, or – let us leave that impossible aetiology aside (if the sense is psychological or genetic) – how does it reveal itself? There was a romantic (Irish?) strain in him early on, in his choice of thesis topics (Keats for his Sydney BA ; Byron for his Auckland MA , commuted to a doctoral dissertation). But this is counterbalanced by a clear-headed, feet-on-the-ground attitude towards the vagaries of literary praxis and human nature. I shall give in to the temptation here to shoulder in presumptuously with a scrappy comparative survey of our respective professional trajectories, in the hope that it will do more to shed light on Michael’s personality than on my ego. There is a ubiquitous class of writers, particularly in America, whose biodata will include the tabulation of twenty-or-so occupations, mostly quite unliterary (from chimp-trainer to hashhouse cook), all these testimony both to an independent spirit and to the encyclopaedic hard-knocks experience of the world that has flowed into their books. For my part, I have stacked hay, loaded wool-bales, slaved as a shearing-shed rouseabout and at the wool-sorting table, cooked for construction gangs, picked potatoes in the frosty morning air, hoed turnips in the heat, painted corrugated-iron roofs and sheepcrates, sorted lamb carcasses in a freezing works... and have published not a single book of creative genius. And Michael? It’s been books books books all the way. This is a wilful distortion, of course – there is ample testimony, en passant, from the man himself that he has casually laboured all over the place. While studying at Sydney University, he was a warehouser and clerical worker for Cassell Australia, then with the publishing arm of the Commonwealth Housing Department. Starting in the late 1970s, he operated Fat Possum Press with Winifred and co-produced with One-Eyed Press. With Julian Croft, he conducted the 1980 pilot study for the Oxford Literary Guide to Australia. He started book reviewing in 1969, while still an undergraduate, and has never stopped reporting genially on literature old

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Editor’s Preface

xi

and new. His first of many successful poetry submissions to journals and magazines date roughly from his postgraduate years (1973 onwards). This intensive primary and secondary involvement with books has been consistently complemented by outreach into fostering literary creativity – organizing and mentoring poetry workshops, readings, and reading tours; initiating art exhibitions; promoting public libraries; directing the Centre for Australian Literature and Language at the University of New England and chairing the New England Writers Centre; judging writing prizes; functioning as guest poetry editor; editing poetry magazines. Writing books (poetry; critical and biographical studies). Editing books. Books... not, then, a jack of all trades (hashhouse cook to chimp-trainer), but he might as well have been, so wide-ranging and often either quotidian or arcane is his knowledge of the world, nowhere more on modest display than in his guiding, nudging, and shaping skills as interviewer in the vibrant, frank, down-home conversations with poets contained in the present book. And me? All that hard yakker was a thing of the past by the time I graduated; pluribus gave way overnight to the unum, first, of schoolteaching (in Dunedin) and, then, of university teaching (in Germany). There was a limply impassioned struggle against these constrictions during the transition from student life to pedagogy, when I tried my hand as a blues singer and jug-band performer (we made records! we were on national TV ! I coulda been a contender!). But, otherwise, the shift downwards from the ‘real world’ to the academic was complete, though given spin and flavour and perhaps a Higher Commitment in the form of editing other people’s writings. Michael, by contrast, started teaching as a tutor at the Universities of Sydney, Auckland, and New England, then went on to lectureships at Toowoomba and Footscray (before the institutions in these places acquired less interesting university names), then at Bond University in Queensland, and finally, from 1992 until his retirement in 2010, at the University of New England. He has also been a visiting professor in Beijing and for many years has done long-distance supervision of the research work of Chinese students. He continues to write drily sympathetic, memory-drenched, and philosophically inflected poetry, and the thoroughness and edge of his reviewing has not blunted. Michael has always been a generous granter of favours to those in need. He pretends to groan under the weight of editing involved in bringing out journals (such as the Australian Poetry Review), but he always has his hand firmly on the helm (or the tiller, if need be). He’s the proverbial duck, gliding serenely while his feet paddle furiously beneath the surface. His industry dismays and eclipses me. His humour buoys me. As a Kiwi who, in less enlightened earlier years, was often enough teasingly and patronizingly invited by boozed-

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up Australian academics to join the drive to make New Zealand Oz’s next State, I deeply appreciate Michael’s deep insight into New Zealand literature and life. I count myself blessed to have been entrusted with the labour of love embodied in the present selection of essays and interviews. There is nothing essential  that I need to add to what Michael himself has covered in his own Introduction below, save to mention that the fun I have had reading and re-reading his writings is bound to be experienced by other readers, whom I can safely promise instruction and delight. — G OR DON C O L L IE R





But perhaps a brief note, before it’s too late, on editorial annotations. Some allusions and references zip by that might have benefitted from a clarifying footnote, but our often frantic joint efforts sometimes failed to part the veil on provenance. The original source of each piece is, of course, dutifully provided; where important names are dropped (e.g., editors of books) and where there are otherwise unsourced quotations, I have endeavoured to insert relevant footnotes. For the rest, readers are invited to seek out information via Google et al.

Introduction ——————————————————

T

and matters concerned with poetry, recorded in reviews, conversations, interviews, essays, and articles published in little magazines, journals, periodicals, and anthologies since the 1980s. My explorations are descriptive; I did not commence with a programme. Perhaps this reflects an empirical bent, reinforced by the manner in which I became acquainted with poetry and writing in general. My parents were well read and possessed an unusually eclectic library that grew from their interests and successive, sometimes parallel occupations. Their interests embraced commerce, law, agriculture, geography, aeronautics, theology, science, history, and the classical and modern literatures of several countries. It was also unusually rich in practical handbooks associated with aspects of farming (my first extended memories are of life on a dairy farm and a sojourn on the Murray River). My writings on poetry concern discovery rather than design from the outset. When I undertook to read Keats in an academic way, to write a minor thesis on the “Hyperion” poems, his phrase about distrusting poetry that has designs on readers, along with his idea that poetry should catch us by a series of welcome surprises, struck me as an encapsulation of my openness to poetry. I distrust programmes and have preferred to read poetry backwards as well as forwards, so to speak, observing patterns emerge over time in the work of writers: the poetry first, the critical apparatus and theorizing later. This is as true of my approach to the writing of Blake as of others who evolve a cosmology as they proceeded. Sometimes the body of a poet’s work is fraught with inconsistency, paradox, and contradiction. Their work would be dull without such signs of life. In looking at other poets’ works, I discern some patterns that emerge over time. I have sometimes attempted summaries of such patterns – as in the essays here on poets as different as Byron, the Australians Roland Robinson, Lauren Williams, and Chris Wallace–Crabbe, or the New Zealander Bill Manhire. Elsewhere, I have interviewed poets, out of curiosity about the way they work or how they see their work in relationship to others. HIS IS A BOOK OF RE FLEC TI ONS ON POETRY

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Many of the essays and occasional writings testify to my interest in New Zealand and Australian poetry; most of my poetry has been published in Australia and New Zealand. Some pieces were written for particular occasions such as academic conferences, introductions to poetry collections, and poetry seminars. As a result of my absence from Australia at a time when something of a revolution was occurring in Australian poetry, I sought the recollections of several poets associated with the Poetry Society and with the demise of Poetry Magazine and its resurrection in the 1970s as New Poetry, the masthead of predominantly Sydney advocates of poetry sometimes referred to as the New Australian Poetry and ‘New Romanticism’. A further feature of this collection is the inclusion of biographical essays on or reviews of biographies of poets whose works went into obscurity soon after their deaths. The phenomenon of cultural forgetting by contemporary reviewers, critics, and even poets, and I began research into two or three representative victims of such relegation in order to reappraise their work and to place them at once in the context of cultural events and literary networks of their times and to have them serve as salutary examples of the brevity of reputation. Such reflections clearly resonate with consideration of more recent, even contemporary coteries and movements, and with the abruptness and extent of changes in literary fashion. There is probably room for more commentary on ambition, the politics of poetry, and the manipulation of reputation by syllabus committees, arts administrators, grants facilitators, event coordinators and other media operatives, but I trust that the focus on poetry and poets’ lives is of more interest to people who enjoy reading poetry. Speaking of New Zealand and Australia, I observe two quite differing temperaments – I will not speak of ‘types’ or identities – that appear commonly enough in some (not all? – far from it) of the production of writers on each side of the sea that separates them. Similarities are deceptive, especially those relating to ostensibly similar forms of local or national government, styles of corporate or governmental architecture, education systems, or addiction to sport. The differences are profound and are the product of many things: the different periods of European settlement of each country and the nature of the people who formed the settlement in each case, with their various registers of speech and occupational backgrounds. There is the very different nature and experience of the Indigenous inhabitants of each country on which the veneer of European language, habit, and belief was overlaid. The resultant struggles of Indigenous New Zealand and Australia to assert rights to inhabit and own their country on their own terms take different forms and produce radically different results. That both countries share certain features – aspects of hieratic bureaucracy and

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Introduction

xv

business organization, social welfare, taxation, representational government, and cultural inheritance – is not at issue. The literature of each nation concerns itself with reflecting and interrogating conceptions and preconceptions of manners and speech that grow out of the local rather than the global, but which reveal the extent to which each nation is also mobile and fluid, even volatile, in its relationships with Pacific, Asian, African, and Arab states since the late-twentieth-century phenomenon of displacement of populations in those regions, and with the shifts in geopolitical urgency of the U SA and Russia, India and China. A visitor to Auckland is struck by the number of Korean, Japanese, Indian, Chinese, Thai and other establishments in the central business district. This follows a global trend – tourist and hotel corporations managing package deals that wrap up the cultural programme so that many Asian tourists will experience what their hosts arrange for them, while the profit reverts to the corporations. Some New Zealand marketers of New Zealand-made arts and crafts souvenirs and clothing have gained no great benefit from events like the Rugby World Cup: planeloads of tourists who came to see a national team play one game remained only overnight before departing, having visited no locally owned businesses. This disparity feeds into some conservatives’ resentment of the ‘asianization’ of the metropolis. What such casual visitors might not apprehend, though, is the extent to which Indian and Chinese immigrants had established importing and other commercial enterprises even before New Zealand achieved Dominion status in 1907. Sydney’s larger population and central business can boast as many Asian-operated souvenir and tourist-accommodation hotels as Auckland’s, and Asian entrepreneurs have exercised culinary colonization in both cities. For all that, the more compact city of Auckland, combined with its more evident maritime (trading, commercial fishing, and sailing-port) activities, strikes visitors as retaining the character of an entrepôt city to a greater degree than does Sydney. The cosmopolitan elements infusing Australian and New Zealand writing also invite comparison and contrast. The literatures of both nations grew out of British colonization. Frank Sargeson’s remarks in his autobiography More Than Enough reflect a dilemma that was not unique to New Zealand; his reading of the literature of other formerly colonized nations such as the U SA brought home the problems facing a writer who possessed a keen sense of place, a writer for whom England was not in any sense ‘home’: And while I wondered whether my doubts about a hero were a shortcoming of my own, or a thinness in the material of New Zealand life which I was so determined to deal with I found myself asking another

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unsuspected question. What was the European doing in this faraway Pacific ocean country anyway? Had he the right to be here? What were the ideas and ways of life he had brought with him and how had they developed? Was a community being built which could continue to flourish, or was the European occupation a kind of tenancy which would eventually be terminated? Did I personally agree with the prevailing sentiments about these matters?1

Sargeson’s questions are echoed in the self-examinations of the Australian writers Joseph Furphy, Miles Franklin, Katherine Susannah Prichard, Xavier Herbert, the Jindyworobak ‘nativist’ poets of the 1930s and 1940s, and others. Ostensibly, Australian and New Zealand writers might seem to speak the same language and have a similar heritage, even to the extent of being able to invoke analogous experience or memories of a pastoral age, wide-ranging persecution of Indigenous human and other inhabitants to the derangement of balance and extinction of some species, and economic depressions and boom times. But such similarities are as superficial and misleading as any comparison between the ‘bohemian’ culture of Melbourne in the 1870s or Sydney at the end of the nineteenth and in the earlier twentieth century reveals itself to be when considered alongside New Zealand’s ‘bohemia’. The differences are more than just nuances: what John A. Lee called a tradition of “vagabondage,” exemplified in the lives and productions of writers like himself, David McKee Wright, Robin Hyde, and Eve Langley, is hardly to be thought of as applicable to Australian literary cultural identities. So, too, with any comparison of Sydney’s Les Robinson and New Zealand’s D’Arcy Cresswell, though both were returned servicemen from World War I who lived reclusive lives and wrote highly individualist prose (and, in Cresswell’s case, even more idiosyncratic poetry). Robinson created near-surreal stories of fabulous creatures and humans; Cresswell, with messianic self-confidence, hoped that his mannered latter-day Elizabethan poetry might turn back the detested modernist poetry of Eliot and Auden that he took to be wrong turns in art. It is tempting to see some parallel between the mode of life and self-conviction of greatness of Frank Sargeson and Xavier Herbert, but comparison fails under examination of their different stylistic idiosyncrasies, their preoccupations and subject-matter. In short, each writer has to be taken on his or her merit and considered in the light of the surrounding culture that they raided for what was useful before, in many cases, striking in other directions. The essays and reviews relating to Australian and New Zealand writers, then, do not constitute 1

Frank Sargeson, More Than Enough: A Memoir (Wellington: A.H. & A.W. Reed, 1975): 95.

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Introduction

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anything like an ongoing this-versus-that contrast between national traits; rather, I have treated each writer as an individual engaged in making sense of circumstances according to an evolving relationship with the craft of writing. The essays and other writing relating to broader poetic concerns may turn the spotlight on eccentricities of my own. The essay on Byron grew out of a thesis on Byron’s revolutionary plays of politics. I undertook the writing of the thesis under the initial guidance of Terry Sturm, and then Michael Joseph. Both were model supervisors, keenly interested in my topic and warmly supportive. Terry Sturm took study leave from Sydney University, and encouraged me to work at Auckland with the assistance of a Commonwealth Scholarship. At Auckland University, Michael Joseph, poet, novelist, critic, and author of Byron the Poet, a notable study of the poetry and plays, was a splendid advisor, who generously gave me access to his personal library of Romantic classics in several languages. Like me, he appreciated Byron’s fearlessness, dark comedy, and underlying seriousness that was reflected in the Venetian and theological verse dramas as much as in Childe Harold and Don Juan. It was my good fortune that Terry , who later also became Professor of English at Auckland University, spent a sabbatical year at Auckland while I was engaged in completing the thesis, so we maintained a social contact that endured until his death in 2010. Professor Joseph died much earlier, lamented by me and other admirers of his manners, his poetry, and his fiction. My essay on Byron’s apocalyptic play Heaven and Earth is, like this entire book, dedicated to both mentors. The essays on what Ron Pretty called “practical poetics”2 grow out of matters that interest me as poet: the line in poetry, the nature of sound in poetry, the nature of parody, the rhetorical construction of ‘voice’, and much else. These occasional writings are based on talks and lectures in the course of annual (later biannual) workshops sponsored by Five Islands Press at the University of Wollongong and Bundanon in New South Wales. Reluctant to write reviews of other poets, from consideration of the nature of the rivalries and competitiveness that characterizes any marginal cultural form, I have reviewed books which have particularly appealed to or interested me, but, for the most part, I have preferred to write introductions to the work of poets who strike me as likely to be further marginalized by a culture of forgetting. I include two examples: an introduction to the ‘non-Aboriginal’ poetry of Roland Robinson, and an introduction to the work of Lauren Williams, a contemporary Victorian songwriter and lyric poet.

2

Practical Poetics, ed. Ron Pretty (Wollongong, N S W : Five Islands, 2003).

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I wrote at the outset that this book concerns itself with poetry, but I have been urged by my editor, Gordon Collier, to include a tailpiece on the U S -New Zealand photographer John Fields – a recent piece that can be understood metaconceptually as exploring the ‘poetic eye’.

— M I CH AE L S H ARK EY

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P A R T 1 (1979– 90)

———— Romantic Hangover in Australian Poetry?1 ————

A

K O U D A ’ S R E M A R K S O N L A N D S C A P E in Australian poetry are particularly interesting because they provide us with an ‘outside’ view of how the land is perceived by Australian poets. Kouda uses as models Douglas Stewart and Judith Wright. In the first case, Stewart displays a correspondence between himself and the landscape, and a sense of the perfection of creation; in the light of this, the poet can at times ‘escape’ into a symbolic perfection away from the unpleasant aspects of social life. Kouda concludes that Stewart’s poems “take no further new meanings than we find in the traditional ballads.” 2 In the case of Judith Wright, Kouda summarizes critical assumptions that the poet is concerned with time and with analogies between landscape and her own time (as in the second stanza of “The Cycads”). Wright is concerned, in this view, to also “use” the landscape to express her “inward concerns.” The inward concerns are with wisdom to perceive change rather than growth and decay. Kouda sums up: Stewart’s description of landscape is a result of outward-looking attitude to landscape; Wright’s is the result of an inward-looking attitude.3 Both of these conclusions come close to the poets. I would propose, however, that both poets are located within the Romantic tradition – which Kouda sees as Stewart’s tendency only – to different degrees, or in differing ways. Furthermore, we might see that the Romantic heritage exercises a fascination for a significant number of Australian poets and writers, one that extends beyond seeing landscape as a symbol of “duality or ambivalence, of eternity and freedom.” 4 In effect, the polarities include eurocentricity and insular national values. As Michio Ochi points out in his article on Xavier Herbert, there is a mental barrier among Australians also, which prevents many writers from seeing a way to Asia.5 At the same time, I’d like to indicate that some writers have explored ways to Asia in the handling of ‘landscape’. Ochi’s view of Herbert seems to require some qualification also, in that aiming to reveal the attitudes of Australian to Asian and Pacific peoples falls into a trap of type-casting individuals as ‘national’ figures. This approach distorts perTSUK O

1 

Otemon-Gakuin Bulletin for Australian Studies 5 (December 1979): 12–17. This essay was written in response to “Essays on the Australian Literature,” by Atsuko Kouda of Otemon-Gakuin University, published in the Otemon Bulletin for Australian Studies 3 (October 1977): 115–20. 2 Atsuko Kouda, “Essays on the Australian Literature,” 115. 3 Kouda, “Essays on the Australian Literature,” 119. 4 “Essays on the Australian Literature,” 118. 5 Michio Ochi, “Xavier Herbert and his Poor Fellow My Country,” Otemon Bulletin for the Australian Studies 3 (October 1977): 157.

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sonality or makes it impossible to perceive all aspects of personality or ‘character’. Herbert’s deliberate style, of stereotyping Australian Aboriginals, whites, and other characters in Poor Fellow My Country (as well as in earlier works, notably Capricornia), makes his figures caricatures, extensions of single attitudes or attributes. Without an ironic mode of narration, or other sceptical approach, it is too easy for the author to be seen endorsing, in some cases, the racist or bigoted views expressed by the characters he is ostensibly attacking. In Joseph Furphy’s 1903 novel Such Is Life there is less possibility of identifying the real author with any of the attitudes expressed in the book. The narrator, Tom Collins, tells us from the start that he possesses three distinct attributes: an intuition which reads me like sign-boards; a limpid veracity; and a memory which habitually stereotypes all impressions except those relating to personal injuries.6

With such a facetious disclaimer in mind, we are prepared to see the entire fiction as a satire on a tendency to have preconceptions of ‘type’. Such Is Life is a romance that satirizes romantic views, and thereby comes closer to escaping the inclination to be seduced by a dualizing morality or aesthetic. Like Don Quixote, it points to the shortcomings of romantic vision. Australian poetry has also been involved in the problems of escaping from this inheritance from Europe. In the nineteenth century, Charles Harpur (1813– 63) and Henry Kendall (1839–82) both attempted to perceive the landscape in which they were born without prejudice. Yet both were without models for the task. They turned to inappropriate modes for description – the eighteenth-century Augustanism that had typecast ‘nature’ as a ‘wild’ place to be tamed, controlled, or organized – and the Romantic, Wordsworthian view that saw nature as a fiction to be exploited as a model for the mind’s operations. Kendall wrestled with the impulse to see the Australian bush as a threatening wilderness filled with ‘fallen’ savages and the impulse to see Australia as a new Eden. Both strains were present in eighteenth-century English poetry, and much of Kendall’s verse echoes English models. In his “Sydney International Exhibition” poem of 1879, his lyrical abilities are woven into the Augustan couplets, as A.D. Hope remarks,7 but there is at the same time no significant shift from an Augusan world-view to an entirely Romantic one, either: 6

Joseph Furphy, The Annotated “Such Is Life: Being Certain Extracts from the Diary of Tom Collins”, intro. & notes by Frances Devlin–Glass, Robin Eaden, Lois Hoffmann & G.W. Turner (1903; Melbourne: Oxford U P , 1991): 1. 7 A.D. Hope, “Introduction” to Henry Kendall, Henry Kendall, ed. Leonie Kramer & A.D. Hope (Melbourne: Sun, 1973): xxxi.

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A stately morning rises on the wind. The hills take colour, and the valleys sing. As strong September flames beyond the lea – A silver vision on a silver sea. A new Age ‘cast in a diviner mould’ Comes crowned with lustre, zoned and shod with gold!8

Here is a collection of commonplaces deployed to convey a sense of wonder; a “new Age” in another land (in effect, a replica of the society that exists “at Home,” projected to arise in Australia); anthropomorphized ‘nature’; borrowed language for want of better things at hand (English “leas” for Australian fields); the metaphysics of “divinity”; and the pomp of royalty or majesty in the ‘crowning’ image. Elsewhere in the poem, European mythology is invoked for another incongruous term, and the myth of the ‘noble savage’ is embodied in expressions like the following: Where now the warrior of the forest race, His glaring war-paint, and his fearless face?9

All in all, what appears is a transported culture, consistently enough in line with colonizing practice to be the basis of a renaissance of all that is supposed to have given the colonizing power its basis for imperium or superiority – ‘Science’ and ‘Christianity’ foremost. In this very public poem, Kendall has revised the elements of both sentiment and rhyme scheme to offer a view of landscape that reappears in his more ‘Romantic’ lyrical and narrative poems. These latter rework the view that nature is hostile and, for all that it can also provoke the sensation of sublimity, requires taming. Such a poem is Kendall’s “Orara,” concerning a settler who is slain by “marauding” blacks in “the ruthless Australian wastes.”10 Here, the threatening and picturesque aspects of nature are stressed to demonstrate the premise that the land contains the bad as well as the good. Kendall is unable to adapt the attitude, developed by his Romantic precursors, of the mind’s ability to create its own sense of a good-and-evil dichotomy, much less transcend the conventional vision. The transcendental attempt is repeated by poets like Christopher Brennan, whose Poems 1913 (1914) rely on a myth of Eden to symbolically reinterpret his place in the world. Starting from such a closed-circuit view, Brennan can do more than provide an Antipodean rehearsal of Symbolism’s styles, while employing the same imagery from the northern hemisphere. His poem-sequence does 8

Henry Kendall, “Sydney International Exhibition,” in Henry Kendall, ed. Kramer & Hope, 64. Kendall, “Sydney International Exhibition,” 63. 10 Henry Kendall, “Orara,” in Henry Kendall, ed. Kramer & Hope, 5. 9

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not address itself to the Australian landscape at all except to suggest that the end of a personal quest is bounded by the setting sun’s prospect of the western sea (the Indian Ocean). In other words, the continental nature of self is explored with little reference to either surrounding objects or the precise landscape. The poems image an inward-looking proclivity that stems directly from a sense of otherness, triggered by Brennan’s physical separation from his German fiancée. His eurocentricity is never seriously abandoned in Poems 1913. Bernard O’Dowd, Australia’s self-proclaimed “Poet Militant” of the 1920s, also follows a transcendental path, but one that takes more account of the land. Following the Shelleyan tenet of the poet as unacknowledged legislator of mankind, O’Dowd, while incorporating more of the Australian ‘scenery’ than Brennan drew on, does not observe closely, either (as with Brennan, it is not his purpose to do so); he is preoccupied with creating a myth of his self and his role. His mountains, hills, deserts, and road, like Brennan’s, have Nietzschean implications rather than descriptive fidelity. The Romantic or, more accurately by now, post-Romantic strain in Australian poetry, which draws its myths and language from Europe and uses landscape to decorate a ‘theme’ concerning self, is still largely present. Much contemporary poetry comes to mind that overtly aims to rework Romantic themes, such as poems by Dorothy Hewett reworking, however facetiously or caustically, the Arthurian cycle, and the ‘magian’ poems of Robert Adamson, adopting the stance of the American Robert Duncan. Les Murray and others turn more to the landscape in order to image another personal schema. Murray’s Christian and ‘sacramental’ view sees sacrificial aspects in the blood-rites of country pursuits, and as providing, in Aboriginal culture, a prehistoric ‘order’ and tradition. Such a view is challenged by the expatriate poet Peter Porter, who holds mythological possibilities in abeyance while he considers events in local history as part of world history. Porter’s landscapes are more European, although small-talk and daily rituals of his characters could occur in any Australian city: Be man enough to end these pointless weekends, Bitching in her tiny kitchen, talking Zen. Sneaking down the dark steps mined with bottles – Take a new room across town, don’t open her letters. Put oriental wisdom and cryptic sense Under your foot – dress well, get drunk once a week. Build up debts: somebody has to take responsibility of all these girls.11 11

Peter Porter, “How to Get a Girl Friend,” in Twelve Poets, 1950–1970, ed. Alexander Craig (Milton, Queensland: Jacaranda, 1970): 146–47,

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Arguably, Porter is closer to annihilating a national ‘self’ in such a poem than many of the poets who seek openly to immerse themselves in the geographic or cultural Australian landscape. Porter’s stance is not advertised, as Adamson’s is, but is implied: he is observer of events and of hackneyed impressions (“Be man enough,” and “somebody has to take responsibility”) – so we can read his remarks as injunctions to take responsibility for events, or as an injunction to include women in one’s reflections – or as a piece of self-mockery. Other inclusions are made by recent poets. Robert Gray, for example, in Creek Water Journal, appears at times content to catalogue or record phenomena, to suggest that poetry has no other function than to be receptive to the commonplace and to refine perception. His approach is closer to Zen, in examples like the following: So hot, that sparrow looks ill; sitting on the tap handle

and Freewheeling on a bike the butterflies of sunlight all over me.12

Randolph Stow, the Western Australian-born poet and novelist, has also provided an alternative to seeing landscape as Romantic vehicle, in his Taoistinflected observations on harmony. In an early poem, “At Sandalwood” (1959), for instance, he writes: “The love of time, and the grief of time: the harmony of life and life in change. In the hardest season, praise to all three: and the crow’s uniting voice in the empty hall of the summer.” Dead eyes have loved and changed this land I walk in the grief of time, watching the skins of children harden under its sun. – My sad-coloured country, bitterly admired.13

This sense of landscape ‘changed’ by humans in the act of regarding it also occurs in Stow’s novel The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea and in other works. His poems about (and purporting to be by) the English King George I II (set to music by Peter Maxwell Davies as Eight Songs for a Mad King) evaluate the king’s 12

Robert Gray, Creek Water Journal (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1974): 67. Randolph Stow, “At Sandalwood,” in Twelve Poets, 1950–1970, ed. Alexander Craig (Milton, Queensland: Jacaranda, 1970): 167. 13

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mental distress in a sympathetic light, an approach made possible, I think, by Romantic insights into the workings of the imagination. In the light of these few examples, I suggest that Australian poetry has from an early stage been exercised in discovering modes of expression that do not make the landscape conform to a preconceived view of the land. There has always been, and continues to be, an inclination to adopt a Romantic view, to make landscape confirm a European sense of relationship, or at times to ‘use’ Aboriginal mythologies to effect a viable relationship with the land. Increasingly, ways out of the poets’ dilemma are apparent in the adoption of a more open stance that includes objects seen for no purpose other than to refine the perception of them more precisely. At bottom, this view owes something to the sceptic tradition, whereby judgment is refrained or reserved. The influence of Asian aesthetic traditions is also evident in contemporary poetic experimentation with ways of regarding and presenting the land itself.

————————— Out of Time14 —————————

W

A L K I N G W E S T W A R D , C.K. S T E A D ’ S M O S T R E C E N T W O R K (1979), is a further collection of poems. It comprises, in Stead’s words,

four blocks – long poems or poem sequences – each with its own tempo and colours, each with its own principle of composition. “Walking Westward”, for example, is composed of random memory, but put together as “music’, not as autobiography – so no first person singular.15

As this particular sequence contains much that seems a summing-up of Stead’s poetic career to date, it is irresistible to examine the ‘structure’ and themes of this ‘music’ at more length. Such an aleatory composition suggests immediate analogies with works of such musical composers as John Cage or Karl–Heinz Stockhausen or Morton Feldman. I am not surprised to find Stockhausen’s Ylem (1972) among the welter of allusive material in the poem. By a sleight analogous to the manoeuvres of the avant-garde musicians themselves, Stead manages to redefine autobiography by providing details of experience organized as what I might call homogenized chaos rather than as sequential-narrrative plotting. Analogous to Stockhausen’s composition for improvising musicians, Stead’s poem gathers memories and observations, treats them with varying build-up or dissolution, and generates moments of explosive tension before offering further arrangements of material, considered as images or spots of time. 14  15

Pacific Quarterly Moana 5 (1980): 405–409. C.K. Stead, “Introductory Note,” in Stead, Walking Westward (Auckland: The Shed, 1979): n.p.

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The other blocks of work in the book also suggest directions that Stead has explored in his experimentation. Considerable Eastern influence pervading “Walking Westward” (the second-last section) is more overtly honoured in “Breaking the Neck: An Autumn Sketchbook” (the first section of the book), and “Uta” (the final long poem, of fifty free translations from Japanese classical collections). The remaining section, “Twenty-One Sonnets,” reprints work from Quesada16 and adds three Spring 1974 sonnets, eight Autumn 1975 Sonnets, and one sonnet from Autumn 1978. These poems together suggest the preoccupations of the “Walking Westward” sequence – the “images / Behind closed eyes” and the “ecstasy once more before I die,” as well as the randomness of things: Nothing entirely random nor exactly repeated Is the art of nature, and if I unlock myself That principle holds.17

These poems, superficially recalling Baxter’s Jerusalem Sonnets, show the terseness and control of the “Hard. Bright. Clean, Particular” elements of Stead’s second collection, Crossing the Bar (1972).18 They admit more of the first-person singular, in a pared-down frame. The associative operations of the mind also occupy the sonnet sequence, as they become organic with “Walking Westward” also: Thinking of the Mediterranean blue beyond yellow wall Of Roquebrune Castle, and terraced vineyards, I was reminded There’s a painting by McCahon of the lamp in his studio That burns with a yellow love. (“Twenty-One Sonnets,” 5)

As here, much of Stead’s imagery is, at first glance, clichéd. The sonnets are also concerned with love and the exaltation of vision, and visionary states, the “ecstasy” that Stead treats in “Walking Westward.” He does not tolerate mediocrity of sentiment or expression, but is cutting like Martial where he detects a sham, in politics, poetry or love: (To Alan Roddick) The visiting celebrity who’s not a poet’s arse Has come like the Queen of the May and departed south Scattering his paper flowers. (“Twenty-One Sonnets,” 4) 16

C.K. Stead, Quesada: Poems 1972–1974 (Auckland: The Shed, 1975). “Twenty-One Sonnets,” in Walking Westward, 5. Further page references are in the main text. 18 “You Have A Lot To Lose,” in Stead, Crossing the Bar (Auckland: Auckland UP/Oxford UP, 1972): n.p. 17

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A pacifist stance is equivocally struck in the volume; invitations to join the revolution are met with “I’ve no time / being in revolt against the Gods” (“Breaking the Neck”). Stead’s fight has wider parameters that reflect a desire to understand what is going on, and the “Walking Westward” sequence in particular comes at the business in different ways. For all the impulse in Stead’s ‘Eastern’ models to be attentive to the life of things, he does not free himself of the urge to make sense of what he perceives. The title poem of Walking Westward catalogues much ephemera, banalities, and commonplaces. The sequence is, despite the disclaimer, a biography of tropes. In invocatory opening states where Stead begins: “The fish of Maui is under your feet / the hook of Maui is in your guts.” This is one of the few express acknowledgments of Mǒoritanga in the collection (a self-willed identity is the Autumn 1978 sonnet concerning the dispersal of the Bastion Point tribe by police). Oceanic images reinforce the opening, another commonplace; as Howard Sergeant remarks, “the beach is symbolized as a point of both landfall and departure.”19 Stead is, in effect, confirming a tradition. The “darkness enfolding” the shore reflects at once the Creole’s longing for the world in any other place than where he is and the sense, by syllogistic equivalence, that the world is “nothing” but the shroud of the dying or dead sun. Stead reduces his tone to non-involvement of feeling through his “changes” back and forth in time. The “Walking Westward” poem comprises twenty-five blocks of unequal length, loosely linked by recurrent images and themes. The ocean works at the base – or bass – level, and the images are quite accessible: in the Mediterranean, this night began before Christ the oil flares flap on the stone stairway. (33)

The Mediterranean is a linking element in the poem; so is the emperor Henshu in Paradise. “Walking Westward” recalls other diarist–poets, but Stead’s ‘walk’ is a more self-conscious rambling after culture, a not-ingenuous ‘sentimental journey’ through familiar locations and icons. Past acquaintances are recalled from various geospheres, together with their contemporary occupations. Some Australian friends (Bruce and Brenda Beaver, for example) or strangers and their concerns stand as brash emanations of a libertarian era taking stock of monolithic institutions, when Stead surveys his Suez-era experiences. Armidale acquaintances referred to in the poems bring such concerns to the fore, as in Stead’s view of the New England landscape of his first book, Whether the Will Is 19

Howard Sergeant, “Introduction” to Commonwealth Poems of Today, ed. Howard Sergeant (London: English Association/John Murray, 1967): 21.

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Free (1964). The title poem of that collection foregrounded libertarian questions and came up with an illuminating admission: This loping landscape doesn’t care What falls on it, what freezes there, [...] Whether the will is free or seems, I would be music, doved in snow.20

Stead’s response to the chaos or apparently undirected disordering forces and energies is disengaged perusal and recording of what he observes. His “Last Poem in Australia” from the same early collection philosophizes on the same landscape, and the town becomes in beauty, a place unknown to me. Always the present blurs with opulence. [...] Only what lies beyond falls into shape, Orderly, quiet – and is not the truth.21

In “Walking Westward,” this same pattern of looking for order throws up similar occasions of grace observed in familiar things. A fleeting religious sense enhances such perceptions. Stead recalls in passing the “musical” side of doctrinaire socialism, and irreverently reflects on Curnow’s still-valid query about “who navigates.” He discards theories of history: “fine compositions plausible fictions horrible accidents” do not fit the bill as explanations of what orders things. Stead remarks that theories “flow into us,” into this day that’s full of sunshine and cicadas and sparrowtalk an aching back a halting typewriter the breath of wind just now that drove a cloud across.

This is a cop-out. From Keatsian flight with the most recent cloud, Stead does not offer any answers to the questions from the 1950s that he has raised with such seeming concern. Admiring the scenery or making a Zen-like record of an aching back deflates the mood that the meditative, engaged pose suggests. The observation is infused with romanticism, too much so to be koan-like. Stead implies that the past is dead (much as Byron suggests that the absent are the dead), but this goes against the movement of the whole sequence’s concern to 20

“Whether the Will Is Free,” in Stead, Whether the Will Is Free: Poems 1954–62 (Auckland: Paul’s Book Arcade, 1964): 34, 35. First published in Landfall 53 (March 1960): 28. 21 “Last Poem in Australia,” in Stead, Whether the Will Is Free, 36. First published in Landfall 53 (March 1960): 26.

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resurrect the absent or to intimate that few things are in fact absent conceptually. The struggle of the poem is to infuse the observations with a tone that reinterprets them. It doesn’t always work, and the bread-and-wine and socialism conjunction is a hangover from R.A.K. Mason. The contiguity of orgasms and liver pâté in another place is absurdity for the sake of a risqué line that, rather, suggests callowness. There is no resolution to the cortical drift of the 1950s reviewed, and this is at once an irritant (for reader and poet), if directions are sought, and a kind of joke about the notion of a search for ‘meaning’. A lyric direction is explored again in the section “the moon / the moon,” but here also the genial spirits fail to suggest pure Zen: “this very moon and no other moon of 15.2.76….” The ‘making’ function of the poet’s moon, its motion, apparent stasis and other features are reviewed. Even the idea of insanity is included as a scheme for understanding, and the catalogue of memory’s bric-àbrac comes to include the image of Baron Philippe de Rothschild reading Marvell on the alien (Takapuna) shore, waiting for his wife to be operated on by a New-World surgeon. The Baron is set up as an example of some unspecified transgression (simply being a member of a worn-out culture, perhaps; or we can interpret his role as that of scapegoat, an externalization of paranoia about responsibility for the “six million”). The Baron’s hypocrisy, like that of Darius Milhaud, whose crime is to have dyed hair at eighty, does not seem to merit such pejorative incorporation, even among the doomed lovers of Dante, or in the shade of Katherine Mansfield at Menton. We might get close to what Stead’s notion of ‘meaning’ is about here, though. The source of his first allegiance is New Zealand; creative energy resides in Europe (in a Picasso image), and is released in an occasion that the artist and viewer share (if not altogether seeing a thing in the same way). An early phrase, “our most inventive coupling,” together with the “less than perfect things” that art has to do with, suggests that identity is found in the moment of or ‘occasion’ for something rather than in any symbolic perfection beyond the couple. One of the “Uta” segments remarks, concerning “my year’s / sins,” “May they melt together!” The wit hides an indulgent resignation to the way sins are. Antony and Cleopatra are later alluded to as examples of the ramification of action. The connections between the corrupt thought of politicians, and others mentioned earlier in the poem, and the quest (even Penelope appears in a Sydney residence) for some non-guilty interpretation of experience are tenuous but present. Stead doesn’t posit causality but synchronicity of time and ‘occasion’, much in the manner of Pound”s “Provence” poems or Eliot’s Waste Land procedure.

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This is not to suggest that the poem is impressionistic, or more kinetic because more recent. The imagery is timeworn, but mimetic of memory. Images oscillate and flicker in a poem that strolls through experience. The century’s catch-calls and failures are summed up in a sort-of metropolitan ‘cool’ tone that has some kinship with academic detachment from examined phenomena. Even the notation-form is part of the poetic game – as if Stead is piecing together a collage of fragments. The elements of chance are dispelled by the myth-in-themaking of the individual perceiving things as connected in memory. At times, Stead sees himself in an Ovidian manner – or as an Ovidian figure – an exile from the centre, living at the furthest outpost. The implied barbarians suggest repercussions beyond any stated irony or unarticulated cultural cringe. Stead played a similar ‘game’ in Quesada, where, for the hero, the search, the performance validating itself, was the thing. Stead is more oblique in “Walking Westward.” He considers the varieties of love and other, chemical, alterations with more detachment, and approaches a more ruthlessly honest, homespun equivalent of the Japanese poems. By trying on several personae as standpoints, Stead subverts preconception and beguiling hallucinations. Time is seen as a continuum expanding in all directions, where memory clings to its icons, not necessarily in sequential order but free-associatively bonded. The images alter but recur, as Stead moves from what looks like autobiography (“Balmoral Intermediate / 1945 / learned to spell ‘principal’ / distinct from ‘principle’ / because it was on the headmaster’s door”) to polemics (“tortured into textbooks”) and references to “Korea / the Cold War / the CI A / Vietnam” and the dicta “corruption of action because corruption of thought / corruption of thought because corruption of language” (39). Stead’s attitudes to “corrupt thought” and war play a cool game with collective guilt. Immediately following the remarks on corruption comes this: a white butterfly drifts across the tomatoes a bell rings 50 million. (39)

This is of a piece with an outlook expressed elsewhere: in the sixteenth “Autumn 1975” poem, he comments, “We don’t answer / for / our violence, nor even for our sense of beauty.” Beauty is dead and art impoverished, reduced to the clichés of war. “Walking Westward” ranges from a ‘thinking-aloud’ mode to the stance of annotator as craftsman. The claims of things on each other are almost satirized in occasionally incongruous juxtapositions, such as that of a CI A man, “fresh-

14

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faced / as if he ate well slept well,” and an imagined riposte by Goebbels to a claim about the Final Solution (41). Even the ‘self’ that records such events and thoughts can trundle together random epiphanies and the cause–effect connections: moments of anger and outrage are intercut with or counterpointed by vignettes such as his mother’s comment on life, a possum’s “last violence / on the floor of the cage” (40), Chaliapin’s encounter with a lady at Monte Carlo (41), and a teary departure of friends in Australia (42). Stead is identified with each object and event he observes; each modulates the other, and a ritual seriousness akin to that produced by aleatory music or stochastic art results as the poem veers toward no-tone or all-tones. The “Uta” set presented at the end of the volume confirms this status. Stead adduces the circumstantial framework of things and events perceived; he reproduces the mind-set of an observer of life and creates a sort of score or ‘chart’, with the “exits / entrances” noted like those of the players in a performance, though with room for improvisations at random, albeit with effects that are not indeterminate. The work is programmed, arranged, directed. In “Breaking the Neck,” Stockhausen’s Ylem conjures up Mosaic horrors – ultimate dissolution in chiliastic bombardment. The work permits an emptying-out, for its demands are on the listener as much as on the generators of the sound. Stead’s focusing on ‘nothing’ except immediacy (a Zen-like preoccupation) suggests a world where chance accounts for all – even though the pear-tree described in the last part of the poem exists on another temporal node. In “Walking Westward,” Stead supposes an inescapable patterning, a law in which all things behave consistently according to their nature, including humans who conform to both historical and karmic ‘type’. The human curiosity about (perhaps search for) explanations remains integral with the idea of art or poetry as a sequence, or with any ordering process. The conclusion of the poem pictures New Zealand expatriates (Shadbolt, Ireland, Frame, ‘Cobra Kaye’ – John Kasmin) like himself in London, and Eliot-like intercut images of the Thames, “Brunel’s bridge,” the “moon’s path off Ngongotaha,” and sparrows in a peartree. The chain-smoking poet of the final lines is as much a bird of passage as each of the sparrows, the swans turning with the Thames tide, the moon over Ngongotaha. The bridge, like Hart Crane’s, suggests a sort-of memory-link between London at the point of the poet’s departure and New Zealand, though the poem ends with “nowhere to jet to but / gone tomorrow / walking westward / the green doors / the runnels of water” (49). Like many items in this allusive finale, the “green doors” are equivocal – Satchell’s “green door” symbolized friendship unto death – but suggest the end of one pilgrimage and the start of another. The journey is as much in the poet’s mind as any literal travelogue. If it is a pre-

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lude to anything, in the Wordsworthian sense, the words “nowhere,” “gone,” and “westward” suggest finality, barely balanced with the promise of “green” and “water.” After all, perhaps, the poem re-states a Romantic staple.

—— New Zealand City Streets and Gipsies on the Road22 ——

G

M C C O R M I C K ’ S P U B L I S H E D V O L U M E S are Gypsies (with Jon Benson, 1974), Naked and Nameless: Street Poems and a Walking Story (1975), Poems for the Red Engine (1978), Poems by Request (1979), Scarlet Letters (1980), Zephyr (1982), and Lost at Sea (1995). He also wrote Performance: A Guide to the Performing Arts in New Zealand (1979) for the Department of Internal Affairs, and (with Scott Wilson) Honey, I Blew Up the Atoll (1995), purportedly the secret diary of Jacques Chirac. Since the 1970s, McCormick has worked as a television documentary presenter, festival presenter, and radio host on T V N Z ’s Good Morning Show. ARY

This brief review of four New Zealand ‘road’ poets sketches something of a phenomenon of the 1970s, a hangover from an earlier ‘Beat’ period, which infused New Zealand poetry with a new sense of mobility and openness that owed as much to the social and political movements of the time as to consciously derived literary models. The work of Gary McCormick, Jon Benson, Sam Hunt, and Peter Olds is not uniformly concerned with travelling, but all these writers deal with images of transience, travel or a trip to convey relationships with people, society, and art. They are not the only contemporary writers in New Zealand to engage in travel sequences, even travelogues. Alan Brunton and Russell Haley explore distance, separation, and perception in their work generally,23 and James K. Baxter’s observations on travelling up and down New Zealand – including hitchhiking scenes – may be considered to be a formative, and even normative, instance of the mode. Associated with the general thematic area are the public stances of these poets: the image of street-dweller, ‘gypsy’, hobo or peripatetic boozer (Sam Hunt). Gary McCormick The deliberate adoption of a pose goes beyond fashion or a passing trend; to mark the output of these four in particular was as an experimental direction in New Zealand poetry. In effect, they represent a casting-off from more static modes into an anti-academic contemplation of landscape, society, and self. And, in the case of at least two of the poets, a conscious grandstanding element 22 

Kunapipi 2.2 (1980): 60–74. See, for example, Alan Brunton, “Letter to Harry Leeds,” New Argot (May 1975): 5–6, and Russell Haley, On the Fault Line (Paraparaumu: Hawk Press, 1977). 23

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advertises their claimed relationship with the public. Their work is ‘public’ by contrivance, their audiences being drawn from the street or pub, or consists of revamped readings that take on theatrical aspects with the arrival of Hunt or McCormick. Declamation, in their case, is the point. McCormick’s second collection, Naked and Nameless, made up of broadsidestyle pamphlets,24 opens with an encapsulation of the dichotomies McCormick observes in poetry. “There are Two Kinds of Poem” differentiates the academic from the street poem: the one is a genius in technique, it whirls with precision across the stage and leaps before tiring in libraries; familiar with college campuses and assisted by the Arts Council, it goes on tour in the provinces lives on in books few care to read.

This ‘type’ has a solid pedigree: a number of contemporary practitioners are campus-located or campus-patronized, including C.K. Stead, Vincent O’Sullivan, Kendrick Smithyman, M.K. Joseph, Mike Doyle, and others from the Oxford/ Auckland University Press stable. Nor is the academic environment of this older generation of poets so remote as to be incomprehensible, on the basis of age, to the generation of Hunt and McCormick. Hunt and Olds, along with Michael Morrissey25 and other younger writers, have served terms as writers-inresidence (Sam Hunt was Robert Burns Fellow at Otago University 1976, and Peter Olds in 1978; Michael Morrissey was the first writer-in-residence at the University of Canterbury in 1979). McCormick is right, however, to point to the pitfalls of achieving ‘genius in technique’, in terms of the poet’s relationship to a wide public base. Transcending Smithyman’s delineations of Auckland versus Wellington poetry in an earlier period, the academic poet – such as Smithyman in Auckland or Manhire in the south and then Wellington – is drier, trickier, concerned more with its being recognized as playing with concepts. Smithyman wrote that the poetry of academics, or poetry fostered in the atmosphere of analytics and contemplation,

24

Gary McCormick, Naked and Nameless: Street Poems and a Walking Story (Porirua: Piano Publishing, 1975). This was preceded by Jon Benson & Gary McCormick, Gypsies (Gisborne: Piano Publishing, 1974). 25 Michael Morrissey, Make Love in All the Rooms (Dunedin: Caveman, 1978).

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exploits tone and calls for nuance as our romantic writing was little urged to do, (and) makes for itself a recurring difficulty about getting “the true voice of feeling” which waits on one’s efforts to keep a tactful poise between the pleasures of intellect which may be offered, and those staple excitements of poetry which tend to be sentient.26

The very language is guarded, to weight “those staple excitements […] which tend to be sentient.” McCormick considers the other side of the metronome: Another is more stubborn. By nature, a more erratic lover, coming occasionally like a brilliant sun from behind clouds; recording no apology it speaks out of turn or like a dumb midshipman on holiday stares cheekily out from the expensive seats. It knows no life other than the brawling street and refuses to come in.

More jocularly metaphysical than the technically brilliant poem that McCormick refers to in his description of the “academic” impulse, the more plebeian but ‘romantic’ poem mimics with its images the difference in sentiment and tone. The entire poem ironically takes off the academic tropes it describes – the poem as skilled actor or action, the tourist in the provinces – and contrasts the career-traveller, the vocational midshipman, intimating love as motive and an uncontrollable impulse to speak out. A ‘new’ Romance, in short, is declared at the start of McCormick’s collection. The poems rehearse various styles and topics, and in each poem the street is more than background. In “What of the Day’s Possible Alternatives,” courses of action are considered: suspended like a bird Between two seasons, going this way And now that I crouch on city pavements, Hoping the clatter of hurrying footsteps Will drown the quiet of my own indecision.

If he is imprecise about the direction to take in geographical terms, McCormick is not indecisive about poetry: total commitment to it ensures a sort of immortality, a confirmation that the right decision has been made. A long poem, “The

26

Kendrick Smithyman, A Way of Saying: A Study of New Zealand Poetry (Auckland: Collins, 1965): 155.

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Rope,” from the third broadsheet in the collection, negotiates a list of twists and turnings through social small-talk and occasions, to remark: My religion, if you like, consists of the worship of the purely temporal, which I choose to adore, in all its uncertainty.

This is not a fatalistic embrace of Negative Capability but a vehicle for continued travel. The second broadsheet includes the poem “In Certain Seasons,” where present emptiness – “Unrequited love” is equivalent in this poem to “life in all its passages” – resolves into inclusion in a perceived greater chaos: one day oceans must swallow rivers, one day the bird plunges, freed from the storm.

There is often an uneasy balance in McCormick’s tone, between acceptance of this chaotic principle and an incipient alarm at personal extinction. Balance is generally maintained through continuing assertion of “possibilities,” a curiosity about choices: “‘My life’ is nothing more or less than one / of a number of possible choices.” This almost-acceptance of chance is accompanied by residual doubt. The undertow of uncertainty is suggested in the poem “Naked and Nameless,” with its wish or hope: I may become the very spirit of a tree. Tall, but no longer alone.

The elegiac mood of McCormick’s earlier collection, Gypsies (1974, with Jon Benson), recurs in Naked and Nameless, in poems like “The Declining Passions of Autumn,” Sighing, sighing, the pain-tinged leaves of old passion and memories decaying

and “Remember February,” with its musing on self-annihilation: such times as these men murder themselves and have much to gain.

Sadness or nostalgia is linked more closely with love in the later collection. Where Gypsies struck strident and even eldritch notes in poems treating disappointment (for instance, “You Never Know,” which spins out some bitter

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clichés about bourgeois life and is fairly unresolved), the later works are more assured, and the irony stems from cooler hesitation rather than from disillusion with realities. The more declamatory works in Gypsies, in particular, sound echoes of Baxter in his 1972 Ode to Auckland mode, or of the unrebated satires posthumously collected in The Holy Life and Death of Concrete Grady – works such as “Ballade of a Happy Bureaucrat” and “Spring Song of a Civil Servant.”27 McCormick recounts, in “The Mall Christmas,” the domestic sleaze and kitsch that characterize not what Baxter might have called accidie or apathy but the designs of capitalism: The men who sell the Birth of Christ Are not aware of what they do. Just thankful for the poor and simple, who Will buy the plastics in the mart The clothes and toys that fall apart And keep the bloody wheels of commerce Turning.

The directness of the attack is weakened by the polemic unsubtlety; the poem might make tolerable propaganda, were it not for the flabby argument (surely the “men who sell the Birth of Christ” know exactly what they are doing) and the reliance on clichés concerning the sacred and the profane. More successful among the early works were the love-related poems in the “Thunderclouds” section, where the slickness of the easy political and social-comment pieces is abated by some restraining of the impulse to be disappointed. Acceptance of transience is more apparent in the love-lyrics: Mean well, be well we have not long, touch me … we thread the needle and are gone (“Thunderclouds 1”)

An introductory note to McCormick’s poems in Gypsies acknowledges Sam Hunt’s ‘older-poet’ status. Calling his poems “Roadsongs” after Hunt’s usage (in South Into Winter), McCormick claims that “Road is of symbolic importance to this mobile generation. Song has no pretensions about it.” (Is this an unstated comparison with poetry, ‘academic’ or not, that does have pretensions?) If the poems of Gypsies reflected more of the turmoil the poet experienced in 1973–74, as he claimed in his introduction, then the poems of Naked and Nameless mark 27

James K. Baxter, The Holy Life and Death of Concrete Grady, ed. J.E. Weir (Wellington: Oxford

U P , 1976).

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a maturing into ability to live more confidently with the uncertainties of the following year or two. The later poems also signal a ‘found’ direction to pursue, in experimenting with Romantic models, including the love-lyrics of Sam Hunt, that argue for a resignation to the limits of achievable contentment. Jon Benson Jon Benson’s poems are marked by an adolescent urgency similar to that of McCormick.28 A variety of derivative pop lyricism accounts for some observations (for example, “Sarah,” with its trace of Dylan’s song of the same name), and Benson warns in his Foreword against looking for “continuity.” The poem “The Road” records his perceptions: This morning a chance renewed. The road, washed By a night’s heavy dew, Clean, Winding in the trees and hills, Following the river [...] I’m following the river Although I cannot see it, Glimpses in the mist, And I hear it singing, It beckons me to follow With melodies from the source.

The gaucheries derive chiefly from employing others’ clichés, not merely of speech but also of situations. Thus, “Late Afternoon Epilogue” constructs a Last Supper of sandwich, fruit, bread and water, and dissipates its clarity. “Harbours” compares a woman to a harbour and ultimately treads an embarrassingly hackneyed line: Sun-crazed and mightily drunk, I’ve run before the moods of night. To beach finally on rocky coast for want of, just one guiding light.

In contrast to the lyrics of McCormick (especially in the later poems) and Hunt, Benson’s are banal and over-contrived. A sense of personal disaster pervades “Execution” and “Another Loser Leaves Town,” where any purpose in travel is 28

Jon Benson & Gary McCormick, Gypsies (Gisborne: Piano Publishing, 1974).

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epitomized in the decision to quit and move on. The dramatic attempt to impose some poetic direction on things patently fails, and the option to quit is congruent with the grandstanding that marks the entire opus. Sam Hunt Sam Hunt’s work since Bracken Country includes two collections, South Into Winter and Time to Ride, that take the road as motif, and two collections that ostensibly celebrate a preoccupation with alcohol, Bottle Creek and Drunkard’s Garden.29 Hunt’s lyrical capabilities were remarked in the early 1970s by Peter Crisp and Trevor Reeves, among others. Crisp notes Hunt’s simplicity or economy of style, his recounting of “freshly familiar” territory (the landscapes and localities of his verse), and his willingness “to keep his sticky inner paws of afterthought and metaphor off it.”30 Reeves observes in his brief mention that Hunt is “reluctant to write more personally about himself, but this may eventually come.”31 Both views are illuminating. Reeves remarks that Hunt is “probably New Zealand’s first genuinely ‘roving poet’” and Crisp emphasizes the imagistic focus in Hunt’s early poetry: it works best where sensory triggers involve the reader in the trip. And, in fact, much of Hunt’s verse is reportage of the seen (and scene). What Hunt tells us of himself is left to inference much of the time, but the predilections are evident from the choice of topics. They are not only “booze, women, wine, women and song (in that order),” as Reeves suggests, with the occasional dog thrown in or a word on pollution. Hunt’s love-poems – concerning booze or women or dogs – are not dismissive or cavalier. His props or set pieces involve Romantic escape as much as bemused toying and dissipation. The dissolution offered by the bottle – or love – is a proper concern of poetry and carries a kosher blessing. As Crisp remarks, Hunt’s poetry evokes an “affectionate” feeling, of recognition of situations without excessive commentary. Reeves takes exception to Hunt’s general philosophical lightness, comparing him to James K. Baxter – an inappropriate comparison, given both the elusive trobar clar of Hunt and the mythopoetizing tendency of the “legendary Jim.” Whatever shortcoming one might allege concerning Hunt’s work, it is not arcane or pri-

29

Sam Hunt, Bottle Creek (Waiura: Alister Taylor, 1972); Bracken Country (Wellington: Glenbervie, 1972): Drunkard’s Garden (Wellington: Hampson Hunt, 1977); South Into Winter (Waiura: Alister Taylor, 1975); Time to Ride (Waiura: Alister Taylor, 1975). 30 Peter Crisp, review of South Into Winter, Landfall 109 (March 1974): 77. 31 Trevor Reeves, “Recent New Zealand Writing,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 5.3 (1974): 30.

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vate in the way suggested by many of Baxter’s self-created evasions or woeful enmeshings in theology. In a sense, Hunt’s economy derives from the transience of “roving.” The poems are mimetic to the extent that they record brief encounters and become ‘moving’ pieces themselves. The metaphor of travel operates throughout Hunt’s work to suggest an overall sense of nostalgia for persons and places visited: the depth is fathomless but contained within the image of motion. (Hunt’s attraction to the poetry of W.B. Yeats is one possible wellspring of this image.) In Hunt’s “Four Cobweb Poems” in South Into Winter, Book 2, the spider spinning in a “seaward window” is destroyed by a visiting girl “spinning faster than a cobwebbed fly,” and the tenuous relationship of poet, girl, fly, and spider becomes parallelled and parabolic to suggest a diversity of readings concerning not sexuality but existence. The flippant tone of the poem (“So this, friends, is the last bright cobweb poem”) rings down a veiled finality and offers a window into Hunt’s particular ecology of wine, beer or travel imagery. Hunt presents many such vignettes as the spider sequence, poems that suggest intensity of watching – “Smash (for Meg)” in Book 4 of Bottle Creek, for instance – or reflection (“Herons, Ma, Bright Spinnakers,” from Time to Ride 34 – a vision of death: “My mother, crying as she dies”). Each experience is archetypal. Without recourse to mythic names and precursor figures, each of Hunt’s occasions becomes a type of epic of a sort, domestically curtailed in the case of moths attempting to enter a crack in a window, or conflated to embrace all occasions in “Everytime it rains like this”: Everytime it rains like this: I walk hangover beaches, make no more sense of it: in love with a winter woman, a woman when she steams, I kiss wet winter lips, return to you Everytime it rains like this (Time to Ride, 17)

The separateness of lovers, as well as their inclusion in the couple, is an endless fascination for Hunt, moving through versions of this, of the “whole / wide world of our bay (...) given in,” to clearer statement in “Words on a First Waking”: And so, you drift from sleep you dress. Deliberate; beautiful, as if you had a wardrobe full – the same tight jeans and shirt you threw on

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yesterday. To think us strangers then: all lovers like to think they’re not! It’s your world, love. You wander out alone into the living room, alone into another dream. (Drunkard’s Garden, 10)

Not the least of Hunt’s appeal is his gracefulness with rhyme and half-rhyme. Throughout Drunkard’s Garden, what seems like effortless handling of common situations (melancholy suppressed only in order to appear controllable in poetry – “Those Eyes, Such Mist,” for instance) holds in check a situation that recalls “Everytime it rains like this”: I dream of several men who’ve sailed seven seas; their many mists; wake again to your love as thick dreams clear; a dream of masts, a dream that no man ever saw your eyes like this. I have lost all voice. I kiss those eyes, our voyaging; such mist. (Drunkard’s Garden, 12)

The voyaging metaphor is of a piece with Hunt’s images of controlled emotion in uncertain circumstances. Throughout his poems, Hunt observes other things in motion as if all confirm the principle of journeying and flight. The title poem of Drunkard’s Garden brings the elements together, as Hunt addresses (yes, his dog): This overgrown acre, full of emptiness, Darkie! a headland, refuge for the heron, swan and wild duck and drunkard; lover, child. (Drunkard’s Garden, 22)

This brief, ostensibly autobiographical lyric expands through a series of shifts to embrace notions of a Waste Land, and the poem’s promontory extends into the darkness, a sphere that reconciles the poet, his loved ones, and familiar emblems. The poem as tenement is perhaps a logical conclusion to a series of pit-stops and roadhouses: a place to pause a while to reflect on the trip so far.

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Peter Olds Arthur Baysting commenced a review of Peter Olds’s first collection, Lady Moss Revived,32 with the disparaging comment “First off, he’s a better poet than he is an illustrator. But he is a poet.”33 Baysting is surely right about the amateurish figurative work that adorns the jackets of Dunedin’s Caveman Press editions of Olds’s work, but he is more appreciative of what he sees as distinctive features of the poetry, declaring that Olds’s tone is “authentic, the style and rhythm assured, and the better poems are bursting with vitality.” 34 The self-image Olds presented was “late-fifties punk” – more specifically, “the bodgie/auto-erotic/ fifties” together with “pill bottles, probation officers and paranoia.” In Baysting’s view, Olds’s literary style recalled Ginsberg, most notably in a poem called “In Auckland,” where a Ginsberg-like “habit of over-kill” rather than “paring-down and sharpening of the vision” impaired the work. Old was persistent: almost as prolific as Sam Hunt, he subsequently produced 4 V8 Poems (1972), The Snow & the Glass Window (1973), Freeway (1974), and Doctor’s Rock (1976), all from Caveman Press. The themes are consistent throughout that period: poems concerning the hidden structures of apparently free-form existence, with the accoutrements of urban dwelling in crammed tenements, suicide, drugs and cars and the open road, escape routes that become a metaphor for the poetic art and offer alternatives to dwelling in the psychosisinducing city. Lady Moss Revived served notice of the parameters of Olds’s world. Starting with “On Probation,” the experiences moved through psychosis and jail to “habits” and, finally, to “Schizophrenic Highway” and “In Auckland.” The round trio was, as Baysting observes, essentially rewarding. “On Probation” sets the patterns up as the poet – Like a Ponsonby native that can’t escape from his neglected monument

– goes through the “shiftless ritual of progress to the courthouse and out into the boarding-house world of barbiturates, late bars and decay (a “smelly dungeon”). Protest, or escape into wine or drugs, or the “dreams” that are poems, are the alternatives to acceptance, and Olds reveals these as mutually supportive. Halfway through the poem, he comments: “I put another piece in the allnight jukebox / and I cry why?” – a question that remains unanswered throughout the 32 33 34

Peter Olds, Lady Moss Revived (Dunedin: Caveman, 1972). Arthur Baysting, review of Peter Olds, Lady Moss Revived, Landfall 108 (December 1973): 357. Baysting, review of Lady Moss Revived, 357.

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collection, for the poem concludes with “while another piece drops in the allnight jukebox,” though, to judge from this poem’s overview of the city’s attraction, the decision to follow the road is understandable. The decision is underscored by further poems surveying Auckland’s suburbs: “Herne Bay revisited” catalogues the “unchangeable Ponsonby,” Auckland’s inner suburban area, to suggest that there is “Not a ghost of a V8 / Not a ghost of you” (15) left in the city as Olds sets off from the scene with “Dunedin / I’m on my way –” on my way hitching.

[Author’s interpolation: Reading such a description of Ponsonby as “unchangeable” forty years later, of course, provokes hollow laughter. That former mix of low-cost working-class houses, boarding-houses, and subdivided villas of Victorian and Edwardian-era merchants and worthies has become a made-over constituency of prestige-car-owning older and newer new-home owners who can afford to live in what is one of the most desirable locations in Auckland.] The early poems advertise nostalgia in the recurrent imagery of the V8 car, and in Freeway, Olds wheels out a “V8 Poem for Chris Howard”: Take off, brother but please return – best that the parts be not then bent. Come back, broken nose, plucked eye & all, better that, brother, than a black-&-red wreck – Not a gearstick, as we would want it. Not a blazing death, as we would dream it. (47)

Further into the poem, he projects his car-haunted self: Tonight I sit in a coal-fired room captain of my own foaming 4-wheeled brain trying to write a line for you while ghosts of Fords rumble across the gloom

There is no denying the lyricism of this self-conscious portrayal. The lines are measured, as if Olds is counting the syllables. They are also memorable in their grandstanding poète maudit rhetoric. The unrespectable hot cars in the city’s quiet areas or in the crashpad zones of the late 1960s and early 1970s epitomize an unstable relationship with mainstream mores and expectations. Olds’s poems dealing with the counter-cultures and alternative societies that he moves through in fact or in imagination speak of a longing to escape. The Mandrax poems, like the ‘1950s revisited’ works (“A Teenage Problem”; “A 50s Schoolboy Remembers”; and “Lady Lust Revisiting the Great Rock & Roll Nostalgia” – from Doctor’s Rock), represent a retreat into a more comforting

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world of the imagination than that which the present seems to offer by way of replacements for what has been lost. The second poem in Doctor’s Rock, “To the End of the White Lady Piecart & Hamburger Joint,” displays this essentially nostalgic and elegiac aspect of Olds’s poetry. The glory of the James Dean era has departed, and the poem is a record of the era’s salient features. Like his satires, Old’s evocations of the transient world are less stagy, less self-regarding than McCormick’s when contrasting the old and the new: Now, walking through Broadway mid-afternoon busrush & Samoan women big bags & bellies, I notice the absence of the ’46 soda joint fountain. I walk into a pub. The barman tells me they ripped out the joint’s tap burgers & bits for a new carpark yard – he added the contractors need some concrete mixers – I walk back out to the street & home. A bit sad, I turned onto Hauraki late night service to hear some music but picked up the White Lady instead singing a commercial – (12)

There is no retreat from the present in this sociological excursion, except in Olds’s effort to re-imagine the past, with its familiar icons, and to soften the shocks by recourse to the ‘drug’ poetry, pre-empting the psychosis resulting from destruction of a world that is gone in every sense (as in Ferlinghetti’s “Pictures of the Gone World”). In Doctor’s Rock, Olds also follows another ‘road’, on the way to self-reliance as the older props run out. The New Jerusalem, of ‘Hemi’ Baxter’s extended family at Hiruharama, is acknowledged to have passed: “4 Notes. Jim Baxter One Year Gone” recounts: “They buried the old man a year ago – / the eels don’t bite so much now.” In this poem, the control of form is most notable in the paired lines, perhaps modelled on Baxter’s Jerusalem Sonnets. The collection concludes with a similarly spare summation of city life, where the picture comes “clear & true, / well framed, well hung, & all of you” (49) and a wry dialogue is interlaced with narrative, describing the “wandering wind’s sinister return” (50). The wind – of imagination, of dreams – images Olds’s fundamental Romanticism. The

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‘heroes’ in his mythology are James Dean, Little Richard, and the V8 engines out of a transposed American Dream. In an interview with Stephen Higginson, Olds, in discussing the American presence in his work, traces some of the directions he has taken. Replying to Higginson’s question, “Is there any single poet/ writer/ movement which has provided you with anything in particular? Interests you now?” Olds speculates: I could mention a few American “beat” poets that have been important to me (not the Black Mountain thing) ... guys like Kerouac, William Wantling, D.J. Burger ... Little Richard (movement), John Lennon (poet), Bob Dylan (Circus), Bernard Malamud (short stories), Allen Ginsberg (confusion).35

Olds also cites Steinbeck, James Baldwin, and Jack London, rounding off his remarks in ironic confirmation of his mention of “confusion” with “I hope I can learn something from what I’ve just said. I’m not in Ward 10 for the money, you know.”36 It’s significant that most of the writers he mentions have been metropolitan residents, and that the road has represented, at least in the interpretations of London and Kerouac, a hope for escape or involvement. The transcendental and even religious possibilities of the Road are also present in Olds’s readings of experience. He recalls Baxter’s influence on him: “I think he paid more attention to me than I did to him. He affected me terribly. I thought I should give up writing and become a monk,”37 and he states that he had Christianity in mind when he wrote some of the reminiscential poems in Doctor’s Rock for his father – muted lyrics like “Memories of a Town Drunk,” where the death of the worrisome (“kicking stones with Mister Kent / was evil”) town drunk provokes an “At last he’s gone – thank God” from the townspeople, and a continuation of routine. Such a subtle insinuation lurks in the departure of the town drunk that the effective shift from narrative to delivery of the ‘point’ of the poem is conveyed in the very act of telling. The form is that of the pruneddown story, a style of writing that Olds claimed he wanted to concentrate on during the brief tenure of his Burns Fellowship at Otago University in 1978. In a disingenuous dismissal, he remarked, with automobile-inflected slang, “I’ve already had a lash at it and I reckon I can handle her with a bit of luck or with the love of Mike.” The themes he summarizes again are “love, hate, baked beans, pistons, courtrooms, hospitals, sneakers, cops and cars.”38 35 36 37 38

Olds, in Stephen Higginson, interview with Peter Olds, Pilgrims 4 (October 1977): 135. Olds, in Higginson, interview with Olds, 135. Olds, in Higginson, interview with Olds, 138. Stephen Higginson, interview with Peter Olds, 135.

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It is this openness relating to intent in Olds’s poetry – a trait shared by several of his progenitors and American contemporaries – that gives his work its particular appeal. In the title poem of The Snow & the Glass Window, Olds offers us, in effect, a catalogue of banal circumstance within which his protagonist, “the boy,” declares: “I must break out” and discovers, once outside, that “the glass window remained.” The breaking of glass by physical or mental effort coincides with the end of the poem. The limits of the Romantic search, as in Keats’s Hyperion poems, take the poet to the edge of his art where realities collide and dualism is resolved. The American critic Ben L. Hiatt commented on Olds’s “power” in poems where “something more than simple nostalgia makes him take these backward looks at what may have been better times.”39 And, despite misgivings expressed by Paul Foreman and William Wantling,40 there is general agreement with Tom Montag’s view that “When Olds is successful, he is powerful.”41 Olds knows what he is about in closing the volume with the title poem, and his neat infusion of fundamental questions into the record of a mundane existence (“‘What have you lost?’ boomed / the sky”) suggests, to me at any rate, that his art should not be underrated. Olds confronts a problem that is essentially linguistic, pertaining to the language of poetry and its relationship to other realities; he investigates the problematic relationship in poems that draw on his society and its mélange of cultures. In doing so, he reveals that his concerns are more conceptual than those of Hunt and McCormick, and that his primary interest is to overhaul the art by rooting it in instinctual perception of its efforts to see things from both sides of the window – rather as Shelley seeks to know what lies on both sides of the “veil” of language.

—————— An Interview with Alan Wearne42 ——————

T

was recorded at my Marsh Street flat in Armidale on 19 and 20 August 1981, when Alan Wearne came to read poems at the University of New England and visit friends. We listened to classical and other music, drank at the New Englander Hotel, and talked a great deal about poetry, football, and his poems written to date that would eventually be included in his book-length poem The

39

HE FOLLO WING INTER VIEW

Ben L. Hiatt, review of Peter Olds, V8 Poems, Second Coming 3.1–2 (“Special New Zealand Anthology,” 1974): 98. 40 Paul Foreman and William Wantling, reviews of Peter Olds, Lady Moss Revived, Second Coming 3.1–2 (1974): 94–95, 89–91, respectively. 41 Tom Montag, review of Peter Olds, The Snow & the Glass Window, Second Coming 3.1–2 (1974): 115. 42  Southerly 42.2 (June 1982): 119–34.

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Nightmarkets (published by Penguin Australia several years later). I obtained several poems from the work-in-progress, and published them in the 1982 issue of Kangaroo, an annual anthology that I initiated in 1978. Many poets, writers, and readers associated with Armidale and the University of New England received copies of the Kangaroo, which had a circulation of well over ten thousand copies by virtue of its free distribution to all students of the university, whether on-campus or studying by correspondence.

MS: We could start by considering the poems in the Tranter anthology, The New Australian Poetry, the poems you put in there from the section “Out There.” AW: Tranter chose those ones and he did choose the section of a verse novella I wrote in 1975, Out Here. MS: What sorts of things were you interested in writing about then? AW: Well, I’d gradually been moving in that direction, to write a long thing using monologues, set in the suburbs; well, set not so much in the suburbs as among the lives of everyday people. I think that’s probably what I was aiming for. I think I’ve always liked tragedies of fairly normal people, as well as comedies of fairly normal people. I suppose it’s in the same tradition as Death of a Salesman. MS: What’s the general idea behind the novel you’re writing at the moment – some of the things that are running through it? AW: I think there’s certainly one level on which I’m trying to stretch myself as far as possible, and do the biggest thing in my life – and that includes falling in love and running for Parliament. So I’m writing this wacky thing, which I’m enjoying very much. It’s not taking its toll emotionally on me, which the other thing probably did; emotionally I’m very sort of buoyant about it, probably because a lot of people support me over it. MS: It’s certainly a very humorous work; the whole tone of it is nicely controlled. There’s no sense of its running into burlesque or send-up. AW: There was the trouble with a character like Macka the Marxist, whom I like dearly, but Macka could be a figure of fun. I want him to be made out a person whom I could, well, respect, I suppose. I like Macka; Macka acknowledges he’s middle-class; he comes from the middle classes. He knows he’s come through the middle classes, he has middle-class values, and he’s prepared to lay them on the line. Most Marxists of that era, revolutionary Marxists, most of them came from the middle classes, but most of them weren’t like that. I suppose that the main people in The Nightmarkets (and there are six main people) are coming to a point of crisis in their life, a point of decision. I think the analysis of these particular people under stress is another theme that runs through the work.

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MS: It is a fairly domestic piece in some senses. AW: It’s very much a Melbourne piece. It’d be wrong to say a good working knowledge of Melbourne is required. It has Melbourne nuances, and things like that.... I enjoy writing about Melbourne, because I think it’s an incredibly interesting city. I find it more interesting than Sydney, although I like Sydney dearly, and I like going there for holidays. I’ve got a list of about twenty-seven characters; there are about six main ones. The plot basically involves about a year in the lives of six people. There are Sue and Ian. They’re both journalist types. Sue’s trying to break into alternative radio, and she writes articles for the National Times. They were radicals from Monash years ago. Ian’s been on the fringe of all this, but he’s just dropped out completely. Now, Sue interviews this Don Chipp-type politician who comes from an established family: he’s a bit different from Chipp because he comes from an established Liberal Party family; he’s not an outsider like Chipp was, from a working-class background. His father was one of Menzies’ cabinet ministers; he took over his father’s seat, he’s had a falling-out with the government over things, and he decided to form the New Progress Party. His mother is one of the major characters, an established figure in Melbourne society. Someone said to me the other night, “Would you see her as a Member of Parliament?” – No, she wouldn’t have run for Parliament. She would have become something like the President of the Victorian Branch of the Liberal Party. So she’s in society, but you know she’s got a lot of presence. Now she’s come to a crisis in her life because her son has left the Liberal Party. Sue, the journalist, is having an affair with him û this weird affair, in which they argue all the time. McTaggart, the politician, hires Ian to investigate some things for him: he had a contact in the Melbourne massage parlours; he had a thing about drugs. He had a contact there, and she was murdered. So he gets Ian to find another contact for him, and he’s been given the name of a girl there called Terri, who seems to talk about things. Ian’s got to go and meet Terri. But nothing really happens, because this murder’s really nothing to do with the massage parlour, and McTaggart has missed the point entirely. The massage parlour is clean, so nothing’s happening. He goes to investigate the murder, and develops this obsession with the woman Terri. Finally, there’s Ian’s brother Robert, who’s running for Parliament, for the Labor Party. MS: I like the Terri sequence, where they decide to go off for a sleazy time in Kuala Lumpur; it seems to have a generous vision, from Terri’s point of view. AW: Yeah, she grows up a lot in this. This isn’t about Terri yet, but this is an interlude about a stick magazine [reads the “Pet of the Month” poem]. Can I

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read you more? Here’s the owner, Leon Smith. Have you ever seen Ugly Dave Gray on the television? Well, I had Ugly Dave Gray in mind for this bloke. He’s the owner of the massage parlour. I once went and interviewed another bloke – it was nothing really like this – a really sad man who was a massage-parlour owner in Melbourne. I got in touch with him through the crazy massage-parlour chaplain, who’s this crazy priest in some wacky religion, who set himself up as the massage-parlour chaplain, but he’s disappeared – went into cleaning hospitals. This is about Smith, the owner of the massage parlour [reads the poem “Well I had these visions too”]. MS: There’s a nice sense of fun in there: it’s one of the neat things to send up – Rex Mossop slips of the tongue… AW: Yes, Jack Dyer in Melbourne football once described a go for a punt kick as a cunt prick. “That was a strange sort of a kick there, Jack,” said the other commentator. Ever heard Jack? Have you ever gone to the football in Melbourne? You’ve not been to a VF L game? Come with me and Phillip Edmonds – Essendon is our team; we support the Bombers. Essendon’s performance this year – and it looks like we’re going to win the Premiership – has just been one of the best things that has happened to me for a long time, Now, football this year has been not only immaculate, which they can do – but it’s had incredible guts – they just do amazing things. MS: Yes, when you mentioned the buoyancy you felt about this sequence – if it was tied up with the fortunes of Essendon? AW: I was buoyant about it when Essendon was down last year and the year before and the year before – I suppose following the football team is a good thing, because you can always ride with it. I mean, you don’t have to go when they’re losing. We lost quite a few games, and I didn’t go – because we always lost by a point. On Saturday we won by a point, and that was indeed incredible; we were twenty-six points down and ten minutes to go. I suppose that by the time this magazine [Southerly] comes out the Grand Final will be won. MS: By Essendon? AW: I don’t know ... I occasionally just follow the scores in Rugby League in Sydney because I want to support a team and I’m not certain which one to support – I mean, I don’t know. I like some colours; I gathered Parramatta’s green and red, is it? – no, they’re not green and red; green and red’s Newtown or South Sydney [green and red are South’s colours; Parramatta’s are blue and gold]. I liked a lot of the jumpers – Sydney footballers are a bit ritzier-looking – more dazzle.

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MS: They all carry advertisements.... AW: Yeah; the Association does that in Melbourne, not the League. We have a wonderful time; we stand with this group of blokes, and they’ve been standing in the same spot, some of them, since about 1946 – in the same spot. I’ve got a few ideas for a novel I’d like to write, but one idea I wouldn’t mind exploring is about a bisexual footballer. There was going to be a policeman in The Nightmarkets, but I couldn’t fit him in. I’ve known a couple of policemen, one of whom was a scoutmaster who’s in the CMF , and he looked like Lee Marvin. And he is a real walloper, but in a way he was kind-hearted; he was always sortof willing to talk with you about politics, and he was really interested in things. But he was a real Lee Marvin type: Lee Marvin would play him well. And then there’s this other cop. He’s like he was out of Z Cars, sergeant, and he’s in the Labor Party. He’s run for Council as an Independent, with the local Labor Party even backing him. He’s on the local school committee; he was brought up in Collingwood. He says, “Too many civil liberties today, Alan, too many civil liberties. It’s dreadful, Alan, you know, because it’s ... years ago, you know....’ And he painted this amazing picture of what a perfect society would be, you know? He was brought up in Collingwood: “You had your fun there, but if you ever got out of line, the policeman’d clip you over the ear and send you off home to your parents.” He had this vision of benevolent despots, in charge of Collingwood. Have you got any Wallace Stevens? Do you know “The World as Meditation”? Do you like Stevens? Do you like Kenneth Koch’s sonnet sequence “The Railway Stationery”? Oh, it’s brilliant; it’s a brilliant work. MS: What about English poets? AW: Philip Larkin, very much. Oh, look, anyone who can write the line “And someone running up to bowl” [“The Whitsun Weddings”].... I hope people who listen to this or read this interview will understand that I just don’t want to seem some Jimmy Edwards of poetry, just rollicking on… MS: Oh no. AW: I’ve got a sensitive soul. I can be Jimmy Edwards, but I can also be Lesley Howard. Well, there’re the nineteenth-century poets, Browning in particular. But they’re written in Meredithian sonnets, those Ian things [The Nightmarkets]. And Tennyson, whom I think is wonderful. And I used to have this great thing about Swinburne. MS: What is it about Tennyson?

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AW: Oh, I think because he was a professional. I think that there are some things about him that are so professional. Even “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington” is a good poem; it’s a good professional poem. MS: I was thinking of Campbell and Hood.... AW: Oh, Hood: are you a Hood fan? I wish someone would write a good book about his life. I wish someone would do that. He’s written some really great poems. Or a choice of Hood’s verse. MS: A great comic poet, isn’t he? His unabashedly doing miraculously what McGonagall hoped he might have come at.... AW: Yes, yes; do you know that one, the poem that ends where the last three words rhyme – hark, bark, ark – you know, they go to the Drury Lane Theatre to see the Drury Lane Dane slain – it’s beautiful [“A Nocturnal Sketch”]. Do you know the “No” poem [1844]? No something, no something, November? MS: Yes; he and Campbell and others are writing public verse, all the time in popular journals and papers. AW: Yes, yes; Thomas Moore – I like him; I’ve read him. I’ve come across him only in the Faber Book of Nineteenth Century Poetry, edited by W.H. Auden. I can’t believe this: I’ve been dying for years to come across someone to talk about these Regency poets. And Winthrop Mackworth Praed: I had a collection of Praed. Isn’t Winthrop Praed magnificent? I’m writing an homage to Praed. One of the poems in The Nightmarkets is going to be from the “My own Araminta, say ‘No!’” poem [“A Letter of Advice: from Miss Medora Trevilian, at Padua, to Miss Araminta Vavasour, in London”] – a parody of that: McTaggart’s mother, who’s writing to her daughter overseas. I’ve started it; she’s coming to the end of her life. Her son – his wife’s dead, and he’s formed the New Progress Party and is running around with this left-winger, right? and then her daughter is going to marry her third husband, her hairdresser in Honolulu, and she’s got to fly out for it, and she’s all a bit embarrassed. That’s going to be written in a Winthrop Mackworth Praed style. Weldon Kees. Would you like me to read a Weldon Kees? This is “Relating to Robinson” [reads]. “On the 18th July 1955, his car was found abandoned on the approach to Golden Gate Bridge. He has never been seen since” [from the Introduction to the edition]: you see, he was talking about going abroad under a new name, just disappearing and going abroad, or committing suicide, and no one knows if he went to Mexico or into San Francisco Bay. He was a jazz musician; he was a painter. He once had an exhibition with Willem de Kooning. He’d learned to play jazz, he composed, and made films, and he did all these things. He worked for Time magazine. He was a real professional; he really wanted out.

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So he sounds like a very interesting person. A number of his poems are dedicated to people; but I don’t think there are any that are dedicated to poets; they’re dedicated to his friends, which is nice. MS: What about things like the Spoon River Anthology? AW: I’ve not gone into that as much as [into] Edwin Arlington Robinson, which I loved very much. I think that Robinson is like Weldon Kees... oh, he is so nasty – do you know “Eros Turannos”? Shelley: I’ve read very little Shelley. In fact Byron I’ve read more than any other of the Romantics. Coleridge I like. I haven’t read Chaucer as much as I should. I really think I’d like to. I think he’s got a lot to teach– narrative verse; I like the way he was able to pick upon something. He must have been so much beyond anything that’d come before in that language. Everyone must have thought he was just amazing. What he did was amazing, when you think of it: in English he seems to have found something in the way that Monteverdi, from what I can gather, just made opera. You know, he just came along and made it; he just said straight away, ‘This is what I have to do’. And it’s the same with Chaucer: ‘I’m going to create English poetry; here we go’ – and he just knows. I really wonder what he was like... was he slightly... retiring? MS: It’s hard to know; he was a public servant – that’s one of the nice things: the possibility of writing when you’re totally conscripted for life. AW: Yes, look at Wallace Stevens; he’s one of the great examples of the twentieth century. I always like telling people, I like throwing in, about Wallace Stevens, the one about his being in insurance, to people who don’t know. I used to read a fair bit of poetry in schools, and people say, ‘Be a full-time writer’. At that time I was trying to earn a living, and I said, “You know, probably one of the best poets in the twentieth century has been an insurance man.” That generally goes down well in public schools: “You know, he was the vice-president of an insurance company.” I tell that to the students. MS: Well, what are we going to make of Eliot, sitting in here at Faber… AW: Perhaps, but – yeah, I suppose, but Eliot... he was still involved – he had to read a lot. MS: Do you think anyone in Australia’s got that impact... say, Wallace Stevens, a Chaucer....? AW: In Australian poetry, no; I don’t think so. I think, for that one would need the equivalent of a Patrick White in Australian poetry – something of that stature; no, I don’t think so. But I don’t think there’s anyone around living today, except perhaps for Robert Graves. I’m afraid I do not understand the Black

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Mountain poetry. I want this on the record: I do not understand William Carlos Williams and Denise Levertov and Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley and all those people.... I do not; they really have me stumped. MS: Incredibly boring? AW: I mean ... Edward Thomas had more balls than them; I think that. MS: When I was out of the country, and I saw the way that Duncan was being promoted and the way that Creeley was being pushed as the way to write.... AW: But why couldn’t they bring out Kenneth Koch? Or what about John Ashbery? But that’d be too formidable. We need Kenneth Koch out here – or Ted Berrigan; I saw Ted Berrigan read in London; John Scott’s got a tape of Berrigan at this London reading. Ted Berrigan’s wonderful; Ted Berrigan reading is beautiful. He reads some beautiful things: the one about how he gets up in the morning and he goes to work at this university and has a coffee; get John Scott to play it for you. He doesn’t do any of The Sonnets, which is a shame, but he does a lot of that stuff. Because when I discovered Tambourine Life, I went berserk – John had discovered The Sonnets, and that was his discovery, but mine was “Tambourine Life”: “FUCK COMMUNISM ”43 – ah, yes, I’m always quoting those lines, and Speaking of Picasso, he once sd that for him true friendship cannot exist without the possibility of sex That is true I have many men friends I would like to fuck However, I am unable to do so because I am not a homosexual fortunately this makes my life complex rather than simple and vice versa.44

MS: What do you like about Scott’s poetry?

43

“Tambourine Life 1” (1965–66), in The Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan, ed. Alice Notley, with Anselm Berrigan & Edmund Berrigan (Berkeley & Los Angeles: U of California P, 2011): 48. 44 “Tambourine Life 61,” in The Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan, 74.

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AW: He and I have been linked together for so long. We grew up together at Monash and did wondrous things. There are some poems of his that I really love: the two John Clare poems are works of genius. He wrote them in about ten minutes one night in the Monash café before a poetry reading – oh, it was about half an hour – he just wrote them down. A lot of his humour’s good. Humour comes into it or it’s totally devoid of humour; he writes fitfully and there’ve been big gaps. There was up to about ’72, from university onwards, then there was a break, and generally a break’s been about two or three years. Him, me, Laurie Duggan, a bloke called John Westcott, a bloke called John Batrouney knew each other and wrote poetry; also acquired John Gough, Colin McDowell, Peter Craven. John Scott was in second year and I was in first. They had monthly readings at the bookshop, poetry readings at the bookshop: Thursday night, first Thursday of the month, and this went on for about two years. I came when they’d just started, and met John Scott. MS: When was this? AW: Sixty-seven. I’d just written “St Bartholomew Remembers Jesus Christ as an Athlete” when I met John, and that was a real breakthrough: I’d never written anything as good as that, but I’d been writing a lot of Augustan satires and things like that, some of which I still recite; one called “On Seeing the Film Tom Jones.” Another one’s called “Warrandyte Scene,” and another one’s called “Death of a Go-Go Girl.” I still write those kinds of poems. There’s a bloke at work called David Bazely who held this birthday party, and I wrote this poem that said How shall we celebrate, with sanity or crazily The birthday night of Mr David Bazely? We save each dollar, pound, mark, franc and guilder, And hold a party somewhere in St Kilda. See Rudi wolfing down his monstrous feast of primal lust with Claire la bicycliste; what now is passé once we thought was dirty; it’s a sure sign that one is turning thirty. Where’d that bong go? Quick, somebody grab it: Uh-oh, here’s Langsford, Annie and a rabbit. How well that bourgeois adage still applies: In life and love it pays to advertise. Drink wine or beer from paper cups or glasses, Watch Darryl making joints or Alvin passes; See newfound lovers leave the place in pairs To start what could be Veteran Affairs....

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MS: What about women poets in the scene, then or since? AW: Oh, Gig Ryan; some of Gig’s poetry I like very much. I’ve said in another interview [Scripsi 1, 1981] that she’s the first poet who seems to be influenced by me. I can sort-of see the tone – the tone of Melbourne grimness: you know, she may be in Sydney, folks, but she’ll always be a Melbourne person. Gig Ryan couldn’t come from Sydney; but who could she keep company with in Melbourne? Me? Gig’s a fine poet. I’ve been reading Stevie Smith. Did you see the movie Stevie? Glenda Jackson as Stevie Smith and Mona Washbourne as the great-aunt; it was on the radio, too, it’s a beautiful; thing. Stevie Smith’s great; I think it’s her uncompromising nature. My girlfriend Diane’s rather Stevie Smithlike; she’s very Stevie Smith-like: it’s explained a lot about her. MS: What do you think of Heaney or Ted Hughes? AW: Never read enough of Heaney. Ted Hughes – I’ve read a bit, but I think I’ve missed out on something. Heaney, I think there’s something, but it doesn’t seem to be anything better than Douglas Dunn or someone like that. I mean, there’s no one in Britain of our generation I find exciting. I’ve been scouring.... MS: What about the beat poets, Henri, McGough.... AW: Or Patten? Liverpool blokes, yeah, they did write some things I like. I once met Brian Patten, actually, who bought me an ale in a pub, reading poetry, but – put it this way – I think the tone of the age requires that it should be spoken by a Dustin Hoffman but instead they have given us Mel Blanc. Mel Blanc’s voices are wonderful, he’s a genius, but they’ve given us Mel Blanc when we wanted a Dustin Hoffman. MS: Films: do any films occur in your writing? AW: Probably my favourite director is Frank Capra. I love It’s a Wonderful Life; isn’t that the most magnificent movie? It’s better than Norman Rockwell paintings. I’ve never seen any of the German movies, except The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, which I enjoyed. I’m not a great film- or cinema-goer. MS: Television? AW: No, I don’t like television, unless there’s a good film on, but it doesn’t worry me because I’m never around a set. Still, I definitely watch the Grand Final if I’m not going to it. MS: Are you involved in radio? AW: I’ve been interviewed and read a few things. I had a couple of ABC scripts – The Poet in Australia – and two programmes I wrote on Robert Browning. The trouble is, with writing dramatic poems, that Browning is there. You can’t escape it, and of course, all these poets, Australian, English, there seem to be

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countless numbers of them who write dramatic monologues about Italian popes. All Borgia popes. Have you ever heard poetry read by Jas H. Duke? MS: Yes, his “Shit Poem” that was published in a local paper.... AW: Jas H. Duke: he knows more about poetry than anyone in Melbourne. He works at the Board of Works. We’d be talking about Richard Crashaw, and then we’d be talking about Betty Boop, and he knows I’ll listen – or Francis Quarles; he’s a Francis Quarles man. Oh yes, I’ve got to tell you this; this is marvellous, this is one of the best poetry stories ever told, and it’s  ’s.   happens to have a copy of the collected poems of Sir John Suckling on his shelf.  , given to reading poems in schools on occasions, read some poems; not only did he read some of his own poems, he read some Vachel Lindsay at Xavier, going “Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM ,” from “The Congo”: beautiful stuff. I think he does “General Booth Enters Into Heaven” – and all the kids thought it was great. And they took him down to the library, and they said, “Well look, Pi, we can’t give you any money, but we’ll give you a book token, and here, we have a copy of Vachel Lindsay reading ‘The Congo’ on record, and we think you’re better.” So off goes Pi with the book token. Now Pi goes to Margareta Webber’s bookshop, high-class, you know, classy, and his mind’s blown! “Oh no!” he says; he’s surrounded by all these great books with hard covers. Pi’s a sort-of secret admirer of middle-class things and the upper class, and so, while he was going along there, along the shelves, he saw the poetry of Sir John Suckling. So he picked it up, and he read it, and he liked it. So that’s how he got it; now comes the thing: he likes it, “This man’s wonderful,” he says, “he writes all this raunchy poetry; listen to this.” He went along to read some poems on 3 RRR and he read a poem of his own which had some dirty word in it, “cock,” or something, and they said, “Freak! Pi, don’t do it again; what are you going to read next, Pi?” “Oh, poems by Sir John Suckling, you know....” So he reads a thing called “A Candle,” which is the most elaborate sort-of phallic thing about virtuous young maidens who take the candle to bed, and they like to lie with the candle and have to blow it out and it becomes limp and damp. He reads this out on Three Triple R and the whole place is in an uproar. Have you ever seen the movie Pure Shit? MS: Pure S, yes. AW: That’s like a Gig Ryan poem at times. You see, I don’t want to talk about how I see the position of women poets or feminist poets, or women writers. I mean, has there been a strong woman poet who’s really just been an incredible influence, in the way that Jane Austen or George Eliot or Edith Wharton are big influences? And, you know, in the same sort of way that Auden or Wallace Stevens are sort-of there?

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MS: What about Plath? AW: I’m not a great Plath fan, but I would agree that she probably dominates the school of feminist poetry in much the same way as say Dylan Thomas and George Barker dominated the Apocalyptics. Anne Sexton, who has written some poems I do like – a beautiful rhyming poem of hers about a photograph or something – it’s about her father – that’s a beautiful poem [“All My Pretty Ones”]. I’m not a great fan of confessional poetry, except for one, “Heart’s Needle”: you know, Snodgrass’s “Heart’s Needle.” That’s a marvellous thing. Margaret Atwood I’ve tried to read, and I sort-of think there’s something in there, but I’m not certain. MS: There’s a sort-of thinness? AW: She’s got a lot of features in women that I really love.... Have you seen photographs of her? A long jowly face; women like Carol Novak: those jowls; I love women with jowls. Have you ever seen the film Shakespeare-Wallah? Did you ever see the television series The Good Life? Remember the wife in that: she’s got beautiful jowls; well, she’s in a movie about 1964, called ShakespeareWallah; she’s about eighteen or nineteen or twenty at that stage, and she’s got even more jowly than that. Anyway, she’s like Margaret Atwood. Hi Marg. I’m very fascinated by Dorothy Parker, and I’d like to read her poetry, but I’ve only glanced at that. And another thing, it’s really just a small thing, but it seems in books they are never promoted – the great song lyricist of the 1920s and 1930s, Dorothy Fields, who wrote the words to things like Jerome Kern and Sigmund Romberg, people like that; she wrote words to “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”: wonderful song. I don’t know anything about her, but she prefigures, by forty years or so, Joni Mitchell and Joan Armatrading. She doesn’t play, only makes the words; but she prefigures them. MS: What do you think about song writing in general? AW: Do you know Brahms once said he would have given anything – any one of his symphonies – to have written the “Blue Danube” waltz? What about Adam and the Ants? Are we supposed to like them or not? Are they supposed to be goodies or baddies? MS: It’s very difficult, isn’t it? AW: Yes. MS: Indulgence? AW: Yes, there’s plenty of that going on in there.... MS: Your vision of a smash hit?

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AW: I wouldn’t mind writing a smash hit with Jo Jo Zep. I like Jo Jo Zep. I think he’s very good. I think he’s smooth and professional; he’s not crass. I’m not a great follower of Australian pop music, I must confess. I dropped out at the time of Daddy Cool, so I’m – I’m really a product of the late 1960s – you know, the Vibrants, the Twilights, the Groove, the Groop. I had a chequered uni career. First it was Monash, at which I did Law. I failed it because I was too young. I just didn’t understand. I should have left and gone to work for four or five years, and then gone to university. But if I had, I would have probably been very public service in the Attorney General’s Department as a lawyer, some thing like that. Initially I wanted to be a barrister. I’d read a number of biographies of barristers. One of them was an Englishman called Norman Birkett. My father knew the late Sir Eugene Gorman, who was famous in Melbourne – QC and retired in his forties, in the early 1940s. He’d defended Squizzy Taylor, among others. His main interest was racing, and he became a member of the Victorian Racing Club. He died about 1973. He was an amazing guy. I never met him; he gave me this book, called Six Great Advocates, which are Lord Birkett’s television speeches about famous people like Sir Edward Marshall–Hall. Do you like Janaœek? MS: Yes. AW: Ah. The Glagolitic Mass.... And Shostakovich? MS: Yes. AW: Like Shostakovich! His Eighth Symphony is just so fucking good. I’ve introduced a few people to Neilsen; I’ve got the boxed set – Herbert Blomstedt and the Royal Danish Orchestra; the Helios overture – that’s beaut; and the overture to Maskarade: I’ve never heard Maskarade, or Saul and David – have you? I’ve introduced Neilsen recently to Geoff Strong, who’s a mad Vaughan Williams buff; he’s a reporter for the Age. Wackier symphonies like the Fourth, which is like Walton’s First. Do you know what Vaughan Williams said about his Pastoral Symphony? He said it’s a symphony in four movements, all of them slow. Someone said it’s about as pastoral as a cow looking over a fence. I’ll tell you what I do like – it’s Eric Coates; actually, it’s my sort of Sunday morning music. I do listen to Ralph Collins and I do listen to “Your Concert Choice’. Have you ever heard of 3CR ? 3CR is amazing. In some ways it’s sort-of like 925. In the summer I listen to their jazz programme on Saturday afternoon, which isn’t as good as Eric Child. Do you like jazz? MS: I do... including Scandinavian jazz – [Palle] Danielsson, [Jan] Garbarek. AW: I must say something: Scandinavian jazz must be a rather specialized taste. MS: Probably, although there’s a lot of interplay.... Albert Ayler?

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AW: I’m not really au fait with present-day jazz. My jazz is more a big-band sort of thing. When I go back to Melbourne, this friend’s friend – he’s a student – well, he’s in a big band, he plays the sax, a Glenn Miller-style band. Isn’t that amazing? It’s just struck me: what a wonderful parallel, but they died within a couple of years of each other – and that was Bix Beiderbecke and Hart Crane. Yes, they’re both from the Midwest. I once started reading the biography of Bix; have you ever seen the Eddie Condon Scrapbook? Ah, it’s a marvellous book. It’s got photographs of Eddie Condon, who seems to be a good publicist; he was a good businessman. He made a lot of money out of jazz, worked hard, lived hard; made a lot of money in his club and just promoted people. Eddie Condon was always promoting somebody, helping somebody: he was a real hustler, sounded like a really positive bloke. Played with the blacks when a lot of the white blokes didn’t. He was a good democratic man, a good American, like something out of a Frank Capra movie. Have you seen Frank Capra’s Platinum Blonde? Platinum Blonde – it’s remarkable. It stars Jean Harlow, a bloke called Robert Walker, who died a few months after, who’s very good: he’s a wise-talking newspaper reporter; and then there’s a female reporter, who’s played by – not Jean Arthur – Loretta Young. I fell in love with Loretta Young; I think Loretta Young’s wonderful. In this movie she’s just so beautiful. She’s only about eighteen or nineteen, but I really fell in love with her: she is very spunky. Have you seen Mr Deeds Goes to Town? You’ve seen It’s a Wonderful Life? You’ve seen It Happened One Night? – Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert: that’s a magnificent film. I took Diane to see it earlier in the year, and it really is. I knew she’d love it, and she just fell in love with it; it’s a great film. It’s a Wonderful Life is very schmaltzy Frank Capra. Mr Deeds Goes to Town is very good. Have you seen Forty-Second Street? Have you ever seen Gold Diggers of 1933? Oh, you’ve got to see Forty-Second Street. Forty-Second Street is just probably my favourite movie. I could see it tomorrow. It just grows on me. It’s got lots of oomph, see. I often think to myself that the ideal life for me would be like a 1930s musical. I say this to my friend Ethel, and she says, “Alan, oh yes, it is.” Ethel’s a very important person in my life; we’re similar sorts, kindred spirits, but we’d never really met until 1977, which was one of the best years of my life, almost equal with 1979 – the best year of my life without a doubt. One of the things that just hits me about women, that just knocks me out, is their stoicism. I think women are far more stoical than me. Margot Scott has always said that women can’t tell dirty jokes. There are differences between men and women; one is that men tell dirty jokes much better than women, and she wishes she could tell dirty jokes. There again, of course, women talk about

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sex much more than men. I’m convinced of that. I’m convinced they’re far closer to where sex is at, because it’s always evident; you know, they’re always being reminded of it, in the menstrual cycle, and that men aren’t. Women understand sex much more than men. I am in the process of trying to write a poem, “Self-portrait as the best man at a shotgun wedding reception,” which I really should finish because it would be a good poem. It’s a bit clearer than “Eating Out.” It’s based on fact, whereas “Eating Out” is based on fact but it’s a fictional fact. This is a real fact about me: I was best man at a friend’s wedding in Ballarat, in 1971, ten years ago, the week after Hawthorn won the Grand Final. He was about twenty-one, his wife was nineteen, and they had a shotgun wedding. It’s a description of a shotgun wedding, and the way I was, because I had a lot of trouble letting people see me the way I want to be seen. I had a lot of trouble in those days. [The poem] “Eating Out”: well, this friend of mine, whom I met at Monash in 1968, he hung out there, and he was in the Labor Club in first year – and then he got cynical with leftist politics. He wasn’t a normal Labor Club guy; he was working-class, and this poem’s two-thirds him and one-third me. A lot of it’s based on this bloke – who’s going out with a woman about 1968–69 for a few weeks, and she’s going up to Sydney to join NIDA . She comes from a fairly affluent background, around Caulfield way. And this bloke – he recalls an evening a couple of years before, when he was going out with another girl. Well, nothing really happened: this is an intensely cynical poem. There’s a reference to “Les Chinois stoic in bakeries” – and that refers to les Chinois, the Maoists. A lot of them lived in a bakery in Greville Street, Prahran; it’s just been pulled down. They all had pictures of Ho Chi Minh on the walls. I don’t think I’ve ever written anything so tight as this [Reads the poem “Eating Out”45]. That poem probably means more to me than anything I’ve ever written. It’s so nasty... no, not exactly nasty; it’s stoical, you know. And these people are going through Hell!

——————— Pulling in a Trojan Horse46 ———————

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A U S T R A L I A N P O E T Roland Robinson [1912–92] was a writerin-residence at Wright College at the University of New England for six weeks in 1982. He discussed his life and writing with students at the College and further on the university campus, and gave several readings at the university and at the Wicklow Hotel, a regular poetry venue in Armidale. The following interview is an excerpt from a radio HE DISTINGU ISH ED

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“Eating Out,” in New Devil, New Parish (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1976): 15. The Fourth Kangaroo, ed. Michael Sharkey (Armidale, N S W : Students Representative Council, University of New England, November 1982): 8–9, 11. 46 

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broadcast on 2A RM–F M in August 1982. Roland talked about the early days of the Poetry Society and its public face, the Poetry Magazine, up to the time when Grace Perry left the committee to found the journal Poetry Australia. Roland also recounted the subsequent history of the Poetry Society and the Poetry Magazine up to the time of the takeover of both the society and its magazine. The programme was hosted by Tony Bennett and Michael Sharkey. MS: Would you tell us something about the Poetry Society and Doctor Grace Perry? RR: Yes, well, I’m not sure of the date, but I did one day receive – I was told someone was trying to get in touch with me from the clubhouse [Roland was employed as a groundsman at the Woollahra Golf Club in Sydney] – a telephone call, and I went up there, and it was Doctor Perry. Now, I’d never heard of Doctor Perry, and I thought it was something in connection with a medical matter, but I didn’t know [Grace Perry was a practising physician and editor of Poetry Magazine, 1961–64, and founder of Poetry Australia from 1964 until her death in 1987]. She asked if I’d come out to her surgery at Five Dock. So I went out that afternoon, and I met Doctor Perry, and I was immediately impressed by her. It seemed that she knew what I was thinking, knew what I was going to say next, and after a while, she said, “Well, look, I’ve got a patient just now, but if you’d like to go into the rear of the house, you’ll find my husband there, and you can have a talk with him,” and I walked in and met Doctor Kronenberg, and I said, “Your wife’s a remarkable woman.” I was like this, you see; this is how I was: no subterfuge. I said, “Your wife’s a remarkable person; she seems to know my mind.” And I got on very well with Doctor Kronenberg and Doctor Perry. But what happened was that I had given a talk, one of my impetuous talks, you know, a recital, out at Newport, at some function out there, and one of Grace Perry’s talent scouts, Ella Turnbull, was there. And they were looking – I didn’t know this – looking out for someone to be president of the Poetry Society. And I think they had asked John Thompson and he had declined, and Ella had said, “Listen, I’ve got the very fellow,” and this is what it was all abut. And then I had to have a suit and, oh, all the things that I rebelled against, but anyhow, I was duly proposed and accepted, as president of the fellowship, you see. And Grace said, “You’ll have to act with some decorum,” and I immediately put my feet on the table, you see. And this is the way I was; I wouldn’t – I bridled at all kinds of things, and if only I’d had the common sense – which I never had – to go along with Doctor Perry, I could have been anything. But no, I would oppose her. One time she had an American speaker there, and I challenged him, you see, and Grace got very upset.

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But she was very kind to me, and had me out to their beach house at Bilgola, and sent me to judge the poetry competition with A.D. Hope, with a great suitcase full of entries, you see, and I said to Hope, “How are we going to get through this?” I said, “You can only give me a couple of hours today and a couple of hours tomorrow.” “Oh, that’s simple,” he said, “just divide it in half.” He said, “Now you go through that pile, and I’ll go through this pile; chuck out anything that’s hopeless, and if there’s anything with any possibility, put it in that pile there.” “Righto.” He said, “Jim McAuley and I did the same thing, and we got through it easily.” So: together, we went through the pile of things which had any possibility, and it was a very funny thing. There were three poems that we picked out. When I brought them back – I didn’t know who they were, who their authors were – and Grace picked them up, she laughed like anything. “Ha, ha, ha, ha,” she said, “Do you know what you’ve done?” I said no, and she said “You’ve given the first prize to an American.” I said, “Oh Christ, no.” And then the second prize went to Nancy Cato, whom I knew very well, and the third prize went to an old flame of mine. Now, how do you like that? But then, of course, I got angry, and I said to Grace, “You see this cheque?” – I gave it to A.D. Hope – and said “and this one that you gave to me?” I said “You can take it and go and buy some stocks and shares with it.” Impossible, I was: no generosity or no gratitude for what she’d done for me. I would just bridle up and assert myself and just throw things to the wind. I would, you know, and roll my swag and set off for the Territory. Nothing could stop me in those days. MS: How long were you associated with the magazine, with the Poetry Society? RR: With the Poetry Society? I was associated with that for years, until I got so disgusted that I resigned. And then Grace installed a committee which she chose herself. This committee in turn demanded Grace’s resignation. And when she had resigned, I said to her, “Why don’t you start a magazine of your own?” – which she did. MS: When did that occur? RR: Well, I’m not good at dates, especially that period, but – oh, I can remember when we first started with the magazine. It was a little magazine, with a shocking cover, badly printed, roneoed or something, and I said, “Look” – we met out at Bilgola – I said, “You’ve got to get rid of that cover.” And she said, “What for?” I said, Look, I’ve got some friends, Edwards and Shaw; they are the best book designers and publishers in the country, easily the best.” I said, “I’ll get them to design a cover for you.” And I went down to see Rod, and he agreed, and he looked through his book of lettering, and immediately wrote “Poetry,” a big “Poetry,” and then underneath, “Magazine,” and this was our first cover. And,

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from that, I then told Grace about various things that we should do, how to set the magazine out. And I said, “And another thing. There is no reason why this magazine should not be subsidized by the Commonwealth Literary Fund. All we’ve got to do is submit it.” Which we did, and we got a subsidy. MS: Who was the fellow who did the lettering for you? RR: Rod Shaw, an artist. He’s got paintings in the New South Wales Gallery. Oh yes, and we used to get it printed and designed by Edwards and Shaw. MS: Later on, you did some poetry books by yourself; did you set up that LyreBird poets series? RR: Yes. In those times, you could not get a book of poems published. No one would take on a book of poetry. So I said, “Righto, we’ll set up a press of our own.” And I wrote to Nancy Cato, and I wrote to Kevin Collopy, and we each put in ten pounds, and with this money we financed the first Lyre-Bird book, which was designed by Edwards and Shaw. A lovely book, called Language of the Sand [Poems by Roland E. Robinson, 1949]. It had a lovely green cover, and an Aboriginal drawing of a bat on it, and nicely printed. I think it sold for three-andsixpence, and everyone could afford that. And then, when we sold that book out, we published Nancy Cato’s book [The Darkened Window, 1950]. Kevin Collopy’s verse we thought wasn’t up to standard, so we didn’t print that. Then we published – oh, we published John Blight, David Rowbotham. I forget who – Nancy Keesing [Imminent Summer, 1951] – she came in as secretary, a very good secretary. MS: You published some young poets, too – Robert Gray and others – later? RR: Then, when the Balmain mob came into the magazine, I opened the LyreBird Writers again. And I sent up their manuscripts [to the Literature Board of the Australia Council]. Some were accepted and some rejected. But those that were accepted were Robert Gray [Introspect, Retrospect, 1970], Wilhelm Hiener [William Street, 1970]– Oh dear, I’ve almost forgotten – Vivian Smith [The Other Meaning, 1956] – I think he was among the first Lyre-Bird writers. MS: There was a gap of some years? RR: There was a gap of some years. All the poets wanted to get their poetry published in book form, sent out to the various papers for review, and then, of course, they weren’t interested. It was a cooperative, you see, and the big thing was that we had to deal with distribution. MS: That’s always the problem, isn’t it? RR: Well, distribution – they didn’t like to go round knocking at the door, or singing “Poems a penny each” or something like that.

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MS: Can you tell us anything about the way the Poetry Society was organized? RR: Oh yes. The Poetry Society was very well organized. It had a constitution, and it was well organized before ever Grace took it over, but it needed something to galvanize it, and of course we gave workshops every week, and I would give recitals and, you know, get people interested. The thing about the Poetry Society, it depended on its membership, It had a big membership – say, over a thousand – who were all entitled to a free copy of the magazine, and it was in the constitution that the Society publish the magazine, you see. This constitution was later invaluable – so that we could say, ‘Well, we are going to publish a thousand copies, and we’ve already sold them because of our membership’. And the membership had to be renewed every year. So this is a very good way to run a magazine here. I mean, if you’re going to run a magazine, or even if you’re going to start a press, I suggest you get a professional printer, and get it properly designed, with a proper cover. And do it through subscriptions; get your subscribers. A friend of mine, I told him about publishing books, and he said, “I see, I go around and get subscribers.” I said, yes, so when I saw him next, he said, “I only went around to three, and I’m already over-subscribed.” And he said, “A doctor friend of mine gave me two hundred. How am I going to pay it back?” I said, “You blithering idiot, he doesn’t want his two hundred dollars back; he wants an autographed copy of that book when it comes out, with ‘This copy is number so-and-so’, or something like that,” you see, and this chap, Bert Shackleton, well, it’s now interfering with his pension, so he can’t go into any more editions. MS: Can you tell us where the Poetry Society originally came from, before Grace took it over? RR: Yes, I can, because I went to the original meeting where James McAuley was at it, and Imogen Wyse – a legendary name – in a cloak, was there. I was asked to attend, and they founded the Poetry Society, which was the Australian counterpart of the English Society. This was the actual founding of the Poetry Society of Australia. They drew up a constitution, and then, later on, past many vicissitudes, Grace called on me to help out, and I did. And then, when Grace was dismissed by the committee, Ella rang me up, and – I know, Grace had sent around a circular. And when I saw it, I saw red. It said that Poetry Australia is the successor to the Poetry Magazine. Wheew! But she needn’t have said this. I rang Ella, who was the secretary, and said, “I’ve just received this circular, Ella,” and I said “I offer you my services,” and Ella started to cry. I said, “Look, stop crying,” and she said, “Oh, we should have taken notice of you.” “Oh well,” I said, “that’s all in the past,” and I launched myself into the fray again. And then Doctor J.M.

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Couper came in. He was a really good man, of course. And then Joan [Mas] and I were around for years, edited it, and did lots of things, got out leading articles and so on. MS: How did you get out of it? RR: Well, when I got out of it, of course, was when I was so foolish as to pull the Trojan Horse into the city. There were a lot of young poets at the time, all avid to be published, but I didn’t know just how ruthless they were. But I was to learn. And I battled very hard to get a certain gentleman on the editorial board, and our editorial board said, “No, we can’t have him as a full-time editor, he can be a part-....” I said, “I want full-time.” Just because I believed in people, you know? So I got him on as a full-time editor, after a lot of battling. And then, when they began to feel their strength, they came to me and said, “We demand....” I said. “Oh, you do, do you?” And I used to go to committee meetings with the dog-chain wrapped around my hand, you know; this is how bad it was. And there wasn’t any trick that they could pull that they didn’t pull. Tony Bennett: It’s a shame that these things have to happen. They happen time and time again. RR: And I wanted to get out of it; I wanted to hand things over to them, providing I knew that financially it was sound. By this time we were getting big subsidies from the Fund, you know, running into thousands. They’d open my mail, mail addressed to the President, and they’d say, in confidential talk – we’d be talking confidentially to someone, to a certain joker, and a girl would come up and say, “Roland, sign this, would you?” And I’d say, “Righto” and sign it. Next meeting I went to, they’d be handing one another the cheques for their contributions. And I said, “Hang on; you haven’t passed those cheques, it’s all a....” “Oh, constitutional meetings XY Z and....” They were foul with obscenities, and they’d put these tricks over. And I’d say, “Look, I’ve got to go to Canberra and there’s a committee meeting, could you...?” “Oh, of course, we’ll put it off for a week.” And the moment I’d leave for Canberra, they’d hold the committee meeting and get everything in the minutes, you see. And I’d always have to sign right up under the minutes, so they couldn’t add anything. And I found out that the person who was the secretary – they didn’t write the minutes at all – it was done by a gentleman from the University, as crook as they come. Both he and another man interfered, the two greatest liars you’d find this side of the black stump. There wasn’t a trick they wouldn’t pull. And, of course, the other gentleman, who I was stupid enough to tell “Look, I regard you as my son” – what a stabber in the back he was, anyhow. But I think we waste time talking about these things. It’s not constructive, it’s not creative.

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MS: A lot of it has passed into history, though – of the cultural movements – so it’s interesting to get the picture, because we haven’t heard so much. One of the interesting things that’s happened about so much of the poetry situation from Sydney, looking at it from up this end [New England] where we’re not at all involved, is that we get a lot of different views which come out of different camps. RR: Well, you see, we had really worked to build that magazine up from nothing for something like ten years, and then at last, when we’re really getting the big subsidies from the Fund, they, the wolves, moved in on it. And there wasn’t anything – they sent, for example, a telegram saying, “The only thing we’ll accept is your resignation.” Then they called a meeting, and the basis of the charge was that I’d been using an American book of committee procedure. I had not; I had been using an English one, you see? I was able to show that their meeting was unconstitutionally called, so they had to call it off. So, then I called a meeting and, when we held the meeting, we had to stand at the door and turn half the meeting away because they’d rung them all in: they weren’t even financial members or anything like that, you see. Then, they’d appointed their own chairman – I think it was Don Anderson, who wouldn’t cast his vote – and the thing was a fifty–fifty deadlock. So I went to see Doug Stewart, and he said, “Roland, you’re just wasting your time, you’re fighting this, and you’re not being creative, you know. Resign from it.” Which I did. But one wise thing that Grace did: she never let go the reins of Poetry Australia.

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R A E D E S M O N D J O N E S , a second window on the takeover of the Poetry Society of Australia, and the consolidation of the ‘New Poets’ as the poetry ‘establishment’, was recorded in 1982, when Jones, along with Chris Mansell, Nigel Roberts, and Richard Tipping were touring Bellingen, Lismore, and Armidale in northern New South Wales. Jones’s reminiscences regarding the takeover of the Poetry Society in 1970 by a group of young writers and poets provide an interesting view in the light of Roland Robinson’s comments, during a radio broadcast on the 2 A R M In Focus programme in August. Rae Jones discussed his early acquaintance with Robert Adamson and introduction to the Poetry Society. Jones was a founding editor of the modern poetry small magazine Your Friendly Fascist (1970) and is the author of several collections of poetry. His first, Orpheus With a Tuba (1973), was a Makar Press chapbook (Brisbane), appearing in a series that was among the earliest to highlight the ‘New Poetry’ in Australia. That collection was folHIS I NT ERV IE W WITH

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The Fourth Kangaroo, ed. Michael Sharkey (Armidale, N S W : Students Representative Council, University of New England, 1982): 14, 18.

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lowed by The Mad Vibe from the Saturday Centre in Sydney (1975), Shakti (Makar Press, 1977), The Palace of Art (Makar, 1981), and Blow Out (Island Press, Sydney, 2008). Fat Possum Press (Armidale, NS W ) published Talking Blues, a broadsheet of Jones’s poems in their Well-Tempered Wombat series in 1981. He was involved with local politics and the preservation of Summer Hill, a heritage suburb of Sydney, through the 1990s. In 2004 he was elected to the position of Mayor of the Municipality of Ashfield.

RDJ: In 1968–69, I knew Adamson. He was living not far away from where I was living in Birchgrove, in Balmain proper. I can visualize the place quite well. It had, immediately opposite – it was a timber terrace sort of place – this old factory wall on which had been painted RELEASE EZRA / RIMBAUD . It had been painted on some drunken night. Anyways, Adamson, I think, was introduced to me by a guy called David Ashton (who’s an old friend of mine – he was actually a real-estate agent in Balmain by the time I knew him; I got to be acquainted with him somehow). I became quite friendly with him. I went round to the Forth and Clyde on one or two occasions to play snooker or have the odd beer. I wasn’t his best pal by any means, nothing like that. I was merely an acquaintance, sort-of hanging in there, and I had certain ambitions to be a poet, but I realized that the things I was writing at the time were nowhere near in the same class as what Adamson was doing, knowing him at the time he actually wrote his “Canticles on the Skin,” things like that. Anyway, I remember him sort-of pulling them out when they were new, and sitting up all night and boozing on and showing them to me. On one occasion, for whatever reason, I remember hearing about this ruckus that was going on; there was some kind of conflict between him and the guy who was running the thing, and it wasn’t being made terribly specific. But for some reason or other, Adamson wanted me to go along to the Poetry Society with him. MS: Were you a member of it? RDJ: I became a member of it just after this meeting. Anyway, I went along, and Adamson was probably the only person in the Poetry Society that I knew. At that particular meeting, I met Greg Curthois, Carl Harrison–Ford, and Roland Robinson, and Joan Mas and a few other people. The meeting was held in a place opposite the present WEA building down in Bathurst Street, in a large room which had a big table in it. And for some reason or another Roland Robinson at that time disliked me intensely on sight: he couldn’t stand me, and I don’t really know why. I don’t know whether it was because I’d walked in with Adamson (with whom he must have sensed he had some kind of conflict coming up – but it hadn’t come out into the open), and therefore somehow along the line he

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was taking out his aggression towards Adamson on this person who had just walked in with him – ot whether the chemistry was such that he just hated me. But he certainly did. The ruckus between him and Curthois and Harrison–Ford and Adamson was on the level of actually whether they approved or disapproved of concrete poetry. MS: Who proposed the concrete poetry? RDJ: Once again, I’m only going on hearsay, but I gather that Adamson, just after he came out of jail (he’d been writing some poems in jail) had in fact sucked up to Roland Robinson and cultivated him. And Robinson was fairly vulnerable to this sort of approach – when his ego was being built up in such a fashion, as you can see from the New Writers edition of the Poetry Magazine in 1969, I think. With all these new writers, there’s a short editorial by Adamson singing the praises of Roland Robinson, and the whole thing is prefaced by a poem of Robinson’s, and so on. And the only poem that I’ve ever had in the Poetry Magazine is, in fact, in that issue. It was the very last little poem in it. It was one of the first poems I ever wrote. Anyway, I gather that at some editorial meeting or another – by that time Harrison–Ford and Curthois in particular had got themselves onto the Board as sort-of co-editors, along with Adamson, and this was being done by Robinson against the advice of some of his older sort of members – and finally they were having an editorial meeting and they were discussing the poems, and Alan Riddell’s “Revolver” was presented, and Roland disliked it intensely and said “This won’t be published” and threw it to one side. And one of the other three said, “Oh yes it will be,” and that was the beginning of the ruckus; and it had been building up quite a bit by the time I got along to this meeting. There was a kind of debate which occurred about concrete poetry – and I’ve always liked concrete poetry, although I’m not actually a writer of it. I can remember Roland looking at me in a defiant and aggressive sort of way and saying, “I refuse to believe that if you write the words in a circle, then this would actually constitute a poem.” And probably because he looked at me so defiantly when he said it, I said, “No, I’d agree with you, but if you put a dot in the centre of it, yes, it would be....” And he got very cross about this, and went very red. When Roland got angry, he tended to stutter and get very red and cease to be articulate. And it was at that meeting that I met Curthois and Harrison–Ford and a few other people, and they made a few friendly moves towards me, and I became a member of the Society, very definitely on their side. Sometime after that meeting, in the next issue of the Poetry Magazine, a meeting was called with the pur-

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pose of debating a motion which was being put by some people on Roland’s side, and was definitely forwarded with the intention of putting Adamson, Curthois, Harrison–Ford and all the rebels, as it were, in their place, Now, in my opinion, anyway, this sort of thing was bound to happen – fundamentally, not very much had changed since 1944 and the Angry Penguins; a few people had nudged their way into the existing system, and most of the people who were there were simply in terms of that age. MS: Who was on Roland’s side? RDJ: I can remember Joan Mas, and a number of faces, and a lot of names being screamed, but I can’t remember who was who. I can’t remember who was actually at that meeting. I knew they elected Don Anderson to be the Chair. I can remember Joan Mas, for example, standing up at the meeting, saying that she had letters of support being received from A.D. Hope and a number of very famous writers. A number of the Young Turks screamed ‘Bullshit, so fucking what?’ – and of course, evidently Joan Mas intended this to put everyone completely in their place and sort-of kowtow before the name of A.D. Hope, which of course didn’t happen. There was a great deal of debate about the meaning of the motion, whatever it was, and it turned out that in many ways what the older brigade intended to do with the motion was to try and control the whole damned thing rather than expel anyone. And I can remember Don Anderson saying, “This therefore turns out to be a motion quite different to the motion that it would deem to be”– and he looked disappointed at having to come along for such a significant thing, which turned out merely to be so relatively insignificant. This was held in a fairly large hall, and I can recall Roland walking up and down in front of the stage waving his arms around and talking about some occasion – Adamson had been around to his house and threatened him with some violence, and so on – and it was terribly hard to be specific about this – I can remember one chap, whose name I didn’t know at the time and I’ve never learned since (but a lady who was next to me whispered that he’d been an ex-soldier), stood up and said, “Poor Roland seems to be the person in the army who’s out of step and says that really the rest of the world is out of step with him,” and then asked Roland to actually step outside and fight. And I gather that the guy was fairly formidable, and Roland sure didn’t take him up. At one stage, Roland approached Adamson, who was slouching in front of the rostrum on the far right-hand side of the hall, not saying a great deal, and Roland addressed something to him in a rather booming voice, and, anyway, it was the first time I’d ever actually seen one of Adamson’s eruptions, and it was

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amazing – he sort-of spat, “Get fucked you.... Grrrr,” and all kinds of things like that, very rapidly, at him. But it wasn’t so much what he said as it was the peculiar intensely physical viciousness he could manage to put in his voice; anyway, Robinson, I can remember, jumped back and was very startled, and I think might have been somewhat frightened by it. In the event, the vote was taken, virtually along party lines irrespective of its meaning, and by that time nobody was terribly sure of its meaning except that it seemed to indicate that somewhere along the line the oldies were disapproving of what the youngies were doing. Anyway, the vote was taken, and it ran out dead even. It was split perfectly down the centre. I can recall that, when everyone went in, Joan Mas was on the door, and Joan was definitely enforcing or checking everyone’s ID and current membership and evidence of same, and so on. The whole thing was very much a numbers game. I can remember Harrison–Ford against the door saying to me, “Robinson’s such a political animal, hell, this has really become a power scene.” I can remember the thought occurring to me that it seemed to be a conflict between a number of political animals, which I was self-interested enough at the time not to say. Anyway, at the end of it everyone went away and was not entirely satisfied. It was interesting that Robinson actually retired: he resigned after that, and so did Joan Mas, and so did all of the others. My opinion is that both sides had drawn up, and drawn in as many people as they could on that meeting; that the oldies had drawn up everyone they possibly could who was still a member, that in fact they were stretched to the absolute limit, and that it was amazing that the vote was completely tied. I mean, from there on in they could only go down; fundamentally, all it would take was one more person against them and they were gone, and it was only going to be a matter of time before more people came in on the other side. Or, alternatively, their numbers had to drop off and they’d be outvoted, so I think they actually got out while the going was good. And Adamson, Curthois, and Harrison–Ford took over. With regard to my own actions in the whole bloody thing, I wasn’t entirely disinterested; I mean, I gained quite a lesson out of it: the politics of poetry. MS: What was the name of the magazine then? RDJ: Poetry Magazine, it was called. Then it became New Poetry. I think it went on as the Poetry Magazine for a few more issues; it might have been perhaps a year before it became New Poetry, changed its format slightly [the first issue of New Poetry appeared in February 1971]. For a while [the Poetry Magazine] was very viable, I think. There was quite a lot of debate among the old guard about

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whether they should have allowed American poetry, and articles on Hart Crane and things like that, to actually go into the thing. MS: They had been running things on – what? English poets, Australian poets? RDJ: Oh, no, they always had reviews, but they weren’t reviews with any great intellectual pretension. MS: Just notices of publication? RDJ: The kind of reviews that were fairly modest.... things about ‘my friend Alec’ – or Rosemary – and ‘Have a look at this felicitous sort of verse and line’, and so on. I don’t know, by the way, that what the new guard was doing was all that different, except that it used a hell of a lot longer words. MS: And a different set of icons of their own? RDJ: Right, and they also, of course, had a slightly different sort of language to describe it. My idea is that in the Poetry Society, and on the literary scene in Australia as a whole, one of the tragedies of the whole generation of 1968 (assuming there is such a thing as the generation of 1968) was that really nothing much happened between 1944 and 1968, although there are a few people that dropped out. Nonetheless, basically the structure remained fundamentally the same, the poetics remained the same, and even the sociological bias of the people in power remained the same. All that was required was that a group of people should organize itself sufficiently to actually push, and the whole house of cards came down. That’s what happened, and I think one of the things that was difficult was that it really collapsed so easily; all it took, really, was a couple of squabbles, albeit vicious ones, between Adamson and Roland Robinson, one meeting, which was in fact indecisive, and then the whole thing collapsed. Adamson, Curthois, and Harrison–Ford became the editors of New Poetry, and so on and so forth, and in fact it was a walkover. Almost immediately, Adamson, Curthois, Harrison–Ford, Dransfield, Tranter, Tim Thorne and so on and so forth, they became the establishment; they became people with access to the power which enabled them to publish books, which enabled them to be published in magazines which were a lot broader even than New Poetry, very very rapidly. I mean, even Poetry Australia virtually had Tranter as sort-of a subeditor. Grace Perry was much more cunning in this respect than Roland Robinson. MS: She invited him along? He did the volume Preface to the Seventies [an anthology issued as Poetry Australia 32, February 1970].

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RDJ: That’s right, and Parallax [a collection of Tranter’s poems published as a special issue of Poetry Australia 34, June 1970]. He turned out a ‘new writing’ issue; I think he was the editor of it, yeah, about that time; it included an article by Shapcott on the New Poetry, and also, of course, at this time Australian Poetry Now [an anthology edited by Thomas W. Shapcott, published by Sun Books, Melbourne, in 1970] came out. But the basic fact was that after the Angry Penguins, everything had really set in a Cold War sort of standard: the same people accepting the same things, published in the same thing for twenty-four years. What would have been much healthier about the damn thing would have been a controversy, a sustained battle, a sustained fight. There wasn’t. I think that, probably, if there’s something healthy, as it were, in me, it’s that I didn’t manage to get myself noteworthy at that particular time, that my first book didn’t come out until 1973, and that for most of that time, I had to fight against just those people who actually achieved power so easily in 1968. I don’t think that was such a bad thing, you know, much as some of them are now my friends.

—————— Beyond the Jindyworobaks48 —————— 1

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E L L I O T T R E M A R K E D in his anthology The Jindyworobaks that “There is at present a discernible rise of interest in the Jindyworobak movement,” RIAN

which may mean that the time is ripe for serious reappraisals; but this interest replaces an attitude which for a number of years has been one of something like contempt.49

The discernible rise of interest has included the projection of a collected edition of the poems of William Hart–Smith, Elliott’s own anthology of Jindyworobak writers, and a renewed interest, notably among the Australian Republican movement and among writers and teachers in the ‘hinterland’ away from the metropolitan cities, in the career and writings of Roland Robinson. There have been few critical studies of Robinson’s poetry during the past fifteen years, and surveys of Australian poetry have tended to include his work in their paragraphs describing the Jindyworobaks’ cultural aims. It is probably fair to say that while some aims of the Jindyworobak poets have been given grudging endorsement, 48 

“Introduction” to Roland Robinson: Selected Poems 1944–1982, ed. A.J. Bennett & Michael Sharkey (Armidale, N S W : Kardoorair, 1983): vii–xiii. 49 Brian Elliott, “Introduction” to The Jindyworobaks, ed. Elliott (St Lucia: U of Queensland P , 1979): xix.

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the largely dismissive estimations of the movement have not facilitated understanding of Robinson’s work, or that of other individuals in the movement. In 1982, Robinson was invited to become inaugural writer-in-residence in Wright College at the University of New England, and consequently resident writer at the Darwin Community College. For a number of years in recent times, Robinson has conducted writers’ workshops near his home at Belmont, Newcastle and given recitals of his own poetry and that of others, at schools, universities, and colleges in other institutions throughout Australia. In Robinson’s view, poetry is an oral mode of communication. He has stated that poets should be able to bear their works in their memory to recite it, rather that ‘read’ it in performance. Perhaps following from this practice, some minor changes are observable in subsequent editions of Robinson’s poems. Works that have been reprinted often contain variations in word order or phrasing. In some cases, the changes have been much greater, suggesting that a ‘new’ version of the work is in fact being offered. This present selection of his poems is aimed at assisting in the reappraisal of a unique poetic achievement, and it makes available many works long out of print and recently revised by the author. 2 Roland Robinson was born in County Dublin, Ireland, in 1912, and was brought to Australia at nine years of age.50 After a brief formal education, he experienced a wide range of occupations including station rouseabout in rural New South Wales, Civil Construction Corps labourer in the Northern Territory during World War Two, ballet dancer with the Kirsova Ballet, ballet critic for the Sydney Morning Herald, film-script writer, groundsman on a Sydney golf-course, and coordinator of writers’ workshops for the Poetry Society of Australia. A conscientious objector during the War, he met W.E. (Bill) Harney and Eric Worrell, who were both interested in preserving elements of Australian experience in the Northern Territory. He also made contact with Mary Gilmore and Rex Ingamells, the founder of the Jindyworobak movement for the regeneration of Australian poetry. He was a contributor to the Jindyworobak anthologies, which were published between 1938 and 1953, and he edited the 1948 Jindyworobak Anthology. Robinson was an editor of the Poetry Magazine in the 1960s, and as President of the Poetry Society actively promoted Australian poetry through his readings and workshops organized on behalf of the Society. His three-volume

50

Details here are from Robinson himself, pace the widely touted ‘County Clare’ in reference works and Frederick T. Macartney’s estimate of Robinson’s landfall in Australia as “at 14 years.”

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autobiography covers his experiences up to the time of his resignation from the presidency.51 The poems in this volume do not simply offer examples of Jindyworobak poetry. While Robinson subscribed to Jindyworobak principles in general, his range, as Elliott elsewhere suggests in his account of the movement, is not circumscribed. If we consider Ingamells’ formulation of Jindyworobak objectives, the case becomes clearer. In the pamphlet Conditional Culture (1938), Ingamells held that an Australian culture depends on the fulfilment and sublimation of certain definite conditions, namely: 1. a clear recognition of environmental values. 2. The debunking of much nonsense. 3. An understanding of Australia’s history and traditions, primaeval, colonial and modern.

Robinson’s poetry demonstrates an adherence to the first and third tenets, which may be more a matter of coincidence than discipleship. So far as the second condition is concerned, Robinson is rarely if ever as concerned as Ingamells (and Flexmore Hudson, or Ian Mudie to a lesser extent) with campaigning in verse for an Australian culture purged of the ‘alien’ or foreign elements that Ingamells considered inappropriate, such as poeticizations and archaisms located for the main part in older English poetry. Ingamellls’ objection contains a number of contradictions based on the attempt to write in English at all while at the same time limiting the language – a procedure somewhat akin to attempts by the French Academy to ‘purify’ the French language by purging foreign elements from the vocabulary. Like the Jindyworobak poets mentioned above, Robinson experimented greatly (and continues to do so) in his poetry, and included many variations on ‘traditional’ English poetic styles and preoccupations. Robinson’s work dwells to some extent on abstractions, although to a less marked degree than Ingamells’ poetry. In effect, Robinson frequently offers imagistic impressions. Early critics of the Jindyworobaks, like Max Harris, remarked that, in some of their works, insistence on a programme diminished the poetry. Robinson’s impulse is primarily lyrical and elegiac; it does not eschew rhyme, but it avoids what Ronald Hugh Morrieson called “lolloping jingles” among Jindyworobak writers. Nor does it abandon rhythmic effects in its effort to convey a spoken narrative; in fact, it may be essential to Robinson’s poetic that the work deliberately embodies such effects, since he maintains that a poet should be able to recite not only his own work but that of his antecedents and national contemporaries. If 51

The Drift of Things [. . .] 1914–52 (1973); The Shift of Sands [.. . ] 1952–62 (1976); A Letter to Joan [. .. ] 1962–73 (1978), all Macmillan (South Melbourne, Victoria).

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Robinson considers his role as equivalent to the skalds and scops of Scandinavian and Old English tradition, or the storytellers of Aboriginal culture, it is not surprising that his range of expression should include ballad forms (“To a Mate”) or forms which suggest ballad-measure (for example, the four-lined rhymed stanzas or couplets, in a poem like “Because I Wakened”) or sonnetcompressions (“The Tea-Tree and the Lyre-Bird,” “Boots and Hat and Shirt,” “The Tank”). Robinson’s poems often resolve themselves into prosaic cadences as well, adopting conversational speech rhythms to suggest a contemplative or musingaloud attitude to his subject. The approach can also be indicative of a recognized inability to penetrate all of the objects in the field of vision. Or of a cultural gap: a number of Robinson’s poems deal with the withholding of communication between the features of the land and the poem, so that frustration, torment, and urgency are signalled in the attempts to perceive further the ‘source’ of the poem, the event which triggers it. Examples of this are not hard to locate. “The Dancers” concludes with the flight of birds clamouring in “harsh and inarticulate words”; the poem “I Had No Human Speech” epitomizes the endeavour to ‘converse’ with inarticulate features of the land. A brilliant evocation of this state is apparent in “The Metamorphosis,” where the “spirit-voice” of the country renders “the very rocks, the throng of trees” incapable of further strife, leaving them “listening, stricken, mute.” The Orpheus-like power of song is here, by analogy, likened to the poetry’s power over its listeners or the poet himself. It appears also to be part of Robinson’s design to stress the frustrated nature of this conversation through an insistence on cacophony and discord of visual as well as aural elements. In “The Blanket,” accordingly, lorikeets “scream”; elsewhere, stones “clatter,” feet “crush” in dead bush, night-birds “creak” or “shriek.” The landscape is not that of Europe, England or Ireland familiar from older poetry, and Robinson’s work is often deliberately strident, seemingly less ‘measured’ than that of his Irish precursors (Yeats, in particular) or contemporaries (Kavanagh, Muldoon, Heaney) in their poems of place or region. The stridency is muted at the same time by Robinson’s characteristic control, and a consistency emerges in his descriptions: his world is wounded or ill, often hostile. In “The Brolgas,” the desert peas are seen as bleeding on the stones; elsewhere (“I Had No Human Speech” and “The Titans”) the gum trees writhe; the land is red, or splotched, leaves are black. The poet remains proudly desolate, identifying himself with the outcasts on the scene, both human and nonhuman: the prisoners of war, the unexpected spray of rock-lily, the falcon, the black Alsatian dog “Wolf,” and even, at a later stage, the Hairy Man and Grendel of Anglo-Saxon epic. Paraphrasing bird-songs, and calling the birds, beasts,

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trees, streams, and plants by their Aboriginal names, Robinson at once gives notice of his curiosity, of the strangeness of the environment, and his own predicament in it, seeking to be included in or incorporated into its living history. His condition is not that of someone who has arrived from another country as a tourist or immigrant. It becomes very clear that Robinson’s responses to Australia turn on the same questions that occur to the “native-born,” though nonAboriginal, inhabitants. At root, perhaps, the poems prepare the way for an ecological consciousness, or at least one in which assumptions about the ‘Western’ness of Australia can be questioned. Besides presenting images of an Australia that has not been so radically altered by white occupiers as to obliterate its Aboriginal character, Robinson offers another perspective, that of the ‘outsider’ in Australia’s white society. Several poems offer critical views of assumptions about white civilization – urban lifestyles, mechanization, warfare, and uniformity. All pressures that reinforce conformity are treated scathingly or sceptically in Robinson’s later works. A consistent subject of the earlier poetry also appears in Robinson’s metropolitan works: the consideration of poetry itself is expanded to include speculation on the poet’s role in a divided society about the time of the Vietnam War. There are few moments of exultation in Robinson’s poetry, beyond assertions that he will join his country more fully at death, or that his songs will bear him along, but this triumph is perhaps only as much as many predecessors or contemporaries have hoped for or projected for themselves. 3 It is easy to be misled, by loose remarks dismissing the Jindyworobak poets, into thinking that the use of Aboriginal names and words in their poetry is utterly arbitrary, as if they somehow aimed to be ‘white Aboriginal’ poets. The aim of the movement was not to suggest such a direction, however, but to foster understanding of traditions and history omitted from the education of Australians, and which had an influence upon their own country. Robinson’s employment of Aboriginal elements (references to myths, individuals’ traits or histories) is subtle and takes several forms. This collection does not include those poems that he ‘received’ from Aboriginal storytellers and worked, in some cases only slightly, into poems or verse-forms. A more consistent pattern is illustrated in poems from every period of Robinson’s career as a poet, which refer to an Aboriginal picture of Australia. In several poems, Robinson recalls Aboriginal myths: in “Nerida and Birwan,” “The Drifting Dug-Out,” “The Water Lubra,” “Altjeringa,” “Ejenak the Porcupine,” and “Hairy Man,” perpetuity and continuation are implied. Robinson rarely com-

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ments overtly on conservation of Aboriginal culture (though later poems like “Minstrels” or “The Unlucky Country” take a damning view of white Australian notions of progress), but always implies the longevity or perpetuity of the initial mythic figures – totems, and what Brian Elliott has remarked on as a reverence for “site-magic”52 in the earliest poetry of the Jindyworobaks. This term implies more than sensitivity to ‘spirit of place’ or ‘environment’, and more than ecological awareness. In his careful employment of Aboriginal myths and words, Robinson indicates, perhaps more than Ingamells, Hudson, Mudie, or William Hart–Smith, a constant preoccupation with gauging the extent to which it might be possible to extend the English language to take Aboriginal Australia into his poetry. Together with Hart–Smith, Robinson was perhaps uniquely situated or qualified to be so concerned. In Robinson’s poems that allude to Aboriginal experience, and in those that do not directly make such reference, there is evidence of the restlessness and urgency of an attempt to embrace what is perceived through another, older line of descent – the filter of two mythologies, in effect. Robinson populates his landscape with fellow beings that have particular identity for him, even when identity is not wholly grasped. To this extent, the poems acknowledge their limits, and extend the concept of Australia beyond political, geographical or ecological definitions to incorporate linguistic considerations. Another way of putting this might be to observe that Robinson’s poetry concerns itself with what characterizes an event or situation, so that the poem becomes a field wherein the significant functions are assembled though no particular element is accorded overarching priority or ‘value’. If Robinson’s poems have been perceived at times as the record of a personal or private spirit or impulse, it is also apparent that they raise wider issues than the personal. The personal references are present, resulting from Robinson’s identifications with other men and women (‘mateship’ and erotic love enter equally into his scheme, in “Deep Well,” “The Prisoners,” “To a Mate,” “To J.M.,” “Shack,” “Trunk Line Call,” and “Jacaranda”), and also from his preoccupation with the way poetry mirrors the seeker as well as the sought, and diffracts both. Robinson’s Celtic origins have been remarked on (for example, by Elliott, in his introduction to The Jindyworobaks) to speculate on whether the Dreamtime was simple substituted for a Yeatsian, mystical, Dark Rosaleen in his poetry. It may not be so easy a matter to maintain this speculation, since the poems reveal much more than fascination with or interest in myth. Robinson canvasses mythologies of all varieties in much of his poetry, but while he notably alludes 52

Brian Elliott, “Introduction” to The Jindyworobaks, xxx.

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to Aboriginal, Anglo-Saxon, Teutonic, Scandinavian, and Classical Greek or Roman stories (for example, in “Grendel,” “Battalions Mass in the Hills,” and “The Metamorphosis” – where the Orpheus legend seems obliquely paralleled in Aboriginal legend), his primary concern is to explore a territory which is largely unfamiliar in European writing. In effect, he alludes to European mythology in particular to assist in the description of a ‘mood’, just as the Aboriginal allusions often serve to convey an impression or to substantiate an image: for, overall, Robinson is perhaps more imagistic than any of his critics have given him credit for. The consistent feature of his poetry is its spareness and tautness, often apparent in his reprinted versions of earlier works, where the expression is severely pruned (as in the case of the poem “Grendel,” appearing in fresh guise in this collection) or amended by a rearrangement of words or the excision of a phrase. Several of Robinson’s amendments may be due to his reproduction of works from memory upon being asked to provide copies. Unlike earlier Australian poets, or his contemporaries at the time of his arrival in Australia who were writing of an older Ireland (poets like Victor Daley, David McKee Wright and others who occupied Yeats’s Celtic Twilight abroad), Robinson does not dwell on the myths with nostalgia. Further, while it is incontestable that the earlier ‘Irish’ poets in Australia also wrote of their immediate experiences of society and of Australian ‘nature’ or ‘landscape’, they employed many of the practically ready-made formulas of the ballads and descriptive poetry of the 1880s and 1890s. Robinson’s recapitulations of myth have a sparser formulation, closer to the terseness of the poetry of Egil’s Saga than to the ballads of the Bulletin Reciter. Robinson’s ‘mythic’ content in his poetry consists of unforced evocations, even while his torment at inadequately expressing the emotions provoked by a triggering event is at times the chief point of the poem. “The Sacred Ground,” “Lyre Bird,” and “Rock-Wallaby” imply the antiquity of rites and understandings to which the poet is not admitted, while “The Dancers,” “Deep Well,” and “Ghost Gums (2)” imbue the tree with spirits which refuse admittance to interlopers in the sacred sites; the magic is elusive and never wholly grasped despite the poet’s efforts. In the poems from the section “Del Espiritu Santo,” the “holy spirit” of the land is not that of James McAuley’s Captain Quiros poems but an immanent characteristic of each place and object, even though the interpretation seems similar to some degree. For Robinson, the trees “agonise” their way out of the earth; blackboys (grasstrees) are “defiant,” warlike, and the landscape appears as an expressionist, abstract place: the bush “ goes back” to its chaos or suggests, to Robinson’s mind, the pre-literate, pre-human earth (“Altjeringa”). Plainly, the extent to which Robinson’s Australia (or McAuley’s) is a projection of an ‘in-

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terior landscape’ may be debated at greater length: it would be appropriate to recall contemporary painting and dance of the same period as Robinson’s compositions in order that some perspective could be given to the discussion. As a general conclusion, too, it might be observed that Robinson’s concern is to a great extent with poetry itself, and its ability to convey most powerfully limitations of articulation is evidence of ability to consider contradictions and concentrate them. Robinson’s comprehension (and at times apprehension) of his poetic nature or vocation is celebrated in many of his works. “The Tea-Tree and the LyreBird,” and “Because I Wakened” made claims abut the poet’s status and preoccupations. Subtler identifications, with place, song, and eternity, appear in “Swift” and “The Coal.” Robinson associates poetry with needs (love, warmth – fire and incense; food, water, wine) to suggest repletion or intoxication of the spirit. The torment he describes or posits relates to verbal inadequacy to express the need most brilliantly or to achieve full comprehension. In “The Tumult of the Swans” and “I Had No Human Speech,” his own “dumbness” or muteness is identified with that of the land and its creatures, so that he sees ironic, perhaps, parallels between bird-song or the flow of waters and his own speech, and can only guess at the ‘source’ of these expressions. The land is thus not seen as merely a projection of an interior ‘state’ or ‘landscape’; the poem raises the question of how such correspondences occur at all. In each poem, the conclusion is contrived in a manner which recalls Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” as the magnitude of the ‘discovery’ or its potential significance is compared with the poet’s dumbness. In several poems (such as “Ghost Gums (1)” and “Rock-Lily”), the land undergoes erotic transformation, being addressed or considered as the beloved person. In keeping with the notion of intoxication, the works can assume an incantatory tone on occasion – for instance, in “The Tumult of the Swans,” where the customary four-line stanza divisions of many works give way to a continuous sweep: no break occurs in the poems’ form or patterning, to emphasize a fluid movement, an effusion. The works are often neatly balanced by a statement at the conclusion that serves as a reprise of the opening line or sentence. In “The Prisoners,” for example, “red sandridges” of the opening find an echo in the “blood red desert” of the final line. Clearly, the poems often aim at ‘resolution’ or completion of their statements, despite the abrupt openings of some of the early works. The ‘curtain-rise’ opening in some cases conveys an impression that the poem is a segment in a train of thought, unseparated from other events: the technique underlies the sense of continuity of behavioural patterns or thought which the poems more directly state in their commentary.

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Robinson’s conception of the poet’s role incorporates some largely Romantic views: the “Lyre-Bird” poem and “The Blanket” suggest as much, proposing the image of the lyre as representative of the poet (after Coleridge, or Yeats, whose poem “A Coat” has a similar thrust to Robinson’s “naked avowals”). Robinson’s range is indicative of experimentation with more than the idea of the poet of ‘no personality’; however, his craftsmanship is evidence of a wide knowledge of twentieth-century as well as earlier bodies of poetry and poetic theory. His work is not parochial, its subjects going as they do beyond promotion of a favoured area or ideology, and it is clear that the works not only exemplify the aims of the Jindyworobak movement by a fortuitous concurrence of circumstances but that they are also manifestations of a personality by turns flamboyant and contemplative, in manner and style reaching a vast range of people.

—————— Storming the Teacups (Again)53 —————— First, the Good News

A

in 1982, late October or early November (it’s hard to think when you have assessment of hundreds of students’ papers on your mind, and the dole queue immediately following your contract’s expiry), Barry Sergeant, Elius Levin, and other young writers and poets around the University of New England suggested over a beer or three in the Bistro that it would be a good idea to stage a reading by poets from the country at the 1983 Festival of Sydney. The time was drawing near, and a hurried phone call and letter to John Moulton, the Festival’s coordinator, brought the response “Interested, very, but it’s a little late; maybe the following Festival?” This was sufficient incentive to practise organizing writers all over the northwest and northeast of New South Wales for 1983, and to have some warm-up readings. After all, Armidale hardly lacks people who are, or who think they could be, poets. Over the past three years especially, links have been established with poets around Tamworth, Lismore, Bellingen, Byron Bay and elsewhere. It seemed a great idea to show Sydney people what sorts of talents were scattered about the hinterland and backblocks. An active publishing scene has also established itself in Armidale through the efforts of Tony Bennett (Kardoorair Press), Don Gentle (Tap Danz Press), and Winifred Belmont and Michael Sharkey (Fat Possum Press), by way of displaying who’s in locations alternative to the Sydney and Melbourne groups, and to the poets with national names who occasionally visit Armidale from Brisbane and other capitals. Armidale has a monthly poetry reading at the RO UN D E X AM TIM E

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Neucleus 37.1 (30 March 1983): 14–15.

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Wicklow Hotel, and many other regular readings besides the large event at the university’s May vacation school. But enthusiasm isn’t everything. Now read on. The Not-So-Good News Around Christmastime in Sydney, Rae Jones, organizer of events for poets in the Big Smoke for some years, thought it would be a good idea to rope in a large group of readers for the Festival of Sydney, and, being on the spot, had earlier sounded out John Moulton about the possibility. A time was made available, and a draft programme submitted – fifteen poets, including one from New England, who’d be on the spot on 23 January. The project was ambitious: to keep Sydneysiders interested in Great Art from eleven in the morning until two in the afternoon. Hyde Park was open to the public, and the venue had seen such spectacles as the free Joan Sutherland concert and many youth and community shows attended by large family audiences. Many things can go wrong at poetry readings: grandstanding by one or two individuals, festers concerning the order of readers, questions of payment or non-payment, hire of equipment, site suitability, poor advertising, arranging appropriate works for the anticipated audience. And so on. It has taken a while for some people to even recognize human traits and foibles in Armidale, judging by some readings. But you’d think that Sydney sophisticates would have sorted out such matters long ago. Not so. On Sunday 23 January, accordingly, I went along to Hyde Park in weather that was ideal for a day at the Colo River, a bushwalk in Dorrigo National Park, or surfing at Dee Why: anything but a sweaty day of Great Art in the centre of Sydney. It promised to be interesting at least. A band was supposed to turn up as a support act: three singers and a pianist revelling in the title ‘Quietly Confident’. They’d have wanted to be. The cabaret singer Mopsie Beans was there with her accompanist Jerry Beans. Rae Jones was setting up the stage for the first bracket; he explained that the piano hadn’t come yet but was due to arrive at 11:30, when the event was already under way. A late start: mark that as well in the book of Things Not To Do at a poetry reading. Sasha Soldatow, listed as first reader, hovered about with Pam Brown, Barbara Brooks, Richard Tipping, Nigel Roberts, and luminaries of the New Poetic and its successors. The cast was a Who’s Who of the small presses and performance-poetry scene: Leigh Stokes, Billy Marshall, Colleen Burke, Larry Buttrose, Joanne Burns, Jill Farrar, Rachel Munro. Have I missed anyone? Oh, yes, one jaded Fat Possum Press poet, Michael Sharkey. The stage was located in front of a vast pyramid, Caltex’s contribution to the festivities. Next-door were the Boy Scouts – several dozen community-minded

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souls dedicated to inculcating leadership, civic responsibility, and manly virtues. Their charges played a variety of team games and displayed their skills on what they called New Games with parachutes, flying foxes (bosun’s chairs to the nautically inclined), and other pastimes. Behind us, a row of tents dispensed consumables of all descriptions: photos on plates, T-shirts with advertisements, Lebanese sandwiches, ice creams, souvenirs – a mini-Gold Coast roadside attraction. Over the way, in Elizabeth Street, building construction proceeded, with jackhammers, rivet guns, and several people hitting bits of pipe with steel hammers to see what they sounded like. Lots of traffic – after all, the trains were off (again, as they say in Sydney); behind the stalls and caravans selling tacos, Lebanese etceteras, and cheapjack trash, the Living Flame Gaslight Dance Company, a fire-eater, folk-singers, traditional dances of all nations, and a bush band were whipping up all the fun of the fair. A real Family Day Out. The technicians explained that the piano had arrived at the vast cost of $150, and they’d had to lug it from the other side of the city, though it felt like the other side of Australia, what with the day so warm and friendly. Rae Jones went about handing performance fees to the poets who’d shortly entertain the spectators. At last, before an audience of many poets (those waiting to have their stab at brief glory), the curious, the idle, and the lovers of Great Art (partners of the poets, in many cases), the show was under way. Mr Jones, resplendent in dinner-suit and wide-brimmed hat, announced “The poet Sasha Soldatow, heading a cast sponsored by the Festival of Sydney.” Even the Boy Scout supervisors looked up. Some games slowed down. Sasha, louche and gangly, neon-blue-rimmed sunglasses a-glint and cigarette dangling from a lip, declared, “This is not strictly a reading of my works but two tape recordings. First, a tape-recording of a poem with piano accompaniment. It’s a poofter tape, about two men fucking.” Stun, shock, amazement all round. Muted voices accompanied by a tinkling and fiddling with chords came over the publicaddress system. Not much coherence there: a few phrases now and then about kisses or hands at work, but it was hard to tell what was going on. Sasha sat on the front of the stage looking cool, Rae looking as if it were all a bit strange. And then it happened: a khaki-shorted Scoutmaster strode across the front of the audience and addressed a technician: “Who’s in charge here? I’m here to tell you we’ve officially complained about this material because it’s A Family Audience here.” More words dimly heard meanwhile, mixing it with the traffic and the builders hitting bits of pipes with hammers. I suppose this is the way they stage Avant-Garde Poetry in Sydney. Rae was given a warning, along with the technicians, poor-devil employees of the festival hired to oversee the sound system. “We’ve told Mr Moulton about this, and you’re going to be taken off.”

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The first tape ended, the second commenced, and the technician left to put in his word. Tape Two was unspectacular, announced as Sasha’s response to Ginsberg and Burroughs. Hey-ho, and mostly notable for its mandarin voicing of poetry. I can’t say we actually heard a great deal of the tape except for a line that declared: “hard to keep your mind on only one thing” – Great Art, all right. A few of the audience lost interest and wandered off. Activity and consternation continued in the khaki ranks, as Barbara Brooks ascended the stage and read for quite a while. Tension was building and everyone knew the show was about to be axed. Barbara read about sunny days in Sydney, going to the beach, watching buildings get built: a perfect Boy-Scout-and-Building-Construction-Family-Poem. By the time she finished, so was the show. We were shut down. The technician: “Mr Moulton has said to turn it off.” So he did. He had asked Rae for an assurance that the rest of the show would be censored, but Rae had said: nothing doing. Muzak came over on the public-address system. Some of the poets were put out. But what do you do when you’ve got thirty dollars of Mr Moulton’s money in your pocket along with a bunch of Family Poems for all the kids in the audience, and you’re shut down? Transmission of Great Art continued viva voce in another section of the Park, in an appropriately hidden sunken garden, with mostly other poets listening. Rae Jones contacted radio and television and newspaper media, but no one came to take pictures of this significant act. That’s show biz, Sydney-style. It’s disappointing to think that the opportunity to hold further readings as part of the Festival of Sydney is now in jeopardy. It’s hard to imagine Mr Moulton being persuaded that not all poets come on as shockers of public morality. But who’d blame him? On the other hand, it’s regrettable that censorship occurs, so speech is impeded on any issue. The major surprise is that Sydney’s gay lifestyle is not represented in any other way than by Sasha’s shock tactics. Was he trying to become the Juan Davila (“Stupid as a Painter,” in the 1982 Biennale Exhibition) of poetry? Why did no one object to his epithet “poofter”? I would have thought the Scouts were perfectly attuned to calling gays by such a name, but there you go: the Scouts were shocked. Sasha’s claim that he was a homosexual person (Sydney Morning Herald, 24 January) is a deflection from the issue. The way he announced the poem constituted the shock. Poetry hasn’t advanced much when boring shock tactics are employed. Boring shock tactics: isn’t that a contradiction? Not when the tricks of other times, other places are produced for the nth time. They still generate publicity of a sort, but for all poetry? It looks and sounds like self-publicity. If ‘audience’

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and ‘readership’ are taken to mean people who have read a good deal of poetry at school or who teach it for a living, or who read it for recreation, and who do not actually write poetry, it’s a fairly safe bet that such an audience can tolerate experimentation within or beyond the forms they’re already familiar with. But I would lay odds on the general public’s perception being that poets are strange people. I don’t think greater enjoyment of poetry is likely to arise among such people if they’re affronted by what seems to them to be not-poetry, whatever else it might appear to be. Shock tactics of the sort that Sasha adopted play to a stereotype that relegates poetry further from everyday experience of other forms of poetry-like stuff: the lyrics of popular or classical music, or of clever advertisements, political slogans and the myriad verbal games and theatrical dialogue that come more readily to mind than a passage of prose-like poetry describing an act that could with a bit more stylishness be made memorable, arouse appreciation, and even be made appealing. I’m not advocating that it be couched in mannered ancient language. But with a bit of cunning, one can persuade an audience to revise an idea, or consider another approach to even a taboo topic. Sasha’s wasn’t the only challenging poem read that day. Joanne Burns read a prosy monologue that sent up middle-class mores in a style we’ve come to associate with Barry Humphries in his Edna Everage performances. Designed as a comment on Greenies in Tasmania, Anti-Nuclear activists, university students of Marxism and their critics, the work reminded us of the fun to be had bashing the working class, middle class, and anyone who watches television. That’s Great Art, Sydney-style, too. Robert Gray, a writer-in-residence in New England in 1981, observed that he doesn’t much like poetry readings. It’s not hard to see why. Politically, it has taken years to establish and maintain funding for arts in general, from such sources as the Australia Council and State and regional Arts Councils, and special project funds, particularly for events such as festivals. Philistines and objectors to State and community funding for the arts are not hard to find. If practitioners of the arts were to see, in a paranoid light, what happened at the abortive and aborted Sydney Festival reading, they might conclude that Sasha’s action was part of a plot to discredit public arts funding – a position that might be defended on libertarian or reactionary conservative grounds. Opponents of arts funding make a point of saying that users should pay for pleasures as well as necessities, and they are happy to latch onto scandals and embarrassments to demonstrate the logic of their position. It’s not likely, though, that Rae Jones’s troupe had any such intention of playing into the hands of critics and strengthening the dead hand against arts fund-

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ing. I put the sorry event down to one person’s grandstanding. Sasha’s tapes might have aroused few or no outrageous guardians of morals if he had arranged their transmission over late-evening F M radio programmes for audiences of passably contemporary books and writing. Perhaps recordings similar to Sasha’s poofter tape are available in sex shops, though not in the poetry section: one up to Sasha. At the moment, no points have been gained by the festival performance except reinforcement of an unfortunate public perception of contemporary Australian poets. The performance wasn’t Dada, and it wasn’t very interesting poetry. But like Davila’s controversial painting, its result was to alienate a potential audience for the sake of an easy triumph. It’s a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy: if poets want to be seen as concerned to reinforce the myth of the hard-done-by outsider or elitist toiling in the garret, they can make that perception come true. Afterword Sasha Soldatow (born Alexander Pavlovich Soldatow to Russian parents at Plochingen near Stuttgart in 1947) died of liver failure in Sydney on 30 August 2006. He came to Australia in 1949 and was raised by his mother and aunts in Victoria, where he studied music and history at Melbourne University before moving to Sydney in 1972, where he became an argumentative member of the latter-day Sydney Push, advocating liberation, prison abolition, and drinking. (He later founded a ‘movement’ he called Drink Against Drunkenness.) A Sydney Morning Herald obituary put his death down to years of drinking, though it’s hard to say what else contributed. Sasha was one of the more remarkable enfants terribles of Australian writing: gifted and erratic, a musician as well as poet and novelist, he embodied much of the spirit of 1968, anarchism and the Situationists. A gay polemicist and truculent believer in his exceptionalism, Sasha worked for SBS television as a subtitler of movies until he left under threat of the sack, though for many years he lived in a certain degree of style on the good graces of many people, including the artist Margaret Fink and the filmmaker Margot Nash, though he hit the skids in later times. Sasha was a charismatic poet and controversialist; from the start he promulgated liberation, in conversation, disputes, dramatic performances, poems, journalism in the gay and straight media and in his roneo magazine, The Only Sensible News. Sasha variously amused, excited, and alarmed his acquaintances and friends with his outrageous statements and behaviour. He championed the poetry of Harry Hooton and Anna Akhmatova, editing the former’s collected poems and translating the poetry of the latter in order to correct others’ mistranslations (he insisted his were always right). He published Politics of the Olympics (Cassell, 1980), short stories including autobiography, history, fiction, travel, and polemic (Private: Do Not Open, Penguin, 1988, and Mayakovsky in Bondi (Blackwattle, 1993), and an autobiography with Christos Tsiolkas (Jump Cuts, Vintage, 1996). He staged entertaining shows such as The Adventures of Rock’n’Roll Sally (record of the burlesque published by Blackwattle, 1990) that he altered through several

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performances and venues from the 1976 (La Mama Theatre) into the 1980s, and Percy Grainger and His Whips, a show with Elizabeth Drake and Pam Brown. I like the note posted by one library site in relation to Mayakovsky in Bondi: “No discipline assigned.” He would have liked that. In a review of the book, I wrote that it was “The tension makes for a series of stories which are collectively memorable, if not individually addictive... peppered with glorious aphorisms and epithets.”54

———————— Fading Shadows55 ————————

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P A G E ’ S A N T H O L O G Y 56 complements J.T. Laird’s 1971 publication (also from the Australian War Memorial), Other Banners: An Anthology of Australian Literature in the First World War. Page’s collection seems destined to become a collector’s item, not least among those who chart Australia’s attempts to revise its national self-image. The collection of photographs and poems is misleading. The photos are taken from the Australian War Museum files and depict the War as it was seen by those engaged in it. The poems are by poets who are still alive and they date from the 1960s. It’s an interesting exercise, to gather contemporary views – retrospectives – on the Great War, but what detracts from the book’s purpose is the editor’s statement that he could not find any works by Australian poets writing about the War at the time whose works come up to the standards of British war poetry. He has simply left them out, correspondingly implying that the current crop of Australian poems about that war is somehow better in quality. It won’t do. The subtitle suggests that the contents are polychromous, although the earliest poem here may be Les Murray’s “A New England Farm,” from his 1965 debut collection. The photographs (not ascribed beyond the museum’s catalogue numbers) more directly image Australians in the Great War and provide a chronological anchor and a counterpoint for the poems. Page’s contention that there is too little quality Australian poetry from the Great War, compared with recent Australian works, could ultimately require amendment as re-evaluation of earlier writers brings to light poets whose work will in time qualify assumptions about mediocrity. As Laird’s collection indicates, ballads and popular and light verse contain aspects of authentic experience. If it were true that there were no front-line Australian poets to compare EOFF

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“Dirty Details Just a Decoy,” Australian (23–24 October 1993: 5. Australian Book Review 53 (August 1983): 23, and Toowoomba Chronicle (11 August 1983): 35. 56 Shadows from Wire: Poems and Photographs of Australians in the Great War, ed. Geoff Page (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1983). 55 

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with Sassoon, Owen, and Rosenberg, it is undeniable that Zora Cross and many others offered trenchant summaries of the myths that killed. Laird’s selection of writings plainly demonstrated that Australian poets were engaged by the War, whether as supporters, reluctant casualties, or opponents. The book contained many works with links to older poetry and song. There is nothing quite so connected in Page’s anthology, whose contributors, twenty-one in all, include Murray, Chris Wallace–Crabbe, and Page himself. The book’s value resides, however, as Page points out in his introduction, in its being an addition to the upsurge of interest in Australia’s part in World War I. The poems in the collection show a trend towards regarding the Great War partly as a theme of honour, but perhaps chiefly as an inescapable test of poetic invention. Variety of styles is achieved by the inclusion of Murray’s halting, ballad-like “Visiting Anzac in the Year of Metrication,” while other poets incorporate formal elegies, and a large number provide monologues. The War offers a way of demonstrating national affiliation, no matter whether the events are looked upon as fascinating or as repulsive. Pondering a photograph of a soldier, Rae Desmond Jones concludes: whether good or bad his likeness is sentimental junk which should be burnt.

Thomas Shapcott weaves towards a statement that could also be a turning-off from further reflection on the faces of veterans or the dead. Alan Wearne’s “Is my gallant taken?” is a poignant lament whose anachronisms – my duty is not to add wail unto wail; Then let it summer perpetual

– provide welcome strangeness in the anthology while ironically providing a counterpoint to Page’s remark that poems of the actual period are omitted on the grounds of their anachronism. Dorothy Hewett’s “The Burial” is one of the notable glimpses into family history, and such personal elements, as well as the photographs, make the book one of the more unusual and attractive texts relating to the War. The book offers evidence as well of a distinctive flattening rhetoric adapted by many of the contributors to the martial subject. Murray, Wearne, and, occasionally, other poets attempt shifts in tone but, in general, their works – Page’s poems included, in similar proportion to Murray’s – reinforce rather than qualify the flatness. A descriptive element tempers many of the poems – in collage works such as Chris

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Wallace–Crabbe’s “The Shapes of Gallipoli” and Murray’s selections from his sonnet-novel – for all their conversational and antiphonal interludes. The effort to render afresh the change to a new era presents difficulties that are not easily overcome by resort to rehearsal of the theme. The subdued tone of the poems may evoke the mood of remote observers of the conflict, but there is little sense of a ‘Strange Meeting’ in them. The photographs present a more striking memento mori, in the event. What predominates in the written texts as well as the illustrations is the contemplation of ruins.

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E V I E W E R S H A V E A H A B I T of encapsulating the smartness of Alec Hope’s poetry and the technical accomplishment of John Manifold’s lyrics and ballads with puns on the writers’ names. Manifold’s retrospective selection of his poetry,58 introduced by A.D. Hope, is welcome. It will alter some conventional views of his poetic achievement in a way that the Collected Poems and Rodney Hall’s fine record of a friendship could not. This selected edition extends Manifold’s definition of treason ballads into a manifesto of poetry’s potential to put the old forms through their paces in ways that enrich tradition. Manifold’s work enlarges through wit. His love poems are gutsy and unsentimental, their tight resolutions showing virtuosity that has more in common with his familiars Byron and Rochester than with contemporary confessional effusions. He borrows blatantly to assert the continuities and strength of poetry’s ability to hold firm against the tides of fashion. The poem “Musicians” not only indirectly connects Byron and music, but the latter’s poem “The Vision of Judgment” is the literal setting for a brooding Gabriel sucking a trumpet and musing on his last chord. The flute magic that inspires the poem “Flute Girl” transforms a novice musician into a goddess and suggests that the Muse is present in every ordered breath. The poems serve for a biography of Manifold’s interests and experiences. The Australian voice is asserted from the start, in “The Bunyip and the Whistling Kettle,” written for a couple of girls in England. More of Manifold’s preoccupations in his Cambridge days in the 1930s surface – his skill at fencing and his espousal of folk poetry, together with later war experiences in Africa and

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Sydney Morning Herald (31 December 1983): 32. John Manifold, On My Selection: Poems, intro. A.D. Hope, ill. Miranda Manifold Macqueen (Adelaide, S A : Bibliophile, 1983). 58

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Europe, interlarded with translations from the Parnassians, with whom, as a colonial, Manifold is patently at home. The infusion of sceptical colonial energy into metropolitan literature, whether French or English, should come as no surprise in view of the older commonplace of the contributions made by Greek and Roman Imperial poets. An all-rounder in classical and modern languages, Manifold is regarded by many, particularly since Rodney Hall’s biography, as an Australian Renaissance man59 – a status he shares with Jack Lindsay. Manifold joined the Communist Party in England about the same time as Burgess and Maclean, and on his return to Australia in 1949 settled into the working-class sprawl of Wynnum in Brisbane, to write books about music in Shakespearean and Restoration drama, peddle the Party newspaper Tribune, and educate his neighbours in love of home-made music and balladry. His Ballad Nights and activities in the Realist Writers’ Group have become part of Queensland’s legacy to the bush-music revival and the literature of dissent in Australia. His appreciation of Orlando sherries, unromantic music, and romantic women informs this collection, punctuated with narrative ballads and the neat whimsy of domestic epigrams: Throughout the tribe of Bustard-Quail, The female’s larger than the male. The male looks petulant and flustered, As well he might, poor little bustard.

The squattocratic origins of the Manifold clan in Victoria get no guernsey in On My Selection, although the initial impulse for Manifold’s fascination with ballads was his reading through a school prize (when all alternatives were exhausted) on a childhood trip home from the city to one of the ancestral stations. Upcountry Australia is well served in the ballads of station life and bushranging days that are gathered in again from the mobs of anthologies where they have been on agistment for forty or so years. Many admirers will know what Bill Lewis told his grandson, in the poem of the same name, and I don’t want to dilute by paraphrase the pleasure of encountering the real Australian history described in “On the Boundary.” Both poems have the freshness of firstencountered anonymous ballads, and it’s not surprising that Manifold was offered one of his own works when he was collecting Australian ballads. Russel Ward’s Penguin Australian Songbook and Manifold’s Who Wrote the Ballads? both appeared in 1964. In the latter, Manifold traced the development 59

Rodney Hall, J.S. Manifold: An Introduction to the Man and His Work (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1978). This was less Hall’s designation than that employed by numerous reviewers.

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of the work-song through to the evolution of the soloist-and-chorus format and pointed out that while upper-class art was measured in period styles, popular art went by local styles. On My Selection prunes many period pieces, notably “The Red Rosary” and other Party-pleasers, to shape a clear, timeless opus from the workers’ suburb.

—————— Minority Groups Like the Living60 —————— There comes a point Where we decide to steer clear of majorities And develop a social conscience, preferring to hang around With minority groups like the living.61

T

in Gregory Shortis’s poetry, which registers from the opening of Yarn, Rave and Red Herring. It would be stating the obvious to comment only that this is an interesting collection of poems. It is not a book that can be easily dismissed at the present time, and if it is not a book for which extravagant claims can be made, it offers many terrible judgments on contemporary Australia that may command greater interest and appreciation as time goes by. The collection contains many poems that refute the notion that current Australian poetry tends to statements that are gormless or trivial. Shortis’s subjects are large, and his shafts are deadly. The collection is designed in two sections, the first containing a range of topics to do with contemporary society, the history of Australia, and the nature and purpose of poetry. The language is trenchant, the imagery startling. The last poem in section one (“Yarn, Rave and Red Herring”) concludes with a dedication to a future mutant of humanity, “Manambulus perhorridus,” the “Night Stalker of the Batavian Forest,” who will be roaming in packs, “Preying indiscriminately on mammals and reptiles / Attacking with teeth and claws” (24).62 The savagery of humanity, whether channelled into bestial usage of others or directed at self-destruction, is a focal reference for Shortis. The first poem in the book, an invitation to find in the volume a series of mishaps and accidents, violence and recriminations, is a disarming menu, and it embraces an aim that has HER E IS A DESPERATE NO TE

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Kangaroo V, ed. Don Gentle & Elius Levin (Armidale, N S W : Students Representative Council, University of New England, 1983): 24, 29, 35. 61 Gregory B. Shortis, “Invitation to a Doctorate in Philosophy,” in Shortis, Yarn, Rave and Red Herring (Armidale, N S W : Fat Possum, 1982): 35. Further page references are in the main text. 62 The phrasing here is uncannily close to that of the description of the Night Stalker in Tim Martin’s Mazaron’s Monstrous Manual (July 2000): 29, http://www.scribd .com/doc/138281004 /Mazaron-s-Monstrous-Manual (accessed 30 December 2013).

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perhaps few counterparts since Martial or Juvenal. The poem is above all a bitterly humorous satire on expectations, and introduces us to a savage wit that characterizes the best of Shortis’s attacks: Starting from Arncliffe, you get bitten By a redback on a toilet seat in Bexley, You run out of Camels, get kicked by a camel, Stand on a stonefish, rise on the third day, Only to be attacked by wild aborigines Or to be given strychnine in your plonk Or cornflour in your outfit, and cop the father of a hiding A mother of a massacre and an uncle of an undoing As punishment just for being original.

To this bizarre compendium of horrors familiar from popular culture (incidentally parodying Whitman and Ferlinghetti), including a retrospective of drug addicts’ deaths (to be taken up in later references to the poet Michael Dransfield and others), the destruction of Aboriginal society, and popular fears of the unfamiliar, Shortis appends the unlikely consolation: On top of that you get a fuck, a fight and a feed, A good howl, a cuddle, a long yarn, The holiday you’ve never had, a cup of tea, A Bex, a joint and a good lie down. (“Proem,” 3)

The catalogue is fulfilled in the pages that follow. Shortis’s delightful assembly of familiar Australian images is couched in a vernacular that takes in the pub, suburbia, the outback, metropolitan street argot, and other varieties of sub- and counter-culture. It’s not a bad start. The book’s first section is distinguished by affection for all the strange varieties of humans that make up the society Shortis inhabits. His second poem addresses a CEO and makes a comparison between the poet and his precursors in the satirical mode: As names to which I am not even a shadow – Martial to his Emperor, Ben Jonson to his King, It is with fine, careless hope I turn to you Rather than those who call themselves my friends. Forgive me, there are many errors in this book. I beg you, censor my poems or have them revoiced If they give offence. And please accept my most abject apologies For the price – I wish it could have been much dearer And worthy to grace your coffee table or serve as a gift

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For some congressman or actress. (“The Managing Director of Utah Industries,” 4)

Shortis includes a line-drawing portrait of the poem’s author, so the Managing Director may identify the patronage-seeking poet. It is a wonderful joke that the portrait is in fact that of a respectable and portly-looking poet of the German Biedermeier period; while it could bear some slight resemblance to Mr Shortis, the portrait makes another indirect statement about the abjection and ambition of the poet (any poet) in Australia. The Dedication proceeds to ironically praise the “developer” of Australian resources for his philanthropy, at the same time apologizing, “I trust that you will not hold it against me / That I am only barely human”; “Would that there were more like you!” The poem concludes with an appeal, “God bless you / And send your relatives over” (5). In a period characterized rather than distinguished by Australian poets’ emulation of the international (read: ‘American’) poets’ neutralizing and denaturing voice, Shortis goes one better, to take off the American cringe. While many contemporaries adulate the banal topics and unemotional range of American college-poets, Shortis has more in common with the forceful manner of Allen Ginsberg and his Beat contemporaries. The longer line, demanding a good deal of virtuosity in recitation, is no less characteristic of Shortis than of Ginsberg. And while, interestingly, Les Murray in Australia has adopted and promoted the long line, Shortis’s poems have a more epigrammatic immediacy on the whole than Murray’s in recent years. And unlike Murray, who once reviled Ginsberg for presenting a mandarin fake-proletarian act,63 Shortis is apparently interested in formulating a vernacular account of experience together with a passionate and compassionate view of life as the underprivileged and outcasts view it. It is tempting to add that Shortis’s view is predominantly compassionate, identifying with the subjects’ views in much of his poetry. The intelligence that governs the poems includes an ironic view of identification with the speaker’s persona/e, however. Shortis signals his sense of his own status, as teacher, academic, or simply ‘employed’ person, but not automatically as one thereby privileged. He does not try to score points for detachment. There’s little sign of pretentiousness about the poems, and he offers sincere views, for all the shifting of perspectives by his personae or masks. A poem that imitates Brecht’s “Ich benötige keinen Grabstein” makes the point clear: 63

Print (newspaper) documentation for this scabrous judgment (perhaps a reaction to Murray’s experience of Ginsberg at the 1979 Rotterdam Poetry International, at which they both read) is lost in the dusty archives, but Murray certainly said as much conversationally during one of his reading stints at the University of New England in Armidale.

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I need no epitaph But if you need one for me Put something like this on the stone: “He made suggestions We gave him a hearing”; that way We’ll all be honoured. (“I Need No Epitaph,” 13)

There’s subtle irony in this; essentially, Shortis appeals to an impulse that could be called decent, in the face of cynicism relating to poets and poetry. His sense of poetry includes awareness of the audience for whom he writes; it’s something of a slap in the face for notions of poetry being only – or mainly – expression or the release of feelings. Interestingly, too, his poems are not merely annotations for performance: they rely on giving various types of speech full weight. Shortis is a devastating parodist of those who adopt poetry as a poseur’s accompaniment or as a means to propagandize on behalf of a cause. His “Poems for Two Journals” adopt the speech of the poet seeking to contribute to separate journals. It’s not hard to identify the journals Shortis has in mind. In the first case, a ‘New Poetry’ magazine contributor brags about his drug habit, expensive tastes, quasi-criminal and counter-cultural milieu, and his poetic derived from Duncan and Mallarmé, to bring off a neat conclusion: “You never thought I had it in me” (14). The poem is an ironic tribute to the very poets he parodies. The second poem takes off a contributor to a more conservative, religiose, cultural symposium: Today is my saint’s day so I wrote this poem Hoping soon it will be your saint’s day too And you’ll feel good and print this.

The send-up is more pointed when the poem offers to agree to the terms of publication: I definitely think our Western civilisation Is decaying and that I didn’t cause it And that this could be stopped by making Every public servant and unionist write a sonnet a day. Smaller government. individual initiative Is what we need and more ab ab rhyme. (“Poems for Two Journals, 2,” 15)

The poem concludes with a reference to the “high art” interpretation of poetry by ABC radio’s regular poetry readers. Whatever voice Shortis adopts, he assumes the manner thoroughly, so that the poem here ends with a mellow statement that incidentally suggests that the ‘great’ Australian poets are addicted to

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Quiros and Stolichnaya vodka. From these cues, several contenders in the Australian college and academic poetry scene spring to mind. Shortis revisits the alcoholic intellectual (writer, poet, teacher) in several poems in this collection. A large part of the second section, “Frappo: Hairs of the Dog That Bit You, or How Not to Run Your Life,” is concerned with tracing the meandering thoughts of a drunkard academic attempting to confront his own projected image, even as he makes the image more horrifying. The character Frappo bears as his slogan the parodic “Je frappe donc je suis,” to sum up his striking-out at the universe. Among stricken elements, Frappo aims at himself, former loves, and his employers (the Australian taxpayers). This attack on the world amplifies the themes in the first part of the book. The Frappo poems single out characters who make a display of their ineptitude, and the central character is a representative of them all. It is undoubtedly a ‘first’ in Australian poetry to have taken on the building of a series of monologues relating to a figure already familiar from novels, plays or apocryphal stories about academic colleagues. Shortis’s ‘hero’ or protagonist is brilliant and volatile, but hardly derivative. He is more local product than Albee’s George in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and more memorable than Frank Moorhouse’s cleverly observed but tired, ineffectual academics in Conference-Ville. Shortis’s narrator is no tourist or voyeur of academic scenes but an individual trapped in his society’s expectations, his acquired knowledge, and the ritual associated with his job. It’s a sophisticated scheme for describing an Australian dilemma. Frappo is not a loner in the way that Francis Webb’s Leichhardt or other discoverer and explorer figures have been made out to be in our literature. Frappo is well placed to comment on the horrors of being born into contemporary society. He serves as a guide or as an exemplary and cautionary character in a domestic tragedy. It is not surprising that Shortis has considered life to be a sort of hell in previously published works. In 1981, several of his poems appeared in a broadsheet entitled Nel Mezzo del Cammin. The title, from Dante, related to his vision of an underworld of alcoholism, and drew on Martial’s view of Roman society for an additional model of reality. A key poem in the “Mezzo del Cammin” series was “The Dawn of St Korsakov,” where a character’s voluntary removal of himself from consciousness was seen to work only part of the time. The flashes of awareness were made more striking by virtue of their apparent disconnection from any ‘plot’ in the narrative monologue. A poem in the first section of Yarn, Rave and Red Herring, “To His Little Green Devils,” reprinted from the earlier broadsheet, charts the self-destruction of another poetic sensibility in the early-openers of Sydney. The persona compares his condition and prospects for survival with

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those of Australian women, Aborigines, and the poet Dransfield. The speaker is doomed to carry the knowledge that he has outlived various atrocities and tragedies, and is likely to witness more, even while he is also aware of his selfdestructive path. The monologue, another ‘rave’ referred to in the book’s title, is an identification with suffering humanity and a celebration of the knowledge of such identification. In this instance, the ‘rave’ is addressed to no one in particular or perhaps to the barman: Have another double, please. World Wars, marriage Or checking the pissy time in the morning What doesn’t get done twice? (“To His Little Green Devils,” 17)

If it can be objected that Shortis concentrates on unpleasant aspects of Australian – or general human – behaviour, it’s useful to reflect that life is not always anaesthetized, sanitized, ‘nice’, and that Shortis’s vernacular does not shy away from the stream of abusive epithets that constitutes the Australian colloquial discourse of many citizens. By the same token, Shortis’s poetry is not obscene: it engages seriously with the very issues that generate such speakers’ stream of responses to the world, and it directs the reader to the circumstances in which they occur. It is, in a very direct way, a ‘moral’ art, as the subtitle of the second section of the book suggests, and Shortis locates himself in the tradition of satire. It is worlds’ apart from pornography in attacking the trivializing influences that promote corrupting aims and destroy significance in human conduct. Here again, Shortis’s work has much in common with that of Ginsberg. Shortis’s outrage is expressed not in an extended howl but in a series of dramatic cameos, like minimalist morality plays that represent aspects of old Vice. Shortis’s focus on human loss, on the individual caught up in the process of dissolution and acutely aware of his situation, makes the personae poems into a collective Danse Macabre that constitutes an advance over contemporary poems dealing with confusion, boredom or inertia. His poetry is consistently mature and reflective, often brilliant in its inclusiveness. Underlying the poetry is a strand of affection for the unusual, whether in people or in distinctive features of locality. These aspects of particularity turn out to be characteristic of more than individual phenomena. The country-town references provoke revisions of opinion rather than agreement. Familiar ‘public’ signs of the country appear: Apex and other service clubs, country-and-western singers (mercilessly parodied for their brand of cultural cringe in “Aussie Neggroh,” 18), K-Mart, bowling clubs, and the camaraderie of the pub. Shortis also insinuates the existential dreariness of unemployment, racism, and dislocation from security (a comforting illusion).

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The self-styled quarter-caste persona of “Afternoon in the New Englander” (12) explodes the mateship myth and reinforces a patronizing cameo spelt out in “Love Poem,” where a Georgian (Hanoverian) English person addresses a partner on the preference for emigration to Australia. Short work is made of any noble sentiments attached to the European invasion or settlement of Australia, in the picture of the contemporary scene in several poems. An Aboriginal figure in a city pub or country tavern is not present to make a scene vivid so much as to recite an alternative history. Shortis hardly refers to a city–bush dialectic; the assumption seems to be that the disastrous effects of the invasion are endemic to the entire population, no matter where it is scattered. The drinker in the New Englander (speaking in lower case) observes: i’ve been up to canberra i’ve climbed round the members’ bar i’ve been spewed along the queanbeyan rsl one river bank is very much like another but some are advertised better (“Love Poem,” 10)

If Shortis’s sympathies are explicit in most of the poems dealing with ‘average’ Australians or with Australian poets, some extenuating circumstances for the characters’ personal outlooks become clearer in the Frappo poems. Shortis indicates that intellectuals necessarily carry a great weight of consciousness of their society’s workings and of their precarious place and acceptance in society. Thus, Australian poets are observed to often break under the strain: Harpur is associated with the ambitions of a demented Frappo who is convalescing from alcoholism and compulsively haranguing nurses, authority figures, or a young widow. Dransfield is presented as an ineffectual preacher of pious platitudes or as a deceased junkie. Douglas Stewart, James McAuley, and other older poets are regarded as safe, out-of-touch voices addressing an educated and presumedly diffident audience. Les Murray and others are invited to take into account less fortunate members of society; and popular singers and balladists are treated as status-seeking products of a brainwashing PR process. Religions and faiths, not unreasonably, are presented in Shortis’s theatre of illusions as denatured, emasculated fads or attention-seeking organizations designed to put minds at rest rather than offering any directions out of the confusions of society. In “Aquarian Turquoise,” Shortis compares love to mutual stalking “With the blunt bayonets of Adventure”; sex provides nothing but momentary distraction. Explicit or implicit references to love are everywhere tempered by references to isolation:

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And there’s always Loneliness – In both its Tridentine and reformed versions – A great room-emptier. When I was sober You looked different. So did I. (“Aquarian Turquoise,” 19)

Love is an unusual state in Shortis’s poetry. Generally, people are portrayed as preoccupied with self and with ironic distancing from their circumstances. Self-consciousness is heightened by a host of therapies that provide, like sexaids, a brief distraction from the unsatisfactoriness of unaided attempts at fulfilment. The ninth poem in the Frappo series, “Ted and Sylvia,” speaking of “a lack of inner resources” in relation to Sylvia Plath and even to “Keats, Coleridge, Tennyson, Berryman, / Lang Hancock of Hamersley Iron and myself,” prescribes a crash-course: I’ve spruced myself up With E ST, gestalt Therapy, Bioenergetics, Rolfing, Massage, Health Foods, Tai Chi, Esalen, Hypnotism, Modern Dance, Meditation, Silva Mind Control, Africa, Acupuncture, Sex Therapy, Reichian Therapy And Moorhouse – A Smorgasbord Course in the New Consciousness! And if I won’t do You can always find a garbage tin with good references And take it home! (“Ted and Sylvia,” 34)

The reduction of self through attempts at self-fulfilment via mail-order enlightenment or the denial of natural limitation is sharply evident. The smörgåsbord imposes a pattern on consciousness rather than shucking off ‘self’ through immersion in another. The effect – or, perhaps more accurately, the intimation – of love appears in “Frappo’s Morning Cuppa”: When you came into my life I took a sickie from irony And felt at one with the great libertines The great bludgers, the great addicts and the great strikers Of history. If I had been straight at the time I would have said it was the Tao taking a punt, The World Spirit having a threepenny fumble. O what a holiday from being Frappo And je frappe donc je suis

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The poem suggests that the hoped-for exaltation is not attainable – “If I had been straight at the time” – so the resultant dismissal predictably explains Frappo’s return to being “bent”: For too long I had been on stand-by. Now there was a seat on the plane, Your annoying practice notwithstanding Of loading my morning cuppa up with laxatives And your promises written in froth on the Macleay River. (“Frappo’s Morning Cuppa,” 27)

The final line’s pungent cynicism (the phrase being a euphemism for micturition) effectively ejects love from Frappo’s mind, and returns him to the life of self, alone again with that “great room-emptier.” With such a profound failure as Frappo, the intellectual acutely aware of his inadequacy, as central figure, Shortis’s sequence invites some comparison with Gwen Harwood’s Professor Eisenbart and Kröte poems. I suggest that the essential difference lies in Shortis’s adoption of the monologue for the framework of his poems. Further, Shortis more generally intermingles colloquial and literary modes of speech. As the appositely crude euphemism in “Frappo’s Morning Cuppa” and the conflation of Australian emblems and by-words cited in poems above suggest, Shortis comes closer to creating a figure whose tone is that of an academic lashing out at real and imagined threats and enemies. Where Harwood describes the state of mind of the drunken musician Kröte, Shortis presents a first-hand account, as it were, through a miasma of erudition, allusion to contemporary events, odd crudities, memories and warnings, signalling the disconnections, the anacolutha (or Korsakov’s Syndrome?) of the alcoholic’s ‘rave’. In such a context, the ineffectual nature of folk-wisdom’s panaceas like “a Bex, a joint and a good lie-down” are consolations of despair. If there is any ‘real’ personage behind the Frappo figure, it is perhaps a conflation of several notable drunken poets in the line of Kendall and Lawson, with the intellectual figure who is accorded an astonishing tribute: No two-pot screamer at the Absolute Was Christopher Brennan, Scrounging around on all fours round his own infinity, Australian, Impromptu, byzantine and chock-a-block with rubble – Our radiance-and-fading-starlight sniffer, Because or in spite of Mallarmé And the rest of his cheap foreign labour.64 64

Shortis, “Parramatta Road to the Cross,” in No Standing: Twelve Poets, ed. Winifred Belmont, Anthony J. Bennett & Michael Sharkey (Armidale, N S W : Kardoorair/ Fat Possum, 1980): 13.

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The Frappo poems expand the concept of the shattered intellectual “sniffer” after radiance and the Absolute. Frappo is a rejection of the heroic or romantic poet; Shortis’s character contrasts the effectiveness of the propagandist of a new poetry with that of Goebbels, disseminating ‘poetic’ reminders of defeat over France in 1940 (“Great Grandad at Room Temperature,” 40). The result of such acknowledged ‘poetic’ legislation is epitomized in the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima, a favourite emblem of the propensities of direct persuasiveness. In a 1980 broadside sequence entitled “Little Poems in prose,” Shortis arranged a series of texts concerning the Enola Gay bombing mission, and in a set of accompanying notes identified the sources of his ‘found’ poems as being notations, instructions, advertisements, and a prayer for the occasion. The first poem in that sequence was “Poetry After Robert Adamson’ (described in the note as “an outré Australian Romantic poet”), and consisted of the instructions for activating the atomic bomb. Shortis’s imagery is remarkably consistent in ascribing poetry to real occasions. His works show how poetry can be made ‘new’ by writing of old subjects in contemporary speech. Shortis characteristically ransacks the language to provide racy disruptions or interludes in a regulated monotone of ‘elevated’ diction. If the poems sometimes appear arcane or obscure, they oppose that contemporary poetry which appears to offer little more than verbal notations for a dramatic performance. Shortis’s poetry, adaptable to performance (as attested by his celebrated appearances at poetry readings), also makes demands on readers: it is a readable art, which does not rely on performance to inject intonations or ‘feeling’. The reader is invited to construct the text, and if it projects obstructions to a clear grasp of all the elements in the whole field, then the work itself images the difficulty of shedding preconceptions that is a large part of its theme. Readers are invited to take the work on its own terms, and not on those imposed entirely by readers. As such, the poetry of Yarn, Rave and Red Herring asserts and demonstrates, despite the ostensible putdown of the art by its most eloquent attacker in the volume, the communicative potential and consequent delight of poetry. Afterword Gregory B. Shortis (b. Sydney, 1945) achieved something like a cult following among poets and audiences of the New England region even before he and others created the Regional Poets Co-operative (of which he was convenor) based in Armidale, Canberra, and Newcastle. From 1974, he taught German at the University of New England. He was a renowned performer of his work at poetry festivals in Sydney, Melbourne (Montsalvat), and Launceston (Tasmanian Poetry Festival). Shortis contributed poems to New England-based journals and to anthologies, including Generally Offensive: Parodies (ed.

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Winifred Belmont, Michael Sharkey & Gregory B. Shortis, Fat Possum Press & One-Eyed Press, 1981), That Moon-Filled Urge (ed. Anthony J. Bennett & Michael Sharkey, Kardoorair, 1985), and The Contents of Their Wallet (ed. A.J. Bennett & Jack Bedson, Kardoorair). In 1981, Shortis self-published Another Double Please (Armidale). Later publications included The Comedy Human (Armidale: Kardoorair, 1997). His writing career was severely curtailed by Parkinson’s Disease. In 2010, Shortis returned to New England after several years in the AC T.

——————— Imperial Nigrescences65 ———————

G

L E H M A N N ’ S N E R O ’ S P O E M S is an ambitious collection that shows his lyric facility to great advantage. Occasionally recalling the pungencies of Juvenal’s satires and the asperity of Catullus’s and Martial’s epigrams, the poems invite reflection on interpretations of Nero made by his contemporaries and successors, and mark a pleasant turning in the attempts of contemporary Australian poets to construct ‘sequences’ of poems. We are not only familiar with single monologues on “classical’ themes (what Alan Wearne refers to as all those poems after Browning on Italian Popes) and sequences taking on various voices (William Hart–Smith’s “Christopher Columbus” standing out as a remarkably sustained work), but more recently with Peter Porter’s After Martial, with which Lehmann’s collection may inevitably come to be compared, and notably to Lehmann’s advantage at that: both collections are outstanding for their sophistication, wit, and range. The collection has drawn some detractors, of course, on account of its dwelling upon the psychology of a renowned exponent of political terror and sexual experience. In a 1981 survey, Les A. Murray perhaps mischievously pointed up thematic aspects of the poems to suggest a component of Lehmann’s personality that the Reverend Fred Nile might aptly have summed up as ‘morbid’. Lehmann’s poems could possibly appear to be so, to readers who carry away as their chief recollection the book’s blatant phallic or sexual concerns. Similar objections might be made to Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover” and “My Last Duchess,” as well as Shelley’s The Cenci, Shakespeare’s Othello, or A.D. Hope’s “Imperial Adam.” Lehmann’s Neronian vernacular does not have quite the contrived archaic diction and reserved effects of Browning: his language is blunt and terse, though the poems are as densely ironic as Browning’s in their predominant concern with art as a subject. Lehmann’s postulations on poetry are distanced by the persona of the Emperor. It is easy to be deflected from the poems’ concern with art and artists by EOFFREY

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“Geoffrey Lehmann’s Nero’s Poems,” Quadrant 28.6 (June 1984): 72–75.

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seeing them as only – or chiefly – psychological studies. Despite the disclaimer in Lehmann’s Introduction that the poems are not intended to be “of the kind Nero may have produced”66 (although Nero’s works are lost, the subtitle of Lehmann’s book may be a sop to the American market, following, no doubt, the taste for a trailer to the Caligula movie), Lehmann insists on casting the Emperor as an artist. This is to overlook or simplify the references to Nero’s personality and poetic achievement made by his contemporaries; Persius’s satires offer us lines putatively ascribed to the Emperor–poet that do not offer a flattering view. It could be, of course, that Lehmann implies that Nero’s poetry was quite deliberately ‘lost’ by hostile rivals or later critics with other reputations to create. The poems themselves, as well as the remarks in the Introduction, throw the emphasis of the collection onto a consideration of the art of poetry. From the Introduction, a statement that could require some qualification advises: “The fascination of Nero as a subject is that he seems to have been the only absolute ruler in history who regarded himself primarily as an artist” (vii). Leaving aside the magnitude of the assertion (wisely covered by “seems to have been”), Lehmann’s fascination is similar to that of Byron with Sardanapalus, of Shakespeare with Richard I I , Marlowe with Edward I I – or Milton with Satan – as architects of ordered states, who were aesthetes of no small order or opportunity. At the conclusion of “Imagined Scenes from the Second Half of My Life,” comments on “Empire” refer as much to the empire of poetry and art as to the Roman Imperium, and the toughness of the images is as bracing as that of Ted Hughes’ Crow or earlier animist and ‘animal’ poems. The metaphors are brutal and exhilarating. A late poem in the collection cataloguing Nero’s efforts to evade urgent selfpropagandizing provincial poets ends with an ambiguous identification: Unpaid, we write for friends who shun our work, and the glory of our Empire. (“The Grand Tour of Greece,” 62)

The same poem incidentally commences with a ‘classical’ though mock-supplication to the gods – of whom, as Nero elsewhere observes, he is himself one: Light bonfires on the seven hills, heap garlands on my statues. 66

Geoffrey Lehmann, “Introduction” to Lehmann, Nero’s Poems: Translations of the Public and Private Poems of the Emperor Nero (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1981): vii. Further page references are in the main text.

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Today, on my birthday, I’ll write a poem! (“The Gracchiad,” 19)

Lehmann’s wit is engaging on such occasions, which are frequent in the collection. The ‘seriousness’ of purpose is no less apparent for his foregrounding of story and mode of telling. The poems are distinguished by their asides and chatty digressions, so that it would be a failure on the reader’s part to see them as merely a version of history. The concern is with overall plot, and the collection stresses imagination and re-creation: Nero persistently, even obsessively, stresses artifice and craft. The poem “My Singing Career” takes off on the pose of the isolated artist as well as showing how it is possible for the Emperor alone to maintain that pose: My Alexandrian sailors start their antiphonal applause. What artistry! Who wins first prize? Whose face is reflected in a thousand eyes? No one else is allowed to sing. Rules must be observed. (“My Singing Career,” 60)

The poem abounds with in-jokes: on the rules of poetry, on Alexandrian verse and sexual dispositions familiar to us from Antiquity and Cavafy’s work, on the reversal of the cliché of ‘the face that launched a thousand ships’, on the hiring of claques noted by his biographers as characteristic of Nero. The passage acknowledges its own status when Nero remarks “I’m sweating. What a tour de force!” There is no doubt that Lehmann enjoys the game of reconstituting an artistic temperament while remarking on his generation of the persona. The poems are conceptual in their patterning as well as their subject, and occasionally employ loose rhyming schemes (for example, in “My Singing Career”), and circular statements. The endings are often abrupt, recalling the first line’s statement or sentential. Lehmann’s longer poems are often elaborations of the ambiguities inherent in clichés, so that “Rules must be observed” comes to represent a statement on poetical as well as political behaviour. The strategies are the same in each ‘power’ situation; Nero’s claim is a gloss on the maintenance of supreme power, the artist’s status quo. Political ruthlessness comes to stand for poetic practice. “The Grand Tour of Greece” and “The Gracchiad” indicate that Nero does not suffer rivals (like

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Gracchus or Petronius) gladly. The passing of Seneca is observed without reference to the Emperor’s invitation to him to do so (“Lament on the Death of Seneca,” 53), and we are left to contemplate the irony of the term “Lament.” What “those nasty little things” Seneca spoke were concerned with affected the Emperor closely, and he has removed a literary critic and rival at a blow. The poem addressed to Gracchus more directly invokes power: “Celebrate some of our modern gods, / myself for instance.” The anticlimactic nature of the “Lament” seems to be intentional; as well as proposing that Nero may regret his tutor’s passing (since the poem is addressed to “My friend (and tutor) Seneca”), Lehmann perhaps cannot pass up an opportunity to show off the Emperor’s inventiveness. The poem seems outrageous because it deftly avoids telling the whole story, and becomes another imperial self-advertisement. There are other instances of such ‘outrages’ against historicity, which compel us to consider how events are made into history. In other words, Lehmann’s collection consistently prompts us to question the motives of Nero’s biographers and to consider the other side of a wide question as a bonus. Nero’s chronicled depravities are not played down; instead, there is an attempt to show us a more complete account of the central character or ‘injured party’. The poems “Aqueducts” and “Aqueducts I I ” propose a broader sympathy with Roman citizens and native land in general than a contemplation of Nero’s acts against individuals might suggest. These poems, ranging over landscape and social conditions, also provide an elaboration or illustration of Lehmann’s claims for Nero as a populist and patriot in sensibility. Nero’s concern for civic works and his suggestions of veneration for the “pure / and neutral flow of water” (together with awareness of imperfections in humanity’s undertakings) humanize the historical figure and makes him credible in a different way from the poems concerning specific sexual encounters. While Nero’s world is described in terms of sexual interplay and usage or elemental bodily images that may offend readers thinking of poetry as a sort of Horatian moral instruction, the Emperor’s characteristic speech mixes the divine and the human in a jumble of sacred and profane allusions and references. The Aqueduct poems range between celebration and description of lofty ideals (religious rituals or fervour, and ‘progressive’ civic plans) and matter-offact failures. Nero’s reality is an acknowledgment of the impossibility of many aims: from the popular desire to have for an Emperor a god who is a man, and the contradiction involved in being a man acutely aware of the relationships between individual and state as well as individual and religion of the state, to the personal inability to be literally a man and a woman at the same time. Nero’s sexual

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satisfactions are fleeting, though the desire to be son and lover of his mother or sister (or a Vestal virgin, another form of incest in the eyes of Roman citizens) indicates recognition of impossibility or the vanity of wishes. “The Night of the Wedding” concludes with such a projection: “Twisting your gold ring on my finger, / I could have menstruated” (33). The poem celebrates the joy, while the final lines recall the impossibility in a way that stresses incapacity to be “my mother, little gelded Sporus, / every girl and widow, / the ladies’ Brigade / of bleeding and suffering ghosts.” The poem hinges on the conditional mood inherent in “could have.” The previous poem, “On the Beat,” is more direct about the uncertainty of performance in any pleasure. Here the continuity of suffering or disappointment is couched in another way: Savage hands drag me into the shadows. Each time I ask, do they bring joy or a knife? The savage hands … (“On the Beat,” 32)

An Emperor who is a whore is no less fascinating than an Emperor–artist. The stance or pose is another elaboration of the self-awareness embodied in the pursuit of identification or authentication in transactions with readers or sexual partners. There is no division here for Lehmann; the poem concludes: On the beachfront at night I go to meet my black god who holds my life in his hands.

The predominant concern here is not the shock-effect of the situation (which has a genuine intimacy implied in the last line) or even the shock-effect of art itself. What is at issue is a more elemental concern with the certainty of human motives (the Emperor’s own as well as those of his lovers), drawn into the final image of a predestined or determined life: “my black god” is not only a dark or nighttime lover but a domineering fatality. Nero has much in common with death, by virtue of its sway over others’ destinies. The poems convey his fatalism: he courts and seeks out circumstances where love and death may occur together. The poem exercises a wit that combines the notion of a dark god with erotic ‘dying’ – such as the Metaphysical poets might have exhibited in audacious situations constructed to demonstrate their artifice or control. Awareness of possible interpretations of the sexual pursuit assumes several formats. The brief epigrams reflect chiefly upon disappointments: post coitum

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omne animal triste est might serve for their base sentiment. The epigrams go further, though, to lambast the extravagances even of those who emulate the Emperor’s antics, on account of the lack of self-awareness displayed in their perpetrators’ mimicry or conduct. Self-awareness is paramount in “A Drunken Diatribe,” levelled at philosophers and critics: the poem admits that those who have “stuffed fair poesy” (16) unwittingly provide fodder for the artist who adopts invective. Aware also of his own would-be divine status, the Emperor directs “My Maenads,” indicating his own self-destructive course. The domestic touch, in the title of the poem and in the wine-bar’s loosened colloquial speech, is juxtaposed with an impromptu prayer or supplication commanding that the behaviour of “King Dionysus the Second” is to be copied by everyone in the Empire. The historical remark “What an artist dies in me” is kept in mind in such Dionysian references throughout the collection, yet awareness that this behaviour provides a lead for a tractable court in particular prompts disgust in Nero at his familiars and at himself. The Emperor’s affections are bestowed not on his aristocratic and immediate parasitic milieu but on the street-brat Acte and a legion of anonymous and plebeian lovers. “Advice to Young Poets” instructs would-be writers to abandon the fashionable, the family, and those who maintain illusions, particularly those concerning art and rhetoric (perhaps a swipe at the Stoic predilection for bombast – for example, in Seneca’s plays): When you’ve nothing to say don’t write. Our world has too much poetry.

Artistry is stressed (in terms similar to Horace’s injunction to poets in his Satire I.10): Revise your inspirations. From a heap of cancelled tablets Your true thought will emerge. (“Advice to Young Poets,” 66)

The ars longa, vita brevis theme informs a number of poems dealing with dreams: “Mother” (27), “Dreams” (69), and “A Vision of the Future Addressed to Emperors of the Future” (76). The disembodiment that comes of sleep or drunkenness is another aspect of the Dionysian character and self-awareness that Nero displays; a romantic commonplace, the impersonality of the poet proposed by Keats. The dream-poem is also, we might recall, a Roman device. Propertius’s arrival home after a night on the town, to speculate on his sleeping

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mistress’s thoughts, offers one such instance. In “Dreams,” the Emperor assembles images of emptiness and impossibility, to briefly mark his own route: roadside tombs a voice out of the ground a lantern carried by no one

Again, the artifice of Lehmann is apparent in the dismissal of punctuation. The collection is generally marked by an economy of effect that is initially hardly noticed. The book is counterpointed, too, with statements put through several combinations to exhibit moody interpretations; the first poem remarks: In hectic verse I’ll sing of an oyster-woman’s son with curly hair – that’s me – and embrace my girl-friend – the nation. (“Proem,” 1)

One of several marriage-pieces in the collection reflects on Roma, Amor reversed. The heart of empire is our happy bed. (“Epithalamium,” 38)

Nero’s wish that Rome might have one neck is further from our mind here than the thought that he might wish to screw all Rome by another method; his procession of lovers is also symptomatic of an impossible patriotic desire: “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori ” might be another punning reference to dying for love in his sub-text. As the “Epithalamium” also remarks, A million different skins – there’s joy Displayed in every public baths; Beauty steams from each girl and boy. Out bodies teach us what is true –

If the diction is reminiscent of A.D. Hope, the sentiment is far older; it recalls, among other expression, Petronius’s lyric on swimming, and Martial’s comments on the public baths’ personalities celebrating their pride in physicality. Lehmann’s illustration of the Neronian world, in all the poem’s settings, is a tour de force, setting up echoes of many satirists and elegists, Greek as well as Latin. The poem “For My Goddess Given by an Unknown Admirer” (25) has the spirit of Horace’s urbane celebrations of love, while the disappointment of “Octavia” (20) is expressed in a pungent dismissal reminiscent of Catullus’s farewells to Lesbia. The dismissive “Calvus” (58) and “Rufus” (17) catch the mood of bawdy verses from the Greek Anthology and Aristophanes as well as Horace’s

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satires. The social settings (for example, in “Eating with Friends,” 45, or “For Verritus, a Jockey,” 9) recollect the crowded references of Persius and Juvenal. The collection is more than an imitation. It displays easy erudition and brio, the pleasure of assembling such an imaginative world. Lehmann’s structures, cadences, and diction are impressively varied. The satires are eclectic in range and purpose, perhaps loosely demonstrating the contention that things remain the same, plus ça change. His style is metaphoric and compressed, insinuating references to a situation that is little changed in contemporary societies where supreme power is gathered to a head. The relationships among the literati and between poets and their audiences amount to a viewpoint for the entire exercise. The poems constantly recall us to the connection between art and society, and to the classical (Stoic) view, espoused by Seneca, that poetry should have a moral function. It is a brilliant device of Lehmann’s that he should have so much of the tension and interest reside in our consideration that Nero was Seneca’s student, and that, amoral as he is, he should be at the centre of the folly castigated by Suetonius and other biographers. Largely avoiding the ‘romantic’ Alexandrian flavour of Catullus and Ovid in their lyric works, and the formal rhetoric of Seneca’s tragedies, Lehmann’s Nero’s Poems is a pleasingly varied opus, both in styles and in subject-matter, presenting a convincing re-creation of the licentious court and the city’s characters. The book also showcases Nero’s and Lehmann’s affection for varieties of experience – including the awareness of how little and how much art may provide a way of dealing with it.

—————— The Persistence of Mallarmé67 ——————

T

R O B E R T A D A M S O N took place at Nigel Roberts’s house in Rozelle in Sydney, on 11 July 1984: Debra Adamson was also present, and the talk occurred shortly before those involved attended the San Quentin production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (referred to in the interview) at the Wentworth Theatre. HE FOLL OW ING CO NVER SA TIO N WITH

MS: I don’t want to go too far into the areas covered in your interview with John Tranter,68 where it seems to me there’s some antagonism underlying the whole transaction, but I’d like to talk about ideas that run through your poems. Would I be off the track to suggest they seem predominantly lyrical, and have some affinity with Symbolist concerns? 67 

Southerly 45.3 (September 1985): 308–20. Annandale, Sydney, October 1978, published in Makar 14.1 and then in Martin Duwell’s A Possible Contemporary Poetry (St Lucia: Makar, 1982). 68

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RA: I’d prefer to talk about Mallarmé; ten years ago, when John was in Singapore, or longer, twelve years ago, we wrote to each other, probably three or four letters a week, and we were very much involved with Mallarmé’s ideas. And those ideas are still interesting to me; John had been disillusioned by it all, and he says so – by this French Symbolist thing. MS: Why was that? RA: He said it was all a dead end. He wrote to me after about four years and said “Stop reading Mallarmé, it’ll drive you mad: it’s driven me mad, a terrible hiatus has come upon me, I blame it all on Mallarmé.” We were great friends as well as – I suppose you could call it – intellectual companions who were onto a similar idea. John had been reading it longer than I had, maybe five or ten years longer; and by this time he had reached a conclusion; I was in the midst of it all, and I still can’t let it go. And John keeps saying... from that interview where there is some argument.... MS: What is – and has been – your interest in Mallarmé? RA: The artefact, something totally imagined that might be sparked off by reality. You didn’t have to tie down the poem to what had happened, or what could happen, could be. Mallarmé was living in a middle-class bourgeois society that was declining, decaying – maybe a similar sort of thing to what was happening in the late 1960s, early 1970s, here. Although that’s making Australia out to be the end of the world. But there is an Australian tradition, probably from Brennan on; we aligned ourselves with it. We were in the middle of Sydney, as distinct from any other city in Australia; maybe in Melbourne it would have been better: we’ve had a similar thing down there with Hemensley and those people – and it’s interesting that a lot of those people have migrated to Australia. Hemensley, Billeter – that axis. They could identify with that tradition in Australian poetry, that probably began earlier than Brennan. MS: I wonder if they were conscious of being in an Australian tradition, any local tradition – Kendall, Brennan? RA: Tranter’s never liked Brennan at all. MS: You like Brennan? RA: I like him as a pioneer; he made it a lot easier for a lot of people afterward. MS: You could argue that everything in Australian poetry in his time seemed to be running in other directions; it was an individualist act to look to a nonBritish thing. NR: How widely distributed was his Musicopoematographoscope, that’s been republished by Hale and Iremonger?

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MS: I don’t think it was terribly well known at all. Known to poets, more likely a private thing. NR: It was known overseas? RA: Brennan wrote to Mallarmé. It’s similar to me and Robert Duncan writing to each other in the early 1970s. I was just amazed that he answered – and Brennan did the same thing. Mallarmé was in a similar position to Duncan, inasmuch as they were in another land, and we were here thinking ‘that’s the intellectual life, that’s the imaginative life’, and they probably wouldn’t be interested in getting a letter from the bottom of the world. And probably, like all poets, they don’t get many letters – and then, you answer it. Brennan was a scholar as well as a poet. MS: Yes; Brennan was interested in a German and French thing – an international coterie rather than a local one perhaps. I can’t think of many people writing poetry along similar lines that Brennan could have discussed the ideas with here, overall; he might have discussed them with historians and classicists.... RA: That’s what drove me mad with Tranter, when John became disillusioned and uninterested in the idea of it all: there was no one left for me to talk about it – Tim Thorne knew German, French, Japanese, and a whole tradition of Symbolism going on right back to the Americans, right back to Poe – but didn’t have the – it’s hard not to be personal about it all – Tim had the information, but the way my imagination worked was very different from Tim’s. I was in Sydney, and he was in Tasmania. I had something to engage with Tranter, and he wouldn’t back down on a point. It must have been about the time he wrote [his poem] “Rimbaud and the Pursuit of the Modernist Heresy”:69 I think that was the first poem after his disillusionment. I don’t know exactly what he’s doing in his poetry, because it hasn’t changed, to me, very much since he’s declared his disillusionment with Mallarmé in particular; not so much. Well, we don’t go around using words like ‘Symbolism’, putting tags on it: Mallarmé was important to us, as he was to the Black Mountain poets. He was the first imaginative poet who made poetry abstract enough to fit open forms without disintegrating, something along those lines – that made finer distinctions between art and life, I guess. His interest in style was fascinating. MS: He’s preoccupied with style: as Tranter seems to be in Crying in Early Infancy? RA: You could say the same about Creeley – and he says so himself, if you look at his early books; he’s even got a poem after Mallarmé. I got a letter from 69

John Tranter, “Rimbaud and the Pursuit of the Modernist Heresy,” New Poetry 21.5–6 (1974): 34–39.

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Duncan talking about a community of poets in the world, saying we’re falling apart. He mentioned that someone in Australia – Mark O’Connor, I think – had said all those things about me and Tranter and Nigel or whoever in Sydney – the ’69 Generation or whatever Tranter calls it – and Duncan denied this, saying it was all terrible and they’d misconstrued what he’d said; and he said “I’m not that interested in these kinds of things – I have larger things to contend with, the same as we all do: I have to understand Mallarmé before I can talk about all this stuff.” This was about two years ago (around 1982). The argument was about the Sydney-grouped poets – me, Nigel, John Tranter, Johnny Goodall, and Terry Gilmore – Free Poetry and New Poetry; and the poets that came out of La Mama, around Kris Hemensley and Billeter and those people. I guess it started with Free Poetry and then Kris’s magazines in Melbourne. And then Poetry Magazine was going along at the same time – and that was influenced by those – you know what happened – we just published what was happening anywhere in the smaller magazines, the ones that didn’t have subsidies. So that was an interesting thing in personal and sociological terms, but it was more the ideas behind it, that no one seems to have tied together, really, that I can see yet. Because it all gets sidetracked in poetry politics, personalities, and all that stuff. MS: So it could be like Mallarmé’s reaction to his society? Or Poe’s to his Virginian environment – looking for some alternative to what’s going on, or writing poetry which doesn’t necessarily directly reflect things going on outside – inventing another order, which requires to be promoted? So the politics and personalities are important but secondary to the work itself? RA: Well, that’s what I tried to do, and probably succeeded in doing. A poem like “The Rumour” tried that – as much as Hart Crane’s “The Bridge,” a poem that was against all odds at the time. The only people around at the time that I knew of or could imagine – I can only think of Tranter.... MS: Thorne, in “The What of Sane”? RA: Yeah, he was, actually – not as abstract as that, but more formally.... Tim was teaching French and German at the time. I was using French Symbolists as a starting point, to do something contemporary. It was important to us at that time to establish, as you say, another world in poetry. I was ignoring millions of political questions that were very important to everyone I lived with and who surrounded me. I didn’t really care about them; even Vietnam didn’t touch me very deeply; I wrote one poem about it, only because I could see what was happening in the world two days ago on television, which I thought was pretty startling at the time: this had happened on the weekend, and here on Tuesday night there were dead bodies on the screen. In 1969, it was an appalling thing;

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now we get it direct. Everyone else was going to demos and actively participating in opposition; I didn’t really think demonstrations would help. You’d either go and assassinate a few people in America and Vietnam or you’d give it a miss. I was young and naive, but it wasn’t that crazy. MS: You haven’t really changed on that attitude to politics? RA: I never have, actually. There’s two sides to it all. Mallarmé’s view is much more effective and always will be. I’m not going to give away too much (laughter) about politics. It sounds like anarchy, which it isn’t. MS: I’m thinking of a time when it seemed de rigueur to send a telegram to Canberra, to create some sort of work on the contemporary issue – a report of what’s happening in the backyard, rather than projecting what’s over the fence in terms of imagination: people concerned with what’s happening in poetry itself and not with society and how they can contribute to it – is that how you’d see the alternative? RA: Well, that’s how I see poetry in society. Instead of just being a propagandist, no matter how good you are at it... including Bob Dylan: he’s such an artist as well. I always thought things like “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” were more effective in putting down things like Vietnam than “Masters of War”; and that’s what I was interested in at the time. But no one could possibly believe it. I thought a whole new structure of thinking would be much more effective in poetry than poetry having to do with the individual’s statement towards the thing. NR: Bob Dylan made the language whereby other people could criticize; “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” or “Black Madonna Motorcycle Two Wheel Gypsy Queen” made the language. RA: Yeah, in a couple of interviews he said his phrasing was the only incredible thing he’d ever done. Providing the symbolism – like James Dean, America’s first teenager – for a whole generation. MS: Hm, using available language: Like e.e. cummings, taking advertising language, political speeches in the media...? RA: Going back to that thing about Mallarmé, I don’t know whether Tranter’s right or wrong. I’m losing faith in a lot of it, the way it’s gone. Talking to Michael Wilding and David Brooks, on Deep Image poetry. Mark Strand and others. Since David went to Perth I’ve been talking to Michael Wilding about this, and Michael keeps showing me examples of Beat writers, especially Kerouac – without self-conscious references to their own writings, just writing from their experience, which is blowing my mind a bit, because I can see what an easy job

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that would be to do. Because I’ve had a lot of experiences, and I have them every day: you could just go home and write them every day. I could be much more popular and much more communicative as a writer if I did that, but that would take me back to a tradition that gained strength from about Lawson, rather than Brennan, in Australian terms. I can see the value in that, and it’d be easier to do than what I’ve been attempting for the last ten years. What I was trying to do in The Law At Heart’s Desire70 was to blend the two. I think you’re more accurate in calling it lyric; the poet I identify with more in history, except for contemporary poets, is Shelley. Not because I’m an intellectual, but I’ve read the poems and in an intuitive way recognized in his writing what I would be able to do... you get an amalgamation of almost autobiographical and symbolic elements in things like “Epipsychidion,” where it’s half-true.... MS: “The Rumour” – do you see the work as something after that? RA: Yeah, or the earlier thing, “Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude.” That’s where Tranter was driving me crazy calling it nature poetry. MS: If you call it nature poetry, you could include it in the nature of the mind? How about The Law At Heart’s Desire’s preoccupations? RA: I’m aware of the cartoon-like qualities of that title. I can’t write a book, as is often the case, until I get the title. I write occasional poems between books, and when I get enough of them, I think, ‘Well, it might be time to start another book’, and until I get another title I can’t start writing the book. Once I get the title I can start writing the whole book, sometimes in a month or two months. I spent eight months trying to find a title before I got The Law At Heart’s Desire. MS: Locating the concept to hold it all together? RA: You’ve got to do it – it drives you crazy. Once I found it, I wrote it in a couple of months. NR: Doesn’t the title come last? RA: No, it comes first. DA: David Rankin came up with one, didn’t he? – Night Preaching. And Robert thought this was really terrific. Robert got this Letraset thing David made up and brought around at the moment the title was going out the window.... RA: David Rankin’s a painter, one of the first editors of the Poetry Magazine; he’s an old friend of mine. He runs Port Jackson Press. He lived in the house in Balmain where I first met Nigel and Terry Gilmore, and Dransfield and Johnny Goodall. 70

Robert Adamson, The Law At Heart’s Desire (Sydney: Prism, 1982).

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NR: How long had you been in Balmain before you met us at that stage? About a year? RA: Yes, we met at the Forth and Clyde [pub in Balmain]. It wouldn’t have been longer than a year – maybe six months. That was in 1967. MS: Back on titles: Cross The Border was a concept before it became a book? RA: I had a collection of twenty or thirty poems and I kept trying to get them into a book that I could send to someone to publish; they were published in magazines. Sections in my books are quite important to me; if I have any doubts about the title I can build a structure around sections, hedge the bets a bit. I’m trying to cut down the sections; I’d like to have one, if I could. I think I have a rhapsodic imagination; that means I have to stop a poem or it’ll go on and on. So I stop it by intervening like an editor. I can go to bed and wake up and know I can write again, but I get to the stage when I go past the point where that happens, so that in the morning I won’t write it on. I exhaust my imagination in one blast rather than spin it out over a month, or else it’ll go on and on. MS: I suppose Wilding’s ‘Kerouackian’ scheme would just have you writing all the time? RA: Oh, Wilding’s been doing terrible things to my imagination: they’re good, they’re very constructive. But he says don’t – well, he’s doing it himself – not doing drafts. Most of my poems, without exaggerating, have about fifty drafts on an average behind them. I’m not that good at writing; it takes me ages to write. I can write, but the way I see it, I keep going at it. Debra keeps saving them. Debra’s got a stack. Pick any poem there, and there’s two or three words or four or five lines in every poem that’s changed; and it just keeps driving me crazy until I get it right. But I never know if the first or the last one’s right. Michael’s been encouraging me to go on the first one: if that doesn’t work, then throw it out – which has been quite productive for me. And that’s taken me further away from the Mallarmé concept. My allegiances are with the avant-garde, which I have always loved and am a part of; and also with the traditions which I love and am part of. And for some reason or other – and I don’t know if it’s because I’m getting old, whether I seem to work on one or the other more or less, or blend them both – I can’t see how it’s possible, except this is exactly what Mallarmé did, and I can’t see many people in history doing it, making something out of both. With Rimbaud it’s totally avant-garde. MS: There’s a careful, formal side to Rimbaud’s poems – a style? RA: His facility with the craftsmanship gave him a bridge; you run into trouble with it if you’re handling the forms....

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MS: The avant-gardist comes to be fascinated with the ways that other avantgardists have done things, at some stage: an endless progression, a tradition of the new? RA: I’d go along with this, though in the discussions with Wilding, he won’t have a bar of it; it’s all ‘This is it; we know all that’, it’s ‘Let’s be aware of that, let’s get on with it and make it new’. MS: I suppose it’s a matter of knowing what it is you’re making new from that position. And it drives you back to ransacking what’s been done before, eventually – including your own stuff. RA: I’ve spoken with him about that, but now never existed before. One of the conversations I’ve had with Robert Duncan was on this type of thing, and he said to me what is the past, the present, and the future all exists now; all people that existed in the past, the present, and the future have to go through now; anyway. MS: That could provoke a sense of alarm that drives us on? RA: It’s not that with me, anyway. How do you mean? MS: There’s the impulse to go on. I can’t think of many people who seem to be happy that they’ve managed to gather it all together, so they say ‘That’s it. I’ve made the good poems about now’. It sets up a situation like Rimbaud’s. RA: Perhaps he said, ‘This is a trick I can do. I’m bored and I don’t want to do any more’. MS: Like Slessor, too. The other way is to go on with the book about your life that never gets finished, in theory.... RA: What Mallarmé called “the great work.”71 He came closer to it; he kept referring to it, but he never says he commenced it. MS: Like Pound in the Cantos. After the classical period, things like the Odyssey and the Iliad that survived somehow the burnings of monasteries and so on, everyone’s got this idea of a complete work, getting an epic together. RA: They’re generally narratives. Lyrics somehow didn’t stay intact – whether it’s the value society put on them. Sappho’s a good example for fragments, but probably, as you say, the vandals stole the handles – if it was preserved on the page. 71

“mon oeuvre, qui est l’Oeuvre, le Grand Oeuvre, comme disaient les alchimistes, nos ancêstres” (1867) [my work, which is The Work, the Great Work, as our ancestors the alchemists used to say], in Mallarmé, Correspondance: Lettres sur la poésie, ed. Bertrand Marchal (Paris: Gallimard, 1995): 345.

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MS: You disperse the community and it gets lost if it’s not in oral tradition, and then it gets transmuted, as Greek traditional songs in Australia get new words, while the melody remains, played on electric bouzoukis. RA: Yes; mentioning Sappho, only a few lines remain; but how many people have been writing in sapphics, in her verse-form? Or transmogrified forms in other ways? NR: The advantage of being unread is that you cannot rob, as it were, the culture behind you. MS: I don’t think it’s a matter of robbing.... NR: Okay, re-interpreting, re-inventing.... MS: You can ignore it, or undervalue it.... RA: This reminds me of a pop-writer who was summing up Boy George. He said he’s this guy who’s half-and-half pretty dumb and pretty smart, who’s got the knack of being able to go back to all the cultures and pick off whatever he likes, and put them together in a style, a style of clothes, style of lyrics. NR: I’d disagree with that – where’s Dinah Shore, Rudy Vallee? MS: It’s always selective. I don’t think many artists come out of a vacuum, do they? It’s a bit like Marcel Duchamp’s notion of a readymade: you try things on, see if you like them, shuffle things round? NR: But the past does need to be plundered! MS: As Elgin thought? ‘Plundered’ is a loaded word.... NR: Go at it boots and all! RA: Lowell calls it imitations, transmogrifications. NR: What about the argument that you, by your translations of Mallarmé or Yves Bonnefoy, were making a new poem out of your lack of French? RA: It wasn’t exactly that, either, because one of my best friends is an expert in French, and went through them with me and told me what the originals were. I also read the Penguin prose translation and every translation I could possibly find, and I had a translation from German; it was really an homage to Bonnefoy. NR: Read us the worst poem in your Selected Poems.... MS: What if we did that to anyone at all? RA: Here we are, “The Rumour.” The epigraph is to a lady who, with her husband, was the first one arrested for going against the Vietnam war – Simon Townsend, that was Simon Townsend, that was the husband, now on Simon Townsend’s Wonder World. Mary Jane was always on television promoting his

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belief in the whole thing; he didn’t resist the draft, really, he said: “No, come and arrest me,” and went to jail. That was in 1966 or 1967. I got to know her because of a woman I lived with at the time, Denise: they were both teachers at the same school. MS: Were you eligible in that lottery? RA: No. I was in jail. I was in Maitland. Her Majesty’s Prison, the whole time. In the Second World War, they got out the prisoners in Darwin and said, ‘Right, you’re in the Army’, but that changed. What they do anywhere in the world, if it comes to attack on your shores, is to get out the murderers and rapists, who are the greatest soldiers in the army, because that’s what they’ve been doing all their lives. DA: The regular ones are just mercenaries. RA: Yes; this treatment of prisoners seems to be quite a patter in several wars. We looked it up in Hansard. Some sociologists thought these people would be the best in a war, because in a time of peace the ones who are violent in society are being locked up for being aggro, and when a war’s on they’d be the ones in the front row. MS: That’s an interesting assumption, isn’t it? That society’s all right: ‘You’re not normal, but when we all go abnormal together, you can join us’. RA: If society’s not all right, then those guys are right; they’ll always be at odds. NR: I can’t understand why it’s the young who are always sent to war. What a cunning ploy it is, what a dirty ploy. In fact, it should be the people who have some property, something to protect or to lose, that should be going out there. You know, the more property you have to protect, the closer you are to the front lines. RA: That’s a very practical point of view, and it’s dead right. What’s happening at this play tonight? [Waiting For Godot] MS: I can’t help thinking of it from the point of the people on stage. They’ve got all these people who pay to come there and watch them: it could constitute a good Grotowski-type joke – they’re thinking ‘God, this audience is performing badly tonight’. RA: That’s what happens. NR: He pays people to do that? MS: No, but in some performances, there’s a limited small number in the audience, and the doors are closed and there’s no intermission. If you think about it,

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he’s abstracted the relationship properly: the people in the theatre are the prisoners of the playwright. NR: Just as you’re a prisoner of the book? MS: Yes, and it’s interesting to enact the relationship, in theatre. You can arrange the audience in jury-type seats along the sides of the stage, to push the joke further – judging the execution or funeral proceedings. RA: We’re back to Mallarmé’s relationship with the reader! MS: Yes, as in his tomb poems; the reader’s in there, too. RA: Yes, that’s what they are like; every poem’s an abyss. There’s no front, no middle, there’s no end; they’re black holes in poetry. What frightens me is that there’s an element of fascism in it, because Mallarmé is deliberately orchestrating whoever is reading it. NR: To make, to do something, is a fascist act, then? That’s what he’s saying? RA: No, making this, knowing in his mind this is a trick, and if anyone gets involved in it there’s no end to it. He’s created an artefactual thing. NR: What if someone says ‘Bullshit’, rejects an artefact he’s made? RA: Then they haven’t been sucked into it, haven’t gone deep enough. MS: They haven’t taken his words and arrangements for what they signify, a sort-of pleasurable thing, but for something else; it’s an evasion, but they call it rejection. NR: What about someone saying that about a painting? ‘That’s a bad painting!’? MS: That involves a similar issue... and ‘bad’ complicates things.... RA: If you’re interested in poetry, or painting, you’ll look to see the artist’s own scale of things... particularly if it’s a spin-off from the mainstream. MS: It’s like trying to see from the arrangement of symbols how you’re going to see it? The whole game of the poem is to see how many ways you can get the audience in.... NR: There’s just something in it that says, ‘I want to tell you this, show you this’. MS: Look at the epigraph here [epigraph to the section “The Home, The Spare Room” of Adamson’s The Law At Heart’s Desire, taken from Mallarmé]: There must be something secret in the depth of all things; I firmly believe in something abstruse, meaning enclosed and hidden, which inhabits the generality; for, as soon as this mass is precipitated towards some trace that what is obscure is a reality, existing, for instance, on a leaf of paper in some piece of writing or another – not in oneself, it becomes

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excited profusely and flagrantly like a storm jealous of ascribing shadows to anything at all.

The work disappears into itself, like Mallarmé’s poem on Edgar Allan Poe. He speaks of this “calme bloc” – “ici-bas chu d’un désastre obscur”; it’s admirable, with that optimism about the game? RA: Magritte does that, in a great majestic routine, almost like [Bonnefoy’s] “Theatre.” Of its very nature, though, an avant-garde can’t last longer than a decade. NR: ‘A magazine, ten issues’ – Sharkey’s point of view. RA: Someone like Richard Brautigan; his span is about ten years, popular avantgarde novelist; does he sell any more? MS: I’d bet he does. Or take, as an example here, Moorhouse? RA: Yeah, yeah, Frank isn’t being avant-garde any more. NR: And gone into film.... RA: Yes, he’s made a transition, so he can have his integrity; he doesn’t have to go back to what he’s done. You can’t just go from one to the other, there has to be a transition. Do you have to stop being avant-garde? Unless you can be like Duchamp.... NR: Duchamp allows new editions of his work, though. There are twenty or fifty models of the chair with the bicycle wheel; or fifty toilet bowls signed ‘R. Mutt’ around the world. In allowing the re-creation, he goes against the tenets of what he’s done. MS: Or he advances art into including areas of advertising and mass-production? Making it available to everyone? RA: He’s turning literal things into abstract things. MS: It’s interesting, the dissolution of a movement like Surrealism.... RA: That’s a short-lived movement, too. MS: Yes, how long does it take for a Breton to rise and fall? RA: To date? Surrealism stopped being Surrealism and became modern advertising. MS: Yes, about the same time. Cummings brings in advertising clichés to his work.... RA: I’ve looked into it, but not to think about… it’s really weird that I haven’t gone into him as a major contemporary poet....

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NR: “How do you like your blueeyed boy / Mister Death.”72 RA: It’s a bit like turning off Mallarmé when his work hasn’t been gone into. Something like that happened with John Tranter. He knew it and understood it, though, and got to dislike it, and then said ‘It’s not what I thought it was’ – sortof disowned his experience of it, saying that Symbolism means witty people that can write in an ironic way, and it’s a con. But he’s forgotten what it was that he was into earlier, in a way, because it’s like having an idea without the experience. It’s like when Rimbaud gave up poetry for no apparent reason. John was like that: “I gave up reading Mallarmé – because if I don’t deny it, I’ll do things I don’t really want to do in my own work” – or in life itself, I suppose. I’ll ask him that.... MS: This poem “Because she comes so often”73... . RA: It’s saying I’m equating a burst of the imagination with an orgasm; and it’s also trying to give you an example of how the process works. Saying this is how a poet likes making love to the page as much as making love to his woman; you know it works well enough but you wonder what on earth anyone else will make of it. MS: It spells it out clearly enough, though, from the word-play in the title through the pauses in the work. NR: That was the whole trouble with ballads – it just rolls off the tongue, it plods.... RA: It could become so rhetorical you could hardly hear what’s happening. MS: In the oral tradition there was probably a need for that rhetoric; it breaks when technology takes over, or dwindles. In writing, like here, you’ve got the chance to embellish the edges a bit. RA: Yes, Bob Dylan still uses the old form of the folk-ballads; they’re still basically iambic pentameters – but he varies it by phrases. MS: In Dylan’s Rolling Stone interview,74 he emphasizes how, when he got out of rock music in a school band and into folk-music, he started to sing songs that don’t change; he was sick of hearing folk-singers do songs they’d written them-

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“Buffalo Bill’s,” in cummings, Complete Poems (London: Macgibbon & Kee, 1968), vol. 1 [1913–1935]: 60. 73 Poetry Magazine 18.2 (April 1970), repr. in Adamson, The Rumour (Prism Poets; Sydney: New Poetry, 1971). 74 Jan S. Wenner, “Bob Dylan Talks: A Raw and Extensive First Rolling Stone Interview,” Rolling Stone (29 November 1969).

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selves and calling them ‘folk’. The folk-singer is the one who preserves the wordstore – as Mallarmé says the poet should do. RA: Dylan says that in an early song [“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”]: “I’ll know my song well before I start singing.” That’s exactly what he means; he knew the form before he started to write. MS: In poetry you get a multiplicity of things; as the media expand, you get the full-blown rhetorical experimentation, an explosion. RA: This is one of the things Mallarmé emphasizes – that a poem doesn’t exist in the air, or as a concept, but on the page as well; that’s why he used that elaborate spacing; if people heard it without seeing it on the page, they couldn’t appreciate it fully. MS: In the eighteenth century there was a Russian poet [Vasily Trediakovsky, 1703–69] doing a similar thing, using capital letters in odd arrangements, organizing different typographical layout. He was known to the Russian Futurists, Malevich’s contemporaries, who were doing similar things. RA: He must have been something like a Russian version of Tristram Shandy! MS: Yes, I suppose, too, that he may have thought of the typography of illuminated manuscripts in monasteries, with large capitals and so on, and decided to adapt contemporary print technology. RA: Billy Jones has the idea of illustrating his work, writing the script. A lot of people reading Billy Jones – Geoffrey Lehmann would read him; Shapcott does, I know for a fact – see him as one of the great naive poets; he doesn’t fit in with Les Murray and Geoff Lehmann’s scheme, that generation. When he sends a poem for New Poetry, he’s acutely aware of what he’s putting into a poem. He’s editing; Bill edits them so well, so these things you usually see are quite amazing. Bill fractures the image a bit, so you do remember these things that are around, like a spoon upon the table.

——————— Starting from Ulverstone75 ———————

T

T I M T H O R N E , a third window on the consolidation of the Australian New Poetry, was conducted at Simon McDonald’s house at 1 Elsie Street, Boronia, on the evening of 10–11 December 1984, towards the end of the Montsalvat Poetry Festival. Simon McDonald, publisher of Wildgrass Press, was present and contributed several questions. The topic was Tim Thorne’s career as a Tasmanian poet and contributing editor of the periodical New Poetry (the platform for what John Tranter and others called ‘the New Australian Poetry’). Applauded by some and HE FOL LO WING INTER VIEW W ITH

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Trans-Tasman Undercurrent 1.1 (1986): 69–76.

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reviled by others, the journal did have, as Thorne points out, a solid establishment position among the many little magazines of the period 1970–84.

MS: When did you first run into the characters involved in the Great Australian Poetry Takeover – those who moved into the Poetry Society of Australia and the editorship of the journal? TT: Well, in September 1967, I shot through from Ulverstone in Tasmania, and decided I wanted to be a poet. And so I lobbed into Sydney. I’d never been to Sydney before, didn’t know a soul there; and after about six weeks, I suppose, or a couple of months, I hadn’t met any other poets, I didn’t have a job, I didn’t have any money. I’d pawned me tranny, and I hadn’t written a bloody word. It was only pride stopped me from telegramming my parents. So anyway, I went to one of the demos, and there was a party back at Bob Gould’s Bookshop afterwards, and I met this lady and we shared a flagon and she had a girlfriend and the bloke she was with had a sister who knew where there was a party; so we piled into this old Holden and lobbed into Balmain. There was no party at all. There was just this room full of poets. And I was sitting there, talking – and Dave Rankin was there, and he kept asking “what do you do?” And I said “I’m a storeman.” But he said “Yeah, but what do you do?” “Load trucks, unload trucks, keep track of the stock in the bins” – “But what do you do?” And that’s when the penny dropped, and I said “Oh, fuck, I know what you mean – I write poetry,” and then he turned to this sort-of scruffy little anaemic curly-headed guy sitting across the table and said “Bobby here, he writes poetry too” and I thought, ‘Oh yeah, he writes poetry’: you always get people who say ‘I write poetry, too’ – a line I’ve heard more than any other. And it was Adamson. And anyway, Dave took me around to the flat that I had in Glebe, this little hole in the wall – and I grabbed my exercise-book with all the longhand poems in it and came back. Bob was working on “Jerusalem Bay”; he’d been working on it for about a year then, several versions. He wrote that poem a lot, and I read that; it was really good, that version – at whatever stage that was; and it kicked off from there. And then they told me about the Poetry Society, and how they had all this money from the New South Wales Government and the Commonwealth Literary Fund, and they were paying them to run workshops and put out this magazine, and that was just all there. And around about the same time, although of course we didn’t know this at the time, a lot of the little magazines were starting up. MS: Which magazine was this they were working for? TT: Poetry Magazine; this was after the split with Grace Perry. She hived off and formed Poetry Australia. Roland (Robinson), J.M. Couper, and Adrian Colman

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basically were the Poetry Society, along with Ella Turnbull, who did the postal workshops; and a lady called Ferma McLean, who lived at St Ives. 76 MS: And Joan Mas?77 TT: Joan Mas was involved, yeah, right; and, oh, a couple of others, including Bill Hart–Smith and a guy called Duncan Miller – that’s right. And there were others, though I can’t recall their names just now, and they were all sorts of old people, you know, they were sort-of over forty! Well, some of them really were ancient; I mean, Ella Turnbull must have been sixty at that stage. I don’t know ... but they seemed old to us at the time. And, well, we thought, ‘This is terrific’ – because this was 1967 or early ’68: it was a great time for having a pet radical around the place, and Adamson and I and a few others seemed to fit the bill pretty well. So we were welcomed – a bit of young blood – and we just sort-of moved into the jugular, and took advantage of the fact the Roland wasn’t too keen on any of these academic shits anyway. Roland never had any time for the academy, and so it was Roland and Joan and Bob and myself with a few other people – Vicky Viidikas, Bob Gray, Dave Rankin, John Blay, Kerry McRae, Kerry Leves, and a few others – Patrick Alexander used to come along to the workshops – and Robyn Ravlich and Tranter, although Tranter always stayed a little bit out of the actual magazine scene. When that many poets meet, the whole scene sort-of grows. About the same time, Craig Powell was running some workshops for Grace’s magazine Poetry Australia, at Sydney University. We used to meet at New South Wales University; there’s some crucial Sydney dichotomy there, I think, something I’ve never been quite able to fathom. We turned up there – that’s how I met Tranter, actually, this guy sitting up the back of Craig Powell’s workshop, and he came up with these terrific poems. About the same time, Rodney Hall had just taken over [as poetry editor] on the Australian, and he started publishing Dransfield. I remember one Saturday morning waking up in Balmain and getting the papers, and here’s this poem by this guy called Michael Dransfield. Nobody had ever heard of him, and there’s this bloody brilliant poem. Nigel Roberts and Terry Gilmore put out Free Poetry, and at the same time, totally unknown to us, this whole scene was going on in Melbourne – because La Mama had started up about the same time, 1968. There wasn’t really much 76

Ella Turnbull, d. 1973, was the editor of two volumes of verse for young children; Ferma McLean, 1923–2003, published The Old Inn and Other Poems in 1991. 77 Joan Mas, 1926–74, poet and editor, was the subject of Roland Robinson’s third volume of autobiography.

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contact, except right at the end, about November 1968: I came down, hitched down from Sydney with a load of magazines. Oh, and Tipping and Rob Tillett had started up Mok in Adelaide; again, not knowing; and Tranter had started up Transit. MS: It seems to have been pretty spontaneous, all over. It was starting, in small measure, in just about every place you could think of. I discovered, for example, when I got to Armidale in 1977 or later, that there had been magazines running at the Teachers College and around town in the earlier years; and Launceston or Hobart must have been part of it early, too. TT: Yes, there was even one, I found out, when I got back to Launceston in 1969, that a group of kids I used to teach at Ulverstone had started. It was called Peter Finke. I guess this explosion was facilitated by the development and availability of cheap printing methods, but, while that partly explains the mags, it doesn’t explain the poetry, or the readership. What was happening was a realization by our generation that something could be done to bring together two concepts: the first, that poetry was a crucial, very central aspect of human life, our lives, and not just a bunch of dead words to be studied, or some highbrow form of Scrabble; and, second, that the printed (or spoken – there were a lot of readings as well as the magazines) word existed as a vehicle for contacting everybody else out there who needed or wanted or would benefit from the energy, the messag e/ medium that both informs and constitutes poetry. If they, the ‘academics’, the establishment and effete, could publish and be applauded, so could we: there was a fair bit of ego-tripping in this. Ken Fields once said (in ’71) that most people who enrolled in creative writing school did so because they wanted to be Mick Jagger. We were the young bulls challenging the old. But the sense of urgency was much more widely felt than it seems to have been at any time since the old Bulletin days of the 1880s. Australia in the late ’60s happened to be one of those places and times where things came together and ‘clicked’. The reasons for this can be traced back through such factors as Vietnam and sex/drugs/fashion mores, ultimately to the economics – the upheavals of capitalism in the early ’60s. More specifically, we were all disgusted at the quality of ‘accepted’ Australian poetry. So much of it was just sloppy. No-one seemed to be even using rhymed iambic pentameter in an interesting way. There was no Antipodean Larkin or Winters, let alone anyone who seemed to have picked up anything from Browning, Mallarmé, Hart Crane. We’re talking about damn near a century of poetry –

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the most prolific century in history – which might just as well have been banned from this country, for all the evidence in local writing. People have written about the American influence (meaning O’Hara, Ashbery, Duncan, McClure etc.) but that wasn’t really important until later. I’d never read any of those guys in ’68. Adamson hadn’t. Perhaps Tranter had. Any contemporary American influence was much more indirect, culturally diffuse – Warhol, Dylan, James Dean, the Chicago 7. Later we read Olson, Creeley, Dorn, etc., and that added a further dimension to our knowledge of what poetry was about, but the ‘Americans’ (for me at least) meant Whitman, Sandburg, Lindsay, Aitken, Frost, Pound. Nothing in terms of technique that hadn’t been available to the older generation. The Beats were probably the exception. I’d read Alvarez’s little anthology78 in ’62 and it had made a big impact, but I’d never been convinced that, technically, Ginsberg represented much more than a logical progression from Whitman. Sure, things changed. Donald Allen’s anthology79 had come out in 1960. Alvarez came to Sydney in ’68 and talked about Lowell and Plath. The magazine ran articles in the early ’70s on Ashbery, Duncan, Kinnell, but that was fuel to an already raging fire. I mentioned Vietnam. We were anti-American. We were building (though not in any consciously nationalistic way) an Australian poetic because there had been none. I think its best fruits were quite different from what came out of the States, just as, say, Silkin and Harrison were different again. What was similar was that something was happening. Anyway, I went back to Tasmania; I kind of stepped out of the scene, because there really weren’t all that many people in Tasmania. I got to Sydney and Melbourne when I could afford it. But the scene in Sydney with New Poetry really took off, because we had this great advantage. Okay, little magazines are terrific things, and it was great they were happening; but we had the mailing list; we had the big government grant; we had the magazine with a spine (well, I think that came about 1970). We had the big magazine, and the international contacts; we had the libraries already stocking us. We had the biggest little magazine in the world. That was great! MS: How many were on the mailing list? TT: Well, when we first took over, I think there were less than a thousand. There were eight hundred and something; I can’t remember exactly. It was only at the end of ’68 that we actually took over. It was coming out every two months then, 78 79

The New Poetry, ed. A. Alvarez (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962). The New American Poetry 1945–1960, ed. Donald M. Allen (New York: Grove, 1960).

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six times a year. It wasn’t until the end of ’68 that we were actually putting out our own issue, because they had already accepted a lot of stuff and they had a backlog. Tricia Davies [Tricia Harrison–Ford now] was involved; she was the Treasurer, and Sue Hunt was Secretary, and they handled all the shit – I mean, it was a real chauvinist division; you know, you wrote the poems and published each other, and your ladies did all the hard work. That was how it was at first. And then, after I’d left, physically left, but was still sending stuff up and drumming up stuff and so on from Tassie, Carl Harrison–Ford came in, and Ken Quinnell. Ken was very good, and so was Carl: they were both very good on the production side. Ken knew all about layout, graphics, and all that sort of stuff, and he actually taught Bob Adamson a lot of what he knows, about how to put a book or a magazine together and so on. Ken did things like editing the plumbers’ journal and that sort of trade work: he knew his onions. So Roland got a bit uneasy, because all these people were moving in: the academics were starting again! Because there were people like Greg Curthois, Don Anderson, Carl Harrison–Ford. MS: Terry Sturm wrote an early thing about concrete poetry.80 TT: Terry wrote a bit later, yes; at this stage it was still before the big split with Roland. And Roland could see them – he was probably quite right, but his old nemesis was there – it was the new generation of academics, and it was the American orientation that he didn’t like at all; and, of course, Carl was very strong on that. I mean, Carl must have been the best-read person in Australia on contemporary American poetry, because he had a lot of contacts over there, and he was getting stuff hot off the press from Black Sparrow and all these places in the States. So I got a letter – I wish I had kept it; I thought I had – a few great letters that I had from Roland, but there was this classic that talked about “that ingrate Adamson, Carl Hyphenated Ford, and the lean grey wolf Quinnell.” And I though, ‘Jesus, what”s happening here?’ you know, because – I remember hitchhiking up to Sydney in May ’69 – school holidays – to help consolidate the takeover, because they needed every vote for the A.G.M. And at that stage, Roland was still on side, and a series of people would come in and work on the magazine for a while – Terry Sturm was one of the first, after this period. And then Bob married Cheryl, and Cheryl had a few contacts with different people, and they came in, but nobody lasted very long. There’d always be a blazing row between Bob and somebody, and Bob would always come out with the magazine. Which was fair enough; I mean, the amount of work and time that Bob put into 80

Terry Sturm, “Perspectives on Concrete Poetry,” New Poetry 19.3 (1971): 9–20.

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it single-handed was amazing. The thing kept going for ten years, really from about ’71 to ’81. A lot of it was Bob and Cheryl in that period, but a lot of it was just Bob. And (laughter) some of it was just Cheryl, when Bob was too wiped out to do anything. I mean, a couple of issues Cheryl just did, you know. That upset a lot of people, because Cheryl was the kind of lady it was easy to get upset by; and Bob… well, it just got too much for him, really. MS: What was Robert Gray’s place in the events? TT: Bob used to come to the workshops and the readings, and he gave us stuff for the magazine; in fact, his first book was in that Lyre-Birds series of Roland’s. And so he was sort-of one of us. He was of our age, and I’ve marched alongside of him in demos. It always struck me with Bob – I reviewed his first book and I said this – and I haven’t seen anything in his poetry that’s really changed my mind – that he’s a good craftsman, but not always. I think he’s a bit sloppy at times, and he never manages to get the subject into the bloody poem. I mean, some of the stuff he wrote – the idea is there, and he can manipulate words, he does some nice line-breaks, he’s got some nice tight images – but there’s always that hiatus between the skill and the real guts of what he wants to get across. It’s strange, because he’s genuine; he’s a very sincere, genuine guy in the concerns that he’s got, but he never sounds it, and he always manages to sound as if he’s playing dilettante with it, and it’s not because he is, but he just doesn’t seem to have that ability to marry his skill of writing to what he wants to do. SMcD: When did it change from Poetry Magazine to New Poetry? TT: That would have been pretty well straight after Roland left; the first issue of ’71. I think it must have been about a year after they came out with the spines. That was when the subscription list bloody escalated. I think at the height – that would have been about ’73, ’74, the acme in terms of circulation – it would have been about three thousand. SMcD: How’s it going now? TT: (Laughter) It’s dead. It’s gathering dust in the back of Roger Barnes’ printing works; or they’ve all been commandeered by the income-tax man. It’s a sad, sick story; and I don’t know enough of the details, because no bugger will tell me what’s going on: I’m only an editor. About August ’81 was the last issue most people have seen, and that was a double issue, with Bob doing this total Rodinon-Quaaludes front cover, you know: ‘I’d be “The Thinker” if I could get my mind together’. It’s a great photo; it’s the ultimate photo of the editor of a poetry magazine ... and it’s all coming down on top of him! Anyway, that was 1981. And then Bob went down to Bermagui – he just had to get a break from it. If only

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there had been someone else prepared to put in the work when Bob was away for that year, it probably could have kept going. SMcD: What sort of work was entailed? TT: There’s a lot of crap work to go on with; you’ve got to answer mail; people write in enquiring about things; and layout, typesetting. He used to do the typesetting and layout himself. You know he bought a typesetting machine and did that himself? MS: Or put a deposit on it? TT: And conned the Lit Board into fixing it when it broke down (laughter). The last thing I saw of it, it was being carried away to Sydney University. I think that I BM had actually been paid for it, but God knows; I mean, the bank managers weren’t too happy about all this. Bob would be the first to admit he’s – you know – as an accountant, he makes a good editor; he just shouldn’t be given that job; he’s just not interested in handling money and keeping books. It shouldn’t be a prerequisite for a poet! So: that side of things got pretty disorganized and about that stage I went back to Sydney, in early ’83. And no one has seen an issue for eighteen months now. Up until ’81 they came out pretty well – a month or two late, but they had their four issues a year, pretty regularly, and that was cool; everybody was happy. Their subscription list had gone down: it was still over one thousand, but it was closer to fifteen hundred than three thousand at this stage. And then, you know, when you don’t get anything for your money for a year, you hesitate before you write your next cheque – and that was the problem. And the letters were coming, and it was all getting too much for Bob, and so I stepped in and did a bit of work, and Terry Gilmore did a bit of work, and we got Bob to do a bit of work; Michael Wilding took a lot, too. We got all this mail answered and we sorted out an issue. Bob did some typesetting on this issue, a double issue he’d been working intermittently on for some time. The [Literature] Board said it was the last straw; if we didn’t get that out, that there was no way that he was going to get another grant. So we got it out – well, in the sense that we got it printed. Contributors – well, most of the contributors – got half a dozen copies each. There was an understanding that no one would get paid – because there wasn’t any money in the kitty at all; and people were told that, when they were told that their poem was accepted; you know, ‘Do you still want to do it?’ So that was fair enough. That was a kind of benefit issue for the magazine as far as the poets were concerned, to get it back on its feet again. And from then on, there was a minimum payment of ten dollars a poem; you were going to get paid. That was the stage where we talked to Roger Barnes. He talked to the Lit Board,

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and he got the money for four more issues. And I believe that there was this sort-of tacit understanding, that although they stipulated four issues, if you got out three, nobody would kick up too much of a shit. That was sort-of inside information – obviously, they’re not going to deny it or otherwise. But that was far better than they’d been getting for the last couple of years, anyway (laughter). Anyway, so we did. Terry and I worked on the next issue, which was the Woy Woy issue – which is a bloody nice little magazine, it’s really good, with a Garry Shead cover that came out nicely. Of course, that was the other thing Bob had done for the magazine: because of his contact with artists: he got some great covers and some great illustrations in those years when the magazine was fat and healthy-looking. There was some nice artwork in there – a real mixture of people – Adam Rish, Gary Shead, quite a lot of others. Anyway, that was the issue. Then I did another issue, which was those who couldn’t fit into the Woy Woy issue, plus some other stuff that I’d conned off people and just found, by magic, in the post-office box and that sort of thing. And then there was more, almost enough for another issue. And at this stage, at the end of ’83, I came back to Tassie, and then I sent that copy back – because they wanted to get the other issues all typeset and ready; and this was for the third of the four issues. So that went back to Sydney, and Michael Wilding and Bob put together another issue, because they had some stuff as well, from Sydney. And they put that together, and that was the one that your poems were in, Michael, that you’d sent, which were in the batch I’d sent to them. So everybody that had sent something in that twelve months had been answered and told they’d been accepted or rejected or they were being put on hold, if there was a case where we weren’t sure if we could fit it in or not, but liked it. So everybody knew where they stood. They were also told, ‘You’ll get paid for this’ and ‘We’re an ongoing concern’. And that’s the last that I’ve heard. At that stage, the last two issues were typeset, and I still don’t know if they were printed. The other I know was printed, because I’ve got my own copy of it. I’m one of the few people in the world who had a copy of it sent, which I thought was a decent thing to do, to send the editor a copy of the magazine he’s edited! That was really nice. Mind you, I had to remind them I was the editor, and would they send me a copy. Well, as I’ve said, nobody’s seen anything else, and the whole thing is just bloody fruited. So, the sad thing is, all magazines die; they all have a lifespan; somebody once said ten years. Well, we’re well ahead of the odds, because it started in 1950. It was called Prism, and I’ve actually seen it – Barbara Thwaites has this news-

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paper clipping from the Sydney Morning Herald with a review of the first issue, Volume One, Number One of Prism. MS: Tell me, how was Prism Poets funded? TT: There were two series. They were funded by the Lit Board. That was in the days when there was a bit of money around. The first series was ’71, the little ones. They were cheap; I mean, they were dollar books. MS: Did they flow on from Lyre-Birds? TT: No, not really. Roland wanted to revive the old ’40s and ’50s Lyre-Birds, but that was ’68. Roland said “How about giving us a manuscript, we want to get these Lyre-Birds going.” I’d never had a book published before, and it sounded like a good idea; so I gave him one. And there was one of Joan’s – Isis in Search. I can’t remember the order now: Wilhelm Hiener (as distinct from Heine!) – this jovial South African guy, who wrote witty and tight, clever, little traditional stuff; Bob Gray’s first book. MS: Peter Skryznecki? TT: Yes (is that how you pronounce it?). There were two lots, but they were all within about twelve months or eighteen months of each other. Lyre-Birds were the little stapled limp-cover things, about a dollar or something. The format, the idea of keeping them cheap, and the fact that they were associated with New Poetry: there was continuity with Prism books to that extent, but the personnel were different. Roland was Lyre-Birds as far as impetus and doing things and getting it done was concerned, although technically it was a writers’ cooperative. MS: Roland was always quite obsessed with typography and design, too.... TT: Yes, he was very keen on that, yeah – and so was Joan; she had a lot of ideas about that sort of thing, too. But Bob was always fascinated by the book as object, as work of art. It goes back to his training as a pastrycook – presentation is part of the whole scene. MS: That was his first job? TT: Yeah (laughter), in one sense of the word. In the first Prism series there was Robyn Ravlich, Charles Buckmaster, myself.... I left for Stanford just as that came out, and there was Bob’s own, The Rumour. He had put his first book out earlier, which he did with [the Italian-born Sydney abstract artist] Franco Paisio. Franco put up the money, and Bob and Franco worked together. That, I think, was a good book. Just from the production and payout point of view, you could see it had the Adamson stamp, the quality to look at; the poems were damned good, too – Canticles on the Skin. Yes, there were four, and that was about ’71.

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MS: Then there was a hiatus for a while? TT: Yes. They weren’t much of a go, financially. That was a period when there were problems, you know, people coming in and leaving. Some didn’t want the idea of books, they just wanted the magazine, and there were certain factions. I never found out the full story, since I was away in that crucial period, and the rest of the time I was back in Tassie, and I didn’t want to know about that, I just wanted to write poems. It would have been about ’75 that they started up the next series; it might have been ’74. It was at that time that they did a series of readings at the Opera House, where we got packed houses to every reading, got a subsidy, and still lost money! – and charged a reasonable amount at the door – because the Opera House costs so bloody much! But still, it was worth doing: they were great readings, fantastic readings – the real formal reading, the full works – and good poetry. MS: Adamson’s idea of presentation again? TT: Yes, right, the oral version of the well set-out book. And we got Ross Ryan [singer], Bomber Perrier [Robert “Bomber” Perrier, artistic director], Jeannie Lewis [singer, performer], the Margaret Barr Dancers – a couple of non-poetry acts for each reading. I only saw two of them; there were four. I came up to see one of them, and then I came up to read in another one. That was about September in 1975. We flogged the books at the Opera House readings, and I can remember going to – I wrote a short story about it – another version of the Jack Kerouac Wake, which was held in the bowels of the Opera House, starring Billy Jones. The story was a bit fictionalized, but one bit in that story contains the memory I have of driving down from Hawkesbury with Cheryl and Max Williams, who was staying with them at the time – and flogging these books: Sylvia Kantarizis’ book, and Max’s book, and probably Dorothy Hewett’s book, too. MS: Jennifer Maiden was included in that series? TT: Jenny Maiden’s book The Problem of Evil was one of the first of that lot, too. There were some strange things in that series; I thought they were fantastic books. Some people brought out their first books in that series – good books – and they’ve never written anything since. Kerry McCrae’s book [The Amazing Scaffold, 1975] was one of them: I thought there was some great stuff in that. I think he’s deliberately given up writing, as far as I know: somebody told me once he’d gone to live on top of a mountain somewhere. Stephen Murray’s book [The Dragon Principle, 1975] – that was another – that was a heavy, very fascinating sort of book because of the way he approached poetry; it was totally unlike anybody else. And again, he’s done nothing much that I’ve seen ever since. That

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was also Cheryl’s doing, that Prism series. Cheryl had the commercial and entrepreneurial skills to flog it. MS: When did Debra enter the scene? TT: Well, it wasn’t quite as simple as that; there was Kate in between, Kate Lilley. I’m not going into a list here of Adamson’s ladies! I remember the first time I ever met Cheryl; it was not long after they were married. I was on my way back from being a delegate to the ALP National Conference at Surfer’s Paradise in 1973. MS: Okay, now, Cheryl was associated with him up to about when? TT: We, it started about ’72. Until about – ’73, then through ’74, ’75 – the readings at the Opera House, the Mafia issues of New Poetry (“Yes, there is a poetry Mafia, and it’s going to get you!”) – and then, let’s see; I can’t date things unless I use another scale – horses or something.... MS: Later than Hyperno? TT: No, earlier than Hyperno, but later than Gold and Black. Cheryl was still around early ’78 – because she was going to publish The Atlas [Tim Thorne’s 1982 collection]. I gave her the manuscript. That was the time I got the Marten Bequest [travelling scholarship, established 1975] and I went up to meet David Foster. That was a pretty weird scene. He got this Marten Bequest for prose writing and I got one for poetry, and we went up to Sydney for this presentation. I had, about a year or eighteen months prior to that, reviewed The Fleeting Atalanta, his book of poems in the Australian. They were bloody awful poems, and I said so, in the review. He’s a great guy, a chemist, and he’d chucked in science to become a poet. And I’d said something in the review about when you give up science it doesn’t mean you give up precision in language. And he didn’t appreciate it. And we had to have our photos taken, for publicity shots for this Marten Bequest, and we were standing there smiling at the cameras, and saying “You bastard, what did you write that in that review for?” – “Because they were bloody awful poems!” (laughter). But his novel [Moonlite, 1981], that he wrote out of this bequest: I still think it’s the best Australian novel of the last decade. I think it’s a great book; it’s funny, it’s clever; it’s a damn good read, and it’s strong. It’s got a hell of a lot going for it. It’s the most underrated book – oh, it won a couple of prizes and all that, but it’s not talked about in the same way as, say, Keneally, White, Ireland. But it’s a great novel. I haven’t read anything he’s written since, I must admit – but he has got another book out recently.

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He really did the classic thing that you’re supposed to do when you get a travelling scholarship; he walked out and he left his wife and seven kids up in this bloody little hut, up there in the tablelands somewhere, and he walked to bloody Scotland. He got five thousand two hundred dollars, or something like that – which wasn’t a fortune, even in those days, and he made every penny last until he’d written that. You know, people don’t do that nowadays; you get five thousand two hundred and you just piss it up against the wall. Actually, that’s what this guy told me, this funny little man in the Trustees – the Perpetual Trustees (they did the Miles Franklin Award and whatever else; none of them know anything about literature at all – and they’re responsible for all those books and all those bloody poets and things) – and this bloke said “The last one we gave it to was Mark O’Connor, and the bugger pissed off to a Greek island and didn’t come back.” That was the Marten Bequest. Anyway, he said, “Really, once we’ve given you the money, we’ve got no control over what you do with it.” You see, I’d put down on my form that what I intended to do with it was to go to the University of Iowa, to the Creative Writing School. Then I found out that it was by invitation only, and so, rather than hang around waiting for them to give me the invite – they could have wangled it, you know: ‘Let us invite you and so on...’ – I realized the whole thing was a CI A front, that they sent out a little brochure with the names of all these famous poets who’d been there. And I know a bit about literature from all over the world, and I’d never heard of any of these guys; there was one thing they had in common – they came from South Vietnam, South Korea, the Philippines, a couple of banana republics in Central America (laughter), Taiwan – and they would have liked an Australian, too, you know (laughter), to complete the set! (hysteria). A grand slam! So I gave that one the big wide berth, and decided that what I really wanted to do was get away from all this crap, and go to the Seychelles. MS: What was going on in New Poetry when you came back? TT: I can remember a poem that I wrote when I was in the Seychelles that I sent when I got back, and it was Cheryl who rejected it; that was the last thing she ever did for New Poetry, I think, which I thought was a nice touch. It had a lot of history behind it, that rejection slip. And then, one morning, about four o’clock, I got a phone call, back in Launceston, and here was Adamson saying “Do you want to say hello to Debra?” That would have been about ’80. MS: Did that coincide with any fracturing of the magazine? TT: The post of Bob Adamson’s wife has always sort-of carried with it the Secretaryship of the Poetry Society of Australia (laughter) and other honorary titles.

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MS: The Poetry Society of Australia is more or less, with New Poetry, defunct? TT: Well, it was defunct, apart from the magazine, for some time. MS: In terms of workshops and other public events, it was defunct quite a while back? TT: It struggled on with the workshops. When Cheryl was living at that marvellous Art Deco pub in George Street, which is now no longer a pub – the Century – I want to a workshop there once when I was in Sydney. That’s when I met Corny [Vleeskens] for the first time, I think – though he claims to have met me earlier: I can’t remember – I was probably off my face at the time – and a guy called Richard Harland [later, an award-winning science-fiction and fantasy writer] was there, who was closely involved with the magazine for a while. Old letterheads and rejection slips make interesting reading, for the series of names that have appeared on them temporarily. This would have been ’77 or ’78; there’d been a gap for a while. I think they’d stopped it, and then started it again. The other thing that died, and that was partly my fault, was the postal workshop, because we took that over. MS: That was a hell of a job, I imagine? TT: Oh, it was a bastard of a job, and I got it, of course. And I got it because I could do it from Launceston. They just bundled everything up and sent it. The one great thing about it was that it was how we discovered Jennifer Maiden. I got a letter in one bundle, a sort-of apologetic letter saying “I don’t know whether these are any good; I’ve never really had much to do with poetry except that after I left school at fifteen and went to work in the foundry at Penrith I decided I wanted to write – so here’s some poems.” And there were about a dozen poems, and it was basically the guts of her first book. They were great stuff. I just wrote back and said they were terrific; but she was so tentative about it all – and here was this great talent. And that’s the only thing that I can remember. I cannot remember another single person’s poem from that postal critical workshop that was worth publishing, really; most of them weren’t worth reading. And so it got to be a real drag, sending them back. I mean, our excuse for taking it over from Ella Turnbull, who used to run it, was that she got behind in sending them back, and she held poems for three months sometimes. Well, Jesus, the way postal rates were changing, their self-addressed envelopes were bloody worthless; by the time I got around to sending them back there was a number of stamps I had to stick on them to make up the current postal rate. So that one died. I’m afraid I hold responsibility for that one; but I just let it fizzle. It got bad when I got one returned marked “Addressee Deceased” – and I though ‘Shit, she didn’t last to see what I’d written about her poem; died waiting in vain’.

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MS: Yes, it’s one of the most thankless jobs in the world. TT: Yes, because you don’t even have a chance of publication to hold up; you don’t even have the power to decide whether its published or not. And you’ve got to say something positive. I told one guy that I really enjoyed his poem, that it was the funniest – that he was a great writer of humorous verse, and then someone said, “That guy’s obviously dead serious” (laughter). MS: Yes – after some New England and Queensland workshops, I’ve had people send me these things, and I think ‘That’s hilarious’ – but I’m afraid to say so – stuff that seems semi-awful and semi-funny; you wonder how much irony’s intended. TT: Oh yes, right – Barney Roberts and I had to do a workshop once with the F AW in Launceston, and we both had them, this pile of poems in front of us, and this pile of people in front of us, and we looked at each other, and an awkward silence descended upon the room. We were both racking our brains to think of something, and Barney managed to think quicker. It was in the library, a little sort-of meeting room off there, and he raced out into the library where the magazines were, and he grabbed a copy of Overland – they had a poem of Adamson’s in it – and he raced back, and he said “Now, let’s take it from the starting point of a good poem,” and he read this poem of Adamson’s, and people started talking about that, and then we got onto the rubbish, and saw how we could relate to it. But the worst thing about that is that you get people – and they’re usually the ones with the loudest voices, or the quickest propensity to use them – who insist on saying that it’s lovely, and that it doesn’t matter whether it’s good or not; it’s lovely. It’s hard to cope with that sort of scene. MS: Yes, the sadness that comes out, too; like a lady I met who wrote all these things, tolerably competently Edwardian-style things, about disappointment. I could hardly believe that she could manage such forced stilted expressions; and it turned out she’s written them in 1940 and had just stayed with that mode ever since – about a guy who left her behind then. The straitjacketing sort-of suited the poems, in a way. And another character was memorable for having given me about a hundred and sixty pages of his meditative verse compiled over about thirty years; he’d lived in Santiago and said that Neruda had once told him that these things were the greatest poems he’d ever heard. I wondered about Neruda’s English – or this bloke’s Spanish translations! It’s a hell of a job to say something encouraging to someone whose work seems to have no glimmer at all of self-consciousness of art about it, nothing you could latch onto as being poetic in terms of communication with another person.

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SMcD: I don’t think you have any duty to say things are okay whatsoever, if the person can’t write. Hang sensibilities! TT: Yes, it seems easy to say, but it’s like putting the hard word on Geoffrey Eggleston for money after a poetry reading; you know, some of us are just too soft for this world! SMcD: I have to deal out hard words to authors when they want to know why I don’t publish their work.... TT: Yes, some people can do it, but obviously Michael and I find the same problem. There’s a dilemma here, you see. It’s the old socialist conscience, the spirit of democracy and all that, which says they’re all potential poets and should be encouraged. Perhaps that was Neruda’s angle. But if the elitists have got it wrong with the old hieratic-craft bit, then why is there so much awful rubbish being written? I think it’s because, somewhere along the line, in school probably, they’ve got away from that direct, honest contact with the guts of poetry. To put it one way, they’ve swapped the Muse for the Grey Tart. Ego, fashion, the desire to preach, laziness: lots of things can get in the way. The writing ends up being, in whatever mode, ‘poetic’, secondhand. I’m not knocking the concept of learning your trade. Poetry is probably nearly as hard a craft to master as cognac-making and a damned sight harder than most things that make people rich. We’re all born with it, but most of us have it kicked out of us, or we cover it up with crap. In our kind of society, it’s a pretty big decision to make to kick back, or to fight through the crap. Once you’ve made that decision, you’ve got to put a hell of a lot of energy and honesty into it; otherwise, why have you bothered in the first place? The potential is there. Look at Nicaragua. Since the Sandinista revolution, because of the revolution, as part of the revolution, even the traffic cops hold poetry workshops. Practically the entire population of Solentiname – an isolated archipelago in the middle of Lake Nicaragua – has turned overnight into a community of poets and artists. Eat your heart out, old Justus [Justus Jorgenson, creator of the Montsalvat artistic community at Eltham in Victoria]! These people were illiterate peasants. The Sandinistas taught them to read and write, and what they wanted to read and write was poetry. Really good stuff. Let’s hope it doesn’t degenerate into earnest Stalinist doggerel. For now, the poetry has been liberated, like the land, like all sorts of other human potential – and it’s all part of the same process. Tony Harrison quotes, in one of his poems, an old Cornish saying: ‘The tongueless man gets his land took’. Ironic, of course, that it’s about the only

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Cornish saying that’s survived. To me, that sums up both the connection between poetry and politics and the need for poetry, not merely as a private practice, which, of course, it is, very, but as a social force.

————— The Myth of the New and Others81 —————

I

T ’ S A C U R I O S I T Y that Nigel Roberts’s poetry has not attracted critical commentary to the degree accorded to many of his Australian contemporaries who came to prominence as members of the ‘Generation of ’68’. In a way, he could be thankful that this is so. Mark O’Connor, Robert Gray, and Jamie Grant have all, in several places in recent years, assailed the ‘Generation of ’68’ poets for their claims to have initiated or consolidated a new poetic in Australia. That Roberts perceives himself as having something in common with others of the 1968 movement is indicated in his interview with Rae Desmond Jones: “A quick look at Quadrant, Meanjin confirmed that we would have to publish elsewhere.... We were being drawn into an American tradition.”82 Robert Kenny and John Tranter have come to occupy positions as representatives of or apologists for the ‘young’ poets of 1968. Kenny’s early comments in Applestealers and Tranter’s remarks in his anthology The New Australian Poetry both emphasize the break that they and their normative contemporaries made with ‘the Australian tradition’.83 There is nothing the matter with breaking with traditions: in effect, the net result is incorporation into the larger history of poetry in Australia (and elsewhere) of all the participants. Roland Barthes observed that “a little formalism turns one away from History, but […] a lot brings one back to it.”84 In repudiating the substance and not merely the forms of Australian poetry up to the mid-1960s, or, more likely, driving a wedge between substance and form, and stressing instead a new form, modernism, the promoters of the avant-garde may have stepped unwittingly or not into the mainstream of Australian poetic history.

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Southerly 44.3 (September 1984): 337–49. Martin Duwell, in A Possible Contemporary Poetry, ed. Martin Duwell (St Lucia, Queensland: Makar, 1982): 69. 83 Robert Kenny, “Welcome, Stranger – By Way of Introduction,” in Applestealers, ed. Robert Kenny & Colin M. Talbot (North Fitzroy, Victoria: Outback, 1974): 22–26; John Tranter, “Introduction” to The New Australian Poetry, ed. John Tranter (St Lucia, Queensland: Makar, 1979): xi– xxvi. 84 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, tr. Annette Lavers (Mythologies, 1957; tr. 1972; London: Granada, 1980): 112. 82

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A word of explanation may be necessary to make this clearer; it has become usual to trace Australian poetic development by focusing on a number of star performers, rather than on movements of ideas shared by various contemporaries. To take two instances, one might consider the experimentation by poets about the time of the First World War, and another group of poets about the time of the Second World War in Australia. Zora Cross, John Le Gay Brereton, David McKee Wright and others gradually rejected nineteenth-century forms and preoccupations evident in their contemporaries’ works in the early years of the twentieth century, and became at least attuned to international movements and themes. Brennan was alert to French and German Symbolist poets; Wright to Yeats and other Celtic Renaissance movement writers. Concerning a later period, one can instance the Jindyworobaks’ earnest, and on the whole successful, attempts to change the emphasis in Australian poetic diction. If we give any credence to George Saintsbury’s claim that the poetry of John Keats made possible nineteenth-century English poetry,85 a reasonable analogy might be Les Murray’s and later contemporaries’ remarks to the effect that the Jindyworobaks made possible a contemporary Australian poetry after the 1940s: things could never go back, despite the charms of the picturesque and the ballad. And we will not delude ourselves that the drawing power of nostalgia is limited only to quaint balladeers like Keith Garvey, keeping a light burning for the 1890s: in the work of such disparate modernists as Les Murray and Michael Dransfield, the paddocks are filled with timeless imported cattle, and the homesteads filled with the ghosts of those who lent substance to the ‘pioneers’ mythology. It is one of the ironies of our poetic history that the fugitives from local tradition ultimately endorse what they sought to escape. In the ‘New Romantic’ vision of several of the writers associated with the ‘Generation of ’68’, continuity with the past is strenuously established with the past. Dransfield’s unicorns, Hewett’s Chapel Perilous, and Adamson’s Grail are transported memorabilia placed as surreally under gums as Sid Long’s satyrs, Norman Lindsay’s nymphs, Adam Lindsay Gordon’s Norman heroes, or David McKee Wright’s “Hellas at Watson’s Bay”: Adamson’s Aphrodite at Double Bay has a Creole pedigree which extends back to the dawn of white settlement. It is taking the easy way out in criticism to lump Roberts in with others of a movement, in order to concentrate on common themes or practical consideration. If this conclusion seems obvious, I have stressed it at the outset in order 85

“The summer-up of the tradition of the first of the groups or periods here noticed, and the begetter, master, and teacher of the third”; George Saintsbury, A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1780–1895) (London: Macmillan, 1898): 435–36.

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to highlight a tendency in Australian criticism whereby particular authors are starred or privileged, to the ostracism or derogation of others of their peers. Thus, the Bulletin and Lone Hand contributors Arthur Adams, David McKee Wright, Mabel Forrest, Zora Cross, and a host of others are excluded or represented in an untypical manner in anthologies in the same way William Hart– Smith, Flexmore Hudson, Nancy Cato, and Gina Ballantyne have been dealt with: a movement (of which the participants may not have seen themselves to be fully-fledged members in every instance) is permitted to stand for the writer’s curriculum vitae and achievement. I have taken some time to discuss this process with reference to Nigel Roberts’s contemporaries in order to obviate his ‘dumping’ on similar lines to those which have claimed so many of our writers. Roberts has been less concerned with promoting his own work than have Adamson and Tranter and others of the 1968 generation with theirs. It would not be fair to assume that all of the poets of that period – ‘group’ or ‘movement’ – were in effect publicity-seekers to an equivalent degree: some, like Dransfield, had greatness thrust upon them by editors with similar leanings. Roberts’s poetry has for the most part been supplied to journals and anthologies upon request, rather than submitted out of the blue. One result of this has been that he stayed out of the limelight even while he gained a reputation for editing the works of others (in journals such as Free Poetry, Package Deal, or the Melbourne-based Living Daylights), and for his guest appearances in alternative circuits to Poetry Australia and Meanjin, which, with Southerly in the 1960s, were regarded as mainstream or establishment journals. A glance at the credits for previous publication in Roberts’s two volumes In Casablanca for the Waters (1977) and Steps for Astaire (1983) suggests that his affiliations have been with what used to be called the Australian underground. Poems in the earlier collection appeared in Richard Tipping’s Mok (co-edited with Rob Tillett), Kris Hemensley’s The Ear in a Wheatfield, the Adamsons’ New Poetry, and in Bush Telegraph, The Digger, and the anti-war anthology We Took Their Orders and Are Dead, among other short-lived or long-standing publishing ventures. Poems in the later collection also have a varied fringe-provenance, but there is a movement toward the centre, if I can put it this way, toward Aspect and New Poetry in their consolidated phases, and Meanjin (under Hemensley’s brief poetry editorship). Anthology appearances for the later works include Philip Roberts’s Poet’s Choice and The Younger Australian Poets of Robert Gray and Geoffrey Lehmann. The terms ‘centre’ and ‘mainstream’, like ‘establishment’, employed above are not particularly felicitous, but I have borrowed them from early spokespersons for the ‘Generation of ’68’, since they intimate something of the lines of

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demarcation Roberts himself refers to in the quotation given earlier. Loose affiliations at least may be observed in the common publishing ploys and ventures adopted by younger poets in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Many of the writers initiated their own journals – Roberts’s Free Poetry, a mimeographed publication, is an early and exemplary instance – or contributed to those of their friends, in various capital cities and elsewhere, to effectively establish a network in the period. Not all of the poets incorporated into Tranter’s The New Australian Poetry may have been aware of the extent to which the publishing experience was endemic and spontaneous. While the poems of Dransfield, Adamson, Tranter, and their contemporaries were appearing in the Australian, Poetry Australia, and simultaneously in Pie, Free Grass, Mok, and Applestealers, a host of lesser-known poets were launching journals and anthologies outside the metropolitan centres. One of the myths associated with the ‘Generation of ’68’ has it that they eschewed publication in mainstream journals. The contents of Poetry Australia and other establishment journals for the period 1965–75 dispel this fiction. Another myth concerns the centrality of Sydney (Balmain and Mosman, Double Bay and Paddington) and Melbourne (Fitzroy and Carlton) in the rise of the ‘New’ poetry. The contents of student newspapers, occasional journals, and small-press publications in regional centres as well as capital cities from around 1967 to the present [1984] give the lie to such an elitist view of poetry’s spontaneous appearance in and dissemination from the eastern capitals. Tracing the rise of modernism in Australian poetry, we can be selective in our vision, and ignore the forest for the sake of a sapling. We will doubtless see many long-ignored ‘new poets’ emerging, as if fully grown, in decades to come, unless we make the effort to open up the past and see that, even before the rise of the ‘Generation of ’68’, modernism had been espoused by poets at various times from around the First World War onwards. The more recent prominence of Nigel Roberts, in this light, is but the tip of an iceberg. Starting from New Zealand Roberts’s uniqueness stems in large measure from his New Zealand background, which has not been considered at any great length in reviews of his work. In a 1982 conversation, he recalled to me his student days in Wellington in the 1950s and early 1960s, when he met Louis Johnson, James K. Baxter, Alistair Campbell, and others who had already achieved reputations in New Zealand, Australia, and elsewhere. Arrival in Australia was something of a shock, coming from such a background; Roberts found that none of the works of American (especially the Beats) and other contemporaries, known and emulated or discussed in New Zealand, were available in Sydney bookstores. The response is

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understandable: Julian Croft told much the same story of his encounter with Australian poetry on return from years abroad in Europe and Sierra Leone. There were, in effect, Australian poets at the time welcoming the contemporary American poetry, but the spate of unfavourable criticism, or the plain ignorance of their works, drove many to change direction, or to emigrate in search of a more genial environment. In this light, the New Zealand background is significant. There is a tradition of experiment with widely varying forms in New Zealand poetry, which may stem from many factors. Two of these have to do with the parallel Mǒori and ƻǒkehǒ traditions of poetry, generally speaking, and the fact that New Zealand poets have tended in large measure to find some support in each other for experimentation from early times. No Ern Malley hoax has divided loyalties there, and a poet like Allen Curnow has consistently shown more variety than many of his Australian counterparts for over forty years. New Zealand poets working in academies – Kendrick Smithyman, C.K. Stead, Michael Joseph, Riemke Ensing, Jan Kemp, Vincent O’Sullivan and others – have in effect often spearheaded the advance of contemporary poetry, whether foreign-inspired or indigenously originating. The inclusion of many of the ‘academic’ poets in Alistair Paterson’s anthology of ‘New’ poets in New Zealand shows a significant recognition of the general tendency toward experimentation in New Zealand poetry. While C.K. Stead and Paterson have been criticized for their espousal of a more intense preoccupation with a poetry that reflects changes in New Zealand’s position in the world, and conditions within New Zealand society, this is no more than the expected controversy that attends avant-garde gestures. Ian Wedde and Alan Brunton, contemporaries of Nigel Roberts in New Zealand, have also attracted criticism for departures from what has been occasionally perceived (by Kendrick Smithyman86 and others) as a tradition in New Zealand poetry of concern with cultural identity. Along with an awareness of growing diversity in New Zealand poetic practice in the 1960s, Nigel Roberts may have brought to Australian poetry a more sceptical attitude to American modernism than that displayed by many of his later local contemporaries. This is not to play down an infectious enthusiasm for what is new, but to suggest that a more tentative note is present in his work, right up to Steps for Astaire, than is to be found in, for example, Robert Adamson’s response to Robert Duncan. Like the work of Bruce Beaver (who, although Australian, lived for several years in New Zealand), Louis Johnson (resident in 86

Kendrick Smithyman, A Way of Saying: A Study of New Zealand Poetry (Auckland: Collins, 1965).

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Australia for many years), and William Hart–Smith, an older expatriate New Zealander, Roberts’s poetry has taken his own place, his domicile, as a standard. His poetry domesticates what might be otherwise regarded as influences, and comments at times upon its ostensible sources, as if testing the work against its original environment. This process is notably at work in the long poem “Japan.”87 If Australia in Roberts’s work seems americanized, it is observed with some detachment, as if by an outsider employing the modern lingua franca of New York and San Francisco for remarking on backyard Sydney. In his later poems about America, Roberts appears to be still detached, at once a cool participant in a trans-national culture and a voyeur reporting on his own responses to the notion of adopting a chameleon personality. Art and culture Humphrey Bogart’s role in Casablanca is ambiguous, as is Roberts’s own role in Australian poetry: at once on side with the underground while keeping the home attitudes (wariness, scepticism, romanticism, curiosity) alive. In Casablanca for the Waters88 takes on, in its title, the world of the expatriate American. The nostalgic glimpses of his past New Zealand and English ancestry are present in the final poem, “In the Family Album,” with its confessional avowal of rebellion against family mores. The photographs and graphics, the slogan (“V I E T/ N A M O U T / N O W ”), and the final lines (“a bayonet / is a weapon / with a worker / at each end”) all point to separateness, immersion in a larger view of history, and an attempt to see oneself from several standpoints. Another attempt at definition, as poet, also expands from nostalgia: “this poem is” concerns the wake for Charles Buckmaster, and it lists the poem’s deployment as mayday signal, as tribute, celebration, manifesto, and existential thing, when ‘message’ or signal appears to be exhausted: “this poem is a raid on fear & silence.” Perhaps more than any other poem in Roberts’s collected output, this work raids the process of mystification in order to define and clarify what it is that constitutes the act of poetry. The poem referred to above also investigates how it is that a poem may fail: “Japan” compares the failure to communicate in love with failure of poetic ‘message’. In much of Roberts’s work there is an effort to comprehend poetry itself. He is more intellectually engaged than many of his reviewers, misled by his ‘boy, how he lives’ publicity, may have observed. The minimalist punctuation, of the often suppressed upper-case, and the insertion of the slash in place of usual 87 88

Nigel Roberts, “Japan,” in Roberts, Steps for Astaire (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1983): 54–58. Nigel Roberts, In Casablanca for the Waters (Sydney: Wild & Woolley, 1977): 54–58.

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punctuation signs, directs us to see some Projectivist and breath-influenced theoretic enacted in the work. Like Ginsberg and Rexroth, Roberts makes use of breath-pauses for surprising lyric effect. It is pertinent to compare Roberts’s practice with that of his friend and contemporary, the New Zealand poet David Mitchell, whose 1972 collection Pipe Dreams in Ponsonby similarly employed the punctuation devices for more intensely sustained lyricism. One instance, the poem “Penelope / Bright & Bare,” suggests affinity: coming out by slow degrees from that dark world of sleep he watches while she combs her hair –eyes quizzing her eyes In the mirror / bright & bare & moves beyond & in/ & deep/ to where all questions die... & her hair is long as sunshine & as bright as she comes under this dark night & he comes through/ into th broken world of morning light…89

Mitchell’s terse style – often aphoristic, epigrammatic – finds some parallel in Roberts’s “Radio priest / apple music” and “Aberrant poetics 4 – for Mark O’Connor” from the Casablanca volume, as well as in many segments of his longer works. These indicate that Roberts, like Mitchell, veils other techniques under the appearance of a cummings- or Olson-like form. Roberts’s poem for Mark O’Connor shows, in miniature, a preference for pared speech and verbal wit: so what that it looks like cut up prose go find fault with thistle 89

David Mitchell, Pipe Dreams in Ponsonby (Auckland: The Association of Orientally Flavoured Syndics, 1972): 53.

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because it is not rose.90

The wit incorporates the rhyme as well as the neat comparison at the end; Roberts is disingenuous in avowing his aberrant poetic – or in out-poeticizing the aberrant critic. In general, Roberts’s practice recalls other New Zealanders’ adaptations of American and English poets far more than his Australia-oriented critics may perceive. Like Roberts, Kendrick Smithyman and C.K. Stead have explored in their poetry and theoretical writings a range of diction, which includes the local and media-imported vernaculars, and, in Stead’s Walking Westward sequence, the abbreviated Pound-like terseness that compounds densities and flavours of speech.91 In common with Stead, Roberts explores the gulf between private, intimate perceptions and public clichés about politics, sex, and poetry. The advertising media and the cinema and television provide fruitful ground for this exploration in Roberts’s case, and his “Max Factor Pink,” “The Mona Lisa tea towel,” and “Flavour of the month” contrast media visions of intimacy and art with his characters’ dreams and day-dreams. In effect, the relationship between dreams and desires is far from straightforward. The intervention of mass-produced canons of taste in the area of choice results, for the most part, in reversals of expectation, as Roberts filters the promotions to define by rejection what appears fulfilling and what fails to satisfy desire. In doing so, Roberts defines his personality by what he rejects, as much as by what he accepts and endorses. He also rejects poetry-as-printed-word-only, choosing to include visuals – advertisements, photographs, sketches, and reproductions of artwork – in his poems. The poems in the first collection about love and what passes for it have earned Roberts a reputation as an erotic poet. He delights in displaying poetical prowess as much as in intimating sexual techniques, though; in “The bed” (In Casablanca, 47), a metaphysical reminiscence (“our world is flat”) occurs, as Roberts undercuts the juxtaposition of disparate images favoured by Donne or Marvell: columbus i seek no new worlds i will remain here to chart this isabella’s coastline.

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Nigel Roberts, “Aberrant poetics 4 – for Mark O’Connor,” in In Casablanca for the Waters, 53. See Michael Sharkey, “Out of Time: C.K. Stead’s Recent Poems,” Pacific Quarterly Moana 5.4 (1980): 405–409. Reprinted in the present volume. 91

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The appreciation of irony in relationships extends to poems which invert expectations that “man does, woman is” (in Graves’s usage), or that frantic action signifies total engagement of faculties. The poem “Dialogue with John Forbes” contains Forbes’s ironic comment that “the private & existential / terror of golf” is more exciting (literally) than the duende of football. In “The Return of the Huntsmen,” a Brueghel landscape is a trigger for a speculation on property development, with its reductive potential, whereby it may turn any ‘natural’ scene into Erewhon/ Pleasantville/ Moloch Gulch New York Paris/ Rome Sydney. (In Casablanca, 49)

The humane impulse, the concern for locating areas where the individual can still exercise choice, is repeatedly located in juxtapositions: “parks / that drunks cannot sleep in” the “tachiste smear” of Vegemite on Ryvita crackers or poetry as “appreciation of reality” all point to a Socratic art, of the sort outlined by Julia Kristeva: Its art is one of articulation of fantasy, correlation of signs. Two typical devices for triggering this linguistic network are syncresis (confronting different discourses on the same topic) and anacrusis (one word prompting another). The subjects of discourse are non-persons, anonyms, hidden by the discourse constituting them.92

Thus, the poem which commences Steps for Astaire, “Beauty / Truth / Genius & Taste etc.” works through syncresis to domesticate art, and the poem represents an inquiry into the characteristics of art – including a discourse on the revelation of the thing itself, the self-consciousness of the artist, the manufacture of the artefact, and the recording of the perception. The poem is at once poem-asdocumentary and a product of manufacture; it embodies a particular consciousness of the possible use (and uselessness) of art. Moreover, the poem seems to reject the notion of uniqueness in the work of art at the same time as it celebrates the perception of what makes a mass-produced product unique – the adoption of the object for another purpose than that with which it is habitually associated. For Roberts, going for a walk in Brett Whiteley’s socks constitutes an

92

Julia Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue and Novel,” in Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez , tr. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine & Leon S. Roudiez (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980): 81.

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artistic borrowing in many senses; it is an adaptation, a reinvestment of value (as Roberts says, “This / unique object / is for sale. / This poem / is for sale”). Steps for Astaire advances over territory traversed in the previous collection. Juxtaposition and syncresis make up the regular devices, minimalist techniques that belie the labour of assemblage. As In Casablanca for the Waters, Steps for Astaire is ‘embellished’ with Roberts’s graphic designs and visual cues: he interpolates drawings and photographs and advertisements into the text, confronting one literacy with another, to expand and illustrate the discourse. “Fresh Art” works through comparisons of contexts of ‘freshness’ – fresh sandwiches, getting fresh with the Poets Union, fresh art – so that the freshness (the spontaneity) of love is revealed: the approach is fresh in every sense. What might be called verbal cleverness is enhanced in the interplay of dialogue and graphics: Roberts visually compares art and love to a sandwich. He has done more than he claimed in the postscript to In Casablanca for the Waters: “The graphics […] are part of the matrix of the poem [... they] fix [...] the area of the poem.” The poem has come to demand re-vision of concepts of poetry, much as Tristram Shandy’s graphic content and that of Donald Barthelme’s fiction insists on being incorporated in any view of the works. They are not merely ‘clever’ but provide evidence of a considerate awareness of the appropriate uses to which technology can be put in art. Essentially designed as oral pieces (the line-lengths in Steps for Astaire, as in the earlier collection, suggest breath-pauses, while contrapuntal effects of rhythm are generated about them), the poems remain embedded in tradition – the cultural forms of anglophone poetry – and push forward towards (but never wholly endorse) the pictorial representation itself as a poem. Roberts’s diction covers a wide spectrum, and it is possible to observe a patterning of both vocabulary and phrasing by now common among contemporary Australians covering similar territory. In “The Los Angeles Affirmation,” the clipped catalogue of objects and events passed along the highway turns to include the reader in the journey: At some point the Number 1 & the Dire Straits’ cassette become a test pattern so you stop at the Harris Ranch for Chicken, Bourbon & a piss (Steps for Astaire, 60)

The clipped style recalls the common trick of Cornelis Vleeskens’ poems, the switch from implied “I” to vernacular “you,” to implicate the reader in a myth of

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shared experience. Something of the poet’s sleight of hand in this matter seems to me another way of arriving at Claude Lévi–Strauss’s procedure: “we do not claim to show how men think in their myths, but how myths think themselves in men, and without their awareness.”93 I don’t suggest that the method is derived: after all, the process may be observed in Gary Snyder’s travel-poems and in occasional works by Alan Brunton or other New Zealand contemporaries of Roberts. The “you” is more generic among Australian poets in recent times; at once, a colloquialism is imparted to the work and an ambiguity introduced into the telling. The poetry of Gregory B. Shortis is replete with this device for sharing communal experience, as he shifts from first- to second- to third-person narration.94 Roberts assumes this ambiguity in “The New Age Class Listings” (Steps for Astaire, 88–95) and “Gemini / Gemini” (96–99), with which Steps for Astaire concludes. Adopting, like Shortis, the role of earnest advertiser concerned for the psychic and physical well-being of a potential mark, Roberts turns from the cataloguing of how “you” can be changed to the satirist’s encapsulation of the net results of following the directions: “You are a psychedelic lightshow in the discotheque of life” (97). No endorsement of the notion of life-as-discotheque is offered; like Shortis, Roberts absents himself from the poem by throwing the questions out at “you.” The first- to second-person shuttle takes off directly from colloquial speech: Roberts extends a democratic myth, whereby we all understand what it is to be on the road, cruising through the western states of America, cigarette in mouth, re-living the screen mythologies, including those which maintain that there is an illusion in the movies, and that there is some difference between illusion and reality. The U S travel poems often end tentatively, upon a resolution that invites us to compare life and art, or reality and illusion. Roberts’s end-note to Steps for Astaire indicates that he wants the graphics kept in any future anthologies (previous ones having deleted the visual content), as indices to the attempt to bridge literacies. The insistence suggests that he is acutely aware of complexities where poetry seeks to redefine itself (if it has ever in fact been defined) in a culture that is trying to structure itself in predominantly visual and aural media. Steps for Astaire re-presents the concept of art as having some relationship to society, or some role within a culture. The poems are concerned to show that 93

Quoted in Geoffrey S. Kirk, Myth: Its Meaning and Functions in Ancient and Other Cultures (Berkeley: U of California P, 1973): 44. “Nous ne prétendons donc pas montrer comment les hommes pensent dans les mythes, mais comment les mythes se pensent dans les homme, et à leur insu” (Mythologiques 1: Le cru et le cuit, 1964, 20). 94 See, for instance, Shortis, Yarn, Rave and Red Herring (Armidale, N S W : Fat Possum, 1982): passim, esp. 26–44.

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poetry can have some cultural function, even if it is by no means clear what this function is, overall – whether to celebrate, criticize, condemn, or satirize the culture in which it has its origins. Roberts does not clarify whether the society he represents is in fact reflected or projected; in maintaining a cool narrative manner, and interspersing his verbalizations with graphics, he establishes an area in which the reader can play out varying interpretations without exhausting possible readings of the text.

————— An Interview with Geoff Goodfellow95 —————

T

HIS CO NVER SA TIO N TO OK PL ACE

on Friday 17 May 1985 at Geoff Goodfellow’s

house, 21 Claxton Street, Adelaide.

GG: I grew up in Broadview, which is a suburb of Adelaide about five and a half miles from the city centre. Copley Street, where we lived, was a Soldiers’ Settlement street, basically full of returned servicemen. I was born in 1949. We moved in there in 1950 and the whole street was chock-a-block with neurotic exservicemen and there were, I suppose, four kids in most houses, five in some of around twenty houses. There was a minimum of three kids in every house, so bunk-beds were the go in the street and most kids had a fairly neurotic father who’d either been a prisoner of war or who had been through the Middle East and come back a bit slap-happy. I went to a Catholic convent for the first three years of school and couldn’t handle the discipline of what Catholic convents were all about. MS: You’ve written a poem about that? GG: Yeah, “Beware of the Penguins.” From there I moved to Hampstead Primary School, and that was a bit of a mixture. That was the time when migrant kids were coming out and at home we’d be playing war games on the weekends. We had kids coming to school like ‘Snowboots Peluso’, an Italian who’d arrived in the middle of summer wearing snowboots – so he got the name Snowboots Peluso. We’d have German kids arriving in leather shorts and we’d give them heaps of shit. It was just one of those areas where you were brought up with ‘The Germans were no fucking good and the Nips were no good’ and the whole theme of the area was that it was a very prejudiced sort of place. I went there until Grade Seven and somehow fluked coming top of the class in that grade. The local high school was Nailsworth Tech, it was the era of the bodgies and widgies, and Ford Customlines were the go – if you didn’t have a 95 

Trans-Tasman Undercurrent 1.1 (1986): 33–46.

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Triumph Thunderbird or a 650 Flash you were a poofter. I said to the old man, “I’m off to Nailsworth Tech,” and he said “No way in the world you’re going to Nailsworth Tech.” So they sent this form home from school calling for students for Adelaide Technical High School, which was co-educational, right in the city, on the corner of Frome Road and North Terrace. It was the exclusive Technical School in Adelaide, where they took an intake of forty students a year. I fronted in there on a Saturday morning for an examination to see if I could get in. I didn’t really want to go there, because all my friends were going to Nailsworth, but somehow I fluked a pass in the examination. I don’t know if it was because they wanted a token working-class kid in the school. So I fronted in there, and kids were getting dropped off in MercedesBenzes and Jags – all that gear – and I was trundling in on a 28-inch Super Elliott bicycle, and I thought, ‘Fuckin’ hell, what have I got here?’ – you know, and all the kids have got hyphenated names and I thought, ‘This is going to be good’. So I caused chaos right through the school, and at the end of the year they said “Look, we’ve never expelled anyone from the school, but we don’t want you back next year; go and find yourself another one.” I thought it was fantastic. The old man wasn’t really rapt when I got home; he’d gone and bought a set of Encyclopedia Britannica on the tick and thought I was going to be a fucking brain surgeon. MS: What was his background? GG: He was a technical and scientific glassblower and used to make medical apparatus for Oliphant Laboratories. Quite a genius – but he didn’t mind a drink, either, and that was his downfall. He fell to pieces through drinking excessively. My old man came from the East End of Adelaide, from an Irish Catholic family. His old man was a publican, who owned the East End Market Hotel. My father was an only child; his mother died when he was seven, and he was brought up by his grandmother, who was a mad Irishwoman. Mother had six brothers and sisters, and they lived out at Highgate. Her old man was a master-painter, and through the Depression they lost just about everything they had. MS: When did you come into writing poetry? GG: In 1981. I was never really interested in poetry apart from when a Catholic missionary priest came around the Broadview area, and my old man was drinking pretty heavily in those days, and he got onto the fact that my old man was a pisshead. The priest came round and fronted my old man up, and spent about a week with him, pretty solid, and got him off the turps for a while and got him going to church again. The old man hadn’t been to church for years. He wasn’t a bad sort of a bloke, this Catholic missionary, and he brought around this book of

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poetry one night – Around the Boree Log by the Catholic priest John O’Brien. So the old man would read poetry to me in an Irish brogue and I thought, ‘This is alright’, and we actually got a copy of the book, and I quite often read it as a kid. I put that away and wasn’t really interested in poetry at all. The type of poetry they gave you in school was 200, 300, 400 years old and used to bore me shitless. I gave that a wide berth. Then, in May 1981, I split two discs open in my back and I was crippled. I spent a couple of weeks in hospital in traction and my back never straightened. After two weeks I was still bent and the orthopaedic specialist said “We’ve got to chop you open and fuse these discs together” and I said, “Well, look, there’s no way in the world you’ve got me for the knife, I’m off home,” and I signed myself out. I plodded around to various chiropractors, manipulative physiotherapists, normal physios, backyard Polish men that had no qualifications, a Chinese Russian acupuncturist, and eventually found a guy who put work in on my back and spent three months on a daily basis and got me straight again. Early in that period of time I couldn’t walk at all, and I had to crawl on my hands and knees. I think one of my kids must have left a book by ‘Banjo’ Paterson lying around the floor. I picked up the book and thought, ‘fucking poetry’ – you know – ‘that’s not much chop, but I’ve got fuck else to do, I’ll take it to bed and read it’. So I took it to bed and read it from cover to cover and thought, ‘This is unreal, this stuff – this isn’t like the stuff they pumped into us at school, this is a bit like Around the Boree Log’. I started to re-read it and I thought, ‘Well, all this bloke is doing is talking about his life and the characters he’s met – and I could do the same things’. I had a few traumas going on in my life at that stage. I’d just split up with my wife and three kids – I’d got married when I was eighteen, and the marriage had fallen to pieces. I’d had a business employing twelve guys in Adelaide and turned over a million dollars a year and had a business going in Footscray [in Victoria], and the whole lot folded and the secure little domain toppled over. I started writing really personal poetry, trying to sort out the life-crisis that I was going through. Then I decided to diversify a bit from what was happening in my own life and write stuff that might interest other people. I thought, ‘Well, where are the poets in Australia, or are there any poets alive in Australia?’ I knew nothing about poetry or literature, basically. I knew that Colin Thiele was a South Australian author, so I rang and said, “Gidday, Geoff Goodfellow’s my name and I’ve started writing a bit of poetry; I don’t know if it’s any chop or not, but I’d like you to have a look. How’d you feel about me coming out and having a cup of coffee with you and getting into it?” and he said, “Yeah, no worries,” and I just about fell through the phone. I turned up on the doorstep on Monday

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morning and he had a caliper on his leg and he was just about as crippled as me, so together we sat down and went through the stuff and he said, “Well that’s garbage; that’s not bad; that’s alright,” and he finished up saying, “Well, I don’t think the style of your writing is going to kill the critics – you’ve got to get away from this rhyming verse and write a bit of free verse,” and he told me about the ‘Friendly Street’ poets in Adelaide. MS: Who was running it then? GG: Same mob as now. It’s basically a secret organization; it’s very hard to find out who does run it. Graham Rowlands, Peter Goldsworthy, Rory Harris, Jeri Kroll, and the infamous K.F. Pearson, who has now taken off to Samoa for twelve months. So I went along there and stood up the first night and read a rhyming poem, which didn’t go down too bad. I couldn’t understand half the poetry that was going down – or more than half. I thought, ‘What’s fucking going on here, they’re all running around in weird clothes – this isn’t my scene – maybe I’d better give away the idea of being a poet’. Anyway, I met Jeff Guess, and he and I struck up a bit of a conversation. He took an interest in what I was doing, and he knew that I didn’t have any academic background, but he said, “Well, look, send your stuff up to me and I’ll have a look through it – I’ll give you a few ideas on where you should be going, from what you’re doing.” He reviewed about twenty or thirty pieces of poetry I’d written and said, “Put away your ‘Banjo’ Paterson, put away your Henry Lawson, and start reading some contemporary Australian poets, then write a free verse poem and send it back to me.” A real schoolteacher exercise. I sat down and wrote a poem called “June in Hurtle Square,” sent it back to him, and he wrote back saying, “The first line could have been written by a Grade Seven school kid, and the last line could have been written by the same school kid – apart from those two lines, the gut of the poem is good. Change it and let’s see it at Friendly Street.” So I took it along to Friendly Street, and Rosemary Jones, who was editing Ash, came up to me at interval, tapped me on the shoulder and said, “I’ll give you fifteen bucks for that for Ash magazine.” I said, “Well you’ve got me – you don’t even have to send me the Gregory Peck, just publish it, I’ve been waiting for this for twelve months.” It was published, and that was the start of it. I started writing poetry that was reasonably acceptable. MS: What were you doing in the years between The Boree Log and 1981? GG: Well, I went to Nailsworth Tech., and it was a pretty heavy school. The ‘Kilburn Killers’ lived about a mile away [in the north Adelaide suburb of Kilburn, with a reputedly large criminal element] and it was the days of bodgies and widgies, Fords and motorbikes, and everyone had aspirations to being a fucking

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hoodlum – black skin-tight strides, pointy-toe shoes, and black shirts with the collar turned up was the go for the weekend. Off to the pub on the weekend to see how many fights you could see or get into. The K.T. Club was in Adelaide, nicknamed the Kiddies and Toddlers. We’d go up there and I remember getting thrown down the stairs one night. I got expelled from Nailsworth Tech. My old man actually had a spell at Thebarton Tech when he left Christian Brothers College, and had been taught by Clarrie Martin and Tom Bennet, who finished up at Nailsworth: Tom Bennet as Deputy and Clarrie Martin, the headmaster. In the two years I was there, I actually got expelled on three occasions. Each time, the old man would go up and say, “Listen, you know he’s not a bad sort of a lad, give him a bit of a break, you know me, do the right thing by the lad because there’s no other schools around here that I can send him to anyway. I’ll just tell him to pull his head in.” But, by the same token, the old man was telling me, “If the fucking teachers give you a hard time, knock ’em arse over head,” so it was a bit of a funny situation. Anyway, I got through till third year, belted the Maths teacher, and I’d threatened to belt the Science teacher, so I got 48% for Maths 1, 49% for Maths 2 and 49% for Science, and away I went out into the big wide world. I grabbed a job as a butcher around at Manoora Street Meat, half a mile from where I lived. I worked there for around six months and finished up grabbing the boss one Thursday afternoon and throwing him into the wall and threatening him with death. The other butcher working in the shop pulled down the blinds, ushered the customers out, and locked the door. The customers were all lined up out the front of the shop, and I said, “You can stick your job up your arse,” and off I went to another butcher’s shop, at Clovercrest. In those days, Friday-night shopping had just come in, and, working all the overtime on Friday and Saturday morning, they started making us take Monday off. At that stage, my old man had gone into the publishing business, and was bringing out magazines for sporting clubs, football clubs, cricket clubs, and various types of organizations, and selling advertising space. He said to me, “What about you having a go on the Monday afternoons with me, selling advertising space?” I said, “I don’t want to work with you. I’ll give it a miss.” He said, “No, give it a try this Monday.” I was making four pounds seven and six a week at this stage as a butcher, and I worked for him on Monday afternoon and made twelve quid. I thought, ‘Hold on now, forty hours a week – and then I worked four hours for the old man and made twelve quid – there’s no percentage in being a butcher’. So I snatched my time. The old man used to like the idea of making a decent quid working two days a week and drinking the rest of the week, which left me at a loose end, so the old

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man and I lasted for about six or eight months. I split out on an oil rig a while over in Caroline, drilling for natural gas on the Victoria–South Australian border. I couldn’t cop that, and came back and worked as a clerk in an office in town but only lasted a couple of weeks and then went truck-driving. When decimal currency came in, I sold calculators and adding machines and had quite a good deal of success. At sixteen, I was the youngest calculator salesman in Australia and was knocking off all the best salesmen in South Australia. I had a fairly successful period of about nine months, I suppose, in office machinery, until decimal currency was fully introduced and sales began to dwindle. I got out of that and went back to driving a truck for a mob I’d worked for earlier. At eighteen, I was riding a BSA 650 around, terrorizing the police in various neighbourhoods. I was sitting on my motorbike in North Adelaide one night, out the front of the fish shop that I used to knock around in, when an F J Holden pulled up to reverse back into a space. A VW came into the situation and drove into the carpark before the F J had a chance to reverse into it. The bloke in the F J jumped out – there were two girls in the car with him, and he went over to the driver of the VW , pulled out his badge and said “I’m a police officer – get your car out of there.” Naturally, I had to chip in and said, “What are you trying to do, impress the girls, big-timer – just because you’re a copper, you missed out on the park, so piss off and find yourself something around the corner,” He came over and said to me, “You just watch yourself, Goodfellow,” and I said, “What?” and he said “You watch out for yourself, Goodfellow.” I thought, ‘Hold on, how does he know my name’s Goodfellow?’ He said “We’re watching you – you and your mate Wally, you’re just about off. We’re awake to you two – you’re just about lumbered.” I said “Ah, go and get fucked.” We’d stripped a car on the Glen Osmond Road and been involved in a couple of bad fights that we probably shouldn’t have been in, but anyway, I went away scratching my head and thinking, ‘Maybe Wally’s gonna finish up getting me into trouble’. I’d met this girl Jenny, at a dance a week before, she came from Port Augusta, and I thought, ‘Well, she doesn’t seem too bad – maybe I’ll sneak around and see if I can do any business there’. Anyway, I finished up giving Wally a miss and took Jenny out for about nine months. Her sister and family couldn’t stand me, because I’d get around in flying boots and a leather jacket, and her sister tried to split us up. Her sister moved out of the flat that they were living in and Jenny used to say she was terrified at midnight when I was leaving to go home, so I’d finish up staying till three or four a.m. The old man said, “Why don’t you bring the girl home? we’ve got a spare bedroom.” I used to tiptoe down the passage each night, then fight the old man next morning. He told me I was setting a bad

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example for my brothers and said, “You’re going to get yourself in trouble.” I finished up thinking, ‘Well, it’s a pretty good excuse to get out of this joint and get married’, and I thought: ‘I’d like to have kids young, yeah, well’. Eighteen years old, you know: ‘I’ll get married’. So I did. The people I was working for at that stage wouldn’t give me any time off for a honeymoon, so I snatched my time and went back to one of the truck-driving jobs I’d had earlier. I worked there for twelve months and went from truckdriving to sales manager. I was doing pretty well for that period of time, and my wife was pulling in a good quid. We got a Trust house out at Elizabeth Fields about fifty yards from the ‘Salvation Jane’ fields. My wife got hay-fever badly, so we moved over the other side of town, and I finished up chucking that job and went back to building swimming pools – which I’d done as about a sixteen-year-old, I suppose: concrete-spraying on a contract basis, pretty hard yakka, but it was twenty quid a day, top money in those days. Then the old man said, “This bloke is looking for a salesman at Easybuilt Garages; it could be just your go.” So I raced down to John Martins, bought a new pair of sports trousers, a shirt, and a pair of shoes and went for the interview. He said, “Come in on Saturday and see if you can sell anything, I’d like to give you the job but I don’t know if you’re mature enough.” I got there on the Saturday morning and some people came into the office and said they were after a toolshed. I had a look at the price on the list and took them out into the little toolshed. I went through the spiel of the tubular-steel frame, showed them what the structure was all about and the quality of the material, and they said, “Well, we’ll let you know.” I said, “Well, just before you go out of this shed, I’m nineteen years old, I’ve just got married, and I need this job really badly. I don’t work here, but if you buy this shed I’ve got the job.” They were old enough to be my mum and dad, and they fell straight into it and said, “Okay, you’ve got us, let’s go in and sign the order.” They signed it, and the sales manager was amazed. He said, “Okay, you’re hired, start Monday morning – you’ve got no worries.” I started there and made $10,000 the first year, twelve the next, fifteen the next, eighteen the next, and twenty-five the next, and I thought, ‘Well, if I can make $25,000 a year for a boss’ – I was a commission salesman – ‘I’ll have a go myself’. I opened up a little factory at Wingfield, pulled one of my brothers back from Queensland who had gone up there to get away from Adelaide, and away we went – kicked a goal, won six design awards in six years in Adelaide, running Adelaide Outdoor Constructions. I opened in Footscray with Out-Door Living Specialists, and won a landscaping award there. We had things going pretty well. I’d gone from the V8 Customline to a V12 Jag. Had the big house up in the hills on two and a half acres, and the kids all

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had motorbikes, trikes, and a couple of horses. It was days of wild partying, a pretty extravagant sort of lifestyle. This was coming into 1981, and I had my girlfriend Sue, who I’m living with now. Well, I was married, and so was Sue. We were all good mates together, but her husband didn’t know what was going on, and my wife didn’t know what was going on – we just used to go out socially together. Sue’s husband suggested that we should go on a cruise. I’d never been on a holiday in my life, being a commission salesman or in business. I’d been a seven-days-a-week maniac ever since I was eighteen, so I fell into this idea of going on a cruise. I thought it was a good opportunity to have a bit of romance as well, and away we went on Sitmar. Well, after being on the cruise for a week – I’d had a bit of a blow-up with my missus, she’d started to wake up to the fact that something was going on, and I’d had a blue with a couple of bouncers on the ship – I threatened to throw the captain overboard in Bali. The ship’s detective came down to lock me up at about 2:30 one morning after a blue with a steward, and I terrified the detective. The next day, the whole thing fell to pieces. I made the grand confession that I’d been having an affair with Sue. My wife tried to jump over the side of the ship as we were pulling into Singapore at 5 a.m., and I grabbed her about ten feet from the opening of the hold. She was sedated and put into sick-bay, and the ship’s minister of religion advised me that I’d better fly back to Australia straight away and sort out my life. We’d only done Singapore and Bali and still had Hong Kong and Manila to go, but we never got that far. I’d terrorized a few passengers on the ship. I’d done a floorshow with Normie Rowe. I was smoking a lot of grass in those days, being a bit outrageous. I hung over the mezzanine floor, singing “I said a hey hey and hey yeah,” joining in with him, so they turned the spotlight on me, and, being the extravert that I am, I went for it – and I can’t sing for shit – but it was a good time and the crowd loved it. My first public performance was with Normie Rowe! As a matter of fact, last night I drove into the car park at the Festival Theatre to go to a meeting for the writers’ Focus Week, and said to the carpark attendant, “Look, I don’t want to pay two dollars, I’m only going to be in there about half an hour.” And he said, “What, are you saving for another world cruise?” I said, “No, no, I’m desperate, mate, I can’t afford world cruises.” He said, “Well, you’ve been on one,” and I said, “No, no, not me,” and he said, “Yeah, you were on the bloody Sitmar cruise, you caused a nice lot of drama.” I said, “Jesus Christ, I’ve come unstuck again.” So on the way out I said, “You’ve seen the real thing, wait until the book comes out,” and he said, “You’ve written a book, have you?” I said, “No, but I reckon I will, stay tuned for it.” So I keep getting caught up – I run into people all over town that recognize me from that notorious cruise.

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After a week back in Adelaide I said to Sue that I’d better get out and make a quid again, get all my blokes working. I climbed up on the back of a semitrailer to look at a load of railway sleepers that I was gong to buy that had been brought down from the bush, and I felt my back go. I collapsed and finished up in hospital that afternoon in traction. And then the rest. MS: There are other parts of your career, boxing and so on? GG: Well, I’d had a go at amateur and professional boxing and at boxing promotion. That was part of the deal with the old man. We promoted the Australian Junior Middleweight Title at Thebarton Town Hall and one of the blokes never turned up. I hadn’t had a pair of boxing gloves on for three years, but there was this Italian guy, Louis Cecere, who was going to fight Gary Brand. Brand had had his jaw dislocated the night before, so I said, “Look, I’m about the same weight as Louis, I’ll jump in and fight him.” They said, “Oh no, you haven’t been training and Louis has won his last twelve fights, the last eight in the first and second rounds.” I said, “Oh, I think I can knock Louis out,” so away we went. I just about had him knocked out by the end of the first round, but I was knocked up myself – I ran out a bit. Louis came in on top of me and hit me on the side of the head, and the referee moved in and stopped the fight. Twenty minutes after the fight I had an epileptic fit, and the doctor said, “You should never fight again, you could be off if you do.” I spent a couple of days in hospital believing that I could have more epileptic fits. I took tablets for seven years and eventually decided that I wouldn’t take any more and gave them away, and I’ve been okay since. In the meantime I’d opened up a gymnasium and started training boys. I was training Terry Fox, who was the Light Heavyweight Champion of South Australia, and promoting professional boxing fights, taking boxers over to Melbourne for TV Ringside, running professional bouts at the Octagon Theatre at Elizabeth and Thebarton Town Hall and various other venues around Adelaide. At that stage I was making plenty of money. Terry picked up the bouncer’s job at the Salisbury Hotel. He had a backstop lined up to go out with him but had to supply another bouncer, and the other bloke never turned up – he’d heard that the pub had been wrecked the week before by a lot of pretty heavy characters. Terry said to me, “Look, if you don’t go out with me I haven’t got anyone, and I need someone to give me a hand until I can find an off-sider.” I was making $25,000 a year at that stage and working as a bouncer on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, which I really didn’t need. Anyway, we won all the fights and started to clean the pub up when Terry found another bouncer. My poem “Crowd Control” is about Terry.

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After I got my back straight again, I went to college to have a go at an Associate Diploma in Aboriginal Studies. I’d hung around like a larrikin for a couple of years – got around like a juvenile delinquent, and I thought, ‘Well, I’ve got to do something’. I’d started writing poetry and started to feel that the prejudiced atmosphere that I’d grown up with as a kid had had a bit of a reflection on me, and I’d really started to think about life while I was crippled and walking around bent up. I started to feel that I was being stared at and pointed at, and I’d had my years of running around in $500 mohair suits and driving the V12 Jag and all that. Then all of a sudden, while walking down the street, I was getting pointed at and ‘Look mummy, spastic, look mummy, he’s crippled’. I started thinking about the problems of Aboriginals and minority groups that are constantly pointed out and the humiliation they suffer. I thought to myself that I’d like to be involved with Aboriginal people. MS: So you started out doing things in an unstructured way? GG: Yeah, I tried to get jobs in the Aboriginal Departments but it just wasn’t on. They said the only way to get a job was to have an Associate Diploma in Aboriginal Studies. The idea of going back to college didn’t turn me on at all. I’d always been told by teachers that I was a dill. I went down and enrolled as a mature-age student at Underdale for an Associate Diploma in Aboriginal Studies and finished up getting seven Distinctions out of the nine subjects in the first year and realized that I wasn’t a fucking idiot after all. I thought, ‘This is okay’, but by that stage I’d also been given a grant by the South Australian Department of the Arts, together with Jenny Boult and Eric Beach, to run the Mobile Poetry Workshop. That was Eric’s idea, basically, and he pulled Jenny and me in, put the submission in, and got the funds through. William Fleming, the Project Officer, thought it was a good idea and they funded it, and it did go exceptionally well. The areas we worked in were mainly reform schools and prisons. My prison poem “Play the Game” came from doing the course at Underdale. One of the subjects I took was ‘Deviance and Conformity’, and through doing that particular course we toured three of the gaols in South Australia. After that, I wrote the poem and became quite interested in prisons. My two brothers had several periods of imprisonment for drunk-driving offences. I’d always been fairly lucky. I’d been in as a visitor but never been on the other side. I had the opportunity, through that, of having a look right through the whole system, seeing and hearing how they spoke to prisoners – and how prisoners spoke back to them. Also seeing and hearing the way the guards spoke about the way the place was run. It really intrigued and interested me.

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Through the Mobile Poetry Workshop we worked in gaols and reformatories, and I thought that all the blokes were just like me – though perhaps a bit unluckier: they weren’t wearing visitors’ passes. I thought most of them would’ve had about the same qualifications as me, which was fuck-all. I went back to college again this year to finish the Associate Diploma, and halfway through the first term I was appointed poet-in-residence at Pembroke School, an upper-middle-class private school. They’d got me out there last year for their Pembroke Festival of Arts, and that blew all the kids out – they’d been getting old poetry – you know, 200- and 300-year-old stuff – and couldn’t relate to it. In I came, reading about Yatala Labour Prison, drug addicts, and hotel bouncers, and they fell right into it, and put pressure on the English Senior, Kim Walton, to get me back and do more sessions with them. So he gave me the job as poet-in-residence, and I did forty sessions in the first term this year. The residency started to interfere with my studies. I never realized how much time it was going to take up and I had other opportunities to work as a writer and I thought, ‘Well I can do as much for Aboriginal people working as a writer and talking about prejudice in schools as I can in finishing the course anyway’, and I thought I couldn’t give the course full-tote odds, so I applied for a leave of absence, which was granted. Perhaps I will go back and finish it; I really don’t know. I’d like to make it as a writer and live wholly and solely off writing; that’s the ultimate goal for me. MS: You’ve got a fairly full calendar at the moment, running around town and further. Were you responsible for organizing the Cathedral Hotel readings? GG: Yeah, well, one afternoon, Jenny Boult, Eric Beach, Neil Paech, and I went out to Yatala Labour Prison to do a reading, and because of some internal problems in the prison, they wouldn’t let us in. We went back to Jenny’s place for a cup of coffee and started talking about how we should do a pub reading. I said, “Look, I know the bloke that owns the Cathedral Hotel in North Adelaide. I’ll jump on the blower and organize it. How about the four of us and Mike Ladd? We’ll see how it goes.” So the five of us ran around, sold tickets, and all put up posters, then split the door money. It was the first time we’d been paid as pub poets. We all pulled about $24.27 for the night and thought, ‘This is unreal’, you know, fantastic stuff! MS: You’re in the Poets Union over here? GG: Yeah, we’ve got a Poets Union. It’s been revived a few times. I think that Jenny Boult revived it the last time and then dropped out of it. It hasn’t really been a very strong unit since. MS: What was Eric Beach’s part in your career?

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GG: Well, he stepped into Adelaide just after I started writing material that was maybe publishable, and I attended one of his workshops. He gave me a fair bit of criticism, some valid and some of which I dismissed – but I took a bit of notice of what he said. He was at a loose end, and so was I with studying, and I was at home perhaps three days a week. He was wandering around the city and would call in here and we would sit around drinking coffee and reading poetry to each other and talking about various poets. He was always looking for jobs, and came up with the Mobile Poetry Workshop idea, which we worked on together. Eric wasn’t an organizer, really. I think my commercial background and running businesses made me aware of how poetry could be promoted. The number of people who said, ‘Oh, you’ll never eat off poetry’ made me more determined to show that it was possible. For the last ten weeks since my leave of absence from Underdale I’ve been working as a full-time poet–performer, and I now know that you can eat off poetry. MS: Do you see any progressions or refining or changes in direction going on in your work? GG: I think I’m getting a lot tighter. I use fewer words to say more. I’m probably delivering a much more succinct message. I tend to write about dramatic situations rather than quiet situations, because I feel that literature is a way that can focus attention on things that otherwise might be overlooked. It mightn’t mean that it’s going to change straight away, but it might bring about some changes in attitudes by people. When I write a poem about a prison, I send a copy to the Department of Correctional Services, although I get slammed in a lot of prisons – I’ve just been over to Port Lincoln prison, a week ago, and did a reading there, and read a fair bit of political stuff about the oppressive nature, etcetera, of prison. I read “Play the Game,” and some of my poetry needs to be spoken fairly loudly to get the message across and show the anger and frustration. They turned on the amplification system inside the room and I could hear my voice bouncing back inside the education building. I know that all the Senior Officers were up in the front office listening to me, so I started a discussion on how the system is fucked – how it has to be changed and that the prisoners shouldn’t tolerate the situation, that they should bring about change, that they’re in a situation where they can write about it effectively and shouldn’t be writing about birds and butterflies. They should be writing about the nature of how they’re treated. As a result of this conversation, the Head Prison Officer has tried to axe me going there. They put a bit of pressure on my tutor, Petria, from the Prisoner Education Unit. They

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don’t want me back at Port Lincoln Gaol again. But Petria thinks she’s got it organized, so, when I go back there, I’ll have the sessions that have been booked. MS: Finally, perhaps, who do you like as writers? GG: I like a lot of poetry Bukowski has written, because I think he’s a fairly tight writer. I got onto him about eighteen months ago when I read Love is a Dog from Hell. After reading his poetry, I thought, ‘I’m just telling half the story’ – I think maybe this poetry had an influence on the way I do write because it made me aware of the things I was leaving out. In Australia R.G. Hay, Shelton Lea, Eric Beach, Jenny Boult. I can fall straight into most of the stuff they write and really enjoy it. I don’t think I’m particularly influenced by anyone’s style, and I like to think that I have a style that is unique – that I’ve found through experimentation. I like poetry to be able to relate to everyday events and everyday people – to appeal to people who wouldn’t generally read poetry. I’ve knocked about with a lot of blokes who’ve been in gaol, and although I don’t drink, I knocked around in hotels around Adelaide that have the real working-class element. My brother’s a builder’s labourer and I go to the pub where he drinks when he knocks off from a building site and get with the bricklayers, labourers, scaffolders, riggers, crane-drivers, semi-trailer drivers – all those sorts of blokes. I’ll often belt out a poem in a pub and blow the fellers out. They’ve grown up with the idea that poetry is for poofs – it’s great to see their attitudes change; some even come to the pub readings now. I’ve copped a lot of flak around Adelaide for being an oral poet. A lot of poets that are maybe from ‘the establishment’ say ‘You know, Goodfellow’s an oral poet, and no-one will ever buy his work or read his work; he might be a good performer, but you have to see him live to appreciate his poetry’. I think that’s bullshit! I think there is a place for my poetry, and I reckon if I can go into a school or a prison or a reformatory and change attitudes in fifteen minutes, then I’ve achieved something. I’ve got stuff that I wouldn’t do at a public reading, because I don’t think people would catch it, and I won’t read that generally. If I have to go into a long introduction for a poem, I won’t normally read it aloud. I don’t think, when I set out to write a poem, that I’m writing it for a live audience or for an audience that’s going to pick it up and read it – I think it just happens.

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———— Something to Contribute: A Conversation96 ————

D

T R U S S E L L I S A C L A S S I C A L P I A N I S T , poet, and biographer. He was born in Christchurch in 1946. He gained his Master’s degree in English at the University of Auckland in 1970, and has published poems widely. His polemical essays on aesthetics and art cover the themes of landscape and civilization in New Zealand painting – “Stockhausen and Doctor Faustus” and major commentaries on the paintings of Alan Pearson and Nigel Brown. He has published a biography of the expatriate Australian painter Roy Dalgarno, and, most recently, Fairburn (Auckland: Auckland University Press and Oxford University Press, 1984), a biography of the poet A.R.D. (Rex) Fairburn, the subject of this interview in Auckland in early 1985. Trussell’s ecological polemics include “History in an Antipodean Garden” (an account of the human impact on New Zealand landscape), “Ecology and Socialism,” which Trussell calls “an attempted synthesis of early Marx and contemporary ecological theory,” and The Expressive 97 Forest. Anthony Alpers (biographer of Katherine Mansfield) has called Trussell’s biography of Fairburn “the best biography of a writer” published in New Zealand, and has suggested that “the very least it should earn him is a prize: let’s hope it does.” ENYS

MS: When did you start on the Fairburn biography? DT: In 1973. My father suggested I write a biography of Fairburn the year before, and I happened to like Fairburn’s poetry a lot. MS: What was your father’s interest? DT: He’s a pianist, a classical pianist, and he has a very strong literary interest. In fact, he’s taught literature at the Training College here for quite a while. And so I thought about it for a while, and thought, ‘Well, a biography is a readable sort of proposition’. At that time I was poised to do a doctorate, and I didn’t particularly want to write a story. So everything seemed to coincide at that moment. The University gave me some money to start the whole thing off. MS: Who supervised the thesis part? DT: MacDonald Jackson; and I told Musgrove [the Professor of English] that I intended not so much to write a thesis as a book, and that was fine by him, he said. MS: Sid Musgrove did the launch, did he? I was told he was there. DT: He was one of the people that spoke at the launching, yes. MS: What did he have to say? 96

Trans-Tasman Undercurrent 1.1 (1986): 58–65. Denys Trussell, “History in an Antipodean Garden,” The Ecologist (London) 12.1 (1982): 32– 42; The Expressive Forest: Essays on the Arts and Ecology in Oceania (Auckland: Brick Row, 2008). 97

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DT: He liked the book. He didn’t say much publicly. In fact, he read a Fairburn poem – he’s recorded some of the Fairburn poetry. MS: He’d known him in Fairburn’s Takapuna days? DT: Yes, he’s still living in Devonport, still at the same place. MS: Yes, I didn’t realize till I read the book that Fairburn lived so close. DT: Yes, he was just around the corner, really. I think Musgrove came out here in about ’47, and he was a friend of Fairburn’s from that time on. MS: Yes, Sidney Musgrove had spent six years at the University of New England – where I was in the late ’70s – when they had recently set up the university – and Karl Stead was there in the 1950s, too [1956–57], so I was interested in these trans-Tasman links; everything seems to be getting closer in recent years. DT: About time, I think. MS: Does anything stem from writing the biography by way of thoughts on – or an attitude to – biography itself? DT: Yes, I’ve often thought quite a lot about that. I read quite a lot of biographies, to start with, and some of them I found superlatively written and readable. One of the most outstanding was a biography of Stalin by Isaac Deutscher, which read like a Dostoyevsky novel, just incredible, because Stalin, in his person, had Dostoyevskian contradictions. I suppose; and that really fired me up about the possibilities – the expressive possibilities – of biography. I read the classic Boswell on Johnson. And another one that I thought was as expressive as a good novel was Henri Troyat’s biography of Tolstoy. Neither Deutscher nor Troyat was written in English – they were translations – but I thought they were both amazing pieces of work, and they stuck out in my memory. The only other major literary biography written by a New Zealander is, of course, Anthony Alpers’ thing on Katherine Mansfield, and I read his first version, and quite liked that, and I was very impressed by his last, revised version. MS: Yes, that’s a beauty; you’ve read Philip Wilson’s book on Satchell? DT: No, I’ve read a lot of New Zealand prose, but I’ve fallen very much behind. I haven’t read any systematically for several years. But at that time, I read most of the people who had made a name for themselves, and a few oddballs like Ian Hamilton, who hadn’t. Do you know Ian Hamilton? A very interesting man who was a friend of Fairburn’s. He wrote a book called Till Human Voices Wake Us, about pacifism, and that had quite a lot of influence on me, actually, because Ian’s book was particularly related to Fairburn’s own life. Ian wanted Fairburn to become– or suggested that Fairburn become – as much a pacifist as he was,

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and Fairburn didn’t. During World War II, he felt that the Axis powers would only be stopped by force. I didn’t read as much as I wanted to. I read quite a lot of early journals; that documentary literature, going back as far as some of [Samuel] Marsden’s; some work by [John Liddiard] Nicholas – Narrative of a Voyage to New Zealand [1817, on a voyage to New Zealand and van Diemens Land in 1814–15] – and that all provided a feeling for the first chapter. MS: Your first chapter’s very good; there’s a great amount of stuff on the nineteenth-century Fairburns. DT: I think a lot of the issues raised in that documentary literature were the ones that Fairburn himself actually had to confront or contend with in his own life – in his relationship to Christianity, landscape, to colonial art and politics. I spent a fair deal of time reading the extant New Zealand poetry, and I think my view of it was that Fairburn at his best has written poetry as good as anybody else here has ever written. I had that sense of disappointment that he wasn’t at his very best very often, really. MS: What sorts of limitations could you remark on, that you experienced – experience still, perhaps – concerning the work (given that certain people are still alive and so on), which might have resulted from non-inclusion of material? DT: There are some very strong restrictions on what I could publish and what I couldn’t, for a start. The obvious restriction’s the libel law; and also, my own relationship with the family. There are things that Jocelyn [Fairburn’s widow] told me, for instance, that are not for publication. But they were helpful, in a sense, in being background for certain things that I could publish. I would have liked to say more about Fairburn and homosexuality, for instance, but at the time I was writing it, Frank Sargeson was still alive, and I couldn’t. A lot of the animosity that developed between Fairburn and Sargeson was actually because Fairburn decided that Sargeson was a homosexual – which he had known all along anyway – and then decided that this was a bad thing, and he took action on it, and cut the friendship. Well, it was mutual: they both cut the friendship for various reasons, and homosexuality was a very major one of these reasons. MS: Yes, that comes through as a real obsession, toward the end of the story, the ‘effects’ of homosexuality on writing, or on art in general, as Fairburn saw it. DT: Yes. MS: Another thing, on the question of Fairburn’s health; it seems to me that there’s little reference to the state of his health until very close toward the end. I

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got towards the end of the book, the last chapter or two, and thought, ‘Well, he must be going soon’. DT: The causes of death: well, the only person who discerned that a long time before his death was his wife Jocelyn, and possible a family friend that I mention in the book, Doctor Chapman. Most people, right to the very end, saw Rex Fairburn as a paragon of health. You know, he was a big man, always physically strong, always swimming. Nobody ever thought of him as being ill. But Jocelyn had sensed for two or three years before that that there was something deeply wrong. And the causes of his illness, as with, I think, a lot of cancer victims, just goes right back to the beginning of his life. There are unresolved tensions, and it’s clinically recognized now that such tensions are major causes of cancer. Probably at the time it wouldn’t have been at all orthodox to think of it in those terms. In fact, I’ve talked to the surgeon who worked on his cancer, Douglas Robb, and I don’t think that Robb could have found it at all that plausible, had I suggested tension as a cause, because he came from that generation – an earlier generation of doctors. If you want to look at it on a deep level, possibly it’s a materialization of some kind of death-wish – I don’t know; those are all imponderables. MS: A lot of information in the book is annotated, of course. Where did the sort of material that isn’t annotated come from? DT: It came from talking to Jocelyn, to Thayer Fairburn, and to the daughters. As I said in the acknowledgments, I really had a sort-of seven-year conversation with Jocelyn. And a few close friends of Fairburn’s, who talked a lot, and repeatedly: you know. I could ring them up at any time, and I did so over a period of years – just to take up a point with them, and they would talk at length. Harold Innes, in particular, I was thinking of. I cut off the formal interviewing when I reached about seventy interviews. I could have done about five hundred. MS: You were recording them on tape? DT: No, I didn’t use a tape-recorder. At the time I was averse to it, and I thought that if I wrote as they spoke the editing would be more true to the person I was speaking to. But now, I think that it doesn’t compensate for the fact that I could have probably recorded a great deal more information by using a tape-recorder. And if I ever did another biography, I’d use a tape-recorder. MS: Yes, there’s quite a deal of reporting, rather than direct quotes, in the biography, which gives it a particular character – events seen through a series of memories.

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DT: Yes, I found that I couldn’t trust my memory, so I had to be very careful about double-checking things. I’m meant to trust my memory, because I’m a pianist and I have to perform by memory with one hundred percent accuracy, but it isn’t quite the same process as gathering information about people’s lives. Facts that emerge or merge into one another and get misshapen by that process in a way that musical statements can’t. I have written another biography, a shorter one, about an Australian painter, Roy Dalgarno, who lives here, and I did all that by the same method. Roy just talked away and I just wrote away, and then I showed him what I’d written and he said it was okay. The thing about the Fairburn biography, too, that I regret, is that it was very hard to get information about his day-to-day life, because, as I said [Chapter 9, page 179, for example], he never kept a journal that related to him, either. I think I could have given it more intricacy and texture if I’d had something of that – what he ate, where he drank, who he met. I’d been doing the work for a couple of years before I realized that you could make a very good biography out of that kind of intricacy: it’s not just trivia. In fact, I think it’s very important. Again, if I’d used tapes, I would have captured more of that. MS: Were you interested in Fairburn’s political career or his political opinions? He seems to treat major issues that concerned other writers in Europe, in particular in England, through the Depression years. What do you think distinguishes his work and ideas as a New Zealander in these matters? DT: His ideas and political opinions always had a broad basis; he reached not just New Zealanders. The way he expressed himself about social and political issues was such that it had relevance outside of New Zealand as well. That was his talent in this area, I think. Rex would have been a good thinker and writer on political and social issues wherever he was, and his writings in the New Zealand context are refreshing partly because of their reach beyond New Zealand. His political career – I don’t think we should really describe it as such. He supported, initially, Communism, when he was under the influence of R.A.K. Mason. He was quite an enthusiastic Communist at that stage – or socialist: he didn’t have the dedication, though, that Mason had – this was in the late 1920s. He respected Marx as a thinker, and that respect carried on long after he had become disenchanted with the Stalinist practice of Communism. His dalliance with Social Credit reduces his credibility in the eyes of many, with respect to his political thinking. But if you look carefully at his reasons for being involved with Social Credit, they were quite cogent at the time. He was not at all part of the image of Social Credit that we have now – that it was a virtually antisemitic

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organization with some rather sinister and cranky ideas. Fairburn was never in the least bit antisemitic, and published an explicit denial of antisemitism later in his life. He involved himself with Social Credit because he hated the power of money, and Social Credit seemed to be a set of theories that attacked the power of money in a fairly logical way, by attacking the habit of usury. You’ve asked what I think distinguishes his work through his career in this area; I think it’s the great clarity of his ideas, and his ability to express them very clearly in poetry as well as prose. He was an eclectic in his social and political thinking, and he claimed, finally, to be an anarchist, in the most creative sense of the word. MS: Dominion [wr. 1935] was the first poem of Fairburn’s to take up social themes in a rather overt way98 – say, as overt as Ezra Pound’s Cantos that dealt with “Usura.” Fairburn was reflecting a mood of the 1930s? And the social element of his poetry, the State’s demeaning effect upon the spirit of man, if I can call it that, seems to have remained in his poetry in one form or another. DT: I don’t think there is ever really a fundamental shift of view in the political content of Rex’s poetry. It was always poetry that was concerned with the maximum of human liberty. Sometimes there is a socialist element in his political writings; sometimes there’s a Social Credit element; but underlying those shifts in emphasis, there is mainly a concern for the preservation of human freedoms. Undoubtedly, his poetry was at its most political during the Depression. In his later years, his poetry was either lyrical or satiric, and the satires, while they often had political overtones, or they might even take up a small issue of the day, didn’t have the great weight of political material in them that Dominion had. Yet again, if we look at his later two long poems, “To a Friend in the Wilderness” and “The Voyage,”99 written late in the 1940s, both can almost be read as political statements in verse-form – of an anarchist. Both of them reject any form of political certainty, any form of political dogma, and, I suppose, support completely open-ended thinking in life and politics. So they are in one sense highly political poems, although they are couched in less explicitly political imagery than Dominion. I don’t think, despite these changes of shading and emphasis, that there was much fundamental change from the time he began writing poetry until his

98

A.R.D. Fairburn, Dominion (Christchurch: Caxton, 1938), repr. in Fairburn, Collected Poems, foreword by Denis Glover (1966; Christchurch: Pegasus, 1975): 15–34. 99 Fairburn, “To a Friend in the Wilderness” (1949), in Collected Poems, 47–58; “The Voyage” (1948), in Collected Poems, 35–46.

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death: He was concerned with freedom: freedom of feeling, freedom of political development, freedom of movement, freedom of artistic form. I suppose you could say that Dominion was his most didactic political poem, because he treated the issue of usury and the dangers of Stalinism in it quite explicitly. Some of its artistic failures are due to his attempt to bring such difficult material into the poem and keep it in poetic form, but even where it’s quite awkward it still has quite a lot of rhetorical power. Even the dialogue between the anarchist and the communist – although it seems in some ways to be stilted – has a lot of eloquence and power, and is not entirely unsuccessful artistically. MS: Fairburn seems to have had a highly developed consciousness of literary tradition, in particular with respect to vers de société, love-poetry, and poems about poetry. He seems easily to have taken over and mastered many forms, especially love-lyrics and epigrams relating to society. Would you think that this aspect is perhaps underrated by some of his contemporary or more recent critics? DT: Yes, I do think that it’s underrated. He had a great facility with given forms; he used them well, he used them elegantly, and it’s something that nobody really talks about much, because – of course – his most important work was usually in a sort of free verse that was breaking away from given forms. A lot of people have made the accusation that Dominion’s a kind of watered-down – formally speaking – version of The Waste Land. It’s my personal belief that Dominion’s got far more pith, power, and poetry in it than The Waste Land. Formally it’s not as adroit, but I think that, because of the energy of the emotion in it, it really goes far beyond The Waste Land – although that would be a very unpopular view of it. It’s my personal view that The Waste Land is a vastly overrated poem: it is a statement of impotence and it is, poetically, I feel, rather impotent; whereas Dominion, which is much more ramshackle, does not leave one with the feeling that the poet had been overwhelmed by the death of civilization. The poet moves beyond it by the force of his temperament. In that sense, Dominion, I think, is a far more useful piece of poetry to bequeath to a future. Formally, though, Dominion is shaky. If we look at some of Fairburn’s rhyming verse, it’s clever; some of it is lacking in any consequence, but it’s always clever, it’s always well turned. His wit is very fine. MS: Fairburn seems (to put it mildly) to have had a vital interest in day-to-day New Zealand political affairs, due in part to his journalistic occupations, and consequently wrote a good deal of verse-commentary on these affairs. In that, I suppose, he’s like other poet–journalists in the New Zealand line who weren’t academics or teachers (and some who were or are) – like David McKee Wright

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around the early years of the twentieth century, or ‘Whim-Wham’ [Allen Curnow] now. Do you think his poetry gained or suffered from this running commentary on current affairs? DT: I think his poetry suffered from it. That’s the conclusion I reached in my book, and I think it’s fairly obvious. The man had too many distractions, too many interests; his eclecticism overwhelmed his development as a poet. Yet, one could say that if he hadn’t had the great stimulus of a social issue like the Depression, his poetry may have not developed – so there’s that side to the question, too. In the final analysis, we probably can’t say either, but just in the sense of day-to-day practicality, he probably would have been able to polish his gifts and develop them more, particularly in his later life, having gone through the Depression and having had that political involvement, had he then withdrawn a little more from the world. MS: Do you see Fairburn as contributing to New Zealand poetry as an influence of any sort, positive or negative, in terms of his affecting any of his contemporaries or younger poets – say, in the way Mason seems to have made an impact on Tuwhare and others? DT: Fairburn is undoubtedly an influence in poetry here. Even Karl Stead, who dislikes his poetry, has admitted to being affected by it, as a young writer. My own poetry, I think, owes a lot to the ground that Fairburn was the first, really, to break. I personally regard him as an influence that needs to be developed, carried further. Those aspects of his talent that can be carried into the future and can fertilize poetry are, for a start, the vitality of his verse. That of course, owes much to the vitality of his temperament, and it means he carries strongly over into the consciousness of those following him. His concern for the meaning of the human tenancy in this landscape, sometimes masterfully handled, is also going to be something that continues on in New Zealand poetry. At the moment, New Zealand poetry is, I suppose, striving to draw on cosmopolitan sources. One encounters, quite often, the imagery of a universal and anonymous metropolis that is not really an actual city – not even New York. But I suspect that what will last as characteristically New Zealand poetry will be addressing itself to problems of human tenancy in the landscape for some time yet. We have not fully ‘settled’ here, psychologically speaking, and our small cities certainly are not much like the universal metropolis that some of our writers would have them be. Sydney is probably the only Australasian city that really resonates with these megalopolitan echoes. If we look at Fairburn’s use of language, his lyricism, I think he has something to contribute there, too, to the future. I regard his language as an antidote to

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enervated language – really, of T.S. Eliot – who’s a very major influence still in English writing, and in English-speaking universities. I think that Fairburn had a very fine poetic style, and has something to teach people, if one can forget his more Tennysonian lines, the lines that look back to overblown rhetoric, the lines where he hadn’t quite brought his lyricism under control – and there are a few of those. I tend to identify him with influences that I find important in my own writing, and I think that quite a lot of young writers in New Zealand are starting to find his kind of intensity and lyricism. At its most intense and lyrical, Rex has an affinity with some of the poets writing in Spanish in this century. I’m thinking particularly of García Lorca and the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, both of whom wrote love-poems of an intensity that is almost unmatched in English in this century. Rex’s love-poems are among the only ones in English that I’ve seen that approach Lorca’s and Neruda’s in this respect, or in the integration of natural imagery with love, or in their sense of fatality – the fatality and the transience of human love. That amalgam of elements that happens in his lovepoetry at its best, and in the poetry of Lorca and Neruda, is, I think, a very healthy influence, if people care to be touched by it. This is, of course, a personal reaction. I get a lot more out of reading “The Cave”100 (which I think is one of Fairburn’s best love-poems) than I get out of reading “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” “The Cave” gives me the sense of the ongoing processes of love, even though they are defeated by death; whereas reading “Prufrock” I’m overwhelmed by a sense of the void, nothingness. Nothingness is not something we can build on. It is the end of a literary tradition, not the beginning of one, and I think that’s one of the good things about Rex’s poetry – it’s full of beginnings that can be developed, where T.S. Eliot, whom I’m always referring to as a kind of antithesis to him, is full of endings. Nothing more can be said after the The Waste Land. That’s the end of the world, and the younger poets, I think, are probably turning away from endings, and perhaps looking around for a lot of new beginnings, some of which may exist here, in New Zealand and Australia, among the already considerable body of Antipodean art and literature. It’s no longer necessary to look to the ‘butt-ends’ of European or American ‘ways and days’ to tell us where all our own literature should be. MS: Could you say something further about Fairburn’s circle of women and men friends? DT: Well, I’m not going to talk a lot about his men friends, because he had literally hundreds, and I’ve said a lot about that in the book. I’m interested more in talking about his women friends, because he is regarded as a male chauvinistic 100

Fairburn, “The Cave” (1943; Strange Rendezvous: Poems 1929–1941, 1952), in Collected Poems, 82.

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pig. And I suppose the first woman he was close to was his mother, who had an enormous influence on him through her music and her general appreciation of literature. She was a good classical pianist. He had a bond with her that was very deep; there was never any rejection of her by him, although their social views and their lifestyles came to differ inevitably. She was living the life of a married woman in New Zealand in the 1920s. I’ve talked in the book about her own eccentricities – she was a Christian Scientist and a very successful healer. I think that her power as a psychic influence over Rex’s life was really quite fully acknowledged by him. He had a relationship with her that was always pretty close, even though in the last ten years of his life he moved a long way from the parental house. Until the mid-1940s, he and Jocelyn lived in a house very near the parental house, and saw a great deal of both Rex’s father and his mother. After that, they lived in Devonport and saw less of them. In 1947, he wrote an essay called “The Woman Problem,”101 which is full of his most negative and destructive thinking about women. I’ve discussed that a little in the biography. In some ways it seems to be just a stereotyped patriarchal view of the female psyche, although I think that in some ways it is more than that. It bears some careful reading; it can’t be entirely dismissed. It was written in a moment of disenchantment, I think the result of a broken love affair. It was never intended for publication; it was published posthumously, and it is not really a reflection of his actual relationship with women. It’s a reflection of his worst prejudices, his fears about women, prejudices that didn’t manifest themselves so much in everyday life. It’s necessary to look at some of the relationships he did have with women to find the substance of his feelings. Jocelyn, his wife – he had a strong intellectual relationship with her. They had their share of the usual emotional problems between men and women, and undoubtedly, in the domestic scene, Rex was hopeless. He delegated the domestic work of the children and of the house to Jocelyn, and in that way he was a thoroughly conventional husband of his time, perhaps even more erratic and more unreliable than many. In that sense, certainly, you could say he was a kind of male chauvinist. He couldn’t cook, he never did a dish, he never appears to have done any housework, he was an erratic gardener. He expected Jocelyn to turn on huge meals on meagre resources for his friends, and he never put in any of the labour for those meals. He didn’t bring up the children very much. But he did provide an incessant source of intellectual stimulus for the children and for her. He never attempted to hide that part of himself away from them and 101

Fairburn, “The Woman Problem,” in The Woman Problem and other prose, sel. Denis Glover & Geoffrey Fairburn (Auckland: Blackwood & Janet Paul, 1967): 11–43.

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become a kind of intellectual patriarch closeted in the study. There were very vital discussions at the table, and the children and Jocelyn were all part of that. They had their own ideas, too, about things that he would be talking about, and in that sense, of course, he contributed to a very rich environment that they were all brought up in. He had relationships outside of his marriage; for obvious reasons I haven’t been able to go into much detail about them in the book, and for the same reasons I can’t here. I’ve spoken to some of the people involved in these relationships, and they were deeply affected by the man, by his vitality, his largesse, his generosity. Those were all in him, and were as available to his women friends as to his women lovers, as they were to his men friends. He had several women friends who were mainly ‘intellectual’. Jane Mander was one, although that wasn’t a close acquaintance; Lucy Wertheim was another. I mention one or two of these relationships in the book. So, if we judge him by the essay “The Woman Problem,” we would dismiss him, you know, just as a traditionalist male in the worst sense of the term, one who allowed women no powers of creativity, no powers of independent intellectual development, and so on and so on; but in fact he wasn’t like that at all. He fully admitted to the creative capacity of women. He was a great admirer of Jane Mander’s writing, and recognized its unique value in the New Zealand scene at that time. He felt the same, too, about Frances Hodgkins and her work.102 He was a great admirer of Lili Kraus the pianist, and he was a personal friend of hers.103 So, if we’re describing his relationships with women, we have to bear in mind that “The Woman Problem,” the essay, is not the whole story. It’s the disenchanted side of the man, at a bad moment in his life, when he gave voice to some pretty stupid prejudices. He points to weaknesses of character and says that they are specific to women; well, as I’ve said in the book, they are actually specific to the human race, and are not particularly female weaknesses. They are human weaknesses. MS: Was Fairburn interested in other artforms to any great degree – for example, painting, film, music in New Zealand? Did he see or project such things as ‘New Zealand art’ or ‘New Zealand writing’? – and what forms could these have taken? – or, did he see New Zealand developments as part of a larger, global situation, like European or English-speaking art and writing?

102

See, for example, “About Frances Hodgkins,” New Zealand Listener (16 May 1947): 24–25, repr. in The Woman Problem and other prose, 185–88. 103 See, for example, “Lili Kraus,” New Zealand Listener (28 January 1946): 5.

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DT: Well, Rex was on about this all the time. He was passionately interested in painting, and writing, and music. He wrote discerningly about them, in the New Zealand context – and he was particularly concerned with the development of an art here that was a true reflection of experience here, not an import from England, America, or Europe. He gave critical support to Douglas Lilburn, the composer, and recognition to the now very well known writers in the 1930s, Robin Hyde and Frank Sargeson. He was also concerned with the international context of art. He was anti-cosmopolitan in his outlook: he believed that cosmopolitan art related to no one, because it tried to relate to everyone. He believed art was most strong if it was concerned with the particulars of the experience of the artist. That meant: if one was an Englishman, living in the West Country, as Hardy was, one could be most universal about the human race through one’s art by faithfully realizing the universal aspects of one’s particular experience, as lived in that region. For this reason, he believed New Zealanders should concentrate on translating their experiences of their own country, and, of course, their experience if they went away, too. But it had to be their own experience. He didn’t want to see a situation where a New Zealand poet, writing in Dunedin, was writing in the same vein as an American poet writing in New York – writing metropolitan poetry as if he were actually living in a city the size of New York, whereas his environment in Dunedin was completely different. But he knew that some aspects of the Dunedin writer’s experience would be in common with the experience of the poet in New York. The common elements of experience, between the New Zealander in Dunedin and the American in New York – those interested Rex, provided they were expressed with fidelity to individual circumstance. In that sense, he was a universalist in art, but he didn’t want any forced situations where a person in one part of the world adopted the milieu and the exterior postures of a person living in another part of the world. That was not authentic for him. MS: What sorts of attitudes did Fairburn hold regarding Mǒori culture and its place in New Zealand contemporary political reality in the 1930s to the 1950s? DT: Rex was innately in sympathy with the tempo of Polynesian life, as lived in New Zealand. He once said that life here, in the final analysis, was going to be Polynesian to the core. I don’t think that he had a great knowledge of Mǒori culture, though. He lacked a strong anthropological or linguistic background in ǒori culture. Not many of his generation would have had this, unless they were scholars or specialists. The general dissemination of information about ǒori culture – of reliable information – is really a fairly recent thing. He was more influenced by the feeling of a common landscape, a landscape that he had

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lived in, in common with Mǒori people. And his response to the landscape was similar poetically to some of the oral poetry of the Mǒori. I can’t remember finding much evidence of his being involved in Mǒori political issues – land rights, cultural-identity issues, issues of teaching or not teaching Mǒori language. I have been told that he became involved in the building of one of the urban maraes, which still stands, at Okahu Bay. That would have been in the 1930s, I think. He was discerning enough to see that racial tension was going to increase in the long term, between Mǒori and pǒkehǒ, in the northern part of New Zealand. He made some comment about it after he had done a tour of the north. Beyond that, I don’t have much information, really, about his involvement with Mǒori political and cultural issues. Of course, his grandfather would have been involved more, because he came at a time in New Zealand’s history when, if one was lively and moving around the country, quite deep involvement in Mǒori culture was an inevitability. Edwin Fairburn probably had a great deal of knowledge of Mǒori culture, which, of course, is lost to posterity, since he never really recorded it. He was also a very able Mǒori linguist. Rex was born around the turn of the century when Mǒori culture was felt to be in eclipse, and it was almost an unknown thing. The Mǒori race was regarded as dying out; the interaction between the two races was at a low ebb during his childhood and early manhood. It probably has only been evident again since his death, really; so he actually lived through a period where the issue of the Mǒori in politics and of Mǒori culture in the context of New Zealand culture was not the major public matter that it is now. MS: Are you likely to consider an eventual revision, in the way Alpers added to his first version of the Mansfield biography? DT: Well, I don’t want to. That’s all I can say at the moment. That kind of writing no longer interests me. I’m writing fiction now, and I’m enjoying the very different kind of freedom that fiction gives you. I think I’ve had enough of being involved in Fairburn’s life, too. I figure I’ve got my own life to lead, and I’ve felt that very strongly for some years, actually, because I finished the book in 1979, and since then, the editing, with me and two editors at Oxford University Press, Denis McEldowney and Robin Dudding, was going on. They were insistent, and I was insistent that the stylistic flow of the thing be maintained absolutely as the original. I had to write over every word – I had to re-write it. I found, when I was doing that, that I’d had a gutsful of writing about Fairburn, and there were other things I had to look at. You have got to be careful about not having your life eaten up by a project like that. I suppose that, with some writers, that has become their vocation, and they want that sort of relationship with their subject. I

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think Alpers wanted that kind of relationship with Katherine Mansfield. But I didn’t want that with Fairburn’s life. I felt that I had other things that I wanted to say. A major part of my work is being a pianist. MS: One other thing about writing: your poem Dance of the Origin104 – [the flautist] Bruce Robertson has said that the dance and music performance took its name from your poem. What was the relationship there? DT: Well, the choreographer of the Origins Dance Theatre, Alison East, was a housemate of mine for many years – in fact, until very recently. Alison and I simply decided in 1980 to work on a sort-of major performance project together. She had access to dancers, I was writing poetry. Her dancing was very much around natural imagery, rather than urban trauma. My poetry tended to be, too, so I wrote the poem in about three months. She vetted it, asking me that I write poetry that was sufficiently open in its argument to be able to be translated into movement. It couldn’t be an intensely intellectual or metaphysical poem, in a way, because it had to be translated into choreography. That’s why the poem is quite gangly. It sort-of rattles along, so there’s plenty of room in it for the dancers to move. Even though it’s only sixteen pages long, it took about two hours to perform. It was performed in Auckland by the Origins Dance Theatre in 1980. I’d like to see the whole thing done again, especially with the same musician, Ivan Zagni – he’s a very interesting performer and composer. But it would take more money and time and energy than Alison and I have at the moment to put it all together again. So that’s in abeyance for the moment. I also wrote the “Dance” with the view in mind of its being read as a poem in its own right. In the long term, I’m interested in more combination of words, dance, and music. Ideally, I would like to combine music of my own with poetry, but at the moment, virtually all my musical energy is being eaten up by mastering repertoire on the piano. My arms ache after long wrestlings with Liszt, my fingers are lost in the tonal mazes of Albéniz and Busoni. Recitals are exhausting and complicated to organize. And my writing energy is involved in a novel, which promises to be as long a literary effort as Fairburn. Time is of the essence with this, as you would know.

104

Denys Trussell & Alison East, Dance of the Origin (1980; Dunedin: Origins Dance Theatre, 2004).

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—————— Cold Turkey in the Cantina105 ——————

I

D O N ’ T S U P P O S E T H E R E W A S E V E R A T I M E when poets weren’t concerned to make a splash among their friends and in society with their writings. I base this remark on some familiarity with comments by Persius, Horace, Martial, and a number of Greek and Chinese writers, who all appear to lament their craft’s having fallen on lean times, or who make reference – usually dismissive – to less skilful contemporaries. In an era when Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love were not admired traits in an individual, this might have done well enough, but the persistence of an element of competition among poets in particular leads me to wonder why it should be so, throughout the Renaissance and an Age of Enlightenment down to our own age. Are poets so desperate for an audience in any era that they have to roll their own publicity barrel? I suspect so. I can’t recall many instances of poets who haven’t drummed up a bit of business for themselves, whether through patronage or simply by getting the crowd at the pub or salon to shut up long enough to hear them through: sleepless to give their readers (or listeners) sleep, as one notable entrepreneur put it. There have been placid souls who eschewed such pranks, but surprisingly few come to mind. The Puritan minister Edward Taylor is one such case, but that, as they say, is water under the bridge. How many of my contemporaries really don’t care about publicity in these post-Whitman and Pound days? Whitman was following, I suspect, a long line of self-promoters when he wrote his own reviews, and Pound hardly needed tutoring in the black art of spinning a yarn. I suppose I’m warming to the business of considering the matter of audiences for poetry. It seems to me that every poetry reading I’ve ever attended is to a great extent made up of other poets, usually anxious to appear charitable towards the stars of the occasion, but harbouring, and occasionally venting, thoughts which are far from charitable. Petulance, envy, rage, and incredulity feature in their summations of the event. The Roman gentlemen whom I’ve mentioned above generally express incredulity that anyone could take their rivals seriously, and this seems to be the chief inheritance in our post-Classical times. There are many matters to consider, following this brief summary. A number of questions spring to mind:

1. Who do poets write for? 2. What are the criteria for taking any notice of a poet?

105 

Germinal: Poetry and Poetics 1 (April 1985): 6–19.

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3. What, ultimately, is the place of poetry? and 4. What is poetry? It’s a nice collection of chestnuts, but the questions inevitably occur to anyone who continues writing after the first flush of adolescence. Lamartine observed that to be a poet and twenty was to be twenty; to be a poet and forty was to be, perhaps, a poet. There are, of course, many late starters in the trade. Personally, I draw some consolation from the example of Hone Tuwhare, who seems to have commenced publication in what is popularly called middle age. I am also relieved to discover that the musician Rameau produced his first opera, after a lifetime of tutoring and academic involvement, at the age of fifty-four. There’s hope yet, as I might have said. Hone Tuwhare has instigated a revolution in New Zealand writing whereby Mǒori writers have claimed entry into the commonwealth of writers in English, but, more to the point, he has demonstrated that allegiance to the craft will eventually out. He is, in some quarters, touted as the ‘first Mǒori poet’ – as if his own tradition counted for nothing. Witi Ihimaera is similarly proclaimed ‘the first Mǒori novelist’ – and while this may be so by some narrow definition, the label shifts attention from the novels to the author. In Australia, critical retardation is manifested in similar comments about Kath Walker (Oodgeroo Noonuccal) or Faith Bandler – the work is relegated to a lesser status than the nature of the author’s ethnic background. Surely, it’s as apt to observe that we are all – writers in English – in a similar case to those writers in Latin who dwelt in Gaul, Africa, Spain, or Britain. A long-term historical perspective will be taken by academics of the twenty-eighth century, when we will all look a little quaint, whether we write for a handful of acquaintances or for the mass audience (wherever that is) or for ‘futurity’ (a questionable long-shot). I wonder what Dante, or Chaucer, had in mind with regard to audiences. If this appears a daunting thought to a contemporary player, it is nonetheless one that ultimately must be taken into account. A swift way to get included in the annals of the future is to provide heaps of contemporary reference. It’s a sure bet that readers and listeners – while recognizing whatever traits are persistent in human behaviour – will appreciate ‘local colour’ and particular bits of detail, even if the recourse to footnotes makes the going a bit slow. We’ve all had the experience of reading Chaucer or Shakespeare in such a halting fashion – ten lines forward, six footnotes back, until some gleam of freshness appears in the text. Reading West Indian or North American poetry, I am driven to the footnotes and dictionaries, and I suppose this is what’s called the didactic function of verse: often enough, there’s no other function apparent besides entertainment of another order.

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Those who decry the past and claim to ignore tradition but keep on writing eventually have to face the music. They are writing in a tradition, after all, of some sort, by the mere fact of using materials that have inherent cultural significances. It’s obvious by now that open-form, concrete poems, advertising. or political-slogan-bearing works and so on constitute traditions. I can’t see where ‘newness’ comes into the business, apart from such contemporary borrowings in any era. Martial was good at lifting dialogue, hawkers’ cries, political slogans, advertisements. It required e.e. cummings’ typographical arrangements on a page to make a larger advance on that score, but then, he comes later (as the saying goes in pedagogical circles) than Eliot and Pound and the Dadaists, who’d done all that. You can’t win, trying to be modern: someone’s always been there before if you look hard enough. I recall the instance of Trediakovsky, an eighteenth-century Russian poet who, in partial emulation of medieval illuminated religious book production, used typographical possibilities, scattering large and small letters and words across the pages:106 and this long before Mallarmé’s throw of the dice. The foregoing observations suggest that poets write, ultimately, for themselves, not in a self-confessional manner or in order to express feelings (whatever they are), but to recast old observations, for the sake of the game. And, to be fair, I suppose readers like familiar things served up in novel ways. In a recent secondary-classroom situation in Melbourne, a class which elected to study ‘Romance’ novels came to the conclusion that it was, after all, formula-writing, but readers go on to see how the formula can be fiddled with, in each particular case. In rural Queensland, as I discovered in 1984, the bush-ballad is alive and stroppy, with various writers attempting endless variations on Will Ogilvie’s themes and stylistics. To observe a Sydney writer, then, going through the process of rewriting Ashbery a few hundred ways, or to observe a Melbourne suburban poet re-doing Olson or O’Hara, is to get a feeling of déjà lu. I can better understand writers like Auden, Shelley, Baxter, or Browning who appear nearly frantic in their race to get away from every single mode they find themselves performing in, as soon as the performance is over. Critics may love the poet who sticks with one style, but it’s hard on the writer to keep doing the same old tricks. I observe this tendency among reviewers and critics of painting and film. I expect that everyone has read that Kurosawa is disappointing in such-and-such a movie because it’s not like his last one, or that Bridget Riley is ‘taking a risk’ in such-and-such a new work, because, basically, 106

Vladimir Markov, Russian Futurism: A History (Berkeley & Los Angeles: U of California P, 1968): 415n.

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the critic has trouble with anything resembling concepts of what it’s like to produce art all the time. There aren’t many critics worth reading, after all, and our literary journals might do better to just scrap ‘criticism’ and feature instead biographical, social, or interview material relating to writers. It would save a great deal of tedium, and the critical impulse could be reserved for those occasions (called academic conferences) where critics come to hear each other speak in order to fuel their adrenalin rushes. I suppose that, generally speaking, readers want to hear about the writer’s life or views, not the critic’s, which have no recommendation unless they enable a clearer understanding of the writer’s ideas and approach. And this brings us to consider why any writer’s views should be given any more weight than a garbage-man’s views. I have, at least, a point of entry into discussion with the jokers who spend their lives dealing with garbage, and I appreciate the zen of carrying the can because I’ve carried one for academic colleagues often enough and have worked in manual jobs among tolerant people. In common with the latter, I share a notion of serving the people and sharing the pleasure of the dialogue. Describing a recent inner-city poetry reading we attended, a writer in Melbourne observed to me: “It sounded like a Mexican dancer – I, I, I, I, I, – but without the castanets.” In a real cantina, there’s a sense of the audience being taken along with the action, participating in it; or, as Byron observed of a minor talent, His strain display’d some feeling – right or wrong; And feeling, in a poet, is the source of Others’ feeling. (Don Juan, Canto III, L X X X V I I )

I guess that this leaves us with a question relating to the characteristics of art – the hallmarks of what some would call authentic poetry. But we won’t get too bogged down in partisan views here. I’m aware that a lot of poetry is written for an audience that is severely restricted to those in the know, those who share some restrictive interest with the poet. I give them joy of their pursuit. I don’t expect that everyone is turned on by Milton’s Paradise Lost, a poem that seems to me to require a certain sympathy for the poet’s demand that we will be persuaded by a particular ‘justification’ of the way things work. Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura also makes this sort of demand, and I haven’t met anyone who’s enlivened by either work to the extent that they can recite great slabs for entertainment. Les Murray’s The Boys Who Stole the Funeral, it seems to me, takes a similar tack towards ‘justification’, at some expense to roping in an audience. It’s a matter of broadcast versus

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narrowcast codification of the message, as the semioticians say. Adrienne Rich’s poetry also makes demands that few enough readers would accede to unless constrained by the demands of a rigidly adhered-to syllabus in a tertiary cramming factory. But this suggests that a few mates on the syllabus committee never hurt a poet’s chance of boosted sales. It has been some time since we saw a best-selling book of poetry, besides ‘Banjo’ Paterson, C.J. Dennis, and Pam Ayres in Australia. Given that poetry has such a small audience, it’s no wonder that competition is fierce, with jealousies and jockeyings for position being features of this sort of cultural activity. Publishers in Australia have surveyed the poetry market on occasion, and concluded that there are some six or seven hundred buyers of locally published poetry by Australian poets. It’s no surprise that print-runs are minuscule and that small presses take up the slack, while large publishers get on with promoting blockbuster novels and books about food preparation and the proper management of cars, cats, and cacti. It’s probably no wonder, given the historical situation of the art, that poets in Australia and New Zealand don’t make a living from their sales unless they hoof it round the circuit in between bouts of government patronage. I suppose most of our bohemians have made a gallant go of surviving independently of State patronage, and have usually been acclaimed some years after they disappeared from view. Everyone loves a dead artist, especially if the life resembles that of Modigliani. The Brennan industry in Australia represents in part an effort to elect a native-born bohemian. It might be more to the point to support the notion of live nonconformists (utopian hope!) or at least elect more of our fascinating men and women bohemians who created some stir while they lived by virtue of their plain avowal of dissidence. One problem of the academic co-opting of interpretation of our literary heritage has been the tendency to privilege authors who ‘fit’ with an arbitrary ‘tradition’ that has gained headway. John Docker and others have usefully pointed out the existence of such mechanisms in academies, although, ironically, they have generally opposed one stream of interpretation with another, equally arbitrarily elected, and have mimicked the argument of the rival school in urging their case. An interesting parallel can be found in Humphrey McQueen’s election of Margaret Preston to the position of Australia’s great modernist painter. We can expect that Grace Cossington Smith will replace Preston in the pantheon before long, until another candidate is proposed. In all the shuffling in and out of this or that star, it seems peculiar that overviews are obscured, that each case is regarded as if it were an eccentric and highly idiosyncratic one, occurring in a social and cultural vacuum, where nothing supportive or perspective-imbuing is possible. Anyone who has ‘studied Lit.’ at a college or university

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(before such courses are abolished for lack of ‘pull’ among the punters who want a quick degree) will know that there was Kendall, then Lawson, then Slessor, then A.D. Hope, and that all these men simply ‘happened’. Nothing else was going on. A cheerful sign of the times in the past twenty years has been the growth of general studies, or social studies, in schools, whereby some cultural connections are made plainer, as a starting point for comprehension of any notion of Australian culture’s being possible. The tertiary response has been an attempt to coopt Australian cultural studies by various schools trained in dogmatic adherence to European analysts of social structures and cultural studies, so I imagine it will take some decades before the wood is seen through the trees. No less than the ins and outs of poetry, the ins and outs of critical approaches must perform their gavotte, to the amusement of practising artists who will get on with the day-to-day concerns of their craft. I suppose that fads among critics and oldfashioned pedagogues determine the conduct of some artists and writers; it would be inevitable, given that many artists and writers are also critics seeking to persuade others to their views. There is a chance that artists will not be catalogued so easily by the ‘banking’ school of learning, whereby formulaic interpretations are tipped into one generation to be tipped, with diminishing interest, into the next, until the capital has been forgotten or eaten up in charges. At this stage, of course, it becomes clear that I have an interest in both the aesthetic issue – what is poetry – and the equally intriguing question of its relevance or irrelevance to society. Once upon a time I wrote an article about poetry criticism, emphasizing that “Thorough analysis proposes inclusion of the work of art into the history of ideas, or society.”107 I still can’t bring myself to deviate from that notion, which seems to have been missed by one or two readers who took the article to be an appeal for art to be divorced from society. Art may be truly revolutionary in proposing artistic concerns as its predominant features but, inevitably, any work will be seen in the context of society – a reflection of a time and place, since these dimensions determine language. We don’t come easily at works of by-gone eras without bearing in mind certain archaeological conditions relating to the act. Charlotte Brontë is not living now, and Walt Whitman certainly isn’t. By an equivocation we can say that an author ‘lives’, but this is an accoutrement of utilitarian criticism; it doesn’t tell us why or how we should live. Those who occasionally read a poem (I am tempted to say ‘accidentally’, in view of the general community’s capacity to stock their shelves with reading107

“Some Reflections on Contemporary Poetry Criticism,” Meanjin 40.4 (1981): 507–14.

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matter of any sort) are, I think, the audience I prefer to consider. They will recognize fairly quickly the importance of poetry in their lives. I trust their judgment more than I do that of the ‘professional’ reader who makes extravagant claims for the art of poetry (or fiction, for that matter), and whose views corrupt some poets into taking their works so seriously as to assume that poetry must bear the groaning weight of some evangel. I haven’t had any rushed telegram from any Muse to the effect that I have to bore men and women with evidence of the existence of personal pain. Much less am I concerned to disrupt the young or the old at their ease with announcements of things obvious to them at a glance. I suppose that pleasure is an element of poetry that embarrasses many poets, so that they take the short way and dispense with it. The curse of the didactic is the direct result of dispensing with the need to draw readers into the game. No one really enjoys serious things, I might say, at the risk of being misunderstood. No doubt there are grave matters to distract us as individuals and, at times, collectively: we live under all manner of threats to survival. But I wonder if it is really so necessary to counter threat with threat, to oppose an imagined unsympathetic audience with anger, abuse, and signs of contempt. There are occasions where frustration and impatience appear to be the only way out, but there may be limits to the infliction on others of purely reactionary poetry, poetry that is preoccupied with protest, or with portraying the alienated, blunted, or anaesthetic individual. I mean, of course, in terms of audience toleration of this theme. Perhaps poetry is such a marginal art – even if extended to include varieties of dub and hip-hop lyrics and performance – that other art forms may better serve agitprop ends. I wonder. The impact of Plastic People of the Universe argues for the transformational power of pop lyrics, though the whole package combined – music as well as lyrics, place and time and cultural milieu – renders the role of poetry in the phenomenon a contentious matter. What I have just said might suggest (to the suggestible reader seeking loopholes everywhere in these observations) that I am opposed to a poetry that conveys outrage at unjust social conditions. Nothing is further from the truth of the matter; I propose a more imaginative response to alienation than a mirrorimaging of the state. I don’t think it’s necessary for poetry to turn into pop slogans (though, God knows, I’d prefer some of that to the mind-numbing selfabsorption reflected in some lyrics), nor is it necessary to continue to endorse the view that poets are somehow more gifted than others when it comes to moral sensitivity and obligation. Poets may be coincidentally priests or social workers, but it’s a safe bet that there are more efficient ways of correcting social ills than writing poetry about them. Readers would, I suspect, nod their heads in

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a liberal manner and say, ‘Yes, yes, it’s really awful, isn’t it?’ Henry Lawson’s “Faces in the Street” didn’t, after all, change the root causes of human misery. The alternative to woeful statements of sorrow and outrage is not to go into the realms of faery, either. Poems about Australian ‘nature’ (usually understood as referring to works relating to gum trees, bullockies, schoolkids in some edenic state of primal intuitive wisdom, reefs, rivers and mountains, and doughty pioneers) usually leave out the entire social set-up, in any event, and focus on the fleeting nostalgic pleasure of getting out of the historical mainstream for a few moments. Our concept of ‘nature’ is a culturally derived one, handy for advertisements for cigarettes, car sales, or Club Med. It would be pleasant to see an advertisement avowing that the Marlboro-smoking holidaymaker in the Land Rover was busily stuffing up someone else’s (i.e. a culture of ‘primitives’) real estate. That would be some advance on the myth-making twaddle, wouldn’t it? So, what do I expect of any poet who perceives the picture in something like an inclusive way? Nothing less than a sophisticated explication of the human situation. This seems to include most objections that could be raised. The question of genre or form is resolved under the epithet ‘appropriate manner’ – whatever does the job. I do expect that poets have better things to do than describe in sentimental terms the personal tragedy of losing a pet cat or a parent: their sentiments are more decently located on a tombstone or in a prefabricated, funeral-parlour’s selection of pious sentiments of consolation. If loss and alienation are to mean anything to others, then the telling of the circumstance had better be pretty good. Otherwise the effort deserves to be revealed for what it is – banality – in a satire that comes closer to remarking on the sense of tragedy that underlies human transactions. It seems to me that some writers, even some fairly practised ones, assume that in order to speak of death, a poet must induce a kind of death in the reader. That’s fine, if you want to go the whole hog and actually kill all interest in the poem: this, I suppose, would be the perfect mimesis. But if life is to be emphasized, surely there must be some liveliness in the work? I can justify comedy and satire with their range of devices and artistic sleights a good deal more enthusiastically than I can the works that labour for tragic tone and fall into bathos as a result. Sooner a laugh on the occasion of a death than a memorial service to which the general public is invited for the purpose of humiliating the memory of the departed. I imagine that everyone has been present at a poetry reading that left an awful taste and a feeling of self-disgust, about one-quarter of the way into the show, that one didn’t have the integrity to go to the pub or cinema instead.

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Generally speaking, I endorse the pleasure principle of poetry. If the art consists, as Horace and a few dozen others have said, in sweetly informing, then I’ll seek to be delighted, even if the poem is about misery. Coleridge’s “Dejection” ode is a lovely work to read or hear, and he didn’t fall into the trap of simply saying ‘Life’s awful, and I’m going to make you all feel responsible’. I haven’t performed a survey of Australian poetry in this, since I’m flying some ideas which, I trust, override nationalist sentiment. If I were to say why I’m encouraged by any directions in Australian poetry, though, I’d have to acknowledge that several books of satires and comic verse are appearing in a rush, so that there could be grounds for thinking that the literature of the Silver Age (or is it the Bronze Age?) of English writing is not without some realist elements in the far-flung provinces of the former Empire. It’s only by attempting to see the picture from an historical perspective that any real progression is at all possible – in terms of honouring precursors, and checking the hubristic urge to imagine we are at the centre of the world’s concerns. It wouldn’t do for poets to usurp the place earmarked by so many other contenders for the honour, would it? Okay, then, what I’ve said I’d like to see – some change coming over the Sargasso of Australian poetry in general, and ‘the New’ in particular (an unpleasant little backwater) – is undoubtedly possible. Perhaps we’ve all had it up to the neck in any case in recent times (the past fifteen years) with evangelists at every photocopier crying out that the new Zion is upon us. The technological revolution can be overemphasized. It isn’t a faster, more efficient way of printing that makes any work necessarily more or less memorable. Maybe we haven’t been seduced by gadgetry into believing that everything in print must be thereby worth reading. Fatuous assumption: if this were true, then we have not advanced beyond superstition relating to books, and in effect we have regressed, since the Renaissance bookseller was interested, for all the suave printing-work, in profit. And who’d print a work that was calculated to damage economic viability? (‘Vanity’, I hear a faint prophetic voice call, ‘vanity presses’ – i.e. a good deal of what fills the unread sections of libraries.) Much poetry that is interesting to us now may not be so to our successors, nor to less wealthy nations’ literati, who may only see such an explosion of printing as the inevitable result of a technological breakthrough coupled with a brief phase of disposable income being available to a wider social spectrum. In New Zealand, at the beginning of 1985, several people remarked on the shrinkage in the country’s poetry printing in recent times. In the golden years around the late 1970s, such a volume of small-press and large-press productions of poetry was released that New Zealand led all other English-speaking nations’ poetry

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production for a short time, as evidenced in Commonwealth Book Expositions. It is not simply a matter of belt-tightening measures that has led to the reduction of printings in New Zealand; nor, contrary to the cruel import of cheap jokes, is it due to the emigration of New Zealanders to greener financial pastures. The plethora of poetry publications released in New Zealand in the years since 1979 suggests something of a return to a notion of craft for craft’s sake (in terms both of book production and of concern for poetry’s possibilities and limitations). The range of poetry published in New Zealand and admitted to the canon of ‘EnzedLit’ contrasts emarkably with the range of ‘AustLit’ contenders in the academic hit parade: we simply don’t appear to have a place for a witty traditionalist and satirist like Basil Dowling (pace Alex Hope, but then, Hope is not an émigré writer domiciled in England), nor a place for a popular performer like Sam Hunt or a graceful writer of erotic and witty pieces like David Mitchell. No; volume is not a replacement for quality, however difficult that may be to define. In speaking so much of print media, I don’t relegate electronic forms of publication to the sidelines; a revolution as significant as that effected by the invention of movable type is upon us. The state of the art is maintained in Australia – as it has been until recent times in New Zealand – by an astonishing array of journals devoted almost entirely to the representation of various schools or groups of poets. I think it was Les Murray or Frank Moorhouse who observed that café poetry was the closest thing we have to a blood sport in Australia; no matter who launched the jest, but the same remark might be adapted with small loss in the translation to the craft of editing.108 There has never been a time in the past hundred years when some school or other was not engaging in a battle of words with a rival clique, phalanx, or individual, and there is fruitful ground for some cultural historians in search of thesis-matter here. These publications, like those of pub dart-clubs or rifle-shooting associations, might be better seen in the light of sub-cultural activities, although they are marked by a certain carping tone in relation to editorializing which seems to exceed the rivalries of most other competitive sports journals. Thus, one Sydney journal excludes material that is objectionable to its editors on the grounds that it is to be interpreted as welcoming only non-sexist, non-racist (and so on) contributions. The Melbourne journal 925 attempted to exclude all poetry that did not relate to the work situation, although professionals were not regarded as being workers of any sort unless they 108

Note after the event: The first reader of this article, Winifred Belmont, pointed out to me that the remark appeared in an article “Poetry as Blood Sport,” by Philip McCarthy, in the National Times in June 1982. Ms. Belmont observes that she has an astonishing memory for trivia; for my own part, I observe that none of us are inflammable.

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were familiars of the editors. The attempt to edit a journal in accord with a manifesto perhaps inevitably arrives at a compromise with original aims. What is common to all the poetry journals around Australia and perhaps New Zealand is that they aim to privilege poetry of one sort or another. This seems a banal point to insist on, but it is one that is overlooked fairly frequently: poetry, unlike rifle shooting or darts, does have eloquent or strident spokespersons for various claims that it is concerned with other issues than technical ones. True, a sports-club journal may remark upon incidental qualities of coordination, balance, control, and so on which are developed by attention to the techniques of the sport, but poetry journals do not always state their claims so forthrightly, and rarely demonstrate the necessity which connects poetry and good citizenship, toughening of moral fibre, encouragement of piety, and a host of other assumed advantages attaching to the generation of poetic texts. In the generation of a good deal of jargon, in effect, the wood is lost for the trees again, and it would be pleasant to open a journal where sap is more in evidence than leaf-compost.

————— Poetry: The Melbourne Alternative109 —————

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1 970 S , THO SE LIVING IN THE COUNTRY outside Melbourne interested in poetry would occasionally hear of the antics of Melbourne writers taking their work public in interesting ways. Most of the news about them was sporadic, since their publications were generally small-press leaflets, broadsheets, private magazines, and manifestos – often directed against each other, making what seemed like extravagant claims to constitute the real ‘New’ poetry, or the most valid poetry for popular consumption. A degree of scepticism greeted their editorials and statements in those benighted places outside Carlton, Richmond, and St Kilda. For those lucky enough to have a friend in the southern capital, material could be obtained which evidenced a network of contributors from Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, and the odd country address. Here was a mutual-support system for vernacular and experimental work coming at a pace that outstripped the ability of mainstream journals to keep up – assuming that it was remotely interested. The work was an offshoot of what Nigel Roberts, John Tranter, and others had called the print explosion, which began around 1968, and the array of work was formidable for sheer bulk. And, undoubtedly, a number of contemporary classics were in the making. N THE

109 

Meanjin 44.4 (Summer 1985): 446–51.

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Prominent from the start was Kris Hemensley, whose mimeo magazines gathered local and overseas writers interested in expanding horizons through postmodernist and conceptual formats, after the examples of Paul Celan, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Gary Snyder, Edmond Jabès, Charles Olson, and a host of others, heirs to Surrealism, Ezra Pound, and other modernist manifestations in prose and verse. A good deal of the work by Australian, English, New Zealand, and North American writers included in Hemensley’s Earth Ship magazine (begun in England in 1970) and its successor, The Ear in a Wheatfield (May 1973 to December 1976), may appear derivative in retrospect, but its triumphs outweigh embarrassments; Hemensley may fairly claim to have provided a more convincing format for experimental writing, avant-garde theorizing, translations, and reviews than many provided by journals operating elsewhere through the period of the Ear’s lifetime. His current small journal, Merri Creek or Nero, carries on this tradition, with works of high seriousness and playfulness, and it elicits (and solicits) work by a fascinating range of international writers ploughing similar fields. The Best of The Ear110 is an attractively constructed compendium of the pick of the Ear in its middle phase, and one can only wish for a similar gathering from some other magazines of the same period. It’s doubtful, though, whether any journal of writing in Australia could show ‘locals’ to such advantage against such an international line-up, and this contextualizing framework recommends the volume to libraries and readers interested in seeing at a glance where experimental writing in Australia is placed. Hemensley can claim some firsts in his magazine, with sections of work in progress by Bruce Beaver, Frank Moorhouse, Bill Manhire, Walter Billeter (whose commentaries on contemporary German writing make an attractive addition), Ian Wedde, Geoff Bowman, and Peter Riley. Hemensley’s reviews are crisp and, in retrospect, discriminating about current Australian writers’ works. Not everyone will agree with his estimations (for example, of Shelton Lea’s poetry), but he has wisely included a fair amount of criticism and reviewing in the volume, to indicate the status of the reviewer in relation to creative works. Off the cuff, I can only think of Les Murray’s reviews included in high profile in recent volumes of prose as similarly revealing the relationship of criticism to other writings. The translations (Bowman’s versions of the Japanese poets Issa and Abutsu, Peter Riley’s versions of Ponge) and essays by Rosemary Waldrop on Jabès and Walter Billeter on Celan are highlights of the collection for me. Prose, including 110

The Best of The Ear: The Ear in a Wheatfield 1973–76, A Portrait of a Magazine, ed. Kris Hemensley (Melbourne: Rigmarole, 1985).

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essays on translation, short fiction, and writing about the act of writing, besides letters (another overlooked genre), provides variety. The Best of The Ear is not a book to read cover-to-cover at a sitting, but offers an argosy for reflection and dipping into: rather like other magazine anthologies,111 it’s a book to return to, even for the pleasure of re-reading favourite bits. For my money, John Riley, Fielding Dawson, Will Peterson, and Mark Reames are discoveries worth making; it’s good to see Jennifer Maiden well represented in this company, too. Misgivings about Hemensley’s collection are outweighed by its scope. I can’t get excited about Laurie Duggan’s “Anagrams,” or his “North/South/ & After That,” which seem derivative, but I take it as read that the one is a playful inclusion and the other may serve to show how someone else besides Robert Gray can convert open-field Snyderesque practice into local use. Frankly, there’s nothing else in sight that approaches the range of this book in showing writing at the limits of experimentation in prose and verse, and it’s a model for future magazine undertakings. With  ’s Off the Record,112 we’re back into the polemics of the heirs to the ‘Generation of ’68’, with a long introduction seeking to legitimize performance poetry as the direct descendant, with accompanying éclat, of that phenomenon. It’s all here in Pi’s essay: factions, schisms, excommunications, and extravagant claims, some abuse for the de rigueur ‘establishment’ (without which no ‘alternative’ movement can function), and some revived calls for poetry to come to the aid of the revolution. If Hemensley’s enterprise (and that of his co-workers Robert Kenny and Walter Billeter) gave rise to Clifton Hill and environs being seen by some as the headquarters of the ‘Melbourne Import–Export Company’, then  ’s raucous tones have been prominent in making ‘proletarian’ poetry (a bit of a misnomer, really) and performance poetry seem like a raree-show elsewhere about the country. And that’s a pity, because the book does show a considerable range of talent, besides much that fails to stand up on the page – but then, much of it’s meant to be performed or viewed ‘off the page’. The introduction to this volume is a cussedly contradictory one, wherein selfcongratulation at having got a major publisher to undertake the venture is mixed with insulting remarks about mainstream publishing. Tom Shapcott (one of the people to whom the book is dedicated) is taken to task for lack of foresight, and several old chestnuts (Hope, Dutton, McAuley, and Buckley) are given another 111

For example, An Overland Muster: Selections from Overland, 1954–1964, ed. Stephen Murray– Smith (Brisbane: Jacaranda, 1965), Quadrant: Twenty-Five Years, ed. Peter Coleman, Lee Shrubb & Vivian Smith (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1982), or, in New Zealand, Landfall Country: Work from Landfall, 1947–61, chosen by Charles Brasch (Christchurch: Caxton, 1962). 112 Off the Record, ed. ஡ O [pronounced Pie-O] (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1985).

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roasting for their ‘stranglehold’. It seems to me that this approach is antiquated now, especially when the ‘Generation of ’68’ is well on the way to strangling younger writers – in the perception of many of the latter. The introduction does, however, give a useful run-down, in several senses, of the small-press scene of recent years. Off the Record, its eccentricities of exclusion and inclusion apart (a whole volume of the excluded could usefully complement the book), is probably the best-looking book of poetry we’ll see in a long time. Mimmo Cozzolino (compiler of the beautiful book of Symbols of Australia and much else), Shane Nagle, and   have done themselves proud in design and layout. One or two typographical disasters, like the dropping of a section of Nigel Roberts’ opening poem of the volume, won’t be dwelt on as the pages are turned to reveal each poet’s work accompanied by a photograph, brief biography, and statement of poetics. There’s no bibliography accompanying the works, a decision made to keep the format “clean’ and focus on the works reproduced, but the writers who appeal to the reader of the collection can probably be located by reference to the magazines cited in the introduction. Hemensley’s anthology does offer further reading hints, in the brief notes on the contributors to The Best of The Ear appended at the end of his book. The format of  ’s anthology superficially recalls one or two overseas anthologies of recent times – like the British compendium of performance works Apples and Snakes113 – but its typography is more varied, and its graphic illustrations are in a class of their own. Concrete poems and line drawings, together with photographs, have been a feature of other   productions, such as his 925 magazine, and the visual-poetry anthology Missing Forms.114 Several of the poets in Off the Record have solid track-records in other printformats: Jenny Boult, Alan Wearne, Sylvana Gardner, Billy Marshall–Stoneking, Eric Beach, Shelton Lea, Graham Rowlands, Chris Mann, Gig Ryan, and a few others. A contradiction immediately arises concerning the purposes of the book as outlined in its introduction. Granted that the poems are offered as texts of performances, and we’re urged to listen to rather than read the texts, but it’s not easy to see how this can be done in every case without stage directions or instructions being provided. The difficulty of transferring performance works to the page is similar to that encountered by the musical composer: the written 113

Apples and Snakes: Raw and Biting Cabaret Poetry (London: Pluto, 1984). See also, as an indication of the continuity of this tradition, Velocity: The Best of Apples and Snakes, ed. Maja Prausnitz (London: Black Spring, 2003), and YouTube sites. 114 Missing Forms, ed.   with Peter Murphy & Alex Selenitsch (Melbourne: Collective Effort, 1981).

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text is at best a poor substitute for the dynamics of the performance, and the record included with the book indicates something of what is lost in translation from one form to another. Jas H. Duke and Leigh Stokes (interestingly, the most accomplished performers of the assembly) do, in fact, provide notes on how their works are to be performed. Duke’s instructions are like Stockhausen’s, elaborating what seem to be mere phrases to imply where and how emphasis can be obtained. Leigh Stokes, who in recent times has moved into theatre more directly in Wollongong, offers a line-by-line set of directions for effective reproduction, which accentuates his high sense of the comic, the absurd, and the tragic. His performances cannot be reproduced even on record, and a video recording would fail to capture the interaction he achieves with an audience. The record included in the volume highlights the individual style of Eric Beach, whose staccato utterances contain a clue for reading his other works in the anthology. Ania Walwicz’s urgent and clipped tones similarly suggest a way around the blocks of language that come unaccompanied by other hints for hearing the text. Peter Murphy’s hilarious reading of “Letter Endings,” Chris Mann’s excerpts from a cut-up text, and Anna Couani’s deadpan reading make one wish that the whole anthology could be made available – as Graham Rowlands suggests – on cassette.  ’s intensely dramatic rendition of “Tekish men” helps to remove the element of caricaturization that meets the eye, if not the ear, in his printed texts. On the page, many of the poems included in Off the Record fall flat, or seem ephemeral and derivative. Ania Walwicz’s slabs of material, like those of Joanne Burns (“Marble surfaces”) and Chris Mann (“scratch, scratch”), demand close attention when no visual relief is offered, although their purpose is clear enough and their ‘tradition’ (through Dada, Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Burroughs, B.S. Johnson, Cage, and a host of others) provides access to them in their print format. Hemensley’s Ear anthology could accommodate such practitioners without effort, and the distinction between reading and performance could happily blur, so that the extension of prose and poetry, and the foundations of each in the spoken and everyday media, could be observed. Off the Record does hold an impressive range of “word works.”115 The ‘purely’ literary or ‘readable’ texts, such as Laurie Duggan’s “Adventures in Paradise” and his shorter poems, or Alan Wearne’s “Still Talking about Jazz” and “Three Sonnets,” or Sylvana Gardner’s works, seem to me to represent a polarity opposite Jas Duke’s minimal scores for performance, or Sue McDougall’s visual works. Visual poems such as Duke’s, Steven Herrick’s, and Lisa Scheikowski’s, David G. 115

Cf. Richard Tipping, “Subvertising: Word Works,” Kunapipi 16.2 (1994): 24–34.

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Harris’s, and Richard Tipping’s are reliefs among the sloganeering of  ’s political poems, Olga Novak’s “Ode to my sisters,” or the nursery-rhyme simplicities of Jeltje’s “Pussycat Song.” I suppose you have to hand it to   for mixing the sublime with the ridiculous in one collection: more than one member of the audience at the launch of this anthology in Melbourne remarked that some of the works could go over well with a CWA fun-night crowd, and I imagine that some might be exceptionally useful for workshopping with very young children. I can’t see the book becoming popular in class-sets though, even while I’d recommend it for general use by teachers and others running poetry workshops. Maybe the private schools would take the obscenities in their stride, but areas with high migrant populations in public schools seem wary of encouraging the flow of healthy vernacular punctuated with crimson. This is not to say that the book consists of massive slabs of lurid language; but it’s not squeamish in presenting pack-rape (Rae Desmond Jones’s “The Deadshits,” a powerful commentary on class relations) or the mechanics of abortion (Dorothy Hewett’s “Days of Violence, Days of Rages”) among the day-to-day commentaries on absurdities endemic in society. The language of the poems in this anthology is for the most part forthright and constitutes its chief attraction as a book illustrating the varieties of English usage in Australia. The extensions of language – Chris Mann’s extenuations, no less than Graham Rowlands’ disquisition on blasphemy, Kate Jennings’ auto-analyses (with their trailing-off conclusions – or is it mimesis in dealing with intimate desperation?) – complement the work in Hemensley’s anthology to provide a window on the curious Melbourne sport of small-press production in an era characterized by infighting over exactly what it is that poetry is supposed to do. Hemensley’s claims are fairly modest in comparison with  ’s, more assuredly concerned with revolutions within language, and it would be ridiculous to throw a spanner in the spokes of either book’s chances on the market. Off the Record is bound to be a crowd-pleaser, and already has the edge in terms of distribution. If the tendentious fuelling of debate about poetry and revolution can be held in reserve, it might be apparent that many contributors to Off the Record do stand on their own merits, and that contributors to both volumes can easily cross into each other’s territory, as they have into the mainstream journals and anthologies already, both here and abroad. It’s clear, at any rate, that the ‘Generation of ’68’ is pretty much a dead issue, and Hemensley’s outward-looking temperament is an attractive counter to the obsession with nationalist questions of ‘identity’ which, for all the hype, still runs under the surface in much of Off the Record.

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——————— Old Tricks Transformed116 ———————

A

S H E L T O N L E A I S A N E V E N T . He has been publishing for the best part of twenty years and performing before that at Sydney’s El Rocco jazz club and scores of other likely and unlikely haunts. Most recently, he has provided a focus for poetry at the Leinster Arms Hotel in Melbourne’s Collingwood, and Poems from a Peach Melba Hat117 carries a plug for the Poets’ Pub among its several end-paper advertisements. Rosemary Nissen’s Abalone Press deserves credit for getting the collection out: vintage and new poems from an underestimated writer of works characterized by open-eyed appraisals of urban life, vagrant encounters, and a celebration of love, friendships, and life’s small and shattering surprises. Shelton Lea’s poetry is distinctively his own. He takes chances others wouldn’t, in writing love and nature up large, and his work comes off well and often with the goods. It’s studded with stray flashes of rhyme, vernacular gusto and a rhetorical phrasing that suggests a delight in archaic as well as contemporary speech. He has maintained a consistent lower-case typography beyond the faddish periods of most contemporaries’ usage; Eric Beach is one of the few others to employ the convention over a long stretch. Lea, like Beach, e.e. cummings, and Don Marquis’s cockroach Archie, veils a toujours-gai romanticism behind a cavalier-seeming surface. Most of the works have sharp resolutions, which save some of them from a tendency to deck out truisms about erotic and other affections. The resilience of tone and the deceptive throwaway closure seem to me to be signatures of Lea’s style. In his much-anthologized and popular “poem on a peach melba hat,” familiar elements come together. The joyful anti-social ripostes to policemen, bus drivers, and bar-managers (all standing in as emblems of unquestioning conformity) are balanced against an Old-World chivalry, an appreciation of beauty in unlikely places, and the bravura camaraderie of street-people. A world of irrepressible picaros comes to life in Lea’s ‘social’ poems: survival is the point in his work, and drinkers, lovers, hustlers, prisoners, and orphans become attractive figures for their vital efforts to assert an individual stance. The price of nonconformity is recognized, together with the weight of routine, and an elegiac tone reflects passing time and erased personalities. Lea’s ‘characters’ are given correct weight in terms of their milieu’s values. More than most contemporary poets, Lea encapsulates a Rimbaud-like frustration with dull conventions and at the same time urges wonder. These charac116  117

NEW BOOK FROM

Overland 104 (1986): 66–67. Shelton Lea, Poems from a Peach Melba Hat (Cheltenham, Victoria: Abalone, 1985).

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teristics are consistent with his association with a Melbourne neo-Surrealist movement on his arrival from Sydney two decades past. The sense of the marvellous appears in various guises in his work, in recognition of a particularly mean character, or the beauty of Balmain women, the fine close-ups of gardens and trees, and in the re-investing of value in well-used words and phrases. In Lea’s poetry, “leaves are etched with autumn,” “beauty hovers endlessly across the flowers,” the poet watches “the elegant penumbra of your smile,” and “the broad back of a poem comes waltzing through the door.” In other hands, his vocabulary could be cloying or hackneyed, but Lea adjusts the senses of the words with twists, cutting and folding references to fragile and precious materials or qualities with deflating contrasting sketches of surface realities. It’s refreshing to encounter this: words to me are like a passport to infinity if i can describe a start that is nth billion miles afar as the incandescence of your eyes then i am on my way

In the best sense, Lea’s poetry is illuminating – incandescent, hallucinatory, revelatory by turns. In “on a conspicuous absence” (not a particularly easy poem at every stage, to my mind), the process of getting at the brightness inherent in things is well illustrated as Lea probes for words to describe the state of illumination. The poem “i’m glad you’re not an actress” sustains a tidy metaphor to throw light on the lives of lovers and actresses; while, for sustained precision and balance, “for joel” seems to me the book’s masterpiece. The collection is a pleasure to read. It reinforces a belief that the old tricks can be transformed into a moving, vital experience. It does what Zen and Surrealism both aim for, without making much fuss about it all.

————— First Thoughts on Everyday Rhetoric118 —————

I

A U G U S T 198 7, T H E M E L B O U R N E W R I T E R B R I D H H A N C O C K asked me about my experience of teaching writing at Melbourne’s Pentridge Prison at Coburg, and

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Bridh Hancock, “Interview with Michael Sharkey,” Seed 5 (August 1987): 16–17; Seed 6 (September 1987): 20.

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my poetry and teaching at the Footscray Institute of Technology, where I was a parttime lecturer. The interview was published in Seed, the newspaper of the Students Representative Council.

BH: You have been to Pentridge Gaol to take writing groups? MS: Yes, last year and the year before, I did a lot of work over there, a series of writing workshops with various coves. We were limited in where we were tucked away. BH: How was that as an experience? MS: Interesting; you get another view of the cage we live in. BH: We all live in a prison? MS: It would be madness not to say so, wouldn’t it? If we are not literally put in one, we make one. Language is a bit of a prison. Everyone has the feeling of looking around for the right word or the right expression to have a bit more freedom. Knowing how to put things is the game when you are writing; knowing how to behave is also part of the routine, just in general terms. BH: Born free – shackled at birth: we seek our own opposite of fetters? MS: We are getting theoretical all at once! Writing and talking to people who are in prison, you get another slant on the restraints of all sorts of writing. People in prison tend to write a lot about freedom and, of course, prison. A lot of wishfulfilment and fantasy, a lot of revenge and a fair bit of violence, so the stories coming put of the place tend to reflect the environment – as most writing would, but in a rather narrower way, as they depict a narrower environment. I suppose that, writing outside a prison, you tend to have the illusion of saying what you like and how you like it, but if you look through any of the journals and magazines and collections of poems that are knocking around, you see that writers put themselves into slots anyway. I am not so sure that we are so much freer. Working in prisons has given me a view of the structures in the Australian society that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. BH: Which are? MS: How rigid many things are that we assume are wide open. Some of the people there are in for obvious breaking of rules, like murder or jumping over the counter with gun in hand to make a withdrawal, things like that; but there are people in there, too, because they have really not thought much about the system they live in, where the dividing lines are. There don’t seem to be too many businessmen in there, so perhaps that indicates that people in business

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have worked out more legal ways of making withdrawals, that there are more ways of going about the business. Occasionally you meet an embezzler or someone like that who has come from the higher echelons, but there is definitely a class bias revealed in the proportion of inmates, against the working class. BH: Are you saying that they have just not thought their problems through, that they have fantasized their need or greed? MS: I think that in many cases people don’t start out by looking at the whole range of options available, and that’s not because they are particularly thick. It’s because circumstances have conspired, in terms of education, family, and environment generally, to close certain avenues to them or make them less attractive than an easier way out of a problem. If someone is annoying you, just bop them – or if you don’t like the environment you are living in, you can stick something in your arm and opt out of it, with drugs. Various infractions of the rules that wouldn’t occur to anyone who’s going to a college like Footscray: there are other ways of resolving a crisis. Many times we feel frustrated with people, but we don’t always take them out immediately, and that’s partly because of the environment we have in a college like this: we are in a world where you thrash issues out or make some sort of analysis of a problem. You are not looking for short-term answers perhaps, or short cuts. You are looking at having an overview of the subject. Others haven’t had access to that sort of process or environment. Also, it can make some people a bit unsteady or insecure if there is questioning. They may start falling out with all their friends and their relatives and society in general; that is a bit more of a problem that’s arrived at through the process of rationalizing, although, in many cases, people I am seeing have not really considered very widely what the alternatives are. BH: How has this affected your writing? MS: It is very difficult to have a view of what you are doing in your own writing at all. Sometimes you just get bored with things because they are technically inept. A lot of early poetry of mine I find relatively clumsy and stupid. I’m not so sure that in ten years’ time I’ll see what I am doing now as clumsy and stupid, too, so that’s a bit of a problem. You can never quite see the whole picture; it’s hard, when you are in the thick of things, to say how you are being affected by stuff, but I think there are some directions. People [in prison] can devalue their own experience and think that life’s more exciting somewhere else, so they start to describe things in terms that are inauthentic. They start to construct a picture of what it might be like to have a lot of money or to have the ideal partner or a beaut home or to travel and do

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other things, and sometimes you can see the fantasy straight off. It doesn’t sound as if they have lived their life. So, seeing this has made my writing a bit more direct. Being in contact with people who have terrific verbal skills, too, you tend to dispense with a fair amount of poeticizing, making things sound smooth and slick. I suppose a greater deal of realism comes into what I am trying to put across in recent times. I have written about my own origins, which I don’t suppose are high-bourgeois or anything like that, and I am not entirely sure if they are working-class, but that seems to be where the alignment has been a lot of the time: labouring occupations, or the periphery of what has been called the ‘lumpenintelligentsia’. I think that working as a tutor for so long in universities and colleges, and coming late to the whole business anyway, brings a feeling that you are never quite secure in the business – a bit like a seasonal worker; so, having done some seasonal work and a lot of labouring jobs and poorly paid jobs, it is all forming a pattern, and my sympathies naturally go to people finding it hard to get along, and I can identify grievances or a sense of frustration in them. BH: Are there changes needed to primary education? MS: You can only talk about your own education, unless you have got kids in primary education and kids running through the system, and contacts at the school, or if you have a particular interest in primary education. I don’t really know that I can fault the system. I know that there is a lot of criticism, particularly of public education in Victoria, but I can’t see who is going to pick up the work if it’s not going to be in the public sector. I can’t see that everyone can afford the excellence of the education they seem to be getting there if it were all made a coin in the slot at a turnstile entry. I don’t think I have any complaints about the standards of education that the state makes available. Probably there are people who would disagree violently with that, depending on their experience; they might have a kid who has had a bad time in one school and has come good in another. BH: I don’t know if it helps the creative student, but then, they never get any help, except personally? MS: Some people can overcome everything in their path, but I don’t know much about this situation in Victoria, because of my experience of having children and seeing what happens in the state systems in New South Wales or New Zealand, or meeting children in Queensland. From experience I have had with primary schools, it seems to me that the kids are very much encouraged to be creative and inventive, so that’s part of the whole person.

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Creativity should be encouraged, and as far as I can see, it is encouraged. Much depends on the personality of the teachers you get. Some people, of course, make excellent enthusers of others. Some people do it for a nine-to-five job, and that’s it – they shut off immediately. I guess that, in a sense, I’m privileged to know a lot of good teachers at all levels, people who don’t just take an interest in what they are doing but who get quite worried that they might be doing it the wrong way, so they are experimental and always revising their practice and trying to make things accessible and stimulate curiosity. In Queensland, I saw a lot of schools where teachers weren’t officially encouraged to do that – just before I came to Footscray. Some teachers were quite worried that they might be encouraging the children to be too questioning, because this wasn’t in line with state ideology on the issue. The children were there to be good citizens but not to question the order of things, and I found that a worry. But, of course, there were a lot of dissenting teachers in Queensland, too, socalled radicals – that is, people who have an interest in educational practice and theory generally. I don’t think there is the bomb-chucking variety, although there are probably some people who would like to do that. I think that we have a very funny idea of what radicalism means in Australia; we think radicals are all about destruction, when in fact it seems that the radical tradition in general is all about encouragement of curiosity and freedom in which to operate, and extension of what seems to be the privilege of the few to becoming what is taken for granted by everyone. BH: I think liberty is one of those things one wants all to have; not a levellingdown but a matter of bringing everyone up to equal shares. I suppose the questions should involve what you write and how you write. MS: I write about all the things that take my interest, and, depending on the mood, I am critical, analytical, amused or trying to be amusing: a whole range of issues; sometimes a sense of outrage or frustration at the way things are. But I’m aware that to latch onto one of those things is to give a false impression. Write half a dozen amusing things, and someone will say ‘When are you going to get away from being a clown?’ If you pull out half a dozen other things at the other end of the spectrum, they would say ‘You are a gloomy character!’ I think you have a go at writing something, but you know it’s not the whole story, so you write something else to qualify it; then you think: ‘That’s pretty good for the moment’, and in a while you come back from another angle. It might be, for example, that you feel very frustrated with a politician, and you write a poem that is almost a scabrous little satire on that person. Then you think, ‘That’s pretty cruel: that person has got a family and a life to lead’, so you

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try to come at it another way, to see it from the point of view of that person. Write it from the inside out: it might mean that you have to go and meet a few politicians and discover that they are just as confused as the rest of us. So you can write a rather more human version of the story, taking into account the circumstances that are revealed. BH: A very journalistic way of approaching it? MS: I suppose that I believe poetry should be true. It’s not an escape, for me; it’s commentary on life as it is, in all its aspects. I don’t really believe that poetry is the expression of emotions purely and simply. It takes a certain form and a certain order. Otherwise you might as well say a good bellow is an expression and it should be put up there alongside more extended treatments – for instance, a poem by Les Murray or Alexander Pope. It’s plainly not just about expression, because poets are interested in craft, in technique. That’s why you read other poets, to see how someone else has had a go at it. After a while, you say, ‘Well, righto, I have seen what they can do, and I’ll have a crack at it myself’. I am not suggesting that poetry is derivative; it’s just that you become aware at some stage that this has been done before. BH: One gives a passing salute to one’s antecedents? MS: Yes, I believe that’s right – to predecessors or to contemporaries. It seems to me that it’s making a decent gesture of acknowledgment. You can also indicate where you are coming from. It becomes pretty clear in some writers’ works that they have their favourites. If you find someone writing a lot like Hemingway, it indicates something about their literary personality; if they write like Helen Garner, that indicates something about them, too; about the lifestyle they’d like to lead or the sympathies they have with certain groups of people who turn up all the time. I tend to write a lot out of the experience of friends, even if I use the word ‘I’ in poems. Whenever I start writing a poem that can sound a bit confessional or indulgent in any sense, I change the “I” to “he” or “she” and try to look as if from a third person, and see if it still looks like a passable poem. Often I’ll be embarrassed by it and throw it away and try to write it better. That, I suppose, is what I mean about craft: the constant trying to get it right. BH: Everyone in the audience, everyone reading it, would be saying ‘What’s it to me, anyway?’ MS: Well, you would hope so. You’d hope that you were not just amusing them, that it’s not just a private indulgence. Communication is part of the game, and if you latch onto the things that people do and what they think, you can extend your audience; more people buy your books: everyone feels happy.

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BH: Fame and fortune and all that? MS: I don’t think you make much fortune out of it, and fame is a fashion. To go back to your earlier question, why one writes is a hard sum. I suppose you write because you’ve seen what others do, and you think, ‘Well, I’ve got a story as well’. Or there is an angle that you can see is being overlooked. BH: It’s simply something one ‘takes to’, isn’t it? MS: Yes, I think it’s very simple or very complex. Why does anyone start writing? The answers are legion: to kill time, to amuse yourself; because it’s cheap; because you have something to say. There is a whole range of possibilities. I don’t believe you get a call on the celestial telephone saying ‘Take the following down’. Inspirational theories don’t excite me too much. I think they are a hangover from when people believed in gods or God, and thought stories and poetry should have the purpose of conveying something about the divine. Writing might incidentally do that, for a believer, but I don’t think it satisfies the case for everyone. BH: I was at the Footscray Community Centre ‘Pelican Dream’ concert recently when the featured writer’s first poem was “God made me to be a poetry man, so I write poetry as best I can.” His next poems were about taking drugs, being in love, and trying to get laid. MS. Yes, that’s right. It’s hard to keep up the façade; it puts an awful responsibility on you if you pretend to be a priest of the imagination. If you really think poetry has that high function all the time, then it means you are only going to write when you are in that mood, or you are going to have to throw out a lot of stuff that comes up in between fits of the mood. BH: So leave poetry to the imagination? MS: James Joyce’s fictional character Stephen Dedalus had this vision of himself and decided he would be a young “priest of the eternal imagination,”119 and I think Joyce is sending him up. BH: Stephen’s friends would. MS: Yes, the idea of nailing poetry to a particular mast or ‘ism’ seems to not always work. You can see terrific tension result from Hopkins trying to always keep his focus on God; he is not having an easy relationship with the deity. Nor is John Donne, who cannot get away from writing sexy stuff: it comes even into 119

“a priest of the eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life”; James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960): 221.

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his religious poetry. There are dangers here for poets predominantly concerned with writing political stuff, too: they follow what they believe will not be ultimately revealed by history as adhering to a passing fashion, but they must suspect they could be later regarded as being quite reactionary, or dangerous, or misguided, or just boring as a result of their efforts: engaged with the fad of the moment. BH: One changes; poetry changes. MS: This is one of the perils of poetry itself. Certain things fall in and out of fashion. Bush poets were pretty strong for a while back there, and still are. I remember four years ago or so judging a bush poetry competition in Queensland for a Stock Horse association. You would never have believed the bush ballad was so strong and in the minds of some people. Mind you, I didn’t detect much stuff that was terribly exciting, but it obviously serves a function. You’ve got to write for your audience, but in general terms, across Australia, if you just write bush ballads and you live in Prahran, Brunswick or Sunshine, people will regard you as an amusing eccentric nowadays, someone not terribly tuned in to all the changes that are going on and everything that has happened since the ballad’s heyday. BH: The bush ballad now involves trucks, surely. I think one modern inspiration is Pam Ayres. MS: Yes, that could be so. But if you wrote like Pam Ayres, it wouldn’t sound right, because you don’t occupy the same territory, you don’t speak the language that she speaks. If you write like Bob Dylan, people would say you’re a sad old hippie. You have to be true to your own tribe. If it’s true in your own environment, it will be true for other people as well. This raises the question again about writing in jail, writing in a form that is often artificial: the people tell you a story in one mode and change channels when they write, sometimes. That can be pretty.... BH: ....Untrue to oneself? MS: Yes. You have to be fairly true to your language. I reckon it’s a test of how fair dinkum you are – read to your family or someone who knows you, and see what they think. If you’re too embarrassed to do that, then you probably shouldn’t be reading it to other people. It’s a test of what sort of faith you have in other people, and what sort of faith they have in you. It took me a while to do that. I thought that what I was writing early on was far too dirty to show my parents, but my brother said “Good on you,” and my mother did too, surprisingly.

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That’s by the bye. I think you have to use the language you ordinarily use all the time, use your own voice, be true to your experience, and if you want to go on and construct a fantasy, you certainly have to make the language credible. Any sci-fi writer knows that, or anyone who writes ‘medieval’ romances or historical romances. The research will show up the gaps – in what we take to be an attempt to reconstruct the period and to get to the reality. BH: Readers of this interview will want to know if you have got much inspiration from the students who go to the Institute – or maybe from some of the lecturers. MS: That’s hard to say; it might turn up. I don’t want to give away too much. I am not suggesting that I’m sitting there writing reports on everyone. Poetry works in funny ways; it’s not like journalism, where you are writing up things immediately as you see them. Quite often the significance of events does not dawn on you until later. For that reason, a lot of people who write about their childhood do so later in their lives when they start to perceive the whole situation a bit better from the outside, as it were. They start to see what type of people their parents were when they’ve been away from them for a bit. So I tend to write about things sometimes when a lot of time has elapsed. I don’t ‘decide’ to do that, but I can assemble the clues much later, and reminiscences can be triggered by all sorts of events. I might make a composite of situations at times. I have written about various things associated with teaching, and they haven’t had to do with classroom confrontation, classroom warfare. A poem about a place can be more interesting than a poem about what it’s like to go through the hackwork of marking a few thousand essays. There may be an element of fantasy in such a poem, but I have written about marking essays, too, and have put that in a form that suggests I am three parts crazy, because I think you have to be. In some of the places where I have worked, you get hundred of essays on the one topic, so work it out.... This is part of the task of the intellectual grunts, the front-line troops in the education business. You are in there to do spade-work – teaching logic, mopping up bad expression, and so on. It’s by no means a glamour occupation, teaching. Sometimes teaching and writing seem to be in collision with each other: one of them demands that you become a person assessing things and being analytical in preparing work in an orderly, logical way that doesn’t permit as much free play as you’d like to think comes into writing a lecture, let alone a poem.

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You cannot stop in the middle of a lecture or discussion and say ‘That’s a bloody good line, I’ll write that down’; and you can’t do that in the middle of a marking binge. So these things are frustrating. I think the people who are writing in Australia come from a variety of occupations, and some eventually get so frustrated, while trying to cope with two things at once, that they drop out for a while and just write. There is no guarantee you will produce good work when you do that, but there is a tension, and some people thrive on it. I cope, I suppose. You find yourself going through the same sort of situation again, and then you think of a previous one, and you remember that you read about a similar one, or someone tells you a story about one, and you think, ‘Well, yes’, and you sit down and you jot down something and you find that you get a poem. You are writing about a situation that seems to have a private significance, but it’s tapping into the communal experience. The community can be as wide as your experience has taken you. BH: As far as your imagination has taken you? MS: That’s right. When I lived in New Zealand for a few years, I found I was writing about childhood in New South Wales, and when I was back from New Zealand, I have found that occasionally I write about situations, events, that occurred over there, or I use that as a setting. So things happen in retrospect in poetry. A lot of people speak of memory as a pretty important part of poetry; I suppose I go along with that. Sometimes a quick two-liner or epigram may occur to you, if you suddenly see something – they’re like headlines, news flashes, something like that. You can handle these easily, but trying to blow them up into longer works and to say more about it – you probably find that futile. But if you try to make a commentary on your friendships, your love-affairs, your relationship with your parents, or some issue to do with education, or freedom, or sex, anything at all, you are likely to take more time and include enough so the readers don’t get you wrong. Then again, there is a bit of polish comes over the whole thing when you decide to pitch it up in such a way as to leave a lot for the reader to do. I think that’s an important part of poetry, to not overkill it and say everything in boring everyday speech but, rather, to suggest a lot. Poetry should be suggestive, so the reader has got a fair bit of anticipation, and you can provide the odd surprise. BH: Some poetry is condensation that exhilarates and explodes within oneself, whereas prose is the whole explosion spread out for you? MS: I guess poetry does work to condense things to make them memorable in a particular way, but that has a lot to do with the rhythm, with the selection of

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what you put in and what you leave out, a lot to do with the shape of the poem, the look of it. Concrete poetry can be surprising to some people – visuals that might only be one line or a rearrangement of a word, but these things are pointing you to the poetic principle. What we see every day can be occasionally seen in a different light. It might be a joke or a pun; Mimmo Cozzolino has a photograph of a street sign that just declares “Why Street,” and he has written underneath “Why Not.” Now, for many people that isn’t a poem, but it did, in a sense, raise the issue of poetic perception: just seeing things like that, the other side of the picture. Very clever to my mind, anyway. These things point to the game of words that poets play. It should be a pleasurable experience; you know, if you are writing about misery, you should ensure that a reader will be impressed by the cleverness of the way it’s put. BH: Magic, in the words. MS: I suppose so, but I am a bit edgy about the word ‘magic’. It’s like ‘inspiration’, something that people tend to see as a big mysterious process, whereas my whole training and inclination is to look at the thing as a very hard-won breakthrough; that poetry is not always a cinch. You have to go over it, like ‘Is that right? have I repeated myself too much? Have I wanted to repeat it that much? Do I need to say it again?’ So it comes down to a fair amount of rational process for me. It’s hard to imagine that someone sat down to knock out a book like the Odyssey and thought that it was all coming straight out of nowhere and straight onto the page. I am sure the man had a terrific vocabulary – I assume it’s a bloke who wrote it; most of the people in it are men, although it could be a feminist fantasy that they are all vicious buggers. I don’t know, but whoever wrote the poem, it seems, had a fascination with language and an eye for detail, a pretty good vocab, an interest in plot, narrative structure, things like that. These are all acquired things. BH: Music in the language? MS: Yes, again, that’s acquired. You can say that we like certain sounds, and that this comes intuitively, but I don’t know about that. I think it’s taught from the moment the child hears the mother billing and cooing – or earlier – and that this is a pleasurable sound or that is an unpleasurable sound. One sound is equated with feed-time, or with a change of napkin; the other is equated with a slap. Acquiring such attunement – and knowledge – these things come into the business of writing poetry. I don’t know anyone who sits down to do it who hasn’t an interest in poetry or its possibilities. You know, it would be as zany as saying you have an interest in potting without having an interest in clays, soils, dirt, and fire.

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BH: You would be only a quarter of a potter. MS: That’s right, and you would be only a quarter of a poet if you sat down and said the equivalent; it’s hard to imagine a person who could say such a thing. BH: Someone who speaks in Newspeak, for example? MS: Yes, but even that would have to indicate that you would know what Newspeak, is, and you’d have to have an interest in manipulating language and the possibilities of doing it that way. Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear and people who have an interest in inventing languages – jabberwocky, and things like that – I think they had an obvious interest in language and how you can change it, make it a pleasurable surprise for the audience and see how it can be put to use in a new way. We know the words should be ‘slimy coves’ or something like that, but it is the surprising twist that gives the languages its memorability: “slithy toves.” BH: Concerning the difficulty of writing while you’re associated with another job, I got myself a phrase years ago: ‘If you don’t write while you can’t, you aren’t going to when you can’. MS: That’s a bit like another, ‘If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen’. I think there’s a perception, too, that people who are academics who write poetry are going to write obscure and difficult stuff. BH: They do, though. MS: Some do. I don’t think it’s true all the time. If you think of some archaic ferret sitting around groaning under loads of stuff and writing stuff that reminds you of Milton, then you’re thinking of someone who has probably made a conscious decision to write to a select audience that appreciates Milton. But if you look at Bruce Dawe’s poetry, you’ll see why it has wide appeal to people. Others who are teachers can write very clear vernacular poetry. There’s all sorts of difficult poetry, not just by academics. Les Murray is an example of a bloke who can be remarkably fresh and remarkably pedantic sometimes, too. The fact of being associated with an academy or being acquainted with a lot of books doesn’t mean you are going to write in an artificial language. The basic thing is to use your own language to convey your experience, and if any of your reading suggests other possibilities, good-oh, put that in. There’s a lot of snobbery about poets who write and teach regarding performance of other poetry, including language experimentation and popular poetry as well. It cuts both ways. BH: I have heard comments about academic poets who are only seen to publish each other’s stuff in their own little magazines.

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MS: Yes, and this is partly because colleges and universities tend to sponsor magazines, and of course those people publish people they know. It is like anything else. If you hang around with street poets, they are not likely to publish with academics. They will stick together. BH: I think if Professor Thoroughly Boring were to put a street-poetry sheet together and pay for it, it would be published in his collected works as well. But then he is not likely to, is he? MS: I think there’s a bit of a breakdown in communication across the lines. I couldn’t believe, for example, that a place like Melbourne would turn out to be more parochial than Toowoomba in Queensland, but in many respects it seems to be so. Maybe because Toowoomba is a small town that drives everyone in who’s interested in writing, poets seem to be interested in everyone else’s stuff, so Toowoomba or Dalby or any other smallish town or rural city was likely to throw up the phenomenon of a punk poet doing poetry with a band, and performing at the same venue as someone like Bruce Dawe, or someone who’d be regarded as a fairly pedantic poet by some Melbourne tribe’s standards. Then you have a bush balladist in there as well, and a few people writing about life in the factories, a couple of women writing about singing in pubs or being a housewife. The variety of forms of writing up there is very interesting to me. In Melbourne, because there are more people – more poets, I suppose, more magazines, more outlets, live venues – you would expect much more variety, but you don’t always find it. In fact, when you go along to a venue, you find that this is generally the case. I think it’s true that academic poets tend to stick together in readings and some publication formats; I don’t have much to do with them, because I’m a bit of a solo researcher and my interests are not necessarily in talking shop with other teachers day in and day out. I do other things as well. Street poets, performance poets, and some writers in Italian and Greek have their circles, too, so I’d find it hard to get across the entire spectrum without moving around town. In Melbourne, in the year I arrived, it was possible to go to one or two poetry readings every night of the week in a different place and meet a different circle of people. As the venues contracted a bit, I started to see the phenomenon of people coming together more, which is probably a good thing, so Marxists and other revolutionaries from Fitzroy would get together with the quiet old Liberal wombats from Parkville, or wherever, and at least listen to each other. Whether they loved each other to death is a different question, but at least they were being exposed to each other’s works, and that’s not a bad thing. BH: You have been a magazine editor.

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MS: A few years ago, I set up an annual anthology that was published as part of a student newspaper, and it’s still running, a thing called Kangaroo, but I haven’t had much to do with it for four years. I think they are going on with their tenth issue this year; ten years, time to wind it up. I don’t think a magazine should last that long. To publish the same people all the time would be dull. It ran out of Armidale, and we published South Australians, Queenslanders, Tasmanians, and I used to solicit stuff from people in France, Sri Lanka, Canada, Italy. With Winifred Belmont and others, I published a number of poetry books by others as well as some of my own. A successor single-issue magazine, Trans-Tasman Undercurrent, started as a very irregular gathering; I just put in things I liked, interviews, articles, stories. I might run another issue if I get the time and money and inclination. I have done some editing in the public service and some guest editing for other magazines. Editing interests me, but writing rejection letters to people screaming at you ‘Why don’t you take my stuff, it’s the best thing since sliced bread’.... Well, I write back, ‘It’s nice no doubt, but I’m off sliced bread’. Trying to write a pleasant rejection notice is harder than it might seem, because you get a lot of things sent in, and you don’t have space to include everything you like. BH: Some character who used a light-brown typewriter ribbon sent you pages and pages, when all you asked for was for one or two contributions, and he would send you stuff you couldn’t read anyway! MS: A bloke in America, Ed Rusche, a painter in California, decided it would be a great idea to have some of his friends do pencil drawing and he would rub them out and exhibit them as a joint work, a piece of conceptual art. Sometimes I wish that principle applied to many other things – a joint production by two poets, so you can’t see it; two novelists: one would undertake to destroy it, and they would publish nothing. It would be a lost conceptual piece, for the record, of fine collaborations. It’s hard being an editor. I prefer another form of editing. I have enjoyed writing articles, and I used to write a lot of reviews. I don’t do reviews quite so much now, because I’ve become interested in biography, trying to research a few people I’m interested in. The purpose of writing literary articles is to indicate work in progress. You are always going to qualify the work, so it’s not unusual for me to apologize in an article or essay for a mistake I made in a previous one: ‘I should have noted this as well’ or ‘My footnote should have mentioned such and such’, sort-of thing. That kind of editing of one’s writing is a dynamic thing, as dynamic as poetry, in the sense that you are always qualifying, sometimes with-

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out always giving the process away, what you have done before, trying to get a different, sharper focus. BH: People seem to be your inspiration. MS: I think they are: the way people behave, the ideas they have. I don’t see as much joy in writing about landscapes or locations as I used to. I write commemorations of places or events in general terms, but it does come down to interactions with people, whether it’s in the public domain or in the bedroom.

—————— An Interview with Eric Beach120 ——————

M

S H A R K E Y : Let’s start off with a question about the sort of New Zealand you grew up in. ICHAEL

E R I C B E A C H : A state house – a lot of blocks of state houses on the edge of Hastings. A large family; one of the oldest kids on the street, so I told stories a lot to keep them amused; and then I worked, and sent stuff to the New Zealand Listener, and they sent all seventeen poems back with one comment, “Too many adjectives,” so I’ve been wary of adjectives ever since. That was when I was at high school.

MS: And later? EB: I blundered around; most of the people I knew who were writing were at university, so it was a bit hard to crack the scene – but I met them at pubs, and in the folk scene. That was the crossover. This guy Arthur Baysting used to muck around with folk-singers, and he put out a movie and a book – The Young New Zealand Poets – and stuck me in it. This came about ’72, but it was in the late 1960s I was mucking around with bands, with some rock bands that never got very far, and some jazz bands in Wellington. I used to go to the Attic in Wellington, and they’d get you to do poetry to the music. MS: What were you doing to make a living? EB: At first it was labouring, and then I had office jobs – Touch and Go – T & G – Temperance and General. And I worked on computers when I got married, and then ended up doing the night shift so I could write. I was supposed to be going to the university in the daytime, but I was a bit tired. And then I quit. I did English – failed English – and I did Education: I started that when I was in the Education Department; they gave me time off. When I first got married I was getting twenty-nine bucks a week: it wasn’t much to feed a wife and kid on, so I was working on weekends sometimes, too. I used to bump into all these writers, 120

Overland 111 (June 1988): 64–71.

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even when I was eighteen or nineteen, mucking around living in houses. I ran into this bloke Rowley Habib, who used to write down in a back shed. I used to live with this bloke who was a sculptor; this bloke called Toss Wollaston used to come around – he was a painter – because his niece used to live in the flat. I decided I was going to be a writer and not work, and just do it, and I blundered around New Zealand for six months and looked up all these writers, who sent me around to see other writers, and they sort-of said things like ‘You’re committing suicide, Eric’. So one day I just hopped on the plane and went to Australia. Then I was here, and I was still blundering around with the same idea, and people were trying to get me jobs in Melbourne, in RMIT , and some of the other institutes, more than the universities. MS: Who did you run into first in Melbourne? EB: It was Frank Kellaway who gave me my first job, I think – him or Les Kossatz [1943–2011, artist]. I met a lot of the people I first met through Barrie Reid [poet, librarian and editor, 1926–95], because he used to have people coming up to his house. There was a whole range of different kinds of writers and painters and sculptors that he’d known for a long time – longer than I’ve been alive, probably. So I ran into playwrights: the Pram Factory was good – though they were a bit hard to crack into; they were very middle-class. MS: How did you make a living when you got here? EB: I used to be able to get day jobs down at the railways. I went on the dole on and off – but they kicked me off a few times, for answering back. The dole office was where the Last Laugh cabaret is now. I was sharing a flat with John Pinder [b. Timaru, New Zealand, 1945, comedy producer and festival director; d. 2015] at one stage there. And I worked as a temporary fettler, in Brisbane, and did the hay-carting, in Wangaratta. MS: When did you start travelling around? EB: When I first got here, really. I hadn’t been to the tropics before, so I went up north, and I lived on and off in Brisbane for a couple of years, till I thought it wasn’t worth the struggle. MS: What was going on in Brisbane? EB: Well, I ended up there staying in this place outside Brisbane – Redland Bay, with these people who’d chucked blood on the Stock Exchange, as a protest against Vietnam – and some of the local black radicals used to come out; Denis Walker and Don Brady used to come out a lot. Don was a Methodist minister then, and then he got a job as a project officer with the Aboriginal Affairs board; he’d stopped being a minister, then, in Spring Hill, but he still had his church

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and they paid him his stipend because he had so many people living in his house, or underneath it – you know, one of those houses with stilts. They couldn’t afford to take his stipend off him, because too many people depended on it. So I ended up walking with them – walking down the middle of the road for Land Rights and so on. It was sort-of an accident. MS: Were you doing anything like that in New Zealand? EB: No; walking down the middle of the road against Vietnam, I suppose – that’s about it. Oh, there was Anti-Apartheid: my brother and I were in the same demonstration, except he was a cop. He was chucking people in vans, and I was sitting in the middle of the road, one of the last to leave – not because I was the bravest: I didn’t want to move, really, because people were getting knocked about a bit. MS: How many were there in your family? EB: Six kids; my mother had six kids, too, so I had half a family, and my father sort-of didn’t have a mother, so I had half of half a family on that side. The kids all left school, except for one: one brother stayed and that’s the one who became a cop – but he left after a while and worked on computers with me. Then he left, and he went around the world, and came back and jumped off the Sydney Harbour Bridge – so it’s a bit hard to change classes maybe; I don’t know – unless you go straight on to a job, like you’re supposed to, like a policeman or a schoolteacher. One of my sisters stayed till School Cert, so she got secretary jobs and things; she sort-of married out of the class, I suppose. MS: Were you conscious of that class thing in New Zealand? EB: Yeah, really a lot in New Zealand, because it’s a matter of – if you travel firstclass, on a train, people think you’re quite odd; people really stick to their classes there. It’s like Max Harris says about Adelaide – I tried living there – ‘New Zealanders don’t need to come to Adelaide; they’ve already experienced it, only more so’. MS: Who were you interested in, as writers, over there? EB: I liked Baxter – but I suppose I grew up with him; he had his profane and his sacred sides – and I’m an atheist – but I used to listen to the Lenten Lectures he used to give for the Catholic Church, not because they were sermons, but because of what he was talking about, and the way he talked. I used to bump into him on the street all the time, and lived in the same sort of flats in Montgomery Terrace in Wellington. And he used to stay with mates of mine up in Auckland – he started up houses, too. And Peter Olds – because he did all those pamphlet poems that were readily accessible, and they were really good to read out loud.

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They were the ones I was interested in. And musicians: Arthur Baysting used to muck around with the folk scene, as I said. I hitched up with a magazine called Earwig a bit – that put out poems and sort-of rabid ratbagger causes as well, and used to get visits by police with sniffer dogs, and made jokes on the phone about explosives. And there was a psychiatric movement going on, too, and a Free Arthur Thomas movement.121 That was all happening with the Earwig people involved. MS: There was a bit of involvement with psychiatric poetry in New Zealand.... EB: It’s the same here. I’m supposed to be going out to the local nuthouse, and there’s blokes in there that used to drink in the Albion. Half the jobs I do in prisons and nuthouses now; there are people I used to drink with in the Albion there. MS: What sorts of differences did you run into when you came to Australia? Was there any class-orientation in the magazines you saw? EB: It was still essentially the same, still the bourgeoisie, but they copped the chip on my shoulder here more easily, perhaps. And there seemed to be more of that egalitarian myth that’s supposed to be in Australia, that I really like. It gives you more movement between classes and suburbs. MS: What about Mǒori consciousness in New Zealand? EB: Growing up in State houses, a lot of the street was Mǒori; three-quarters of the street now, a third to a half then, I suppose, and I used to go fishing, because they had this thing that kids didn’t have to start school straightaway. You’d take days off and go off with a family if they were going fishing – and they used to sing while they were fishing. And they used to come to the local church – the Baptist church used to send a bus up to the pa, and the Mǒoris used to sit down the back and sing ‘A-men’ at the wrong time. They had a sense of humour and a way of life that was apart from the rest of the world you were living in. MS: Sending up pǒkehǒ society, or iconoclastic in general? EB: Oh, both. MS: When were you were first aware that you were gravitating towards song and music?

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Arthur Thomas, b. 1938, was convicted of two murders in 1971 but, granted a Royal Pardon, was released in 1979 after a Royal Commission into police and other improprieties. Thomas was also compensated for the loss of the use of his farm while he was in prison. John Laing directed a 1982 New Zealand docudrama on the affair, titled Beyond Reasonable Doubt.

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EB: I always used to sing when I was growing up, to entertain my younger brothers. I used to make up songs, do a dirty version of the school anthem, or “Home on the Range,” because I got bored singing the same thing, and I didn’t know that many songs anyway. MS: So, Australia. EB: I came to Melbourne first, and mucked around and sent a lot of poems out, and got them published in Poetry Australia and Overland and a lot of little magazines – especially in the smaller magazines. There was a huge range of smaller magazines between, say, 1972 and 1978 or 1979. People in Melbourne and Sydney would get up magazines; we got up three in a row here, called See Page 207, and Great Australian Whiting, and Chook Chook, which were done in a democratic process. We collected all these poems, and people like the Whittle family122 put on benefits for us – we sold food, and various other things, and raked up enough to put out the magazines. And then we’d go around to someone’s house and everybody who’d sent poems in would sit around the lounge and spill into the hallway. And poems would be read out loud, and there were three piles in front of you – Yes, Maybe, and No – and they’d all go into one of those piles. Then some of the Maybes would go back in: that was the only editorial intervention; the editors would add in from the Maybe pile. We used a lot of drawings in those magazines. We pulled out a few stories from people like Morris Lurie or whoever, just to add a bit of tone. MS: What kinds of differences did you see in terms of subjects or styles between Australian and New Zealand writing? EB: I found more writers who were using the vernacular, but that might be because it was a bigger place. Because there were people like Glover and Baxter who always used the vernacular over there, they were the ones I was attracted to. Perhaps the vernacular was thought of more highly over here; people like Les Murray’s first books were coming out – Lunch Counter Lunch.... MS: Yes; there was some trad of that coming through in New Zealand – Glover, Fairburn, from the 1930s, but that seems fairly late. EB: Yes. Fairburn was another one who always stood up: parody and send-ups – Polly Tickle Parroty. I suppose a large thing I noticed was that a lot more politics had been involved in the literary scene in Australia, and things were divided off: you know, Quadrant is right-wing, get published in Quadrant and wither; Overland came out of that social realism, and then the democrats won, over the 122

The 1970s–80s Whittle Family country-and-western comedians consisted of the writer Mitchell Fairclough, Tracey Harvey, and others.

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communists, and took it over. The same with the art movement over here – the sort-of communist schools. And, I suppose, in modern writing, the social realists lost, but they still had an effect, through other people. MS: Where did you fall into music in Australia? EB: Ah, another introduction by Barrie Reid. Judy Jaques lived up the road, and so I just started writing songs with her; she picked out a thing I’d written when I was eighteen, about Jesus really being a man – which ended up on Christian TV when she needed a quid once. I got flak from my Marxist friends, and the song got into trouble from Christian listeners because they thought it might be blasphemous. I just worked with her and a lot of jazz musicians that she was working with. She started off with trad jazz / gospel, and was looking for more modern music, and still is – working with people like Brian Brown and Bob Sedergreen now. I was introduced to quite a few jazz musicians through Judy, and the Pram Factory and Captain Matchbox. But then, there’s about eighty people that have worked with Captain Matchbox, or Matchbox, bands over the years. I’ve worked with some of them, and put down tapes, got some grants. MS: How did you get the grants? EB: At the time – between ’72 and ’78 – I was spending a lot more time writing songs than poems, and I was always trying to get a record out with musicians, but we couldn’t interest companies in that. I got three or four grants; then I stopped getting personal grants after Whitlam was sacked and all the people who were leftovers from the Whitlam era had left. And my grants ran out; I got a lot of small grants from State Art Boards, too – or Community Arts Boards – as well as the Literature Board, to start up what I called Mobile Poetry Workshops, where we employed people from Adelaide, and Sydney as well as Melbourne writers, to go round schools and handicapped centres and prisons. I started that up before I was actually employed in it, and then started it up again in Adelaide with State funding to break into prisons. I might start it up again at some stage. It took six months of knocking on people’s doors before we [Beach, Jenny Boult, and Geoff Goodfellow] were actually allowed into the prisons, let alone getting money off them. MS: You’d been into prisons before? EB: Yeah, well I started going in about 1975, ’76, because I ran into people who’d been working in the Messhall Players in Pentridge – which was their theatre group. A woman friend of mine was a life-member of it. And then I started going to COPE sessions out there, where you sit around in a smoky room and eat prison bread and drink prison coffee and just talk to people. And people started to pass me over some poems; and then we did a reading there, and we started

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the Poets Union up.  , and I, and the bloke who was head of the Community Arts Building in Footscray, Robert Hughes, went to a Trades Hall meeting on the arts, and we were really irritated that they were talking about arts as though it was separate from working life; and so we started the Poets Union, and we got George Seelaf to open it.123 The Poets Union was the first one that organized a whole lot of people to be able to go into Pentridge Prison. And then eventually got money for people to go out there – because people were really broke; a lot of the people going out there on the trams didn’t have the tram fare. MS: Can we take up the question of the value of poetry – or how poetry’s integrated into society? EB: Well; poetry’s only hermetic insofar as you have to lock yourself in a room to finish the stuff off. You get bits of it from all over the place ... people get touches of poetry in their everyday speech, and love it when someone has a nice turn of phrase. That’s a very Australian thing, too. MS: Not so much a New Zealand thing? EB: No, it’s a bit stiffer – except for the Mǒori influence – because they didn’t have the migrant influx, for a start, where poetry is seen as not a bookish thing so much. So that’s probably why I love Melbourne so much – because I see it as the most cosmopolitan city. You can go to Sydney and live in Newtown, I suppose: I don’t seem to come across so much that’s much more Anglo over there, until recently. MS: Do you find there are things – or obsessions – you keep coming back to, in your own writing, things you can’t get away from? EB: Alienation; the idea that this country is not owned by us. But that’s not because it’s owned by multi-nationals: because it’s not owned by the vast majority of people over here – we’re all renters, in a way, and people don’t feel much control over their own lives. You can take alienation to extremes, say, when you’re just ordinarily the victim, like when you have to go to the VD clinic, or you can go further and say that when the elected government somehow gets the boot, palace coup d’état equals alienation. MS: Is there any consciousness of being interlopers, or being colonial, in your writing? EB: Yeah, well particularly when I was in Queensland I felt that, because I was feeling it myself, as much as from them – and I found Australia much more racist towards Aboriginals, even, than I found people were racist towards Mǒoris: be123

Seelaf, 1914–88, was a long-term union organizer who initiated many cultural and social activities for trade unionists.

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cause Aboriginals were so dispossessed and so murdered, and so little was given back to them. Very much third-class citizens, where Mǒoris are second-class citizens, I guess. MS: This alienation is a theme or commonplace of the blues, isn’t it? There’s something basically elegiac about what you’re doing? EB: Yeah, well, it’s also a way of using metaphors in a really simple way. I’m very wary of metaphors, but if you’re saying ‘On Friday the eagle flies’ in the blues, you’re saying that’s when the dollar arrives: those metaphors are taken off real things. It’s partly because, when I was blundering around Australia after first arriving here, my audience were the people in the hundred different flats I lived in – sitting down the back-yard or somewhere – so I wrote stuff that would get across to them; people who quite often were illiterate, and I wanted to impress them, I suppose, as much as I wanted to impress editors. So, eventually, I used to have two streams of writing: one that I saw as performance poetry, and one that I saw as ‘poetry’ poetry. I even used different spellings to keep the two streams separate, and then I just joined them up. My first poems were published under E.A. Beach – that was my ‘poetry’ poetry. MS: And ‘Eric Beach’ was the populist, or performer? EB: Yes; I hung around the folk clubs a lot, in New Zealand, before I left school even, and I used to run into these old Reds – who used to wear red ties and play their home-made guitars and sing a lot of American songs, I guess – but occasionally they’d adapt a poem to music, a poem I’d read in a book; and they changed the phrasing a bit and made it into a song. MS: What is there in blues and jazz songs that operates for you better than in other forms? EB: Well, for a start, rhyme is good for memorizing things; it gives you a sort-of handbag full of poems in your head, so you don’t have to rely on the paper all of the time. And you can work with musicians – and it’s more of a conversation going on. I like dialogues; when I’ve worked in schools, I’ve used dialogues a lot, and come to poetry in a very roundabout way. I used dialogues first, to get people talking to each other, and to get people writing from the conversation. There’s an idea that the way you write is different from the way you speak – and poetry comes from that world and it’s not your own world. But I think that’s a false idea. MS: What’s the advantage of jazz for you? EB: It works well; sometimes I write parts for the audience, which means there are spare lines, which the musicians can repeat if the audience won’t. They also

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relax people a bit, so that they’re not afraid of acting like a three-year-old, if there’s a saxophone saying exactly the same thing: [as in the poem] “I’ll tell on you”: they’re much more relaxed about doing the same thing themselves. MS: There’s a sense of absurdity, too, which fits with the alienation in some of the lines you’ve written – like some of the earlier poems, “Christchurch,” or “Fantasyland” – which still carries through in some of your more relaxed lyrics.... EB: Yeah, well, if you’re in the front bar at a pub you can feel alienated. A bloke gave me these cards for my birthday that said E R IC BE A CH , PO E T, NO F I XE D A DDR E S S , and I just handed them around, over the front bars, and people used them to slate me. In a way, that was good, too, because it meant they had an idea of poetry that they were prepared to defend: ‘You didn’t know Madam Lash, you didn’t know the Sydney Push’: it was very isolating to come over here in some ways, as a New Zealander, because Australians are very nationalistic in a way. New Zealanders who come over here to work often stay on the edge for quite a while. I suppose those things I was writing in Brisbane or Christchurch or Adelaide were trying to find a place. I had to do a lot of work cracking institutions – to just go and do it – before I started getting paid. After a while, people get to know you can do jobs, and try to rake up jobs that pay money, seeing that you’re already doing it. MS: Have you had much to do with others – expatriates – with the same sort of idea? Or is there the sense that everyone can be...? EB: I see performance as giving the audience something to do; this could be mainly where I’ve had a bit of an influence – in responses. What people used to leave to musicians, now they write these things into poems. So, where you get a mass audience, like the few hundred people who come along to the Harold Park Hotel – it’s Melbourne poets generally, like Komninos [Zervos], who get the audience chanting lines back at them.... MS: Do you have a sense of talking predominantly to the working class? EB: No, it’s not who you’re talking to, but getting a lot stories from there. I’ve always pushed the work in the western suburbs, where there’s less money, but the kind of stories that I like come from there: how-to-survive stories. MS: Is that because you’re trying to survive in the same sense? EB: Yeah, I suppose so; but it’s partly loyalties to where you come from. MS: Has there been any change in that perception of where the audience for poetry is, in your experience in Australia? EB: Yeah, there’s a lot more company, I find, with people when you do go out and – say, like the do at the West Footscray Cricket Club last Christmas. There’s

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a bloke from Adelaide, a bloke from Footscray (Tom Grant), and me that could get up and do it. The bloke from Adelaide – Geoff Goodfellow – when I first met him, was writing working-class stuff, but he was doing it with old rhymes, rhymes about the pie-cart, which he sells to the pie-cart owner. There’s much more freedom, more things going across different lines. You can have modern verse, but talk about urban myths – or a story about the local bouncer. So modernism has combined with the patois, I suppose. MS: So it’s not just sitting there on the page and referring to events in Greek history or other myths? EB: Which I grew up liking as well – Pears Cyclopaedia. MS: What sorts of ‘classical’ (well-known or traditional) poets were you brought up with? EB: Oh, everybody I could get hold of in the library; mostly English poets, I suppose, and then as soon as I left school I ran into the American poets as well. Some of the older English [and American] poets like Louis MacNeice, Archibald MacLeish, George Barker – all those whacking great books – and there’s always something there – and W.H. Auden – there’s always something in there that’s talking about the working class. I always found them slightly false, and coming at it from the outside. And I’ve always been interested in telling the stories from the inside, as far as working-class people are concerned. MS: Do you take off voices – or ‘do’ voices? Would you put it that way? EB: I don’t do accents all that well; because, as I said, growing up in New Zealand you don’t have the opportunity. What have you got, a few Dalmatians – and it’s a bit insulting to take off the way Mǒoris talk English sometimes, because it’s only their second language in a way. But it’s more just the way of saying it, just the knack of phrasing, that leaves some kind of echo. MS: What do you think about trying to resolve political messes or dilemmas, in your poetry? EB: That’s an old frustration, isn’t it? Is a writer only a witness? If no one’s bearing witness until it’s going on, or off, then we’re in a worse situation already; so it’s worth being a witness anyway, whether you can get to the extent of actually changing things or riding waves in the political world ... it depends on whether people take you up or not. MS: Yes; a lot of people have had a go at it – Baxter, with a religious resolution, or R.A.K. Mason going for Marxism: I’m not always convinced that works.

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EB: Yeah, that’s the trouble with writing: you can like a fascist’s writing, too; Roy Campbell wrote some good poems, and Louis MacNeice went across the road to punch him in the snout, over Spain. MS: What about the senses of place and time in your poetry? There are some clues there, in the way you phrase things, that the poem’s about a particular place: do you have any concept of being ‘at home’ in any particular – imagined or real – kind of society? EB: No, it’s a dance around from one different society to another. You get a job in Warracknabeal and you get all these global-tourist things, and talk to all the people about what’s going on with the drought, and you might only end up with a haiku – and all this unfinished stuff might end up somewhere else, when you’re in another drought. It’s the same with going up to Darwin: you get the way the people tell stories and are really defensive towards outsiders, and you can start picking the eyes out of a dozen little put-downs you’ve been handed, and put it all in the mouth of one character. So it’s listening to people and trying to get the knack of the way they say things, too. MS: So there’s no concept of any ‘ideal’ place to be? EB: No, I end up back in Melbourne. There’s more of a range of poetry going on in Melbourne, I find. You’ve got Mr  , exploring his one suburb he’s grown up in; I’ve stood on street corners and heard people who’ve just come out of hospital talking to him in a mixture of English and Greek, and I’ve seen it end up in a poem. Mine’s a lot more scattered than that. MS: What sort of thing do you go for, as a story? What recommends it to you? EB: I like stories that give you the feeling that they’ve happened time and time again, I guess. A lot of my jazz stuff has started off with a really simple idea, and after a while I’ve got maybe half a dozen riffs that are tied to a musical riff, or a story of a jazz musician who’s survived, or not survived, the pitfalls of working nights in pubs and travelling – and there’s always the booze might get you. MS: A sense of some situations being fairly constant, then? EB: Happening over and over. MS: How does that fit in with any notion of ‘progress’ or history? EB: I don’t know whether ‘progress’ is one of my favourite words. Oh, if you haven’t got a sense of history, then you’re a bit lost, aren’t you? About half the time, you’re backtracking; even now; everyone’s backtracking about our general history.

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MS: How about personal history: in the sense of working off memory, or childhood concerns – do you think poetry’s concerned much with that sense of time? Family? EB: Yeah, well, Lowell’s the obvious example, isn’t he? He did all those things off his family; funny thing is, they’re a family of Boston Brahmins, aren’t they? Yeah, I’m gradually working through – as my grandparents die, I suppose. I’ve always written poems about my mum and dad and brothers and sisters; gradually working through the whole family when my father died – and then I got all these forty years of letters between him and my grandfather, so sometimes I use them. I’ve used one letter just as a whole poem – cut it into lines, because of the way my grandfather spoke, a different idea of using English. The division of male and female in those days is quite fascinating, too. MS: So there’s some change there? EB: Yeah; getting back into personal history, I’m not quite seeing myself alone, I suppose. Maybe that’s a result of a bit of exile, leaving your own country: you can talk about some things that might upset your family if they saw them in the New Zealand Listener. MS: There’s a line of exile in New Zealand writing – Mander, Hyde, right back to Mansfield – leaving the country, to write about it. And in Australia, too – Peter Porter, Malouf, Germaine Greer; is there a sense of some constants cropping up in your poems (in your grandparents’ lives, your parents’ and yours) that seem worth saying? EB: Well, there’s that dispossession, I suppose – you know, my grandfather’s farm being lost in the Depression. And people come up – like, Barbara Giles comes up and talks to me about how she likes that poem because that happened to someone in her family. And another one – when I was writing about Warracknabeal, a person came up and said “That’s where I did my teaching and I couldn’t get married, because they’d sack a woman in those days.” Poems are a way of unlinking old oppressions, too: you get to see how long it’s been going on; it sort-of becomes less individualistic just by persisting, and telling other people’s stories as well as your own. You reach a lot more people and hear a lot more of other people’s stories; it keeps on rolling on. MS: In some of your earlier poems, like “Converse Corolla” – Open an umbrella inside Your head The wing falls off the duck The spikes don’t touch The lid comes off the pot

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– the kind of logic that operates is not the kind that we hear on news broadcasts or such … EB: I suppose that ends up with me using juxtaposition: leaving the argument in the poem, but not giving the solutions, so you’re saying one thing and then another thing, and the truth should be obvious: not trying to persuade so much as just indicate. MS: “so much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow”124 – or the converse corollary? EB: Yes. MS: The same thing happens in the “Christchurch” poem – “I pedal wheels of granite through the cold and clanking streets” – okay, it has a metaphoric truth about it, which connects back with riding a bike. EB: Yeah, and there’s the “Lambton Quay” one, I suppose [“When Lambton Quay floated out into the harbour”], which is the same; that was under water once, Lambton Quay, New Zealand, eh? The Shaky Isles. MS: And there’s “The Clerk”: Long boxed-in days; long box cut short his holidays.

EB: Yeah, that was ten months in the Education Department; that was the only thing I wrote. MS: What situations are best for your writing? In retrospect, where do you see your best periods for this? EB: Every time I’ve had a grant; well, when I travel, a lot comes up. Grants are great, because they give you that time to face your writing-room and clean it all up, to put one thing together with another; you can tie it up, and you can go through your old stuff – and even if you’ve written it badly at the time, you can see what you were trying to get at. So, when you’re on grants you’ve got the opportunity to empty out your suitcase of your notes – or some of them. I’ve got a mass of material, and a lot of it’s let lie – because if you’re doing workshops it takes a lot of your energy. Teaching’s like that, too: it takes a lot of your creativity up. MS: Do you do more of that work now than in the past? 124

William Carlos Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow” (1923), in Williams, Collected Poems: 1909–1939 (New York: New Directions, 1991): 224–25.

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EB: Oh, more, but then, I don’t work on the railways anymore. I’ve stayed in the same places longer. I’ve lived as a beggar for years, on and off; I couldn’t have survived without my mates with a floor and getting feeds. I didn’t have a little black book, like Henry Miller, but I came close! MS: I don’t think many people in the country are leading a happy contented life off poetry.... EB: No, you get odd jobs, bit parts, readings; you don’t make much money from what’s actually printed. MS: Is there any place for the printed poem? EB: For sure: it’s a way of handing out your poem to someone else; it’s a bit of a waste, not having more poets on tape or record: that’s a wasted opportunity. Grants generally go to poets who are well-published in the print media, and the ones who are published in other ways are ignored. People complain that the narrative poem is going out of style – but it hasn’t, it isn’t. Those people who write it, and are good at writing it, are not taken up. That’s the thing about Australia and New Zealand: someone like Peter Olds, who writes a narrative poem, is taken up, while over here, someone like Shelton Lea, who writes a narrative poem – at the Premier’s Awards he won the audience, and got the booby prize. MS: A recent poem of yours? EB: “cabaret colloquy”: smoke out th blues curlin’ & fat fat cheque at th hat check twirlin’ a hat wrap around a bar stool elbow th bar whisky’s kind of mournful forgotten cigars ice burns in his drink love is cruel there’s a shadow playin’ pool remainin’ cool man of th moment glass to th light sad bit of graffiti in th brasco tonight ‘go to th albion

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take a girl home she might be a slut but you don’t sleep alone’ there’s a free supper there’s a high hatter that cat with th patter has got it down pat dixie down under toilet roll jazz unwinding don’t mind me that’s how it was knock back a bottle light up th joint ever’body’s swingin’ but’ they missin’ th point

MS: When your blues poems appear on the page they’re made up of short lines that suggest they should be taken as discrete breath-units: is that a fair comment? EB: Yeah, it’s partly the phrasing you need to sing things, that’s different from writing poems. When I was writing poems that were being changed into songs, I found it was quite different, the way you phrased things for singing. Yes, I suppose ‘discrete breath-units’ is pretty good; I always like that bebop stuff that Kerouac did. I mean, a lot of it was poopy-doo, but every now and then he’d get a great little story, and get it exactly right. I always remember this one he did about these guys sitting around a hotplate in the middle of the night, and they’re pushing the food in, taking their turn, and he’s got the exact rhythm of it. There’s that idea you can get more from poems when you read them out loud – it can do more than one thing. The page is a bit dead: the poem’s more like a score. MS: Yes, and reading has liberated poetry from libraries and exams, too. EB: How to kill a poem, line-by-line. Yeah, you’ve got a job at an Institute with thin walls, and you’re teaching poetry, your kind, and then next door they’re teaching the dead poets, and through the walls of your class you can hear them asking this guy ‘What is poetry?’ and things like that, the questions he has probably never tried to answer, and he’s saying ‘Oh, well, poetry is a kind of mental orgasm’. Argh. Why mental? There’s those stories of people in the islands who go off for three days – and they might just be sitting outside the village – and they draw a big circle and sit there with a bottle of water and a day’s rations, and

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they stay there for three days or whatever the time is, and then they come back with their poem or their song, and they sit down with everyone and they do it. And they get pissed as a newt because they’re starving, and they have a party and stay up all night, and everyone’s saying ‘We’ll change this’, and ‘This line’s flat’ – and that’s what performance does for you, because lines that fall dead in the sixth row, you get them fixed up.

—————— VIP and Business-Class Poetry125 ——————

T

126

S E T M E T H I N K I N G of its rivals in late years – the glossies from other States with their happy snaps of writers, potted chronicles, and modest one or several pages for each to strut the stuff that Plato banished from a State that was ideal. Like Professor Julius Sumner Miller, I asked myself why this should be so.127 I guess we still stand on a divide. Writers like Hal Colebatch seek to live like Peter Porter, Stow, Malouf, and others shuttling around the language’s great capital, while Lee Knowles, Mudrooroo Narogin, and Philip Salom continue defining its push into places less felt than described. Heresy, you say? We borrow language or it borrows us awhile; we didn’t invent it, though we choose which bits to use and which to toss aside while we invent a country. For all the editors’ disclaimer that the book’s not one more effort to locate a “grand totemic role for the landscape,” I can’t believe them. The landscape isn’t just the bush: most poets in this volume live in Perth, and lotos-eating routines, stabs at guilt for being comfy, and thoughts of being everywhere and nowhere on the earth (just part of the audiovisual village) come through clearly. This book is the fourth recent attempt (Dorothy Hewett, Veronica Brady, Fay Zwicky taking turn about) to assemble a map showing us what it’s like to occupy another place and use the English language. I do believe the claims – which should be emphasized – that use is what’s at stake. There are some outstanding users in this book. I went straight to the main contents and gave the prose critiques a miss, until the organization galled me. There are sixty-six poets in the book, divided into HIS BOOK

125 

Australian Book Review (April 1989): 21–22. Wordhord: Contemporary Western Australian Poetry, ed. Dennis Haskell & Hilary Fraser (Fremantle, W A : Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1989). 127 Miller (1909–87) was a Massachusetts-born physicist who, from 1963 to 1986, held a visiting lectureship at the University of Sydney and, while there, continued the popular-science programmes he had started in Los Angeles, now under the aegis of Australia’s A B C television and the syndicated series title ‘Why Is It So?’ 126

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VI P and Business class. The first half of the book presents ten poets whose

works the editors found “most impressive.” They come in alphabetical order (just like the passengers in the rear): Alex Choate, Hal Colebatch, Mary Dilworth, Steven Hall, Nicholas Hasluck, Lee Knowles, Andrew Lansdown, Shane McAuley, Philip Salom, and Fay Zwicky. Each one gets a mug-shot, some ten pages to cavort in, and an editorial “critique” that will drive you nuts. A prose recension’s nice for schools but, reader, will you wear it? Fraser and Haskell have put their trust in the lovely forms of passion: pity, that. I like notes to tell you that the writer has trouble staying sober (or drunk), speaks fluent KitchenKaffir, hates the human race, lives in a cavern, and is rich beyond computation. I see Lee Knowles inhabits a boat. Getting there. Why, after the book’s introduction (designed, I think, for college and school more than pleasure on the Marie Celeste bound for Hobart or Dili), do we need critiques? I envisage the West’s rising hopes being told, ‘Open Wordhord at page 90; Ursa Major, tell the class what “Ode to Apathy” brings to mind, if you have one’. And I swear they’ll look at page 93 and discover that irony is where it’s at. I hate it: notes should be issued separately, and burnt. Why can’t we read it, as we read prose? ‘Critiques’ make poetry look hard. And prac. crit. is what they do to dead people, isn’t it? Poetry Australia does it better: no notes, just poems. And then there’s the second half of the book: fifty-six comrades bunched up like the Department of Supply group entry in a City-to-Surf Fun Run. Without the happy snaps and critiques. Thus, the book presents the Top Ten and the lucky contestants for Tomorrow’s People. See if you can spot the winners! I like Jim Pipp, Brian Dibble, Ee Tiang Hong, Mary Dow – look, I don’t want to give you a catalogue, but I suspect there’s very little between the State Treasures at the front of the book and the State’s Little Treasures crammed up in Economy. The division is annoying – it’s an each-way bet on elitism and egalitarianism. It’s tolerable only because the editors’ selection is so good when it comes to the individual works included. Haskell and Fraser have shown enough consideration for general readers to pitch the book towards beauty and use rather than duty: guesthouse, rather than heritage-listing as seen in historically focused collections. No doubt some genius loci does emerge in every regional anthology. R.S. Thomas would have felt himself among genial spirits in Effects of Light’s Tasmania.128 Readers fascinated with gloom and navel-gazing would have loved The

128

Effects of Light: The Poetry of Tasmania, ed. Vivian Smith & Margaret Scott (Sandy Bay: Twelvetrees, 1985).

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Orange Tree’s South Australia.129 Yve Louis said it for New South Wales in Another Site to Be Mined: “cracker in the jar says eat me, eat me.130 Place and Perspective walked us through the fabled Queensland paranoia, guilt. and irony associated with putting the kettle on.131 Overall, Australia’s a great place to have a cuppa while you’re dying. So many people in the anthologies burlesqued above are vagrants. Did you know that Les Murray and Michael Dransfield are Tasmanians? Or that Ern Malley was born and bred in Adelaide, sacred site of automatic writing? There are creaking joists in our houses of talk. Give them credit, Wordhord’s editors keep the tramps and runaraounds off the premises, though season-ticket-holders David Brooks and Nicolette Sasko have gone back to the Canberra circuit. There is optimism for the craft itself in this book. The editors are spot-on there. Forgive their nods to entrepôt Australia, and their too-long pedant’s chat. This is, so far, the best of the regional gatherings. Read the poems, skip the prose.

————— The Great Singer, Icon, and Enigma132 —————

I

N H E R T R I B U T E T O M A R Y G I L M O R E in 1965, Dymphna Cusack observed: “integrity is a lodestone even for those who do not possess it.”133 The comment was aimed at those who deprecated Gilmore’s work during her life or after her death. No one belittled the work like Gilmore herself, though, and while self-deprecation requires self-knowledge, she could be sure she occupied a high place among Australian writers. Gilmore knew her own propensity to fantasize, but we can ask how well she read her own jealousy of women who impinged on her status – Henry Lawson’s Bertha, or her son Billy’s Dorothy. Questions proliferate about her self-promotion, her constructions of literary and folkloric tradition, her admiration for turncoats like Lane or Hughes, her contradictory socialism and acceptance of an Imperial honour, and her secrecy and canniness in dealing with the record for

129

The Orange Tree: South Australian Poetry to the Present Day, ed. K.F. Pearson & Christine Churches (Adelaide, S A : Wakefield, 1986). 130 Another Site to Be Mined: A New South Wales Anthology, ed. Norman Talbot (Poetry Australia 107–108; Sydney: South Head, 1986). 131 Place and Perspective: Contemporary Queensland Poetry, ed. Barry O’Donohue (Brisbane: Jacaranda, 1984). 132  Overland 114 (May 1989): 92–94. 133 Dymphna Cusack, “Foreword,” in Mary Gilmore: A Tribute, intro. T. Inglis Moore (Sydney: Australasian Book Society, 1965): np.

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posterity. And doubts concerning all these remain at the end of Bill Wilde’s instructive enterprise.134 Gilmore was convinced of the importance of what she has to say. Her poetry and prose give her the right to our respect. Direct, humane, at their best honed and spare, her lyrics have not been in vogue for some time. The reasons are not far to seek. The detached, public utterance favoured by Hope and a later generation was at odds with her engaged and personal manner. Products of later views of what poetry is and what it should do, we can fail to see those elements that made her work loved and remembered. She drew on literary as well as folk forms and sources – song, ballad, lullaby – imbuing her localized experiences with universalist values. The nationalist iconography or even avowed purpose of much of her work has made it impossible to interpret her role as that of literary conscience of her country, a sort of poetical H.V. Evatt. She subordinated much of her writing to interpretation of the political struggle she saw as characterizing history, and portrayed herself as representative figure in that struggle. That said, the mordant lyric “Nationality” defies any effort to gainsay her comment or skill. Her campaign began with the struggle to be productive beyond nurturing good white English-speaking communalist children in the workingman’s Paraguayan utopia at Cosme. Productive she was. Some of her writing is great. Some is plain bad, where the predominant concern is with what is said rather than with the best way of saying it; Gilmore contended with working journalism for much of her career. The Worker was her reluctant host for twenty-three years, and, like her contemporaries H.E. Boote, R.J. Cassidy, Lola Gornall, Zora Cross, and David McKee Wright on that paper, Gilmore often published verse that seems hurried, unresolved, at best striking or merely competent. It is time someone looked at it all closely: there are surprises. Where poetry still has readers, it stands in danger of being marginal to their lives, of occupying the same space as Stockhausen – or Galuppi – on the cultural shelf. There is much to be said for Gilmore’s candid speech and her persistence in the old craft ways. Straightforwardness and passionate concern do not long remain out of vogue, as the overdue swing to appreciation of the Victorians attests. Roll on, I say, the discovery of the Edwardians and Georgians. Gilmore courted hazard in common with all who strive to make public occasions live in art. She sought to keep high poetic company – Burns and the anonymous Scots bards – and her work could miss the verve of the originals. Her 134

W.H. Wilde, Courage a Grace: A Biography of Dame Mary Gilmore (Melbourne: Melbourne

U P , 1989).

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objects of worship in other fields were spread wide: George Robertson and C.E.W. Bean were among the “inspiring and attractive” men she knew.135 So was Billy Hughes, and Gilmore suffered for her allegiance. Wilde does not tease out any adequate reason for Gilmore’s loyalty to the man: one’s sympathies remain with Boote and Cassidy. Wilde does not offer a celebration of the woman, for all that the book trades as the official authorized biography, and a bicentennial knell is sounded in the “Preface.” The Australasian Book Society published Mary Gilmore: A Tribute in 1965, and the sponsors of that project snaffled the Dobell portrait for the dustjacket; Melbourne University Press’s cover portrait is, frankly, disappointing by comparison. Wilde provides a generous range of Gilmore’s poetry and some tentative judgment upon it. Commentary by others is made to do most of the work, so one is forced back on one’s own judgement after all. I don’t mind this approach, but Wilde is too nice all round. His own interpretations are illuminating: yes, we should read her. I can appreciate the difficulties Wilde faced. Gilmore’s secrecy about her private life leaves gaps in the tapestry. Readers will want to know more. Did her men seek to escape her as keenly as she sought to escape them? Gilmore was assiduous in obscuring all that came between her and her family. Wilde comes as close to psychological interpretation as he dares when he proposes a sense of guilt relating to her view of her father – a reasonable hypothesis based on the ‘penance’ of her later poems. So much is guesswork: the family unit, cornerstone of Cosme’s society and contractual article in its wedding-service, was jettisoned by Gilmore, just as her mother (and her mother’s friend Louisa Lawson) had also escaped to greener literary pastures. Decent Victorian primness hides the reason for Gilmore’s spending most of her forty-five years of marriage apart from her husband. Contract, according to Gilmore, was sacred, but her silence marks another sense of duty – to present only her public face to posterity. She destroyed nearly sixty years’ letters concerning her family life. Did guilt or shame attach to broken contracts? Her departure from Cosme on health grounds was, on the face of it, more dignified than that of Lane, the founder. She liked a “manly man,”136 and Wilde tentatively suggests surrogatefather types: was Hughes, then, like her father in being at once strong-minded and a disappointment? Not quite. More speculation, or more weight on the puzzling aspects of character and career, would be welcome in a work that will remain the standard reference for some time. 135 136

Mary Gilmore, Diary, 10 July 1919, quoted by Wilde, 212. Gilmore, quoted by Wilde, 47, 100.

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Gilmore’s character is enigmatic. Scandalized by suggestions of eroticism in her own writing, she could appreciate Zora’s Cross’s work and yet be shocked by Marie Pitt’s relationship with Bernard O’Dowd. Gilmore appears to have been a wowser. Her own Bill seems to have liked a beer, and her son Bill died an alcoholic; medicinal spirits were in standard Victorian fashion, Mary’s relief in times of stress or insomnia. Wilde does not explore the reasons for Bill’s condition. More annoyingly, Gilmore’s attitudes to race are not clarified. Did she ever see Aboriginals as quite equal to whites? Old racial loyalties are posited as her first consideration, and her attachment to the clan Cameron is understandable. She held out early for racial purity, applauding Southern American segregation and regarding miscegenation – in Prichard’s Coonardoo or in real life – as repulsive. Were her Aboriginals ever more than picturesque anachronism? Her friendship with Faith Mussing (Faith Bandler) and her patronage of organizations could do with more comment. For all the contradictions spun out by her or surrounding her, Gilmore’s campaigns for progressive causes are part of Australian history. Her work encouraged the preservation of material that some of her contemporaries would sooner have forgotten. Wilde’s coverage of one hundred years of Australian history is facilitated by Gilmore’s sense of what was worth preserving. It would be pleasant to think that Wilde’s hints at the uncollected and unpublished works would be acted on in the interests of bibliography, and to restore some of Gilmore’s finest works to a user-friendly format. This biography is a choice companion to the Letters of Mary Gilmore – another of Wilde’s labours of love and enduring monuments.

——————— A Caution to Reviewers137 ———————

I

A P R I L A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W , I reviewed Wordhord, an anthology of contemporary Western Australian poetry.138 I asserted that it was the best of the State collections I’d seen to date. So far as contemporary work is concerned, I’ll still hold this view. I briefly canvassed the contenders from other States, and mentioned three other Western Australian collections. Serves me right, then, to discover William Grono’s superb Margins: A West Coast Selection 1829–1988, published by Fremantle Arts Centre Press as a sort of companion to Wordhord, if you like (and I like it very much). Bill Grono sent me a copy with the note, “I’m sorry you didn’t N THE

137  138

Australian Book Review 113 (August 1989): 33–34. See above, 203–205.

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know Margins. And now you do, I hope you’re not.” The man should be paid more. His note points up, for me, the problem with Easterners (t’othersiders) reviewing Westralian books (is it all right to say ‘Westralian’ in these all-togethery times?). How do we stay in touch? I haven’t seen Margins on sale in Melbourne, Sydney, Newcastle, Armidale, Canberra or Brisbane during my travels this year. Eastern booksellers may address their abuse to me care of the A B R , saying ‘The book has been on sale for months’, they’ve moved hundreds of copies, supplies can’t keep up, and I must be hanging around the Adult bookshops. Whatever, this is a good book to work through fitfully or purposefully. I think it’s essential material on the shelves of every reader who pretends to be interested in Australian cultural history and letters. It will be a great day when books like this repose on doctors’ waiting-room tables, an oasis in a desert of ageing mags. What do you get? Margins is the work of a scholar–poet. The collection is edited with concise discernment, offering relevant brief lives, a few lines only, but what a wealth of detail in ten dense pages: William Nairne Clark (1804–54) “killed merchant George Johnson in duel 1832; published the first book in the colony, Report of the late trial for libel Clark versus MacFaul 1835.” Notes like this send you to read the poems again. And what a fine collection there is: it’s wonderful to see ‘Bluebush’ (John Philip Bourke) represented so fully, and his contemporary Edwin Greenslade Murphy (‘Dryblower’). Both score very lightly elsewhere in national anthologies. I’m happy to see Thomas the Rhymer (Andrée Hayward) so well displayed. Bill Grono has returned to the newspapers as well as the published books of the poets he includes, and each work has its provenance attached. The book is plainly a labour, and a great one, of love. As Grono observes, the smallness of the population in the colonial period may have led to the proliferation of pseudonymous and anonymous works in print. What is most striking is the sheer volume of poetry published and read (or, as we say in gobble-and-go times, ‘consumed’). You’ll read about fifty poets’ works here before you effectively arrive at the twentieth century. I’m impressed by Grono’s inclusion of popular ballads – drawing-room stuff or patriotic, satiric, religious, bawdy, heroic songs and narratives. The book is not dull. There’s also a handsome representation of chiefly twentieth-century and contemporary names, and the biographical notes are tantalizingly brief, although one would like to see more details about many of the writers: the lives of some may offer more than their verse. Wilhelm Siebenhaar, deputy Registrar General

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of the State and champion of Zora Cross’s poetry, was tried and acquitted on disloyalty charges in 1916 – what on earth!? Once upon a cold winter’s day in 1977 in Armidale, Peter Porter observed that an anthologizer’s own poems should not appear in a collection. I didn’t – and don’t – agree with this view. I don’t mistrust Porter’s motives: bless him, he’s a treasure of the language and not just the nation at the end of the English-speaking chain. But future readers may be too apt to disregard the works of the scholar–poet when perusing the work collected with so much diligence. Grono himself is a fine poet, and I’d like to see more of his work in Margins. His collection reveals the distance one must travel to overcome the hegemony of ignorance about our culture, and it makes the travelling easier.

——————— The Australian Fascisti139 ———————

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A N D R E W M O O R E ’ S “The Historian as Detective,”140 the more so since my own game of detection concerning Bulletin editors and subeditors between 1918 and 1926 has turned up one James Alexander Philp (1861– 1935), author of Jingles that Jangle: A Book of Unpolished Satires (1918), and Songs of the Australian Fascisti (1923). A copy I investigated in the Mitchell Library is dated Brisbane September 1924. Philp was educated in New Zealand, and part of his collection Some Bulletin Stories (1916) is set there. Philp appears to have contributed verse and stories from Brisbane to the Bulletin, of which he was a subeditor during the Great War. His Songs of the Australian Fascisti is a loose compilation of verse-journalism from various periods, brought together, I think, as a reaction to events since 1919 in Brisbane (the One Big Union Propaganda League which organized the March 1919 demonstration is directly alluded to in Philp’s call for “Another Big Union,” and in his title-page device). Philp’s “Foreword” to Songs of the Australian Fascisti reveals his grievances at rigged electoral rolls and faked ballot-results; taxation without representation (a result, he says, of calmly paying taxes at the behest of Parliaments “elected by means of stuffed rolls, electoral quotas and ballot-boxes with sliding panels,” which scandals “have been associated with Australian Labour politics in at least two States”); and, finally, the association of Labour politics with Bolshevism. Philp’s poetry is as doctrinaire as his political analysis. “The Prince’s Smile” is a commentary on changes to the teaching of history in Queensland State schools about the time of the visit of the Prince of Wales (1920); “Class-Consciousness” ENJ OYED

139 

Overland 115 (August 1989): 54–55. Andrew Moore, “The Historian as Detective: Pursuing the Darroch Thesis and D.H. Lawrence’s Secret Army,” Overland 113 (December 1988): 39–44. 140

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and “Comrades” (8, 23) represent the author’s diatribes against the traitors in our midst who breed a sense of class: from the latter poem, You’re a scoundrel A traitor A disintegrator You’re as foul As the filth In the sewers You’re the offspring of Cain.

On the evidence of Philp’s other essays into verse-experimentation, it is plain that the devil indeed had the best tunes. Philp’s subjects are those of the day – the Irish Troubles (“The Freedom of Michael,” 23) or the rigging of the electorate in Queensland (“The Ghostly Voters,” 22) – but his verse misses the satiric edge which might have revealed some self-awareness or irony, features which redeem much of the hack verse-journalism of ‘Gilrooney’ (R.J. Cassidy), H.E. Boote, ‘W’ and ‘Glen’ (David McKee Wright), and other contemporaries on the Worker or the Bulletin staff. The Bulletin’s brief mention of the publication observed that the book was “ready to meet the Australian Bolshevik case,” and was “at least a wholesome warning.”141 After such fulsome praise, Philp might have offered more wholesome hints, but these are not recorded in book form. I would be grateful for any particulars relating to Philp’s career in Brisbane, or his contacts in Sydney. Afterword For the record, no one replied to my enquiry, but Philp’s career still interested me. His move to Queensland put him in the box seat at a most conservative paper at a time when anti-trade unionism and anti-socialism ran high; during World War One, the Brisbane Courier campaigned for conscription, and its letter pages published numerous virulent appeals to intern citizens of German and Austro-Hungarian descent. The AustLit database returns some the following information about Philps’s publications, but nothing in connection with his Songs of the Australian Fascisti. Philp was born at Glasgow, Scotland on 7 October 1861, and went with his parents to New Zealand when he was three years old. He was educated at Auckland Grammar School, and began his journalistic career on the Thames Star and the Auckland Star. In 1889 he moved to Australia and joined the staff of the Bulletin, becoming a sub-editor. Under the pseudonym Timi Piripi (‘Piripi’, with its Mǒori-style transliteration of ‘Philp’, a wave back at his formative years in New Zealand), he contributed poems to the Bulletin and a short story to the Town and Country Journal in the 1890s. Poems under his own 141

Bulletin (15 May 1924): Red Page.

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name appeared in the Bulletin from 1893 to 1931, likewise short stories (some of which were collected in 1916). In 1901 he became the commercial editor of the Brisbane Courier, a position he held until shortly before his death in Brisbane in June 1935. As well as books of poems and short stories, Philp also published a one-leaf poem, Mazuma, in Brisbane (1928).

————— The Jokes Just Get Verse and Verse142 —————

T

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but I can appreciate that some souls are so devoid of poetry that they will find the very concept of amusing verse an irresolvable contradiction. Some will look for Australian references, or even Australian poets, between its covers, and pass over the volume in favour of A Complete Guide to Nouvelle Fun. John Clarke’s book comes out just in time for the last spending orgasm before the shops go into catatonia for one day only, so there’s the risk it’ll be cast aside or overlooked. But soft! do not disregard it lightly. It’s a medium-rare event: a book of parodies in verse. People who don’t read poetry (probably ‘mostpeople’, as e.e. cummings would have said) will miss a lot of the jokes and wonder why, for instance, Ted Lear’s limericks are so dull, or why Vern Scanlon’s Standing Orders falls down and won’t get up. Wendy Cope got in first with this sort of book, writing brilliant parodies of contemporary or dead poets. Allen & Unwin and Susan Haynes might be forgiven for taking off the Faber & Faber format, however, because there are some hilarious cracks at the Great Dead (and one or two of the living) between the wrappers. Clarke’s book adds a few nice twists to the art of parody exemplified by the great Punch editor Owen Seaman (even to the extent of his surname) in his 1899 volume In Cap and Bells. Seaman sent up the Poet Laureate rotten, and if you can find a copy of the book, you’ll see what every subsequent parodist has had to come up against: To Julia Under Lock and Key is nicely updated with Clarke’s Upon Julia’s Speedos, attributed to Bob Herrick, well-known Mittagong Boer War veteran (defunct). What gives me pause is the reflection that dozens of contemporary writers have folders full of wicked send-ups of poets they love to hate, but they’ll never get a book of their works published in this country, because they are not ‘media personalities’. Clarke has cruelled the market, and those works you’ve circulated 142 

Weekend Australian (18–19 November 1989), Weekend: 8. John Clarke, The Complete Book of Australian Verse, ill. Jenny Coopes (Sydney: Allen & Unwin/Susan Haynes Book, 1989). 143

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and even published now and then in Matilda, the Review, New Poetry, the Adelaide Review and elsewhere for twenty years might as well go for fire-starters. It’s a simple fact that publishers will tackle a collection of light verse in this country only if it’s written by Barry Humphries, Max Gillies, John Laws, Michael Leunig or John Clarke. God knows why it should be so: the London Review of Books and New Statesman have been regular venues for some of the funniest parodies written in recent times, and the competitions run by the latter have generated several star performers who put the dead and the living through the hoops with élan. Send the day when 24 Hours magazine or the Independent Monthly decides to get with it: people do like to clip these things and keep them. So what can I tell you about the Complete Book of Australian Verse – one of the Long White Cloud’s choicest primary products – and it’s going to cause many a merry chuckle in the common-rooms of Canberra, Perth, and Darwin. It will resolve many a crisis-wracked yuppie’s dilemma over what to tuck into the stocking for that special, sensitive, and caring person in its life. Clarke has made up the details about the lives of the ‘authors’ of these spoofs: Sylvia Blath, Stewie Smith, R.A.C.V. Milne, Warren Keats, Fifteen Bobsworth Longfellow, Walter Burley Yeats, and a mob of others. My favourite’s Emmy Lou Dickinson, although I have a sneaking regard for Pinko Brooke (Brookie), who didn’t come back from the Big Stoush. Parody is not easy to do well, and it’d be crook if it were: no one would be safe and people would be frightened to write anything. Yet it was a staple of late-nineteenth-century print media and lasted well into the twentieth-century weeklies and dailies like the old Sydney Sun and the Brisbane Courier–Mail. Poetry readings all over the country are chocka with people ostensibly taking themselves seriously who are, in fact, writing unconscious parodies of Plath, Sexton, and Les A. Murray. It’s a brave writer who jumps up and lets fly with a straight left at any of them. It’s regarded as being in bad taste, if not artistic suicide, to assail Saint Sylvia or Laissez Moray or John T. Ranter, even though the targets (if alive) might revel in the free promotion. I suspect the real reason has to do with envy of the one who got in first. The timidity of publishers is a thing apart, based on terror of litigious scribbling twerps who see a fat settlement as a sort-of literary grant. Thus, the funniest takeoffs of the most self-regarding and pompous remain hidden, or occupy a small slot in the verbal outpourings of our myriad stand-up comics. It’s a pity that they don’t test the waters or that publishers won’t take the plunge. It’s also regrettable that Clarke doesn’t let fly at living Australian authors: fear of frying by writ-wielding nutters? Irony, said Schlegel, is nothing to joke about.

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I can’t find one live Australian author as a target in this book, and it prompts one to consider the title afresh: ‘Australian’ verse? The introduction claims that many of the world’s most famous poets were actually Australian (and the book attempts to demonstrate this thesis). While I take the point that it’s a total sendup of academic paraphernalia (‘critical apparatus’ sounds like lower-limb prosthetics, doesn’t it?), I wonder why a few of the local great and late haven’t found a niche. The hardback format and the Faber lookalike wrapper suggest that you should store this book with your Craig Raine and Wendy Cope, beside the originals on your Five Feet of Standard British Authors shelf. You could do worse – this book will grow on you. It will possibly drive non-readers of poetry to seek out the originals of Larry Parkin’s This Be the Chorus, b.b. hummings, and Sir Don Betjeman’s greatest hits.

—————— An Interview with Shelton Lea144 —————— Introduction

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H E L T O N L E A ’ S P A T H C R O S S E D W I T H M I N E in Sydney in 1965. We both sojourned at Kings Cross in Sydney. Shelton (‘Shelly’) was already an identity as a poet, among other roles. He read and recited poems at the El Rocco jazz club in Brougham Street at the top of William Street, to the accompaniment of jazz musicians. He also performed poetry impromptu in pubs and coffee lounges like the Royal George, Windsor Castle, and the Piccolo. Eric Beach recently [1988] observed to me, “Shelton’s a rumour; even people who don’t know his second name know Shelton all over Australia.” Shelton Lea’s poetry charts his picaresque life, but to see him only as Bohemian nonconformist is to overlook the seriousness of his dedication to the craft of poetry. The poetry and the life bear each other up: eight volumes in print, besides countless magazine, journal, anthology, and chapbook appearances, recordings, and readings in every State for over twenty years. Despite the ‘rumour’, his work has not been the subject of critical attention. He would probably be grateful that he has not been ‘done’ by the academies. I had thought on several occasions to record an interview with him, and on 22 June 1988 we talked in North Carlton at several venues, including the Dan O’Connell, Melba’s, and the Albion; and later at his home. The ensuing transcript is an excerpt from several hours of conversation. The interview is in two parts. The first chiefly concerns prison life and life on the road. The second part relates experiences with poetry and poets. Prior to moving to Mountain View at Poowong in the Strzelecki Ranges, Lea ran a bookshop at Fitzroy. He has an extraordinary library and still deals in books.

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Southerly 4 (1989): 560–80.

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A Poet’s Education MS: You left home pretty early, didn’t you? SL: I hit the frog and toad at twelve. I had this argument with my adoptive father, about giving this feller about my own age a hand with reading. His father was employed out the back in the old man’s business [Darryl Lea Chocolates], and his son was behind with reading, and I gave him a couple of lessons, and the old man sacked this bloke. When he came up to my room in the house we lived in at Toorak, I said “You sacked him, didn”t you?,” and he said “Yes,” and I just jumped up – I was a little feller at the time – and I – bang – straight into him. I went back to Carey Grammar School. I was a gymnastic champion at the time, I went to training on a Saturday morning and at nights, after school, in the gym. And I had my shower, and I walked out and I stole a bike. It was outside the gym. And I pedalled to Adelaide, stealing all the way. So I hit the frog. In order to survive as a twelve-year-old, as any twelve-yearold would have to do, because a lot of them are out there on the bloody street, surviving, you’ve got to be a thief. And it took them six months to get me the first time. And I found Adelaide then – and now – probably one of the most depressing places I’ve been to in my life. It’s the only place where I’ve ever truly contemplated suicide. I was going to throw myself off the bridge into the Torrens, and I looked at the river, and saw all the duck shit and I thought, ‘No, fuck that, Jack’. And still, to this day, if I’ve got to go to Adelaide I’ve got to watch myself carefully, man. I’ve spoken to the Kooris down there, and they reckon that about a hundred years ago the bonji was put on the joint; you know, a couple of the elders got around and pointed it. And I believe it. Then I slept on the beach there, at Glenelg, for about three months, at the height of summer. Had a wonderful time swimming all day, getting out at night stealing food, money, clothes. MS: There was a lot of snowdropping in those days? SL: Oh, I’ve never actually stooped to snowdropping; I used to go into shops. Boosting, man, boosting. But you learn how to survive. I wandered around the streets. I was a pretty diminutive twelve-year-old boy, you know; and I used to just attach myself to families. There’d be three or four kids with the mother and father, and I’d just stay a few steps behind them. Because you had to have a reason then, you know, to be a boy alone at that age. I learned a lot of tricks like that. Like how to melt into the shadows – which all, of course, in my later criminal career came in very handy (Laughter). And because I was a gymnast, I was a bloody good second-storey man, a very good cat burglar.

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Oh, I’ve done time, I’ve done seven and a half years in the nick, so I can take it sweetly, this stuff, without fear of retribution. MS: Who else was in your family when you left? SL: Well, there were three of us who were adopted. There was myself and Brett and Honey. I still see Brett. Honey went to America with a feller called Charlie – he used to look like a miniature Beethoven walking down Bourke Street. She still lives there, and she’s got several kids. Brett’s around. The family already had four of their own kids as well, you see. And you know, when you keep getting reminded that you’re not real, you tend to find your own points of reference, your own focuses. And so it was Brett and Honey. MS: So you never had anything to do with the family since? SL: No, I was never in it. MS: When did Brett leave? SL: When he was about sixteen, seventeen. We were all sent to different schools. Honey went to St Catherine’s, Cherise went to Lauriston, Gaila went to Shelford Church of England Girls’ Grammar, Jason went to Caulfield Grammar; Brett went to – where was it? Lael [Leighland] went to Wesley, and I went to Carey. They had this weird idea that you shouldn’t have two children in the one family in the same school. I haven’t got anything against the Leas; they took me in for ten years, they fed me. They gave me emotional nightmares, but that’s beside the point. They fed me and they sent me to school, but I tell you quite frankly, I am an indictment of the private-school system. You know, they’re just terrible places. You learn absolutely nothing; you learn how to be a fucking snob. No education at all. MS: What happened after you were loose for six months in Adelaide? SL: I went to Turana. Where I wrote my first complete poem: forewarned by legends of my youth i trust not an associate’s truth for if on these truths I dwell the end is but a darkened cell. the size of the cell being nine by fourteen, the rotting boards that made up the floors the decayed and cracked plaster all over the walls on which one reminisces his downfall. and within these cracks the shadows play to a prisoner in an indefinable way. the imagination runs riot with thoughts most wild

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like those when you’re young almost a child.

MS: That’s quoted in your poem “nineteen sixty four” in Poems from a Peach Melba Hat … SL: Yeah, and it went on for about another thirty verses. They made me a Ward of the State until I was about eighteen; what they call indefinite sentence. So I kept hitting the frog. I was pretty good at escaping. I think I might still hold the record for the amount of times I got out of Poplar House, which was maximum security. Me and a fellow called Stevie Stovell – seven times we got out. He had a lot of go in him, did Stevie. They’d keep bringing me back, but I just kept on going. I think they just gave up, eventually. And then, when I was about sixteen, with a fellow called Mickey Doran – now dead, O.D.’d many years ago – we were the youngest blokes in Pentridge – we went to a joint called Y OG S , Young Offenders Group, behind ADivision. I’ve still got plenty of friends from those days, like Phil Motherwell, writer, and Karl Gallagher, painter. I got eighteen months there. It was my first real lagging, because I was doing time, in the sense that I had a sentence, and I knew when it was ending. Before that, being a Ward of the State – it’s like throwing away the key – ‘Governor’s Pleasure’ – that means you never know when you’re getting out. The maddies are what they give that to. Those poor bastards – I mean, whether they deserve it or not, it’s a terrible way to treat another human being, given no time, because they just go berko. They just get progressively fucking madder. They’re always on the Governor’s door, knocking: ‘Hey, any news of my release?’ and all that sort of stuff. Because every day’s a possibility: you’ve got not real time. You can get sprung at any time. MS: You can psych yourself up if you’ve got a sentence, if you know how long you’ve got. SL: Yeah, if you know your time, you can do it. And still, to this day, they do it, to kids in these joints. They make them Wards of the State, and the State’s got hold of them until they’re eighteen. They can hold them in there, or they can send them out. And that’s bestial behaviour, for my money. Because you’re taking time away. MS: Time turns up constantly in your poems. SL: Well, it’s very real to me. When I did six months in Grafton, as a ‘trac’ [intractable], I was doing it real damned hard. I punched a screw in Goulburn because he kept ripping my poems up. I was doing eighteen months in Goulburn, about ’74, ’75, and I’d go on Governor’s Request during the day. ‘Can I have paper and a pen?’ – ‘What do you want it for?’ – ‘I want to write poetry’ – ‘Right,

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granted’. I’d get my paper and pen, and I’d go up there and I’d be busy screwing round, writing poems and putting things down, and this arsehole on the evening ramp, Femister his name was, used to come in and – “What’s this? Paper and a pencil? Smuggling letters, eh?” – “Governor’s Request.” You’d be face up, against a wall, hands up on the wall, and leaning backwards to tell him, and watching him, and he’d take your paper and your latest poems, and just rip them up and flush them down the dunny. And I got so jack of this, one day, that I just went berko. He was the last one about to leave the peter; I just grabbed him and pulled him back, and I slammed the peter door and I put him up against the door and I just had him. I nearly fucking ate him. And, of course, I went to Grafton, as intractable, and doing solitary up there, I kicked it off wishing the hours away, wishing the days away. I literally woke up one morning and it was almost like a Buddhistic experience, or Tao, and I suddenly realized that I was wasting time, and tried to make my days go longer, to really space out. I wanted every minute to be an hour, every hour to be a day. And I did my time real damn easy after that, man, because I’d got control of time. Time was no longer an enemy; it was no longer my master. I mastered it. It was just one of the lessons learned. I get almost aggressive about time. You see, at that particular time I’d already had, I think, three books published. And I’d got into the gaol, and ‘What’s your occupation?’ – ‘Poet’ – ‘What’s your occupation? You can’t put that down’ – ‘Why not? That’s what I do for a bloody living’ – ‘What are you in here for?’ – ‘Thieving – you want me to put my occupation as a thief?’ – ‘Better than being a poet’, and they’d say. ‘All poets are poofters.’ I used to get that in the yards. I had to fight in the yards on occasion for the right of poetry. And because of the early work I, and a couple of other people like Kevin Gilbert and Bob Adamson, had done in the gaols, poetry became acceptable. And these days, of course, every crim who goes into the joint’s either a poet or a painter (Laughter). I used to earn my tobacco writing love-poems for the guys. It could’ve been a quarter of an ounce for a quatrain, an ounce for a sonnet, and for a full-blown number it’d be an ounce of good weed: we don’t want no Grey’s or Robin Hood, we want Drum, man, we want the Mickey Mouse. And I ended up having more tobacco than the bookies. But it really taught me refinement – the matter of poetry, the fact of it, the parameters of it. It was a really good apprenticeship. I’ve done a stint in Fanny Bay and joints like that. [Note: No evidence exists of Shelton spending time at Fanny Bay Gaol in Darwin.] The only importance of gaol to me is that it’s where I honed my craft. Because you couldn’t waste words there; you couldn’t waste anything there. You couldn’t waste a cigarette-butt. How could you waste your words?

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MS: You’ve been writing nonstop for years now since prison fell behind; which isn’t to imply you weren’t always busy writing. You’re a book-collector, too – running a store at one stage. SL: I’m not a thief anymore, you see. I’m a poet. But I have a professional interest. I like this boy in Toorak, how he does it lately. Robbery without violence is fine; it’s cleverly thought-out, it’s done with skill and panache, with a certain amount of dash; and they can put their boots under my bed any time. MS: What Nigel Roberts would call duende? Fatality hedging you about; you carry out the gesture, like the bullfighter in the ring. SL: A while ago I was on radio in Sydney and this young bloke, the interviewer, said, “Why did you give up thieving and decide to be a poet?” I said “To tell you the truth, I was eighteen storeys up, on the outside of a building in your very Edgecliff, and I’d just done this bloke for his lot: they were asleep, he was snoring, and she was mumbling and moaning. I was tickling their tank right in front of them; I wasn’t disturbing the molecules of air, and as I left, on the eighteenth storey on the outside, about to make a rapid descent, I saw the sun rise, and I was stuck there, like a butterfly, watching the absolute beauty, and the jewels in my pocket faded.” You know how you recognize beauty? It has integrity. You get rocked to your heels. Poetry allows you to capture light, density. You get all that. Mostly About Poetry MS: Let’s get something about the other poets and where you ran into them. SL: Sandor Berger [1925–, Hungarian-born poet resident in Sydney 1949–75] was the kickoff. Then I met Slessor – on William Street, with Gavin Greenlees [1930– 83, poet and sometime lover of Rosaleen Norton]. I was with Gavin Greenlees on the bridge halfway down William Street overlooking Woolloomooloo, just past the ABC , and this big man with a wonderful-looking hat came walking down the street, and Gavin said, “Ah, Kenneth, this is a young poet friend of mine, Shelton Lea”; and it was Slessor. It wasn’t too long before he died – a couple of years – and he stood at the bridge there, and I don’t even know if I had an idea or an image of what a poet should be or not be, and it struck me as odd, because he was so correct. His manner, his mien, his bowtie. And he read me this poem on the bridge there: Night, the old nun, in voiceless pity bends To kiss corruption, so fabulous her pity (“City Nightfall”)

… the clothes hanging in the windows and so on.

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MS: Yes, William Street was a magic street. SL: Was. Not any more. You used to start off at the New Zealand Hotel and work up. At Brougham Street, the El Rocco. Yeah, it was a good street then. They put in Whisky-Au-Go-Go, and all that shit and it really brought the tone down. It was always very nice to drop into the ABC foyer if you wanted to keep cool. Who else? Ozzie Fenato was pretty good. He used to run – not the Apollyon: Gavin’s old witch-mate [Rosaleen Norton] used to run that – the Piccolo, down from Les Girls. And John Montgomery: he was a great boost. Not in terms of publication, but encouragement. MS: You’ve had the occasional grant, speaking of encouragement? SL: The Literature Board of the Australia Council gave me ten grand in 1972, and five grand in 1976; plus the Victorian Ministry for the Arts, for a six-week tour in 1984: they gave me two grand, I think. And with each of these grants I put a book out: The Paradise Poems (1973), Chockablock With Dawn (1975), Poems from a Peach Melba Hat (1985); Poets on Record (1975) – Rob Harris was on the flipside. MS: Have you ever had any residencies? SL: No. Who’d give me a residence? Wagga was nice; it was beaut (1988). I went up there to do my reading, and some arsehole went and stole my crutches; they had to carry me upstairs to do my reading. And I did my reading. From the feedback I got, it was pretty successful. MS: You’ve been touring the country for years with poetry: some of the places? SL: The Star Hotel in Newcastle. They invited me, paid for me to come up, put me up, and I read poems there. I liked that, the Star – now pulled down, unfortunately. It was about the same time – 1977 – that I did Newcastle University. It was a walk-up start. I just went up to the University and said “Right, where’s the English Department? I want to read some poems.” I’ve been knocked back for years, doing that. I’d go to Melbourne University, and I’d end up reading to the medical fraternity, the legal department – and all of a sudden the English Department would hear that they had a poet on campus: I’d already fronted them, and they’d given me the razz, man, but it didn’t stop me. I’d just go to the legal fellers and say, ‘I’ve done a bit of time, I’m a poet, and perhaps I could elucidate things for your law students’. And I used to do all the faculties except the English Department. By the time the English Department got around to it, I’d say ‘Sorry, see you later, I’m on my way’. They’re very slow starters, the English Departments. Christ, it’s a bloody big country: if a man can’t travel around, as published as I am, and then can’t just front into an English Department and say ‘Look, I’m here, use me …’.

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A couple of months ago, in Sydney, I’d gone around to Bob Adamson’s joint, and we got into his flash car – he’s always had a flash car – and went around to see Viidikas [Vicki Viidikas, poet, 1948–98]. But we couldn’t find her, so we went to Sydney Uni, and we met Jim Tulip, who’d taken us for a beer, in the students’ place, where everyone’s sitting on the floor – it was great. And Mike Wilding turned up, and I got up and said “Well, I’ll give you a poem,” and I bellowed out my “Australia” poem, and then I’ve gone around trying to get money off the students. I got about five dollars forty from a hundred and fifty students, but they loved the poem! Tulip couldn’t believe it; Wilding and Adamson could believe it. I tried to get Adamson in on it, but he wouldn’t be in it. I’ve done heaps and heaps of that sort of thing. That’s how I met Chris Pollnitz. At Newcastle University I ran across him, and he said “Oh, yeah, can you do it in about an hour?” and he goes and buys us a bit of tucker, and I did a beaut reading, about two hundred people in this lecture-theatre, and Pollnitz was very good. I went into my spiel about half-way through my reading: “Well, I do like to get paid for these readings, if you like what you’ve heard …” – and Chris said “No, no, Shelton, you can’t do that here; but I will do this.” And he put ten dollars on the table and said “I’ll leave this here as an emolument for you.” And I walked away with about a hundred and sixty bucks, which was great. That’s how it should happen. It’s all very well to be studying dead poets, but it’s good when the live one comes in. You know, I read that poem “Could you kill a dog with a hammer?” to a nun in the front row at Newcastle and she adored it. You connect with one person, and it flows through them to everyone else. So you concentrate on that one person. Then I asked her if she minded me saying “fuck” in my next poem, and she said “Not at all, not at all.” Setting the parameters, you understand. Other readings? The Leinster Arms Hotel [in Collingwood, Melbourne]. I ran those for a couple of years; that was a beauty. Harold Park Hotel [Sydney, site of regular readings in the 1980s]: I’ve done them twice, as a guest. Adelaide, Brisbane, Cairns, Darwin, Alice Springs. MS: What about your first idea of what a poem could be – or should be? SL: I thought the first poem I wrote, “forewarned by legends of my youth” – because it sang, because it said something, and because it had a framework, it had a structure. And then I came across people like Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg. I was already reading John Donne, when I was younger, so I had a fair intellectual idea of what poetry was. But it wasn’t until I came across Sandor Berger, I guess, that I really knew that that extra was there, that poetry was a matter of giving.

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Sandor and I would be just sitting on fruit boxes in Darlo Road, getting spat on, and getting yobbos trying to fight with us. Sander was a tough little nut, and I knew how to handle myself, and we used to give as much as we got. The hearing side of poetry, I guess, came to me with Sandor. He would’ve been the first one I came across, and then I got into doing it myself, in the El Rocco, and doing it with jazz. MS: I first met you about the time you were associated with a fellow called Harvey, a musician, flamenco guitarist: where did he spring from? SL: A Melbourne boy, Harvey Brookes. Fabulous guitarist. Segovia came out, and heard Harvey play, and wanted to take him to Spain with him, but Harvey bent his head with acid. I used to manage him; I did eighteen months gaol for him, and I did it easy. He had straight blond hair; used to do karate kicks in the air. He used to play his guitar by the fountain in the Cross, and I’d read poems out, near the man with the birds – the birds would hop on the bow while he played this violin with a megaphone on it. That old bloke got knocked, stabbed to death by a couple of yobbos who wanted to rob him; saddened me immensely. Cheverells was just behind the fountain; it was a huge fucking tim – a brothel. MS: A lot of people lived in there; I lived there. SL: I lived in there; you know how I used to pay my rent? I watched all the girls – there were about twelve of them working there – when they came in. They were all half-hour tricks, and my job was to go and knock on the door in half an hour: ‘You ready, are you, Marge? Everything sweet, love? Time’s up’ – I was the timekeeper for the tim! Time does occur a lot! There were corridors and stairways everywhere: the joint’d be empty by the time the jacks came in. Tommy the Stink, the best dip I ever met in my life, used to live in my place. We used to listen to Thelonious Monk records all night, ripped off our tits on dynamite dope. MS: You met Monk in Sydney, didn’t you? SL: Thelonious taught me about time, too. He said “Shelton, it’s the space between the notes.” Lenny Bruce said much the same thing to me; he said, “It’s your timing; the space between the words is most important.” They taught me more about poetry than most poets could ever teach me. Thelonious was living in the Chevron, and I was his minder. He’d have a curried egg in the morning – which was for him a hard-boiled egg with the top chopped off and a huge spoonful of curry powder on top of it; and then he’d just sit down at the piano and go.

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Johnny Montgomery taught me all about jazz, and how to watch a movie; he died last year. Poor old Johnny Montgomery: he was a great teacher. Each poem I wrote, he’d go through it and vet it, and he was normally right. “This is bodgie, Shelly” – “Ah; why?” – and he’d show why it was bodgie. He was a great guy. He read Kafka – he was a great reader. Loved television, loved movies. I asked John Flaus about him, and he couldn’t remember him. He was my mentor; in the poem “nineteen sixty four” (Poems from a Peach Melba Hat), I pay homage to Montgomery – and in a few other things. I met him back in the days of the Royal George; we lived together in various places, you know, from Cheverells to flats around. I was saddened to hear he was dead. Flaus is always talking about the sub-text in a movie; well, I know that stuff from what Montgomery taught me. We’d listen to jazz and we’d get stoned and he’d say “Now, listen to this passage,” and I’d hear things I’d just never heard before. He was a very good influence on me, Montgomery. He’d keep the fee to a minimum: he had to pay the rent – he wasn’t a working man, because he’d been shot in the lung: he used to be an old heavy in the early ’50s. He introduced me to Lee Gordon. Ted Noffs would come around to all the Push houses and offer free soup if we’d lay a couple of bricks. So I actually built some of the Wayside Chapel. I met Lenny Bruce in ’64 when he was playing at the Wintergarden in Double Bay. He got a walk-up start. He went up on stage, and he knew what was going to come down, but he didn’t realize just how quick it was going to come down. He got up and said “Now I know you’re here to hear me say ‘fuck’, and I’m probably going to say ‘fuck’ a few times.” And as soon as he started this off, the jacks came down the aisles, and that’s all Australia ever got to hear of Lenny Bruce. But I had the privilege of spending a couple of weeks with him while he was waiting for the Mariposa to come in: he was under house arrest in the top floor of the Chevron. I used to provide him with smack and all that sort of shit. But he taught me a lot about poetry and how things work. The first person to realize that I had anything with poetry after Sandor was Sweeney Reed in Melbourne. That was after I got kicked out of Sydney for the LSD bust – it was the best acid this country ever had; it was pure. Nobody ever had any bad trips, because we’d tell them what it was about; we’d guide them. Two guys used to make it at the university at Kensington: one was an atomic physicist, who was involved with time, and the other was a physicist. They wanted the Sandoz caps, and I rang up a mate in America and said “Next time you’re on the Mariposa, man,” and so he got me those. They worked out what it was and said “Right, now can you get some ergot?” and I said “Whatever you need,” and ergot came out, six weeks later, and that’s what we got done for, for

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having a ‘Prohibited Import’, to wit, ergot. Well, we were fined a hundred pounds each. It was all they could do to us. They couldn’t pinch us for the acid, because there wasn’t a law against it. But it didn’t stop them from taking all my money. MS: And free enterprise is to be encouraged? SL: Only if they can get their tax out of it. Most of the drug laws originally are tax laws. It’s absurd. MS: Who else did you know from the Royal George in Sydney? SL: Seaforth Mackenzie, Harry Hooton. I met them in shortened circumstances. Like Harry: it was only a year before he died, and he was a sick man. I don’t think we talked about poetry; but he was a philosophical giant at the time. He was the quintessential anarchist-humanist-socialist: he was all those things; his book – It Is Great To Be Alive. MS: You lived at the George after running away to Sydney, didn’t you? SL: The woman who owned the pub, Mrs G, this great big woman who had this place in Melbourne before that, she found me going through the stuff out the back, and I stayed there, picking up the glasses, listening to everyone, meeting all these people who’d knocked around with Professor John Anderson, all that mob. I’m in the process of writing a poem at the moment that’s a conversation between Harry Hooton and Kenneth Slessor outside the Royal George in 1960, and I’m using both their voices. It’s going to be a lovely poem. Harry as a poet wasn’t spectacular, but his ideas are what come through, and his energy. He reminds me of an Antipodean Artaud, the young Harry. MS: What poets stick out from your early readings? SL: Oh, there’ve been some great influences on my work – Ezra Pound, Walt Whitman, e.e. cummings, Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, John Donne, Marlowe, Herbert, all the Metaphysical poets, Blake, in a lot of ways; Peter Olds, James Baxter, Eric Beach, Barrett Reid. MS: What is it in Barrett’s poetry? SL: His economy of line, and his essential music. He’s one of the most marvellous poetic tacticians I know. I’ve just selected six of his – I went through his manuscripts yesterday – which I’m going to read at La Mama for the anthology 145 Mal Morgan’s putting together. One of them’s called “Aboriginal” and it starts 145

La Mama Poetica, ed. Mal Morgan (M U P Paperbacks; Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne U P , 1989). Ultimately included by Morgan are Reid’s “Coral Cays – an A B C ” and “Sketches from a Laparotomy,” along with Michael’s “Thinking about Heaven” and “An Essay on Criticism.”

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“We are making country.” It’s just so beautifully balanced. It’s got an ear that, apart from Frank Kellaway’s, must be the best in the country. It’s got such a good ear. There’s a beautiful one called “The ABC of Birds,” dedicated to John Reed, which is just – he deals with a nuance as if it’s an absolute. MS: About the time you came to Melbourne again from Sydney and met Sweeney Reed, you had some poems published in a collection with others from Still Earth Press. SL: That was Corners in Cans, around 1968 [in fact, 1969]. Sweeney Reed and Russell Deeble did a limited edition at Richmond, around two hundred or two hundred and fifty copies. Peter Cowan, Russell Deeble, Bruce Dawe, Mike Dugan. MS: And Selections from Still Earth? SL: That was a special edition; poems by Russell Deeble, myself, Christopher Logue, Diane di Prima, and Tom Pickard. I haven’t even got my own copy. That was ’69. MS: Can you say anything about what happens when you write a poem? SL: The bird of poetry alights on the shoulder and whispers in your ear! Maybe Teilhard de Chardin can answer you there? I can talk about things like drive: Auden says that having a poem inside you is like having a big bubble of air in your oesophagus; you’ve got to get it out. Whence it cometh, the bubble of air, who fucking knows? Perhaps you got a root on the night before: it could be as simple as that (Laughter). I’ll walk around and, at any given time, in my head there’ll always be an average of six poems working. It doesn’t come to the page until it’s – ‘mentated’ – you know; sometimes it’s as many as ten poems. You work it all out in here, so that when I get it to the page, generally I’ve just about got the poem where I want it to go. I revise, I do all that, but when I get the bugger on the page, its shape is there, its music is there, its form is there. It’s a bit like a wrestling match. I was watching the wrestling the other night with Noela Mackinnon: I spent the night around there with Eric and all them, and Noela hates wrestling. But I said, “You’ve got to watch this”: Randy Savage, or whatever his name was, Macho Man. But what’s happened there is what should happen in a good poem. It’s within the confines of the ring that most of the battle takes place, but occasionally someone gets thrown out of the ring, and then the other bloke jumps out after him, but in order for the match to be finished, they’ve got to get back in the ring: you know your parameters. On the occasion, you step outside them, but you get back in the ring to finish things off. It’s tightly controlled: the narrative’s there, like in the wrestling match. It’s always the good guy and the bad guy – it’s good and evil; the narrative line is there.

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In this particular match we were watching, it was this Randy Macho Savage, or whatever his name is (it’s a boring sport really, but it’s hypnotic!), has got this girl, Elizabeth or something, and he’s fighting this parody of Elvis Presley, and the parody of Elvis Presley is a great lump of a man, with the hair slicked and everything. Elizabeth’s standing outside the ring for this Macho Man, and the parody’s making suggestive gestures towards the girl, and of course Randy gets real fucking mad and throws this bloke right out of the ring, you see, and follows him out. And I’m saying to Noela, “Now this poem will work beautifully – you just watch this; they’re going to have to get back in the ring to finish it all, and might will triumph, but the whole balance and sequence of events, the whole relationship is there.” It’s choreographed, but these blokes were angry, bleeding by this time. Well, the good poem bleeds like that. You can break the barriers. I’m trying to do that with the ballad form, take it beyond the di-dah di-dah di-didah, in “the snowdrop kid” (“poem on a peach melba hat”) or “picnic day at the drouin races.” They’re essentially ballad forms, and I’ve broken some rules, but I’ve got back in the ring all the time. It was a perfect metaphor for a poem, the wrestling match. MS: Yes, it’s occurred to me that C.J. Dennis and other balladists are in there. SL: Oh yes, I even make apologies to C.J. Dennis in some poems. MS: Closure is important in these works, isn’t it? SL: Closure’s important; it’s everything; that’s how you want it. Your end is as important as the beginning. The ballad form is lovely to work with. It comes from the Spanish balada, a dance; it’s actually a dance. MS: With an element of fado? Fate? SL: Yes, it’s integral to everything that we do. Time is probably the essence that drives us – you know, what Thomas says about “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.” It’s time, the thing that hangs our molecules together. Your beginnings and your endings – “the day was fifteen bright balloons,” in the Drouin Races poem: we end up with that again after all the extended poem; it’s balladic form. MS: The poem “tonight” (in Chockablock With Dawn) is also balladic in that sense. Words come back throughout it like a refrain – even the one-word refrain, which hauls up everything else and knits the poem together as you go along. SL: Yes. You read people like C.J. Dennis and Lawson, and then you read Lorca, and Lorca worked in balladic form quite a lot. And you realize that because language itself has changed over the millennia – even though it’s not a millennium

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since Lawson and Dennis were writing – the old forms remain true, they’re at the centre of it. I break the ballad up quite a lot. MS: The “palatine madonna” poem works as a straight ballad? SL: Yes, that’s a straight-up ballad; it’s almost a classical ballad: o palatine madonna lady come and take my heart you can see how sad its made me and I want another start.

And each of those refrains is read with a different inflection or inference. MS: How about poems like “poem to a hospital balcony”? SL: Well, that was for Johnny Tulips. MS: It doesn’t operate like a ballad: I am reminded of the longer poems of the last century, particularly those of shelley and byron, they must have had a rural sense of timelessness to create those tome-poems. line after line, stanza after stanza. well ordered thoughts well shaped and moulded into a perfect metrical form. you can’t write poems of that nature today because of the distractions that are prevalent in our society. television, media. the accusation of cars and trucks. the impenetrable rumble of suburbs and cities.

and so on: it’s, like, Shelton Lea’s apologia, in a way, because you’re talking about a different sense of timing from Byron and Shelley. SL: These guys would have five or six mile walks before breakfast, and their sense of time was very different to ours today. I’m acutely aware of that, and I don’t believe it should mean the death of the ballad form. The more I write poetry, the more I find the sense of narrative in a poem, because its lateral association with time is fundamental to the poem: telling a story. Tell a story with your poem: you can be suggestive, whatever. Narrative is getting more and more important to me – which doesn’t mean to say this thing on Nebuchadnezzar I’m working on at the moment is going to be narrative; there is a strong

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story line coming through it. Things don’t occur in a vacuum, they occur in relationship to each other, and what give them that relationship is time. It’s the function of it all, even in the smallest things – like the poem found a letter on the street, couldn’t read the words because the rain had beat me to it.

In that, short as it is, there’s narrative, there’s movement, all the way through it. MS: Yes, Eric Beach points out the story, narrative content in your work. SL: You know why it is? Because I write outside myself. My main concern is other people, what they’re doing. I’m not giving you the landscape of my inner soul, although I am in a way, because how I observe what I see is obviously my landscape, but I like to write about other people doing things: that’s why I use the small “i” – i as the observer; “I” has no real place in the poem. Beach and I talked about this in Brisbane ten years ago, and we both still hold true to it. It’s the only way I know how to describe my universe – the action of people outside of me. MS: What once upon a time might have been called ‘social’ poetry – and thereby perhaps missing the point of it? It’s what Browning did by latching onto Renaissance figures, or Byron with Don Juan? SL: Keats’s Endymion, the whole lot. It’s always a poem about other people. The greatest compliment that you can pay an audience is to let them know you’re talking about them. Your audience is always looking for keys to itself. This is one of the great shames with Sylvia Plath: she’s talking about her own inner landscape, and somebody has to do it, obviously, but I don’t think it makes for great poetry; she talks about herself to the exclusion of other things and people around her. I get the feeling that she gets her metaphor by dragging it through mud and dust and shit and blood, and it’s all her own. Noel, the bloke we met in the Dan O’Connell pub, gives me more for poems than I could ever get if I was sitting in a drawing-room or anything like that. That’s why you spend time in pubs, as a poet, to meet other people and get the stories elsewhere. You can’t invent them. They’re too big to be invented; they’ve got to be real. You can’t turn around and say to someone ‘I met this guy in this hotel in North Carlton and he said this and that’: you can’t invent anything. Noel is a found poem: “What do you think I am?” he says. That’s where you get them; that’s the source, where all good poetry is, the pub. If you’re in Alice Springs, in Brisbane, if you walk into a pub, there’s always a Noel. That’s what I like about this, but I can’t stay in one place. I go back to the country and take a breath and come back refreshed.

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MS: Do you really enjoy living there? SL: No, I don’t enjoy living there. I’m in a state of constant movement, Michael. I’m never happy in one place, and I don’t know if I ever will be. That place up there – I’ve built up that place with my own hands, and we have parties up there, but I don’t belong there at all. Possibly a good damn reason why I’m always on the move. I don’t really belong. Chrissie was born there, and her parents live over the road and all that sort of stuff. She belongs there: Hypotenuse – that’s the name that I gave her. She took me back up to her parents’ place … and I just stayed there, because it was the landscape of my dreaming. I keep the library up there, and a part of myself up there, but there’s always the other part of myself, which is the way of the birds, the way of travels. The only reason I spend my time up there is Christine. MS: There’s always the note of balancing expectation and actuality in your work? Weighing up experience. SL: Sure, a man’s been killed in his life, emotionally. Which is not to say in any way that poetry is therapy. It is not. What is finally of consequence is what comes out of that experience. C O U LD Y O U KILL A DO G WIT H A HA MMER ? WO U LD Y O U S T A MME R W HEN Y O U C R US HE D T HE S KULL O F A CHI LD?

(The Paradise Poems)

You know, that poem came out of real experiences, of things that have occurred and are real, that occurred around me at that particular time, and I’d seen this dog get whacked on the head with a fucking hammer – and it killed the dog. They hammered it and hammered it, and I watched the thing die. I watched the child as well, and I was powerless to stop it because it happened in one fucking second. The kid must have been the best part of ten months old, and this woman’s picked it up and she’s whacked it against the wall. Its brains splattered there, and I thought, “I’ve seen it” – “S O M E P E O P L E D O ” – some people do these things. Me – accuse me of murdering? I’m not in the business of killing. I’m in the business of loving poetry. And poetry is the last line of defence of the truly irrational. Not the rational, but the irrational. MS: The rational is the real killer in our society? Doing what’s rational. SL: Of course it is, man. You’ve got good old Gorgeous George [Bush Jr.] in America: he’s rational. He kills people here and there. Logic kills. Logic ain’t got a place in my heart. It’s probably where the value of a poem lies – that a man can order his universe through it, talk about the things that he’s seen, that he’s known, in an irrational manner, and that he can manage to turn the irra-

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tionality of life … I mean, they reckon that God’s given us life and that we do the best we can with it, and all of that: with a poem, you can turn around and give some kind of explication, if you like, of what it is that we do with ourselves. MS: You were involved with a Surrealist magazine, Outlaw, when you came to Melbourne from Sydney in the late 1960s or early 1970s, weren’t you? It was fairly avant-garde in some ways. SL: I published something in just about every one of those things. Walter Billeter and Joel Elenberg had a lot to do with them. They would be avant-garde still. The poets and the painters were all on the move; they were between – between Melbourne and Sydney, Brisbane. You’d never know where anybody was at any given time. Poets now, in the ’80s, are far too conservative. They’re not prepared to get up and sing their song and do it, like people did. The thing that people miss is their culture: we’re giving it to them: ‘Give me your line’ – I’ve been doing that for years. The simple job the poet is doing is to entertain, with words, to make words sing without extraneous music, because the music is within the words. And that’s what I try to do. What we have to do is continue to write and let people out there know that poetry is still alive, that the word’s still alive: don’t just lie down and die on behalf of convention. You don’t do any of that shit. Just get up. MS: Blake’s idea that energy is eternal delight? SL: You know what drags me down more and more? It’s people sitting around saying ‘Oh, ah, gotta pay the rent next week’. MS: Hell is other people? SL: Hell is other people. You’ve got the police on one side who want to knock you out because they reckon you’re an anarchist, or you’ve got the straight society saying ‘Fuck you Jack’, and you’re simply trying to say ‘Let’s get a bit of action going, let’s get something happening here’. MS: Life is a death sport for us, probably. SL: How come we remain to be forty-three or whatever? The women can give me a hard time, the blokes can give me a hard time: I don’t give a stuff. MS: There are more important things to do: catching everything on paper for the moment? SL: In my head I’ve got lines that I remember from when I was eleven. They’re still waiting. The time will come. I keep saying to Flaus, ‘Listen, all the time I’m at work; life is a continuous movie for me’. MS: The whole lot races past while you look at any part of it, any freeze-frame, but you’re aware of it all as process?

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SL: You don’t miss a trick of it. You don’t miss any of it: it’s a narrative, it’s a story. I believe this more and more. MS: In the poem “A Drunk” from Chockablock With Dawn, there’s this sense that things still continue when you get to the end of the poem: you leave the pub thoughts awaft: stagger on with dignity and curses through streets full of malice; the modern chalice of your gods left in the rubbitydub. your hands scratch at the aimless air while you wait for a bus to take you two stops to your home. hands in your pockets you doff your head at paper boys while your fingers search for money, for memory. and your pockets are sore from hunger, the need to remember what was once in them when you were strong and full of youth. dogs bark at your senseless feet. a half cigarette hangs in your twisted mouth: the butt end of paradise.

Nothing really ends here: paradise continues. SL: Paradise is here and now. MS: Yes, unless you walk through the world self-obsessed; then you pick up nothing: you hear nothing, see nothing? SL: Yes; if you’re prepared to listen to other people, that’s what it’s all about: it’s your source. When I read that poem on a peach melba hat, everybody in that audience has been on a bus and seen an old woman. They mightn’t have been through the same concatenations that I’ve had to go through with the Snowdrop Kid, but everybody’s been on that bus and they’ve seen an old dame there. MS: Sometimes you see that sort of beauty; and sometimes you don’t even walk up as in the poem and say anything: you just think, ‘What a great day to be alive!’ SL: Yes, you pay duty to that beauty. You should never be offensive in life, and poetry should never be offensive. Poetry should be, in a sense, to adore things. I feel that’s right. Even if I write a poem to Nebuchadnezzar – fuck him, he’s involved my head for a long time, and he will for a while longer – but it is to adore. All I’m interested in doing, and all that I’m interested in continuing doing, is writing poems. I’d rather be a forgotten person, as long as my poems are remembered. Poetry is more than an act of faith – it’s a lot more, because a lot more work goes into a good poem than an act of faith would allow you. An act

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of faith gives you God. I’m not interested in God. You get one crack at it; no afterlife, no bullshit like that. You can do what you can with what you’ve got. You don’t let any bugger turn you, whether it be a woman or a man. You know what you’re doing, and as long as you’re doing what you know you’re doing, it’s sweet. Jesus, I look at the business of rhyme as using it more – deliciously, if you like – so you suggest rhyme. So it’s not di-dah di-dah di-dah: you arrive at verbal conclusions, I suppose, that would otherwise not be considered. The more I write, the more I find that rhyme has less to do with words that I write – it’s always there, it’s always part of what I write. So when I write a piece of prose if find rhymes occurring. If I write a piece of bloody poetry, rhyme definitely occurs. But it’s becoming less and less important; the suggestion of rhyme occurs. MS: Yes, it seems that through everything you’ve done it’s a nerve. SL: It’s a nerve-ending. Maybe it’s the way that I bloody well think. All the classic metric effects give you is a way of saying. You don’t bother putting pen to paper unless you’ve got something to say. I’m strong on metrics, because it’s the soul of words. When you put words down, you’re singing a song without music, and you’re bridging gaps between yourself and other people. But we go back to the wrestling-match analogy: it’s okay to run out of the ring, but you’ve got to get back in. Ezra Pound was the perfect master of it; he goes out of bounds, but he comes back in. MS: Okay, what about the idea of disaffection for some things in society – at the same time as you’re drawn to it: is there anything in society which is repulsive to get down that we haven’t alluded to? SL: The police state, obviously. And the people bashing their kids. And women having abortions; there’s this thing in a poem about abortions: it’s a fair answer to a very difficult problem. There’s always things going on in society that you don’t particularly like. You don’t accept it, but you absorb it, because all of life is a learning experience in the long run, and you’ve made someone take note of that. It doesn’t matter what happens to you or what it is that you do to somebody else. Life is an adventure; it’s a great adventure. There are no morals in poetry, as there are no morals in life. The object of a poem is not to change things but to record things. I said to Dinny O’Hearn the other night: “What are you trying to do, change the landscape of Australian bloody writing, or what?” and he said “No, Shelly, I’m trying to record it.” And I said “Good on you,” and you know, that’s the best that’s possible. Look, poets are a forgotten fucking breed in the face of microwaves, microphones, loud music, all that sort of shit. Poets are almost a forgotten race. But you get five or ten people, from anywhere, in a bar or coffee lounge, and you

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give them a poem, and they recognize it in themselves – what they’ve forgotten since they were kids. That’s the thing that poets have to do: remind people of the poetry that is in themselves, that is a part of their makeup. You can have your Dylan Thomases, your Les Murrays, you can have all that mob around the joint and they won’t make a mark on it. But you get into a pub, into a coffee lounge, and you stand up and ‘I have heard that there was, recently, a man come down; he was up there to be hung, he sang his song’ – and you’ve got them, because you’ve reminded them of the song in themselves. Afterword Diana Georgeff’s biography of Shelton Lea, Delinquent Angel, was published by Random House (Sydney) in 2007. Georgeff drew on many people’s recollections, private letters, and public documents relating to Shelton, to create a memorable, harrowing account of his upbringing with the cruelly eccentric family of the Darrel Lea confectionery magnates who adopted him, the experiences of his adopted siblings, his earliest escapades and incarcerations, and his many adventures as poet and promoter of others’ works – leading up to the revelation of his birth-mother’s existence and his meeting with her and her family. Some of the details uncovered by Georgeff cast doubt on and in some cases contradict Shelton’s account of himself in my discussions with Shelton recorded in the interview. The biography is the record of a wayward youth and career measured by bourgeois or straight society, and a celebration of an indomitable spirit and a poet whose work gave joy to hundreds of writers he sponsored into public performance or print, and whose work he encouraged. Georgeff records Barry Dickins’s remarks to her after Shelton’s death: “I think, to be honest, nobody really knows how to read a poem aloud. And Shelton really did know how to do it. He could make the bar fall silent by the way he looked at the page. That was something absolutely irreplaceable, unteachable. It was a show business excess that he had. He was riveting” (156). I would add that the poems themselves spoke to the audiences; they spoke of shared experience, ideas, and emotions.

————— Poetical Atlas of Political Diversity146 —————

I

198 5, H A R V E Y M C Q U E E N AN D I A N W E D D E published The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse. In a departure from anthologies of recent decades, they included work written in Mǒori as well as poems in English. This was a recognition of a fact that was obvious to most readers of New Zealand literature – a large body of work in Mǒori, dating from colonial times, already existed elsewhere in print. The McQueen–Wedde anthology was also unusual for including poets rejected by Allen Curnow in his canonical postwar anthology N

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Weekend Australian (3–4 February 1990), Weekend: 7.

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(also published by Penguin). McQueen and Wedde tried to chart the historical outlines of New Zealand poetry for a generation that had not seemed to delve beyond the 1950s and ’60s. That situation needed to be redressed, and however the critics argued about the extent, nature, and usefulness of their achievement, the editors confronted contemporary readers with a national tradition in two languages. This new Penguin anthology147 follows on from that historically oriented book. It’s not an easy work to review – it’s so big and goes so deep in its ‘slice’ approach. The easiest way to think of it is as a post-James K. Baxter anthology. Some people will applaud this as a radical breakthrough. I do. With few exceptions, the poets included – more than eighty of them – are alive and producing. Most work included is quite recent; all of it stems from the past twenty years. There’s an additional editor for this collection. Miriama Evans separately introduces the Mǒori works, and translations are provided for each. Evans emphasizes the oral basis of Mǒori poetry in general, and many of the works make this clear. There are poem for ‘official’ occasions, such as the opening of a marae (meeting-place) at Auckland and Wellington, or the opening of the Expo pavilion. There are poems for more intimate though family (whǒnau) occasions, such as a death. Laments and challenges, love songs and abuse provide numerous cases for comparison and for reflection on the antiquity of these forms. The ǒori works are – to my mind – extraordinarily ‘traditional’ … their modernity consists in large measure of the urgent injunction they contain to foster te reo ǎori, the language itself. Kuini Moehau Reedy urges (in Mǒori), “learn Mǒori my loved one,” and the frequency of the appeal provides a chant rather than an undertone in the book. Many Mǒori poets are represented, and their solidarity makes this collection every bit as political a phenomenon as a poetical one. The Mǒori works qualify a definition of ‘contemporary’. The strength of ǒori poetry is a direct result of efforts in families, in ‘language nests’ or other schools, and the universities, to keep oral and performing skills vital. This can, and does, appear at times as contrived as the rhetoric of those Pǒkehǒ poets for whom ‘contemporary’ is a term almost equivalent to awareness and sharing of hip ‘international’ techniques that produce clichéd lines blackbirded from the media and other people’s works. The Mǒori poets reflect a strong sense of the indigenous and perduring traditions of values as well as styles. The land and people are presented as inter147

The Penguin Book of Contemporary New Zealand Poetry: Nga Kupu Titohu o Aotearoa, ed. Miriama Evans, Harvey McQueen & Ian Wedde (Auckland: Penguin N Z , 1989).

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related. Aroha (love) and genealogy are also presented in high relief, with all the regional pride and jealousies such kinship awareness produces. Hone Tuwhare’s poem “Tangi-hanga” is exemplary of this sense. Longer poems are scattered through the anthology: works by Alistair Paterson, Kendrick Smithyman, C.K. Stead, Michele Leggott, and Fiona Farrell Poole. Smithyman calls his meditation on “Reading the Maps” an “Academic Exercise,” and the points do seem fairly self-evident: is this what he means? I like Poole’s poems immensely. They’re cleverly vernacular and utterly ‘traditional’ in their rhythms and stanzas as they explore the lives of women immigrants. I haven’t read her book Cutting Out (1987), but I’ll look for it. Isn’t this what anthologies are supposed to encourage? By and large, the Pǒkehǒ poets seem a self-conscious lot. I suspect it’s because they have some intimation, like their Australian, American, and English contemporaries, that the free-verse revolution of the past hundred years is pretty much played-out, but they don’t want to admit it. Perhaps the awful knowledge will go away if they just hang in there together. It takes a mighty effort for readers to hear a poem do anything like ‘sing’ when the poet has deliberately censored out irony, pathos, wit, ambiguity – those old-fashioned things that made people memorize whole epics and slabs of verse in every language up to our own era. I’m not suggesting that poems shouldn’t make sense as prose – in fact, I prefer them to do so for the most part (and not just in narrative works), but attention goes for a ride when you find that the poem might as well have been prose, for all the joy you’re getting from it. Yet there’s a lot to admire in the book. Often, just when I was at the end of a dull stretch of pages, along came reminders that poetry is meant to derange the familiar, present it freshly and upset expectations. Great: so I acknowledge Elizabeth Smither and Poole as top-notch. This is the century of women writers after all, and they do stunningly what the chaps often seem uninterested in – grabbing an audience. I’m also pleased to see expatriates included in the book. Eric Beach and Nigel Roberts should have had honour in New Zealand ages ago. I must admit I prefer both these poets to the Fleur Adcock poems in this selection; they seem drab indeed. There are so many ‘new’ writers in this anthology that I can only urge you to buy it straight off if you want some understanding of where New Zealand is at, both poetically and politically. The bibliography is useful, but you won’t get notes on the poets’ lives and habits. I have admired several writers here for years: Tuwhare, Merimeri Penfold, Vincent O’Sullivan, and Rachel McAlpine among the better-known, and Gregory O’Brien and John Dickson among newer

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writers. There’s no point in offering a Top Ten, though. There is an overall sense of the poets’ being participators in a dynamic: history is being made in New Zealand, and the poets have, by and large, a proper scepticism for monuments and anniversaries, even while they get on with their cautionary tales and meditations on current events. I’d have liked to see some other names in this book. Why are David Mitchell, Rosemary Menzies, Denis Trussell, Ron Riddell, and others unrepresented? No room? I don’t believe it. The attempt to achieve some parity of the sexes, and something like a real reflection of the state of Mǒori poetry, is commendable, but the doors could be opened a trifle wider. I recommend the book. It should be, with its predecessor, in every library in the country. Why is it that New Zealand has to do so much so well before Australia gets to hear about it?

——— Passionate Complexity Among the Loco-Poetic148 ———

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was to open it at the index and look for George James MacDonald, celebrator in verse of Northern New South Wales scenes, and commenter upon the grim lot of colonial heirs of Byron and Shelley. No sale. Well, I would take that in my stride and wander through the text to see who was at home. Mind you, I like MacDonald’s verse; a small selection published years ago by Victor Crittenden at his Mulini Press in Canberra revealed an accomplished and passionate recorder of his own and others’ emotions. The Poet’s Discovery is well-organized. There are six Colony divisions and one Federation section, chronologically ordered. Each compartment has an introduction and a bipartite showcase of verse-poems culled from newspapers, and poems from monograph publications. At the back of the book, brief biographies describe 111 writers. The editors also offer a relatively thorough bibliography, and separate author-and-title and subject indexes. At the fore-end of the book, a general introductory essay follows an excellent table of contents that records the dates of poems, down to the very day of publication. Notes are provided, but assiduous students will be chagrined to find that the notes are gathered at the conclusion of each poem. Eschewing the tired convention of putting notes at the foot of each relevant page, the editors appear to encourage reader participation in re-creating the text (I thought you’d like that). One of the pleasures of the text is the inclusion of the original tail-notes – such 148 

Y FIRST RESPONSE TO THI S BOOK

Australian Book Review 120 (May 1990): 19–20. The Poets’ Discovery: Nineteenth-Century Australia in Verse, ed. Richard D. Jordan & Peter Pierce (Melbourne: Melbourne U P , 1990). 149

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as the expansive and illuminating paragraphs by the pseudonymous Maxwell Miller containing sketches of the characters of his “Metrical Catalogue” from “The Tasmanian House of Assembly.” While we’re workshopping technical matters, I must tell you that the paper is on the execrable side. I haven’t seen the hardback edition (I trust there is one) [later note: none such exists], but the paperback version is a ‘thick heavy’ book whose recycled paper does not augur well for private or public archival purposes. Is Melbourne University Press seeking to rival some well-known Australian presses in the penny-pinching stakes? At all accounts, get hold of the book. It’s not only an important work, it’s a good read. Now to the matter. One might think that editors long before this would have attempted a survey collection that includes nineteenth-century newspaper verse as well as monographs. Yes, I realize there are collections of ballads, collections of satirical works, and so on. But why no omnibus anthology before the appearance of this one in 1990? Reasons include bafflement by prospective collectors and publishers relating to the thankless chore of research and the likelihood of commercial loss. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Sladen’s anthologies (and, in the early-twentieth century, Bertram Stevens’s) were outstanding works among several Australasian projects aimed at showing the achievements of a primary intellectual industry. Rather in the manner of the Victorian Intercolonial Exhibitions displaying other primary and secondary wares, these edifices housed works likely to appeal to consumers with the wherewithal (in this case, the cultural readies). Elizabeth Webby’s survey Literature and the Reading Public in Australia150 suggested the most popular poets among readers and writers. No such extended survey concentrates on readers’ tastes and editorial rubrics for the second half of that century, although Marc Askew and other scholars are looking into the sources for such information.151 Late-nineteenth-century poetry anthologies included works hot off the press as well as editorial touchstones suitable for cultivated littérateurs and general readers. Editors of English and American ‘Treasuries’ as well as those of their Antipodean contemporaries appear to have had a 150

Elizabeth Webby, Literature and the Reading Public in Australia 1800–1850: A Study of the Growth and Differentiation of a Colonial Literary Culture During the Earlier Nineteenth Century (Sydney: U of Sydney P , 1971); cited by Jordan & Pierce, The Poets’ Discovery, 15. 151 See, for example, Marc Askew & Brian Hubber, “The Colonial Reader Observed: Reading in its Cultural Context,” in The Book in Australia: Essays Towards a Cultural and Social History, ed. D.H. Borchardt & Wallace Kirsop (Melbourne: Australian Reference Publications/Centre for Bibliographical and Textual Studies, Monash University, 1988): 110–37.

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didactic purpose; collections for reciters, and other limited-focus anthologies may be said to have taken up the slack. The Australasian productions, like their models abroad, were, for all their ‘improving’ or ‘correct’ orientation, compiled by admirers or practitioners of the art, and it is far too easy to ignore the poetry of passion and complexity between the covers, while one is seeking ‘responses to place’, national types, or other limited and limiting goals. Jordan and Pierce and their researchers have made available a range of poetry that will balance interpretations gleaned from repeated assertions based on a search for a ‘national literature’ in the nineteenth-century anthologies and more recent publications. I am not convinced that The Poet’s Discovery will entirely alter the picture: the title of the book directs us back to the nationalist obsession. It will, however, take a foremost place among the rediscoveries and reclamations of poetry itself. It advances the researches of Crittenden, Webby, Elizabeth Perkins, Ken Stewart, Vivian Smith, Margaret Scott, Bill Grono, Paul Depasquale and others. It will supplement and qualify the findings of Tom Inglis Moore, G.A. Wilkes, Douglas Stewart, Judith Wright, Nancy Keesing, Leonie Kramer, A.D. Hope, Geoffrey Serle, Coral Lansbury, and other luminaries. The reason for these claims is not far to seek. Twentieth-century anthologies of Australian poetry have inclined, until the recent rash of State-oriented, thematic, and regional collections, to slot in works already familiar. Who does not experience this déjà lu? Editors have chosen to feature, for the most part, poets whose works are available in monographs – or earlier collections. The stodginess of certain fat (or thin) anthologies of predominantly twentieth-century poets has skewed the sense of inheritance towards concern for ‘identity’, so that we do not wonder at the parroting by successive waves of academic or secondary teachers (and their products) of the claims made about the ‘greats’ or about the drift of writing up to the 1890s, as everyone has been primed by the narrow selectivity of such collections as Leon Cantrell’s 1890s anthology to imagine that nationalism was the issue and gloom was the mood. It is refreshing to see such a generous gathering of verse as Jordan and Pierce have reclaimed. It has long appeared appropriate that a grand Australian collection, like those classic encyclopaedic and many-volumed Chinese anthologies of poetry of every sort, culled from vast collaborative scholarship, should be available. The Poets’ Discovery is a step in this direction. I might compare it with Kissing the Rod, that impressive anthology of seventeenth-century women’s poetry assembled by Germaine Greer and her colleagues, were its range not curtailed by ‘place’. Highlights of the text include the incorporation of some fine, passionate poems. It is not, I think, usual for commentators on Australian poetry to dwell

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upon the emotional complexity of works of the Georgian, Regency and Victorian periods. The question has been reduced to a dry debate between ‘classical’ and ‘Romantic’ tensions, and works heretofore available have been subjected to sociological interest (the European view of Australia; the landscape and fauna; the emergent ‘type’ and so on), or regarded as instances of Augustan or other mannerisms. This has been to assume crippled sensibilities in the poets, as if they could only be regarded in the light of their clever-for-colonials adaptations and mimicry of earlier and current British models. Their originality, not to put too fine a point on it, has been submerged or lost to view in the attempt to make them fit with an Eng-Lit canon which was (and in some places still is) at the heart of the literary cringe. On cringeworthy topics, the anthology contains a glaring howler in its medley of Winthrop Mackworth Praed’s poem “Australasia” with William Charles Wentworth’s poem of the same title. Praed’s work won the Chancellor’s Medal at the Cambridge Commencement in 1823, while the colonial poet’s work was the runner-up. Now the editors of The Poets’ Discovery have cobbled together a poem that consists of about fifty percent Praed and fifty percent Wentworth. Perhaps the editors were distracted with the labour of slotting poems unearthed by their research assistants into relevant pigeonholes. Whatever the cause, it’s unconscionable. Anyone wishing to read or cite Wentworth’s poem, in which the immortal hope that Australia might prove a “new Britannia” occurs, is advised to chase up the original elsewhere. On a more positive note, while the editors of this volume recite their lines on the persistence of Augustan decorum and heroic couplets where applicable, I wonder if they haven’t broken, more by accident than design, the great mould of perception which has led generations of twentieth-century students to see Harpur, Kendall, and their poetic kin chiefly as curiosities instead of bards like Keats in fealty to Apollo. I am agreeably surprised to discover poetry of passion and intellect among this overwhelmingly loco-poetic collection. I wish there were more examples of the sort. For example, I do miss such works as MacDonald’s “On a Movement of Beethoven” which point us away from an obsession with where we are to what we are, more broadly speaking. I trust the book will be seen as an epochal work, and that further enterprise in literary archaeology will continue to expand the views of the literary past – views of editors as well as readers. The Poets’ Discovery deserves a place in all libraries. It should prove an enjoyable teaching work, for the problems it raises as much as for its companion status to the Oxford Literary Guide to Australia. It’s a fine bedside or travelling companion. Now, wouldn’t it be bonzer to have a collection of what the editors told their researchers to ignore?

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———— Diverse Flights, Ethereal and Grounded152 ————

F

The dust-jacket of this collection153 sports a fetching Colin Lanceley painting. Circular design, bright colours, geometric shapes inside, appliquéd shapes, very swish. Something to do with a Lark Ascending: someone at Angus and Robertson cares about appearances. What else? It’s a slim volume, and it sits oddly with recent verse-releases from this publisher. It’s shorter in every way than its fellows. In another sense, too, Geoffrey Lehmann’s volume is a diminished return to earlier preoccupations. This book will be judged against his smart Comic Australian Verse, an historical omnibus collection of 1972, which it updates but does not supersede. For their next trick, I hope Angus and Robertson will issue a revised conflation of both volumes in one. Lehmann’s first collection took us up to Bruce Dawe’s Enter Without So Much As Knocking. The Flight of the Emu kicks off with Peter Porter (not included in 1972) and a fat swag of Dawe’s works – not one of them repeated from the earlier volume. Dawe’s poems are met everywhere we turn in Oz Lit like Manifold, he may be almost abstracted into Anonymous in his own time. These poems prompt me to ask where parody, burlesque, and travesty might end and light verse begin. There’s a touch of democracy about this collection. Hal Colebatch, Anne Bell, Bruce Osborne, Susan Hampton, Sandra Shotlander, Julian Croft, and others of the Sure To Rise encampment are happily ensconced with such Risen commodities as Murray, Tranter, Wallace–Crabbe, and Brissenden. It’s good to see Nigel Roberts and Laurie Duggan scoring the space they deserve. The apparent ignorance of some noted modern anthologists (surely they are strangers to pride, sloth, envy, and hatred) is infuriating at times. There are writers so polished and so well known on out-of-the-way grapevines that their omission from nationally ‘representative’ collections has seemed as calculated an insult as a punch in the face. Hence, it is commendable in Lehmann to enrol Philip Martin,  , Peter Corris, Susan Crafter, and John Forbes with greater names among occasional or professional scribblers. Futile to complain of omissions here: Lehmann has chosen judiciously. Some of those not represented in the volume may rejoice that they are referred to. Several have been condottiere IRST THING S FIRST .

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Weekend Australian (7–8 April 1990), Review: 7. The Flight of the Emu: Contemporary Light Verse, ed. Geoffrey Lehmann (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1990). 153

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or peasants in a Thirty-Year Poetry War begun on a lazy Saturday afternoon in Fitzroy (or was it Paddington? – no matter) for most of their lives. I suppose that parody is one form of light verse. Lehmann must think so, too. Does parody stem from a concern for the craft? Out of a desire to promote one’s own practice? Peter Porter’s epigram from his After Martial series softens us up for Dawe’s burlesque of the Literature Board; by volume’s end, it’s open season on anything that purports to take itself seriously. Roberts fangs a Yankee writerin-residence, Garry Sargeant peels the bark off Patrick White’s The Tree of Man, Kevin Dowling mocks the preciousness of The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, and, in a bout of repletion, Laurie Duggan makes a meal of Murray, Tranter, Tipping, Adamson, Viidikas, Wearne, Gray, and two other things. The distillation of vapidity is a tricky business. I think Lehmann is right to include the parodies under the rubric “light verse” – these are jeux d’esprit, not trenchant critiques. The exuberance of their making is reflected in the ease with which they slip into the language and styles of their begetters. Some of these poems are the best their victims never produced. Of the non-parodic works in the book, several are not ‘light’. Some fall flat – like  ’s “Etiquette,” through a lack of resolution – which, in fairness, scarcely seems to have been intended. Forbes’s “Drugs” shifts between archness and banality, and I prefer his poem on Europe. Elsewhere, irregular blank verse doesn’t quite promote ‘lightness’: these poems lack epigrammatic snap or the slapstick verbal pyrotechnics of the shrewd raconteur; a few poems are bluntly prosaic or only fitfully droll. On another tack, Don Anderson,  , Wallace– Crabbe, and Jennifer Alison exhibit aphoristic flair; Colebatch, Clive James, and Geoff Page demonstrate the storyteller’s measured stride. Oh yes – it’s light enough – rarely light-on, often letting light in. Light on the pocket? Don’t be lousy. I am reminded to mention Barry Humphries: I’m surprised that there is not one parody of him anywhere in the book. Unless those published under his own name....

———————— You’re Imagining It154 ————————

J

R O D R I G U E Z D E SE R V E S A G U E R N S E Y for this book.155 It’s one of the best collections to appear in a long while. I think it’s more interesting than its companions in the U QP Selected/ Collected series that is now three-all with Shapcott, Taylor, and Rodriguez standing as our Living Treasures, and DransUD IT H

154  155

Australian Book Review 126 (November 1990): 7–8. Jennifer Rankin, Collected Poems, ed. Judith Rodriguez (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1990).

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field, Buckmaster, and Rankin among those freed from earthly care. Two chaps and one lady in each category, one observes. There must be logic in it? Poets don’t actually have to die before they get notices. But in the case of Buckmaster and Rankin it will push the reputation up a few notches. I know that’s callous, but you want the truth, don’t you? Putting it another way, hands up all those who can remember Charles Buckmaster’s poetry from a time when he wasn’t past caring. People in Melbourne, please sit down: what does the rest of Australia say? Who can remember Jennifer Rankin’s first collection? Do you recall her “Koan”? Ania Walwicz never seemed quite so exciting, while “Koan” stayed in the mind. And it does stay in mind. There wasn’t much of Rankin’s poetry about until this collection arrived. Her writing was scattered to billy-oh or part-collected in one slim volume from Makar (Ritual Shift, 1976) and a rather fatter effort from Secker and Warburg (Earth Hold, 1978). The first is worth revisiting, the second more so. Why didn’t we hear more from her? Ah, many reasons. A little digression. The Australian poetry ‘scene’ has resembled many things. From earlier times, I tender as models the corroboree, the kangaroo battue, a Boer War Kommando, a gentleman cricketer’s outing, a Sunday School Recital Group, a Stalinist Boy Scouts troop, and Bulldog Drummond’s Black Gang. And that’s only the twentieth century. In the late 1960s and through the 1970s, if we are to believe the beer-garden chat of the ageing players, it resembled nothing so much as a football grand final. No prize for nominating the Old Boy’s side. The New Boys had a great scrum. Nigel Roberts, Bob Adamson, and Les Murray in the front row. Second, Rae Desmond Jones and John Forbes. Lock forward, John Tranter. Props, Alan Wearne and Kris Hemensley (on loan from Another Place). Right wing (or was it left wing?), Robert Gray, Geoff Lehmann, and, discovering Ned Kelly knew his father at half-time, the Adelaide reserve Richard Tipping. Half-back,   (Honorary Balmain player). Full Back, Tim Thorne. Back line, Geoff Page and whatever you fancy: fill in the names yourself, but don’t go over the class lines. Oh yes, the football. There, as they say in lawnbowls, is the rub. Cheryl X. Adamson. Debra Adamson. Jennifer Maiden. Vicki Viidikas. Robyn Ravlich. Antigone Kefala. Jennifer Rankin. I thought you’d never ask. When they weren’t being the football they were being the bucket of oranges. That’s how it looked to me when I popped back to the natal country in 1977 and 1978. You say it’s all changed? Now everyone’s doing aerobics? Exactly so. Where is Jennifer Rankin now that we need her? Jennifer Rankin wrote poetry that had guts. I respond to her writing with utter pleasure. I can’t read her poems in long bursts: they’re dense meditations that repay attention. Taken in large quantity, her poems knock you

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about. So does forty-year-old Macallan single malt: better to treat it with respect and let it work on you gradually, so you get some idea of the care that went into the making. What did she write about? Answer: she writes about anything at all. There are lots of things here about nothing at all except that act of perception, and the relation between the perceiver and the perceived. And speculations on what the relationship signifies. It’s too corny to say this is celebratory stuff, but there is a sense of triumph in getting the perception down on paper, ‘developed’ as in a photograph or worked on until the image leaves you fascinated with the process: the image represents the process. There’s quite a conceptual edge in Rankin’s verse: her poems often work through narration to a brilliant epitomizing image. The narration is sometimes minimal, an assembly or catalogue of things, including people and events. The technique owes something to montage and collage: a “Poem for Hans Arp” suggests how early Rankin got onto this ‘method’. At the end of “Cicada Singing” comes the crisp encapsulation of fragile wings that “tear like a child’s first transfer in the air.” Yves Bonnefoy would have given much for that image. Rankin is preoccupied with poetry, with making the model of the process right. Sometimes she shows traces of influence and at times I wonder, considering all those male poets and artists to whom Rodriguez refers (see for yourself), who was influencing whom. Her “Forever the Snake” could be commentary on Ted Hughes: I wouldn’t say it’s imitation. It makes D.H. Lawrence’s “Snake” look pretty twee. Rankin’s “Mound poems” also seem to be gauging a manner of saying, a style of seeing: we’ve all heard rocks moving but she has heard “the cackling of stone.” Such blithely Surrealist effects seem perfectly right. Here is a superb singer. In Rankin’s practice, words can sing as well as make allegations and inquiry. Some phrases are lapidary, like her landscapes: she seems to image herself at once floating (flying) over and moving in and under the earth. The perfect image of the latter, the wombat, occurs in her “Mud Hut” poems: posthumous things, these works convey her bravery, fascination with life and death, and sense of a self “not eager to dance to jut out from the rim” in any sense. “I lived for a year,” she says, “and it had no number.” Elsewhere, “I hang in my white sargasso.” The hitherto uncollected works, which make up the greater part of this book, will expand horizons. Rankin’s cool intelligence is absorbing. I admire her for her essential paring-away of clutter to get to real dilemmas involving people. It is good to see pain looked at so hard, to see children and lovers come under such scrutiny while remaining intact – which is not to say ‘appropriated’ or

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arbitrarily co-opted. Some are superbly honest in their revelation of diffidence. What she lived through at times drove Rankin mad and she examines herself brilliantly in the throes of illness and dying. The book’s a marvel. 

P A R T 2 (1990– 2003)

———— Stepping Back: A Word of (Auto)Biography ————

M

Y E N G A G E M E N T with Australian and New Zealand writing stems from early encounters with poems and stories in the Schools Magazine, a State-sponsored periodical distributed throughout New South Wales primary schools. The 1950s and early 1960s was another country, where Henry Lawson, Zora Cross, David McKee Wright, Elizabeth Riddell, and Douglas Stewart could inhabit the same territory without readers among us being the wiser for knowing that half the people we read had commenced their literary careers in New Zealand. My passionately literate parents also gave the example. Novels and short stories by Henry Handel Richardson, Katherine Mansfield, Xavier Herbert, and Olaf Ruhen did not look strangely beside those of Sigrid Unset, B. Traven, Somerset Maugham, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Years later, I would meet with books by Maurice Shadbolt, Patrick White, and Thomas Keneally on the shelves of Cassell Australia’s warehouse, where I worked in Sydney. Later still, I would study and then teach Australian and New Zealand writing at a university in Australia and, courtesy of a Commonwealth Scholarship, in Auckland, where I read and meet living authors. If I told people in either country about the richness of the literature of the other, it was also evident that I would seek to bridge the gap by exploring the cultural background of some of the interesting New Zealand writers who had made their livelihood in Australia as well as New Zealand. I’d met New Zealand poets and storytellers at conferences, and at festivals and poetry readings where I’d read alongside them, and I’d come to know many in the course of editing magazines and anthologies, and hosting and promoting literary tours. I interviewed writers on both sides of the Tasman, especially after my first residence in New Zealand from 1974 to 1977, and I reviewed many other writers during twenty-five years of writing book reviews for the Australian, the Australian Book Review, and other newspapers and magazines. It wasn’t as if I had little to go on, but I was wary of writing about living writers by reason of their productivity; as a case in point, I encountered the poetry and first fiction of C.K. Stead (who had briefly lived at Armidale in New South Wales in 1956) around 1973; Stead’s work is, as I write this, still ongoing. The same can be said of other New Zealand expatriate writers such as Rosie Scott, Jennifer Compton, Nigel Roberts, and John Sligo. Notable earlier writers included Elizabeth Riddell, Ruth Park, and Jean Devanny, who, like the more recent arrivals, also offered interesting subjects for a cultural or literary biography, but I was more interested in literary impact of a more particular sort,

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which resulted from a writer’s fostering of literary patronage through journalism and editorship, associations and coteries that we might now call networks. Three New Zealand writers who supported their poetic or fiction-writing careers by journalism had made a special impact on Australia writing as a result of their editorship of papers or journals, including the Bulletin, the premier Australian literary periodical of the first sixty years of the twentieth century. The brief term of editorship of Arthur Adams, a New Zealand-born and Otago-educated journalist and war correspondent, coincided with the Bulletin’s change in status from the colonial-era ‘bushman’s Bible’ to a journal more concerned with Federal and State politics and business concerns. Douglas Stewart’s literary editorship from 1939 to 1961 was tempered by his fascination with Australia’s colonial and rural heritage and a measured response to high-modernist inroads into Australian and other literatures in English. David McKee Wright’s editorship, occurring halfway between those of Adams and Stewart, offered most likelihood of revealing the debates centred on the emergence of literary cultures in the two new nations. Wright had started off as a balladist and advocate of a distinctive New Zealand literature in the late-nineteenth century but, by the time Australia became a Federation and New Zealand a Dominion, had little time for what he called “the horse ballad,” and later was wary of high modernism of the Pound and Eliot variety. He was at least interested in new international movements, and he generated controversy by the way he edited the work of his contemporaries, including Henry Lawson, the way he scornfully reviewed such writers and artists as Norman and Jack Lindsay, who attempted to resuscitate classical glories in the age of the wireless and aeroplane. Wright’s unusual background for the tasks he undertook, and his unconventional liaisons, also made him an obvious choice for a story that might reflect on a trans-Tasman interfusion of cultures. I might have chosen a subject that was more recent, confined to one nation’s history, or a writer whose career in some way crystallized the nature of expatriatism, but, beside his role as one of the first to make an impact on Australian writing after crossing the divide, he had an alluring and enigmatic personal history. He was conceived in one of the most unlikely places in the Arab world, spent his childhood years in the atmosphere of strict Presbyterianism in Northern Ireland, and then in a stiflingly bourgeois family setting in London. His education was technical and practical rather than classical, yet he successively developed into a late-Tennysonian poet, a leading New Zealand balladist, and a radical journalist and literary editor of Australia’s most renowned and conservative periodical, to end his days writing pungent satires on capitalism and warmongering, for a socialist newspaper.

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Along the way, Wright had worked as a station rouseabout and as Congregational minister, at first advocating prohibition and then freedom from religious interference in individual choice. His poetry took a turn from lush Romantic lyrics and dream-narratives to Edwardian and Georgian songs and parodies, and to narratives and elegies, including poems that evoked his Irish childhood and radical Irish patriotism. He wrote waspish stories of Pǒkehǒ–Mǒori relations, science fiction, a novel concerning white supremacy, and another based on the life of the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate. He fathered families by three women, the first of whom he married and abandoned, the second by the daughter of a Melbourne establishment family, and the third by an intense and ambitious poet and actress twenty years his junior. Wright’s story provided a window onto a bygone age and into a passion for writing that overcame conformist expectations. Wright’s contemporaries and friends included conservative and bohemian writers on both sides of the Tasman, and to his death he dreamt of renown in the literary capital of the Englishspeaking world, towards which goal some of his later work came within an ace of succeeding. I first became interested in Wright when investigating the career of his final partner, Zora Cross, the Queensland poet who came to fame in Australia and beyond as “the Sappho of the South,” author of Songs of Love and Life (1917), a book whose core consisted of a long sequence of erotic poems widely and correctly believed to be inspired by her love for Wright, to whom she directed a succession of intimate love letters before she met him. After Zora Cross’s death in 1964, her personal papers had been poorly housed; they displayed the ravages of bushfire, rain, and insect damage before being lodged in the archives of the Fisher Library at the University of Sydney. Many manuscripts were beyond reconstruction, but among the drafts of poems, articles, short stories and novels, scrapbooks, letters and other memorabilia, and in similar parlous state, were the manuscripts, extant correspondence, and scrapbooks of her partner David McKee Wright. From the thousands of pages by both writers and their friends, there emerged the threads that connected a literary circle centred on the energetic activities of both partners, but first of all Wright, who published four collections of poems in New Zealand before moving to Australia in 1910. To some of her contemporaries, Zora Cross was a fantasist or careerist. Envy no doubt tinged some of the comments levelled at her life and work; prudery also played a part; she and Wright never married, but had two children. By all accounts, she was unconventional, but so was Wright, as I discovered when I met one of his sons from his second relationship (with Beatrice Osborn, a poet, journalist, and short-story writer, daughter of a Melbourne establishment

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family), and the surviving daughter of his relationship with Cross. What was apparent was the affection that Wright kindled in these children of different mothers. When I discovered that his son by his first and legal wife had left a memoir of affection for his father, and had, by a beautiful turn of events, risen to become a senior bureaucrat in the Department of Child Welfare in New Zealand, the impulse to write became irresistible. There was no doubt in my mind that I would have to write the story; all that remained to work out was how I would do so. Were the children of each liaison still alive? Had they stayed in touch with each other? Who, among survivors of Sydney’s literary bohemia and journalistic circles, was still alive or had left records of meeting with Wright and his partners? The ‘how’ of the writing should be empirical, an investigation of what was known and then an untangling of rival versions of actual events. There might be no end to such an inquiry, and in effect it proved to be a game of detection involving sources in New Zealand, England, and Northern Ireland as well as Australia. Over several years, the story took firmer shape as letters, manuscripts, and personal recollections of people active in years before my own birth gradually filled out frequently unstable details. It became an urgent paperchase and in many cases a succession of extraordinary meetings with living history. As a result of meetings with Wright’s relatives and descendants on both sides of the Tasman, I began to trace his poetic development from late-Victorian Romantic poet to New Zealand balladeer and satirist. In 1992, I published a biographical essay on his earliest phase, in the Journal of New Zealand Literature, revealing, after a near-century, the extent of his obligation to earlier and contemporary English poets.

———— Zora Cross’s Entry into Australian Literature1 ———— 1

Z

C R O S S ’ S F A M E was extraordinary in 1918. Her name was fashionably given to children born in subsequent years, and was even bestowed upon a racehorse. The publisher George Robertson had initially rejected her Songs of Love and Life sight unseen but, on reading the poems in an edition prepared by his former employee James Tyrell, was so struck with the contents that he published a more handsome version. He offered Cross a contract equalled in generosity only by that signed with C.J. Dennis for The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke. Prior to this, Cross had worked as a schoolteacher, actress, and journalist. She OR A

1 

Hecate 16.1–2 (1990): 65–89.

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remained a journalist from 1915 until her death in 1964. Her literary career reached its peak in the 1930s. in 1918, the success of Songs of Love and Life was consolidated with another collection of poems, The Lilt of Life, and The City of Riddle-me-ree, a narrative poem for children, and her splendid Elegy on an Australian Schoolboy appeared in 1920. It is rarely if ever recalled that she was a novelist and supporter of Australian writing. Her pioneering Introduction to the Study of Australian Literature (1922) has been pointedly ignored by some critics, and denounced by others for its extravagant promotion of the work of her partner, David McKee Wright. Nettie Palmer did not acknowledge the Introduction in her 1924 essay Modern Australian Literature 1900–1923, published by Lothian. The Introduction did more than puff the poetry of Wright. First given as a series of lectures at Sydney Teachers’ College, Cross’s account provides a thoughtful response to the work of many nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers. Among Cross’s more remarkable achievements was a series of popularizing commentaries on contemporary Australian women writers, published in the Australian Woman’s Mirror for several years from 1927. These essays variously offer interviews with their subjects, comments on writers’ circumstances and appearance, and critical observations on their output. It is not surprising that Cross’s work in this format has been overlooked while literary inquiry has tended to privilege ‘better-known’ authors and academic sources. It is a commonplace that histories of newspapers and magazines provide us with linear accounts of business expansion, occasional potted memoirs of managerial figures, and anecdotes about notable (that is to say, eccentric or colourful) journalists and reporters. As a rule we are told nothing of labour conditions and awards. What we know least about is who read the journals. I have kept these matters in mind throughout what follows, as a result of scepticism that provokes me to ask two questions from the outset. First, why were Zora Cross’s efforts on behalf of other writers unacknowledged for so many years? Secondly, were Australian readers of left-wing, theatre, and women’s periodicals between 1910 and 1939 more knowledgeable about contemporary Australian writing than the generations that succeeded them? This essay concerns Cross’s first thirty years, from 1890 until 1920. Australian literature was modified in the 1920s and 1930s by the impact of foreign films and wireless. I believe these influences have not been adequately explored, but they should be borne in mind. When Cross was coming into her own as an author, I suggest, the democratic temper and offensive Australian bias was not as unusual as it became in the 1930s and 1940s. I am as loath to believe that Zora Cross was writing in a vacuum as I am to accept that her writing

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was of less interest to her contemporaries than that of fellow literary propagandists like Mary Gilmore, Norman Lilley, R.A. Broinowski, and a select company of activists from Perth to Port Douglas. I believe that readership tastes can be moulded into new acceptances and my aim is to bring about the same thing. I also think Cross’s non-residence status in Oz Lit may be the result of the small tribute literary criticism pays to the bread-and-butter work of journalists (with the exception of writers like Kenneth Slessor, George Johnston, and a scattering of more recent journalist–novelists). It is a commonplace that journalism has been one of the seedbeds of Australian writing, and Ken Stewart explores this contention at some length in an essay in the Penguin New Literary History of Australia.2 There is, however, no sustained investigation in the Penguin History of the question of readership at large. Nor did the editors’ attention stray toward considering the industrial history of journalism. Zora Cross’s career was not an isolated phenomenon but was representative of a process. Recent attention has been given to Mary Gilmore and Louisa Lawson, but I don’t think their careers as journalists are so different from those of their contemporaries such as Ethel Turner, Lala Fisher, Lola Gornall, Mabel Forrest, Louise Mack, Amy Mack, Lucy Cassidy, and Zora Cross. Most of these women were writing from the mid-1890s, and were prominent in journalism before and during the Great War; for example, Louise Mack joined the Bulletin staff in 1898 before travelling overseas, where she wrote for W.T. Stead’s Review of Reviews from 1902, and for the Daily Mail from 1904; she edited the Italian Gazette in Florence 1904–1907. Amy Mack worked as a freelance journalist after leaving school, and from 1907 to 1914 was editor of the Sydney Morning Herald’s “Women’s Page.”3 It was not until the 1920s that the poetry, fiction, and journalism of Dulcie Deamer, Nettie Palmer, and Katharine Susannah Prichard gained acknowledgement similar to that accorded male editorial and critical peers. Investigating the careers of the women referred to above, I find Victorian and Edwardian persons imbued with and circumscribed by (or inscribed in, if you prefer) the values (or ‘meanings’) of the time – including a patriotism that drove them for the most part to encourage their men to go to war in Africa and Europe. Divergent attitudes were expressed by Louisa Lawson, Marie Pitt, and eccentrics like Lala Fisher who had visions of transcendental love, or Zora Cross, 2

Ken Stewart, “Journalism and the World of the Writer: The Production of Australian Literature, 1855–1915,” in The Penguin New Literary History of Australia, ed. Laurie Hergenhan (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1988): 174–93. 3 Nancy Phelan, “Marie Louise Hamilton Mack and Eleanor Amy Mack,” Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 10, 1891–1939, ed. Bede Nairn & Geoffrey Serle (Melbourne: Melbourne U P , 1986): 287–88.

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who imagined that her love-affair with David McKee Wright might shake the world of letters, or Dulcie Deamer, who offered muscular paganism and prehistoric Mills-&-Boonish romance in place of contemporary muscular Christianity. This was also the period of the famous ‘decline of the Bulletin’ – incidentally, long before David McKee Wright took over the Red Page and was alleged by the Palmers and others to have debased it. But the Bulletin was already debased by forces beyond the control of Wright and his immediate precursors on the Red Page. These included the growth of other magazines and papers that supported literature, the coming of film, and the industrial conditions of working journalists. The Bulletin did not adhere to a formula which had made it the ‘bushman’s Bible’ in the 1890s but shifted its ground in line with the tastes of editors who succeeded Archibald. In the period of Cross’s rise to prominence, James Edmond imbued the paper with an emphasis on economics and a strident White Australianism which tilted towards the Tory status it had earlier opposed. Many of its regular contributors deserted the Bulletin when Archibald left. Others sought more issue- or genre-based publications for their work. The Bulletin became the recipient of contributions by a new wave of writers who believed that appearance or mention on the Red Page still represented the acme of critical approval. Zora Cross was not alone in aiming for acceptance by a journal that had become skewed to more political ends after 1908. The editorship of the Red Page had altered since A.G. Stephens’ time, and the conservative taste of the New Zealander Arthur H. Adams was reflected in sonnet competitions and other manifestations of a desire for ‘higher standards’ than the eclecticism of Stephens. Cross’s early poetry was derivative and formally conventional; Adams and his successors Bertram Stevens and David McKee Wright carried forward a conservative canon which was antithetical to literary modernism but which eventually received Cross’s offerings and those of many young contemporaries who were persuaded that they had ‘arrived’ upon acceptance into the premier Australian literary forum. While they waited for acceptance by the Bulletin, there were other journals to assault, and Zora Cross, at first without being aware she was doing so, assiduously followed a well-beaten path. Even before Federation, literary journals had sprouted, and some flourished beyond the ephemeral lives of C.J. Dennis’s Gadfly or the Lindsays’ Free Lance and Hawklet. Steele Rudd’s Magazine lasted a little longer, as did the New Zealand imports the Red Funnel and the Triad. University magazines such as Galamahra and Hermes attempted sophisticated criticism of local writing and writers. The Green Room and Lala Fisher’s Theatre Magazine featured essays and

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interviews of a high calibre, as well as promotions that reproduced the studio publicity about ‘stars’ and productions. Some newspapers and sporting journals branched into the arts, often taking over small specialist journals; thus, the weekly Fairplay, under Wright’s editorship in Sydney, featured more local littérateurs, while the Queensland Figaro took over and incorporated Zora Cross’s weekly the Bohemian in one gulp. Among these smaller papers it was possible for women journalists to take some leading part. Though the wages were smaller than they might earn from attachment to major dailies and weeklies, they were able to build up portfolios of cuttings and the experience of reporting which might recommend them to the larger organizations. At the same time, amalgamations of smaller newspapers did not always operate in ways that were disastrous to former contributors. Sweeping changes of staff threw many reporters out of work, while younger talents were hired at lower rates to replace them and some journalists from provincial and small-circulation metropolitan journals moved rapidly up the scale of promotion. It was crucial to Cross’s career that women were part of this process. If editors and subeditors were predominantly male, women journalists worked in a variety of flexible roles among the great proportion of ‘other ranks’. Daily papers changed noticeably in the ten years after Federation. The Sydney Sun established the conventions of bright headlines, front-page news reporting, crossword puzzles, and terse writing. Adam McCay, David McKee Wright, and O.C. Cabot (Ernest McCulloch) – the ‘three Macs’ – worked on the satirical “Moving Picture Page,” which McCulloch imported into the Brisbane Daily Mail during the Great War. The Daily Mail followed the Sydney Sun in adopting the brighter format in order to trump Brisbane rivals. The Sun and the Daily Mail both set out unabashedly to make a readership or take it away from the big Tory dailies, and their subject-matter and style were populist. Before the Great War, film reviews supplemented drama reviews, and such journalists as Randolph Bedford, C.A. Jeffries, and John Barr turned to writing plays and film scripts on the side: there was money in it even then. Randolph Bedford was careful enough to copyright his dramatic scripts with the American Library of Congress.4 In some papers, the Women’s Pages assumed greater importance than social diaries; Mabel Forrest instituted commentary on political issues in the Daily Mail, and Zora Cross followed her lead. Left-wing papers such as the Australian Worker developed from male-issue-oriented journals like the Hummer and took the opportunity to enhance readership with a Woman’s Page focusing 4

The chief repository for Bedford’s papers is the John Oxley Library, Manuscripts and Business Records Collection, State Library of Queensland.

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on family and socialist, rather than socialite, concerns. Finally, working conditions after 1913 began to change remarkably. The Australian Writers’ and Artists’ Union in New South Wales and the Australian Journalists’ Association in Melbourne both began to agitate for better pay and conditions in 1910. By 1913, the AJA was the dominant journalists’ union, and it won an award that gave better pay and decent conditions to members of the trade. It took years for the major papers to agree to the award, but the wedge was driven in. The heyday for the freelance contributor began to fade at the same time and, one might say, partly as a result of the better award for full-time and permanent staff. Hitherto, Dulcie Deamer, Zora Cross, and other women might earn the same pay as men for freelance contributions. After the award came to be accepted (and the Bulletin was one of the papers that held out longest into the 1920s), papers – including the Bulletin – were inclined to favour permanent members of staff over freelance contributors. Smith’s Weekly and other competitors saw the chance to snaffle well-known or promising writers from the Bulletin’s stable, and took it. Mindful of these considerations, I want to look at how Zora Cross came into the newspaper and magazine scene, and became a producer of ‘literature’. Where did the change occur? Was there a change at all? How typical was she? These questions have no straightforward answers. 2 In the course of researching Zora Cross’s life, I spoke and wrote to many of her contemporaries from the 1920s and 1930s, including her brother Douglas Cross, her sister Helen ‘Mid’ Somerville, her Glenbrook friend Gwen Rowe, Phil Ophel, Marie Davison (widow of Frank Dalby Davison), her daughter April Hersey, her stepchildren and other descendants of David McKee Wright, her grandchildren, and writers who knew her through literary and journalists’ organizations. Several informants saw Zora as the author of outstanding poems for children, scattered through school magazines in the period 1930–50. Others recalled her reviews, stories, and articles in daily or weekly papers between 1920 and 1964. A few older informants recollected the frisson in literary circles connected with her setting-up house in 1919 with David McKee Wright, literary editor of the Bulletin from 1916 until 1926. So much of her career consisted of myth that it is useful to explore ‘factual’ (and at least documentary) records of her career to shed light on the process whereby such myths arise. Cross spread some of the stories herself. Others have been embroidered by historians of literature taking as their sources accounts by those who had no time to check facts. Cross’s daughter told me that H.M. Green called on Cross to gather information, telling her that he had only an hour to spare. Cross’s response was suited to the occasion, but her

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irony might have resulted in an account of her career and work that did her little justice. Zora Cross is the subject of patronizing comments by Jack Lindsay’s brother Ray in an account of their harum-scarum days in Sydney in the 1920s. Zora is the harassed wifey-figure to Wright, who is portrayed as doing his best to avoid going home to what is called “a crazy house, with what appeared to be hundreds of children.”5 Dulcie Deamer wrote of Cross, who interviewed her (for the Australian Woman’s Mirror), that she “felt sorry for her; Cross was so much ‘all heart’, and therefore a person without armour.” Dulcie Deamer observed that in one of the poems in Songs of Love and Life Cross “exclaimed, ‘Give me a child!’,” and added, “Well, she very shortly didn’t have to worry over that.”6 Deamer’s comments reinforce an image of Cross as a woman for whom motherhood rather than authorship provided identity. Moreover, this construction of a woman to be pitied – from the superior Bohemian standpoint – seems to have been moulded from the start by Norman Lindsay, who sarcastically wrote to Robertson that he was unable to provide an appropriated illustration for the works of “this estimable married lady” – works based on “a plaintive effort to assure herself that fornication is all the misleading things that poets say it is.”7 Lindsay included a farcical caricature sketch but, in the event, provided a watercolour illustration for the dustwrapper of the book – a graphic which might have more appropriately decorated one of Deamer’s cave-people stories than Cross’s works set in more up-to-date eras. In an unposted letter, Lindsay had consigned Robertson to the lowest depths for publishing “servant girl poets” like Cross and “music hall poets” like Dennis.8 Cross was not a servant girl. Her family was well-to-do and her mother always maintained an upper-middle-class aloofness from household duties and manual work. Cross was self-sufficient; in Brisbane from 1914 to 1916, she ran a drama studio, and from 1916 she saw herself as a working journalist, competing for fair wages for equal work. She was assisted by her mother and father in the business of child-rearing, but the real work of writing came first. Her stepson Ullin McKee Wright told me that she was “married to her typewriter” rather than to his father. In the 1920s she occasionally installed her own

5

Jack Lindsay, The Roaring Twenties (London: Bodley Head, 1960): 145–46. Dulcie Deamer, The Queen of Bohemia: The Autobiography of Dulcie Deamer, Being “The Golden Decade,” ed. Peter Kirkpatrick (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1998): 59. 7 Norman Lindsay, undated letter to George Robertson (c. November 1917), in Dear Robertson, Letters to An Australian Publisher, ed. A.W. Barker (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1982): 86. 8 John Hetherington, Norman Lindsay, The Embattled Olympian (Melbourne: Oxford U P , 1973): 150. 6

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children in tea chests while she worked, to avoid distraction, so that Ullin and his brothers were often responsible for practical domestic tasks. 9 Lindsay’s opinions, and those of his sons Ray and Jack in this period, reflect their wish-fantasy of an artists’ aristocracy from which anything like realism was to be rejected, since realism drove them to acknowledge their own detested bourgeois origins. When he conveyed his slurs to Robertson, Lindsay probably did not know that Cross’s work was dedicated to David McKee Wright. Few if any of Cross’s contemporaries knew of her attraction to him. Cross’s relationship with Wright did not develop until late in 1917. It did not become apparent to a wider circle until nearly a year later and Wright spent a wretched year deciding whether to leave his children and their mother Beatrice Osborn (‘Margaret Fane’), his partner of several years who achieved a reputation as a poet, journalist, and fiction writer on her own account. Wright had encouraged Osborn to write for the Bulletin and other journals; he may have also been responsible for suggesting that she adopt her pen name, similar to that of the contemporary actress Maud Fane. Their relationship had commenced in 1913 and the couple had four children before Wright met Cross. Wright first sought to take three months’ leave from his relationship with Beatrice when Zora’s importuning grew insistent, but, as her son Ullin and her daughter Nina Beaton remarked in several conversations, was granted no such ticket of leave. Lindsay’s sons and Dulcie Deamer certainly came to know of the Wright– Cross liaison by the early 1920s and they made sport of it when they wrote their reminiscences. Others who wrote impatiently of Cross in later years or who belittled her abilities were inclined to lump her in with Wright, citing his foibles and shortcomings as a man and writer as evidence of her delusions. Cross was criticized for devoting a segment of her 1922 Introduction to the Study of Australian Literature to Wright’s work – yet, at the same time, Mary Gilmore and other more dispassionate critics acknowledged Wright’s achievement as deserving international, as well as local, recognition.10 Nettie Palmer paid some tribute to Cross’s poetry in her 1924 essay Modern Australian Literature 1900–1923 but took no account of Cross’s Introduction. In other published works, Palmer appears not to have acknowledged Cross’s critical or ‘popular’ essays. Cross’s Introduction and magazine and newspaper articles urged her readers to appreciate local theatre and literature even while Palmer was disparaging the status of the Bulletin under Wright’s sway. Cross’s acceptance partly declined as a result of her association with Wright; rumours of the 9 10

Ullin McKee Wright, interview with Michael Sharkey, 27 January 1989. Mary Gilmore, letter to David McKee Wright, 25 February 1920, Cross Papers.

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liaison were confirmed as fact when her divorce from her husband, Stewart Smith, was announced.11 Details of the love-affair took on a scandalous tone when partisans of Wright’s former partner, and admirers of Wright himself, lamented Cross’s intrusion into his life. Fair-weather associates of the couple slipped away but Cross was far from cut off from all literary acceptance. While Nettie Palmer failed to acknowledge Cross’s prose writings, several influential supporters encouraged and assisted her. Maurice Hurst, John Le Gay Brereton, George Robertson, W. Siebenhaar (Western Australian littérateur and civil servant), John Kinmont Moir, and several classicists to whom Brereton introduced Cross admired her work and materially assisted her from 1918. The correspondence preserved in Cross’s papers in the Fisher Library of Sydney University makes it quite clear that Cross was treated as more than an equal by numerous influential writers, critics, and reviewers from their first contact, and dispels the notion that Cross had no male supporters.12 Brereton’s circle was particularly useful to her when she began writing her most ambitious project. This work, started in 1924 and meant to be epic in its proportions, consisted of a series of novels dealing with life in ancient Rome. Cross’s potboilers (to use her own term), consisting of poems, serial-stories, and articles, began to take on the appearance of ‘incidental’ pieces. She began the project at a time when her novel Daughters of the Seven Mile was enjoying popular success: the Bulletin reported in May 1924 that the first edition of 4,000 copies was sold out in 48 hours.13 Cross’s initial aim was to expand a section of this autobiographical novel that concerned the education of a schoolgirl into a fiction focusing on the imaginative impact of the story of Caesar. David McKee Wright, simultaneously writing a novel set in the time of Julian the Apostate, warned her that the project would never end. Cross was inspired by the story and persevered, making the decision in 1928 to add further volumes to track the principal actors in the fall of the Roman Republic. She lavished her skills on the Roman works, and her deepest literary disappointment in life was the rejection of these novels by successive publishers. Those in Australia refused the Roman novels for lacking

11

Sydney Morning Herald (13 September 1922): 8. Julia Saunders, “Cross Observations, Notes Towards a Critical Biography: Examination of the Zora Cross Papers, Rare Books, Fisher Library, The University of Sydney” (B.A. Hons thesis, Sydney University, 1989): passim. The papers in the Fisher Library have been re-sorted and re-boxed several times since they were acquired from Cross’s daughter. Julia Saunders’ work, the first systematic attempt to provide a lucid account of the contents, reveals the extent of Cross’s sustained (and predominantly male) literary friendships over several decades. 13 Bulletin (19 May 1924): 32. 12

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ostensible relevance; Wright’s novel was also rejected on these grounds.14 In time, Cross dropped from view for reasons associated with the Roman project. Her absorption in polishing the fictions left little time for other work that was both saleable and of a high standard, the relevant criteria being by no means synonymous. Cross was compelled to produce veritable potboilers during the Depression in order to cope with raising her family. By the 1940s, her journal writings appeared to newspaper reviewers as hackwork, and, as reviews among the Cross papers in the Fisher Library indicate, her 1944 novel, This Hectic Age, received unflattering reviews. Through the 1950s and early 1960s she earned her income from contributions to the Australasian Post and other popular journals which were far removed from the literary magazines for which she had written in the period of her greatest success. 3 Zora Cross embarked on a literary career before she was in her teens. Born at Eagle Farm in Brisbane in 1890, she was encouraged to submit her earliest stories and sketches of domestic life to the children’s page of the Town and Country Journal around 1902. She took her first publications seriously, commencing a scrapbook cuttings collection that was to chart her progress over many years. Her mother, Mary Louisa Eliza Ann Skyring, was descended from the Queensland pastoral and mercantile pioneer Zachariah Skyring. Mary Louisa Eliza Ann Skyring was outstanding less for her literary interests than for her abilities as a dancer and choreographer. In her childhood, she had “lived among aborigines” at the family headquarters, ‘Mumbeyana’ near Gympie, and other properties. What Mary L.E.A. meant by “living among” Aborigines is not altogether clear; in her letters to Zora she recounted details of daily life and courtship and made it clear that she maintained her separateness from the people who lived on the property. She says nothing that reveals the Aborigines were workers there.15 In later years, Zora’s mother recalled incidents of family and local history so that Zora could incorporate details into her novels of early white-settlement times. Mary L.E.A. Cross’s father knew a Wide Bay Aboriginal language sufficiently to speak it with fluency. Mary Cross, a gifted dancer, later prided herself on her own early friendships and knowledge of Aboriginal customs, and advised John Antill on the choreography for his ballet Corroboree. Zora would later drew on her mother’s accounts in several of her fictions for serial publication in the Australasian, the Sydney Morning Herald, and elsewhere from the 1920s. 14 15

Michael Sharkey, “David McKee Wright’s Roman Novel,” Southerly 51.1 (1991): 71-87. Letter to Zora Cross, 12 March 1923, inter alia, Cross Papers, University of Sydney.

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Cross’s impulse to write was not initially encouraged by her mother. Mary L.E.A. Cross bitterly resented the collapse of her husband’s business interests in the 1890s crash and took the family to live at ‘Mumbeyana’ while her husband Ernest William Cross found work, first as a selector, then as tutor to children in the area, and finally as an accountant. The family exchanged a luxurious villa on the banks of the Brisbane River for shared accommodation with relatives who were not impressed with Ernest’s abilities. He had several literary friends, including his former teacher, Brunton Stephens, George Essex Evans (who unsuccessfully offered himself in marriage to one of Mary Cross’s sisters), and Mary Hannay Foott, who encouraged Zora’s early work. Cross later recorded that her father wrote poetry, and that her uncle Oscar Cross was a journalist of some literary ability on a Paddington newspaper. The Cross family appears to have held extensive property in Paddington and Bondi (NSW ); Zora Cross’s Eagle Farm home was named ‘Bondi’. Relations between Zora’s parents were strained by her father’s resort to alcohol following his financial disgrace; his wife contributed mockery of his acumen. According to her descendants, she was “tough as Boadicea” and physically brutal to her husband, children, and grandchildren. Her granddaughter observes of her and Zora’s sister Arline: “I can never remember any of these women offering a kind word or performing a kind action.”16 Ernest Cross was unlike his wife in having a profound religious disposition. Zora Cross attended a bush school (called the Two-mile) and then a town school in Gympie, where she first displayed an imaginative turn in her writing and where she first heard from a woman teacher the story of Caesar’s landing in Britain. Her gratitude for this introduction to the classics was incorporated into the autobiographical novel “A Story from Australia” (“Sons of the Seven Mile”), designed as a companion-piece to Daughters of the Seven Mile. “Sons of the Seven Mile” was published as a serial in the Sydney Mail from 2 March 1927. Cross’s secondary education commenced at Ipswich Grammar School, to which she obtained a scholarship. The school taught her the rudiments of Latin, and fostered her imaginative writing. She boarded with a teacher who introduced her to the School of Arts library, where she regularly read the Bulletin. Cross’s reading was already extensive; her father had encouraged her to read editorials aloud from an early age and kept her supplied with pocket editions of the classics – against the wishes of her mother, who saw in bookishness the cause of the family’s financial ruin. Cross dated her regular acquaintance with

16

April Hersey, letter to Michael Sharkey, 22 March 1989.

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the works of Lawson from this time, although her favourite Australian poet was for many years Victor Daley. A relative in Sydney offered to pay for the education of Zora’s older sister Arline, and Zora wrote to persuade her aunt to take her in her sister’s place. Surprisingly, Arline surrendered her claim, and in 1906 Cross moved to Sydney, where she lived more or less permanently until 1915. She attended Burwood High School in an effort to bring her standard up to entry requirements for Sydney Girls’ High School, where she was enrolled in 1907. She was not an outstanding pupil and believed her shortcomings reflected the nature of the education she had received at Gympie and Ipswich.17 Cross fictionalized this period of her education in a draft manuscript of an unpublished novel, “The Complete Education of Daisy Marsh” (held in the Zora Cross Papers, Fisher Library). She lacked Greek, but enjoyed studying Latin, and her general standard improved to the extent that she won a scholarship to Sydney Teachers’ College in 1908. Throughout her secondary and tertiary education she continued to publish sketches and stories in the Town and Country Journal and was invited by the editor of the children’s page, Ethel Turner (‘Dame Durden’), to meet other young and established writers at the Turner home on Sydney’s North Shore. At Sydney Girls’ High School, Cross was an editor of the Chronicle, the school magazine, where one of her stories (“Merilye”) had won a prize for the best contribution. At school she was criticized for not confining herself to subjects under discussion in formal academic work, although her teachers acknowledged that she revealed “wide and intelligent reading” in her essays.18 At seventeen, she was submitting work to the Bulletin and shortly afterwards to the Lone Hand, but without success. She did not break into the Lone Hand until 1913, when Bertram Stevens accepted an impressive lyric, “The Casements of the Past.”19 She was to have a fruitful literary friendship with Stevens after 1916, when she wrote him a series of speculative and descriptive letters from Queensland – letters remarkable for their frankness about her background, aspirations, and current engagements. During her Teachers’ College training, Cross became more widely acquainted with contemporary literary works, including those of Christopher Brennan and David McKee Wright. One of Cross’s classmates was A.R. Chisholm, who later recalled the time in remarks to Beatrice Davis, which she relayed to Cross. 20 Cross also heard anecdotes about Brennan from fellow-students who attended 17

April Hersey, letter to Michael Sharkey, 26 January and 24 April 1989. Lilith Norman, The Brown and Yellow: Sydney Girls’ High School 1883–1983 (Melbourne: Oxford U P , 1983): 45. 19 Zora Cross, “The Casements of the Past,” Lone Hand (19 February 1913): 13. 20 Beatrice Davis, letter to Zora Cross, 14 December 1959, Cross Papers. 18

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Sydney University; he was “that poet who doesn’t use capital letters.” 21 Wright had arrived in Sydney in May 1910 and continued to build on his reputation as a topical versifier and lyrist. He boarded with classmates of Cross’s in Glebe. She did not meet Brennan or Wright until some time after her 1916 return to Sydney from Queensland. She met Amy Mack and her husband, the zoologist and nature writer Launcelot Harrison (1880–1928), and other writers through Ethel Turner’s circle around 1909 and, with the example and encouragement of this coterie, made efforts to establish herself as a ‘real’ writer beyond the children’s pages of Sydney journals. Cross’s first ‘adult’ writing appeared in the contemporary Woman’s Budget of the Sydney Sun, and took the form of sketches of student life. Action and plot were pared away to emphasize dialogue. Thus “Berenice” and “Margaret” debate the merits of the Montessori method versus more traditional pedagogy; or “Bobby,” a North Shore schoolboy, argues with his family about inequities of wealth and opportunity as demonstrated in his classmates’ circumstances. These sketches drew on Cross’s urban experiences, just as her childhood sketches for the Town and Country Journal had recorded farmyard and domestic scenes in Gympie. The dialogue form may have stemmed from her engagement in amateur acting experiences and scripting performance pieces. Cross’s interests and sympathies were expanding beyond her family’s, to include the plight of strikers and the working class and the future of suburban school pupils. In “A Strike Idyll,” she portrays a North Shore woman wondering “if the strikers ever think of their children when they rush blindly into these strikes?”; the woman’s husband takes a more sympathetic view of strikers, until his son and wife propose that women should also strike.22 She developed a sense of realism through her Woman’s Budget sketches, in marked contrast to the fanciful stories of romance such as “Merilye.” The sketches were impressionistic and didactic: she sought, for instance, to persuade her readers of the advantages of a more liberal school curriculum. This ‘instructive’ streak persisted into her early sketches for the Worker, at the end of the Great War. At the end of 1910, Cross left the Teachers’ College and was posted to Leichhardt Superior Public School, the first of five suburban institutions where she taught until 1914. Under the terms of her scholarship she was bound to work for the Department of Public Instruction for three years. As a dodge to escape this provision, on 2 March 1911 she married Stuart Smith, an actor who lived at Petersham. The Department did not waive her responsibility so easily, and she 21 22

Notes in Cross Papers, Fisher Library, University of Sydney. “A Strike Idyll,” undated poem from The Woman’s Budget, Cross Papers.

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abandoned her husband and returned to teaching after a brief stay with her father in Brisbane. Smith made sporadic attempts to reclaim his bride until 1919, when Zora instituted divorce proceedings against him. Her marriage, like that of Katherine Mansfield to George C. Bowden in 1909, was apparently impulsive and destined for impressive brevity.23 Cross met Smith while she was taking lessons in elocution and drama from the English actor Gerald Kay Souper. At the time of her marriage she was also living at Petersham, where her aunt Lottie, a nurse, and uncle, Harry Matthews, had moved in 1907. Matthews was Postmaster at Burwood before transfer to Granville in 1907 and to the Queen Victoria Markets office in 1909.24 Concurrently with her teaching career, Cross also took part in amateur theatricals, and she eventually joined Souper’s Sydney Stage Company, taking a prominent part by 1913 in melodramas, farces, and comedy productions such as Rudolph Besier’s Don at the Palace Theatre.25 Cross’s marriage was not her first assertion of independence. At fifteen, she had by her own account seen her father “morally killed” and had left home. Her move to Sydney, which she described as having “been thrown out of my own home,” was an escape from the restraints of provincial life in Queensland.26 As a result of that initial assertion of independence, she became a lifelong advocate of higher education for women. Sydney Girls’ High School had brought her in contact with the example of such notable contemporaries and precursors as Ethel Turner, Louise and Amy Mack, and Ethel Mallarkey, who became Principal of Sydney Teachers’ College in 1919. Christina Stead and Nina Murdoch were among the writers who emerged from the school; Cross thought Nina Murdoch the “loveliest of all our poetesses in the matter of good looks” both at school and later.27 Cross may have been the most unconventional of the alumni of Sydney Girls’ High School and Sydney Teachers’ College; her marriage was shortly followed by the birth of her first child, a daughter who did not live long. Cross was not a sexual radical; she refused to countenance an abortion urged by her aunt on another occasion, and generally took the view that motherhood was a badge of identity although she was insistent that it was not the sole indicator of identity. She was consistent in upholding the dignity of women’s work and counted motherhood as “labour.” When she began contributing to the Worker from May 1917, she expatiated on her earlier views on women’s roles, 23

Antony Alpers, The Life of Katherine Mansfield (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1982): 85. Commonwealth Permanent Staff List (as of January 1906), and letter from Renato Perdon, Australian Archives, 6 May 1989. 25 Anon., “Stage Society Play ‘Don’ at the Palace Theatre,” Bulletin (19 June 1913): 10. 26 Letter to S.H. Prior, 26 February 1928, Zora Cross Papers. 27 “Impressions of Some Writing Women,” Australian Woman’s Mirror (11 May 1926): 11. 24

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and indicated a general shift of political allegiance to Socialism. Her observations took the form of sketches, short stories, and brief essays; she portrayed marriage partners working for wages in different occupations and expressed regret, in such vignettes as “Jim and I,” that they could not be employed in the same business.28 She offered her own career as a model of self-sufficiency, acknowledging the pleasures of arriving home from work to “the wet, sweet kisses of my infant son”29 or taking her “best boy” to the movies.30 Considering the roles allotted to workers and wives in fiction, she remarked that motherhood was work; the true “idle” were the rich.31 By 1917 she had developed the theme that “all life is labour,” and declared “Yes, I am inclined to believe Socialism will bring out the best in men and women, and make us kinder and happier.”32 Her progression to this stance was gradual; in 1914, her political views were, from the evidence of her published sketches, generally conservative. Cross’s theatrical career came about through repugnance at the thought of country service, after her experience of the city. Like many teachers in every period, she found some satisfaction in being among schoolchildren but grew impatient with other aspects of the system. She was shifted from Leichhardt to Campsie in 1911, to Erskineville in 1912, thence to Milsons Point. At the end of 1913, she became ill while staying at Nathalia near Echuca in Victoria and sought exemption from the impending obligatory country service required by the Department: she had been instructed to proceed to Young, in southwestern New South Wales. With her mother’s help she was transferred to Naremburn in Sydney and remained there from March until her retirement in May. She was officially diagnosed as suffering from anaemia, enteritis, and laryngitis, all of which may have been exacerbated by her continued performances in Sydney theatricals and in dramatic touring during school vacations. In addition, she became pregnant early in the year and her retirement from teaching was doubtless linked to this event. Her mother had shifted to Sydney and with Zora’s financial assistance bought a substantial house called ‘Carlemon’ at Mosman. Zora’s mother appears to have independently come into funds from the sale of her husband’s property at Pie Creek, which he had taken up around 1900. ‘Carlemon’ was to be home to all of Zora’s brothers and sisters for several years and remained her mother’s chief address until 1952. Ernest William Cross stayed in Queensland for 28 29 30 31 32

“Jim and I,” Worker (29 April 1920): 13. “Nails,” Worker (15 January 1920): 13. “Robin Hood,” Worker (22 August 1923): 13. “The Idleness of Fiction,” Worker (3 February 1921): 13. “The Road of Labor,” Worker (19 June 1919): 13; “On Commonwealth,” Worker (1 April 1920): 13.

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some years, before joining his family in Sydney, where he died soon after his youngest son was killed in the Great War. Cross moved to Queensland when she gave up school-teaching, and joined a travelling comedy company on a tour of the far north of the State. She sang, danced, and recited works, including her own compositions. At a concert in Brisbane she collapsed; the proverbial doctor in the house discovered her pregnancy, which was disguised by her tight corsetting.33 In Sydney, on 4 September 1914, she gave birth to Norman Garvin, named after an actor friend, Norman Campbell, and her headmistress, Lucy Garvin, of Sydney Girls’ High School. She did not remain long in Sydney; leaving the child with her mother, she returned to Brisbane, to teach elocution and dramatic technique and organize patriotic concerts for the war effort. By mid-1915 she was regularly performing in concerts, first of all arranged by the Y MCA and then of her own devising. She performed with musicians and actors of her acquaintance and with her own young students, at open-air and theatre shows, in Army encampments and venues as distant as St George in the west. In 1916 she took a company to Port Douglas and worked down the coast to Rockhampton and Gladstone, beginning to be noticed and reviewed in dramatic circles. She was also attacked by rival teachers and performers and by ‘Tympani’, the Queensland correspondent for the Theatre Magazine, who compared her efforts with those of longer-standing teachers and artists. The criticism appears to have been class-based: Cross’s concerts were seen to be drawing attention away from established entrepreneurs who commanded bourgeois and even Vice-Regal patronage. A lively correspondence began, with Zora leaping into polemic. The experience of writing extended prose accounts of her own conduct stemmed from her publicity work for her concerts. It is fruitful to look at the range of her writing at the beginning of 1916, since by that time she was entirely freelance, earning her living by a combination of teaching, professional theatre work, commission for sales of magazines, occasional writing for theatre publications and, for the latter part of the year, regular journalistic work for the Brisbane Daily Mail. In 1915, too, she had begun to make herself known at last as a serious poet and to widely publish works she would collect the following year in A Song of Mother Love and Other Verses. 4 Cross’s first significant break in journalism was to capture the Brisbane Daily Mail’s front-page women’s column “Woman’s Ways” late in 1915. The newspaper’s editor, A.J. Buchanan, appears to have been impressed with her abilities, 33

April Hersey, letter to Michael Sharkey, 6 May 1989.

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although her chief dealings were with the associate editor ‘O.C. Cabot’ (Ernest McCulloch), who had introduced racy Sydney Sun-style features. The “Woman’s Ways” column became available through the absence of Mabel Forrest, who ran the page in the earlier phases of the Great War: she was to resume writing for the paper in 1916. The daily writing of a column provided Cross with experience in coping with editorship later in 1916 of a journal of her own. The Daily Mail was conservative in its dealings with staff; in 1913, it fought against the newly established Australian Journalists’ Association’s minimum rates of pay and acceded only when the Court upheld the award. Previously the paper had sought to avoid or to terminate the agreements. Under the August 1913 award, junior journalists received three pounds ten per week, senior journalists five pounds ten.34 In Cross’s time, the newspaper was in the courts to answer for its policy on overtime claims; its proprietors constantly tried to defeat proportional grading for employees throughout the Great War. 5 Cross’s special cause through the early years of the War was the Red Cross. She donated the proceeds of her concerts to the organization and used her Daily Mail column to advocate for its work. Her patriotism was of the King and Empire variety; her first writing on the War echoed official policy.35 She was unable to shed her upbringing – bourgeois, Anglo-Irish-Australian – and the thought of doing so seems no more to have occurred to her than to those of her fellows who spontaneously enlisted or put themselves at the disposal of the authorities. She was committed to the well-being of Australian troops, and her Army camp concert performances were designed to entertain the soldiers, just as her ‘civilian’ shows were designed to build morale and raise money at the same time. Cross raised funds efficiently; she took pains to comment on this aspect of her concerts in her response to criticism by ‘Tympani’. The extent to which the audiences were representative of working-class sentiment in general is more difficult to gauge: she was performing for the converted. In a draft letter to an unknown lover (perhaps a dramatic sketch) in March 1915, Cross wrote: I’ve been thinking about the war ever since I throttled my German friend…. I told you, didn’t I?.... The marks of my fingers are still on his

34

Crusade for Journalism, Official History of the Australian Journalists’ Association, ed. Geoff Sparrow (Melbourne: A.J.A., 1960): 65. 35 For example, “Silhouettes of War,” Daily Mail (12 January 1916): 4.

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throat. But how dare he to say “Curse the English” in my presence…. I’m afraid I haven’t much sympathy after all.36

In December 1915, she extolled Mina Mikhailovna Ivanoff, a Russian nurse who had received the Order of St George for bravery in leading a Russian regiment, after its officers had been killed, to capture a German trench.37 At the outset of the war, Cross had expressed the wish that she were a man, but by 29 November she felt obliged to remind her readers that “More Red Cross work must be done. Women must not grow tired.”38 She varied her commentaries on Red Cross initiatives by inserting short fictional sketches into her column. In these the writer and her friends – Marion, Ettie, Daphne, Emmeline, and so on – debated the progress of the war and the home effort. One sketch reports the homecoming of the narrator’s brother from camp, where, she observes, he regularly got roast dinners in contrast to her own humble sausages.39 The brother was no fiction: Victor Cross enlisted on 28 August 1915, trained near Brisbane, and fought in France for two years. Concern for Victor’s fate cast a seriousness over all Cross’s subsequent writing about the war; she was in earnest when she urged women to match the sacrifices of the men. She and her family were appalled by her young brother Jack’s insistence that he, too, should be permitted to enlist. In the event, their fears of the odds were well grounded; Jack’s death provoked Cross’s most thoroughgoing questioning of Empire patriotism in her 1921 Elegy on an Australian Schoolboy. Cross’s articles continued her experiments with dramatic form – unsurprisingly, given her theatrical training and interest – and the dialogue form came to her as instinctively correct for the interpretation of café-society conversations. Her protagonists are educated young women with a keen interest in international and national events. They are fashionable and sentimental about their lovers and families; as Judith Kazantsis observes, speaking of women’s poetry of the Great War, sentimentally and patriotism went together in the dominant ideology of England during the war years, and if the writing now seems dated, it is because it confidently embraces the patriotic “and religious, English cause.” 40 As the War proceeded, Cross withdrew from composing patriotic encomia to focus on other subjects and other forms of writing. She was not altogether easy 36

Letter to unknown recipient (on “throttling” her German friend), Thursday 25 March 1915, Cross Papers, University of Sydney. 37 “Woman’s Ways,” Daily Mail (11 December 1915): 16. 38 “Woman’s Ways,” Daily Mail (29 November 1915): 10. 39 “Woman’s Ways,” Daily Mail (24 November 1915): 19. 40 Judith Kazantsis, “Preface” to Scars Upon My Heart, Women’s Poetry & Verse of the Frist World War, ed. Catherine Reilly (London: Virago, 1984): xvii–xviii.

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with reworking the subject of reluctant volunteers: “The Leave Taking,” a tearoom playlet of January 1916, discusses the case of one such “shirker” who is persuaded by the example of a colleague to enlist the following day. Cross was more at home with morale-boosting through concert activity than through journalism, and welcomed Mabel Forrest’s return to editorship of the “Woman’s Ways” column in 1916. Forrest, who had been offered a large salary to work in America but preferred her native Queensland, possessed, as Cross put it in an undated letter to Bertram Stevens, “a rosier and finer pen,” even if she were “not quite a daily paper writer – you know, because dreams and roses do not go well with stocks and shares – with the price of wool and with what Mr Hughes is doing in London.”41 Cross’s freelance activities became immediately evident. She took a rare holiday from concert work at the close of the year and published an account of Southport on 1 January 1916. The coast was a revelation to her, and her narrative was in part a résumé of the tourist promotions of the late Victorian era and a prolepsis of future encomiums on the region: The Pacific Hotel [...] which commands an enviable view of water and sky and mountain, though it resembles, somewhat, the fashionable hotels of Manly, Sydney, and St Kilda, Melbourne, has an English air about it. Harrison’s Southport Hotel stands near the ferry, which for the price of threepence takes you to the main beach.42

Cross contrasted Brisbane where “every day we meet sour-featured, crabbed and tired workers” deploring the city’s lack of holiday resorts, with the company she met at the coast, “a slow train journey” of two hours’ duration. Between August and November 1916, she wrote six articles about North Queensland for the Daily Mail. They detailed the development and character of the inland and coastal towns that the theatre company visited and were appreciated by editors of other publications who noted her style and subject-matter. In 1922, the articles were reprinted by the Queensland Government Intelligence and Tourist Department in condensed form (with references to the dramatic company’s experiences deleted) as The Wonderland of the North. In the first quarter of 1916, Cross’s elocution school provided her staple income. She continued to arrange concerts where she sang, acted, and recited and won continuing critical favour. In January she joined the Tivoli-based King’s Dramatic Company as a soubrette and acted in Camille, Sarah Bernhardt’s 41

Letter to Bertram Stevens, undated [1916]. Stevens Papers, vol. 5, Correspondence A2437, Mitchell Library. 42 “Southport,” Daily Mail (1 January 1916): 10.

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adaptation of La Dame aux Camélias. Cross’s melodramatic idol, Vera Remée, played the leading role and Zora took instruction from Remée in subsequent months, performing as a regular member of the company, which changed its offerings every week in order to build up a large repertoire. Most of the plays at the Tivoli were of English origin and many of the actors had remained in Australia after visiting with English companies. Cross appeared in few Australian productions: an adaptation of Fergus Hume’s Madame Midas she thought execrable. She continued in the theatre, with King’s Company and others, until her departure for Sydney in October. At the same time, her theatre contacts led her directly to editorship of the Bohemian, a journal published by William Carter of the Carter–Wilson company and specializing in topical news of dramatic and artistic events centering on Brisbane. The paper was politically conservative but permitted a good deal of editorial freedom. The pay was negligible; a journalistic colleague later recalled attending the office with Cross while she collected a salary of five shillings – minus half-a-crown deduction for an advance.43 Cross contributed stories, articles, poems, and interviews to the journal, and it provided, in the long run, a springboard for her entry to Hugh D. McIntosh’s national theatre review, the Green Room, for which Cross became a distributor early in 1916. The Bohemian suffered several transformations after Cross gave up the editorship, ultimately becoming incorporated in the Queensland Figaro, which combined feature-articles on motoring, photography, the theatre, and politics. In Cross’s time, the journal was a bright pictorial affair and, under her editorship, it made a comeback from its decline under Emerson, her predecessor, until its circulation, to Cross’s amazement, gradually increased.44 Cross’s politics at this stage of the War were still conservative. In a humorous short story, “The Twilight of the Half-Gods,” written, like much of her prose work, as a filler for the Bohemian, Cross depicted Lucifer telling his subjects, “You’re as bad as a Labour crowd” and “It’s bad enough to have Nietzsche here jabbering about thought and mind. We only want Holman and a few others to send us stark staring mad. Hang it all! We must be sane in hell.” 45 Another tale of 1916, “The Browns in Town,” depicted the war-games played by six suburban children together with their victimization of a neighbouring German child whose father has been interned “for praising Germany.”46 Cross forces a conclusion which has the children making concessions to their victim’s humanity. It 43

F.C. Brown, “Zora Cross,” Australian Woman’s Mirror (20 March 1928): 10. Letter to Bertram Stevens, undated [1916]. Stevens Papers, Vol. 5, Correspondence A2437, Mitchell Library. 45 “The Twilight of the Half-Gods,” Bohemian: undated cutting. 46 “The Browns in Town,” Bohemian: undated cutting. 44

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seems that, at this relatively early stage in her career, Cross knew what would sell or pass for a space-filler, and she provided material as required. Her shift toward more aesthetic concerns was manifested in an increasing output of poems. She directed these poems to, and discussed her concerns in correspondence with, Bertram Stevens at the Lone Hand. The clarification of distinctions between verse-journalism and poetry, newspaper yarns or serials and ‘serious fiction’ in this period is matter for a lengthier study. The popular press often provided the bread-and-butter for writers and informed their choices of genre and form. As Ken Stewart observes of Melbourne’s reading community in the 1880s, distinctions between ‘popular’ and ‘high’ culture are particularly difficult to define,47 and this is also true of the community which read the Bohemian, the Bulletin, the Lone Hand, the Town and Country Journal, and the Daily Mail in Brisbane during the Great War. While Cross might take issue with a Melbourne clergyman’s condemnation of the extravagance of fashionable women “doing the block,” not because they were avoiding learning how to dress wounds and cure illnesses but because “there is no reason why women should not dress as brightly as possible, and cheer up the world with little womanly touches of beauty,”48 she could simultaneously keep her readers informed of major literary events abroad and publish poems and stories of her own which aspired to conformity with broadly accepted canons of good taste. In 1916, the proprietors of the Bohemian printed Cross’s first collection of poems, A Song of Mother Love and Other Verses, a slim volume of twenty-four pages containing twelve poems and a short story about a woman’s heroic sacrifice. Some of the work had appeared in the Sydney Mail, Splashes Weekly (a pictorial budget of current affairs and literary matter), the Woman’s Budget, the Courier, and the Modernist. The latter, originally a journal given over to theological concerns, was probably introduced to Cross by her devout father. It devoted itself to social issues during the War and, while not openly pacifist, was strongly nonconformist, trenchantly opposing the White Australia policy. A sign of the audience response to Cross’s collection of poems was its reissue when the first edition of several thousand copies rapidly sold out. It is as difficult to make assumptions about Cross’s readers’ cultural interests as it is to tie her down to a discrete set of opinions and interests in this period. A Sydney reviewer had labelled her “a gifted soubrette” and she was regarded as 47

Ken Stewart, “Journalism and the World of the Writer: The Production of Australian Literature, 1855–1915,” in The Penguin New Literary History of Australia, ed. Laurie Hergenhan (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1988): 176. 48 “Woman’s Ways,” Daily Mail (25 November 1915): 10 (on a clergyman’s criticism of women’s fashion).

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“the star turn” of a company of players at Cairns.49 Bertram Stevens and David McKee Wright in Sydney were beginning to take her poetry more seriously and in response to her exuberant and indiscreet letters gave her good advice and encouragement. Her poems began to appear regularly in the Bulletin and in 1916, and by the end of 1917, she was employed by the Lone Hand. Cross’s career appears to have accelerated through 1916. It did not seem to her to be doing so at the time. She was in a quandary about her future, opposed to a career of drama teaching and battling against rivals and critics; she was also worn down by the demands of acting in a bewildering array of changing roles in musicals and melodramas at theatres and halls scattered about the State. She may have felt the range within melodrama to be inhibiting; although she regarded this form of theatre as a superb training-ground for acting skills, the performances took their toll on her and, as early as October 1915, she complained of having to get out of her wig and trousers as “a quite unnecessary liftboy in ‘The Third Degree’ at the Tivoli,” at 8.30 in order to appear as “a smiling Juliet” at 8.45. While she travelled north for her last concert tour, from July to September 1916, she corresponded continuously with the Theatre Magazine and the Daily Mail, providing an account of “Busking in the North” for the former and, for the latter between 25 August and 11 November, the “Wonderland of the North” travelogue series containing some of her best descriptive writing. The combination of acceptance of her prose writing by the Daily Mail, Theatre Magazine, and the Green Room and of her poetry by the Bulletin turned her mind to literary journalism in Sydney as an alternative career to the theatre. Cross did not storm the Sydney media but continued to lay siege to two leading journals, the Lone Hand and the Bulletin. In a letter to Stevens, she observed, of her earliest efforts to break into print: “One generally attacks the Bulletin first. It seems as if it ought to be attacked.”50 David McKee Wright published several poems by Cross even before she came to Sydney; he was particularly impressed with “The Vision of Jehovah,” an apocalyptic work of unusual length and power.51 He also rejected many of her works, advising her to curb slapdash punctuation and to avoid slipshod lines. Responding to one of her indiscreet letters attached to poems sent from northern Queensland, in which she related a dream that she and Wright (whom she had never met) were bathing “à la Adam & Eve – on the Cairns beach,” Wright commented: “Restraint in art is really a most important thing – but then you don’t know anything about 49 50 51

Anon, review of Cross as “star turn,” Northern Register (Cairns; 3 July 1916): np. Letter to Bertram Stevens, undated [1916], Cross Papers. “The Vision of Jehovah,” Bulletin (26 October 1916): 47.

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restraint.”52 His criticism was apposite; much of Cross’s poetry, fiction, and journalism was vitiated by facile mannerisms, including weak plotting, throwaway conclusions, and, as inspection of her manuscripts reveals, often near-illegible writing coupled with cavalier spelling and punctuation. Wright’s pedantry about clarity and exactness in his own composition led him to make countless suggestions for improvement of drafts to other writers besides Cross. Her frank correspondence with Wright and Bertram Stevens (who was not so discreet as Wright in preserving confidentiality) doubtless provoked Wright’s interest in Cross’s personality. Stevens was won over by her manner when she visited him on her arrival in Sydney, and he promoted her poetry to a degree only secondary to Wright. It was probably through Wright’s advocacy that Cross gained entry into Sydney journalism as a contributor to the Worker. Wright had written under various pseudonyms for Henry Boote’s paper at the same time as he joined the Bulletin as full-time editor of the Red Page, and he was in due course responsible for introducing Cross to Boote, Mary Gilmore, and Henry Lawson. Wright represented the professional journalist for Cross. In late July 1916, she wrote to him of her “vital interest” in him and her ambition to “someday write a real poem.”53 Wright’s professionalism as a journalist extended to simultaneously writing proConscription editorials for the Bulletin and holding an anti-Conscription line in the Worker. Wright’s political views were closer to Boote’s and, in time, contributed to Wright’s removal from the Bulletin. Cross’s views began to alter in line with her new company in Sydney; by 1917, she was less sure of her earlier ‘Would-to-God’ stance, and her short columns in the Worker reflected, haltingly at first, broader sympathy with the condition of working-class men, women, and children and their attitudes to contradictions in Australian society. Her own background was brought into her journalism and fiction in ways she had not formerly attempted, and the realism of her lyric poems, in particular the lovesonnets which were to establish her fame before the year was out, is of a piece with her growth as a politicized writer. There are two further factors to consider in accounting for her development as a writer. By the end of 1917, she was engaged as full-time drama critic for the Lone Hand, reviewing pictures as well as live theatre events about Sydney. Her style reflected fuller confidence when she was writing on home ground. Her familiarity with many of the plays, players, and producers gave her an edge that her rivals do not appear to have possessed. Hal Porter was quite correct in 52 53

David McKee Wright, letter to Zora Cross, 6 October 1916; Cross Papers. Letter to David McKee Wright, 29 July 1916, Cross Papers.

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describing her, in his 1965 theatre history, as a “perceptive drama critic,” on the strength of her Lone Hand style.54 Cross was concerned with raising the standard of theatrical performance; she wrote enthusiastically about productions she appreciated and scathingly about those which failed to come up to scratch. Thus, she wrote of a February 1918 entertainment: Victor Prince, who wrote and produced Fuller’s new production at the Opera House about an old humbug, named by most of the company, “Robasen Crusoe,’ is an instance of a good comedian gone back to childhood nastily. There are moments in “Robinson Crusoe’ when his grotesque form is ludicrous and he himself amusing, but most of the time he is as dull as flat beer. Beer is the chief source of comedy throughout the entertainment which is not exactly a pantomime, since all the principal people are constantly losing themselves and some do not even bother to turn up again. Everything ends in anti-climax just as it seemed as if something might happen. This Robinson Crusoe, even in fancy dress, never meets De Foe. The piece seems pretty closely based on the old ragtime Dorothy Harris used to sing, “Where Did Robinson Crusoe Go With Friday on Saturday Night?”55

Cross’s “Sydney Notes” presented a compendium of each month’s dramatic news and reviews and she wrote more extended articles on other aspects of performance, including dance, elocution, and music for the Lone Hand and the Green Room. In “The Theatre To-Day,” she commented on the paucity of permanent stock companies in Australia playing anything but melodrama and appealed for a “patriotic” manager to offer “a stock season of good play” which were not merely “plays which have met with success somewhere abroad.” There was no shortage of local works in which “symmetry of form,” balance, poise, human courage, and cheer might be located.56 Another landmark in Cross’s development as a mature writer came about through her domestic situation in Sydney. She was now accepted by her family as a career writer and journalist and received their support. On her arrival from Brisbane she lived at her mother’s house ‘Carlemon’ and contributed to the family’s upkeep through her earnings. Her income stemmed from canvassing for the Green Room, freelance contributions to the Bulletin, and office work and canvassing for the Lone Hand. She was determined at all costs to avoid teaching drama or elocution and now had a congenial environment as a result of her

54 55 56

Hal Porter, Stars of Australian Stage and Screen (Adelaide: Rigby, 1965): 128. “Sydney Notes,” Lone Hand (1 February 1918): 125. “Sydney Notes,” Lone Hand (1 August 1918: 376 (on “The Theatre To-Day”).

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successes in Queensland. The family was unusually gathered together and harmonious. Zora was reunited with her son, who now insisted on being called Teddy, after a soldier hero he idolized. Her sister Arline had married Leslie Nilsson, a musician who conducted classes in a house adjacent to ‘Carlemon’. Zora’s father, who was inordinately proud of her achievements, came from Brisbane to join the family. One of her uncles also lived with the family and she was grateful for his presence when she stayed up writing after the rest of the family slept; on occasion, he reassured her when she suspected movements outside were traceable to burglars. Urged on by David McKee Wright after the appearance of her “Sonnets of the South” in the Triad,57 Cross worked assiduously at the composition of sixty “Love Sonnets” which were to provide the core of her collection Songs of Love and Life. When Bertram Stevens approached George Robertson with the manuscript of the book, Robinson was not interested in the proposition; his later note to Stevens attributed his initial reaction to “the mood I happened to be in” and “the fact that the lady’s mother was willing to ‘put up’ part of the cost (almost invariably a bad sign).”58 Cross’s mother may have been impressed with the success of A Song of Mother Love; that collection had been reprinted several times, as a result of Zora’s Queensland ‘busking’ tours. In the event, Mary L.E.A. Cross paid for the printing of the first edition of Songs of Love and Life. Bertram Stevens took a copy to George Robertson, who discovered to his chagrin that he had dismissed a very saleable author from consideration. Robertson bought the remaining stock from Tyrrell and reissued the book in his Standard Australian Poets series. Wright’s review of the work in the Bulletin and a wave of other favourable reviews established its success; the book was reprinted within a year. At the time of publication by Angus and Robertson, Cross was working full-time for Stevens and her financial situation seemed secure. Cross generally imposed stylistic limitations on herself in her poetry, eschewing modernist experimentation, even while she paradoxically explored variations of grammar, punctuation, and layout within the confines of sonnets or other received forms, in the interests of psychological realism. In her critical work she avowed the well-made lyric, and in “Plain Paper” provided a manifesto to this effect: Never accuse me of things feminine – Frilled frocks and lacy hats and parasols! 57

“Sonnets of the South,” Triad (10 January 1917): 46–47. George Robertson, letter to Bertram Stevens (29 October 1917), in Dear Robertson, Letters to An Australian Publisher, ed. A.W. Barker (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1982): 84. 58

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There was a time I loved these, being nine; But it is long now since I played with dolls. This plain white paper matches more my soul [….] Just as the lines run here – now white, now black, Straight, cold, indifferent to tide and time – So, unadorned with broidery, I pack My plain self plainly in my plain, still rhyme.59

Cross’s “self” was anything but plain; her Songs of Love and Life epitomized the tensions in her life to 1917. Cross’s famous – or infamous – liaison with Wright was a source of conflict in her work and life during 1918. Wright was living at Oatley with Beatrice Osborn, and he and Cross agonized a long time over the decision to set up home together; the couple did not abandon their respective domestic establishments until 1918. The liaison had a lasting effect on Cross’s writing career. In the short term, she parted company with the Lone Hand but gained regular employment from a succession of journals, the first of which was the Worker. She later won the Australasian’s patronage, and the editor William Hurst became a regular correspondent and supporter. From 1924, the Australian Woman’s Mirror was her most regular source of journalistic income. As a sidelight, she was invited to be the first editor of a proposed Australian Girls’ Weekly: the project fell through, to be later resurrected as the Australian Women’s Weekly. In 1918 Cross had become pregnant and, at the birth of her child (Davideena, born 12 August), contracted puerperal fever and almost died as a result. It was Wright’s decision to remove her from their residence on the North Shore to Glenbrook in the Blue Mountains, which was to become her base for the next forty-four years. Cross did not expect to live but resumed writing after the success of her Elegy on an Australian Schoolboy. She had to write continuously after Wright’s death in February 1928 to support herself. She considered that she had, in any case, been the major breadwinner through 1926 and 1927. By 1928, she was publishing short stories and serial novels with some regularity, and poetry had begun to take a greatly inferior position in her fiction. Her poetry rarely appears to have recaptured the intensity of the ten-year period of her life with Wright, though she occasionally published lyrics of acerbity and wit, within the parameters of Georgian formalism. As a brief illustration, here is “The Sarcastic Charwoman”: 59

“Plain Paper,” Bulletin (16 October 1924): 32.

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I wonder ladies worry to be clean; I’m always dirty – not fit to be seen. Smutty my face, my garments all dust-soiled Because from morn till night I’ve tiredly toiled. Yet I care not, since some day I shall lie A thousand years beneath the blue-winged sky, In a clean house, wearing a spotless shirt, For ever lady-like, though deep in dirt.60

The bulk of her verse was now addressed to ‘light’, saleable matters. Her reputation had been founded on the poems she published between 1915 and 1922 and, although she continued to contribute verse to poetry journals beyond that period, the greater part of her poetry, like her prose, went into popular magazines and newspapers. This is not to suggest that her judgement was impaired; she was perfectly aware of the requirements of her publishers and wrote a good deal to order. At times, however, her epigrammatic skill broke through the slightness and decorativeness that characterizes much of her work from the start; one instance of this is her “Epitaph for that Promising Young Australian Actor”: Here lies a good Australian by His careless country slain. Oh, let him in the fair earth lie, He may not hope again! He comes no more to dance, to sing Beneath his own blue sky. Say he was free – yea, as bird’s wing. Free? Free to starve and die!61

Aspects of Cross’s career have often been invoked in order to veil reasons for her exclusion from the canon of Australian literature. The assumption by Dulcie Deamer, Lala Fisher, Norman, Ray, and Jack Lindsay among others that she was misguided in estimating her abilities and in tying her fortunes to David McKee Wright does her no justice. The persistence of this assumption rests on refusal to investigate her writing and her life to dispel the handed-down image of a naive arriviste. In December 1986, Barry Oakley’s revue commemorating Angus and Robertson’s centenary portrayed Zora Cross as “a Mills and Boon romance” figure; Suzy Baldwin had researched the Angus and Robertson papers for Oakley

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“The Sarcastic Charwoman,” Worker (14 May 1924), newspaper clipping book, Zora Cross Papers, Fisher Library, University of Sydney. 61 “Epitaph for That Promising Young Australian Actor,” Bulletin (11 December 1934): 36.

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and interpreted Cross’s letters as evidence of an attachment between Cross and George Robertson. Cross’s entry into a brief fame was in fact the result of desperately hard work. It was not the result of currying favour with influential males but achieved within the framework of support from several men and women who were convinced of her ability. For her part, she remarked that poetry did not come easy to her. In a journalistic milieu, her ambition was to win an independence that would permit her to write an outstanding work of fiction. The contradictions of her life and writing provide insight into the structures she encountered in her early career, though I have barely sketched an outline of their dimensions. Cross is an example of engagement and application for anyone who chooses to look fairly at her career: it’s worth celebrating.

——————— From Duty to Tribute62 ———————

T

and ends as a belated tribute to a writer of some of the most elegant and powerful poetry in the country. I met Tony Scanlon at Armidale in 1977. He was a superb lecturer and a generous colleague and friend. Students loved his classes in English literature and I sat in on his lectures, awed by his scholarship, orderliness, and delivery: his lectures were occasions, performances. He set standards for enthusing students with a love of Beckett and the moderns. Academics with such gifts are rare: Bill Maidment, Bernie Martin, Terry Sturm, Michael Joseph (the three former at Sydney University, the latter at Auckland). I published some of Scanlon’s lovelyrics and satires in an anthology sponsored by the University of New England’s Students Representative Council in 1978. His work attracted attention then: more readable and immediate than Les Murray’s poems in the same issue, Scanlon’s poems spoke to and about lovers and love. They were funny, mature, and cynical enough to make other poets who read it jealous. I envied it. I still do. Tony left Armidale long before I did. He went to Darwin while I stayed on, a grunt in the front lines of the classroom struggle. He deserved a great job. We all did. He got an interesting sideline, writing speeches for the Chief Minister of the Territory. He wrote glorious letters to me when I left the university to live the free life on the dole in Camperdown, Armidale, and Murwillumbah. I did time in Toowoomba, called by some the lawn cemetery of academic hopes and desires, before emigrating to Victoria. Tony did his dues in the Territory, emerging as an even more sophisticated writer. He won awards for the best poetry HIS RE VIE W ST ARTS AS A DUTY JOB

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Kangaroo Twelve, ed. James Vicars (Armidale, N S W : University of New England Armidale Students’ Association, 1991): 26.

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published in the Top End and elsewhere and sent me poems postmarked from exotic resorts. If I seem to look for superlatives to describe his talent, I’ll get around to noting what I see as limitations in his verse. When Tony Bennett decided to publish Scanlon’s poems, two things were clear: that the edition63 was overdue, and that the poems would be spectacular. Rain at Gunn Point is beautifully produced. Kardoorair has been gradually building a reputation for editions of solid work since 1979, and I’ll declare an interest: the first production from Bennett’s Kardoorair Press was a joint edition of poems by Sharkey and Julian Croft, entitled Loose Federation. I didn’t think Sharkey’s work was up to much, but Croft’s was impressive; a short time afterwards, Angus and Robertson published his Breakfasts in Shanghai, which won the British Airways Prize for the best collection of poems in the Commonwealth. Everybody knew Croft had it in him. The lamentably deceased T. Harri Jones and Tom Naisby, Newcastle poets who had known Croft when he was a student at Newcastle University, knew it. Louis Johnson and the strenuously alive Les Murray and Peter Porter knew it. Kardoorair’s last production before Scanlon’s collection appeared was a solid collection of Gwen Kelly’s short stories. Kelly has been resident in Armidale since the 1950s, where she accumulated a fan club of writers in the region to complement those in Europe and elsewhere. Those who didn’t know that Armidale had so many writers had Armidale in common. There are countless others: Russel Ward, Geoffrey Blomfield, Sandy (A.T.) Yarwood among historians, the poet Andy Peek, and the translator Christine Michel (who arranged with Grace Perry a contemporary French-poetry edition of Poetry Australia and a special Australian poetry edition of the Marseilles journal Sud). There is little provincial in the writing of these people, unless provincial in the sense that King Island cheese and King Valley wines are provincial and cherished wherever they can be got. Why don’t I get on with it, then? I wanted you to know that I can praise friends whom I envy. Greg Shortis was once quizzed by a visitor to New England about the writers he liked. “I read only my friends,” he answered. Quite so. The visitor thought this was a bit strong. Shortis does, after all, keep a stunningly fine library of European poets in several languages on his shelves. But the visitor wasn’t admitted to the library, and didn’t note Shortis’ sense of self-mockery To it, then. Scanlon’s poems require no prac. crit. from me, and I won’t deconstruct what is self-evident. I want to quote “Razor Wire” in its entirety, to point up its lyricism, tension, and humanity: 63

Tony Scanlon, Rain at Gunn Point (Armidale, N S W : Kardoorair, 1990).

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Nothing speaks as eloquently as razor wire where the wind from the bay tugs at the coils and the blades hum. Run your thumb along the blades, the wire is unambiguous, precise – the points hunger only for flesh, for penetration: reach carelessly, stumble, and the blades slide easily into meat, without fuss. Coil after coil along the high fence base, along the concrete parapets, the razor wire gleams in sunlight, moonlight, searchlight: stainless steel, articulate, brutal, metre after metre the blades face inwards, outwards, patiently humming in the wind.

This seems perfectly poised to me. Read the lines again to consider the balance, the suggestibility of each. Has anyone caught the mood of vulnerability within prison so well in this country? The poem could stem from anywhere: South America, Asia, Europe, North America, England, Northern Ireland. How it shifts sense between each reference to humming, between feeling and meat. Ginsberg with his brutalizing references to living meat isn’t in the game. Scanlon’s “Death in Custody” is another masterly work, starting with the superb understatement “And if there is a dignity in death, he did not find it,” and echoing to the last line’s “sentence his body could not bear.” A pathos that, breathtaking in its charity, leaves you savouring every poem in the first section of this book. Bruce Dawe’s ironies and take-offs of tabloid rationalizations seem stagey alongside Scanlon’s “Editorial: Sunday Territorian,” while “Snapshots” enshrines the Japanese tourist in an ambiguous elegy for both the Tiwi people and the “Grandfather who lost two brothers at Kohima.” Lines and phrases lend themselves to the purpose of excerpting, but it’s difficult to be satisfied with this process. I dislike excerpting lines from poems because nothing less than quoting an entire poem will or can do justice to the texture of a lyric or elegy. I’ve read scores of reviews in which a couple of lines are cited to indicate some peculiar knack the writer has for aphoristic versatility. It won’t do; it’s the easy way out. I will insist that this collection is outstanding for its humanity and skill: the writing is finely tuned, the narratives taut with refrains and shifts in focus that enrich the lines with every repetition. Nothing much rhymes in this book, though no one insists that poetry should rhyme. There are a very few matters for some concern, though. The love lyrics in the last section of the book are not so striking as the earlier meditations on entrapment and freedom. One poem, “City Woman,” is so forced that I wonder

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what it’s doing in the collection. “Mosman Nocturne” is more interesting for its attempt to see things from the woman’s point of view. I’m not convinced that Scanlon’s strength is in works about intimate relationships, but a poem “For Belinda” is a startling exception. Scanlon is usually at home in contemplating an individual – or any gender – confronting and confronted by society. Poems on place take their laurels, and the images of family members, country, fish, and snakes are memorable for their precision and startling placement: they’re often couched in lapidary speech. “English lecture” could be inscribed on noticeboards in every cramming factory in the country, though few might pause to read it: I have done what is expected: laid bare the text; left each subtlety exposed and quivering in the autumn air. I ask no questions and look once more into the shuttered eyes of that pale mass, collective faces dully reflecting the light. Silence. The air is quietly sullen; crickets call on the lawns outside; a laugh, far-off, the murmur of a car. I am tired of books and sterile places; tired of making meaning of shifting sand; and there are no questions. There never are.

It does, of course, occur to me that I like this sort of thing because I’m also jaded by the chore of teaching. Top marks to you. It occurs to few to give creative expression to the ennui. I don’t know why this should be so. We read countless poems about ‘the woe that is in marriage’, and the ostensible pointlessness of existence in other straitjackets. We can manage those quite well; they don’t seem to threaten us, that’s why. They generally refer to someone else, so we can skim over the lines and put them down to the fashion of the age. Bring in the chore that most readers must confront every working day of their lives, and it’s a different matter. We’re compelled to take stock of ourselves: horrible. Scanlon has given thought to every aspect of his life. His book draws on autobiography as well as anything we might ascribe to observation of others’ lives. I like the honesty of it. I think the collection is for the most part open in its emotions, wise in its self-evaluations: meditative, rhetorical without being grandiose. I should emphasize that phrase ‘for the most part’. When Scanlon gets romantic, he turns soft. This isn’t a bad thing; some writers never expose such

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an aspect but keep up a veneer of coolness or unconcern in every word they write. Is that a sign of reluctance to “walk naked,” as Yeats puts it in his poem “A Coat”? I think I’ll return to Scanlon’s Northern poems where he applies the same criticism to self that he turns on the Territory: Go to the down-at-heels pubs reeking of oblivion where losers wrangle over threadbare pool tables: ask them for directions to the Last Frontier and black hands will wave away south, or west – “Not here, mate’, they will say, “this is Suck City’. In their eyes is the truth of the ravished north, of the Dreamtime raped brutally by alien men, remoter from the true North than Andromeda: pastiche pioneers, Durack according to Disney.

—————— The Poetry of Gwen Harwood64 ——————

G

H A R W O O D ’ S P O E T R Y seems to me distinctly accessible on account of its frequent address to a reader. I admire her cool narrative and dramatic experiments, her clever allusions to other artists’ productions in a continuum of recording what it is to be alive and thinking of art and death. I know there are pitfalls in writing a review of a woman’s work from a male perspective. Trebly so when I know the authors of these critical studies: there’s not much escape from this phenomenon in Australia. It’s difficult to be in the literary racket as reader, writer, teacher, and critic for nearly three decades without becoming part of a system which looks, to outsiders, like a closed shop. But I shall, I trust, discriminate and point up the usefulness of each book. Alison Hoddinott’s study65 opens up aspects that might be intuited from Harwood’s love of word-games and their limits: the German influence and the Byronic, as well as the musical and the philosophical. Harwood’s verse reveals a strong shaping imagination that resolves each line into the just-so pattern of a formal song or elegy. Hoddinott’s work is especially interesting in view of her long friendship with the poet. I regret that Angus ánd Robertson have produced such a beastly-looking book, though. The layout and handling qualities are less than appealing. Even if authors must submit their text on disk, it cannot be beyond the wit of publishers WEN

64 

Overland 124 (Spring 1991): 91–93. Alison Hoddinott, Gwen Harwood; The Real and the Imagined World: A Critical Analysis (Sydney: Collins/Angus & Robertson, 1991). 65

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to adjust the format and make the final product attractive to the eye. Alison Hoddinott and Gwen Harwood deserve better. To my bibliophiliac mind, the study by Elizabeth Lawson66 is more attractively produced. The Sydney University Horizon studies, by comparison with Angus and Robertson’s efforts, are superbly got-up. It seems a pity to say such things in a book review, but I cannot help thinking that standards are not just declining in some areas of book production: they’re almost non-existent. The merit of Hoddinott’s study resides first of all in the lucid ordering of themes. Letters, poems, and commentary are woven together in a sprightly way that comes as a refreshment after the chaotic ordering of some previous, rival critical studies of Australian poets – studies that seem no more than random articles flung together between covers. There’s attractiveness in variety, but it’s something new to see the development of an argument in a lengthy critical work. Hoddinott traces Harwood’s preoccupations from her earlier works through to her most recent in a pattern whose model is musical composition, a fugal or canonical text. At times she repeats material from one section to another, as she recounts “Childhood, Memory and Preservation of the Past” through to “The Professors,” “The Philosophers” and so on, but the effect for the reader is not one of déjà vu. The whole is tied together with reference to Harwood’s abiding concern with language. The book gathers momentum as it proceeds; the core of Hoddinott’s critique lies in her examination of the Eisenbart and Kröte poems, and Harwood’s interest in Wittgenstein and Ryle. The chapters on the philosophers and language offer absorbing analysis. Hoddinott, a student of Harwood’s husband in Hobart, shares the poet’s Romanticism while appreciating Bill Harwood’s rival positivist necessitarianism, Her discussion of the appeal for Harwood of the ambiguities inherent in expression and form in the Tractatus provide tension in her own writing. It’s a welcome, cant-free discussion of some of the most ironic and accomplished poetry in Australia by the person best equipped to speak on the subject apart from the poet. Hoddinott’s study is more than a handy companion to the poetry. With her edition of Harwood’s letters to Thomas Riddell,67 it genuinely elucidates the text. Hoddinott’s study, expanding a 1981 essay,68 traces the gradual build-up of a position behind the “masks” that, once exposed, led Harwood from notoriety to 66

Elizabeth Lawson, The Poetry of Gwen Harwood (Sydney: Sydney U P , 1991). Blessed City: Letters to Thomas Riddell 1943, ed. Alison Hoddinott (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1990). 68 Alison Hoddinott, “Gwen Harwood and the Philosophers,” Southerly 41 (1981): 272–87. 67

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outright fame on publication (at the age of forty-three) of her first collection of poems. The study is particularly good on Harwood’s “masks,” the pseudonymous poems that, thirty years ago, upset editors and provided a frisson for sensationalist reporters. Harwood’s works may have helped to make editors briefly more self-critical than they had been, although Hoddinott’s discussion reveals the impassioned and controversial nature of debates about poetry in a period sometimes alleged by later waves of young poets (chiefly male) to have been characterized by complacency or spiritless theorizing. Hoddinott’s study is also commendable for its revelation of Harwood’s affinities with German Romantic song and poetry. Hoddinott plainly shares Harwood’s affection for Schubert, Heine, and the art-song tradition. What matter when chaps have the good tunes, if one can write such splendid music of one’s own? Elizabeth Lawson’s book is a thoughtful shorter guide to Harwood’s work. She notes that Harwood’s style does not easily corroborate “some feminist thinking about cultural inheritance.” Quite so: unless Wittgenstein, Schubert, and Bach are primarily to be considered as exemplars of the patriarchy and only latterly as universalizing thinkers and artists, then Harwood is guilty of lèsemajesté in gender terms. Faced with the self-imposed task of “inscribing” Harwood in female literary history, Lawson sees the poet as an “undercover agent” in male culture. The tension in both Harwood and Lawson’s writing signals undoubted consciousness of the political ramifications of language. In the long run, Harwood eludes all the nets – like her admired Byron, who will not be tied down to Tory versus Whig categories but who exposes what Flaubert called the “idées reçues” and the “idée chic” in all bourgeois codes. Lawson’s book is bound to find approval among teachers and students on account of its conciseness, detail, and price. Hoddinott’s work will provide more material for extended reflection on Harwood’s theme and will direct readers to further research in the areas of language theory, formalism, Romanticism, and epistemology. A tall order? It will be fascinating, in view of Lawson’s research and of Hoddinott’s glimpses of Harwood the artist, to read the first biography that appears on Gwen Harwood. She is a marvellous asset to both writers, and to all who read her.

————— David McKee Wright, Maorilander69 —————

D

A V I D M C K E E W R I G H T arrived in Australia for the second time in May 1910. He had first visited in 1887, an Irish youth direct from school in Lon-

69 

J N Z L (Journal of New Zealand Literature) 10 (1992): 35–55.

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don on his way to an uncertain future in New Zealand. The official cause of his emigration was the diagnosis of a spot on his lung, although Wright’s early verse accounts of his situation would suggest that he was exiled as the result of a misdemeanour involving an unnamed young woman whom he associated with memories of Naples. The romantic explanation to himself and the world may not have been entirely mythical: he was in other ways a scapegrace and cause of disquiet to his family. An ailing uncle of Wright’s, the Reverend David McKee (1838–80) of Dublin, had gone to New Zealand in 1879 and, dismayingly, died at Christchurch within a short time of his arrival. Wright had numerous McKee relatives in Christchurch, where his uncle had been foundation minister of Knox Church. Wright was himself a son of the manse, and his father, the Reverend Dr William Wright, would exert some effort to induce his son to enter the family profession. 70 By 1920, when Wright came to Australia, his future was more promising than it had been in 1887: he was in good health and had a literary reputation that extended to other countries. He was to rise rapidly through journalistic and editorial circles, becoming literary editor of the Sydney Bulletin during the Great War until 1926, and a poet admired by many outstanding contemporaries and reviled by a number of influential others. This essay concerns Wright’s ‘missing years’ from an Australian point of view, and I suggest that his New Zealand achievement has been greatly underestimated in both countries. 

On his first arriving in Christchurch in 1887, Wright visited his McKee relatives at their house in Hawthornden. Sarah Jane McKee, widow of the Rev. David McKee, had been left with nine children and was bringing them up with the assistance of her mother-in-law, Rebecca McKee, who had emigrated with the family. Wright had been brought up by Rebecca McKee following the death of his own mother in 1876, and the reunion was joyful for the entire family. Wright regarded Rebecca McKee in the light of a “second mother,” and he paid tribute to her character and influence on his life in “Fern Fronds and Mountain Daisies,” a sonnet sequence of 1893. The poems reflect Wright’s debt to Tennyson in their lushness and close observation of nature. At the time of Rebecca McKee’s death in November 1892, Wright was working as a rouseabout and rabbiter at Puketoi station and contributing verses and stories to the Christchurch Weekly Press and the Otago 70

Knox Church 1880–1955 (Christchurch: Simpson & Williams, [1955]): 2–7; Zora Cross papers, Fisher Library, University of Sydney.

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Witness. His sonnets are more orthodox in their note of Christian consolation than were the Laureate’s later elegies. Wright was firmly convinced of immortality beyond the grave. The sonnet sequence is much like Wright’s early output in its conventionality of form and occasional derivativeness. For all that, it presents a dramatization of friendship or love that has seen several crises. The poems recount early memories of life in Ireland, notably the scenes of his childhood. They are particularly interesting for their experimentation with the length of sentences within the sonnet format. The first sonnet establishes the theme in an opening sentence of ten lines; the second sonnet, introducing recollections of early days, consists of a single sentence. The stanza structure of Wright’s earliest poems gravitated, as a rule, against such sustained expositions, but in his meditative works he often maintained the meandering and parenthetical sentences that distinguish Tennyson’s and Milton’s verse. In the last sonnet of the “Fern Fronds and Mountain Daisies” sequence, the greatest number of breaks occurs as Wright recapitulates the arguments of the preceding poems: The trees will soon be breaking into bud, The flowers will soon be breaking into bloom; Nature her winter sorrow will forget, And joy and sorrow work alike for good. Forget the past? Nay, but forget its gloom: Remember all its beauty shining yet Through the long cypress glades from the white tomb. Pure lilies, ye are emblems of her heart. Pure daisies, ye are emblems of her love; And ye green ferns of Immortality: Yet all shall fade and wither into dust. But her pure virtue ever lives above, And it may chance that sometimes she may see A glimpse of those she crowned on earth with love.71

Wright had composed verse while in his early teens; by his own estimation, his first real poem, on the subject of Milton, was written when he was fourteen years old. Milton remained a passion with Wright. He had first read Paradise Lost at the age of twelve and could recite entire books of the poem at fourteen. In the 1920s, Wright was to argue with Hugh McCrae that Milton was a fit book for young readers. He revelled in the graphic and narrative qualities of Milton’s verse. As a boy, Wright had been prevented by illness from sharing the life of his brothers and sisters, and it is well to review briefly his early education. 71

Wright, “Fern Fronds and Mountain Daisies,” Otago Witness (3 August 1893): 39.

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Early Days Wright was born in the Ballynaskeagh Manse in County Down in 1869. His father, the Rev. William Wright, was a Presbyterian missionary who was serving in Damascus, where he child was conceived. Wright’s mother, Annie, was the daughter of the Rev. David McKee, a notable controversialist and apostle of Temperance, though not averse, as an acerbic critic pointed out, to taking a drop himself.72 The Rev. McKee lived for ninety years, dying two years before the poet’s birth. Rebecca McKee, second wife to the old minister, relayed stories of her husband’s life, including his presence at the Battle of Ballynahinch in 1798, to young David McKee Wright. David McKee Wright was the second son of the Rev. William Wright. An older brother named William remained in Damascus with an older sister, Rebecca Jane (always referred to as Jane), when David’s mother Annie returned to Ireland, where David was born. Annie shortly afterwards came back to Damascus, leaving the infant in the care of his grandmother. The future poet subsequently spent much of his early life with older people. Annie Wright, plagued with illhealth, bore two more male children, and died when David was seven years old. The Rev. William shortly afterwards took up residence in London with his family, now counting four sons and their older sister Jane. The Rev. William’s fortunes improved with his engagement as superintendent of translations at the British and Foreign Bible Society, and his marriage in 1880 to Sophie Davison, daughter of a wealthy (though deceased) London solicitor. Wright attended the local Glascar School in Down before his family moved to London, where he was educated at Pope’s School, a preparatory institution, and the Crystal Palace Engineering School. His early days in Ireland made a lasting and pleasurable impression on the boy. He recalled conversations with fisherfolk and other workers, and he collected a store of local expressions, history, and legends. Towards England, he entertained ambivalent feelings all his life: he regarded his education there with some nostalgia on occasion, and late in life thought of returning to London to further his literary success. He disliked the divisiveness of class in Britain as time went on, and from the start resented his father’s remarriage. Three daughters increased the family from the Rev. William’s second marriage, and David did not altogether get on with his stepmother, who was regarded by the boys as ‘English of the English’ from the point of view of their self-styled ‘wild Irish’ temperaments and habits. The Rev. William was awarded an honorary doctorate of Divinity from Glasgow in 1882 for 72

J. Ramsden, The Brontë Homeland: Misrepresentations Rectified (Westminster: Roxburghe Press, 1897): 86.

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his ecclesiastical efforts (he was to supervise 150 translations of the Bible), and he was elected to the Royal Geographical Society in 1886 for his research into the ruins of the ancient Hittite capital in Syria. A correspondent of Gladstone’s and a familiar of many notables in civil and ecclesiastical life, the Rev. Dr William was a friend of Sir Richard Burton and wrote under the penname ‘Salih’ on archaeological and theological matters. In London, the Wright family occupied a stately gentleman’s residence staffed with servants and governesses. The other boys attended Dulwich College. Two of them, William (born 1867) and Robert (born 1873), followed their father into the ministry. Charles, born 1876, became headmaster of the King’s School in Lagos after a distinguished career in several English public schools. David’s sister Jane was educated at the Crystal Palace Engineering School, where she studied art; later she married a Dulwich College old boy, Claude Paine, and removed to South Africa. Wright was enrolled in the ‘Colonial’ section of the Crystal Palace School after some years of education by tutors at home. His family recounted that he was sickly as a child, and Wright recollected being sometimes on the point of death in his youth. This information sits uneasily with his record of escapades. He ran away from home to make his way to Ireland on at least three occasions, once reaching ‘the wilds of Connemara’ to escape his London situation. These adventures provided him with additional legends and tales for inclusion in his ‘Irish’ poems, plays, and fictions written from around 1914. The area in which he had grown up was rich in oral tradition. In classical times, it had been the site of the Ulster cycle of legends concerning Fionn, Cuchulainn, and other heroes, and it included the ancient capital of Ireland and the landing-place of Saint Patrick. Wright’s interest in the locality was not only romantic. At fourteen he tore down a Unionist election poster at an Ulster rally, and he recalled his first sight of fresh blood on the ground where a man had been killed in a sectarian brawl.73 Wright’s Irish family on both sides appears to have been anti-Unionist, and were all distressed by attempts to partition the country. For Wright, Carson and Haig came to represent the ruin of the country’s hope, and after 1919 he was appalled by the civil war. Wright was proud of his Irish heritage, drawing consolation during his life in Australia from the fact that his adopted country was “one-third Irish in race.” Among his literary remains, a letterhead souvenir suggests his association with Sinn Féin. He was not likely to advertise political affiliation of this sort while engaged at the Bulletin, however. During his sojourn 73

‘Pat O’Maori’ [David McKee Wright], “The Place Where I Was Born,” The Lone Hand (July 1919): 18.

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in New Zealand, Wright’s colleagues among the rural workforce and, later, the clergy and journalistic circles were predominantly of Scots descent, and he was indebted to them for their hospitality and support; his sole Australian collection of poems, An Irish Heart,74 was dedicated “To a Scotchman for Ireland’s Sake.” His first patron in New Zealand, a hawker who subsidized publication of his Station Ballads, was Robert McSkimming (“Crockery Bob”); another Otago friend was Archie McFarlane. The Rev. Dr William’s wife did not encourage the Irish sympathies and associations of the family. Of all the children, David was the most afflicted with homesickness for Ulster, and his removal to New Zealand may have come as some relief to his father and stepmother. The Crystal Palace School was formally a school of art, science, and literature, and had Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s divisions. The former focused on visual, written, and performing arts and skills and the latter on ‘Practical Engineering’ and the “Artistic and Economic Improvement of Estates’. In later years, Wright’s brother Robert remarked, of David’s abilities: Needless to say, he knew as little about practical life as Shelley or Byron and cared as little; and all the engineering ever came to was to teach him to pitch a tent and boil a billy and live the life of a rabbiter in the backblocks. From 1887 to 1896, he was doing that kind of thing and, I do believe, as happy as a king.75

Robert was correct in assuming that his brother loved outback life in Central Otago. He was wrong to think that his brother lacked a practical streak. Wright revealed his talents repeatedly, in the construction of cabins and gardens and furniture, throughout his life. His final home in Australia was built by him and remained standing until 1989, when it was demolished in the course of housing development. Wright was impractical in one notable way: like his grandfather and uncle (both named David McKee), he was incapable of managing finances. Just as had been said of the old minister in Down and of his son in Christchurch that they had literally given their clothes to the poor, David McKee Wright could not hear a story of distress without emptying his pockets. To the end of his life, this fecklessness with money rendered Wright an easy touch. His generosity to indigent journalists in Sydney was legendary and constituted a large element of his charm.

74

David McKee Wright, An Irish Heart (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1918). Robert J. Wright, letter to David McKee Wright (Jr.), June 1931, in D.M. Wright, “The Family Background” (unpublished folio): 11. 75

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Poet to Preacher Wright’s reputation in New Zealand rests on his ballad poems of station life. They are chiefly contained in two collections, Station Ballads and Other Verses and Wisps of Tussock.76 An earlier pamphlet, Aorangi and Other Verses,77 contained eleven poems, none of them ballads, although several reflected Wright’s outdoor occupation. The small pamphlet New Zealand Chimes, issued as a Christmas souvenir, contained six poems, none of which are ballads: the collection reprints an early “Christmas Carol” and includes several patriotic works.78 This last New Zealand collection represents the genteel parson–poet whom several contemporaries, including the anthologist and poet Johannes C. Andersen, believed incapable of maintaining former standards of discernment. Wright began to contribute verses to the Otago Witness from April 1890, when he despatched a loco-descriptive poem “Manapouri” from Otatau. His career as shepherd and rabbiter began in the Southland district before he moved to Puketoi and Table Tops (in the Hakataramea Valley) – the locales of his balladry. The earliest poems, represented by more than a hundred publications, many of them poem-sequences, in the Otago Witness and sporadic publications elsewhere before 1896, exhibit the range of a young poet experimenting in a plethora of lyrical and narrative forms. Wright knew his Wordsworth and Tennyson well, and traces of their influence can be found in many titles and stylistic effects. Wright never repudiated the fact of influence nor sought to hide it. He believed, like Shelley, that poetry might be written about the experience of poetry itself, and that influence ‘authorized’ his own work – in fact, enrolled him in the canon. Wright’s facility with conventional forms appears early in his output and may have recommended him to the editors of the Dunedin paper, where his work appeared regularly throughout 1891 and, from 1892 onwards, was often featured on a weekly basis. In a 1920 Bulletin article, Wright defended the constant practice of writing that resulted in fluency at handling received forms.79 His flair with these forms – odes, sonnets, short lyrics, and blank-verse narratives on historical and biblical themes – distinguishes him sharply from many contemporaries in the Otago Witness and other provincial papers. He became well known as a result of his copious contribution of verse to the Dunedin paper and to the Christchurch 76

David McKee Wright, Station Ballads, and Other Verses (Dunedin : J.G. Sawell, 1897), Wisps of Tussock (Oamaru: Andrew Fraser, 1900). 77 David McKee Wright, Aorangi and Other Verses (Dunedin: Mills, Dick, 1896). 78 David McKee Wright, New Zealand Chimes (Wellington: W.J. Lankshear, 1900). 79 Wright, “Facility,” Bulletin (11 March 1920, 3.

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Weekly Press, and several replies and tributary verses were written in response to his work. At times, Wright might have written counter-versions of his own poems, by way of amusing himself with presenting, under pseudonyms, alternative points of view. Such might be the case with respect to a poem by ‘John Plod’ that appeared on 28 July 1892 after the publication of Wright’s poem “The Poisoner’s Lament” in the Otago Witness on 7 July 1892. Wright’s poem was a remarkable prolepsis of his later balladeering style, and it is worth noting the congruence in style between the opening stanza of Wright’s acknowledged poem and that of the reply by ‘John Plod’: With fingers dirty and rough With debts contracted, unpaid, A rabbiter toiled o’er the shingle-strewn hills Plying his penniless trade. Walk, walk, walk, In eternal changeless round, Forever sticking up useless marks For the rabbits that can’t be found. Stones, and tussock, and scrub, Scrub, and tussock, and stones, Skins so scarce that the job can’t pay Entrails, and blood, and bones. (“The Poisoner’s Lament”) With paws both weary and sore, With fur bedraggled and wet, We scamper all day o’er the fern-clad hills Shunning the rabbiter’s net. Jump, jump, jump, Forever we’re on the hop, Dodging the dogs and rabbiters’ traps As into our burrows we pop. Boys and dogs and traps, Traps and dogs and boys, We live in a state of perpetual ferment And taste but few of life’s joys. (“The Rabbits’ Refrain to the Poisoner’s Lament”)

Wright’s early reputation was based both on his lyric skill and on his short stories. In Dunedin, he was represented primarily as a poet; in Christchurch, he was highly regarded as a clever writer of short fiction, as a result of a series of yarns about life in the Otago and West Coast mining regions. Wright situated

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many of his stories in a fictional ‘Barravale’, near the Rough Ridge, where he worked as a rabbiter. He adopted the name ‘Cleggs’ for his fiction from 1892 to 1895, by which time such tales as “Fair in Love or War” and “Mignonette”80 demonstrated sophisticated control of plot and dialogue and a high degree of selfawareness in the writing. Wright demonstrated a broad sympathy for his fellows, including women employees and identities. “Mignonette” is unusual for its casting of a Chinese worker (‘Min Let’ – the ‘Mignonette’ of the title) as hero: Wright traces the doomed love of Min Let for the Barravale servant girl Agnes, to conclude the story thus: We in New Zealand are willing enough to assert “that all men are born equal and free’, but then we can never quite bring ourselves to think that Chinamen are men.

Wright’s stories attracted sufficient following for the Weekly Press to advertise his previous tales as part of the by-line when they appeared. The Christchurch paper did not, however, entertain such a high opinion of his poetical works. On the appearance of Aorangi, the Weekly Press observed that Wright was capable of “splendidly sonorous lines” in such works as the title poem, but that “here and there we come upon a slipshod verse which would have been polished by a poet who took his vocation seriously.” Wright suffered from a divided allegiance, according to the reviewer, who commented astutely that Wright’s prose was remarkable for its “lucid clearness of style, and its forceful simplicity,” qualities aided by his practice of verse. The reviewer recommended against the publication of an enlarged edition of poems, on the grounds that it was preferable “to see its author concentrating his energy and ability on the more popular literary form” in which he had already achieved “a distinct and integral success.” 81 The Weekly Press already had a reputation as “the most Conservative and, at the same time, the most progressive paper” in the country, 82 and was in the process of modernizing its programme by mid-1892 under the guidance of G.G. Stead, the owner since 1890. Whether the paper considered itself progressive or not, it was correct in seeing itself as less Liberal than its chief rival, the Lyttelton Times, whose outstanding literary contributor was perhaps Jessie Mackay. Wright appears to have agreed with the Weekly Press critic’s estimation of his verse; he withdrew the volume from circulation and did not refer to it again in later years except to include it in brief bibliographical notes for other editors. 80

Wright, “Fair in Love or War,” Weekly Press (2 May 1895): 6, and “Mignonette,” Weekly Press (31 October 1895): 4. 81 Anon., review of David McKee Wright, Aorangi, Weekly Press (12 March 1896). 6. 82 The Press 1861–1961: The Story of a Newspaper (Christchurch: Christchurch Press, 1961): 100.

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Wright’s New Zealand politics were initially Conservative; in effect, he distinguished between Liberalism in England and Ireland and Liberalism in New Zealand. His earliest commentaries on New Zealand politics took the form of satire in poems such as “Demos and the New Zealand Liberals.” Here, Wright offers a summary of complaints against the Liberal government from the time of the “fall from grace” of the common man in 1891 until his debasement as “Seddon’s slave” in 1893 and 1894. Wright scorns Seddon’s murdering of the English language and his secret borrowing. Wright’s “Demos” spurns the cabinet members in brief character sketches, lingering particularly on John MacKenzie, the enemy of Wright’s Dunedin patron, Scobie Mackenzie: Ay, truth and purity are dead and gone – Our faith’s been shaken in that ‘honest John’ – Big Jock Mackenzie – freedom’s deadliest foe, In spite of all his ignorance and blow. Oh, never shall the link be loosed again That shackles Pomahaka to his name, Or men forget the night he ran away From facing Scobie e’er election day. But now the worst of all is come to pass – New Zealand’s press has written John an ass, And Jock has sworn the press must bend the knee To Liberal despotism or cease to be. O big, weak, foolish Minister for Lands, Our free-voiced press is not yet in your hands. Strike at our education, homes destroy; Encourage dummies, honest worth annoy; Lie, brag, blow, bluster how you can and may, But touch our press and you will rue the day. Yes, Jock! believe me, this shall come to pass – New generations still will write thee ‘ass’. When all thy greatness is forgotten quite, As one who tried to curb the people’s right, Thine epitaph in history shall be: ‘A tyrant born behind his time was he.’83

Wright’s view was not in the long run the prevailing judgment on the Minister for Lands. Wright owed some favour to Scobie Mackenzie, however. The latter had started out as a station hand and overseer in Otago, working his way up to manager of an estate and ownership of Kyeburn station. He entered politics on 83

Wright, “Demos and the New Zealand Liberals,” Otago Witness (1 November 1894): 43.

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the Conservative side and retained popularity and loyalty among his employees and fellow-pastoralists. He held the Mt Ida seat from 1883 to 1893, when his namesake, the older John MacKenzie, defeated him and the Mt Ida seat was swallowed up in the new Waihemo seat. John MacKenzie had more followers in Waihemo than Wright’s patron could muster in Mt Ida, and Wright’s poem refers to an occasion when ‘Big John’ failed to meet Scobie Mackenzie on the latter’s terms. Wright clung to his Conservatism until 1905, when he left the Congregational Union over the issue of the Church’s proposal to endorse Prohibition. Throughout the 1890s, Wright held out for individualist values and roundly condemned trade unionism in its rural and urban manifestations. It was not until he established his own newspaper in 1906 that Wright began actively to support unionism and to campaign effectively for Labour in New Zealand. His frustration with the slow pace of progress after that time was instrumental (along with other causes) in directing him to follow his journalistic career in Australia. The espousal of individualist values was typified in Wright’s early stories of young men bent on making their way in a new country. Some of Wright’s fictive protagonists were scions of bourgeois English families; in rare instances, they were offshoots of the older aristocracy. Wright provided his heroes with upright intelligent women neighbours or visitors with whom they could fall in love, although the limits of women’s independence and intelligence were revealed in their acquiescence to wedded bliss at the conclusion of several such ‘romances’ of pioneering life. Wright underscored his awareness of the conventionality of these tales of true grit and true love by subtitling them as romances, and the structure and resolution are as much a reflection of editorial taste and readership expectation as of authorial intention. This is not to say that Wright could not but fall in line with editorial direction. Several of the tales invert expectations or exploit comic situations and plot denouement for their effect. He seems to have revelled in the opportunity to work variations on romantic or comic themes, and he occasionally tried tragic approaches and brief impressionistic sketches of up-country life for his town-dwelling readers. Several recurrent themes distinguish his poetic output in the 1890s. From his first appearance in print, Wright celebrated pictorial New Zealand. The poems seldom go beyond travelogues in the years 1890–93, as he strives for effects of sublimity and awe, drawing on Wordsworthian epithets or offering observations from the point of view of one who has experienced an epiphany while going about mundane tasks. Such visionary moments occur in “Aorangi,” first published in the Otago Witness on 3 September 1891, or in “Waitangi,” published on 7 April in the following year. In both poems, Wright takes up a story of travellers

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(“we”) in the mountains who are overwhelmed by the grandeur or antiquity of the scenes before them. In “Waitangi,” Wright indulges in a fantasy of ancient Atlantis, only to be at last appalled by the power of his vision and awareness that, like Keats in the nightingale ode, he is being drawn to a forlorn fairyland. The poem concludes: Nature, dear friend, thy winds are growing colder, Dark clouds hang round thy far south-western hills, I dread the feathery snow cloak I have longed for; Downward I fly to mingle with my kind, Good friends, and loving they are there to meet me, Thinking me lost amid the gathering gloom. On to bright lamps and happy, ruddy, firelight, Where great Waitangi pours his mournful song, I follow where they lead me, – coward mortal, Thy friend and yet afraid to share thy glory.84

Wright was aware of his tendency to egregiousness; he appreciated the exotic element in his new surroundings after Ireland and England, and at times contrasted the dynamic New Zealand landscape with the flattened monotony, as he saw it, of the Australian bush and desert. Throughout his New Zealand residence, the face of ‘nature’ engaged him in attempts at specific local descriptive poems and prompted him to project universal significance into the objects of his contemplation. He was not limited to reading altogether eurocentric messages into the sights surveyed. In “Maniototo,” he played on the legendary “field of blood” significance of the location, with an oblique glance at the present and future: Field of blood – ah! whose the savage glory? Thousands fell to make thy cornfields wave; Every tea-tree tells the dreary story, Every silver tussock shows its open grave. Yonder fell a nation: wild winds dying Bear the fated spirits of the slain – Through the long, sad ages crying, crying Vengeance on their foes – not all in vain.85

As a rule, Wright’s poems that are triggered by landscape contain genuine elements of sublimity where, like Wordsworth, he reflects on human transience and impotence. Wright was to frequently return to nature for renovation of his 84 85

Wright, “Waitangi,” Otago Witness (7 April 1892): 37. Wright, “Maniototo,” Otago Witness (23 February 1893): 39.

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spirit, and for the first ten years of his New Zealand life he could return in more than spirit. When he moved to Dunedin to study for the ministry in 1898, he recalled his outback days with nostalgia for a cleaner and simpler existence than the industrial city accorded. His attitude in this respect was undoubtedly naive, rather like Wordsworth’s in overlooking those aspects of Lake District society in England that are remarked upon in Harriet Martineau’s account of the realities.86 Wright addressed topics other than the landscape and seasons of Central Otago in his early verse. From the beginning he wrote of exile, with an element of self-dramatization heightened by reference to a separated loved one. In “Sea Dreams,” written at Puketoi on 4 September 1891, he wrote The roses now begin to bloom at home, And lilies whiter than the white sea foam. It seems as if their fragrance met me here Where summer’s glory brightens all the year. Beautiful rosebud of the lawn of love, Lily whose briefest flowers may bloom above, Forgive me if in day-dreams of the sea The murmuring waves forever speak of thee.87

In “Nell,” written some two months later, Wright strikes a more extreme pose; the repining lover longs for extinction with his beloved as the poem concludes: I am standing by the streamlet where we used to meet of old, ’Neath the drooping willow branches in the dell, But my steps are getting feeble and my heart is growing cold, – Would to God that I were laid beside thee, Nell.88

The poem is theatrical in the manner of a music-hall tearjerker and may bear little reference to the death of one of Wright’s specific early loves. He was to compose several works on the conventional theme of a lover’s remorse for the death of an absent partner; a long narrative poem, “By Marion’s Grave,” offers a reprise of this situation.89 In a number of personal lyrics, however, Wright draws attention to his melancholy, to the extent that Marie R. Randle, who at times vied with Wright for quantity if not always quality of verse in the Otago Witness, 86

Harriet Martineau, “Town-Evils at the Heart of the Mountains,” in The Lake District: An Anthology, ed. Norman Nicholson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988): 312–13. Excerpted from Martineau, A Complete Guide to the English Lakes (London: John Garnett, 1855). 87 Wright, “Sea Dreams,” Otago Witness (17 September 1891): 37. 88 Wright, “Nell,” Otago Witness (5 November 1891): 41. 89 Wright, “By Marion’s Grave” (November 1892), Otago Witness (1 December 1892): 37.

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was prompted to write of the characteristic sadness of the admired poet. For his part, Wright paid tribute to Randle in a graceful sonnet in May 1894. Wright did not remain the melancholy lover of such early verse for long; he embarked on lighter amatory verse from 1892, moving rapidly from hackneyed expressions90 to more assured effects of tone including domestic detail: When daylight was sleeping under the sea And the star of the morning shone I left my love by the garden gate For I kissed her lips and was gone. When the dew-pearls sparkled on lawn and lea, I knew that my sweetheart was weeping for me. When daylight was brightening the earth and sea And the broad sun shone on high, I stood on a distant shore alone ’Neath the blue of a southern sky, Where the flax blossoms waved on meadow and lea – I wondered if Ethel was thinking of me. When daylight was setting under the sea And the star of the evening shone, I kissed my love by the garden gate Where the sweet of the rose was blown; And the sunset was brightening lawn and lea – Ethel I knew had been waiting for me.91

In time, Wright composed numerous amatory verses, though they contained little of Cavalier abruptness for all the carpe diem that they implied. In the mythology about Wright promulgated by John A. Lee and others, Wright was portrayed as something of an agrarian Casanova, and while there is an element of truth in their accounts, Wright’s manner of describing encounters is curiously restrained. The verse is not passionless but kept within the bounds of taste and decorum imposed by the medium of publication. In similar manner, his verses expressing doubt, thoughts of personal extinction, or the idea of catastrophe on a wider scale are restrained. They do not fall short of their mark, but they suggest tact. Wright was cleverer than many of his contemporaries in avoiding the pitfalls of easy sentiment; practice made him so. In “Once Again,” he contemplates the surprise approach of feelings of love and

90 91

Wright, “Dear, will your love be true?,” Otago Witness (16 March 1892): 39. Wright, “Song,” Otago Witness (24 May 1894): 39.

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attendant daydreams of bliss, but he hauls himself out of this state to present circumstances with tough sureness: Oh that this in some far island You and I might ever rest, Idly love and dream forever With perpetual sunlight blest. Sunlight? No, the clouds are sombre, And our paths are far apart – Life’s an everlasting struggle Of the mind to crush the heart.92

In “Passing Vesuvius,” Wright describes the placid departing voyage of a ship from the doomed cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, in a tour de force of controlled mood. The poem is reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The City in the Sea” for its sense of impending doom and superb concluding atmosphere of peace and even ‘normality’: A wail of pain, a cry of agony, And all is o’er. The fair twin cities lie Crushed in the very noontide of their fame, An awful monument of Nature’s might, And the loud blazing cone sends up to heaven A bonfire of rejoicing for the doom Old earth can heap upon her boasted lords. The day is dead, the stars have set their watch, And the swift vessel keeps her stately way Amid their shadows o’er the placid sea.93

In most of his verse, Wright projects optimism, which in the Station Ballads and Wisps of Tussock manifests itself as a cheery form of muscular Christianity. He was not always so single-minded, as the poem on Vesuvius suggests. He was a product of contradictory and often conflicting views on education, religion, and patriotic allegiance. His father’s Presbyterianism reflected a liberalism of outlook that encouraged wide experience of books; his grandfather McKee represented one of the straitest channels of Ulster Presbyterianism, and Wright was drawn to the passional elements in his Irish past as well as to the rational arguments for a doctrine that emphasized personal commitment and action to a righteous way of life. Like Byron, another product of strict Calvinism and

92 93

Wright, “Once Again,” Otago Witness (21 January 1892): 37. Wright, “Passing Vesuvius” (June 1892), Otago Witness (21 January 1892): 37.

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conflicting indulgence, Wright was “antithetically mixed”94 as a character and his poetry reflects the division in himself. The acceptance that his poetry initially found was due to editorial encouragement by his patrons in Dunedin and Christchurch newspaper circles and, increasingly, Dunedin ecclesiastical circles. He did not collect his darker lyrics and narrative verses, but advanced his balladry, which was promoted after the poems appeared in the Otago Witness and in collected form in Station Ballads, by his father’s former associate the Rev. Rutherford Waddell and others as exemplary ‘New Zealand verse’. The qualities that Wright’s admirers emphasized included manly subject-matter and a cheerful embracing of the outdoors in contrast to the lowering melancholy of Australian contemporaries such as Henry Lawson and Barcroft Boake. The age demanded, one might say, such a response to the gloom of the 1890s as Wright provided. At the end of 1896, Wright moved to Dunedin, to embark on studies for the Presbyterian ministry. He continued to publish verse in the Otago Witness, and in fact published a poem every week for the entire year until he went to Alexandra and Clyde to assist the Rev. John Lothian in pastoral duties. The poems of 1897 rework themes of 1896; Wright hoped to recapitulate the success of the station ballads with a series of “Tussock and Asphalt Rhymes,” thirty-two of which appeared in the Otago Witness. Few of them are distinguished by tension or resolution as verse, but the series includes some capable ballads and sheds light on Wright’s still-developing political consciousness. He was twenty-eight, new to city life, and had a near-mystical attachment to the mountains and plains that had sustained his verse and fiction for ten years. He was genuinely horrified at the extent of vice in the city’s slums and higher echelons of society, and was at a loss to understand the mentality of the unemployed or members of trade unions. His career as a verse journalist dates from this time. He was to remain a commentator on the social scene in New Zealand and Australia for the rest of his life and would lament throughout that he could not give his entire time to his craft. His entry into the ministry was not an unaided decision; his father, according to Wright’s later partner Zora Cross, paid for him to undertake study at the Theological Hall and Otago University.95 In 1898, Wright’s brothers William and Robert came to New Zealand. William was suffering from a similar complaint to the one that had carried off the younger David McKee in 1880, and which had driven David to New Zealand. At the same time, Robert, also undertaking study for the ministry in England, 94

Byron, Childe Harold, Canto I I I , l.2. Zora Cross, note on David McKee Wright, Zora Cross papers, Fisher Library, University of Sydney. 95

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conducted a mission with Wright at Oamaru, as if to strengthen the resolve of the poet-turned-preacher. It is no coincidence that Wright published virtually no poetry between 1897 and 1905. Throughout these years, he was engaged in making a fist of what he thought was a vocation but what was finally rejected as a false direction. The manner of Wright’s ministry changed through these years. His studies at Theological Hall did not strengthen any academic bent. His university passes in English and English Composition and Rhetoric were Third Class, and the award of the Stuart Prize for a poem on Queen Victoria’s Jubilee did not disguise his struggles with other courses. Like other theological students, he undertook summer outreach duties designed to relieve other ministers in the field, but he did not pursue study for the Presbyterian ministry on his return to Dunedin early in 1898. The Presbyterian Outlook for 28 May 1898 recorded that he had resolved to join the Congregational Union and administer the Emmanuel Church at Oamaru. Wright remained at Oamaru until early 1900, when he transferred to Wellington to take charge of the Newtown Congregational Church. His career at Oamaru is notable for the publication there by his friend and bookseller Andrew Fisher of the collection Wisps of Tussock, towards the end of Wright’s ministry. The poems in this volume were not new. Wright was popular as a reciter and lecturer, but his energies were diverted into other areas that are more interesting for his development as a prose writer and controversialist. Wright was undoubtedly a popular preacher; at Alexandra and Clyde, his experience among country people encouraged him; he spoke the language of his congregations, and his services and lectures (on popular poets of Australia and New Zealand, besides his idol Tennyson) were well attended. He turned his versifying talent to good use there, composing new words for old hymn tunes and providing printed copies of them in the churches where he spoke.96 He continued this practice at Oamaru and later in Wellington and Nelson. At Oamaru, he began to campaign as a Prohibitionist, conducting sermon services and speaking tours in neighbouring districts and inviting missionaries from Dunedin and Christchurch to his Emmanuel Church. Wright’s sermon style was trenchant and colourful; he had, like his brother Robert, much in common with such revivalist preachers as General Booth, who visited the town. To increase the appeal of his message, Wright composed sermon stories in the style of the American Congregational preacher–novelist Charles M. Sheldon, whose ecclesiastical romances In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do? (1896) and the earlier Robert Hardy’s Seven Days (1892) provided him with 96

Dunstan Times (4 March, 18 March, 25 March 1898).

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models. Sheldon’s novels were initially given out as individual chapters at his church at Topeka, Kansas, and had become runaway successes as improving texts. Wright composed two serials along the lines of Sheldon’s works, and he drew large crowds to his evening services. The exercise in composing sustained fiction led to Wright’s later series of “Maori Mac” stories on Mǒori subjects, tales that were, notably, published in the Sydney Bulletin after the turn of the century when Wright had left the ministry. Wright would also write a four-part fiction, The Lost Prima Donna, a story of love and adventure turning on the self-exile of a beautiful singer who believes herself racially tainted by her “dark” blood. If Wright appeared to have ceased composing poetry, he was busy from 1898 writing prose fiction and campaigning as an agent of moral reform. When Wright’s zeal extended to taking an oppositional stance to New Zealand’s participation in the Boer War, he alienated some of his Oamaru congregation by his outspokenness, and significantly estranged one of the editors of the North Otago Times. Wright had created a furore on his entry into Oamaru by denouncing the city’s vice and complacency, and he had been assailed in the columns of the paper. The rival Oamaru Mail supported Wright, however, closely reporting his sermons and actions during his ministry. When Wright removed to Wellington at the beginning of 1900, he found himself among a different class of parishioners. His ministry was involved with workers rather than bourgeois elements, and his alienation from church policy set in even before he was transferred to Nelson in 1901. In Nelson, he continued to draw apart from the church’s formal programme, until, in 1905, he gave notice of his resignation at the annual meeting of the Congregational Union in Christchurch. The trigger for the separation was the proposal by certain delegates that the entire Union should support Prohibition. Wright was the first of a small minority to firmly reject the resolution on the grounds that other churches were not unanimous in their opposition, and that it was not the function of the church to identify itself with political movements. Wright proposed that “The evil did not lie in drink but in the heart of man.”97 From this point, he began to devote himself to social reform outside the church, while still offering recitals and talks in public and on church premises. He established his own newspaper in Nelson, calling it Te Rauparaha, with which is incorporated the Nelson Times, and conducting a pro-Labour campaign for the next two years, at the conclusion of which he became regular Parliamentary reporter for the New Zealand Mail, writing a column called “The House of Talk” under his old pen name ‘Cleggs’. 97

Lyttelton Times (1 March 1905): 3.

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Wright’s fortunes greatly altered after he left the ministry. He lost his personal effects through an action for reclamation of debt, and he left his wife of six years, Elizabeth Couper, whom he had met in Dunedin. Elizabeth and David were never reconciled and Wright saw his son David McKee Wright Jr. only until the boy was ten years old, when Wright left New Zealand for Australia. The parting of husband and wife was acrimonious. Their son later observed that “there could, I am convinced, hardly have been a more unsuitable union than that of my parents.”98 Wright departed for a Crown Lease in the Baton Valley near Nelson, and built a cabin; efforts to persuade his wife to move there with him were in vain, and he left for Wellington to make a living as a freelance writer before emigrating to Australia. From 1907 until 1910, Wright returned to versifying; he became an adept observer of the political and social scene, and his satirical talent as much as his facility and wit in composing editorials and leading articles recommended him to the Sydney Sun, the Bulletin, Fairplay, and The Worker in his next adopted country. In the period 1908–10, Wright submitted journalistic “paragraphs” to the Bulletin, together with satires and squibs in verse on New Zealand social life and politics. His “parsonical” background was later occasionally remarked on by Sydney journalistic colleagues, who noted that Wright never swore or expressed personal animosity. One legacy of his clerical years was his adoption of the “psalm” format for some of his most entertaining satires. He began submitting these while still resident in New Zealand and continued to use the form whenever moved to comment on affairs in Ward’s (and, later, Massey’s) “paradise.” Wright’s ‘serious’ verse in the Australian phase of his life is matter for another study. That he was committed to ‘serious’ poetry in New Zealand is beyond doubt. There is the evidence of several hundred works in New Zealand newspapers, journals, and anthologies. Much of his output was ephemeral – juvenilia or exercises in form written simply because he had a ready outlet at hand. He could say, however, on his arrival in Sydney in 1910: In the interests of truth I cannot afford to be modest. I have written poetry. It was rather small for its age, and rather thin, but two or three who knew said that it was it.99

98

Robert J. Wright, letter to David McKee Wright (Jr.), June 1931, in D.M. Wright, “The Family Background” (unpublished folio): 17. 99 Wright, “Poetry and – Joy,” Bulletin (8 September 1910), Red Page: 3.

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——— Mudrooroo Narogin and William Hart–Smith100 ———

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G A R D E N O F G E T H S E M A N E A P T L Y C O N V E Y S a predominant mood of the latest collection of poems by Mudrooroo (formerly Mudrooroo Narogin and, earlier, Colin Johnson).101 Mudrooroo’s book titles, like his name changes, chart the vagaries of his concerns with perception and identity. His superb first novels brought him to notice, even fame. Wildcat Falling and Dr Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World respectively chronicle contemporary times and the period of European contact in Tasmania. Mudrooroo’s fictional and poetic themes are intertwined, reflecting complex experience. The poems in the 1988 collection Dalwurra: The Black Bittern trace his odyssey from Perth to Singapore, then Scotland, England, and back home to Western Australia. The Song Cycle of Jacky and Selected Poems, which preceded Dalwurra, recites the experience of being Aboriginal, in a lyric sequence combining narrative, dialogue, meditation, and description. Mudrooroo’s poems in Song Cycle of Jacky and Dalwurra are more than articulated feeling or travelogue: they aspire to the prophetic status that Blake claimed for poetry. Peculiar to think of Mudrooroo as an Australian inheritor of the Romantic legacy? Harpur and Lawson, like their American contemporary Walt Whitman, also claimed to speak for more than themselves at times. Nobody would deny that they all had moments of what Allen Ginsberg calls “complete command”; at other times, as Ginsberg also says, their efforts bear more resemblance to “diddling away, woodcarving, getting a new shape.”102 The Garden of Gethsemane is a strange gathering. Subtitled “Poems from the last Decade,” it frames “The Song Cycle of Jacky” between four other sections. The first sections, “Stradbroke Island Dreamings 1989” and “Happy Birthday, Australia, 1988,” contain reflective and documentary poems that frequently read like proclamations or manifestos. Redolent of Mudrooroo’s wide experience of reading and song-lyrics (protest songs and laments), the Bicentennial poems in particular employ prosy and stilted diction imitating, I suppose, the stiff official Bicentennial rhetoric. To my ear, these works sound arch, the quotations and allusions sitting uncomfortably among the counter-propaganda. It could be a case of overkill. The Bicentennial made many Australians ache with embarrassment or anger, and to see Mudrooroo’s artefacts enshrined in a volume highlights the rigidities of each side in the struggle over land rights and selfHE

100 

Oz Arts 2 (1992): 84–85. Mudrooroo, The Garden of Gethsemane: Poems from the Lost Decade (South Yarra, Victoria: Hyland House, 1992). 102 Thomas Clark, “Allen Ginsberg: The Art of Poetry V I I I ,” Paris Review 10 (Spring 1966): 55. 101

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determination. Picking his way through the jargon of “patriarchal voices,” the bourgeoisie, bagmen, and the media, speaking of “labour accords” and “development,” Mudrooroo indicts “structures.” He makes wry jokes at the “unnaturalness” of language and the “too many cooks” in our history. His own “Bicentennial” poems, though, seem self-consciously literary and are frequently clotted with wordiness. He can be more engagingly precise, clever, I think, in spare works like “Walls,” “Diaspora” or “The Land.” Contemplating a pandanus palm, he observes: “the palm holds me entire / As I flake cells to form new islands.” It’s difficult to quote bits of poems and give a sense of their entirety, so I’ll focus on the works that interest me most and trust to the applicability of general remarks to other whole poems. Some poems in this book are memorable for their indictment of the structures that limit us all. Others are outstanding for their sequencing of ‘snapshots’ of the author’s self-awareness and physical travels. “The Song Cycle of Jacky” is engaging as story and as song. If you don’t have copies of the poems in their original format, The Garden of Gethsemane will supply the lack. There are bonuses in the collection, such as the “Calcutta Dreaming” section, where Mudrooroo pays homage to the spirit of India, identified in survival and compassion, and in individuals like his Bengali teacher and suffering contemporaries. Here, “waste” is the common lot, and the Buddhist “Renunciation” is Mudrooroo’s farewell to India and a reassertion of belief. Finally, the “Fringe” poems gather the book’s concerns: pain, loss, and mindful identification with the common fate. At best, they demonstrate Mudrooroo’s lyric skill. While there are traces of passion and compassion in his meditations on experience, I also observe a curious sense of abeyance, as if the author is looking from a great distance and focusing on language itself. There are analogies here for anyone absorbed by deconstruction: the reluctance to assign significance to things, the ‘deferral’ of meaning as one considers the ability of language to relate. There are some uncommonly interesting poems in this section, which, along with those of the “Song Cycle of Jacky,” give the book its poetic nerve. “City Suburban Lines,” “Cat Love,” and “Granny Mary Came Our Way” range from philosophical musings to domestic “feelings” and political identity. Poems like “The NAC Song,” “I Am,” and “What Happened to me and Bobby?” are more like duty pieces, exercised in expanding a trigger-idea to its limits. “I Am,” for example, stretches the image of an SS man until the poems creaks with cliché. But Mudrooroo is better than this. Undoubtedly many poems could have been pruned, but it reveals, overall, the urgency of a fine writer and the “Gethsemane” that Australia represents for more than its aboriginal inhabitants. 

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Bill Hart–Smith’s reputation can only grow larger as a result of Barbara Petrie’s labour of love.103 She has created an unrivalled book of uncollected works, interviews, and observations on poetry by Hart–Smith, with a bibliography and several appreciative essays, by different hands, on the man and his poetry. There is a none-too-fine irony in the fact that Angus and Robertson produced, five years before Hart–Smith’s death in 1990, a slim volume of his Selected Poems 1936–84. Nothing less than a Collected Works would seem to have been the man’s due, but, as Brian Dibble, editor of the Selected Poems, points out, things ain’t what they used to be with Australia’s former leading publisher of ‘standard classics’. There’s another irony in the fact that agitation to get Hart– Smith’s work represented in the format it deserves in recent years has come from two other poets who moved to Australia in their maturity. Brian Dibble, editor of the Angus and Robertson Selected Poems, came from the U SA ; Barbara Petrie came from New Zealand. Hart–Smith himself, English-born and raised in England and New Zealand until his twenty-fourth year, first settled here in 1936. Hart–Smith was and is a classic. I think everyone of my generation who has talked about his poetry has done so with respect. Some of us revered his talent and achievement. I first came to his work as many did, through reading some of his “Christopher Columbus” series in the Voyager Poems anthology edited by Douglas Stewart. His work was a revelation, never to be forgotten. The poem of the Indian “saved” for the True Religion concluded: “he will be lonely in Heaven.” The more I read Hart–Smith, the more I marvelled at the brilliant aptness of his images, his ear for the mot juste. While I was still discovering his poems written between 1936 and 1960, fresh works were appearing with insistent regularity in newspapers and Quadrant magazine from the mid-1970s to 1990. It is wonderful to have them at a swoop in this book. Hart–Smith’s previous appearances in anthologies have variously played up his connections with the Jindyworobaks. Those avant-garde Australianists of the 1930s and 1940s were mocked by the mandarins and panjandrums of academe and the weekly magazines for a shorter period, I think, than has been allowed. The Jindies used strange Aboriginal words at times, and for their endeavours were first regarded as fakes. If they were ‘fake’ artists for their borrowings and attempts to identify the spirit of Australia beyond European history and the landscape of the coastal fringes, their adaptations of matter at hand were more urgent and appropriate to Australia than the borrowings or ‘quotations’ of Picasso, Epstein, Brancusi to Europe. They liberated us from the cult of 103

William Hart–Smith, Hand to Hand: A Garnering (With Uncollected Poems and Essays on His Life and Work), ed. Barbara Petrie (Springwood, N S W : Butterfly, 1992).

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the Bush, and brought the Land into a modernist context. Their revolution in plain-speaking, tightly crafted verse, and a reverential attitude to the land won the respect of numerous contemporaries and of a rising generation. Their chief contemporary successor and adept was and is Les A. Murray. A further generation included Gary Catalano and Andrew Landsdown, whose essays decorate this volume. It is not, I think, too much to say that the Jindyworobaks paved the way for eventual acclamation of Aboriginal poets such as Oodgeroo (Kath Walker) and the consolidation of her contemporaries and successors like Grandfather Koori, Mudrooroo, and the tragically destined Robert Walker. Hand to Hand offers more. It notably reveals the essentially non-Jindyworobak Hart–Smith. It shows the scope of his imagist and narrative works: the meditative mini-poems, autobiographical poems, and extended works of myth and history such as “Adam and Eve” and the radio work “Canoe to San Domingo.” I’d like to have heard that work when it first appeared; now it seems to me a perfect reprise of the themes of “Christopher Columbus.” It also confirms for me a sense that we are blessed to have had such writers in our own time. This book seems to me to be required reading for anyone who wants to know more about the Australian literary tradition, about Australia itself. Hand to Hand is a monument to Hart–Smith’s “rich and fertile voice.” It is also a brilliant introduction, for anyone who still needs it, to the outstanding productions from Butterfly Books, who have, more than many of their larger rivals, the extraordinary idea that good writers and editors deserve lovely editions. Barbara Petrie, one of the finest poets in the Blue Mountains, has coedited two other collections of poetry, one of them for Butterfly. All her anthologies reveal her generosity and concern to let nothing of worth among her contemporaries’ poetry escape unnoticed. I think the book is a triumph for her, as well as for the publishers.

—————— The Province of Every Person104 ——————

F

O R PEO PLE WH O ’ VE F OLLOWED HIS CAREE R

as Aboriginal activist, playwright, and poet for the last twenty-five years, Jack Davis won’t need an introduction. His first book, The First-Born and Other Poems, contained protest poems and laments for the loss of his Aboriginal past. His second collection, Jagardoo, was published in 1978 and focused on Aboriginal life in urban settings. His plays have depicted incidents in Western Australian Aboriginal history since white settlement. 104 

“Between the Covers,” A R M F M (Armidale), April 1992.

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In his latest book,105 Davis repeats many themes of his earlier work: the shift from optimism to disillusion that accompanies growing up black in Australia. The title is, I suppose, a sort-of dry pun on the whole affair. There is no doubt that there’s cause for such pessimism or doubt relating to the present and future for many individuals whom he portrays. Davis’s work cannot avoid the issues confronting Aborigines in this country. It’s depressing to think that we still have so far to go. Black Life is an uneven book. Davis writes beautiful short lyrics about the joy of life: why shouldn’t he? But the lyrics are interspersed with reminders of his bleaker themes, like the title poem that refers to “crap life” and “scum life” for many of his contemporaries: Blood in my nostrils a nightmare afloat a mosaic of meaning caught in my throat Black life.

It’s not a book of pretty things to solace us, but a mixture of things that reassure us of the beautiful aspects of life around us, and it comments on facets of social existence that won’t go away. No good expecting legislation to do the job of making us understand. No good to just speak to the sympathetic ones outside black experience. Davis’s voice should have a wider audience, to simply remind us of the need for personal initiative, and to remind us that human emotions and thoughts are not the preserve of comfortable people only. His poem “Gino’s” is anyone’s daydream of a cosmopolitan existence in any coffee shop: Sitting free, easy on the seats outside in the sun drinking small and large macchiato flat whites iced coffee An occasional beer and other drinks An easy atmosphere It could be in a café in Milan or in some other place than Gino’s shop in Fremantle W.A.

105

Jack Davis, Black Life: Poems (St Lucia: U of Queensland P , 1992).

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I like his breezy evocations of such relaxed moments, and the brilliant descriptions of remoter places – the forests, islands, and inland locations which he loves and with which he seeks the consolation of identification. Trouble is, of course, identification brings with it the nostalgia and pain associated with his people’s tragic history. The “savage twist of fate,” as he calls it, is never far from any daydreaming about the pleasures of contemporary existence. There is consolation in his poetry, though, for himself, his loved ones, and for the astute reader who can perceive, between the lines, a hope that has never disappeared, that these pleasures and recognitions should be the province of every person in this country. Davis has a greater experience than falls to most, and broader compassion. He can be amusing, self-deprecating, and, above all, can retain his lyrical response. The poetry is not often flat, though it sometimes appears ephemeral or one-dimensional. But lyrics are like that: consider popular music’s banalities or plain statements about the pain of love or separation. We can allow that Davis has greater cause than most for seeing ironies in everyday things, and that he can rise to the occasion of recording these moments in musical lines that stay in the mind after the book’s put down. You can read it at one go, if you like, but I think it’s better to take in his words more attentively, and pause to let them sink in. He comments on his own work as a writer, as an artist with words, and, like any artist, he knows when he’s not writing to full capacity: I sit alone with words with synonyms and antonyms with vowel and verb searching the cadence in each line and verse I cross out tear out overwrite underwrite is it heavy is it light is it serious is it trite The elusive line

When Davis catches the elusive line, he’s one of Australia’s best writers.

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—————— Cheer Up and Take It Lightly106 ——————

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between a rock and a hard place. Any consideration of Bob Brissenden invites grateful acknowledgment of his gifts to readers and listeners over many years. His selection of poems for this volume107 was incomplete when illness wound up his affairs. Regrettably, the selection is still far from complete. A really comprehensive anthology of light verse has been long overdue. So has an expansive essay on the very nature of the beast, and anything Brissenden had to say about it would have been generous and distinguished by his authority as a writer of light verse. There have been numerous anthologies of Australian light verse. Recent compilations have included Geoffrey Lehmann’s Australian Comic Australian Verse (1972), Bill Scott’s Penguin Book of Australian Humorous Verse (1984), and Lehmann’s 1988 Flight of the Emu: Contemporary Light Verse. Lehmann and Scott both leaned heavily on collected works and previous anthologies for their selections, though Scott provides generous amounts of vernacular and oral material. It’s a curious thing that compilers of anthologies have by and large resisted the impulse to systematically investigate the pages of newspapers and periodicals, where most Australian light verse has traditionally had its home. I put it down to low financial return for massive outlay of time. Anyone who has conducted lengthy research into an Australian newspaper or journal knows what treasures hidden from view since their first heyday deserve to be reprinted. Philip Grundy’s observations on light verse draw on Brissenden’s criterion: it is “always marked by a clever manipulation of words; however serious its intent may be, its hallmark must be that of wit.” Quite so. Grundy adds another: light verse should exhibit detachment, “a kind of benign observation which does not treat life flippantly but at the same time refuses to take the human race and its follies too seriously.”108 Not every generation can produce poets who possess these admirable qualities – “Times of war, depression, and political and social upheaval are all too serious for light-hearted treatment. These are times of bitter and savage satire rather than of light verse,” Grundy declares.109 Fiddlesticks, I say. From the time printing presses were set up in New South Wales, there have been amusing verses on the vagaries of life in an open-air penitentiary. HIS BOOK SETS ME

106 

Australian Book Review 140 (1992): 56–58. The Oxford Book of Australian Light Verse, ed. R.F. Brissenden & Philip Grundy (Melbourne: Oxford U P , 1991). 108 Philip Grundy, “Foreword,” in The Oxford Book of Australian Light Verse, xii. 109 Grundy, “Foreword,” xii. 107

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Light verse – vers de société – is a genre that hasn’t always made it into the canonical anthologies of Oz Lit: wit has been devalued for too long in poetryreviewing circles, and I’ll hop on a limb and say it’s about time it was put back. I would have thought one or two of the anonymous ‘pipes’ against governors and administrators from the early days would have sat comfortably between the covers of an anthology of light verse. And I can’t believe that the nineteenth century is adequately represented by six poems. Marcus Clarke’s “The Wail of the Waiter” (3) already appears in Les Murray’s Oxford Anthology of Australian Verse, and an Oxford light-verse collection should see Clarke’s work joined by a few dozen contemporaries. I’m disappointed that Oxford may now appear to have succumbed to the myth that nothing much happens until we get to the twentieth century. When we move into the twentieth century, I wonder if Canberra has got Philip Grundy in its spell. The National University folk are too close to people who, for no reason apparent to anyone outside Canberra, Paddington, and Fitzroy, take themselves far too seriously. Among the few people who could be said to have ‘lived’ in Canberra, Bob Brissenden was one of the most vital – as his “The Canberra Blues” (100) makes plain. It’s more than a pity that Brissenden did not survive to oversee the editing of this collection. It’s a disaster. I’m probably inviting a protest letter from Philip Grundy, but I can’t believe Brissenden would have let some of the horrors that appear in the book survive the early draft list of contents. Some of the great names are peculiarly represented. In their efforts to mimic voices and be otherwise humorous, A.D. Hope, Geoffrey Dutton, Rae Desmond Jones, Ian Reid, and Peter Goldsworthy sound about as funny as Wordsworth’s “We are Seven.” It’s not the case that these poets are habitually too heavy to be light. When they’re not consciously pretending to be bardic, they can and do write amusing salon-pieces. In this book, though, they appear laboured and light-on. A.D. Hope isn’t always fustian, but “Clover Honey” (26–27) is a sermon in twenty-one stanzas. Dimitris Tsaloumas’s “CH OG M – Melbourne 1981” (81) flops in its effort to be ribald. It’s as robust as a footnote in a thesis on nineteenth-century Methodist AG M s. Chris Wallace–Crabbe’s “Exit the Players” (120) sounds self-aware and arch. I’m sorry about offending delicate poetic souls here, but, damn it, they’ve offended mine. Much of this stuff is yuppie humour, little amusers to be snuffled and chortled at after a few bottles of common-room port. Is that what light verse is supposed to be? God help us. Cheer up, though, it’s not altogether thudsville. Some of the First-Eleven types I’ve mentioned do achieve witty detachment. James McAuley’s “Jindyworobaksheesh” (62) is still a cleverly wounding dismissal of a rival literary

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gang. “The Convict and the Lady” (67) displays elegance, another quality I’d have thought de rigueur in light verse (and which distinguishes it from comic verse). Keith Harrison’s “Picasso Bull” (118) is stylish: none of your archness here, as he cleans the Augean stables of modernist worshippers. Geoff Page is also cleverer than many people will acknowledge; his light verse is, above all, refined. Alexander Craig’s “The Silver Screw” (86) is a nice instance of comic verse, but it wouldn’t get in my book as light verse. It has an amusing storyline – the old chestnut about the screw that keeps the bum fastened to the body – but I’d toss lengthy versified locker-room tales into the comic verse carton. If it takes too long to tell the tale, you might as well face it: there’s only Byron to measure yourself against, and if you’re not as virtuosic as he was, you’re better off in real estate. Length seems to oppose light verse. The best are short. Happily, this oeuvre of Brissenden and Grundy features predominantly brief poems. W.T. Goodge’s “A Bad Break!” (5) is the quintessential light verse: cleverly personal, nasty, and short. John Goss, Hector Monro (especially “Fundamentalist,” 34), David Campbell (anything he wrote), Rosemary Dobson, Gwen Harwood, Peter Porter (why is he so miserably represented in contrast, say, to Munro?), John Bray, and Bruce Dawe have written exquisite light verse, and there’s a sampler of their output here. The best things are the poems that haven’t been workshopped through classrooms and seminar rooms, though. Isobel Robin’s poems will get a deserved wide audience as a result of this book. Clive James’s poem on his enemy’s book will also cheer up people who didn’t get a copy the first time it appeared (though you can put out more garlic against his sad old bit of trumpery, “Will Those Responsible Come Forward?” 126–27). Peter Corris deftly renders Manning Clark in eighteen lines; John A. Scott could raise a smile, and John Clarke probably takes the iced vo-vo for being a parcel of joy in the nation. There’s a mob of New middle-aged Boys here (not so many of the New Girls – or am I dis-permitted to say boys and girls now?). It’s time somebody told Richard Tipping that no one who’s grown out of playpens and number twos can stand his poem on mangoes. On the other hand, his “When You’re Feeling Kind of Bonkers” (155) has cruel panache to recommend its inclusion in a light-verse book. His “Mangoes” (154) and “Captain Cook Considers his Fete” (153) are about as funny as a triple goitre. So is Chris Mansell’s “Definition Poem: Pissed as a Parrot” (158). I’ve sat po-faced through live performances of this one, and “Mangoes,” the way you do at poetry readings – aching all over, sweating, hoping the bloody agony will end before rigor mortis sets in, dreaming of screaming ‘Die you bastard’, and hating the human race – and I admit I hate these poems even when they’re on the page.

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Jamie Grant’s poem on cricket is abysmal; I suppose it hasn’t occurred to him that no one can make cricket, which is much more serious than God, seem humorous in verse. Cricket is light verse; every over a stanza. Grant’s poem would probably go over nicely at a party in a morgue. Nigel Roberts’ “The Kiwi Riposte” (137) does it better, faster. John Tranter manages to make television and telephones (“Telephone,” 141; “Channel Nothing,” 142) sound as exciting as a day in solitary. I suppose that’s the point. It depresses me, this collection. It should have been sparkling. And about twice the size. Australians produced amazing verse in massive quantities before the radio, talking pictures, and television usurped the print-spaces that verse and fiction used to occupy in journals and newspapers. James McAuley and Bruce Dawe were about the last well-known poets to regularly publish light verse in state or national newspapers. Dorothy Drain of the Australian Women’s Weekly published superb light verse for decades; it seems gaga to me that anyone would prefer Wallace–Crabbe’s version of Hamlet to hers. And there are dozens of formerly renowned light-verse writers who may yet remain unsung. It’s no use crying over lost opportunities, though. I lament the passing of R.F. Brissenden and I appreciate the labour involved in getting this book together as a sort of memorial to him. But I hope I live long enough to see a much-revised and massively expanded volume, doing justice to the absent virtuosi of the nineteenth and twentieth century, supplant this collection. Afterword I would stand by the judgments expressed above, with one exception. Cricket has provoked some of the finest writing in prose and verse for the past two hundred years. Some splendid poems on cricket have given rise to humorous reciting pieces (“How McDougall Topped the Score,” for example). In more recent times, a New Zealand anthology contains some splendid comic verse.110 I think it a great pity that no such historical anthology of Australian verse about cricket exists. But were it to be included in such a volume, I doubt whether Jamie Grant’s poem would be one of its highlights.

—————— McCuaig Made Poetry Talk111 ——————

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that everybody’s doing it, I’ll try my hand at a new history of Australian poetry. One of the amusing myths going the rounds is that Australian poetry is made up of chaps who come in spurts every twenty-four years like catatonic eroto110

INCE IT APPEARS

A Tingling Catch: A Century of New Zealand Cricket Poems 1864–2009, ed. Mark Pirie (Wellington: HeadworX, 2010). 111  Australian Book Review 143 (August 1992): 48–49.

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maniacs.112 Another fairly blue number concerns modernism, which hopped out of Christopher Brennan’s bed one morning and ran around advertising its availability until Kenneth Slessor took pity on it, whipped it home, and begat any amount of lovely modern poems on it. Then, when Slessor was out of the country, Ern Malley rose from the dead, and ran off with it, and modernism and Malley had a whole mob of fresh poems together. Obviously before the Pill. The Holy Ghost, little green men from outer space, gremlins, and the Angel Moroni aren’t in the show for sheer inventiveness. My myth of Australian poetry goes like this. Poets in the first two or three decades of this century didn’t sit around waiting for modernism to rush up and make them an offer they couldn’t refuse. Their poetry used anything that worked. There were some new words, references to new things about them (not much, when you think of it: people took a while to adapt to going faster than a horse and carriage or a suburban tram), and some new rhythms. Popular music was for poetry what it had always been, a mine of ideas, phrases, and cadences. At the same time, the cadences in McCrae, Slessor, and McCuaig, and countless precursors and contemporaries, also mimicked Carew, Herrick, John Gay, the music hall, operetta, the rising folksong movement, and recorded tunes and lyrics from more countries than many of us now imagine. ‘Literary’ influences included anything from Catullus to Heine to T.S. Eliot. Pound got by with Propertius, Provence, and Browning for a spell. If Christopher Brennan thought Mallarmé was the bee’s knees during the 1890s, he wouldn’t have given tuppence for anyone who put down everything else in poetry in French or English. Nor would McCrae and his mature peers in the next generation. The youthful Slessor and Jack Lindsay, though, variously seeing themselves as the last possible living examples of the genus bohemianus australianus, got as much fun out of throwing brickbats at people they regarded as ‘established’ as their victims – journalist–poets such as Frank Morton and company – had previously managed in the course of bashing their own imagined opponents, until they became editors themselves. Nearly everyone came up through successive poetry wars staged in journals. Some were befriended or “discovered’ (then or later) by academics who were poets themselves. All of which brings me to Ronald McCuaig, journalist–poet, writing topical and light verse in the 1930s which, though long considered by cognoscenti as outstandingly fine, is only now becoming enshrined in the modernist pantheon. In McCuaig’s poetry there are echoes of earlier and contemporary song and

112

Cf. Sian Powell, “Poetry Moves into a Boom Cycle,” Sydney Morning Herald (30 May 1992): 43.

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poetic modes, including music hall, classical arias, and everything else he experienced. What I admire in McCuaig is his acknowledgment that Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Scarlatti, Haydn, and C.J. Dennis also knew something about the business of entertaining a listener. These people had an existence independent of McCuaig, but in poems such as “Berçeuse de Newcastle,” “L’Après-midi d’une Fille aux Cheveux de Lin,” “Au Tombeau de mon Père,” “Schubertian Aria,” and “Lament on a Pedal-point” from the “Holiday Farm” cycle, quite apart from the series “Vaudeville,” McCuaig transmutes them with his own experience and gives them back as a variation on a theme. This is no small point. We are, I think, constantly being told to ignore what is not new, so that we are surprised at discovering a poet who has done something we didn’t think of first. “Vaudeville,” McCuaig’s title for a sequence of lyrics about average lives, was inspired. Voix de ville: transforming and transmitting contemporary life in 1933 in different voices strikes some people still as a revelation. Who is not to say that he did for poetry what the talkies were doing for the silent movies? McCuaig’s characters might want to engage with objects of desire, but they are edgy with irresolution, numb with apathy when it comes to enacting their desire, afraid that life might say Yes. If Eliot’s The Waste Land was the first extended poem in the twentieth century to draw certain parallels between poetry’s condition and the neurasthenic boredom of consumption and commuting, he was far from the first to depict the condition of anxiety in lyric form. Browning and Tennyson had been there, done that: “Come into the Garden Maud,” from a sequence about somebody going crackers, was an old-time hit. Edith Sitwell’s Façade went upmarket in 1922 when Walton took the megaphone away from the politicians and gave it to the poetry-performer in the concert-hall. Edwin Arlington Robinson was worm fodder before his “Richard Cory” appeared on the charts. Nor was Australia the Ozarks of twentieth-century poetry that some literary revisionists claim it to have been until 1968. While Slessor carried on the lyric tradition in verse on topical news and gossip and arranged blue moods in a poem about a drowned man, Robert FitzGerald contemplated memory’s role in defining humanity, and Hugh McCrae depicted contemporary society as a ship of fools embarked for Cockayne. Serious poet and comedian, McCuaig is close to being the most readable of the lot. “Early bittersweet poems of love, sex and city life are followed by his more contemplative and mellow later poems,” McCuaig’s blurb writer sums up, hailing him as “a lyric poet of rare genius.” No one would dispute that claim. Peter

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Kirkpatrick’s intelligent introduction to the collection113 adds a pleasingly succinct biography of the poet and the vagaries of his reputation. McCuaig represents a conundrum which is comprehensible to writers fixated on self-promotion: he’s a poet whose craft is in the best sense a matter of private satisfaction – the creation of a clever thing of wit or beauty (debased word, though a good one). One should, I think, revere such craft. Invoke such names as Dickinson, e.e. cummings, or Cavafy, and we rush to acclaim their skill and impact on our sensibilities. Fair enough: McCuaig deserves the chance of a similar hearing. He isn’t Dickinson, cummings, and Cavafy: that’s not the point. He is every bit as original as any of these. “The Passionate Clerk to His Love,” written Before Feminism, is still a devastating satire; so is “The Daily Round,” which considers the life-cycle of the manager of that poor clerkly worm. “Final Extra” is a crisp, enigmatic ballad: the tone of the line “Anyhow, what’s it matter?” is perfect. I know few poets in Australia who can accomplish the same throwaway line without interrupting the spiky lyrical flow of a haunting surreal tale. The macabre masterpiece “The Ballad of Bloodthirsty Bessie” is in the tradition of journalist–poets’ humoresques on gruesome matters: astute readers would, I think, recognize a correspondence between this work and the epigrammatic “Kindness-to-animals Week,” and the last poem in “Madrigals,” both of which sustain the tone of curious amusement in banter on topical horrors. The impossibility of taking a sombre attitude to these works would probably shut them off from consideration as great poetry for readers who want the world to be horrible, but these poems and dozens of others in the collection will be welcome relief to people who believe poetry is something we should enjoy. God knows what serious-minded folk would make of McCuaig’s gifted contemporaries, Bernard Hesling and Alexander MacDonald. The “Country Dance, after Corelli and Scarlatti” displays another rare characteristic: the variable-pitch ballad, whose rhythm is irregularly disrupted just as the elements appear to become rigid or predictable. McCuaig is an exemplary composer. The daily practice of throwing off formal virtuoso pieces for immediate publication in the press or on the radio gave McCuaig a facility for extemporaneous composition that is alien to many contemporary poets, possibly because we are directed to solemn reflection on the pose of poetry rather than pleasure in the act for its own sake. In the most recent poems, the meditative mood predominates – at once a distillation and an extension of the earlier meditations on social life, but now turned to homages to intimate relations and 113

1992).

Ronald McCuaig, Selected Poems, intro. Peter Kirkpatrick (Sydney: Angus & Robertson,

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friends. “Aria,” a superb consideration of the nature of love, might catch the mood of all. It is needless to remind readers who have been struck by McCuaig’s virtuosity in anthology pieces over the years of the virtuoso techniques he employs. New readers will wonder why they haven’t read more McCuaig. But that’s another story. It’s good to have his work at last in one place.

———————— A Salom Course114 ————————

T

HER E’S N O DO UB T AB OUT IT:

Philip Salom’s poems are proof of the power that is possible in the form. His subjects are more urgent than most and his technique rises to brilliance. Commenting on Salom’s earlier poems, a reviewer praised his “formidable talent and imaginative richness,” and announced that Salom’s Sky Poems115 made up “a substantial volume in more ways than one.”116 I share this view. Salom has always had things to say about history, philosophy, art, and poetry, and he has always said them in ways that run rings around a lot of fashionable verse that merely hopes it will chance on a subject so striking that it will excuse commonplace expression. Salom is an extraordinarily skilled writer who is probably best known to people who take the craft seriously – notably other poets. Perhaps it’s always that way. His work shouldn’t be hard to come by, but the fact that he writes in Western Australia probably contributes to his low profile in eastern metropolitan sites: on recent trips to Melbourne, Brisbane, and Sydney I saw a few copies of his books in specialist ‘literary’ bookshops, but they were predictably crowded into corners by the locals. A local community can help us to gain in self-confidence, but parochialism can blind us to the depth of others’ experiences. A pity. In earlier books, Salom seems to me to have outstripped most of his east-side contemporaries, many of whom, I guess, are secretly or overtly envious of his range of styles and apparent felicity of expression. I think he’s one of the most intelligent poets in Australia. His Western Australian reputation is as high as it should be; his national fame, bolstered by two major poetry awards, will only increase with Feeding the Ghost.117 It would be surprising if this book does not receive one of the major awards for poetry in 1993. Why? Feeding the Ghost is a large collection of fascinating, sometimes startlingly arresting works. They reflect the moods and modes of travel he’s experienced around Europe and Asia, as well as Australia. They add up to a lot more 114 115 116 117

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“Between the Covers,” 2A R M F M (Armidale), 17 March 1993. Philip Salom, Sky Poems (Fremantle, WA: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1987). Philip Neilsen, review of Salom’s Sky Poems, The Age Saturday Extra (20 August 1987): 13. Philip Salom, Feeding the Ghost (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1993).

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than travelogue and autobiography. His poems on relationships – between people and places, history and other cultures, as well as individuals in marriages and friendships – should trigger remembrances and recognitions among a wide readership. This is not to say that everything is uniformly astonishing. Some of the poems on intimate liaisons – or the gaps between them – sound too obviously strivenfor at times. But Salom is distinctly clever in bringing poems that have corny lines, or arch effects, to a surprising resolution. The poems in “Maps,” one of the book’s four sections, record European travels, and while I’m not thrilled to death by his Florence poems, which seem like compulsory texts written to prove he was there, “The Sex of Autostrada Driving” (33–39) and “After Many Marbles” (46–47) have the air of spontaneous, lived emotion. Salom is generally witty when he makes comparisons between sex and other activities, and he’s sly enough not to explain and describe everything. “Joss,” the last section of the book, is particularly impressive. I think the poems about Singapore, in a lengthy sequence titled “In Residence” (110–40), are something of a tour de force. All the poems in this section are distinguished, in the best sense of the word, by linguistic cleverness and superb formal structure. “Joss” concludes with a large series of unusually adapted sonnets, in which he reflects on modernity, history, friendships, and teaching experiences in Asia. Kipling and Conrad are viewed from two worlds just as, earlier, Australian culture is seen from many perspectives. Describing talk with a Singaporean friend about Conrad and the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, Salom remarks: “I felt Achebe right. The old investments going under” (120). It’s magnificent that Salom includes history – including contemporary speculations – in his work. It expands the range and appeal of his poetry. He writes maturely of friendship – perhaps the hardest theme to handle without collapsing into sentimentality; after all, it’s possible to write of love without being soppy, simply by standing back and considering the relationship as a disinterested observer might record it. But friendship: hard to get that right unless everything in common and everything that is not common is subjected to a critical gaze. At times Salom seems to be a sort of John Tranter or Peter Porter in the fast lane. He puts the reader in the picture, frequently referring to “you” as sharer of the scene or principal actor in it. It gives the poems a cool, hip tone, as in “Hunger” (57), and I’ll end with a quotation from the beginning – but not before suggesting you could do a lot worse than order this book if you’re interested in reading one of the smartest contemporary poets in Australia. You’re in the latest nightclub wearing the latest gear, each sign

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is given if not always understood, each brand-name like a perfect crime, or a post-modern essay with signatures and quotes, your skin as filled in as the tattooed lady’s. But no, you’re not sad like that. No no you’re not a freak of any kind no offence to the tattooed lady, it’s just that she’s an earth-mother for generations who thought like that. No. Style is the finding place for those who fear a life lived without compliments.

————————— Ern Burial118 ————————— But the most tedious being is that which can unwish itself, content to be nothing, or never to have been, which was beyond the male-content of Job, who cursed not the day of his life, but his Nativity: Content to have so farre been, as to have a Title to future being; Although he had lived 119 here but in an hidden state of life, and as it were an abortion.

P

S I R T H O M A S B R O W N E had in mind when he wrote this lovely description in Hydriotaphia, or Urne-Buriall is a question as puzzling as his teaser about the song the Sirens sang. But we can all supply a list of tedious beings who might better please us were they to embrace non-being. I admit to detesting certain beings. And certain non-beings who are ritually tricked-up and exhibited, like the togged remains of Bentham, to the gaze of people who honestly don’t give a toss about the old spectre, and who hardly know who or what he ever was or did. Ern Malley, like Manning Clark’s Henry Lawson, or Sidney Nolan’s Ned Kelly, is a tiresome being. For upwards of thirty years the disembodied one has been poured, like ectoplasm jelly, into both modernist and anti-modernist moulds until his surviving manufacturer can only laugh at the successive hoaxes that Malley-rooters of every persuasion have perpetrated upon each other. It’s a bit like the Australian Republican movement: is there anyone with a nose to fame 118

RECIS ELY WH OM

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Australian Book Review 155 (October 1993): 61–62. Sir Thomas Browne, “Hydriotaphia, or Urne-Buriall” (1658), in Religio Medici and UrneBuriall, ed. & intro. Stephen Greenblatt & Ramie Targoff (New York: New York Review Books, 2012): 132 (ch. v). 119

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or profit who does not want to print a bar-code on the ghost of that idea? The Malley affair keeps on coming back just when everyone is quite sure it is really old hat. We’ve seen the play, read the collected poems, and now we have what numerous folk will hope is a final word. But it won’t be. Ern Malley has been reprinted in anthologies appointed to be read in cramming colleges. Impressionable youth may learn to lisp “In the twenty-fifth year of my age I find myself to be a dromedary.” Examinations, of course, will be compulsory. It is pleasant to contemplate Michael Heyward’s conclusions in his lovely recension of The Ern Malley Affair.120 With Peter Ryan,121 I could heartily wish Ern Malley might be finally exorcized now that Heyward has provided the history, done the prac. crit., and pointed us to brighter issues. But it’s not so easy. Peter Ryan has good cause to wish the Ern buried. What, after all, could be more tedious than to have to repeatedly hear young whippersnappers in search of a quickie article or thesis topic reciting how a squib by one’s peers fifty years back is the answer to all questions about how modernism lived, died, rose on the third day, turned into Mister Magoo, and wrote like Robert Duncan, Amen. Peter Ryan has my sympathy: there are better things to do than wish yourself stuck forever like a stylus in a cracked 78 labelled ‘Croydon, NSW , 14 January 1944’. Unlike Peter Ryan, however, I was not around at the time of the original wizard jape. But I sure heard the Authorized and the Gnostic versions, together with imitations ancient and modern, whistled and sung from an early age. Depending on whom they were interviewing or addressing, John Douglas Pringle and John Thompson played variations on the martial “When Harris Painted the Parlour You Couldn’t See Max for Paint” and the affecting air “The Night Before Modernism Was Stretched.” But, by the early 1960s, I don’t think many people outside academic, publishing, or newspapers circles really knew or cared much about the Ern Malley kerfuffle. And I suppose the number of readers who bought reprints of the Ern Malley poems from Max Harris’s Mary Martin’s Bookshop in Adelaide was hardly sufficient to make the poems a household word. For God’s sake, you had Ferlinghetti to read and the Modern Jazz Quartet to listen to. Few people used the Ern Malley folklore with an ease that was not studied. I was reading Robert Graves’ Wife to Mr Milton during a break in Cassell’s warehouse in 1965 when the foreman let out a world-weary sigh and pityingly remarked of me: “Another victim of Graves’s disease.” The pun flew over most of the 120

Michael Heyward, The Ern Malley Affair, intro. Robert Hughes (St Lucia: U of Queensland P & London: Faber & Faber, 1993). 121 Peter Ryan, “The Ern Malley Affair,” Independent Monthly 5.3 (September 1993): 33.

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company. But I’ve wondered, at times, if the original ‘Grave’s Disease’ wasn’t aimed at the increasingly (by 1943) mystical Robert Graves, as well as more obvious, Australian and modernist, writers. So far as literary influence went, Graves was, after all, another Upas-tree in the grove where Barker, Auden, and Dylan Thomas exhaled their stupefying vapours on all who, hapless, gazed upon their leaves. Many people who liked their poetry Georgian (1820s or 1920s, didn’t much matter) were convinced Dylan Thomas and George Barker were hoaxers, too, come to think of it. Robert Hughes calls the Ern Malley affair “the literary hoax of the twentieth century.”122 I’m sure I don’t know of all the literary hoaxes that have been perpetrated in this (or any other) century, but his claim strikes me as extraordinary. Did the punters really rush the news-stands in Caracas and Tbilisi when the story broke? Odds-on they didn’t. Ern Malley was, even in Michael Heyward’s account, parish-pump stuff that rated scant in-depth coverage overseas. In midJuly 1944, Newsweek scoffed at Ern Malley as the “epitome of Australia’s striving for culture” and Time magazine declared the hoax “as fantastic as a duck-billed platypus.”123 Even Robert Hughes suspects that “for the first and possibly the last time in Australian history, poetry became front-page news.” 124 He’s wrong about the “last time”: Michael Dransfield’s death scored lurid headlines. Everybody loves to gloat when a smart young stager dies – as Stewart and McAuley knew. Hughes’ claim about the hoax of the century obscures the extent to which brag operates in any cultural promotion: if there’s a hoax in Australia, it has to be the greatest in the twentieth century because, as we all know, wherever you are in Australia you’re in the Speewah. I’d like to hear what Hughes has to say about the desire, fostered by later editors and critics than the original participants in the Ern Malley affair, to keep the corpse warm. The question that seems skimped in all writing about the event is not why on earth anyone bothers to read the original stuff (until it’s as familiar and thrilling as the cast and dialogue of A Country Practice) but why on earth some people are still so keen to convince us that the Ern Malley affair was the bar mitzvah of Australian verse. Ern Malley is far from being the first hoax perpetrated on Australian readers in the twentieth century. The Bush Ethos wins, I think, hands-down, in a field that includes the Colonial Romance, the Great Australian Novel, and the Metaphysical Novel. The first of these is the product of wishful thinking by reviewers seeking a promotional angle to facilitate book-dumping in Britain and the de122 123 124

Robert Hughes, “Introduction” to Heyward, The Ern Malley Affair, xvii. Heyward, The Ern Malley Affair, 162–63. Robert Hughes, “Introduction,” xvii.

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pendencies. But we can’t track down the individual initial perpetrators as easily as we can the begetters of the Ern Malley show. So let that one ride. The second hoax is the result of a beat-up to sell newspapers (S.H. Prior’s Bulletin prize; the Sesquicentennial Prize, and others: easier to trace the initiators here). The hoax of the Metaphysical Novel is as tricky as the Colonial Romance: who first thought of it? Was it a collective product? Norman Lindsay thought that what he called the ‘myth’ of the Great Australian Novel stemmed from “a forlorn conviction that the rest of the world knows nothing about Australia.”125 After Ern Malley, who couldn’t believe in conspiracy theories? How did a fit of compassion for a young man’s nostalgic visions of trees and paddocks come over the owners of the Bulletin, so that Douglas Stewart could disguise Theocritan delicacies as agrarian and pastoral themes and let everyone go on thinking the Bush was still a force to be reckoned with? A hoax, really: no one would really want to live there. It wasn’t always so. The literary editors of the Bulletin (from around 1900 until the Depression) had gone flat-out to eradicate the Bush Ethos. And, happily, for a few years they succeeded in providing an imaginative city and suburban Australia for readers to live in, until Leonard Mann and Douglas Stewart dragged the sawdust- and bulldust-stuffed effigy of the Bush out of the editorial attic again. One might ask why, as well as how, such scarecrows are put on show – when they are no more representative of a society’s experience, interests, or aspirations than those overlooked icons of local colour, the winos in Belmore Park and the Fitzroy Gardens. The tendency to take the part for the whole provides welcome relief from the necessity to look further, and accordingly adjust the focus. I suppose it’s inevitable that we will leap like trout at the fake flies as well as the true. While I hope Heyward sells thousands of copies of his book – because of the entertaining way in which he describes the antics of the principals in the first Ern Malley confection – I wish he (as well as Robert Hughes) had gone further in his speculations about the second-generation resurrection-men. I wonder if the various strands of history will ever be untangled: they certainly aren’t tucked out of sight by Heyward’s final and, I think, most important chapter, on the aftermath of the Ern Malley affair. For years I’ve read in prefaces and interviews, and heard people at poetry readings and literary conferences say with straight faces, that Australian modernism took a battering from the conservatives in 1944 from which it didn’t recover for more than twenty years. I think it’s cods125

Norman Lindsay, “The Great Australian Myth,” in Norman Lindsay on Art, Life and Literature, ed. Keith Wingrove (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1990): 105–11, esp. 105. Originally published in The Bulletin (4 August 1943), Red Page: 2.

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wallop. So, it delights me to discover John Forbes, whom Heyward quotes, as saying that those who thought modernism was slowed down by the appearance of Malley “must have been wimps.”126 I think this is spot-on. I cannot imagine Jack Blight or Roland Robinson or Elizabeth Riddell being deflected from writing whatever and however they thought best by a bonzer spoof. Heyward, more circumspect than Forbes, suggests that after Malley “a species of poetry became untenable for a while, though that would have happened anyway.”127 Heyward’s book suggests more questions than he can perhaps be bothered pursuing. But he points us in the right direction, I think. Why was Malley so right for the 1960s? Was the world finally as disjointed as McAuley and Stewart’s Goon-Show-mode imaginings had prophetically portrayed it – or were Australians just slow learners? Was anyone under forty by the 1960s not sick and tired of ‘real’ poetry, which, they were told by various primary, secondary, and tertiary teachers, and a handful of Bulletin reviewers, was what McAuley and (anyone at all called) Stewart were writing during the 1960s? Who was really stage-managing Malley in the 1960s and 1970s? Who’s still doing it? Why? What’s the full extent of Ern Malley’s legacy, when John Ashbery can demonstrate, by means of anonymized passages for prac. crit.,128 that Geoffrey Hill is as fraudulent as Malley? Michael Heyward’s observation that “a species of poetry became untenable for a while” can be taken two ways. For all that Heyward praises “the skill at mimicking the sound of a Bad Poem,”129 which can be found in the work of recent Australian poets, we are perhaps still hedging our bets. No doubt many poets are skilful at mimicking Bad Poetry; but, since we will use such terms, we can surely wonder if a penchant for (or, shall we say, an amused dabbling in) Bad Poetry may also veil a reluctance to espouse anything which could be labelled Good Poetry, for fear of appearing too much like Jim and Harold, and too little like Ern, who, after all, scooped all the headlines.

—————— Black Stump or Burning Bush?130 ——————

D

of 29 January, I was sitting in the beer garden of Tamworth’s Imperial Hotel with Judith Hosier from the Stockman’s Hall of Fame, and Tony Windsor, MP for Tamworth, judging the 1994 Imperial Hotel Bush Poetry Contest at Tamworth. 126 127 128 129 130

URIN G THE WARMISH PART OF THE AFTERNOON

Michael Heyward, The Ern Malley Affair, 233. Heyward, The Ern Malley Affair, 237–38. As reported by Heyward, The Ern Malley Affair, 234. Heyward, The Ern Malley Affair, 233.  Australian Book Review 159 (April 1994): 59–61.

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Julian Croft, who has been one of the judges for the past four or five years, dobbed me in. That’s why. He was out of town, and Cliff Hathway, one of the head sherangs of the Tamworth Poetry Group, and an instigator of the Blackened Billy Award for traditional verse recitation, made it sound as interesting a proposition as any I’d get over the tail-end of summer. So I shared the judges’ table with the timekeeper and scorer, while the officials Maureen Quickenden, Cliff Hathway, Keith Jones, Jan Morris, Bill Gleeson, and a sound mixer occupied an adjacent space, in the midst of several hundred people who crowded to hear the 1994 poetry finalists. The Tamworth Country Music Festival is twenty-one years old. The first time I was up this way, in 1977, the Festival was already big news, and wounding jokes were rife. Chief among these was the report that one-third of the population hit the road a week before the Festival, headed for the twang-free zones: beyond the Moonbi Range or Hunter Valley. But the tale was only half-true. Plenty of people loved the sound, identifying it with an era when Australian music was distinctive, before America took over the airwaves. My neighbour Hilary Carter had the habit of playing his awesome collection of Slim Dusty shellacks straight through on occasion. Amazing, the number of records Slim Dusty has recorded. Hilary’s collection must have been worth a fortune. While snobbish youth and I were listening to Plastic Bertrand and Wreckless Eric, Hilary was closer to the grassroots than anyone I knew. And if the sound of country got up the nostrils of ten or fifteen thousand Tamworth inhabitants, the Festival hauled in more than enough temporary residents to keep fearful shopkeepers and service operators going flat-chat. In 1993, 40,000 visitors boosted the city’s population of 35,100. And more than 700 came for the poetry finals. For three nights leading up to the finals, a large crowd of contestants had played off in other venues, while judges reduced the field from sixty-plus to fifteen performers of original poetry and eleven reciters of traditional verse. The contestants couldn’t have been in it for the money: the winners of each section were competing for $100 prizes and a trophy (original section) and a gold medallion (traditional). Runners up got silver and bronze medallions. A sort-of poetry Olympics, and the best-organized in the country. Next year, the prizes may be considerably more valuable. I experienced some trepidation about judging bush poetry. Not because this was in Tamworth, nor even because I was the ring-in from the university up the road. And certainly not because the sight and sound of a huge mob of country music aficionados put the fear of death into whatever high-cultured sensibility it might be supposed I nurse like a delicate tulip. No: it was because I had a twinge of déjà vu when Cliff Hathway first phoned. It is ten years since I was

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similarly dobbed by Bruce Dawe, when the Australian Stock Horse Association asked him if he’d be interested in judging their bush-poetry competition entries. I can now reveal that I sat down with Winifred Belmont, John King, Paul Vanderloos, and two casks of wine in a Toowoomba kitchen to unravel the weaved-up folly of several hundred contestants. I forget what the prize was, but the winners and runners-up were all destined for publication in a handsome volume. We made three piles on the floor, for dead certs, possibles, and outright embarrassments. The first pile was a worry: we only had two or three poems, and the Association had requested a terribly long list of runners-up. So we dug through the possibles again, and came up with a list that may have spoken more for the wine than for unaided critical acumen. There was no doubt about the winner: a polished piece of vernacular poetry expressing solidarity for a Chinese rural worker. It was gutsy and contemporary; it spoke of real experience; and it took more chances than most in rhyming cleverly, as ‘bush verse’ was supposed to. We discovered it was written by a woman living in a suburb in a Western Australian city. The final list went in, and behold! the prize-winner was not printed; in its place appeared a few of the runners-up, poems which registered much lower on the scale of good modern occasional verse and which, in one or two instances, worked-in some reference to horses. Predictable, in a way; the organizers of the competition must have been annoyed that brave little pioneering women, reliable dogs and horses, tough men on the Speewah, and other nineteenth-century verse-furniture was pointedly not included. A short time afterward, I was bailed up by a legal eagle at a cocktail party, who wanted to know why modern poetry was so obscure, pessimistic, and prosaic: “Now, take Lawson and Ogilvie....” Yes, I thought, take them and read them carefully and see how cheerful Lawson really is, and see if Ogilvie really speaks to as many cosmopolitan Australians now as in his heyday. I expected that Tamworth’s competition would be less top-driven, more open to poetic merit, and, somehow, more democratic. And it was: one of the ranking categories was “audience appeal.” Other criteria included “quality of material,” “presentation,” “starting and ending,” “adhering to the time limit,” and (shades of maligned elocution lessons) “voice production.” The judges on the three previous nights had had their work cut out culling the field, and the finalists were impressive. Not that the judges’ final marks showed total agreement. Mark Gliori, a young ex-Queensland policeman who retired from the service (‘So he must be a good bloke’, in the words of more than one informant), impressed the crowd more than most: enough to take out first prize with his own poem “Queenie” – a farouche little rhymer about a country-town dweller who, in addition to bearing the distinction of being the “ugliest woman in Australia,”

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is also a sort-of tutelary spirit on whom the town’s welfare depends. Chancy sort of topic for mine, but the crowd went for it. Ray Essery of Mullumbimby recited a hilarious McGonagall-style ballad of a yokel who is dispatched to a coastal town to be taught religion, and Bob Miller cleaned up third place with “The True Australian,” an ostensibly patriotic effusion that backed both ends. I was taken with Ray Essery’s professionalism and sly humour about the whole performance, as well as his subject-matter. But I’d have given a whole set of other prizes to the Melbourne performance poet Allen Gregory (whose “True Blue” I first heard five years back in the Rochester Castle Hotel in Fitzroy), Murray Hartin, and the Mǒori performer Campbell Irving. Hartin, a journalist on the Northern Daily Leader, is prodigiously prolific and clever: his verse-journalism would earn him a handy packet if newspapers and journals still, as they did some forty or fifty years ago, went in for witty vers d’occasion. Hearing Hartin’s poem “Just Looking,” and reflecting that it was composed on a tape-recorder during a drive from the Agquip Show to Tamworth, might give anyone pause. Could the weekend-verse published in capital-city newspapers possibly attract readers back to the art in the way Hartin’s poetry obviously does? In 1987 he won the first Bush Poetry competition at Tamworth – when Dan Byrnes and Jim Hynes first put the idea to Ted Egan at the Longyard Hotel. Hartin’s verse merits a bigger audience, and I can’t see why Penguin, Angus and Robertson, U QP or any other large publisher doesn’t take a punt on contemporary colloquial, and popular ‘bush’ poetry in between getting up anthologies of ballads by dead authors. Which observation provokes two questions about the whole ‘bush poetry’ phenomenon. None of the Tamworth finalists was a woman; yet my creaky memory of the Stock Horse Association prize competition suggests that the majority of people writing poems in this category are women. I put this to some of the Tamworth crowd, and they told me that this year, unlike previous occasions, the women weren’t coming forward in numbers, as writers or performers. Perhaps so. But I’d like to know more. Perhaps I’ll look in again next year. Secondly, not all the bush poetry I heard was by dead famous white males. Campbell Irving’s “Our Spiritual Earth Mother” was a moving thing, more ‘traditional’ in one sense than anything else I heard on the day. And among the official ‘traditional’ poems recited in the second prize competition, Ray Essery’s first-place getter, “The First Time” was by ‘Anon.’, while six of the remaining ten poems were written by such ‘traditional’ poets as Frank Daniel, John O’Grady, Jim Kiley, John Fogarty, Jim Haynes, Mark Gliori, and Charles Marshall. The only ‘major’ traditional author whose works were recited all day was ‘Banjo’ Paterson: two of the poets chose his work to win second and third places. Plainly,

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Tamworth’s bush poets stretch preconceptions of ‘tradition’ as much as the thrash-bluegrass band the Fargone Beauties or the all-girl combo Scarlet Rose are likely to shake hazy notions of ‘country’ music. There is something distinctive about contemporary bush poetry of the sort I’ve outlined. To listen to it performed – by the people who write it and have honed their performance in clubs, pubs, and events across the country – is to be impressed by the fact that it draws a larger audience than most city venues. In 1993, more than seven hundred people packed the Tamworth Imperial for the finals – at a time when bands and music buskers were playing (free admission) all across the city, and a huge festival procession was under way in the main street. And the poetry audience wasn’t just other poets, as audiences frequently are at poetry pubs and cafés in Adelaide, Melbourne, and Sydney. A broader audience in age and geographical and social background supported the Tamworth acts. There were, naturally, some poets among the crowd: contestants who’d performed in the run-up events, or who had just come to listen. One of the most distinguished was Gertrude Skinner, now eighty-one years old, who came to prominence in 1987, reciting her own work at the Festival. It’s fashionable to send up ‘bush’ poetry or to see it as hopelessly out of touch with concerns of people who live far from its sources. But, as we all know, we are lied to from morning to night by incredibly sophisticated media. I don’t expect any change. It was refreshing, though, to listen to the performers of bush poetry at their biggest national gathering. In some bush poetry, clichés are apparent at a glance: you have to cut through the predictable historical façadism and linguistic anachronisms of weaker exponents with their forced diction and tortured rhymes. But these are no less wince-inducing than the clichés of cool urban, street, club or pub poetry. Dan Byrnes and I noted that, ten years ago, Melbourne street poetry was all about being in or out of love (or work), angst, drugs, booze, defining reality, and Zen. Ten years on, it’s much the same, except that it’s a bit wittier (in the compositions of the poet and singer Lauren Williams, a lot more so). As for derivativeness, assiduous perusal of many contemporary Australian poets’ works could convince you that Tammy Wynette’s only rival as an Australian cultural guru is John Ashbery. It’s like assuming that all Australian ‘country’ music (honky tonk, thrash, hillbilly, bushband, rock and so on) reflects the melancholy of not being born in Nashville. And to assume that to be a bush poet in Australia is to pine for the mythical verities of nineteenth-century horseand-blokeism is about on a par with assuming that our best-promoted urban poets are emotionally crippled by efforts to identify with New York or Los Angeles rather than downtown Kew or suburban Westbourne Park.

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———————— This is Not a Review131 ————————

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C A M S E N T M E two recent books from Hale and Iremonger’s Contemporary Australian Poets series: Philip Hammial’s With One Skin Less and Dane Thwaites’s South China. At the same time, a parcel arrived from Wakefield Press containing Neil Paech’s k is for keeper a is for t.v. And another from Sophie Masson containing Pamela Brown’s This World/This Place, published by U QP . This is not the place for a full-scale review. Nor the place to comment on reviews of poets by their peers. No. But it could be the place to reflect, briefly, on my loss of memory and, then, on the trade of back-cover-blurb writing. First things first. I was stumped to recall exactly when I wrote the remarks, on Dane Thwaites’s previous volume, which met my eye when I looked over the back cover of his latest volume and saw my name among the sanhedrin announcing “Critical acclaim for Thwaites’ Winter Light” – an extract from something I’d written in the A B R . Thwaites and his publisher have been taking their Berocca and drinking their regulation eight glasses of water per diem to ensure long and active memories. Not so this little black critical acclaimer. Although I still like Thwaites’s Winter Light, and bid South China even more welcome. It’s a worry, forgetting dates and the precise words one has spoken and written. Which leads me to consider the back-cover game in general. It’s part of the publishing stock-in-trade to feature reviews of an author’s earlier works on the back covers and fly-leaves of new books, even though such reviews do not guarantee that the latest work is up to much. The latest book could be a duty piece, calculated by the author to facilitate a break with a publisher who has anticipated first refusal – or it could be the first really exciting thing the author has produced. As the common reader, you take your chances. You really have small choice but to believe. Unless, as uncommon reader, you have a shrewd awareness that the reviewing trade and the blurb-writing trade may have more in common with packaging and selling cereal than with critical investigation of the contents of the package. Nor is a ‘good’ review of a previous book an assurance that the reviewer was not actually in bed or out to lunch with the author during the production of the review. We take so much on trust. Time past, I wrote notes to authors whose books I liked, to tell them as much. I don’t do this so frequently nowadays. In part, I’m concerned not to appear obsequious. But when I read a bad review of a book that makes the reviewers’ efforts seem, by comparison, mean-minded or unlearned, the urge to reassure

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the author that someone out there loves what she has done is irresistible. Not that I’m frightened to pan a book that strikes me as inept trash. I’ve frequently wondered when the fat V-8 with tinted windows and a front-seat full of shoulders will pull up outside and rearrange my life, so my future will consist of doing impressions of Geoffrey Barnard in a wheelchair. Some writers are extraordinarily touchy. As a rule, I don’t like writing blurbs. A few years ago, when I was publishing my own juvenilia and poetry by better writers through a small press, I wrote some extraordinary recommendations. When I mentioned the dishonesty of this to Nigel Roberts, who published with an infinitely more up-market publishing house, he told me everyone does it. He’d written one or two himself. And he listed some people whom decency forbids me to mention in print. They have all become household names, in those households where poetry is read. Mary Lord has a story about Hal Porter’s invitation to her to write a blurb for him, and the fairly graceless comments made about her behind the scenes. I’m sure the practice has a hoary ancestry. Like Mary Lord, I still fall for some friendships, though I can’t say I’ve written a blurb in recent times for anyone whose work I’d have preferred not to have to comment on. I have been asked to write encomia for back covers, for grant applications, and for press releases. It gives me pause. The two easiest ways in the world to make yourself feel like a prat is to endorse a first book which turns out to be a laughing-stock. The best way to get a reputation among publishers as a total prat is to endorse someone who is known to write twaddle, but who consistently, through extraordinary feats of self-promotion and urging, sells. There’s quite a bit of it going about. People whose taste is beyond question ask each other at parties ‘Have you read this thing by Prawnhead that the Weekend Fishwrapper is raving about? I can’t believe they’re serious’. But they are serious, of course. If you subscribed to conspiracy theories, you’d swear the publishers were off-pushing brown-paper parcels stuffed with Mawsons across the editors’ desks. But I’ll still take a chance on being associated with a laughing-stock. I’ve written one blurb in the last twelve months – for Billy Soo-Lee,132 on the grounds that his self-published novel is so unconcerned with polite views of political correctness that it could be considered a parody of those who are concerned with superficialities. God knows what a new wave of readers will make of it. It would be pleasant to think that a book that has impressed several American editors, whose chief fear was of reprisals if they published it, would repay the author for

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Billy Soo-Lee, The Sexuality Theory of Value (1987; Kingscliff, N S W : Wobutoft, 1994).

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going it alone. Perhaps he’d even be encouraged to revamp some of his other fictions. So my blurb, like the book, went over the top. Nothing ventured… As far as seeing one’s name on the back cover of Thwaites’s book is concerned, I don’t mind people knowing I thought he was a poet to watch. He’s obviously more than that: a mature, lucid writer who has no time for poetry that strives to attain the condition of mental bubblegum or alphabetic dysparaxia. It is refreshing to read poetry that is not terrified of making aesthetic and moral judgments. And Thwaites doesn’t hide his respect for craft. Perhaps his next book will be made up of sonnets – a sight less strained, I would think, than those of James K. Baxter, Roy Fuller, Les Murray (The Boys Who Stole the Funeral doesn’t seem to me to be anywhere near as good as Murray’s later poems), John Tranter, and others who have written sequences throughout Thwaites’s lifetime. One of Thwaites’s Shakespearean sonnets, which appeared in the second issue of Hobo, the magazine he edits with Judith Beveridge, has a deceptive easiness of diction and rhyming which is like the best of Murray’s recent poems. Incidentally, I hope I won’t be quoted on this, on the back of Thwaites’s next book: perhaps he’ll pick up a prize for South China, and thereby reap mobs of useful guff for future PR . I expect some reviewers of the four books I mentioned at the outset might take a shortcut. It has been known to happen: glance at the blurb (as if it could intimate anything of what’s inside the book) and then read three or four poems in toto, glance at a few stray lines here and there, and hey presto! – review. Tell me it isn’t really like that, when I see six or seven books knocked over in an 800word weekend review. Not, as I said at the outset, my idea of a review at all.

————— Celebrating the Poetry of the Ballad133 —————

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‘B A N J O ’ P A T E R S O N ’ S C O L L E C T I O N The Man from Snowy River appeared in the Bulletin on 26 April 1890. It was far from the first literary ballad written in Australia. Earlier, the rural and street songs of the British Isles had been imported into the colonies by genteel as well as working-class readers and reciters. Paterson was aware of the old colonial songs that made up a ‘native’ tradition – as he was to demonstrate in his 1905 collection, The Old Bush Songs. But he was also the inheritor of the tradition of the literary ballad, practised by Gordon and Kendall in Australia and, in Britain, by Tennyson, Swinburne, and others back to John Gay and beyond. Critics such as Cliff Hanna have seen Paterson’s poem as the ‘bridge’ between the bush song and the literary ballad. HE TITL E POEM OF

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Modern readers can lose sight of the poetry of the ballads. “The Man from Snowy River” is, by traditional criteria, essentially poetical. Paterson’s subject is of a piece with ballads celebrating the deeds of the outsider whose heroism paradoxically confirms the aspirations of a community. Just as the minstrels of courtly times recorded the young man or strange knight who wins the prize or restores order, the “stripling” from Snowy River will restore the status quo of the station-community. A sense of contest between other “knights” – the plainsman Clancy, old Harrison and the other “cracks”– is fundamental if the hero’s acts are to be considered exceptional. Together with the theme, though, there are technical features that are often overlooked by those who would relegate the poem to an inferior status beside twentieth-century productions. The poet John Manifold rightly insisted that the poetical features of Paterson’s work as a whole were underrated. What could he have meant? First of all, Paterson employs demotic speech, which is rarely weakened by archaic effects. The first few lines establish the tone of a yarn. Some readers miss this effect, because they’ve been taught to read ‘traditional’ verse in a sing-song way, reading each line as if it were written to a metronome. But if you read the poem as ordinary speech, pausing where Paterson punctuates it with commas, dashes, and full stops instead of reading each line alone, a conversational tone emerges. The full stop in the first sentence comes after four lines, and if those four lines were written out in conventional prose style, you’d call them the start of a fairly lyrical sketch of an action story. It has always seemed to me that the thing was meant to sound like someone talking, not orating. Clancy’s speech is surprisingly lyrical: it’s not just that he talks in rhyme, but that his speech has some of those old-fashioned effects that remind us of earlier poets. Elaborating on the terrain around Kosciusko, he throws in “Where a horse’s hoof strikes firelight from the flint stones every stride”: is this how they speak out on the plains? And Paterson twists the language for the sake of smooth rhyme: “Where the river runs those giant hills between.” Why shove the word “between” along to the end of the line? Surely no one talks like this? But it fits with an older idea of appropriate rhetoric, and Paterson’s a creature of his age, that’s why. Paterson revels in detailed description of country and the specialized language of horsemanship (“a touch of Timor pony”). The skill of the mountain horsemen is contrasted with that of the plainsmen: “let the pony have his head”; “he was blood from hip to shoulder from the spur.” The other pursuers can only hold back and watch such headlong bravado. And at the end of these particularized descriptions, the myth is confirmed.

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It’s not just a myth of a lone horseman and his pony, but of the region itself. Kosciusko is more than a travel-writer’s fantasy. The odd words “battlements” and “crystal” emphasize the chivalric potential and purity of the site. The “cold and frosty sky” add their weight to the contrast between this locality and that of the plains-dwellers, including city readers who might, like Paterson in another poem, fancy that he’d “like to change with Clancy.” As it is, stuck in his “dingy little office,” he can only call on memory to invent such heroes as Clancy and the man from Snowy River.

———— Voyaging Through Depths and Shallows134 ———— 1

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HE BO O K ISN ’T M UC H TO L OO K AT .

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It’s a small-format paperback from Jacaranda Press in Brisbane, who used to produce educational texts that had an appeal beyond the classroom. The front cover has a small drawing of a seventeenth-century caravel, with a bowsprit sail, two mainsails on the foremast, and a lateen sail on the aft mast. The picture sits below the title and the name of the editor Douglas Stewart. The top left-hand corner bears the legend Australian University Paperbacks. (Was this an early advertising ploy, suggesting at once that the book was ‘set’ by universities and, more cunningly, reminding anyone who saw the thing that there were in fact such things as Australian universities? Nowadays, any sort of poetry book is ‘set’ for university study.) The poems are listed at the bottom left-hand corner of the page: “Five Visions of Captain Cook” by Kenneth Slessor, “Heemskerck Shoals” by Robert D. FitzGerald, “Worsley Enchanted” by Douglas Stewart, “The Wind at Your Door” by FitzGerald, “Christopher Columbus” by William Hart–Smith, and “Leichhardt in Theatre” by Francis Webb. Stewart didn’t jib at including a work of his own in the anthology: an interesting matter to me, since Peter Porter told me years ago that it wasn’t done to include one’s own work in a book one was editing. Not that I’ve seen much evidence of lack of hubris in anthologies printed since that time (1977) – or before: including one’s own work in an anthology of acclaimed writers can be taken merely as suggesting one wants to be regarded as ‘seriously good’. But neither Stewart nor his publishers needed to convince anyone by the end of the 1950s that he was full bottle. Voyager Poems was published in 1960, the year before Stewart left the Bulletin newspaper in acrimonious circumstances when the paper changed owners. At 134  135

Salt 9 (1996): 71–80. Voyager Poems, ed. & intro. Douglas Stewart (Brisbane: Jacaranda, 1960).

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that time, Stewart went to work as an editor for Angus and Robertson, where he stayed for the next ten years. I’ve wondered why he didn’t publish Voyager Poems with A&R, who might have been as well placed as Jacaranda to promote the book: A&R were pretty good at persuading booksellers to display their poetry books in those days. And before Voyager Poems, Stewart had co-edited with Nancy Keesing two anthologies for the company: Australian Bush Ballads (1955) and Old Bush Songs and Rhymes of Colonial Times (1957). He would edit other collections for A&R: Kenneth Mackenzie: Selected Poems (1961); Modern Australian Verse (1964); and The Pacific Book of Bush Ballads (1967). Perhaps Stewart was commissioned by Jacaranda, or he thought they were a better bet in the educational market. An imponderable. What’s obvious from the list of his anthologies is Stewart’s interest in the older Australian balladry and in contemporary, chiefly lyric, poetry. Stewart had been assistant editor (to Cecil Mann), and then editor, of the Bulletin’s Red Page since 1938. Earlier, he’d contributed poems to the Bulletin while he lived in New Zealand, and he’d stayed for a while in Sydney in 1933, in hopes of becoming a light-verse writer for the Bulletin on a regular basis. That wasn’t a bad ambition in those days: the money was good, and Stewart’s fellow New Zealander David McKee Wright had been a prolific contributor for twenty years between 1907 and 1926, before the Western Australian Charles W. Andrée Hayward (‘T. the R.’, ‘Thomas the Rhymer’), employed by the Bulletin from 1922 until his death in 1950, became Wright’s most notable successor. In the course of his twenty-two years as Red Page editor, Stewart gained a knowledge of contemporary Australian poetry matched by few practising poets. He had helped many younger writers into print, and his personal acquaintance with countless older and contemporary writers provided a near-unique basis for his forays into preserving a nationalistic cultural heritage in his historical anthologies. That cultural bias is evident in his introduction to the Voyager poems. In 1960, Stewart was considered by contemporaries such as Keesing and Beatrice Davis (another renowned editor employed by Angus and Robertson) as one of the most outstanding contemporary Australian poets. A.D. Hope, Kenneth Slessor, James McAuley, Roland Robinson and others who had come to fame since the 1940s admired Stewart, as did Mary Gilmore, Hugh McCrae, FitzGerald and others who had earlier ‘arrived’. Some of them were connected by enthusiasm for mutual friends like Norman Lindsay who thought Stewart the best of a generation. If Stewart did not love all the Jindyworobaks’ productions, he admired in turn Roland Robinson and Bill Hart–Smith for their lyric virtuosity. As well, Stewart shared the mistrust of numerous older contemporaries of quirky and sometimes even ‘un-Australian’ directions others had followed since the

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1940s – the Surrealism of the Angry Penguins, the overly elaborate Aboriginalism of Rex Ingamells and other Jindyworobaks, the too-classical pyrotechnics of Hope and others. In the introduction to his 1964 anthology Modern Australian Verse, Stewart discerned a national–classical dichotomy in modern poetry, and picked his way between the extremists in both camps. He considered the Jindyworobaks a group without a great deal of significance because its members tended to disregard technique in favour of ideology, and because other poets, outside the movement, were already practising what the Jindyworobaks preached, but with more restraint.136

Stewart’s categories gave him trouble: he wondered if he could rate McAuley a ‘classical’ poet, when McAuley also wrote simple nature poems, and such ‘voyager’ works as Captain Quiros. Judith Wright’s poetry also eluded the nets. “The truth is,” Stewart wrote, “there is a place beyond the divisions of schools and movements where poetry meets; where it is neither nationalist nor antinationalist, but poetry” (271). In his explicit remarks on the Jindyworobaks’ ideology, and in implicit critiques of other groups’ ideologies, Stewart was laying himself open to the charges that would later be levelled at Hope, McAuley, the ‘Bulletin school’ and others, that they constituted some kind of ‘official’ poetry. Emergent writers of the 1960s, like the Sydney-based John Tranter, Robert Adamson, Nigel Roberts, and Michael Dransfield, along with the Melbourne-based poets Kris Hemensley,  , and the Adelaide-based Richard Tipping, would espouse other poetics and attitudes to contemporary politics. Not all of these were war-babies or babyboomer-generation writers, but some of the most vociferous declared their aim to put distance between themselves and the old brigade represented by Stewart and his fellow-nationalists by adopting American models of the 1940s–60s, or rediscovering and reinterpreting earlier modes including Symbolism, Surrealism, and concrete poetry. They found the supposedly traditional Australian lyrical and narrative verse modes and publication outlets too restrictive. While Stewart admitted them to the Bulletin on occasion, or when older practitioners like Flexmore Hudson, Roland Robinson, Grace Perry and others published their earlier, often derivative, work in Poetry, the Poetry Magazine, Poetry Australia, and elsewhere, the newer poets may have initially been flattered, but gradually sought to create their own space for verse which repudiated the older verities and sanctities, and cultivated or created rival publications. 136

Douglas Stewart, “Modern Australian Verse,” in Stewart, The Broad Stream: Aspects of Australian Literature (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1975): 269 (263–72).

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Alluding to the emergent dissident strands of verse – whether outcrops of metaphysical, classical, religious or postmodernist tendencies – in his Voyager introduction, Stewart speaks of “the winds that move contemporary poetry” 137 and “the difficulty and the narrow personal interest of so much contemporary poetry” (8). Here, too, he found himself in some difficulties, for he was trying to convey so much in so little space. Stewart believed poetry was unpopular at the time of writing, and suggested that one cause was “undoubtedly the shallowness of the age.” He thought it significant that the last poems of this century to be sold and read in thousands instead of a few hundred were – apart from the special wartime poems of Rupert Brooke – the narratives of John Masefield. [...] Poets should not write down to cheap popular levels, either in the ballad or the narrative, to achieve popularity; but it does seem to me that they might consider meeting the public halfway; as, by returning to the basis of the narrative, the poets in this anthology have done. (8)

As an example of the seeker after popularity who descended to the depths, Stewart cites C.J. Dennis – thus providing a postscript to an ancient debate in Australian literary criticism as to whether ‘dialect’ could rate as poetry. Beyond the decline in widespread reading of serious poetry, Stewart does not list factors that constituted the perceived “shallowness of the age,” but it’s worth reflecting that he had already tried his hand at radio drama in verse as one way of correcting the taste. By and large, though, Ned Kelly (1942), The Golden Lover (1943), The Fire on the Snow (1944), Shipwreck (1947), and Fisher’s Ghost (1960) were not broadcast on ‘popular’ radio stations. A sense of maintaining the standards of serious art was evident in at least the first four of these productions: Stewart drew on Australian and New Zealand mythologies and histories for his subject-matter, and the poetry of the plays is far removed from popular balladry. I would guess that Stewart’s sense of “shallowness” was exacerbated by the impact of television on private life: the medium was less than four years old in Australia when he assembled the Voyager anthology. Television aside, though, Stewart was composing his introduction at a time of unrivalled material wellbeing in Australia, and what he considered shallowness may have stemmed from breadth (rather than depth) of alternatives. I don’t believe the 1950s were as uniformly dull as some accounts have made out. Some of those who were at school in that period may recollect blandness in 137

Douglas Stewart, “Introduction” to Voyager Poems, ed. Stewart, 10 (7–16). Further page references are in the main text. The “Introduction” was reprinted as “Voyager Poems” in Stewart’s The Broad Stream: Aspects of Australian Literature (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1975): 226–32.

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the quality of their education: I don’t. Nor do I recollect being unexcited by the flood of American and European magazines that arrived weekly with news of the Korean War and other agitations, as well as the American movies that filled the cinemas. America’s cultural influence was apparent in the poetry of some Australian writers under fifty years of age; and, by the mid-to-late 1960s, the American presence was on the way to being domesticated in a broader spectrum of Australian poetry. As for the somnolent 1950s of Holdens, Hills Hoists, Menzies, Calwell, and the DLP , I wonder where some of the people who think they were dull days grew up. Where I came from, there was plenty of action among adult protest groups against the dropping of bombs, against Australian participation in Malaya, and against the forces of darkness. Sydney could provide exhibitions of avant-garde painting, music, ballet, and opera, together with all the apparatus of ethnic clubs, associations, sporting teams, newspapers, cafés, shops, and delicatessens before the belated official recognition, in the form of multicultural policy, that such things existed. If we didn’t have Papunya paintings, we knew that legislation preventing Aboriginals from having citizenship rights was a disgrace, and activists among my parents’ generation did not mince words. I suspect that the generations of poets who succeeded Stewart’s and Webb’s suffered from the illusion that modernity was something they’d have to invent, even though Stewart was accommodating himself to the idea of modernity all through his writing career, even if he seemed like an enemy of modernity to those who came hot on his heels. I find it hard to knock him for his idea that poetry could go beyond jingly ballads and popular rhymes. He did discriminate and, committed to the notion that poetry was about the most important thing in a nation’s culture, could not shuck off a view (shared with his friend and mentor Norman Lindsay) that ‘popular culture’ was an oxymoron. Stewart and Lindsay were not the only ones who shared this view. Lex Banning’s celebrated riposte to the claim that poetry was “not the the wine but the brandy of literature” – “Not the brandy ... the cognac!”138 – echoed the feeling of a generation, nurtured on classical precedents, who gauged their accomplishment against that of Americans such as Carl Sandburg, Stephen Vincent Benét, and Hart Crane, whom they saw as dedicated professionals attempting epic (and, especially, nationalist) themes. Stewart admired lyrical writers, including Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ezra Pound, and Dylan Thomas, whose aims were anything but nationalistic (what Ronald McCuaig called “whooping up the 138

A variant of this anecdote is reported by Les Murray, “Banning, Lex (Arthur Alexander),” in The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English, ed. Ian Hamilton (Oxford & New York: Oxford U P , 1994): 29.

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nation”139), and he appreciated Neilson, McCrae, Slessor, McCuaig, and a host of contemporaries who were pointedly unconcerned with “whooping up” the nation Australia. At the same time, Stewart reckoned that “if a nation were, on balance, worth whooping up, it should be quite possible to whoop it in acceptable poetry.”140 Debate could rage around that epithet “acceptable.” 2 Who read the Voyager Poems? It was apparently used in some high schools as a textbook. (At Murwillumbah High School it was read by senior classes through to the early ’70s: was this because the headmaster was exceptional in being a fellow-student with A.D. Hope at Sydney University in the 1930s?) The book entered Teachers College syllabuses soon after publication; whether trainee teachers took it with them into their classrooms is a moot point. I imagine they did, since it was a reliable standby, even in an era (the 1960s) when a good deal of emphasis was placed on Shakespeare and other English authors by Leaving Certificate examiners. That’s not to say that every student who studied English at lower levels (and one could leave school earlier then and still expect to land a job) would have missed the joys of Shakespeare or the Voyager Poems. As for general readers of poetry, I’m sure John Kinsella and I aren’t the only ones who still appreciate the book, even though neither of us first encountered it as a set text. 3 What prompted Stewart to get the book together? If it was not a commissioned job, I had better take him at his word – that he believed that, if Australian poetry was going to be widely read and enjoyed in the post-ballad period, it was likely that narratives would stand as much chance as what he called “approachable lyrics.” His introduction instances older narratives from Homer, Virgil, and Chaucer, to Camões, Spenser, Milton, Byron, and Browning as evidence of the essential appeal of storytelling, however intricate and varied its form. In justifying his choice of particular works written by Australians, he added another element that he thought made for appeal: poems that dealt with the “founding spirit” of a nation – just as “Landfall in Unknown Seas,” by his fellow New Zealander Allen Curnow had done in relation to New Zealand. Stewart thought poems which dealt with adventure on the heroic scale might supplement a list of works which specifically dealt with that theme: hence his inclusion of Fitz139

As quoted from a personal remark by McCuaig, in Stewart, “Kenneth Slessor’s Poetry,” in Stewart, The Broad Stream: Aspects of Australian Poetry (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1975): 287. 140 Stewart, “Kenneth Slessor’s Poetry,” 287.

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Gerald’s “The Wind at Your Door,” and Hart–Smith’s “Christopher Columbus.” The former could be admitted, since it treated pioneering days, the latter because it reflected the sense of adventure that brought Cook and others southwards. Stewart’s notion of ‘adventure’ was plainly male-oriented: his navigators and adventurers, pioneers and convicts are a blokey lot, and he did not hesitate to use the word “virile” in commending the subject-matter and tone of the works. What did women readers of the poems think? Hearsay evidence suggests that women were not repelled by Slessor’s “Five Visions of Captain Cook,” while Hart–Smith’s “Christopher Columbus” registered as a sceptical treatment of ‘history’ and masculine striving. I don’t think that men, or women, will or should refrain from proposing ‘heroes’ in any era, and I’m impressed by Hart–Smith’s attitude. The poem “He Will be Lonely in Heaven” from Hart–Smith’s sequence is one of the most memorable in the entire book: He will be lonely in Heaven, this solitary Indian, servant of the young Prince Juan; baptized he was, and one of nine; but he died, and did not return as the Queen commanded, with his brethren. At the fringe of Paradise, ten million aboriginals of Eden, creatures less than human, living naked in a garden: the Holy Cross they have not seen , nor have they heard of Salvation. The fires of hell the reward of sin; therefore let us rejoice herein that one is surely saved, the only one. He will be lonely in Heaven. (82)

The irony in this is characteristic of Hart–Smith’s whole performance. And, as Stewart points out, this sort of poetry is a long step from the kind of ballad or lyric that is associated with the ‘Australian tradition’ (including works by Slessor, FitzGerald, and Webb). Stewart attributes the style to Hart–Smith’s Spanish ancestry: Hart–Smith told Stewart he drew on the imagistic casida tradition of Moorish Spain, and cited as a model a thirteenth-century line by Abu-al-Hachchach al Munsufi of Valencia describing a galley as an eye Whose lids are banked by the lashes Of the slender, quivering oars.

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It was Hart–Smith’s “He Will be Lonely in Heaven” that moved me to keep, or at least find repeated replacement copies of, Voyager Poems over the years. And I still find Hart–Smith’s sequence the best representative of what Stewart calls “acceptable lyrics” and, at the same time, a kind of proto-epic that is not nationalistic but broadly humanistic in drift. What else can I gauge from the work Stewart includes? His poets’ ‘heroes’ are a mixed lot. I doubt they would have got on with each other. Hart–Smith’s Columbus is a deluded tyrant, Stewart’s own Worsley an apparently decent Georgian-era New Zealand gentleman (even historically speaking). Slessor’s Cook is a sanitized exemplar: “Five Visions of Captain Cook” alludes only obliquely to the qualities in the man that now exercise biographers and historians: Cook was a Captain of the Admiralty When sea-captains had the evil eye, Or should have, what with beating krakens off And casting nativities of ships; Cook was a captain of the powder-days When captains, you might have said, if you had been Fixed by their glittering stare, half-down the side, Or gaping at them up companionways, Were more like warlocks than a humble man – (17)

Quite so: at a time when, says Slessor, “captains drove their ships / By their own blood,” Cook managed to spill quite a bit of his crew’s as well as, ultimately, his own. But generations have memorized the whole or parts of the “Five Visions” and it has inspired many tyro poets to embrace modernism. Additionally, Slessor’s “Two chronometers” poem, the third in the “Five Visions” sequence, indicates that wit is possible, if not paramount, in making poetry accessible, if not appealing. FitzGerald’s “Heemskerck Shoals” and “The Wind at Your Door” are of a different order from the sequences already noted, in that they are not, strictly speaking, sequences but discrete lengthy poems. Their ‘heroes’ are also unusual in being essentially constructions of a decent, if not altogether admirable type of human. FitzGerald’s Tasman has something in common with Slessor’s Cook – each “a practical man” who disliked “dreams.” FitzGerald effectively aims at ‘national epic’, though his disclaiming to like “dreams” is belied by his projection of creating, in the South Land, a possible “home”: home is the door you enter at night for food and shelter, met by love and little children; some other spot is right around the world, and soon what someone forgot

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a generation ago. And perhaps the ground was not all barren; it would be one task to learn its needs and fill them; good was not found but by that ache of striving which might ask too much of ordinary men. Though that was what the thought in his mind was biting at: the necessity in men, deep down, close cramped, not seen into their own hearts, for some attempt at being more than ordinary men. (28)

This gets to the heart of the poem’s ideology. Tasman is made to enunciate a projection of Australia’s prosperity. As such, the poem has much in common with Allen Curnow’s “Landfall in Unknown Seas,” written for New Zealand’s 100th anniversary of foundation. Both poems have Tasman as an ancestral voice prophesying peaceful settlement – never mind terra nullius or the Mǒori Wars. The “more than ordinary men” who make up the subject-matter of the Voyager Poems can be read as woefully exclusive of groups embraced by the pieties of the 1990s and later. If we no longer maintain the mid-twentieth-century triumphalist mood that celebrated Leichhardt, Tasman, Worsley, and Cook, we might admit, at a pinch, to sympathy with the flogged rebel-convict of “The Wind at Your Door.” But I can’t go along with such exclusiveness. The poems define various moments in literary and national history, and, collectively, the book defines another moment. None of the works is a full-blown epic. Long narrative poems (like those referred to in Stewart’s introduction) were no longer ‘popular’. Perhaps Stewart was right in projecting a more appreciative response to shorter lyrics and narrative poems that earlier dwelt on nationalist themes. Rex Ingamells’ poem The Great South Land was unlikely to find appreciative readers; its book-length sections, relatively flat blank verse, and didactic tone made it a curiosity to all but dedicated readers of Australian poetry. Historical narrative might be better attempted in dramatic prose. Since Pound and Eliot, the poetic ‘sequence’ had come into its own, displacing or marginalizing epic verse. The grand colonial and early nationalist verse epics of the late-nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries had receded to library shelves alongside Longfellow’s Hiawatha, Browning’s The Ring and the Book, and William Morris’s Sigurd and Volsung. Long before 1960, the bardic tone and sweeping narrative had been usurped by the novel: Ulysses and The Rainbow, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony and Capricornia – these were more likely to attract Australian readers than any ‘serious’ contemporary novel-length verse epic. This said, Voyager Poems contains more than tumbledown efforts at epic. The lyric passages, the accounts of struggle, the revelations of indecision, tyranny, and

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discovery (including self-discovery) are admirable. So far as poetic techniques are concerned, Stewart’s exemplary crew occupied, and still occupies, a crucial position. Later generations of writers, exemplified by figures as disparate as Les Murray, Julian Croft, and Robert Adamson, would find points of departure in the writing of Slessor, FitzGerald, and Webb for their own idiosyncratic lyrics and sequences. For my part, as I’ve suggested, the Voyager Poems are worth the effort of re-reading long after their first publication for reasons that have a little to do with antiquarian interest in nationalist impulses in Australian poetry but more with the craft itself.

————— In Celebration of Gwen Harwood141 —————

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one of the first of Tom Thompson’s new Imprint series, and proof of his fine eye for arresting graphic designs and his sure recognition of significant writing. It’s a labour of love for all concerned, not least Harwood’s editor, Alison Hoddinott, who makes no prefatory remarks but lets the poems and stories in this volume speak for themselves. In all the time I’ve been ostensibly committed to the trade of teaching literature, I count it as a mercy that I’ve never had to read Harwood out of ‘duty’. I wouldn’t want the freshness to rub away. Harwood’s never been a ‘set’ author on any course I’ve supervised (cries of ‘Shame’? – hang that). Nor have I ever had to prop up any postgraduate student’s inquisition into what makes Harwood’s poems tick – let alone encourage the prurient impulse of a critic–biographer bent on annoying the live author. Perhaps she’s not considered hip enough to be read by postgraduates who want to display their adherence to alternative canons. Or she’s too mature for them. But, I repeat, it’s a mercy. I’ve always read Harwood’s poetry for sheer pleasure. She belongs with others who are read for pleasure, such as Lesbia Harford, Kate Llewellyn, Gavin Ewart, John Betjeman, Philip Larkin, and dozens of others, who are all ‘studied’ but who never, I think, wrote with any eye to a syllabus. It must be awful to know that, in spite of your dedication to being heard by all and sundry, your chief readership is whatever year’s cohort of HSC and Oz Lit students, along with their teachers, school or academic, want to ferret out the last tedious detail of your life in their earnest pursuit of career-driven awards. Isn’t it heresy to say this? And isn’t it fun?

141 142

HIS IS A BEAUTIF ULLY PROD UCED BOOK:

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Southerly 56.1 (1996): 188–95. Gwen Harwood, The Present Tense (Sydney: E T T , 1995).

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I warm to Harwood’s defence of her craft in the first of the “Six Odes for Public Occasions.” “On Poetry” sets up a dialogue between a recording angel and the writer – “an arty old lady of the Devil’s party.” “What would you like to see occur?” asks the spirit, and the poet replies: My friend, let poetry be given its rightful place, I said, the first among the arts. And ye be cursed ye Philistines, and ye be driven into the wilderness ye foul critics, and be ye left to howl ye Ph.Ds in desolation. Verily, verily, I say the Formalist Abomination and all its heirs shall pass away. Poetry shall prevail. No thesis appear, that is not hacked to pieces. I will arise and extirpate all footnotes, saith the Muse.

Loud cheers. Harwood’s satire on criticism, arts funding, poetry readings, festivals, conference audiences, and pop culture makes play with the prophetic tone of the Bible (the proper version), Blake, Yeats, Coleridge, and what you will. It’s chatty, beautifully irreverent, and as unbuttoned as Byron. She smacks all sorts of loose balls out of court in a graceful display of self-confidence: Poetry isn’t propaganda, nor is a poem an act of will. Though it may help us understand a poet, it stays a mystery still. We’re caught, as Wittgenstein reminds us, In the net of language. Language finds us chirruping at our mother’s knee, captures us in the nursery. Everyone’s called, but few are chosen to wrestle, from our common speech, the brightness of the world, to reach the life that lies beyond our frozen habits of thought, to show with love much that cannot be spoken of.

This is as neat a manifesto as the rest of the book adds up to. The long affection for poetry is attested in the short stories as well as the poems (like the entertaining ode on “Little Buttercup’s Picture Book”). “Among the Roses” records

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Harwood’s early sense that poetry, like prayer, is “a spell to make fairies visible.” I would like to think that, if Harwood’s work becomes the subject of ‘required reading’ lists, it will be reflected upon by the kinds of scholar–critics Harwood lambasts in her ode “On Poetry.” The answers to their questions are there in the short prose pieces describing Harwood’s early life, and her sense of the primacy of love is everywhere evident: love for the strange neighbours, for casual visitors, for her family (yes, of course there are tensions, otherwise the stories wouldn’t be so memorable). “Goddess of the Crossroads” concludes with a prolepsis from the early encounter with the “Gypsy” or “witch” who foretold Harwood’s future: “Mother, you are like an old gypsy yourself now with your snowy hair and tanned skin… / Now it is I who must comfort you against the dark.” The story “Gemini” records the secret life of children, with their important rituals against grown-ups – words and actions based on Lodge ceremonies, binding together the participants in rebellious pursuits. And the account of the suffering of an unhappily married woman in “The Glass Boy” is a masterpiece of brevity and depth. Its close catches a world of significance: “Our street was full of boys. It was nature’s way of making up for the Great War.” The four stories tantalize with hopes of others, though I doubt that more will appear which have a relation to Harwood’s early days. Perhaps this is sufficient as autobiography. I don’t really regret the paucity of stories, in terms of number: they are gloriously written, and there are, after all, the letters, also edited by Alison Hoddinott, in an award-winning collection published by Thompson while he was with Angus and Robertson. Autobiography surfaces in the poems as well as the stories. “Midwinter” is kick-started with a lucky find in a Salamanca market-stall: a commentary on the Book of Job, with a Queensland Book Depot stamp. “O Brisbane you have sent me this text, and to what end, from my old lunch-hour haunt…?” Memory speaks eloquently, and Harwood recollects for us her father’s God, “the Great Architect of the Universe,” and her mother’s, who “rode on her hip, the boychild to whom she sang, at whom she smiled all day” (the “Little Man” of the prose-pieces?). The word “charm” occurs: her grandmother “used one text as if it were a charm: ‘Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him’.” The sense that words are spells, charms, a sort of poppysma against the evil of the world, recurs throughout the poems. The young Harwood’s “word-book” captured unusual gems from the word-hoard of others’ speech, against the day when they would surface here. And the words take us back to the original “Word,” in the Eve poems that are among the treasures of the collection. I haven’t seen them before, but I’m grateful that they’ve been gathered up: nine “Songs of Eve” (including one to the tune of “The House of the Rising Sun”) and three further

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“Songs of Eve” dedicated to James Penberthy make Eve contemporary, cool as a cucumber: Adam came in from his bird-watching, flopped on the grass, said “Where’s my dinner?” Get it yourself, I said, There’s plenty of everything, just go and pick it. “What’s that you’re reading,” he said. I said I’ve bought this set, the Book of Knowledge. It will help me get ahead. Such a nice salesman. Try this apple. (“Songs of Eve II”)

The seeker after recensions of myth will have a field day with these songs. In the third poem in the second set, Eve describes the unicorn, who laid in my lap his fearful horn and now adores me says he’s my slave and buys me a Porsche and a microwave and a washing machine and a fan-forced oven and all of the symphonies of Beethoven on compact disc and a great TV and a queensized waterbed just for me.

There are also recensions of her own creatures: two of the three “Later Texts” reconsider the life the poet. The third of the “Later Texts” tosses up a fresh view of Eloisa’s response to Abelard; the first I take (erroneously?) to be a sort of selfportrait: She sits in the park, wishing she’d never written about that dowdy housewife and her brood. Better the Memoirs of a Mad Sex-Kitten, or a high-minded Ode to Motherhood in common metre with a grand doxology. “They have eaten me alive.” Did she write that?

Turning from Harwood’s meditations on a suburban fiction, I’m rather surer of the identification of poet and persona in the second “Later Text”:

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She practices a fugue for pure enjoyment, The graceful C sharp major from Book One. Friends call. “Still at your classical employment?”

Of course, we might observe: it never ends. And it’s not just the writer of a poison-pen letter referred to in the poem who constitutes a social pest to distract the poet in her meditations. Harwood concludes: “Be wise, my sorrow. Evening falls as last.” This seems to me to capture the sure knowledge that silence is as much part of communication as words – just as Bach, Satie, and Monk exploited the silences in music. Music is celebrated throughout the book: in the apostrophe “To Music” (“made of the very air we breathe, / with us from everlasting, always new, / in throats, in guts, in horsehair and wooden bellies”), in “Midwinter Rainbow,” addressed to Vincent Buckley (“You laughed once when I told you / the luminous space between / inner and outer rainbows / is called Alexander’s Band”), and in the incidental references and allusions (the angel of “To Poetry” deplores “the witless scoring for treble, alto, tenor, bass”). “To Music” acknowledges the presence and the varieties: “nowhere without a human ear.” If we quibble with Harwood’s definition, we had better write our own and come up with something as wide-ranging, tolerant, and celebratory. Among the elegies and lyrics, “The Death of Eisenbart” nestles next to a poem “On Uncertainty.” Eisenbart, in hospital, calls his nurse (“reminiscent of his mistress”): The wardsmaid brings a get-well card: a fat koala wearing braces to keep its rompers up, the sky thick with balloons. Wrong room she says, taking it back. It’s not for him. What is? More pain. A taste of chaos.

The rhymes are toned-down, the mood of confusion imaged in jumbled recollections. “Listen, he says, as he dies, frowning” – in a poem in which Harwood bids an elegant farewell to another of her creatures. As “The Death of Eisenbart” indicates, Harwood locates the sincerity behind even the kitsch that passes for sentimental messages. Her facetious rhythms and rhymes elsewhere jostle pop notions with culture: We all know that Yeats was silly Like us: but Wittgenstein was sillier and really not like us at all. He said himself he wrote for men who’d breathe, one day, a different air.

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In that case, they’d need different lungs. Never rely on metaphor. (“On Uncertainty”)

Harwood’s friendships with, and homages to, other writers and musicians are also memorialized. Vincent Buckley is directly recalled in three poems, one of which gives the book its title: “Pain’s your continuing absence from the world / among other matters.” These are restrained, decent elegies: in a dream of Buckley, You said, “We live two lives. One in the world, and one In what others write about us.”

“A Sermon” is prefixed with a text by Veronica Brady: “The way to make sense of a text is to give it a context.” Like the occasional ode “Syntax of the Mind,” this is one of the philosophical tours de force in the collection. The latter reaffirms her membership of the devil’s party, illustrating its theme with recollections of her joy in perverse readings of scripture, love of grammar, and the “heady taste” of ideas gleaned from Joyce, Eliot, Proust, “the mighty Russians” and Berg, Bartok, Schoenberg, Beckmann and Klee.

(I’m pleased she included Beckmann: his “Woman with a Mandolin” stopped me in my tracks when I saw it in a Munich gallery.) “Syntax of the Mind” is an essay on memory, like much in the book, setting against any desire to revisit all of life’s experiences the gain in terms of “fugitive moments of joy’, and thankfulness to those who taught her “to use the language the right way.” Little doubt about that, in this essay, and in “A Sermon,” which acknowledges: As Hume observed, he [God] might well be a spider. In fact he’s language, throned among the cherubim, enclosing his own elementary syntax, sole I-am-that-I-am, a thought we think among the coloured surfaces of things that offer us no literal understanding, imagining a silence we must enter, a space of pure unmediated knowledge.

I wonder if I should continue to heap up the good things to be found in The Present Tense. It’s not good enough to excerpt from the works. I commend the Tasmanian Peace Trust Lecture, another verse-essay, outlining the origins of fascination with language, and Harwood’s concern for the place of poetry is a world of war-filled presences (including memories). This important poem

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canvasses the multiform responses of those who found suffering inevitable and variously added to it, resisted it, or accommodated themselves through rationalization – Homer, Socrates, Virgil, Milton, Augustine, Russell, Pavlov, Skinner, Heidegger. Keats’s view is endorsed (“it is art that stays to sing to passing generations”), together with Socrates’ “meditation on death” and Heidegger’s wonder “that there are things in being.” Harwood adds: So let us look at the living world with a kind of Socratic pleasure: discover again and again the need for a merciful vision of what has been, and what is now, and what might be in the future; and fight, if we must fight, for truth.

Mercy and truth, together with love and wonder, stand out as guiding lights in more than this single poem. At the end of it all, I know nothing of Harwood’s day-to-day life but what I gather from the work. A poem in memory of William Hart–Smith contains a line I think characteristic of the whole trend: “I should have written / to tell you I think The Ship’s Cat is a knockout.” When I wrote the foregoing review, I added, at this point, “I hope this review tells Gwen Harwood that I think The Present Tense is also a knockout.” Alison Hoddinott, to whom I sent a copy of the review, forwarded it to Harwood, who wrote back to say how pleased she was that I liked her occasional verse. I’m pleased I added the line.

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this is a beautifully got-up volume:144 what the trade would call a deluxe paperback: glossy wraparound dustjacket, lovely reproduction of a Perceval painting (“The Man,” 1942) on the front. Nice paper and fonts: the way Max Harris might have liked to see his work gathered at the last. Too bad he didn’t. Alan Brissenden’s introduction (vii–xx) culls details of Harris’s poetic career from printed and manuscript sources: it will be handy for people who want to chase up details beyond Harris’s collections of essays and scarcer novel and volumes of poetry. Alister Kershaw’s afterword “Salute to Max Harris” (106–10) is handsome, for the light it throws on a friendship which was picked up after decades of separation. I don’t propose to dwell on Harris’s life, though. The poetry is the thing, after all. O START WITH EXTERNAL S,

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Brissenden’s remarks on the poetry point to the allusive density and flashiness (akin to posturing) in early work, and the fine lyricism of later works in particular. Brissenden perceives fluency (verbal prodigality giving way to sparer technique) and pervasive melancholy, punctuated by narrative and satiric forays. I’m putting this as tersely as I can: Brissenden strikes me as a good critic of the poetry, and a good ‘selector’. I grant that I haven’t read everything that Harris wrote, but I’m reasonably familiar with most of the collections, and with some of the more arcane motherlodes in which work first appeared, and Brissenden doesn’t withhold examples of experimentation pushed to the limits of each period. Like many readers for whom the Ern Malley affair was (and remains) old hat, I’m interested in what Harris wrote in spite of the debates which rage about his lean output even up to the exposure, let alone afterwards. Harris’s ‘surrealism’ has sometimes seemed to me as wacky as any of the wilder reaches of the “billabong troubadours” (“The Tantanoola Tiger,” 72). While I recognize that his output and influence were salutary against the settled-in late-Georgianism or neoclassicism of some of his peers, it’s pleasing to tumble to later poems of his which some folk may read as a sort of recantation of early experimental, enigmatic utterances, but which I would read as a shrewd melding of all the impulses of his poetry until the 1960s and 1970s. Thus, “Colonial Ghosts in the Adelaide Hills” pronounces: “Out, Judith’s bullocky, black billies, and all!” (74) and conjures up other company from the earth: “Sir Thomas Elder descends his rich crank’s tower” (74) and “every dead settler worth his grave” (75). And, after so many poems which conjure or court varieties of death, “Sleep Demeter” declares “The pain of the day, the haunted houses of the night, are precisely What we were not born to” (101). A poem “On the Death of Mrs Adele Koh” puts it more tersely: “Death has lost my vote” (95). Love, a fleeting subject of his early work, is given the guernsey in Harris’s later verse, and celebrated as “our one certitude of the soul.” “Love’s Metaphysic,” dedicated to John and Sunday Reed, defines “the poetic urge, the which is naturally love” (98): “naturally”? One would not have thought so at times, conning over the early things like “Words to a Lover” (“Know that we are lovers, and as such, are grown gravely old and do not expect much,” 6). Words like ‘sardonic’ and ‘laconic’ come to mind while trawling through the poems from The Gift of Blood (1940) and Dramas From the Sky (1942). Except, perhaps, in poems like “Concessions” (11) and “The Pelvic Rose” (12–17), which seem over-contrived, overblown. Whatever Brissenden and others have claimed for it as Eliotian, the four-part “The Pelvic Rose” (dedicated to Salvador Dalí, and with prefatory remarks, 12)

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always struck me as a vintage undergraduate poem, a rapt neophyte’s sesquipedalian response to Freud and biological urges, and a Krafft–Ebing job on clarity. I suppose Harris could have held back on some deliberately gnomic expressions, but then he would have been prosecuted for obscenity a few years earlier. Where the images are sharpest, the language least abstract (as where Bataille sometimes seems keen to let no gouging of bodily parts remain implicit where full details will do) one wonders what, beside shocking the beastly bourgeois, the point of it all was. Harris’s “Mithridatum of Despair” (9) and other shorter poems from the 1940s strike me as more lucid explorations of angst, sexual ecstasy, or frustration with language. The poems involving landscapes are similarly interesting, as Harris eschews the sunburnt-country clobber of balladists and aboriginalizing Jindies. The earliest poems as well as the later work seem more concerned with finding the right language than with conveying clichés. Whether employing cunning free verse or sophisticated stanza-forms in narrative, meditative or lyric verse, Harris maps the process of writing about landscape. “The Coorong” and others contain some terrific epitomes: “Because all meaning is retrospect / of visual trauma and surprise” (28); “I could not sing, a Poet, in verbal tone / that flattened art and image to a landscape” (“The Prelude,” 22); “we have no faith that the heart can change the weather” (“The Explanation,” 70). The epigrammatic turn of phrase is better illustrated in poems on arresting time, on love, and on poetry itself. The striking rhythmic effects (early remarked on by Charles Jury as one of Harris’s gifts) also repay re-reading of nearly every poem in this collection. Harris’s enduring affection for the tropes of English metaphysical verse is plain in numerous poems whose titles recall Donne, Herbert, and their peers. “Lines to a Lady” observes: “this, you know, is New Found Land” (30); “The Traveller” (24–28) plays an elaborate game on the significance of the Antipodes. The inclusion of outré, colloquial or vernacular expressions in philosophical or narrative discourses makes me wonder that he has not appeared in more anthologies. Consider that old stager of his, “The Tantanoola Tiger” (71–73): “pastoral Quixotes” and “red faced / young Lindsay Gordons” pursue “invisible trails,” where “Beauty burst on a loveless and dreary people” (72). The humour and ironies might assuage any outrage that the Tantanoola citizenry harbour. The “loveless and dreary” ones are found wherever Harris turns his gaze; when he considers “Dawn at Sea,” he conceives of “grey uneasy lovers on the bed / [...] making their passage over the dead” (84). So, in Harris’s poetry I see love and death performing a pavane that stumbles at times even as the couple move to a graceful conclusion. There is much elegance, much wit, and an admirable lack of rancour. Brissenden is spot-on, I

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think, to recollect John Dowland, when comparing the tone of one of the later lyrics. Jenkins and Croft, Donne and Herbert are well-found in Harris’s tumultuous and crowded three-quarters of a century.

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between books for Eric Beach, and I’m surprised at the choice of poems in Weeping for Lost Babylon – frequently pleasantly surprised.146 At the same time, I wonder at the selection process. I’d have thought we’d see more of the poems which have made him a star turn on performance circuits and in anthologies. “Despite his success with audiences,” the publisher’s note on Beach ambiguously informs us, “Eric Beach has been included in every anthology published by major literary magazines in Australia.” “Despite”: why not ‘in addition to‘ or ‘as a corroboration of’? Eric Beach has obviously given the blurb-writer problems. It’s fashionable to slot him in with ‘performers’ as if performance poetry somehow guarantees lack of serious intent in poetry. Lauren Williams, Jenny Boult, Geoff Goodfellow, Komninos, Myron Lysenko, and a host of others have given reviewers and publishers similar problems: how to package the performance artists who also look and sound good on the page? I don’t think the critics’ conceptual division of poets into ‘performers’ and (presumably ‘real’) writers has done much to elevate Beach’s reputation among those who don’t possess “every anthology published by major literary magazines.” And you won’t find his work in the New Australian Poetry, the Oxford Book of Australian Verse, and a mob of other major anthologies that have predominantly drawn on monograph publications. A pity. The first anthology I read containing Beach’s work was Arthur Baysting’s 1973 The Young New Zealand Poets, where Beach’s lyrics (still sporting capital letters) sat beside such established “young” (prematurely middle-aged?) poets as Sam Hunt, Peter Olds, Barry Southam, and more ‘experimental’-seeming practitioners – Gary Langford and (in ascending scale of accomplishment, to my mind) Alan Loney, Don Long, Jan Kemp, and David Mitchell. Beach’s poetry had features it still retains: a beautiful sense of paced speech, zippy epithets, domestic situations couched in surrealistic images (“I heard a vampire knock last night”; “I pedal wheels of granite through the cold & clanking streets”), a cagey revelaT HA S B EEN A L ONG TIM E

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Australian Book Review 182 (July 1996): 54–55. Eric Beach, Weeping for Lost Babylon (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1996).

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tion of his own vulnerability, a compassion – beyond democratic political gestures – for fragile individuals, and a great sense of humour. Weeping for Lost Babylon extends all these traits. The compassion is everywhere apparent, most programmatically in the dramatic monologues drawn from Beach’s experiences with working with intellectually handicapped people, and in the title-piece elegy for his own son. At times, Beach’s whimsy evokes visions of Michael Leunig-type small persons experiencing a world of scaly monsters, yet insisting on the marvellous and beautiful in everyday encounters – in a dried-flower arrangement (“I made arrangements / watching th days fall to th sill”), railway yards, neighbourhood callers and drifters’ stories, lovemaking (“when you get excited / we get police messages in bed”), family reunions (“eric’s pinching granddad’s letters for his poems”), and other minutiae. Beach’s poems reveal the extraordinary intensity of emotions, which are not the preserve of only the very rich. Grief, ecstasy, dazzling dreams, wistful ambitions, and the curiosity expressed by a wonderful cast of characters are never undervalued. Lives are honoured – whether those of his ancestors, family, lovers, friends, passers-by, or poetic predecessors. One of the most engaging poems in the book is the first, “basho’s autobiography,” a show-piece of Beach’s gifts for lyricism, brilliant images, narrative, witty self-deprecation, and humane feeling. There’s a sureness about this poem that sets the tone for much of the remaining hundred and forty pages. I think it knocks for six the work of many of his contemporaries who are better known as imagists. Technically dazzling, it has the warmth of Issa, as well as Basho. The clipped diction (a Beach trademark, like that of his New Zealand contemporary David Mitchell) contributes to the precision of the work. Throughout, Beach transforms the everyday, in gnomic or aphoristic turns of phrase that stay in the mind. To say he borrows from everything he hears and reads and sees is to put it too low: “there is no truer saying than that each of us is ‘an omnibus in which all of our ancestors ride’” ; “ ‘ parties’ you said ‘were for / enjoyment, not joining’” ; “his last post in th letter box / where snails turn envelopes into clouds”; “post-modernism is th life you write before you’ve lived”; “she wanted me forever / but not just now.” At one stage it occurred to me that Beach’s poems are most simpático with the lyrics of Jacques Prévert: the same sense of song (the list of jazz singers and musicians who have performed Beach’s work is impressive), the wit that ranges from Zen-koan slyness to zany audacity, and the unembarrassed assertion of the primacy of love’s intimacy. Always there’s the acute self-consciousness – his poem’s “gateway” acknowledges: I went to live with selfish poverty making a crust

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& throwing it to the birds.

Do I have any complaints? Yes: I think A&R could have taken on board more of Paperbark Press’s talent for designing a book which is not only remarkable for its satisfying contents but which also looks and feels good to the eye and hand. The margins could be broader, the pages larger. Perhaps they are mimicking the small cheap paperback editions in which Prévert used to appear. But I doubt they had that in mind. However, we can be grateful for small mercies. Beach’s first major collection in years deserves a fanfare.

——— Goodfellow’s Semaphore and Other Messages147 ———

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E O F F G O O D F E L L O W ’ S Semi Madness brings together poems of his we’ve seen before in print, and some that we’ve heard from one end of the country to the other.148 Some are short, snappy lyrics, others dramatic monologues, and a number of short or lengthy prose poems (“Out of the Shadows,” “Me and Eddy,” “The Eyes Have It” … ). Several themes hold the collection together: the madness or sanity of contemporary Australian society; the vulnerability of ordinary people, optimism in the face of personal or institutional brutalization, and the narrator’s affection for all his neighbours, whether they are scattered around the globe (“Emma in London, Ulla in Aachen, Theo in Athens”) or whether they’re sojourners in Semaphore, the suburb that provides Goodfellow with a world of experiences to draw on. A handful of poems have appeared in earlier books, but they are appropriately located in this one, which gathers the Semaphore-inspired poems at a blow. “The Lemonade Kid and His Brothers” is an extended yarn about Goodfellow’s experience of collecting his brothers to take them to work after their nightly binges at the local, at home, and with the Hell’s Angels who have moved in across the street. There are moments of comedy in this narrative: Geoff arrives home after an afternoon with the brothers and the Angels: “The dog barked when I walked in. Then the wife started.” To hell with political correctness: the fascination with urban pirates and their notion of a work ethic offers stark contrast with the storyteller’s wife’s ethic. Whatever brought this couple together isn’t in it anymore. Goodfellow has near-perfect pitch when it comes to recording dialogue. His poems capture voices of Semaphore residents: mad Eddy, Dorothy, Bobby, an

147  148

Overland 152 (Spring 1998): 118–20. Geoff Goodfellow, Semi Madness (Adelaide: Goodline, 1998).

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anonymous “old bloke” (of twenty-eight years), Melanie, and others who live on the fringe, in the middle of the suburb celebrated in the book’s first poem. Goodfellow doesn’t ‘take off’ the voices he hears: he invests them with understanding and sympathy. Sometimes he reads the characters from outside: “De-Tox Blues,” “Home Ground,” “Semaphore Sandra” (a rare “rhymer,” as Charles Bukowski called such poems), “Unsteady Eddy,” “Grace” (a poem about Goodfellow’s daughter). These poems steer away from sentimentalizing their subjects. There are some accomplished technical effects in many of the Semaphore poems – as we’ve come to expect in most of Goodfellow’s writing. The clipped lines, the cannily placed line-breaks, the mix of vernacular snippets and commentary (rumination, really), make for variety, surprise, and sheer pleasure. In “Semaphore,” after a catalogue of the fashionable and the unfashionable types who make up the population, Goodfellow comments: “chances are – / Semaphore / is not yet ready for you.” Another, “Which Bank,” kicking off with a description of overheard conversation between two girls at a handy bank, typifies Goodfellow’s placement of a telling line at the end: i turned and faced them when i heard the girl with the most skin blemishes speak they keep you fucken waiting at the counter for half a fucken hour she said girls

girls i said attracting their attention that’s no way for a semaphore girl to speak we’re not from fucken Semaphore the tallest girl snarled that’s fucken obvious

i replied

Goodfellow’s poems are like musical scores: to hear him read (or recite) his work is to listen to a performer with a gift for the value of pauses, and for switches between modes and registers. Sometimes he plays it for comic effect, but something besides comedy comes through, loud and clear, in poems like “Unsteady Eddy,” “Me and Eddy,” “A Handful,” and others. The victims of Goodfellow’s humour are the exploiters and the hypocrites in society: “Out of the Shadows” characteristically sends up the stock-market junkies. And all through these poems, Goodfellow portrays a society in which the behaviour of the marginalized and mad often appears saner than the manner and routines of the certified

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straight. To say that Goodfellow’s affinities are with social realism and the working class is to typecast his accomplishment. Goodfellow is literally at home with his tragic suburban toilers and drifters. For all that his self-dramatization appears a pose, he now and then reveals a sense of the comic that, together with his generally tactful avoidance of melodrama, gives his poetry a depth often lacking in the work of others who appear to visit the suburbs and the underclass only as tourists. The Sex Poems Unleashed is a terrific bunch of new works (new, at least, to this reviewer).149 It shows a side of Goodfellow that everyone who has heard him knows – the public hard-case jokesmith who wants to get in first with a crack at himself, before anyone twigs that a lot of the repartee is a pose and that he’s secretly as soft as putty. The first two poems in the collection are clever putdowns of himself as sexual performer. “Small Town Talk” and “Anti Climax” bring us back to the Semaphore ethos: a small town, where everything is known. While the comedy of sex is clear in these and in “Qualifying the Theory,” “The Songbird,” another mood emerges from “The Heat,” “Reminders,” and “Perished.” Here, the traditional traps for every player of the game appear: indulging the luxury of thinking a relationship might actually last, or that, once the contact has ended, one can drive a stake through the heart of its corpse. Nice tries; and, I think, a poem like “Reminders” is as fine an example of this genre as anyone can offer. This is a small collection, but it’s one of Goodfellow’s most memorable. So is the cover: a photo of Goodfellow, naked except for swimming goggles, holding a plastic snorkel in place of his penis. My copy came wrapped in glapwrap, with a condom inside: I did say he has a sense of humour. The poems are much more interesting, and likely to last, than the packaging.

———————— L’Chaim to Life150 ————————

M

M O R G A N ’ S F I F T H B O O K O F P O E M S 151 is in the fullest sense refreshing. He makes the world attractive in spite of the pain he’s familiar with, and which friends and fellow beings suffer everywhere. Morgan has experience more than most: these poems chart the heartache and loss of forebears, lovers, children, and those encountered in his career as suburban and hospital pharmacist. The drugs we use, including poetry, to make the going smoother: he knows these, as Jacques Prévert, an admired model, knew the

149

Geoff Goodfellow, The Sex Poems Unleashed (Adelaide: Goodline Press, 1998). Ulitarra 14 (1998): 127–31. Mal Morgan, Out of the Fast Lane (Melbourne: Five Islands Press, 1998).

150  151

AL

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“charm” in the lovely speech that softens blows and lets the mind out ‘on parole’. It’s irresistible to compare Morgan’s late poems with those of Prévert: they share the predilection for crisp, tight images, the pared-down quickness of a word, and the sense that words can heal or hurt. And there’s no doubt that both poets perceive the miracle of everyday things: read Prévert’s “Vous allez voir ce que vous allez voir” straight after Morgan’s verse, and catch the sense of wonder Morgan shares with the poet called with good reason “le plus populaire” in the France of his time. To say that Prévert and Morgan are uncannily sympathetic with people is to understate their distinction: their verse embodies commitment, deftness, sinuosity, musicality, timeliness, and much else. Love is the dynamo and marvel of marvels for both. In their ways, they have made poetry attractive to general readers and listeners, and have made it out of a sure sense of celebration of the best impulses that are in human nature – and that is no small achievement. I don’t want to give the impression that you simply have to go out and get hold of Prévert and you have the key to Mal Morgan’s poems. Nor do I imply that Morgan’s poetry is derivative. I could point up correspondences between Morgan, Ferlinghetti, and William Carlos Williams: the chanson-like esprit, the occasional wryness, the shrewdness and precision of image making. So, I am talking about recognitions, correlations that spring to mind, triggered by Morgan’s allusions and my own sense of his place in twentieth-century Australian poetry. For Morgan, as for Prévert and Ferlinghetti, life is urgent, and war unspeakable, whether in the Europe of his early years or in any place on earth from then to the present. Consider Prévert: “Quelle connerie la Guerre.” For each of these writers, children are as precious a gift as imagination, for overcoming despair. This expansiveness, as many who have heard him or know him are aware, accords with Morgan’s extratextual activities. The mood of his poems is at one with his generosity to poets and on behalf of poets in Australia, through his organization of readings (such as the ongoing La Mama series that he initiated in February 1985 with John Irving at Melbourne’s La Mama Theatre) and festivals (he directed the Montsalvat Poetry Festivals at Eltham 1991–93), his anthologizing activities, and his promotion of others in broadcasts and reviews. This is not to say we have a cock-eyed optimist on hand. Exasperation and frustration come with the territory, where competing egos require to be massaged and coaxed into cooperation. As in promotion of others’ happiness, so with one’s own.

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The poems in Out of the Fast Lane recognize the complexity of transactional experiences. How closely can one know the minds of one’s own children and loved ones? Can anyone really see into our own? As communicative ritual or performance, poetry mediates idea and act. It manipulates as much as it is manipulated. Thus, in conversation with his son about the Moonlight Sonata, creativity, and money, Morgan writes: I ask my son if he has much work at the moment. He says that’s his business, but the Moonlight Sonata is everybody’s business.

What agreement could we have concerning the Moonlight Sonata? As Morgan observes, “There is moonlight / that passes through each of us, / you can’t look it up / in the Shorter Oxford.” Right on. The poem “in the Slow Lane,” placed last in the book as an equipoise to the title-poem at the start, invites the reader to “overtake me / and dream carefully. / Choose your dream / as if it were a highway, / and you had / a special place / to go.” One can see why Morgan invokes the cartoonist Michael Leunig on occasion. – as dedicatee and as acknowledged kindred sensibility. This book contains many prayer-like moments, though the mood is never earnest or saccharine. There is insouciance, drollery, calm acceptance of criticism, melancholy nipped in the bud, and, above and through all, a joie de vivre that calls the poet himself as well as his readers and addressees to comprehend that they are not alone. This is one of the gifts of Morgan’s book; in a poem called “In-Between,” he records a conversation in a pharmacy and a meditation while cooking. With a friend, he discusses the pleasures of music and the gloom-suffused topics of the late-twentieth century: ethics, politicians, suppression of history – and the right to speak, concluding not with a cri de coeur but with a toast – “L’Chaim” – to the ability to reckon with the space “between the prelude and the coda.” Morgan’s book is full of dedications and homages. Dismiss thoughts of a name-dropping display: this is a symphonic arrangement of relationships, balancing odes to joy against an impulse to construct a farewell symphony. Some losses are irrevocable: a loved partner, children, admired and intimate friends, and the sites of outstanding encounters with all these (as in the “hotel” poems, the Cairns series, or the splendid “Stoke House” poems). Poignancy is in these utterances, modulated so every reminiscence appears a precious object to be savoured in the light of ongoing life. That’s a hard business, but it’s one of the signatures of this collection. Moments of intense recognition of the value of a shared joy

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with the living are also savoured, and a Zen-like calm pervades many of the meditations. Gush is abolished. This is a rich collection. Music of Offenbach, Beethoven, Goldmark, Glazunov, gypsy rhythms, folk and pop cadences – all provide leitmotifs; so, too, with the visual and literary references to Toulouse–Lautrec, Beardsley, Di Morgan, Van Gogh, Keats, Blake, Prévert, Hugo, Coleridge, Shakespeare, Anne Frank, Whitman, Ferlinghetti, and innumerable contemporaries, all addressed as fellow wayfarers on that highway. These enter the poems so casually, so naturally, that, together with eating and drinking, cooking, travelling, and conversation, a picture of a richly endowed life emerges. Morgan’s Ophelia is no Pre-Raphaelite washout. In “Ophelia in Safeway,” she marvels at the superabundance of consumerism, sees Hamlet and Claudius (one “psycho,” the other “leering”) among the produce, and, hiding with her father Polonius in the “thousand litres of soft drink / – N O N A M E ,” declares: “A girl could / drown.” The mind somersaults to Ginsberg’s tribute to Walt Whitman in a New World supermarket, and rejoices in Morgan’s poem. More playfully here than in “5 Poems from the Royal Hotel, Mornington,” where he transfixes monetarism, Morgan peels the wrappers off consumerism to reveal the hollowness of each inviting product. These poems strenuously assert life, from the abjection of sorrow to the ecstasy of joy. A Hungarian waiter is at once a brilliant individual and an epitome of collective suffering; a drug-dealer in a pub is a complex human being after all; a son becomes a child again in the face of multiple crises; and the poet acknowledges the power of a nicotine addiction to subdue the attraction of a tropical interlude. Lovers quarrel and are reconciled, and revel in each other; the face of an old man in the street is so engraved with lines that when he spontaneously smiles, it is “the way a millionaire / smiles / at growing collateral.” The pun here conveys Morgan’s pleasure in his craft. Of himself, he writes of the “rose in the heart / and a fire in the head,” of possessing a “Quasimodo consciousness,” and of the hearts of poets that can be “mashed / like dark red / plums.” As with the beginning of this review, so at the end: I appreciate the ripe sophistication of the book. I hazard that, for refined maturity and outright delight, others will agree that this will be one of the finest collections of poems published in Australia in 1998. Afterword Mal Morgan (born London, 1935) died in Melbourne, on 17 November 1999, two months after publication of his collection Beautiful Veins (Five Islands Press, 1999), launched at a packed La Mama Theatre. It is typical of Morgan’s attitude to fellow poets that he could write in his introduction to the rich anthology La Mama Poetica (Melbourne: Melbourne U P , 1989): “There is an order in this anthology. To try to define it accurately would do an

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injustice to my own sense of poetics. You may ask why an artist uses burnt sienna next to magenta in his landscape. Lisa Jacobson sets the mind rolling with the fall or ripe fruit like small suns, when writing was easy. She is also haunted by nuclear flowers. And the book unwinds in a sequence where I feel some poets need to be read one after the other, then a pause, a breath taken, something mild and dreamy, or of complete contrast – a shout from the street, where something sharp enters and something soft succumbs. Just like an evening at La Mama!” (2).

———— Far Away From How it Looks at Home152 ————

W

F A R A W A Y S O U T H is the first extensive collection of Australian poems translated into Arabic that I have seen.153 The book contains 85 poems or excerpts from printed sources chiefly supplied by Anne Fairbairn. The translations, editorial commentary, and biographical notes are the work of Raghid Nahhas. The introduction (“The Translator’s Whisper”) acknowledges that the poems are “almost entirely” selected by Fairbairn, and that the translator “selected Fairbairn’s poetry, in addition to three other poems.” Well enough, but at least one of the translator’s choices from Fairbairn’s work is odd: why omit a substantial part of her “Dilmun Dreaming”? Nahhas does not indicate the three additional poems he selected, so I cannot gauge his personal taste. It would be interesting to know. Nahhas observes that Anne Fairbairn’s selections “give us an idea about the development of Australian poetry,” so I take the collection as mirroring Fairbairn’s eclecticism and apparent predilection for the lyric impulse. The poems range from versions of Aboriginal songs (the Aranda “Ankotarinya” in Strehlow’s translation; a Nunggubyu “Corroboree Song” [“Flood Water”] in Mungayana Nundhirribala’s version) through colonial-era lyrical and narrative works by Harpur, Kendall, and Paterson, via Mary Gilmore (“An Aboriginal Simile”) to Boake, Lawson, Hayward, and Brennan to Neilson and others whose reputations chiefly rest on their output in the twentieth century. A Narranyeri song, “The Railway Train” (translated by George Taplin in 1879), is a little out of place, coming just before FitzGerald’s superb poem “Edge,” but with Slessor’s “Beach Burial” (an excellent choice) we are solidly into territory beloved of later-twentieth-century popularizers of Australian verse. Given the volume’s spatial confines, Fairbairn has chosen judiciously. A.D. Hope is represented by “The Death of the Bird”; Elizabeth Riddell by “After Lunik Two”; 152 

HISPERS FROM THE

“Far Away From Satisfactory,” Quadrant 43.11 (November 1999): 79. Raghid Nahhas, Whispers from the Faraway South: Translations of Selected Australian Poetry (Damascus: Alabgdya, 1999). 153

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Roland Robinson by “Altjeringa”; John Bray by “Address to the Pigeons in Hurtle Square”; John Manifold by “Garcia Lorca Murdered in Granada.” These give some insight into the preoccupations and styles of the writers concerned, and attest to Fairbairn’s discretion. Judith Wright’s “The Company of Lovers” is a discerning choice that will, like Manifold’s elegy for Lorca and the anonymous “Adieu” from an Australian soldier, have particular resonances for many readers in “faraway Northern” regions. The texts are presented in bilingual format, and this review necessarily addresses the range of work offered in English. I acknowledge inability to gauge the standard of Arabic employed in the translations, though I am familiar with the esteem in which Nahhas is held as an accurate translator of English works into Arabic. A scientist by profession, he has published short stories, articles on diverse technical subjects, and translations in a broad range of English and Arabic journals. From feedback from several Arabic-speakers with whom I have discussed the volume, however, it appears that the translations in this case, while accurately translating word-equivalences, nevertheless miss something of the spirit of the originals. One reader has suggested to me that the poets would not recognize their works if they were re-translated from Arabic into English. Inaccuracy in the matter of translations extends beyond imprecision with regard to particular words. I hope that the comments I have noted do not reflect a widespread reaction to the book’s presentation to the Arabic-speaking world of the ‘Australian’ flavour of the poetry. My own misgivings hinge on other concerns. First of all, I query the notion that “whispers” is an adequate word to convey the variety and force of much of the work selected. Is John Tranter’s “The Death Circus” a “whisper”? Or R.A. Simpson’s “Antarctica,” with its far-from-intimate first lines (“After my talking destroyed her / I looked down at the rocks below”)? The anonymous “Convict’s Rum Song” is far from what the OED understands as a “whisper” (“a secret or slight utterance, mention, or report; a suggestion, insinuation, hint”: Cut yer name across my backbone, Stretch me skin across a drum, Iron me up on Pinchgut Island From to-day till Kingdom Come!

This is hardly the “soft rustling sound” that the OED records as even the figurative sense of “whisper.” No, I am afraid that “Whispers from the Faraway South” does not do justice to the variety of speech-resonance conveyed by much of the poetry in the book. It conveys a sense of timidity, tweeness, or even, since the

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book is pitched at Arabic-speakers, the nebulous “faraway North,” a slightly patronizing attitude to Australian poetry that, probably, never was the intention of Anne Fairbairn or Raghid Nahhas. The text is presented in Arabic format: the book’s pages number from the back, so that the volume ‘opens’ at page 320, with potted biographies of the contributors. These biographies do not inspire confidence, when one reads that Judith Wright (the second-to-last poet in alphabetical order) died in 1995. Much of the biographical information has been culled from the second edition of the Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, a volume that still manages to contain the odd wacky editorializing gloss (your reviewer is supposed to be a “volatile and voluble” poet: thanks for nothing). I would have appreciated the opportunity to cast a glance over the entry under my name in “Whispers,” but I never saw a proof – and I suspect that Judith Wright would have appreciated the opportunity to make a small emendation to her entry. The editor remarks that “sources differ by one year in listing dates of birth,” and that “in these cases I have consulted more than two sources. This does not mean that I avoided the problem completely.” Quite so. While I sympathize with editors’ and proof-readers’ problems, I would have welcomed a little more accuracy throughout. Under entries for James Taylor and Andrew Lansdown, Nahhas notes “Unable to obtain information.” I don’t believe these writers have opted for obscurity. Arabic readers may find that Robert Adamson “is an editor and has established some publishing ventures.” I guess this will give Bob Adamson a chuckle or two. Meanwhile, Les Murrey [sic ] “is a leading figure in Sydney’s literary society and continues to write poetry of the highest calibre.” I think this rather underplays Murray’s social orientation and status. Would a mildly interested Arabic reader be thrown by the fact that Les Murrey, like Mark O’Conner [sic], Alec D. Hope [sic], or Jeniffer Maiden [sic] do not exist, in any other standard reference, electronic or otherwise? Australian readers will enjoy a merry game of ‘hunt the howler’ in this section of Nahhas’ anthology. For my part, I vote for the removal of the second, third, and fourth sentences in the notes on my own career and practice, even though they give my friends a good laugh. I can only shudder when I consider the usefulness or otherwise of the 21-page biographical and bibliographical section. Evan Jones, I read with fascination, “was educated at reputable universities”: so now you know. The entry for Slessor is bathetic: “Slessor spent the last thirty years of his life without writing a single poem. This is one of his mysteries.” The entry for Oodgeroo concludes: “She worked as a domestic when she was thirteen and then joined the army.” Michael Dransfield “died when his health deteriorated following a motorcycle

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accident when he was only twenty-four.” Within the main text, there are other solecisms that will cause anguish: the spelling of “Gwen Harrowed” at the head of a Harwood poem, or the note on Robert Harris, on page 305 (Harris “has published a few collections of poems” and is apparently still alive and well: I clench my teeth over such insensitivity). How our faraway Northern friends will think of us is one of the editor’s mysteries. In another section of the book, preceding the five poems of Anne Fairbairn, there is a lengthy account of Fairbairn’s work in promoting Australian–Arab understanding. Surely this section belongs with the editor’s introduction, since the entire volume, in the editor’s words, was “inspired by her appreciation of the culture and problems of the Middle East”? It is reassuring that the collection as a whole displays an effort to convey such variety as it does: oral and ‘folk’ traditions, Victorian narratives, concrete poetry (Alan Riddell), and a generous swag of modernist and postmodernist exemplars. It is, though, lamentable that the collection appears so carelessly edited.

————— Dransfield Among the Biographers154 —————

I

T’S BEEN A WHIL E

since any biography has been so critically mauled as Pat Dobrez’s life of Michael Dransfield.155 Australian reviewers have variously claimed that the book has been in the making for anywhere upward of fourteen years, and it seems they have been fanning glowing coals for at least that long, in order to dump them on the hapless biographer’s head. Pat Dobrez declares that her interest in the poet began at Adelaide University in 1970, when she and her husband were students in Geoffrey Thurley’s class on contemporary poetry. Thurley’s enthusiasm for Streets of the Long Voyage, Dransfield’s first published collection, was clearly infectious. I envy the Dobrezes their good luck to have heard Thurley at first-hand. Thurley’s provocative book The American Moment: American Poetry in the MidCentury, based on his poetry lectures at Adelaide, was revelatory to many Australian (and other) writers and, no doubt, to innumerable students, when it appeared seven years later. His book critically appraised Wilbur, Berryman, the ‘confessional’ poets, Roethke, Olson, Moore, and other successors to Imagism, and many who were hip at that period – including Rexroth, Ginsberg, Kinnell, and Bly.

154 

“Poetry: Entirely Useless; Out of Date,” Ulitarra 16 (2000): 134–42. Patricia Dobrez, Michael Dransfield’s Lives: A Sixties Biography (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press / Melbourne U P , 2000). 155

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Those Americans’ influence on Australian poetry did not occur all at once, as some accounts have made out. Bruce Beaver, Bruce Dawe, Julian Croft, and countless others had tumbled to much that was useful a good deal earlier. By 1970, though, it’s fair to say that American influence was widespread. To imagine otherwise is to underestimate the intelligence of Australian writers operating in very disparate, often isolated locations. When John Tranter compiled his anthology of contemporary Australian verse for the 1970 Captain Cook Bicentennial year, he could draw on a considerable body of work which demonstrated that modernism in Australia was already old hat. Dobrez did not get to meet Dransfield in 1972, when he was listed to appear at the Adelaide Festival of Arts, where his second and third books (The Inspector of Tides and Drug Poems) were to be launched. Dransfield did not front: the appearance of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, A.D. Hope (castigated in one of Dransfield’s poems in The Inspector of Tides156), Andrei Voznesensky, and even Rod McKuen (who failed to pull a crowd) perhaps overawed him. One year later, Dransfield was dead at the age of twenty-four, and the critical mill, supercharged by Rodney Hall’s two posthumous anthologies of Dransfield’s poetry, has been busily grinding his work and his life into legend ever since. I don’t share the negative view of some of her earliest reviewers, relating to Dobrez’s election of Dransfield to exemplar of postmodern sensibility in Australia. Nor do I question her employment of many of the insights of cultural theoreticians; but I baulk at her adoption of the jargon of so many of them. There is some point in Don Anderson’s objection to Dobrez’s mélange of “slavish nods to Baudrillard, Kristeva, Jameson, Foucault and Derrida,” which he labels “Habermasochism.”157 Dobrez can (and does) write lucidly, when she wishes, throughout much of this volume (as in her 1990 biocritical essay The Art of the Boyds). So why torture the unwilling dross, as in the following sentence (describing a friendship)? The foursome also satisfied one of the needs of modern disaffiliated youth, that of establishing a lateral unit to replace the post-industrially obsolete hierarchical and generational family for which Dransfield nevertheless felt an acute nostalgia.158

156

Michael Dransfield, “Endsight” (The Inspector of Tides, 1972), in Dransfield, Collected Poems, ed. Rodney Hall (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1987): 79. 157 Don Anderson, “Oh Dear – 600 Pages Of Biography, And Where Lies The Poet?,” Sydney Morning Herald (11 September 1999), Spectrum: 8. 158 Dobrez, Michael Dransfield’s Lives, 348.

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This is the stuff of academic book-making conference papers. Considered alongside the language of such biographies as Andrew Motion’s Philip Larkin or Hazel Rowley’s Christina Stead, Dobrez’s stumbles too frequently. Ever since Malcolm Bradbury sent up the psychobabble of poorly translated European aesthetics in Mensonge, it has been impossible to take such language seriously as prose. Anderson is also fairly right in calling Michael Dransfield’s Lives “an old-fashioned biographical narrative,” for all its “Theoretical Postmodernism,” but this doesn’t altogether hit the spot. The book’s title refers to plural lives, and Anderson’s and others’ reviews do not come to grips with this, beyond seeing that Dransfield tried on several disguises or masks that can too easily be dismissed as adolescent poses. To dismiss the different voices as posturing is to fall into the same trap of mythologizing the dead writer that the critics suppose Dobrez (and Rodney Hall, and Tom Shapcott, and Uncle Tom Cobley and all) to have fallen into. Dransfield dramatized himself, and took on many attitudes? A glance at Shelley’s or Rupert Brooke’s, or Flaubert’s letters would suggest that he wasn’t the first to do so. Some of the resultant poems were god-awful: so are many of Keats’s, or anyone else who has slipped in and out of the canon. A.D. Hope, James McAuley, Judith Wright, and Les Murray have all been represented in school and other anthologies by poems they subsequently expunged as stinkers from their selected or collected works. What does this tell us, except that, had Dransfield lived to that age projected by Don Anderson (ninety-two), he might also have ‘lost’ a good number of poems that surfaced in books published during his early years, or from those now gathered in Rodney Hall’s two posthumous volumes? More about Dransfield’s personae later. The subtitle of Dobrez’s book causes more angst among reviewers. Dobrez pointedly indicates a major preoccupation: A Sixties Biography. It’s clear that Dobrez is reassessing the formation of her own career, and her understanding of the impact of postmodernism on Australia. The first sixty pages lay out this theme, reprised at many points in the book. Is it wicked of her to do so? In their blasts against the monstrous regiment of baby-boomers, the conservative columnist P.P. McGuiness and others have pretty much had the field to themselves for at least a decade. It is refreshing to see a serious attempt to outline the idealism that fuelled so much overhaul of Australian culture in the twenty years each side of the 1960s. In many respects, Dobrez rejects the conservative revisionism (the “blight that failed”) that is fashionable among those for whom the period is summed by Larkin’s “Annus Mirabilis,” or those whose formative years were tempered by the obiter dictum of Gordon Gekko (“Greed is good”), neo-conservative ‘incentivation’, and the fashionable claptrap of managerialism and political correctness. If every generation consumes its parents, only to emerge

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as a facsimile of its tucker, is it to be wondered at that a book that seeks to understand the processes in operation at a particular spot of time should be slagged by those who can only see, in their backward glance, the unlovely prospect of their own mummification? I have no brief for the Richard Neville “Playpower” and Tim Shadboltian “bullshit and jellybeans” accounts of those years, though I appreciate Dobrez’s effort to stand aside from the rigidified rhetoric of those who would lament the period as an aberration, or see it as the blissful dawn of an era that was promised much and went down in a shower of merde. When I read Barry Hill’s and Peter Pierce’s reviews, I wondered if we were reading the same book. According to Hill, “this massively pretentious book” buries Dransfield in “a cultural studies discourse that would have made him sick – or sicker.”159 Pierce’s waspish account attacks Dobrez’s “ugly prose,” while allowing that she “tells Dransfield’s story plainly and kindly once she begins a conventional task which at first she appears to resent.”160 The “ugly prose” crack suggests to me that Pierce resents her employment of language that is too “layered” to be straightforward enough for a crusty Tory to comprehend. Robert Adamson’s more recent personal account of his association with Dransfield argues that the latter was misguided in his decision to publish (against Adamson’s advice) the collections Drug Poems and Memoirs of a Velvet Urinal, but that the poet “threw a tantrum and stopped talking to me for a month.”161 This seems highly credible. While Adamson asks “Who is to know what he really took,” apart from prescription drugs, the appearance of Drug Poems gained him a cult following. Dransfield had a reputation as an aficionado of fashionable drugs, even if, in Adamson’s (and Alan Wearne’s) post-facto reading, the poems were “warnings against heroin.” In a period that saw the exponential rise of drug-taking exemplars in popular culture, Dransfield’s apparent espousal of poetry and drugs together provided a cool and local alternative example of calculated – as opposed to riotously flamboyant – rebellion against conservative mores that ended in self-destruction. Adamson’s review, unlike like those of Pierce and Hill, was generous in respect to Dobrez’s style. But where Pierce and Hill fixed bayonets and took no prisoners, Adamson exercises splendid restraint in noting that Dobrez’s “ava159

Barry Hill, “‘And no bird sings’, Michael Dransfield’s Lives: A Sixties Biography,” Weekend Australian (31 July–1 August 1999), Review: 11. 160 Peter Pierce, “Brief Blaze: A Poet of the Desultory Decade,” Canberra Times (10 July 1999), Panorama: 22. 161 Robert Adamson, “A Prodigy Life,” Australian Book Review 214 (September 1999): 7–9. Revised as “ ‘ Who was Michael Dransfield?’: Robert Adamson revisits ‘Michael Dransfield’s Lives: A Sixties Biography’ by Patricia Dobrez,” Rochford Street Review 3 (March–April 2012): online.

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lanche of detail” serves to “describe the banality of drug culture and the poverty it creates both physically and spiritually.” This is in marked contrast to Anderson, who, like Pierce and Hill, fangs Dobrez’s prose style (“almost 600 pages and 15 years of slogging by someone who may be a scholar but is decidedly not a born writer” and who writes “biography created from a street directory”). Anderson remarks that had Dransfield “lived as long as A.D. Hope (born 1907) he might have had a tombstone of some 2,000 lifeless words weighing down upon him.” Anderson, like Pierce and Hill, is greatly entertaining when he pulls out the stops, but he does not rest content with sledging Dobrez’s “lifeless words.” Anderson is right, of course, to point up the “distracting and unnecessary” nature of such plunges into the jargon of the cultural theoreticians. The early chapters of Dobrez’s biography could do with some subediting. Their critical perspectives could be put more succinctly, and Dobrez’s case be permitted to stand. This observation will undoubtedly put me offside in the critical scrum, but I see merit in her effort to account for more than the aesthetic appeal of Dransfield’s poetry. I take Anderson’s point that much of Dransfield’s poetry is pretty terrible, even if I don’t agree that Dransfield comes across at times “as a minor Kenneth Slessor, without the saving grace of rhyme; at others, he seems like a hip writer – of chopped-up prose fragments.” Chopped-up prose fragments a lot of the time, yes. But a “minor Kenneth Slessor, without the saving grace of rhyme,” no. Slessor was clotted at times (for instance, in his early Lindsay-inflected fantasies), and often, as in his “Darlinghurst Nights” and “Backless Betty from Bondi” poems, slight, derivative and, to modern readers, as dated as ‘Mustdie’ fly-killer. But Slessor had his day in the writing of topical verse, and Dransfield has had his. Both managed to write above the popular taste, and while it would be absurd to conduct a poem-by-poem contrast, there is no doubt that each produced work that escaped the nets of transient appeal. To label Dransfield the “baby-boomer bard” seems to me on a par with labelling Slessor the Coleridge of clubland. I nail my colours to the mast here, and suggest that Dobrez is making a sophisticated effort to suggest the complex nature of Dransfield’s relationship to his own times. This is only part of the stylistic game she engages in. Following, or paralleling, her husband Livio Dobrez’s earlier books (Parnassus Mad Ward: Michael Dransfield and the New Poetry, 1990, and Identifying Australia in Postmodern Times, 1994), Dobrez canvasses the 1960s’ blurring of modes of perception, accounts of experience, cultural artefacts and extant memorials in order to mount a hypothesis about Dransfield’s naive and shrewd perceptions then, and his iconic status now. Her prose also honestly discloses the near-

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impossibility of ever revealing to herself, let alone her readers, what the 1960s actually ‘were’ to those who can recollect the period. I don’t think anyone is going to write a biography of Dransfield that will situate him in his own times and make him appear so human as Dobrez manages to do. Sour grapes and selectivity of passages to attack Dobrez’s style will not do as a summary of her account of the man’s life. Dransfield emerged as many intriguing writers before and since have done, imitating favourite writers, and proceeding with all the implicit derivative gaucherie of such a process, before he discovered the pleasure of trying on varieties of his own language. While I wondered at the to-and-fro shuffle of Dobrez’s opening chapters, which now employed reminiscence of her own experiences of her subject’s poetry, and next, tested her speculations on the corporatization of Australia (a topic that occasionally or otherwise exercised Dransfield and many of his peers), before she leapt into a “conventional task”162 of narrative, I admire the ambition of her enterprise. Dransfield is an elusive subject. I don’t think it’s anything against Dobrez’s accomplishment that, confronted with a Caligari cabinet of (her own and others’) memories, she should initially outline the problems of conveying the humanity of her subject and the complexity of his motives and reception in language that mirrors the diffraction and distortions inherent in a remembrance of time past. To the contrary. The opening sixty pages of Dobrez’s biography can be skipped by anyone wanting a relatively straightforward, chronological account of his life. Dobrez acknowledges, more clearly than most writers portraying a writer who has been proposed as the crystallization of a period and an icon for succeeding periods, her fascination with the unappealing as well as attractive features of her subject. This is not to say that Dransfield is some sort of Svengali, who was able to turn on-and-off his charm or anti-social faces. Dransfield is a much more interesting and complex figure – pace those reviewers who see him as a mono-dimensional placard rather than as a human with some modicum of talent for seeing things in ways they cannot. He tried on many masks and sounds like a twit in many of the pronouncements in his notation-type poems. So, for that matter, does Frank O’Hara in many of the poems gathered in Don Allen’s edition of O’Hara’s Collected Poems, but is anyone safe from the castigation of critics who want poetry to be uniformly accomplished or to conform to the critics’ prescriptions? God save any writer from critics and bio-critics, if that’s the case. Better to look in the letters, perhaps, for evidence of the poet’s 162

Dobrez, Michael Dransfield’s Lives, 54.

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constant re-positioning of the self according to how the poet understood the taste of each letter’s recipient. Keats may have hit the nail on the head in declaring that the poet has no personality – while recognizing that the poet takes on all personalities. Do we need a psychologist to explain the hard words in such a formulation? While it’s clear that Dobrez’s biography glosses every rift in Dransfield’s life, it’s also plain that she has provided us with an exegesis of the 1960s that takes into account her own uncertainties, and that she has shrewdly cut through much hagiographical writing to present a confusing but not always confused writer whose work is, if not always great, frequently more than merely good.

————————— New Music163 —————————

J

L E O N A R D ’ S S U R V E Y of Australian verse164 samples the work of ninetysix poets whose work has appeared with some frequency in the decade since the appearance of his first Anthology of Contemporary Australian Poetry (Melbourne: Houghton Mifflin, 1990). He has included a poem of mine in this second collection, and I am agreeably surprised to find myself in the company of younger and older writers whose works I have admired from a distance, or whom I have had the pleasure to hear and meet at readings in several States. I don’t envy Leonard’s task. To be an anthologist is to risk the incomprehension of those whose work is omitted; it is also to risk adding to the chagrin of those who know and appreciate the work of writers who are not represented. In an ideal world, Leonard might, of course, have compiled a companion volume of the work of writers left over from this collection. I would hazard that, just as many poets have made some impression on their contemporaries in the last ten years, there are as many more who have not ‘pushed’ their writing in the public domain. In twenty-three years of editing other people’s poetry, I have been acutely aware of the excellence of the work of many talented and even profoundly impressive poets who have refrained from broadcasting their productions or who have been pointedly overlooked by reviewers. Some of those writers are innately shy or wary of live audiences. Many are dismayed or disgusted by the ‘machine’ aspects of promotion, having seen the careerism, the scrabble for stardom, and the hype we now associate with the poetry ‘business’, and they consequently avoid engagement with it. There exist poets who prefer to hone their work at a remove from the glare, who chance a OHN

163 

Island 88 (Summer 2002): 126–28. New Music: An Anthology of Contemporary Australian Poetry, ed. John Leonard (Melbourne: Five Islands, 2001). 164

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poem or an entire manuscript now and then to the judgment of friends, peers, editors, and publishers. Such writers may be unfamiliar to audiences who enjoy readings that resemble an auction or a Battle of the Bands – readings that are bound to disillusion those who see themselves as writers rather than entertainers. Their allure of rarity may attract audiences to their work. Some of these less pushy and less promoted writers are included in the current anthology. There are many writers who will rejoice at their inclusion in the book, and readers familiar with their work will appreciate that Leonard has chosen particularly admired poems. Readers who are not poets, and those who are not aficionados of metropolitan or regional poetry ‘scenes’, will be all the more grateful for the opportunity to test their taste against this generous collection and enlarge their understanding of the state of the art as Leonard perceives it. It is worth noting that Leonard’s relative isolation from big-city literary centres in the past twelve years has given him the opportunity to reflect on the state of contemporary poetry in a way that is given to few who reside in the vortices. His ostensible non-participation in the primary production of poetry and his scholar’s sense of the breadth of poetry in English are appreciable bonuses in the business of the disinterested consideration of others’ work. This is far from saying that Leonard has no sense that he is compiling an anthology which is bound to be a twenty-first-century literary landmark: he is a modest and discerning connoisseur of world-wide poetry, as instanced by his major collections of international English-language poetry. This is a canny collection. The poets are not selected on the grounds of equal opportunity, calculated by gender, ethnicity, regional or other extra-literary criteria. The States and Territories, and such expatriate sites as the U K and the U SA , are represented according to no bean-counting formula. They are selected according to intrinsic merit: writers such as John Muk Muk Burke, Jemal Sharah, Cassie Lewis, and others have struck Leonard as offering transformations of experience in language that is idiosyncratically their own. It is refreshing to see the number of poets who have come to national attention by virtue of such presses as Five Islands, Fremantle Arts Centre, Northern Territory University, Black Pepper, Brandl and Schlesinger, and others that have sponsored poetry in the 1990s. Older presses have provided space for numerous collections by authors included by Leonard, and small magazines as well as literary-prize and specialist anthologies have also contributed to the emergence of many of the newer voices in this collection. I doubt that there is any single ‘point’ in the anthology. Leonard’s catholicity of taste enables him to rejoice in the yoking of some extraordinary variations of style and theme. Some contrasts and comparisons leap to the eye and mind as I

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read the book (and I have read it sporadically, coming back to it in different moods, starting in different places, as I suspect most readers will, as they peruse works by known or unfamiliar writers). It had not occurred to me that John Kinsella’s tone is so nearly an echo of Fay Zwicky’s agrarian mode (though without the wryness); nor had I read Alison Croggon’s overt take on Kit Smart’s cat-poem – but I am in greater admiration of Croggon’s wit as a result of meeting this poem. Jordie Albiston’s poetry has long been fascinating to me, for her beautifully cadenced lyrics as much as for the classical elegance of her longer ‘historical’ work. Brook Emery’s poetry is represented by an elegant philosophical poem,   by a choice demotic excerpt from his epic 24 Hours, and Ken Taylor by a lovely epithalamium. Others I admire: Emma Lew, Lauren Williams, Jennifer Harrison, Philip Hodgins, and John Tranter, for their inventive wit, their distancing of self from ego, their plangent depth. There is something like an Australian fado in some of this poetry. There are poems that put a spin on the intimate, the autobiographical and the confessional: Geraldine McKenzie, Morgan Yasbincek, Melissa Ashley, and Ouyang Yu are among the notable practitioners. Each poem offers a unique voice, the tones conferred by variations of lines, stanzas, shrewd ‘other’ punctuation, contributing to the fresh revelation of language possibilities on every page. It’s no mean feat to select poems that do not sound like each other, for all that they share much of the demotic vocabulary. The big names are present, but what I have enjoyed most about Leonard’s anthology is the generosity of spirit manifest in the selection. That generosity is reflected in his judicious presentation of poems that clearly communicate a keenness for living, whether through socially enacting the changes urged by the poems, or through recording personal transformation, or simply by putting one’s faith in the power of poetry to move others to reflect. As a ‘map’ of current Australian verse, the book sells few modes short. It does justice to its publisher’s claim that it embodies passion as well as eclecticism and wit, and, in this respect, it can sit handsomely alongside anthologies of the decade since its precursor. It would be splendid to think that readers would buy two copies, and help spread the word.

———————— Reviewing Now165 ————————

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O M E P O E T R Y I S I N T R I N S I C A L L Y I N T E R E S T I N G . Some of it further interests us because it shows the continuing explorations by poets whose work has altered the way we think about poetry. A lot of poetry is not interesting and 165 

Blue Dog: Australian Poetry 1.2 (November 2002): 69–73.

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merits swift dispatch. It should be uncontroversial to say so. Like editors, critics must make judgments or go out of business. Every poet wants a review. There is a sense in which poetry does not exist until it is reviewed – Peter Porter has noted that his poetry is not critically perceived, hence not much read, in America. He also remarks that British poets and critics have claimed that his ‘Australianness’ is what sets his work apart from that of other poets in his adopted country. For Porter, “The term ‘Australian’ has to 166 be bestowed by someone who is not Australian.” Yet, while for many poets in Australia the question of Australianness does not arise, others engage in asserting nationality. Any category can be limiting, but it may provide the beginning of a discussion. What all poets might agree upon is the sense of authentication that a review confers. Meanwhile, the majority of contemporary poets in Australia and elsewhere are never reviewed. For some, this could be a worry. Canonization still occurs. In the minds of some poets and reviewers, it consists of a list of the glorious dead, drawn up by the living dead. According to the imagined rules of the game, writers are moved vertically or horizontally along the canon’s axes after the style of a game of chess. By design or accident, this mind-set has long suggested to the suggestible that conspiracies exist which ensure that (to change the metaphor) the canon lawyers are busy representing clients with whom they maintain a you-scratch-my-back attitude. It’s also within the realms of possibility that some academics with an eye to advancement have seen possibilities in canonizing a poet or group of poets. Mostly, I don’t hold much with conspiracy theories in poetry-land, though, from a relatively ‘outside’ viewpoint, I recognize the general disposition of fencible hamlets and snipers’ posts. The acts of choosing who will be published and who will be reviewed can be interpreted as canon-casting. Further, the discussion of poetry is often so parochial as to lend weight to conspiracy theories. Is it an accident that almost two-thirds of the poets in Calyx (subtitled 30 Contemporary Australian Poets) happen to live in its State of origin? There are a few Victorians, but where are the Western Australian, Tasmanian, South Australian, Queensland, and Territories poets? Answer: one. It’s curious that this question has merited only passing mentions in the reviews. Has the game been so stitched up that a part is almost the whole? The conversation of poetry itself suffers as a result of such parochialism. Other voices, in other States, might reasonably question the rather common assumption that the burning critical issues for reviewers to tackle are those that 166

“John Kinsella interviews Peter Porter (1998),” Kinsella blog, http://www.johnkinsella.org /interviews/porter2.html (accessed 18 March 2016).

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circulate in Southerly, Jacket, and Heat. There are poets and critics overseas who look upon some of the more famous Sydney journals’ themes as matters fitter for book-club gatherings (and nothing wrong with that, either). To an extent, Sydney poets and reviewers, and their web of satraps abroad, are perceived to act as though they constitute an exclusive conduit to international ideas, and to arrogate to themselves the role of negotiating those ideas. Terms like ‘experimental’ and ‘postmodern’ can be interpreted quite differently by poets outside that power loop, who are engaged in quite sophisticated discussions on poetics with others overseas and across Australia. Moreover, there is little agreement in the Australian poetic community on the appositeness of canonization of younger poets such as MTC Cronin, Adam Aitken, and a handful of others. A dozen poets as good from other States could be proposed. But, by and large, younger poets are, unfortunately for the health of the profession, invisible. Discussion of emerging poets rarely occurs outside the boundaries of the State in which the poets live. Australian poetry reviewers have tended to be poets. This is not surprising, given that the rewards are so small, and that few readers who are not poets would want to enter the arena where so many poetries are in contestation. The few who do enter the contested ground do not fully enter into discussion. It is not that they are partisans. Factions are virtually nonexistent in contemporary Australian poetry. It is more that reviewers are loath to make judgments for fear of being considered partisan or plain wrong. Some are incapable of making informed appraisals. A common observation of critics and teachers of creative writing – in Australia and abroad – is that young poets are reluctant to read widely in their own field. It is less commonly acknowledged that reviewers do not appear to be cognizant of the literature of reviewing. The ability to read widely, without prejudice, is something to be treasured, and it is often disappointing to observe that poetry reviewers are so ill-read as to make no connections between a poet under review and the genres and traditions in which that poet is working. It is a rare reviewer who can accommodate all the changes rung on tradition and experiment in contemporary poetry. Like its floppy American cousin, Australian poetry (and its criticism) can appear to be in dire condition, and anyone who has the nerve to say so risks being dealt with by that most effective of all tactics, silence. There are few genuinely slashing reviewers in Australia. For the most part, critics are too polite, too bland. In part, this may be due to the desire to appear unwilling to badmouth any practitioner of an art that has such a peripheralized existence. Some reviewers choose the easy way out, taking poets’ or blurbists’ claims at face value and evading judgment. If some avant-garde verse

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is romantic traditionalism lurking under a veneer of L = A = N = G = U = A = G = E -poetry – like a deal of poetry by Gig Ryan, Amanda Stewart, John Kinsella, or Louis Armand, who would dare to say so? Gary Catalano, Robert Gray, Jean Kent, Kate Lilley, and Cassie Lewis push watercolour impressionism toward grand statements that license critics to celebrate their lyric qualities, but it would be an exceptional critic who would note that Wordsworthian sincerity masks a will to be ‘poetical’. The linguistic games of Javant Biarujia,  , Adrian Wiggins, and Peter Minter are effectively ignored by critics, who are more at home with conventional syntax and verbal correspondences. (Interestingly, I note that, with few exceptions, poets I have mentioned above have a New South Wales orientation. Have I fallen under the spell of Sydney’s grip on poetry discussion? As John Cooper Clarke might have remarked, “Quite a party we have found... funky but neat.”) Outsiders, particularly Europeans and North Americans, who comment on the postcolonial tribe are generally polite. Reviewing the Calyx anthology, the Canadian Douglas Barbour liked the “dead even” gender balance of writers represented, and observed that many of the writers “seem to be conversing, about how poetry should work, what it should do, how it should do it, what, in some cases, the writers think it should be saying.”167 (He doesn’t elaborate.) He also noted that “for some poets, questions of identity, and the politics of identity, are terribly important,” as indicated by the employment (or not) of first-person pronouns in poems throughout the collection. Barbour is shrewd in asking whether poetry, for all its preoccupation with self and mainstream culture, can effect cultural change, or whether it remains only “an interesting, even entertaining” example of “a craft ever more utterly under siege.” I guess he suspects the latter: that poetry doesn’t sell very well, and that most buyers are people “who already care about contemporary poetry anyway.” He concludes that readers of Calyx will have “a good time with at least some of them.” Quite. And that’s about our lot, isn’t it? The reviewer notes the death of poetry as a cultural phenomenon (pace the special pleading of minority interest groups – L = A = N = G = U = A = G = E adherents, performance poets, ethnopoets, psychopoets, and so on), records that one has enjoyed the odd work in a collection, and notches up another duty job. In a world where poets are reviewed by other poets, a further damper is put on rigorous analysis: when one is likely to be reviewed in turn by someone who has been the subject of one’s review, it can be politic to go softly on the other’s weaknesses. Nor is this communalist politics restricted to Australia, as a glance 167

Douglas Barbour, “An Alphabetical Appreciation of the Latest Australian Anthology,” Jacket 15 (December 2001): online.

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at the columns of the Poetry Review (U K ), the Kenyon Review (U SA ), or the forums of the Poetry Society of America indicates. In the standard-format roundup of several books, a review of a poet’s recent work frequently comes down to citation of some touchstone writer against whom the exhibit is to be measured, quotation of a few lines of middling or no distinction, and a sketch of subject-matter, with little commentary on line or language beyond approbation of sporadic phrasing. What is the alternative? I think that honesty is the crux of it. It does not take a visitor to tell us that there’s a chance we’ll enjoy (read: ‘be briefly distracted by’) this or that poem in any anthology of contemporary verse. A reviewer is on safe ground, of course, to commend arresting vocabulary, a reaching for sophisticated ideas – but one must not state that the ideas seem beyond the poet’s grasp or capacity to convey. On the other hand, we also see many reviewers commend a book of boring, plain-words poems for its mere earnestness. Conversely, it’s a nice test for a reviewer to be able to pick up on those books where a plain-words life-account is performed with subtlety. Many young poets appear to see poetry as a career. There is encouragement to do so. It is over ten years since Dana Gioia noted that there were two hundred graduate creative-writing programmes and more than a thousand undergraduate ones in the U SA , poised to produce 20,000 “accredited professional poets” by 2001.168 These poets would become the primary audience for contemporary verse. Many of them would teach others to teach poetry. Gioia further recorded that poetry reviewing had already become a commodity intended “less to be read than to be noted with approval.”169 Introducing his Canadian poetry anthology, the Toronto poet Michael Holmes remarked that creative writing classes had proliferated in Canada to the extent that he could imagine Canada as “a nation of thirty million poets.” “What disturbs me,” he added, “is how few of them will ever consider purchasing a book of poetry.”170 Australia’s universities have not been slow to see money in offering similar courses, and editors of Australian poetry-publishing outlets (including those on the Internet) are increasingly deluged with the end product of this corporate approach to poetry. Poetry submissions are accompanied by declarations of earnestness, recording progress along a credentialling conveyor-belt, and re168

Dana Gioia, Can Poetry Matter? Essays on Poetry and American Culture (Saint Paul: Graywolf, 1992): 1–2. Introductory essay “Can Poetry Matter?” originally in the Atlantic Monthly 267.5 (May 1991): 94–106. 169 Gioia, Can Poetry Matter?, 3. 170 Michael Holmes, “Introduction” to The Last Word, ed. Holmes (Toronto: Insomniac, 2009): 3.

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quests for advice on speeding-up the process. One could do worse than to advise certain eager spirits to drop out and tear off into the mulga to read poetry for a few years, rather than to ravel out reams of andecdotal look-alike, soundalike free verse. (Going bush, in fact or metaphorically, appears to work for John Graham, Lidija Cvetkovic, and Catherine Bateson, who combine unpoetical lives with production of poetry that far exceeds passing-grade accounts of how life can be taken for a stroll on a leash.) In the light of the naivety of the assumption that poetry can be wrought out of willing it to exist, it is not surprising that poets hell-bent on their own progress do not always make the best reviewers of others’ work. I can’t see how the reviewing situation could improve, in the print-media, unless vast space is given over to extended treatment of individual writers. The problems are immediately apparent. Who would control or pay for such space? What poets deserve such extended treatment? Who would write such reviews? Who would pay to read them? (The Internet is free, though largely chaotic in terms of standards of judgment. The soul selects its own society…) The familiar names will get the best of any print-based consideration. This is a dispiriting thought. Perusal of yellowing issues of Australian poetry magazines from the 1930s forward suggests that reviewers are not always the most reliable guides to works that have more than transitory currency. Second-hand bookshops also present a doleful cavalcade of superseded poetry books and critical discussions. Oblivion wraps up poets (and reviewers) who were (mercifully) briefly famous, together with those whose work can be read without head-shaking or hysterics – or, too rarely, sudden delight. One of the pleasures of haunting second-hand bookshops is the rewarding discovery of a writer whose work is so arresting as to cause us to revise our literary maps. Reviewers are susceptible to current fads and fits of passion, and critics whose judgments are trustworthy beyond their subjects’ use-by dates are rare creatures. Reviewers at times play status games, measuring local identities against local and international contemporary and historical figures. Claims about the relative merits of Francis Webb, Judith Wright, Gwen Harwood, A.D. Hope, and Les Murray vary, in or outside the pages of Oz Lit conspectuses. Claims about the merits of Pam Brown, Ken Bolton, John Forbes, Robert Adamson, and Mark O’Connor are likely to provoke amazement, rightly or wrongly, among many younger poets for whom the whole lot are near-fossils, good only to represent the ancientry in any new anthology that also advertises this season’s new wave. Perhaps more than we realize, contemporary poets are pulling our leg when they persuade us that they’re interested in winning an audience for poetry. They

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may win an audience for a specialized branch of poetry. A few dozen or few hundred readers may routinely pause to glance at poetry titles in bookstalls or libraries and, globally, thousands may drop in on a poetry website. (Some websites are clearly once-seen-never-to-be-revisited efforts.) That thousands trawl the Web for poetry seems reassuring, but there are thousands of certificated poets, products of creative-writing programmes, who will never see their own names in any review, and who, for all that they may create their own websites, may never attract more than a glance from readers in search of something beyond the eccentric and self-involved. Poetry had better say something important to readers, and say it in language they recognize as aimed at persuading them of its importance, rather than gratifying the writer. (In writing classes this is known as the ‘so what?’ test.) Because so much that appears in print seems to be concerned with the sincere recording of intense emotional experiences, reviewers can find themselves regarding poetry itself as a variety of cathartic experience for the poet that must be honoured. I think this attitude stinks. I don’t believe that all experiences per se constitute causes for critical welcome. Some hardly merit notice. Poetry that seeks to convince by mere assertion of a physiological or mental phenomenon – poetry the event of which we should automatically revere (rather than be seized by the significance, if any, of a poem) – is bound to be unsatisfactory as a ploy to engage the whole being. Much verse that poses as ‘serious’ is in effect frivolous or pretentious. Bad poetry really exists. So does good poetry. It is crucial that reviewers say how and where it does.

———————— Parody and Co.171 ————————

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N SPEAKIN G OF PAROD Y,

I venture into an area that has, since Bakhtin, been theoretically mapped by Doug Muecke, Wayne C. Booth, Margaret A. Rose, Linda Hutcheon, and countless others. While their exercises in taxonomy are of particular interest to literary theorists, they may seem too arcane to be worth applying with close attention to poets for whom parody and satire have porous boundaries. Parody takes many forms, and has many relatives. A minefield of formal distinctions exists between parody and burlesque, and between both of these and travesty. It is not my intention to dwell on the debated territory claimed by persiflage (raillery or light banter), ‘pekoral’ (unwitting parodies, by inept writers, of other styles), and plagiarism, and I will simply signal my awareness that 171

 Practical Poetics, ed. Ron Pretty (Wollongong,

N S W : Five Islands, 2003): 90–105.

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pastiche and hoax constitute further adventure playgrounds for the critically imprecise.172 Let me start with an unexceptional claim. Parody is imitation; parodia is imitative song; a parodos is a singer who imitates. In Greek comic plays, the chorus (and other characters) moved to the front of the stage to send up, for the audience’s delectation, the actions and words of the actors behind them. The audience itself could be the subject of parody. Aristophanes’ first play, The Acharnians, was produced in 425 BC , thirteen years after Euripides’ celebration of the Mysian King who led the Greeks to Troy. In Aristophanes’ comedy, the Mysian king is reduced to a beggar who ironically shows how peace, rather than war, can be achieved. As with The Acharnians, so with later parodies: parody posits an audience that is alert to the associations (generic, semantic, syntactic and otherwise, between the two works): an audience that can appreciate the discrepancies and draw the right conclusion. And the right conclusion may have less to do with casting one’s lot with the representative of some moral absolute (say, ‘justice’ or ‘patriotism’) in relation to the issue to hand, and much more to do with recognizing the possibilities for choice. As with the Greeks, so with later cultures’ tolerance of certain forms of parody: Fasching, the festival of Misrule, the Mardi Gras distortions of ceremony and good order – these could function as release-valves in societies where restraint, control, censorship were ‘normal’ features of society. (Do these festivals have less meaning when the occasions of misrule proliferate, when censorship, control, and economic exigencies evaporate as life is lived on secular, rather than spiritual, credit?) In what follows, I’ll range over some questions that occur to me as an occasional practitioner of the mode. Some of these questions will have resonances for anyone who has been parodied – as I know from the reactions of some of the writers I’ve sent up, and the responses of some editors. Cordite magazine refused to publish one series I wrote in 1998; one of the poems was subsequently runner-up in Australia’s major poetry award, the Newcastle Poetry Prize, in 1999 – where it was seen for what it was, a respectful tribute to the admirable poet John Forbes. Parody has destroyed the reputations of some parodists, as well as some of their targets: most of Charles Harpur’s targets in his satirical poem “The Temple of Infamy” – contemporary colonial writers of New South Wales in 1846 – are today scarcely known to scholars of the period. Conversely, parody has 172

Margaret A. Rose’s Parody//Meta-Fiction: An Analysis of Parody as a Critical Mirror to the Writing and Reception of Fiction (London: Croom Helm, 1979) is a fruitful source of fine distinctions: in what follows, I draw sometimes on her insights.

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saved numerous writers from obscurity, long after their victims’ works and names are forgotten: Vincent O’Sullivan reprinted “The Temple of Infamy” in 1988, ensuring the continuance of Harpur’s reputation.173 We could all cite examples of other writers whose reputations have been destroyed, or made, by parody. Why write parody? This question is frequently underpinned by an assumption, sometimes stated, as it was by F.R. Leavis, that parody is a low form of art, practised by writers lacking imagination or inspiration. I don’t believe this. Parody stems from feeling as well as from any cerebral impulse to engage in a technical exercise. The success (when it does succeed) of the technical manoeuvre demonstrates sensibility in the writer, and the performance gives pleasure to the audience. Parody does not stem from exhaustion of mind or emotion. The poet’s motives are more complex. For one thing, parody can be a way of coping with the “anxiety of influence” of poetry that so powerfully calls the imagination into play as to dominate one’s mind. I’ve certainly felt this to be the case, in relation to poems I wish I’d written, or of poems that preyed on my mind, and had to be exorcized. Faced with works that make so profound an impression that they threaten one’s confidence in writing anything that could be called authentic, parody is one way of silencing the critic within, or of dispelling the baleful influence. Seen in this way, parody is an anti-toxin, an inoculation against infection, a way of saving one’s own craft. There are dangers, of course: some ‘cures’ have unguessed side-effects. The authors of the Ern Malley parodies believed they were preserving ‘healthy’ poetry by inoculating themselves with the virus of a modernist plague. Half a century later, critics and readers tended to the view that the Ern Malley poems were among the best things James McAuley and Harold Stewart wrote. Parody can also represent a type of homage. The act of parodying a text subverts it while simultaneously acknowledging its claims not to be subverted. The audacity of the manoeuvre is what draws the acclaim of the reader or audience – including the person parodied. Parody can confer status on the parodist – and sometimes, paradoxically, on the person parodied. When one poem puts on another’s clothes, it may be that the parodist is simply practising the scales. But something is usually added – as in Auden’s ‘take’ on Byron, in his “Letter from Iceland”: Byron’s Don Juan provides a framework for a wide-ranging, partly 173

Charles Harpur, “The Temple of Infamy,”in The Unsparing Scourge: Australian Satirical Texts 1845–1860, ed. Vincent O’Sullivan (Nedlands: Centre for Studies in Australian Literature, University of Western Australia, 1988): 26–55.

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facetious commentary on contemporary manners and politics. This is far from a substitute for inspiration. In part, the imitation of other poets is a professional ‘rite’. Kenneth Koch’s parodies of Frost, Pound, Lawrence, and Hopkins, like Gilbert Highet’s send-ups of Ezra Pound, are the result of a lifetime of reading as well as writing – and Highet’s and Koch’s parodies are in every sense ‘inspired’ responses to the originals. Highet’s and Koch’s poems are also ‘political’ – particularly those that seek to ‘correct’ the fascist Pound, or the wiseacre bumpkin Frost. I read Owen Seaman’s send-ups of the late-Victorian poet laureate Alfred Austin as efforts to sharpen Austin’s style and make it congruent with his own experience. Les Murray, speaking about politics in Australia, commented that there is too much emphasis on politics in Australia, and that “everything is political,” down to one’s selection of a cake in a coffee-shop.174 Murray longed for a return to an Australia that didn’t care about politics, that was naive and spontaneous. He also thought that the communal dreaming in Australia was television dreaming: what chance, then, of any return to the days “before politics”? I doubt that there existed any Golden Age in Australia “before politics.” I wonder if Murray isn’t wrong in assuming that his peers, the generation of Clive James, Germaine Greer, Barry Humphries et al., could be called apolitical in their student days. Where, in Murray’s poetic output, does one draw any line between pastoral and the political? He is right in commenting that “everything is political.” Murray’s poetry is rhetorical and political, and has been since he began to interpret his work in public and to comment on others’ (past or contemporary) poetry. It is a truism with critics that all writing is political: how, then, can parody not have a political dimension? Elegy, celebration, melodrama, the gothic, narrative, epigram are among the age’s genres; the heightening of effect that is integral to every structured news broadcast, every soap opera, is a political comment on what is appropriate to someone’s idea of a national identity. The narrative poem (The Boys Who Stole the Funeral and Fredy Neptune – among other poetical ‘products’ of the past twenty years in Australia) is a map of the way society might be reconstructed. The epigram, sardonic distillation of crackerbarrel wisdom, is often overtly political (Dransfield has cracker: “I was flying over Sydney / in a giant dog // things looked bad”175). Australian poetry favours no single mode. Linda Hutcheon isn’t the only person to see a blood-relationship between parody and irony. Black Australians 174

Les Murray, “Conscious and Verbal,” The Arts Program, A B C T V (February 2000). “Flying,” in Dransfield, Drug Poems (Melbourne: Sun, 1972): 40, repr. in Dransfield, Collected Poems, ed. Rodney Hall (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1987): 148. 175

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employ it: Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s “No More Boomerang” in her collection We Are Going. Many writers, both poets and critics, may offer instances of temporarily favoured or popular forms by way of refutation. Narrative and pastoral have their champions: no contest there. I think it’s probably true to say that, at least since the Ern Malley affray, parody has been considered by Australian writers as a reactionary artform. Let me put another spin on the notion of ‘reaction’. As reactionary art, parody can be seen as an aesthetic response to varieties of super-nationalism in verse. Henry Lawson is said to have written at least part of “The Bastard from the Bush.” The poem is at once self-parody and a parody of politer forms of balladry such as A.B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson’s “The Man from Ironbark.” It reflects Lawson’s simultaneous need for, and loathing of, the male bonding that parades itself as mateship but which has its apotheosis in the misogynistic gang or ‘push’. The Bastard is everything his name suggests. Lawson’s poem strips the city–bush dichotomy of its superficial rhetoric, to reveal the degenerate art of the nationalist ballad, its focus on technique and sentimental propaganda. It is parody as purgation and cursing, its ventriloquial focus a mask for an attack on the manifestations of a rival political attitude. Further, its success as an oral text attests to its unerring sense of its audience’s ethos. The mode is old in Australia. Parody emerges, from the first anonymous ‘pipes’ or satires on authority-figures in early colonial times, as a form of handling the parent culture’s inheritance. In the mid-to-late-nineteenth century, the people who were claiming possession of a country were in part descended from (or were in fact) people who had been expelled from or who had otherwise absented themselves from the matriarchy. As a side issue, we may reflect on how this explains the vaunted Australian emphasis on maleness. The image of the great white wife and mother of Empire was present in visual and plastic representation in every town and city. Were Australia’s nineteenth-century satirists and parodists of imperialist ties, broadly considered, engaged in a running critique of a maternal dependency? In his study of irony,176 D.J. Enright might have appreciated another case-study, in the form of the grand Irish joke played on Australia in its Bicentennial year. Contributing its mite to the nationalist beano, the Irish government gifted a statue of Queen Victoria, which had decorated the city of Dublin before the Revolution, to the citizens of Sydney, who plumped it down beside the newly restored Queen Victoria Building opposite the Sydney Town Hall in the heart of the city. Perhaps the Irish figured that if Australians were so keen to retain such a remnant of colonial grandeur, there

176

D.J. Enright, The Alluring Problem: An Essay on Irony (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1988).

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was a god-sent opportunity to be shot of several tonnage of colonial Irish detritus. Were they parodying Australian nostalgia? There is more to say about the possibilities inherent in the ‘everything is political’ approach. Verse that satirizes the efforts of other writers might represent a contest for an audience, a form of debate, a rhetorical push against a – rightly or wrongly – perceived hegemony that links approved or acceptable taste with the productions of certain writers. (Recall that Michael Dransfield and others of his generation linked A.D. Hope and Kenneth Slessor with ‘official’ culture.) In what follows, I’ll glance at some cases of poetry that has as its direct object the characteristically evasive speeches by several politicians and representatives of variously conceived ‘official culture’ – speeches that betray beliefs, attitudes, and behaviour sanctioned or promoted by ‘official’ patrons. Nineteenth-century cartoonists, popular songwriters, writers of skits, reviews, and vaudeville turns traditionally drew on the physical aspects of politicians while spotlighting the gulf between their promises and their accomplishments. In constructing verse parodies, satirists have relied more on the verbal rhetorical features of politicians, while keeping to the fore the record of achievements of their victims. (Television has largely replaced the newspaper and magazine sketch and the print-media broadcast verbal parody, but the form endures, in oral circulation and in the plethora of small magazines, political journals, and student newspapers.) The historian Manning Clark notes that, in the period from 1790 to 1818, the “mimicry of repentance”177 by depraved convicts appalled the captains, chaplains, surgeons, and charity workers who worked on the convict ships, and that the first doggerel verse aimed at Governor King was recorded in June 1803. Clark’s first point suggests that the captains, chaplains, surgeons, and charity workers had been living in some isolation from the human race. Governor King, by all accounts, was less likely to be appalled by the cloth with which he was to cut out a colony. As in the nineteenth century, some notably earnest, dull, foolish, or plain corrupt public figures have proved a bonanza for parodists and satirists. A recent example is Robert Hughes’ Ballad of Alan Bond.178 The tone of these medicinal verses is often (but not always) one of jokey appreciation of the monster under review. Thus, Bruce Dawe’s takes on the Queensland Premier Sir Joh Bjelke–

177

Manning Clark, A History of Australia: From the Earliest Times to the Age of Macquarie (Melbourne: Melbourne U P , 1962), vol. 1: 98. 178 Robert Hughes, Ballad of Alan Bond (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2000).

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Petersen sometimes have the air of Dawe playing Oliver Hardy (“Here’s another fine kettle of fish you’ve gotten us into”) to Bjelke–Petersen’s Stan Laurel. Dawe’s several poems on his bête noire include numerous parodies of the Premier’s spectacular verbal absurdities. They have also taken the form of spoof sermons or gospels – apt ur-texts for recounting the ‘chosen one’ the National Party ‘elect’ who served as their messiah during much of Dawe’s working life as a teacher in the Toowoomba bible-belt. Consider Dawe’s “News from Judaea”179 and what is being parodied: Dawe simultaneously mimics the tone of Mark’s Gospel and the speech-patterns of Queensland’s Police Minister and of that State’s Premier. The risk such parody runs is not suppression but that of making out the leading characters in the drama to be merely droll rather than frightening. Elsewhere, Dawe can be more devastating when he puts on his New-Testament lingo. In “Revelations Revisited,” Dawe the evangelist recounts a vision of “a desert place called California” which spawns all kinds of feel-good cults and soft-core versions of Christianity, and where a “socially zip-uppable / God of the lounge room liturgy” announces that “even Golgotha’s / just another red-nose day!”180 In every case, the parodies also run the risk that their subject-matter will appear, to successive generations of readers, as remote from contemporary actuality as the subject-matter of colonial-vintage Australian parodists whose language and targets were those of the parochial moment. Dawe’s parody of the voice of the politician in “News from Judaea” has a long pedigree in Australian poetry. Consider Graham Rowlands’ fascination with Bob Hawke, whose eloquence in frequently shifting registers, from impassioned commination and advocacy to tear-jerking confessional bathos or obscene peroration, has provoked several imitations. In their appreciative collection, Tom Thompson and Elizabeth Butel provide several instances of Hawke’s parrying of reporters’ probings into his electoral ambitions. Hawke dealt with questions about a rift between Hawke and the Labor Party leader Bill Hayden, in the course of which his allegations that Hayden was “gutless” and a “temporary leader” who had “gone to water” were enlarged with the following repartee: If you are naive enough to believe that when Joe Blow and Mrs Joe Blow go into the secrecy of the ballot box on 13 December 1980, they are going to be making their vote in terms of what Bill Hayden or Bob Hawke, or

179

Bruce Dawe, “News from Judaea,” in The Penguin Book of Australian Satirical Verse, ed. Philip Neilsen (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1986): 229. 180 Bruce Dawe, “Revelations Revisited,” in Dawe, Mortal Instruments: Poems 1990–1995 (Longman: Melbourne, 1995): 62.

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Joh Bjelke–Petersen or Malcolm Fraser, did on the 14, 15, 16, 17 July 1979, then to coin a phrase, you’re wanking yourself.181

Of such performances, Rowlands produced (among other poems), “Bob Hawke Replies”: If you think I’m deliberately misrepresenting the findings of the Arbitration Commissioner after the number of times I’ve already referred (This hasn’t been Hawke speaking by the Commissioner) to the Full Bench’s statements on this and all other matters concerning industrial disputation (and in all humility I think I can say I’m as well versed in the findings of the Commission as anyone not on the Commission) just for the sake of currying favour with what you call the Right wing (It used to be the Left, the alleged Left but I’ll refrain from insulting the intelligence of the viewers by going into that particular (fabrication) (Can’t you hear properly? I said “fabrication’. I’ll thank you not to put words into my mouth) if you think I’m deliberately misrepresenting the latest findings of Commissioner Mandala (Yes, of course I’m using them selectively; it took Commissioner Mandala a full two hours to hand down what I might be permitted to call his perceptive, pertinent and very perspicacious findings) if you think there’s any deliberate deception or disloyalty to the Leader of the Opposition (I’ve known Bill, now, for at least twenty years) if you think there’s been any attempt on my part (If you’ll stop interrupting, I’ll answer the question) to misconstrue or misrepresent the Commissioner or mislead on this issue or any other issue of industrial disputation then you must be wanking yourself.182

Rowlands clearly enjoys at second remove the employment of his subject’s favourite term of abuse, and it is used reflexively, to qualify the subject. Is that the point of the poem? For readers born after 1980, Hawke-speak is scarcely a 181

The World According to Hawke, ed. Tom Thompson & Elizabeth Butel (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1983): 22–23. 182 Graham Rowlands, “Bob Hawke Replies,” Overland 87, repr. in The Penguin Book of Australian Satirical Verse, ed. Philip Neilsen (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1986): 263.

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memory. Dawe and Rowlands were not, of course, the first, or even perhaps the most notable, Australian poetical parodists. Hal Colebatch earlier seized on a visit of several American astronauts to Perth as an occasion to deflate provincial rhetoric and invoke a broader perspective. Colebatch made a telling point by aping the mode of a man considered to be the worst poet in the English language and butt of innumerable unkind practical jokes, William McGonagall (1825?–1902), the Pindar of Perth, Scotland. For all that McGonagall suffered in his own time as a result of overestimating his abilities as poet and tragedian, Colebatch’s poem is a tribute, in its way, to the earnestness of the poet of the bathetic moment. Consider the titles of a handful of McGonagall’s numerous effusions to be recited on public occasions: “The Famous Tay Whale”; “The Burial of the Reverend Gilfillan”; “The Horrors of Majuba”; “The Miraculous Escape of Robert Allan, the Fireman”; “The Burning of the People’s Variety Theatre, Aberdeen.” McGonagall’s civic celebrations and elegies also provide Colebatch with a plethora of models: “The Beautiful City of Perth”; “The Inauguration of the Hill of Balgay”; “The Funeral of the Late Ex-Provost Rough, Dundee”; the ode on “The Tay Bridge Disaster.” The opening of the latter will serve our turn: Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay! Alas! I am very sorry to say That ninety lives have been taken away On the last Sabbath day of 1879, Which will be remember’d for a very long time.

Hal Colebatch’s heartfelt ode pays homage to the master, while celebrating an equally momentous civic occasion in another Perth: ’Twas in the year nineteen hundred and sixty-nine, On a day when there was not very much sunshine, that the Apollo-II astronauts visited the city of Perth Where of sophistication there is a dearth. A speech was made by the Premier, Sir David Brand, Which indeed the simplest could understand. And to add to the welcome for the astronauts There was a fly-past by the Royal Australian Air Force. Also Acting Lord Mayor Harris made a speech to the astronauts, Who had indeed for a long time been present in many people’s thoughts. And Acting Lord Mayor Harris did not fear his speech did bore, Despite its sentiments’ expression several times before. And the astronauts politely tried to look interested in the speech, Which seemed by no means the least impressive of their feats.

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Indeed it was a nice visit, with little agitation, Despite the ceremonies’ total lack of imagination. The city of Perth by the diminished Swan River, Is not really a place for a high-liver, And indeed when visiting astronauts arrive and scan it, I am surprised they do not plant a flag, for to claim it as another planet. 183

John Clarke’s verse parodies mimic English and American poets. Three or four poems specifically send up politicians. “To a Howard” (by “Rabbi Burns”) illustrates the persistence of a spin on parody that has a long Australian pedigree: Wee, sleekit, cowerin, tim’rous beastie, I know tha’s probably doing thy bestie, But the kind’st heart wuid ha’ to see Tho’s nay made a fist o’ the thing, For e’en when there’s nothin at a’ to say And ye’d far better tak to th’ hills fo’ th’ day Tha opens thy gob a’ the drop o’ the noo And thou lets the wind bloo thy tongue aroon. Och ye poor wee laddie, ye’ve no got the breen, Ye’ve no got the sense to come oot o’ the reen, Why don’t thou gi’e it awa’ and gae hame, It’s no guid th’ watch if ye can’t tell th’ tame, There are jobs gang aplenty awa’ at the farm Affrightening birds by waving th’ arms, Ye ken they’re gae keen t’employ the bold laddies Awa’ at the links where they’re lookin for caddies, If that’s no to thy taste and thou’s wanting a change Thou’ll try wi’ th’ gunnery up at the range, Thou’ll no have much truible, thou’ve dun it before, Thou’s an expert for a’ that; look, “Wanted: Small Bore.”184

The master of this sort of verse mimicry was David McKee Wright – perhaps the most outstanding (and by far the most prolific) Australian verse parodist. From 1905 (when he first contributed satires and parodies to the Bulletin newspaper), and especially between 1910 and 1928, Wright had the widest adult audience of 183

Hal Colebatch, “A Poetical Gem (for William McGonagall,” Westerly 4 (December 1969): 31; repr. in Sandgropers: A Western Australian Anthology, ed. Dorothy Hewett (Perth, W A : U W A Publishing, 1973): 137. 184 John Clarke, “To a Howard,” in Clarke, The Complete Book of Australian Verse (North Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989): 5.

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any verse-satirist in Australian literary history. (Bruce Dawe’s Australian readership, like that of Les Murray, is in large measure a result of being ‘set’ on several States’ school and university syllabuses since the 1970s.) As political and poetical editorialist for the Bulletin between 1916 and 1926, Wright was well placed to observe the vagaries of Australian cultural life. His licence to write as he pleased, under his own and other names, prompted several hundred verses that variously celebrated and criticized Australian and international affairs. Like his successors Dawe, Rowlands, and Colebatch, Wright did not satirize and mimic only the speakers in high office or in the eye of the media of his day. He scrutinized a wide range of bewilderingly contradictory assumptions and cultural phenomena (ideologies, institutions, and productions) that might have come under that now-wearisome shibboleth, ‘Australian identity’. In much Australian satire, the sting disappears when the provocative moment passes. What saves some of the political verse of Dawe, Rowlands, Colebatch, and Wright from such a fate is perhaps the modesty of its claims as verse, together with the paradoxical cleverness exhibited in the verse-forms adopted to make the points. Wright variously mimicked biblical psalms, Shakespearean tragedy, Whitmanesque free verse, epigrams, ballads, and lyrics for his parodies of editorializing and speechifying commentators and politicians. Two examples illustrate his technical virtuosity. They also demonstrate the danger that tooclose adherence to ephemerality (or ‘topicality’) can render such work tedious to later audiences. Both poems refer to pre-1914 elections in New South Wales; both attack conservative governments and parochial views of States’ rights. The first was published in April 1910, and the second in October of the same year: F OR AUST RA LI A A psalm of David when a great hope was kindled within him. Behold I am lean, O lord, and all my ribs are numbered of the Devil. The thing that my hand doeth cometh to naught, and the thing that my soul desireth is not. Yea, my hand toileth for a little piece of bread in the noontide, and when night cometh I take account of the number of my debts. The shadow of the bailiff is upon the threshold of my door, and every rent day followeth hard upon the heels of its fellow. In the morning I curse softly, and in the evening is the voice of my swearing heard. For he whose waistcoat goeth far before him is increased against me, and mine enemies lie in wait for the wages of my right hand. O Lord, have mercy upon me and give me a fair show.

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Awake, all ye that love Australia, and kick mightily with the dexter hoof, Yea, heave loftily with the right hand that the fatness of Fat may be lifted from off us. The time of our deliverance is at hand, yea, it hath been fixed for April 13th. Shall the little tallow-pots have twenty-five bob for ever, and Fusion remain in the seats of the mighty? Nay, but Australia shall become Australia, and Fat shall no more have dominion over her! For the time of her deliverance is at hand, unless the people are damned fools. Australia shall become Australia, and the greatness of her glory shall have beginning, The debts wherewith the States are cumbered shall be all taken over, The States wherewith the nation is burdened shall be split up, The Fat that sitteth upon the people shall be rendered down, The capital shall be set by rivers of pure water, The Territory that is in the North shall no longer be a hissing and a reproach, The railway that is in the middle shall be speedily joined together, The army that is not shall be – yea, and the soldiers thereof shall be grown men, The ships of war shall be builded, and humbug shall altogether cease, For Australia shall become Australia, and Fusion shall be kicked into the outer darkness. Only let him that loveth Australia awake, and the thirteenth of April shall see it! (7 April 1910) BLACK F RI DAY Act V. Scene 4. The One Deep-Sea Port. Darkness, with fitful lightnings. Flourish, hautboys. Enter scullions bearing torches, followed by King Gregory and courtiers. K . G REGO RY:

The presage of large triumph fills my soul! Gordon hath smitten Labour. All the field Is heaped with war-won trophies, and Von Hagen Hath gotten him to horse. The day is ours! F IRS T COU RTIE R:

My Lord, the victory is thine alone; The kingly strength of thy triumphant tongue

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Part 2 (1990–2003) Hath smitten dark McGoven from the field; Thy repartee hath banged upon the nose All thine opponents, and the briny wash Of thy most potent tears hath swept away The lords by which the people sought to pass To place and office. SE CON D CO U RTIE R:

All the praise be thine! Proud victory sits upon our waistcoat curves. O M N E S : Proud victory sits upon our waistcoat curves! K . G REGO RY:

Thanks friends. Your praise doth honor to yourselves. The fight is fought; the triumph is assured. Fat hath his victories no less renowned Than those of Fisher. Hail the parish pump! Proud emblem of our local sovereignty, And death to all Australia! O M N E S : Hail the pump,

And death to all Australia! Enter M ES S E NG E R K . G REGO RY:

Who comes here? Thy breath is scant, and both thy cheeks are pale. Which suits not with this hour. M E S S EN G E R :

Gracious, my Lord. K . G REGO RY:

Well, say, sir. M E S S EN G E R :

Woe, my Lord, that I should bear Tidings of ill report unto your grace. McGowen reigns in Redfern. K . G REGO RY:

What of that? ’Tis a small matter. Was the battle fierce About his stronghold? M E S S EN G E R :

Full two thousand spears Deserted from our standard.

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Bowling’s chain! Thou stickest a dagger in me. Get thee gone. M E S S EN G E R :

Worse tidings still, my Lord. Oakes is bumped out By full three hundred votes at Paddington. K . G REGO RY:

Legirons and jail! Accursed be the tongue That prates disaster to the cause of Fat. Enter S E C ON D ME S S E NG E R. What! Still whey faces. Speak, thy looks proclaim More croakings of confusion. S E C ON D M E S SE N GE R :

Moore is slain With forty trenched gashes in his hope At Bingara. K . G REGO RY:

What more, and more, and more; And still they come. Enter T HI RD ME S S E NG E R. Why lookest thou so upon me? TH I RD M E S S E N GE R:

Sire, all is lost! The devil hath broke loose! The Glebe hath chosen Keegan! Dismal James Floodeth all Toxteth with his tears’ despair, And howleth out his soul against the moon. K . G REGO RY (overcome with grief):

Why so, so, so, so, so. My crown is gone. Jimmy defeated, Oakes and Moore undone, Wood and old Twaddle shaking in their shoes! The ”Liberal March” is over. I am sick. Give me a little space in which to die. He lies down. Where are the H E R A L D and the T E L EG R A P H And the small blood-encrusted E V E N IN G N E WS ? Who shall believe the three weird sisters now That keep the word of promise to our ear And break it to our hope? O Fat, Fat, Fat! Had I but served the people now and then

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As diligently as I worshipped thee They had not bumped me out with such a bump, O Justice! O Chief Justiceship forsworn! I think that we shall never make again At any future time vague threats against The good of great Australia. Lay me low Beneath the parish pump of my desire, And never let men murmur o’er my head Of Federal triumphs. None shall snatch my crown, ’Tis mine alone for all the days to be. I shall remain when others are forgot, And men shall point the tomb that still enshrines The smallest man of all a little crowdThe smallest, least, and meanest of them all. Dies to slow music. The H E RAL D, TE LE G RA P H and N E WS descend from a cloud and cover him with newspapers.

Wright’s effusions illustrate the role of parody as document of social change. Parody makes explicit the implicit assumptions or realizations in everyday discourse. In many of the examples I’ve quoted or referred to above, the poems may never achieve the status of anything more than an amusing illustration of an historical “mood’. At the same time, a further question arises: if parody is supposed to be such a low form of art, why were there – why are there – such strictures against it? In some cases, why such penalties? Why was Lenny Bruce hounded for his parodies? Why was Tom Lehrer (author of “The Vatican Rag,” “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park”) so subject to criticism? If parody is a low form of art, it is also a dangerous one. It can bring down the mighty against the parodist whose work has a predominantly satirical edge. As the history of censorship in Australia and elsewhere demonstrates, Vincent O’Sullivan’s case for satire’s traditional appropriation of “the right to injure by way of reforming”185 will not wash with some legal tribunals. No use arguing that it was all in honest fun, or that it was a burlesque intended to amuse. Leaving aside the wounded pride of the person parodied, parody appears to me to be a popular, even democratic, art and, as such, a threatening one to those who align themselves with powerful elites, or who appropriate the censor’s role. Parody mocks the loquacious who cannot abide silence. Parody loves assertion, self-confidence, dogmatism, assuredness, certainty, seeing these as hubristic. This viewpoint is one that it 185

Vincent O’Sullivan, “Introduction” to The Unsparing Scourge, ed. O’Sullivan, 12.

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shares with the satirist. Satire posits a moral order, a standard of behaviour; the satirist presumes to speak from a superior sense of the rightness of things. There is danger in this, of course: the satirist had better be a classy technician if the work isn’t to backfire. The satirist also risks being written off as a disappointed or jealous rival if the target of the satire is someone who possesses status the satirist desires. (This is particularly true of poets who satirize other poets.) The act of parodying a text subverts it while simultaneously acknowledging its claims not to be subverted. The audacity of the manoeuvre is what draws the acclaim of the reader or audience – including the person parodied. Parody can confer status on the parodist – and sometimes, paradoxically, on the person parodied. Some poets knowingly parody themselves. Is Ania Walwicz’s “Australia”186 an example of self-parody (the rhythms of speech – of ‘broken’ English)? Or is it a parody of Australian expectations? Is Walwicz playing to the gallery? Do Australians expect migrants to speak like Walwicz’s persona? Do they not expect them to say things like this? (Do all Australians expect migrants to be grateful for the chance to live in Australia? Isn’t Australia the ‘Lucky Country’ in many minds, still?) Is Walwicz’s poem a parody of audience expectations concerning poetry in general? After all, some folk consider “Waltzing Matilda” to be the national idea of a great song. And doesn’t a ballad by Lawson or Paterson conform to some people’s notion of a great poem? Curiously, in a biography of Buddy Holly, there occurs the following aperçu relating to Holly’s concert tour of Australia in late January 1958: Unnoticed on the far side of the world, Australia was also in the throes of internecine warfare between a brash, novelty-hungry young generation – harder-drinking even than Texan teenagers – and a conservative older one whose idea of good music was “Waltzing Matilda.” Capitalizing on the huge Australian record-market, and the dearth of home-grown talent, several major American rock ’n’ roll names had been there ahead of Buddy, notably his friends Little Richard and Eddie Cochran, whose tour with Gene Vincent had caused spectacular riots at Newcastle, New South Wales, the previous autumn.187

The rhetorical performance is a demonstration of the parodist’s ability to uncannily take on the thought-patterns as well as the techniques of the writer or speaker parodied. Parody demands a degree of skill that often exceeds that of the unfortunate model. I use the epithet ‘unfortunate’ because it seems to me 186

Ania Walwicz, “Australia” (1981), in The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets, ed. Susan Hampton & Kate Llewellyn (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1986): 230–31. 187 Philip Norman, Buddy: The Biography (London: Pan, 1997): 213.

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that parody breaks with pastiche (and with burlesque) to the degree that a powerful relationship between the parody and the work parodied – and between the parodist and the ‘parodee’ – is invoked. There is a seriousness of purpose in the act and fact of parodying a text. This relationship, to be fully apprehended by a reader, demands as well an unusual degree of critical awareness by the reader of the original speech-act. Parody reasserts God’s perspective; all is seen from outside, everything is seen at once – and ‘everything’ includes the original rhetor, whose speech and thought-patterns are revealed through minor or major emphasis of certain features of style: vocabulary, figures of speech (repetitio, synecdoche, and so on). This ‘everything’ also includes the parodist, who brazenly advertises his own standards of criticism and his own limitations. After all, the parodist is not an originator, right? The success of so much popular parody (parodies of politicians’ speeches, of official directives, of sports commentators’ behaviour and speech, of soap operas, of ‘serious’ dramatic or cinematic performances, of love-letters, interoffice memos, and much else) suggests that parody supplies a sort of social glue. It is so pervasive as to provide us with our folkloric identity. Is it, then, better that the mimic muse should be silenced at birth, that criticism should not occur, or that it be presented through ‘the proper channels’? Is silence golden?

—————— Defending the Line of Wit188 ——————

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’ M A T T R A C T E D T O P O E T R Y that realizes the near-indefinable quality of wit. I’m also aware that the display of wit for its own sake is a dead end for poets. A mind alert to punning possibilities and opportunities for one-liners does not guarantee anything more memorable than a gag and a reputation for producing trivial work. Wit can be mordant, wounding, precious, facetious or flyting. Some forms of wit are tiresome: genteel wit may disgust, scabrous wit may alienate; caustic wit may offend. The Buddhist scholar Hsing Yun claims that “The most intolerable sound in the world is satire.”189 Wit that has no object but amusement, though, can seem a dull clubbable exercise, like the efforts of toastmasters or undergraduate humorists. Wit that editorializes runs the risk of tediousness; better, perhaps, the dialogic approach that allows the reader to make the decision, as in the case of Robert Graves’s poem “A Slice of Wedding Cake,” about “lovely, gifted girls” who marry “impossible men”:

188 

Blue Dog: Australian Poetry 2.4 (November 2003): 76–79. Hsing Yun, Mindful Wisdom, Heartfelt Joy: Dharma Words from Venerable Master Hsing Yun (Berkeley, N S W : International Buddhist Association of Australia, 1995), vol. 2: 44. 189

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Has God’s supply of tolerable husbands Fallen, in fact, so low? Or do I always over-value woman At the expense of man? Do I? It might be so.190

This poem sits at a remove from poems that function as witticisms, whether extended – like Clive James’s splendidly lacerating “The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered” – or brief, like the scatological limerick verses of A.D. Hope, Robert Conquest, and Philip Larkin, who refrained from including such ‘byblow’ productions in collections by which they hoped to be remembered. A gulf exists between the bon mot – wit that flashes for the moment of delivery – and wit that notes the tears of things and offers us their gravity in words we wish we had written. Wit does not pause to laboriously explain. In place of theory it offers plain correspondences. At times it argues playfully, offering reasoning that we are meant to see as false. It pretends to hide its ‘literariness’, although canny readers notice its heredity and appreciate how it differs from and still resembles its parent stock. Wit grows in an environment of encouragement (such as that which fostered the ‘university wits’ of the sixteenth century, or that which provided the testing-ground for Dorothy Parker and others in the twentieth), and when it strikes out on its own, it bears the marks of its upbringing. Wit knows its history. It can behave in company with the serious-minded, but it knows that the world values authenticity of experience as much as book learning. The German aphorist George Christoph Lichtenberg had this in mind when he jotted in his notebook: “It is necessary for a writer to go out into the world, not so much to observe the situations as to get into as many situations as possible.”191 A broad frame of reference is fundamental to wit. Professional comedians have played on the idea of the half-wit and the nit (or zero)-wit. Wit provides relief and something more from dutiful factuality and literalness. I appreciate the cleverness of Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Drain, Gavin Ewart, D.J. Enright, John Clarke and countless others whose facetious verse is a holiday from the esprit de sérieux that makes so many other poets’ labours for effect a chore to read and an embarrassment to hear. Better a sharp epigram than an over-extended attempt to make a mountain out of a topicality. 190

Robert Graves, “A Slice of Wedding Cake,” in Graves, Collected Poems 1965 (London: Cassell, 1965): 354. 191 Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, “[Notebook F, No. 152],” in Lichtenberg, Aphorisms, tr. R.J. Hollingworth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990): 103.

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In Book 4 of The Dunciad, Alexander Pope warned that critics who fail to suppress dullness thereby increase its power. The same can be said for poets who do not suppress dullness in their own work or who inflict their lugubrious musings on readers. We have more than enough trouble locating books that we want to live with. For many readers and poets, witty poetry equates with comic effects, pleasantries, limericks, jokes. For some, it is the obscure wit of John Donne and certain of his contemporaries and followers. Pushed to define ‘metaphysical wit’, many would have difficulty. Some might fall back on Samuel Johnson’s dismissive remark that Donne’s wit consists of a violent yoking together of images that bear no relation to each other in nature. Johnson was a latter-day Puritan, incapable of imagining the exaltation of ‘being in love’ that Donne celebrated. As J.B. Leishman observed, if Johnson had had a glimmering of the state whereby the poet’s relationship with a beloved person is the poet’s only reality, he’d have thought Donne’s way of thinking morbid or “not far removed from insanity.”192 Johnson is not alone in that view, pace Hollywood commodification. Johnson’s response is like that of the doctors who failed to recognize Janet Frame’s literary allusions and took them as further evidence of an unbalanced mind. In the case of Donne, the matter goes beyond literary allusions tossed to the ignorant. Modern materialists and idealists might also mock the idea that any ultimate reality exists, let alone that it could be attained through intensely personal experience, whether in a relationship with a lover or with God. I rate Donne’s concept of wit on a higher plane than Johnson’s notion of the arbitrary combination of antithetical images. Donne expected his reader to have more than a scintilla of intelligence. I take wit to be the working of an intelligent mind resolving an imaginary problem in a way that gives pleasure to other intelligent minds. Donne knew how to lie like the truth, and appreciative readers know how to play the game. We read fiction, and get lost in the world the novelist represents, even while we know that it doesn’t exist. I extend the same courtesy to the poet who presents a world that contains things that are found in a concept of nature that admits the ‘imaging’ of unlikely things coexisting in the mind. Our dreams and nightmares tell us this occurs. Jennifer Maiden’s poem “The Mother-in-Law of the Marquis de Sade”193 points up the falsity of assuming that the fantastic imaginings of the Marquis might extend to reproducing the imaginings in actuality, and that actuality presents us with more 192

J.B. Leishman, The Monarch of Wit: An Analytical and Comparative Study of the Poetry of John Donne (1951; London: Hutchinson University Library, 6th ed. 1962): 220. 193 Jennifer Maiden,“The Mother-in-Law of the Marquis de Sade,” Southerly 37.2 (June 1977): 102. Repr. in Poet’s Choice 1977, ed. Philip Roberts (Sydney: Island, 1977): 51–52.

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horrors than occur in de Sade’s mind. Aristotle was getting at this ability of the poet to knowingly produce a world that lied like the truth, in his observation that the ability to make good metaphor is the mark of genius, since it reflects a mind alert to resemblances. I am positing a notion of wit that involves the reader in fine discrimination – in poetry that offers itself as verbal play and poetry that communicates the questions underlying ‘play’. I’m aware that there’s a slip of the tongue between ‘ludic’ and ‘ludicrous’; but the mind requires more than a holiday from reality. The awfulness of existence is alleviated by pressure-release that restores balance. Verbal play, of the sort exhibited in Gwen Harwood’s “Homage to Ferd. Holthausen,” Chris Mansell’s “Definition Poem: Pissed as a Parrot,” or Anna Couani’s “What a man, what a moon,”194 operates on a level that appeals to the solver of cryptic crosswords and appreciation of the advertising agent’s inventive coup. These manifestations of the release are akin to irony. We see ourselves slant, and appreciate that tunnel vision takes us several steps towards Belsen. The game can be lifted, however, to include the exploration of the process that sees witty combinations in nature that urge the inquiry to its source: how is it that mammoths and waterclocks and space-shuttles occur in a phenomenal world? The big questions loom. The Renaissance Jesuit Emmanuele Tesauro proclaimed that wit (ingegno) involves a process of joining two areas of experience – not, as Johnson would later suggest, by a capricious and violent yoking-together of heterogeneous ideas but by a natural process. For Tesauro, the joining together of ideas by metaphor embodies “a correspondence that obtains in nature between apparently unrelated objects”: Inventing a metaphor is therefore an act of discovery, an exploration of the subtle network of relationships knitting all things together; the more surprising and original the connection – the more conceited the metaphor – the greater is the poet’s wit.195

For Christian poets and thinkers like Donne and Tesauro, the answer was clear. Tesauro argued: 194

Gwen Harwood, “Homage to Ferd. Holthausen,” in Harwood, The Lion’s Bride (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1981): 62; Chris Mansell, “Definition Poem: Pissed as a Parrot,” Compass 3.2–3 (February 1981): 56–57; Anna Couani, “What a man, what a moon” (1985), in The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets, ed. Susan Hampton & Kate Llewellyn (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1986): 196. 195 Emmanuel Tesauro, Il cannochiale aristotelico (1654), quoted in summary in Ernest B. Gilman, The Curious Perspective: Literary and Pictorial Wit in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven C T : Yale U P , 1978): 70.

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God himself is the cause of wittiness, the creator of a witty universe. Not only is the language of scripture ingeniously metaphoric […] but the “metaphorical witticisms of God” are evident everywhere in the book of creatures, from constellations to insects […] God’s witty designs are such that everything in nature can reveal meanings to the witty observer. Wit is the method by which the creator confers significance on the creation – and by which the conceited poet explores and imitates the workings of the divine mind.196

After this, we might say, the deluge surfed by Coleridge. Like Tesauro and Donne, Coleridge displayed a propensity of puns and odd combinations (sunny domes and caves of ice; water everywhere and not a drop to drink) that had existence in an actuality of the mind in correspondence with ‘nature’. As with Johnson’s response to Donne, so with Wordsworth’s objection to “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”197 Wit fights a constant battle against readers who are determined to be literal but who cannot allow that products of the mind have a literal relationship with the ‘real’ world. Peter Porter remarks that “One cannot speak of ‘A Byzantium of the Mind’ – everything is in the mind.”198 As others have pointed out, the disturbing element in Bosch’s paintings is not the appearance of giant-sized insect- and animal-headed creatures, but that they wear such strange human costumes. Curiously, ancient and modern theatre and opera patrons might allow precisely such outlandish representations of things that never were, such as humans dressed as birds in a performance of an opera by Mozart or Rameau. Sir Philip Sidney scored a point when he stated that, “for the Poet, he nothing affirmes, and therefore neuer lyeth,”199 even though he castigated the absurdities of the contemporary theatre. (His example, incidentally, of a drama in which a player enters to inform the audience that one side of the stage represents Asia and the other Africa, “or els the tale will not be conceiued,”200 might have appealed to Jarry’s or Beckett’s sense of irony.)

196

Tesauro, Il cannochiale aristotelico, summarized in Gilman, The Curious Perspective, 70. “From what I can gather it seems that the Ancient Mariner has upon the whole been an injury to the volume” – Wordsworth to Joseph Cottle, 24 June 1799, in The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, rev. Chester Shaver (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1967), vol. 1: 264; “The Poem of my Friend has indeed great defects” – in William Wordsworth & Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (1800), vol. 1, np. 198 Peter Porter, “Sailing to Corminboeuf,” in Porter, Collected Poems, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1999): 352. 199 Sir Philip Sidney, “An Apologie for Poetrie” (1583), in English Literary Criticism: The Renaissance, ed. O.B. Hardison, Jr. (Goldentree Books; New York: Appleton–Century–Crofts, 1963): 128. 200 Sidney, “An Apologie for Poetrie,” 138. 197

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A witty poem does not claim to be the truth. It advertises itself for what it is, the imitation of a lie, designed to give pleasure to a reader who understands that it is a fiction, and who reflects on the relationship between the notion of ‘truth’. Puritan critics, such as the teacher Stephen Gosson, detested witty poetry because they thought it distracted people from contemplation of “the place from whence we came, and whither we muste in spighte of our hartes.”201 Verbal dexterity is the least of Gosson’s accusation: he could not imagine a witty universe but insisted on the literal correspondence of words. Saussure’s revolution, like Darwin’s, is still pure heresy to some puritan minds. I don’t hold out for a revival of Renaissance Christian theology. Stranger things than centaurs and sirens appear to exercise writers and critics of twentyfirst-century poetry. The problems attendant on the reception of witty poetry, though, remain. The whiff of reverence for seriousness still attends poems that have ‘literal’ correspondence to actuality. Wit is less valued than earnest craft in pursuit of an earnest goal (publication, publicity, a hand in the cookie jar). The state of mind that upholds the beautiful and true is a gift to the parodist: Owen Seaman’s send-up of Alfred Austin (“If you cannot be great, at any rate be good”202) put paid to Austin’s reputation for the rest of the twentieth century. Australian earnestness took a caning in the Ern Malley hoax: wit bombed the temple. Gwen Harwood’s mole in the guise of ‘Walter Lehmann’ sapped the serious Bulletin. For all that, wit is rare enough in Australian poetry for it to be relegated to subsidiary status alongside the narrative poem based on personal or social history, the geographical/ geological excursion poem, the desert, reef, and rainforest poem, the domestic anecdotal poem, the Language-With-EqualSigns poem, the lifestyle-inspecting lyric. In short, the sorts of poems that I, in company with so many others, produce, but which I increasingly relegate to the never-to-be-published and probably-to-be-used-as-a-firestarter carton, seem to be the vogue. Why this is so is understandable. The age demands obsessive self-regard. A type of wit is possible in public venues, to relieve the diffident mood: a throwaway line, a jokey nod, a ‘What more can we say?’ I’d hold out for more of esprit, ingegno. In “Anzac Day,” John Forbes produced one of the grandest poems on Australian mythology: the closing lines are a witty tour de force.203 The poem 201

Stephen Gosson, The School of Abuse: Containing a Pleasant Invective Against Poets, Pipers, Players, Jesters, Etc. (1579; London: Shakespeare Society, 1841): 33. 202 Owen Seaman, “Mr Alfred Austin,” in Seaman, In Cap and Bells (London: John Lane, 1899): 9. 203 “[. .. ] it’s / like a huge works or 8 Hour Day picnic – // if we still had works, or unions, that is” – John Forbes, “Anzac Day,” Overland 150 (Autumn 1998): 16, and in Forbes, Damaged Glamour (Rose Bay, N S W : Brandl & Schlesinger, 1998): 59–60.

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does what the readymade answer won’t do: I’d have loved to hear him read it; it gets the reader and listener involved in the anticipatory project of resolving a poem without end. Fay Zwicky gets me in with her “Mrs Noah Speaks” (1980); 204 like Jill Hellyer’s “Jonah’s Wife”205 or Ania Walwicz’s “Australia,” a witty twist of the monologue renews a hackneyed theme. These poems take risks, not that they’ll fail to please, but that they’ll end up in a collection of light verse. The poets will not worry: their poems revere poetry and life. They do it by stretching the argument of their topics beyond mere statement of fact. Metaphor carries the day: the inclusion of “Doreen” in Walwicz’s poem turns the work into a fable: a lie where something like the truth resides. Only an obtuse reader would fail to see that such poems bring us up short. Dorothy Parker’s “Resumé” does the same, in its tight last lines: “Gas smells awful; / You might as well live.” That’s what wit tells us. If we read such verse as comic, we risk seeing the comedy of survival as only a matter for a hollow guffaw. There is gulf between low comedy and the comedy that Dante, Chaucer, Byron, and Kenneth Koch acknowledged. Koch observed that “Some readers think of a poem as a sort of ceremony – a funeral, a wedding – where anything comic is out of order,” whereas “the comic […] is part of what is most serious for art to get to – ecstasy, unity, freedom, completeness, dionysiac things.”206

———————— More About Wit207 ———————— In the Cratylus, talking part jokingly to Hermogenes, Socrates says: “I should imagine that the name Hermes has to do with speech, and signifies that he is the interpreter, or messenger, or thief, or liar, or bargainer; all that sort of thing has a great deal to do with language.208

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PLAN TO GIV E SOME EX AMPL ES O F WIT IN POETRY ,

and to intersperse them with observations that may well display the literary symptom that George Bernard Shaw is supposed to have remarked:

204

In Kaddish and Other Poems (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1982): 21–24. In Mother I’m Rooted: An Anthology of Australian Women Poets, ed. Kate Jennings (Fitzroy, Victoria: Outback, 1975): 227, and in Hellyer, Song of the Humpback Whales: Selected Verse (Carlton South, Victoria: Sisters, 1981): 4. 206 Kenneth Koch, “An Interview with Jordan Davis” (Summer 1995), in Koch, The Art of Poetry (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1996): 212, quoted in David Lehman, The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (Garden City N Y : Doubleday, 1998): 244–45. 207  Discussion paper, New England Writers Centre, Armidale, N S W , 26 November 2003. 208 The Dialogues of Plato, tr. Benjamin Jowett (New York: Macmillan, 1892), vol. 1: 351, quoted by William Redfern, Puns (London: Basil Blackwood, 1984): 36. 205

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there is no more dangerous literary symptom than a temptation to write about wit and humour. It indicates the total loss of both.209

With this warning in mind, my intention is to explore some of the attractions and risks attendant on both the practice and the criticism of the line of wit in poetry. I don’t want to confuse laughter, comedy, and wit, so some working delineation is in order. A consideration of laughter invites a world of philosophical possibilities. Laughter that accompanies humour gives pleasure, but laughter can also be seen as a sign of idiocy and imbecilic behaviour. Laughter can be seen as a sign of mental health, as healthful, liberating relaxation of seriousness. Comedy also embraces a world of opposites. Tim Nelson defines comedy as consisting of two conflicting elements, one being laughter (often mocking, derisive, or discordant), and the other being the movement of a story towards an ending characterized by harmony, festivity, and celebration.210

These attempts at definition bring us closer to appreciation of wit in poetry – wit of the type that William Hazlitt claimed “is founded on the detection of unexpected likeness and distinction in things.”211 Far from laughter-inducing humour, it is the deliberate creation of surprising effects that rely on a sophisticated reader’s perception of the artful disposition of words calculated to juxtapose startling comparisons and unusual images. The result of a dialogue with self, wit is the antithesis of the readymade solution to a problem, for it seeks the audience’s involvement. There may be a focus on an apparently trivial game or a matter of crucial concern to others beside the poet. In any case, the collaboration of others is sought through flattery of their ability to make imaginative leaps and appreciate the ingenuity of the solution. Wit wrestles with boredom. Keats was right when he said that poetry should overwhelm us by a series of surprises.212 Somebody else has said that attention is the gift that busy people bring to art, and it follows that, whenever we pick up a book, we hope to be engaged by writing that upsets routine expression. We are 209

George Bernard Shaw, quoted by Max Eastman in The Sense of Humor (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1921): viii, and by Victor Raskin, Semantic Mechanisms of Humor (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1985): 7. 210 T.G.A. Nelson, Comedy: The Theory of Comedy in Literature, Drama, and Cinema (London: Oxford U P , 1990): 22. 211 William Hazlitt, “Lecture 1. On Wit and Humour,” in Hazlitt, Letters on the English Comic Writers (Collected Works 8; London: J.M. Dent, 1903): 22. 212 “Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by Singularity” – letter to John Taylor, 27 February 1818, in Keats, Selected Letters, ed. Grant F. Scott (Cambridge MA : Harvard U P , 2005): 97.

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surrounded by tsunamis of mediocre writing and expression, and we don’t read a poem hoping to meet with more of the same: we long for evidence of thought and expression that jolts our expectation of the banal. As Wallace Stevens said of poetry – “It Must Give Pleasure”213 – so both reader and poet are engaged in a risky enterprise: if the poem isn’t as good as the fiction we choose for vacations, it’s not worth the bother. Let’s up the ante. The O ED offers this, concerning wit: Denoting a faculty (or the person possessing it). 1. The seat of consciousness or thought, the mind – 1660. 2. The faculty of thinking or reasoning in general; mental capacity, intellect, reason.

In the light of the second definition, the differences between individuals’ mental capacities have long been acknowledged. Roger Ascham, the sixteenth-century tutor to Princess (later Queen) Elizabeth and author of the treatise The Schoolmaster, clearly understood wit as intelligence. His treatise was sparked by a conversation he had with the Treasurer, Sir Richard Sackville, on “the right choice of a good wit in a child for learning, and of the true difference betwixt quick and hard wits” and of the importance of “alluring young children by gentleness to love learning, and of the special care that was to be had to keep young men from licentious living.”214 Ascham and Sackville’s subject-matter continues to exercise opinions, as is evident in the range of views held about the status of witty poetry. The witty poem advertises its rhetorical stance: it presents an argument that attempts to persuade another (or the poet) to make a decision. Wit assists poetry’s effort to please, by offering some advantage that will accrue to the recipient as a result of the adoption of the course that is urged. It utilizes all the strategies of verbal cleverness at its disposal: logic (and anti-logic), complaint, appeal to emotions (including humour, pity, fear), and appeal to the senses. It employs figures and devices: rhyme, antithesis, paradox, exaggerated similes, hyperbolic metaphor, allusions, and puns. The witty poem aims further than wit for wit’s sake. Alexander Pope wrote that anyone who thinks wit is the only end of poetry is a fool.215 In pursuit of

213

Wallace Stevens, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” (1942), in Stevens, Collected Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 1965): 398. 214 Roger Ascham, “The Schoolmaster” (1570), in The Oxford Anthology of English Literature: The Renaissance and the Eighteenth Century, ed. Martin Price (Oxford & New York: Oxford U P , 1973): 105. 215 “A wit with dunces, and a dunce with wits” (The Dunciad, Book I V , l.90); “In Wit, as Nature, what affects our Hearts / Is not th’ Exactness of peculiar Parts; / ’Tis not a Lip, or Eye, we Beauty

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tonal effect, a profoundly witty poem can employ parody, satire, lamentation, hectoring (chiacking), expostulation, and it especially favours the short lyric form: it relies on compression and sudden leaps that require the reader to work at the poem’s sense, thus heightening the active engagement of both writer and reader. It shows off its erudition and supposes that the recipient is responsive to nuance and subtlety. While it appears to some readers as poetic self-absorption, an instance of the poet’s vanity or self-assuredness, it also provides its own corrective. It opposes maudlin sentiment, and plays to an audience, seeking to impress and to entertain. In this respect, it is sociable, embracing discovery, and life, through its appeal to the senses. The poet who revels in wit is, however, unabashedly addressing an elite who are assumed to share distaste for the conventional and the popular. The witty poem is thus usually lyrical, and is characterized by technical virtuosity, which it foregrounds. (The short lyric form that is characteristic of what some call the ‘metaphysical’ poem is a deliberate reaction to the contemporary longer poem, or the poem sequence – including the sonnet sequence – of the late-sixteenth century. John Donne’s short poems were seen, by aficionados of the long, often moralizing poem of the late-Elizabethan era, as outrageous and repulsive ‘sports’.) The witty poem seeks its own advantage, in terms of winning the appreciation of its performance. It displays an understanding of the psychology (and the mental alertness) of the reader, flattering him or her by supposing that s/he is capable of rational judgement, and shares the urbane experience and values of the poem’s speaker. It seeks the emotional as well as thoughtful attachment of the reader to the poet. In this sense, the witty poem might be compared to a courtship ritual, whose rules are known to each party. The ostensible experience and outlook of the poem’s speaker are firmly foregrounded. Where many of the short song-like poems of the English Renaissance were so formulaic as to be effectively anonymous, the lyrics of John Donne, Herbert, and Ben Jonson were distinctively marked with traits of personality and temperament that have become conventionally attributed by critics to those writers. Their wit included puns, verbal nods and winks, or a kind of private language of an in-group. I’ve written elsewhere about Samuel Johnson’s deprecation of Donne’s wit, and I still wonder at a man who couldn’t allow for a wit more subtle than his own. The explanation lies perhaps in Johnson’s commitment to common sense, and his dismissal, as violence done to language, of the enthusiasm of certain late-Renaissance writers, painters, and artists for striking new concepts (or ‘concall, / But the joint Force and full Result of all” (An Essay on Criticism, ll.243–46); in The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen, 1963): 771, 151.

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ceits’) that contrasted with the artistic conventions of earlier centuries. Those conceits were in part the result of new theories and inventions concerned with optics and perspective, which encouraged discoveries relating to new lands and cultures, and the human body and mind. Johnson’s world was relatively foursquare; Donne’s a world of expanding vistas at every turn. What Johnson objected to in Donne’s poetry was analogically expressed in other artistic phenomena: reversible portraits, anamorphic lenses, optical trickery, and stage machinery (such as that employed in masques and dramatic performances) enabling poetic ideals to be embodied in visual representations. Cognate modern visual effects in these fields include the rearrangements of perspective made possible in buildings like the Sydney Opera House or Melbourne’s Federation Square that compel us to see the surrounding environment with ‘fresh’ eyes. Where early Tudor and Elizabethan poets and writers considered ‘wit’ as akin to ‘invention’ (locating the range of possible things that could be said on a given subject), later writers (such as Ascham, and Jacobean poets such as Samuel Daniel) considered wit to be a specialized sense of quickness of mind. The earlier poets found inspiration in, and consequently imitated, poets like Pindar, Ovid, and Petrarch (witness the fashion for Petrarchan sonnets in English). Ernest Gilman remarks that Jacobean poets came to associate wit with swift perception of “resemblances between dissimilar things, and capturing these insights in unusual metaphors or engaging paradoxes”: for such seventeenth-century writers, ‘wit’ continued to imply originality, though “originality came to mean (rather unhelpfully) not writing Elizabeth verse.”216 Jacobean poets sought ‘strong’ lines and ‘masculine’ expression, in contrast to what were considered the ‘soft’ and highly orotund verses of their forerunners. Favoured Classical poets and writers were now likelier to be those (like Tacitus and Seneca) whose expression was curter, more acerbic. Donne and other contemporaries (such as Chapman, whose translation of Homer would later impress Keats) packed their verse with ‘strong lines’. For such writers, ‘wit’ now encompassed verse that was elliptical, learned, terse, mysteriously allegorical, enraptured, or otherwise ‘veiled’; defenders of wit and ‘conceit’ cited Aristotle’s remarks, particularly that the “ability to make good metaphor is the mark of genius because it implies an eye for resemblances.”217 Those who rejected the style correspondingly associated “conceit with outrageous metaphor and wit

216

Ernest B. Gilman, The Curious Perspective: Literary and Pictorial Wit in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven C T : Yale U P , 1978): 68. 217 Gilman, The Curious Perspective, 68–70.

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with a more or less frivolous turn of mind, or a gift for social repartée, that needed to be checked with the sober restraints of judgment.” 218 Even its defenders understand that wit can be a means of deception. This is because its dominant ornamental conception, metaphor, is a violation of plain truth. Aristotle suspected that metaphor was a linguistic impropriety (Poetics, 1475b), and Puttenham believed that, however much metaphor adds to pleasure and ornamentation of speech, it consists of “a kind of wresting of a single word from his own right signification, to another not so natural.”219 Sir Philip Sidney, in his 1595 defence, An Apologie for Poetrie, had replied to Puritan objectors to poetry and metaphor that employed pagan and imaginative stories, personages, and figures, that even St Paul had admired many pagan writers, and that poets are the least liars under the sun – since poets affirm nothing. In Sidney’s words, “The Poet neuer maketh any circles about your imagination, to coniure you to beleeue for true what he writes.”220 Donne took it for granted that his readers had intelligence enough to understand that wit such as he employed in “The Flea” was a counterfeit of logic. Reading the poem, we recognize the spurious argument, and are amused by Donne’s ingenuity, rather than outraged by any effort on his part to have us believe the truth of what he says. Pleasure, not instruction, is the end of “The Flea.” The witty poetry testifies to what ancient writers called ‘genius’, what Renaissance Italian writers called ingegno and French writers esprit: a mind-set that perceives alternative ways of looking at the linguistic possibilities of any situation. Skill in drawing on ‘original’ comparisons and analogies, and tactfully deploying them, is the measure of the mind. Claims for the imagination’s power and fellowship with the divine wit that shapes creation have been out of fashion since the Romantic period, but there is no slackening in the production of poetry and fiction that exemplifies the allure of wit for writers and readers. With the downplaying of the divine analogy, though, witty works are less highly regarded than productions that attest to a tragic vision of life. This is hardly accidental: the decline of optimism concerning the projections of Christian and other utopian and millenarian narratives accompanies intensification of the mood of alienation and threats to individualism, so that survival is presented as no happy theme, let alone a laughing matter. Poems that comment wittily on human inadequacy or folly are rated inferior to those that take life seriously, 218

The Curious Perspective, 69. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (publ. 1589), quoted in Gilman, The Curious Perspective, 72. 220 Sir Philip Sidney, “An Apologie for Poetrie” (1583), in English Literary Criticism: The Renaissance, ed. O.B. Hardison, Jr. (Goldentree Books; New York: Appleton–Century–Crofts, 1963): 128. 219

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which is to say, with due sombre hand-wringing. This doesn’t do justice to the desperation that is often at the base of works that cleverly (and concisely) express a typical instance of confusion of human plans. A self-evidently witty topical poem takes risks, chief of which is to be regarded as a facetious or insincere display of skill. Such poems are direct in their self-advertising as humorous, and this may offend those who prefer their poetry oblique and even obscure. The verse risks being damned as obscene or blasphemous, and finding itself subject to censorship. It is more likely, though, that it will be lost to view, canonically speaking, by being critically relegated to the category ‘light’ – as opposed to presumably heavy – ‘verse’. Light verse is in effect witty verse in miniature. Brevity, verbal adroitness, topicality of reference, and implied universality of the matter expressed unite to indicate clear intention to amuse. Ogden Nash’s “Reflections on Ice-Breaking” is exemplary: Candy Is dandy But liquor Is quicker.221

The more elaborate form of the limerick combines verbal slickness with, in modern times, inventive obscenity and optional blasphemy: There was a young lady of Exeter, So pretty the men craned their necks at her; And one was so brave As to take out and wave The distinguishing mark of his sex at her.222

I don’t think anyone would claim that such poems represent anything more than clever light verse. But one can see how such squibs might repel those who are predisposed to think that poetry must focus on elevated subjects – that some subjects are of their very nature ‘poetic’ (a point of view with which most of us would disagree). A surfeit of squibs will understandably prove tiresome, and some forms of merely ‘adroit’ wittiness may advertently or otherwise alienate readers. Caustic and satiric wit offends those who are its victims. Clever poets know how to offend, but most don’t make a habit of it, for, by doing so, they risk losing existing or potential readers.

221

Ogden Nash, Collected Verse from 1929 On (London: J.M. Dent, 1959): 37. William S. Baring–Gould, The Lure of the Limerick: An Uninhibited History (London: Granada, 1983): 152. 222

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In respect to word-play, puns have had a poor reputation. Why? Puns have variously been considered as play on words, play with words. They can be good, indifferent, or embarrassingly bad. While ‘serious’ language transactions attempt to restrict meaning, puns, like other word-games that suggest analogies, echoes, and affinities, consciously exploit the inherent ambiguity of language. Some critics have claimed that puns are a contemptible kind of wit, one that reveals infantilism or a pathological condition. William Redfern suggests that weak puns stem from “impotence, regression, or profound insecurity.”223 Conversely, Fowler declares: The assumption that puns are per se contemptible, betrayed by the habit of describing every pun not as a pun, but as a bad pun or a feeble pun, is a sign at once of sheepish docility and desire to seem superior. Puns are good, bad, and indifferent, and only those who lack the wit to make them are unaware of the fact.224

Redfern speaks of puns as “language on vacation,” an artful, subversive activity that opens up possibilities.225 Of course, some puns make us wince, and some contain profundities, such as Christ’s comment to Peter (Petrus) that he is the rock (petrus) on which Christ will build his church. The Latin poet Lucretius was a notable punster, who suggested the parallel structures of words and the universe through word-play in his poem De Rerum Natura: Fire and firewood, says Lucretius (II .907ff.), are composed of slightly different combinations of atoms just as the two Latin names of the substances, ignis and ligna, are formed from slightly different combinations of letters […]. Just as materies contains the letters m-a-t-e-r, so also matter and its atomic structure function as the mother of things; materies is the mater from which all forms of plant and animal life arise, Lucretius implied, for nothing can spring suddenly out of nothing.226

Clearly, as Redfern warns, “punning can spring from uncertainty as much as from overconfidence.”227 Some poets seem to be frightened by criticism that stems from bad faith into excluding puns from their work. Puns, like other forms of verbal wit, reveal a fundamental concern with playing with words in such a way as to show enrichment of meaning, sometimes oblique, but always 223

William Redfern, Puns (London: Basil Blackwood, 1984): 21. H.W. Fowler, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, Second Edition, revised by Sir Ernest Gowers (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965): 492. 225 Redfern, Puns, 19. 226 J.M. Snyder, Puns and Poetry in Lucretius’ “De Rerum Natura” (Amsterdam: Grüner, 1980): 46. 227 Redfern, Puns, 15. 224

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intrinsic. If some puns can backfire on us, others can generate a kind of verbal fission. Puns rely on the reader’s ability to respond with agility: those who denounce the pun and verbal wit advertise their own narrowness of thought. Wit should not be innocuous, unless we want to abandon poetry for a career as a feel-good facilitator. Wit should provide a break from solemnity. Poetry is the equivalent of churchgoing. Perhaps the confusion of witty verse with inconsequential or insincere poetry stems from thinking of wit only in relation to what is humorous, and mistaking laughter that gives pleasure for the laughter of idiocy and imbecilic behaviour. We’re also aware that many witticisms and jokes used in teaching moral principles do not invite laughter; Howard Nemerov quotes Nietzsche’s remark that “the last Christian died on the Cross.” 228 Laughter can be seen as a sign of one’s scornful superiority, or one’s hatred of or hostility towards some other person or thing. Aristotle adduced this view to account for our laughter at what we deem ugly or ludicrous, though definitions of ugliness and ludicrousness vary according to the observer’s point of view, as Montesquieu demonstrated in The Persian Letters. Against this account, laughter can be interpreted as a healthful, liberating relaxation of seriousness. We can laugh at others or at ourselves. Bergson drew a distinction between what is witty (spirituel) and what is comic according to how language is used: A word is said to be comic when it makes us laugh at the person who utters it, and witty when it makes us laugh either at a third party or at ourselves.229

This distinction preserves the capacity of wit to cause harm, while suggesting the calmative effect of comedy, a division further explored by Tim Nelson.230 Boris Sidis seems to downplay the impact of mocking or derisive laughter, however, in his claim that laughter is “the beginning of love,” and that “we laugh when we cease to hate.”231 By this account, even allowing for the quotidian misery that society extends to people capable of feeling, comedy views the world as a site of possible redemption through laughter. This digression takes us some way from focus on wit, though it sheds some light on the reception of wit. If one inclines to the view that laughter makes a 228

Howard Nemerov, “Bottom’s Dream: The Likeness of Poems and Jokes,” in A Howard Nemerov Reader (Columbia: U of Missouri P , 1991): 217. 229 Henri Bergson, Laughter, tr. Wylie Sypher (Le Rire: Essai sur la Signification du Comique, 1899; Garden City N Y : Doubleday, 1956): 128, quoted by Raskin, Semantic Mechanisms of Humor, 27. 230 Nelson, Comedy, 22. 231 Boris Sidis, The Psychology of Laughter (New York: Appleton, 1913): 145, quoted by Raskin, Semantic Mechanisms of Humor, 9.

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toy of all endeavour, to the extent of deriding faith and morals, then perhaps one is in the grip of a delusion based on a categorical confusion. If one sees laughter as a way of defusing danger and dispelling folly, one is in harmony with faith based on feeling supported by logic. Do any poets think of such things when they write witty poetry or strive for lightness? The poetry comes first, the theory some way behind. It’s more helpful to think of light verse as what poets write when they’re taking a holiday from other projects. This might explain the occasional forays of such poets as Philip Larkin, Gwen Harwood, and Vincent Buckley, though I think none wished to be ‘labelled’ a writer of light verse only. (Peter Porter, Clive James, and Peter Goldsworthy, by contrast, appear to be safely tucked into the light-verse box, whether they wish it or not.) Poetry’s two major topics, death and sex, are not always treated so reverently as to preclude treating them in a witty manner. Geoffrey Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Alexander Pope wrote as though they believed it possible. So did Emily Dickinson, Stevie Smith, and Gwendolyn Brooks. Some poets find composition of light verse so agreeable and profitable that they seem rarely to succeed in any other mode. A penchant for wit can deteriorate into a formula as hidebound as any that are slavishly followed in other modes. This may be particularly true of rhymed ballads: Pam Ayres and countless Australian bush balladists rely on distilled repertoires of techniques that lend their work predictability. The same can said of certain dub, rap, and gangsta performers – though we listen to all modes hoping to hear distinctive witty variations on recognized themes. This much resembles the experience of reading other constrained types of verse, such as troubadour lyrics or Elizabethan sonnets. Following this, if there is a threat to poetry’s seriousness (whatever that might mean), it is not likely to originate in the inclusion of wit. It is far more likely to originate in mimicry of what is ‘acceptable’ modern verse. No one breaks new ground by sheer imitation, useful as that exercise might be. We all commence by imitating the forms we admire. The task is to expand our knowledge, and to increase awareness of further possibilities – to take risks. In its study of poetry, the academy still inclines to poems that have the smell of moral improvement about them. When I attended Sydney University in the 1960s and 1970s, Byron did not appear on any English syllabus in four years and the Cavalier poets were similarly dismissed from consideration. Happily, Chaucer was not. It was left to students to fill in the gaps between the acceptable array of great authors, by independent discovery of what was omitted – including our Australian, American, and other contemporaries. Much of the discovery left those of us who attempted to write poetry with a wealth of knowledge concern-

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ing what we did not want to imitate. In time, I think, those of us who remained readers of poetry came to register what was of value in all that we learned – including the works of that underrated wit, John Milton. By some enigmatic logic, witty prose was included in the university syllabus, so that Shakespearean and Restoration comedies, the essays of Addison and Steele, and the fiction of Swift, Sterne, Smollett, and Fielding supplied a dimension otherwise largely ignored in the study of poetry. (Dryden and Pope were wheeled in as examples of deadly political satire or as instruments of moral betterment. Pope’s mock-epic The Rape of the Lock struck me as the longest as well as most precious example of light verse in English.) This prompts the thought that comic fiction, especially that depicting the clash between low life and high society, has great appeal across all class and other divides. This further chimes with the appeal, across all divides, of wit in verse. ‘Banjo’ Paterson’s and John O’Brien’s and Pam Ayres’ comic ballads attract readers of all types. Only a snob would derogate such productions – along with contemporary bush and other balladry – as ‘not poetry’. Highbrow literary journals make little or no allowance for such work, presumably because populist witty verse by definition seeks – and finds – populist outlets. While classically educated editors of such eighteenth- and nineteenth-century magazines as the Spectator and Blackwoods admitted witty verse of a popular nature into their pages, latter-day literary magazines cater to the fad for the self-involved modern lyric, which privileges introspective accounts of experience (however prosaically articulated). Wit of the type that William Hazlitt claimed “is founded on the detection of unexpected likeness and distinction in things”232 is present in both popular verse and verse with social-climbing aspirations. In the demands it makes in terms of active engagement, witty poetry is sociable, embracing discovery and endorsing life through its appeal to the senses. This is true of the four-line squib or the two-line epigram (Pope’s inscription on a dog collar for the Prince of Wales’ dog, for example: “I am His Highness’ dog at Kew; / Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?”). The witty poem shows off its erudition and supposes that the recipient is responsive to nuance and subtlety. While it appears to some readers as poetic self-involvement, an instance of the poet’s vanity or self-assuredness, it also provides its own corrective. It opposes maudlin sentiment, and plays to an audience, seeking to impress and to entertain. Wit operates as a derangement of the familiar. From the Renaissance to present times, it undercuts conventional efforts to restrict meanings to one out of 232

Hazlitt, “Lecture 1. On Wit and Humour,” 22.

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many possible connotations embedded in a word. This subversive function of wit is a handy corrective when publicity agents for individuals, business, educational, religious, and political organizations attempt to persuade us to see things from one angle. Efforts to win us to accede to a limited meaning invite a ‘poetic’ reclamation of language, a rescue operation that restores by questioning the intellectual, moral or spiritual balance, even while it appears to set orthodox words and images upside down. There is some analogy with Zen Buddhist practice. Buddhist teachers chastise students who return conventional answers to questions: the point of the Zen paradox (koan) is to liberate through removal of attachment to meanings that enslave the disciple in worldly names. This sort of poetic ‘carnival’ of language upsets those who consider the wit of puns, riddles, and paradox to be a sign of moral or intellectual weakness. William Empson labelled Shakespeare’s word-play as such, claiming: It shows lack of decision and will-power, a feminine pleasure in yielding to the mesmerism of language, in getting one’s way, if at all, by deceit and flattery […]. Many of us could wish the Bard had been more manly in his literary habits.233

I doubt that Empson could get away with such a bald statement of his case in our own enlightened times, but he will do service for the sniffy point of view that seeks to restrict the poet’s range of rhetorical ploys. When we are so susceptible to the efforts of the media to twist meanings, we can be grateful that the gift of the gab, which Diderot called the only luxury available to the common people, has such a profound ancestral champion as Shakespeare. There are, of course, other ancestor-figures, including Socrates, the compilers of the Gospels, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Donne, Milton, and Byron. A puritan would denounce the salutary common pleasure: we might recall that some of the finest sermons of the Renaissance and the period of the Counter-Reformation employed word-play as a way of attracting adherents to the true religion. The eighteenth-century Neoclassical backlash, levelled at such word-play in religious writings, poems, plays, and journalism, ran athwart of a common human propensity to find intellectual stimulus and delight in ambiguity and paradox that characterizes language. Wit is dense intelligence: consider the paradox in that.

233

William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (Harmondsworth: Peregrine, 1969): 250.

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————————— Poetic Voice234 —————————

F

G U D A S A N D M I C H A E L D A V I D S O N open their article on “Voice” in the New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics with this observation:

ABI AN

To stress voice in discussions of poetry may be simply a reminder of the large extent to which poetry depends on sound. The qualities of vocal sounds enter directly into the aesthetic experience of performance, of poetry readings, but no less do those sounds resonate in the “inner ear’ of a fully attentive silent reading. T.S. Eliot felt that one may hear at least three voices of poetry: that of the poet in silent meditation, that of the poet addressing an audience, and that of a dramatic character or persona created by the poet. Implicit in Eliot’s division is the notion that behind these various voices lies one original voice – or what Aristotle called ethos – that expresses the poet’s intentions and organizes the various personae.235

Whether or not we agree with Eliot’s division, we certainly hear a voice when a poem is read aloud, and even when we attentively read a poem in silence, we are conscious of something like the way the words sound. I’m aware that a consideration of written or gestural poetry by deaf poets will disrupt such a facile statement as the foregoing, a matter which I’ll leave in abeyance. For the moment, it might suffice to remark that written poetry by deaf poets may manifest the same aspects of textual familiarity as those employed by poets who are additionally alert to aural and oral aspects of poetry. Edgar Allan Poe took pains to reveal the composition of “The Raven” as an exercise in logical plotting of form and effects, but I’m far from sure that all poets start out with some Poe-like programme that dictates what ‘voice’ a poem will have. I think it even less likely that poetic composition is something like taking dictation in some way similar to St John or Mohammed’s listening to the angel. Inspirational theories remove the poet’s responsibility for the composition, rather in the way that the T-shirt slogan ‘I only do what the voices in my head tell me to do’ suggests limited responsibilities for one’s actions. Voice, I suspect, is as problematic for poets to explain as it is for readers to interpret. A once-and-for-all interpretation of a poem is, however, not a straightforward business. The engagement with any sort of art involves readers (listeners or observers) contributing their experience – greatly varying experiences of life, and books and other artforms – to the occasion. 234 

Seminar on Poetic Voice, New England Writers Centre, 1998. Fabian Gudas & Michael Davidson, “Voice,” in New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger & T.V.F. Brogan (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1993): 1336. 235

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As readers, it is our contribution to a poem to be alert to the possibilities of sound and voice; as John Leonard remarks, “poetry, as an art that foregrounds language, will pick up suggestiveness of sound where this is possible and appropriate.”236 Sound is one of the clues we have to go by when we try to follow the poet’s thought-pattern. Generally, we understand what the words ‘mean’ in the dictionary sense, but we are also alert to other associations, some of them aural, such as homophones and puns. The placement of a word in a line (for example, at the beginning or end of a line or following a caesura) can also suggest arresting emphasis on a particular word or phrase. The length of the syllables, and the sound-patterns that result from repeated consonants or vowels, can also help us to make an educated guess at the poet’s intent. A further clue may be the emphasis that breath and pitch can give to certain words and to entire lines in a live or recorded reading by the poet. No two readers will express a poem in exactly the same way, and this is where we meet problems in attempting to get at the actual voice of the poet – what Aristotle called the poet’s ethos, which we take to mean ‘character’ or ‘authority to speak on the matter’. We gauge, from the words alone, how the poet is qualified to speak with authority on the poem’s topic, and we learn, by broad experience of reading, the ways in which a poet can seek to influence a reader. The poet may be writing in a manner that is playful, melancholy, angry, grim, passionate, or a host of other moods. Consider, for instance, the opening two stanzas of James K. Baxter’s ballad “Lament for Barney Flanagan”: Flanagan got up on a Saturday morning, Pulled on his pants while the coffee was warming; He didn’t remember the doctor’s warning, “Your heart’s too big, Mr. Flanagan.” Barney Flanagan, sprung like a frog From a wet root in an Irish bog – May his soul escape from the tooth of the dog! God have mercy on Flanagan.237

The poem has at least two voices –the narrator’s and the doctor’s. However we read these eight lines, we are aware that a story is shaping and is given dramatic variation through the interplay of the two distinct voices. We also guess that the poem is going to continue in the same way, intercutting the narrative voice with 236

John Leonard, in Seven Centuries of English Poetry, ed. Leonard (South Melbourne: Oxford

U P , 2003): 573. 237

James K. Baxter, “Lament for Barney Flanagan” (1953), in Baxter, New Selected Poems, ed. Paul Millar (Melbourne: Oxford U P , 2005): 37.

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other voices associated with Flanagan’s life. The tone of “Your heart’s too big, Mr. Flanagan” is apparently matter-of-fact, though we detect another note: Flanagan’s heart might be literally outsized, but when we say that someone has a big heart, we’re remarking on that person’s courage or generosity, among other admirable qualities. Whether or not the doctor meant both senses that I have outlined, it is impossible for a reader not to see and to ‘hear’ both. We can go further in detecting how effects of ‘voice’ operate in the first stanza. The apparently straightforward account of Flanagan’s morning activities is given a twist by the phrase “a Saturday morning.” We may ask ourselves why Saturday has a particular significance, and recall that the title of the poem includes the word “Lament.” We can make another educated guess about what is coming. Names of days, like other ‘seasonal’ words, can take on extra significance in a poem, by suggesting moods associated with such ‘dating’. The importance allocated to a particular day or occasion can be seen in the following examples: Overnight, very Whitely, discreetly, Very quietly (Sylvia Plath, “Mushrooms”) Midsummer stretches beside me with its cat’s yawn (Derek Walcott, “Midsummer, VI”) It is 12:20 in New York, a Friday (Frank O’Hara, “The Day Lady Died”) That Whitsun I was late getting away (Philip Larkin, “The Whitsun Weddings”) April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing (T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land) Whan that Averyll with his shoures soote The droghte of March hath perced to the roote (Geoffrey Chaucer, Prologue to the Canterbury Tales)

In all of these opening lines, the ‘ordinary’ associations of a day, time of day, month, or year frame the event or activities that occur or have occurred at a particular time. They imbue with their conventional associations, and so advance, an argument about a relationship, event or process that has enough significance for the poet to be worth the writing of a poem. In the case of Baxter’s lament, the day is significant enough for Flanagan, but it is also significant for the poet, whose affectionate memories of Flanagan are

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woven into an artful poem modelled on the style of popular Irish balladry. We can assume that Flanagan liked such poetry. The irreverent (and suggestive) humour of the emphatically rhyming description “sprung like a frog / From a wet root in an Irish bog” suggests that Flanagan would have enjoyed the tone. The seventh line offers a wish in the form of a proverbial exclamation and, as if to make the wish sound more formally sincere, the eighth line expresses a rather more devoutly phrased blessing. The poet’s ‘voice’, then, is far from monotone. Every ‘effect’ in the poem (everyday language with its popularly understood other meanings, the mix of full and near-rhymes, and the switch from racy vernacular to the urgent “God have mercy on Flanagan!” is used to convey the blend of emotions attached to the passing of Flanagan. It may be that Baxter’s first draft sketched the gist of the poem, including many lines and the pattern of a refrain or stanza that the poet retained. I think it very likely that, while revising and fiddling to bring the poem into its near-final form, Baxter gave thought to the voices in the poem – that is, to craft the speeches so as to achieve fidelity to what prompted the poem. Along the way, several changes might well have occurred to further temper the initial expression. In the process, a single voice might assume several registers and intonations. There is nothing mysterious about this idea that we might hear several voices when we read a poem attentively. It is hardly necessary to conduct a hunt for Baxter’s drafts to corroborate such a set of assumptions. Rather, an analogy with our experience of writing a letter or other document might assist in the discussion of ‘voice’. At the outset, we might be aware that, in striving for a certain effect; we are trying to work out an approach to the topic, often provoked by something external to ourselves, something we simply must tell the intended recipient of our letter – or something determined by some piece of business that we simply have to address. So we first plan some approach to the topic. The shape our writing takes will inevitably reflect our thought-processes or ideas relating to the topic under consideration. We can regard this as the ‘meditation’ aspect that Eliot refers to in his comments on voice noted above. At the same time, we are aware that we are addressing an audience (the reader, or many readers of the letter), so we tailor our thoughts through whatever skill we possess to relay those ideas. This involves certain rhetorical strategies – how we will introduce our topic, arrange the supporting argument, outline requirements, provide answers to questions, choose examples, and so on. All this involves care with vocabulary, grammatical accuracy, and so on, relative to our understanding of the recipient’s expectations.

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In this procedure, we are aware that we are creating a ‘persona’, a self-dramatization reflected in the language and structure of the argument we will use to persuade the reader that we are writing from an authoritative position: after all, we don’t want to come across as bumbling dolts. We aim to persuade the reader that we know what we are talking about and that we should be taken seriously. Consider this in relation to writing a formal application for a position: how will we present the case for ourselves? We employ artistry similar to that of the poet, in offering evidence that we can think and that we have knowledge and selfconfidence. I emphasize persuasion and argument because I consider most poetry to be an argument of some sort. Sometimes, the argument is with another person. At other times, the argument is with ourselves: the poem traces the stages in stating a claim. The idea may be baldly stated at the outset and followed by arguments, or the arguments may be presented in such a way as to lead up to the claim. These are classical rhetorical ploys. Even a poem that seems to be nothing more than a celebration of a mood or the description of a scene may be read as an attempt to persuade the reader to see things the poet’s way. An example of such rhetorical shaping of an argument in a lyrical poem is Hopkins’s “God’s Grandeur”: The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod? Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink, eastward, springs – Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.238

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One could read the poem aloud, adding emphasis here and there to highlight subsidiary meanings, but although one could read the poem several times, one might never quite repeat those emphases. This already tells me something 238

Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur” (wr. 1877), in The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse, ed. Christopher Ricks (Oxford & New York: Oxford U P , 1987): 420.

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about voice – that, in line with Eliot’s formulation, I am hearing different voices in the poem. I hear the voice of a man meditating, or recording a meditation. I hear as well the voice of Hopkins addressing an imagined audience, and I hear the voice of Hopkins putting on an act – as he is well qualified to do by virtue of his role as poet, to say nothing of his long practice as a clergyman hoping to convince listeners by every rhetorical means at his disposal. Hopkins commences with a claim, the truth of which he tries to persuade us of by piling up evidence and examples. His entire effort is to convince us through his verbal dexterity, by using all the resources of sound and syntax and poetic form at his disposal. Now, we may agree or not with Hopkins’ world-view based on his Catholic faith, but we can at least recognize the ways in which he mounts his argument. Advancing beyond declaration, he adopts two similes to suggest what God’s grandeur is ‘like’: it flames “like shining from shook foil” (think of tinsel used in decoration, or gold leaf on priestly vestments); it gathers to a greatness “like the ooze of oil / Crushed” (think of olive or other oils, and of the oil used in religious ceremonies such as baptism, the anointing of kings or of dying persons). Hopkins next shifts to a question that uses another rhetorical figure, metonymy: God’s “rod” – like a king’s sceptre – is representative of overall majesty and rule. Hopkins asks why, if God’s grandeur is so apparent, people do not acknowledge God’s rule. If we wonder who Hopkins is talking to in those two sentences, we may wonder a little more when we reach the next sentence. We can now ask who Hopkins might be addressing: himself? any reader? On what basis does he presume to ask such a question? Here we start to see why voice is so interesting a concept. I suggest that Hopkins is posing a question as if to himself, but at the same time, he knows the answer , and he proceeds to suggest it throughout the next four lines: Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is smeared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

In short, Hopkins is implying that humanity has become dulled through repetition of toil and trade. The world is “seared” (burned) by trade – a reference perhaps to the steam-driven factories and transport systems of England. Here, he sounds like the Victorian gentleman he is, looking down on trade as a grimy occupation unfit for a cultured person, a thing somehow below one’s dignity: the tone of voice is temporarily almost snobbish.

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He follows up this reflection with the words “bleared, smeared with toil.” Industrial and manual labour over centuries have undoubtedly “bleared” the earth and “smeared” “all,” humanity and the earth alike (think of industrial England covered in smoke and grime). He advances from this image to a subtler one: everything wears “man’s smudge” (think of the actual smudge, and of the figurative ‘stain’ of original sin). He compounds this with “man’s smell” – so that he momentarily steps back from the religious suggestion and reasserts the physical, adding at the end of the line “the soil” (think of generations who have died and become part of the spoil). Hopkins follows up the suggestion of man’s relationship with the soil in the final line of the sonnet’s octave, to state that the soil “Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod” – another indication of how humans are out of touch with the earth by virtue of wearing shoes. At this point, we can say that Hopkins has subtly interwoven several themes in the poem: celebration of the grandeur of the creation, a query as to why we do not appreciate that grandeur, and the reasons why we no longer appreciate it: we have lost touch with the grandeur through the toll that trade and toil have taken on our lives. The shifts in images suggest as much, but underlying the images even of physical drudgery (including the “smell” of humanity) is a series of additional religious associations of the words he uses to present those images. (It occurs to me that the references to a thing that is seared, bleared, and smeared – as well as smudged – could as well refer to a picture as to a landscape or person: the brightness of the picture – God’s “painting” – is smeared by human trade and industry?) What we are hearing is the voice of a man contemplating beauty and the fall from spontaneous appreciation of the world’s grandeur and that of its creator. The poem is at once conservatively religious and ecological. Up to line 9, the ‘voice’ is that of a puzzled and concerned person attempting to reconcile the paradox of humanity ruining its living space and forgetting its part in the divine scheme of things. The sentiment has something in common with the Romantic notion that nature is the source of our being and that reconciliation with all the aspects of nature. Spectacular power and beauty can serve to refresh our spirits even while we are reminded that we are individual parts of a greater whole, no matter how insignificant we appear to ourselves. In lines 9–12, this ‘Romantic’ element combines with Christian orthodoxy, as Hopkins reminds us that “for all this, nature is never spent; / There lives the dearest freshness deep down things,” and that, for all that darkness comes each day, dawn continually brings light and with it, a reminder (for a religious person) that the Holy Ghost encircles the earth – just as the arms of a pair of parentheses or brackets encompass a statement. I have been attempting to trace the

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shifts in voice that occur throughout the poem – from calm statement of fact to glorying in vision, to questioning, distaste, matter-of-factness, a sort of melancholy, and onward to reassurance and relief: “ah! bright wings.” Throughout this poem, we can see how sound-effects contribute to sense by directing us through repetition. The repeated end-rhymes are only part of this: “God,” “rod,” “trod,” “shod”; “foil,” “oil,” “toil,” “soil” and so on. In every line, Hopkins builds up a sound-pattern that is frequently controlled by careful punctuation. In the second line, for example, following the words “It will flame out,” he adds a pause as if looking for the right comparison before adding “like shining from shook foil”; and, in the following line, two more sound effects are situated each side of another comma: “It gathers to a greatness” and “like the ooze of oil” – as if to suggest, in each case, the process that is described. In the fourth line, he plays with the syntax and sound effects to suggest the thorniness of the problem: “Why do men then now not reck his rod?” The placement of “then” next to “now” is a neat touch – suggesting at once time past and time present: the problem is not a new one, and that generations of men have pondered the same question. I hardly need to remark what is evident in the sound-effects in the following lines: the repetition of “have trod” continues the theme of seeming eternity, and the repetition of the vowels in “seared,” “bleared,” “smeared” further suggest long-term effects of “trade” and “toil.” The musicality of the poem is further reinforced with “wears,” “shares” and “bares.” I observe throughout that the rhythm of the poem is not regular: Hopkins’s pauses and stresses (his ‘sprung rhythm’) contribute to the conversational tone. We cannot force the poem into overall conformity with any preconceived idea of regular iambic speech that we might imagine. The best way to read the poem is to read it as ordinary speech, simply following each sentence and pausing where Hopkins adds punctuation. Just as speech can rise and fall according to where we place emphasis, so Hopkins’ poem uses the rhythms of ordinary talk. To take another short example of the interplay of voice effects, Marianne Moore’s “Poetry” opens with a disarming statement: I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it after all, a place for the genuine. Hands that can grasp, eyes that can dilate, hair that can rise If it must, these things are important not because a high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are useful. When they become so derivative as to become unintelligible,

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eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a role, a tireless wolf under a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the baseball fan, the statistician – nor is it valid to discriminate against “business documents and school-books”: all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry, nor till the poets among us can be “literalists of the imagination” – above insolence and triviality and can present for inspection, “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” shall we have it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, the raw material of poetry in all its rawness and that which is on the other hand genuine, you are interested in poetry.239

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Readers who claim not to understand poetry can take some consolation from Moore’s first four words, and her claim that poetry involves untangling the point of “all this fiddle.” Allen Tate admired the poem because it pointed out that one cannot “love poetry” in general: “Is it not absurd to say that one loves poetry? To say that is to say that one loves all poetry – as indiscriminate a love as the love of all women.”240 Moore distinguishes between poetry that records the fact of a phenomenon (inauthentic poetry, poetry that is a variety of journalism) and poetry that is admirable because it makes something imaginative 239

Marianne Moore, “Poetry,” in Moore, Selected Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1935): 40–41, and in Collected Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1951): 40–41. Note that the original version (in Observations, 1924) is only thirteen lines long, and in her own final selection, the Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (New York: Viking, 1967 & London: Faber & Faber, 1968): 36, the poet had stripped her poem down to the opening three lines only. 240 Allen Tate, “The Unliteral Imagination; Or, I Too, Dislike It” (1964), in Tate, Essays of Four Decades (1968; Intercollegiate Studies I; Wilmington D E : I S I , 1999): 461.

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out of the literal. In lines 2–3, Moore allows that poetry can contain “the genuine.” In short, she is defending poetry against things that are derivative, and words that are unintelligible. By the time we reach the middle of the fourth strophe, Moore’s ‘point’ is even clearer: she has a “perfect contempt” for “half poets” who offer readers ‘phenomena’ (things, events, the ‘raw material’ of poetry) as if the mere mention of them were poetry. She requires that poets transform the material and create “ ‘ imaginary gardens with real toads in them’.” She goes about this business ingeniously. Within a few lines, she shifts position from “I” to “one” to “we” – a ploy that almost imperceptibly has us agreeing with her claims. I say imperceptibly, for the form of the poem deflects our attention from the shifts in position. The poem has the appearance of a set of regular stanzas (prosodically, and more accurately here, strophes) whose organizing principle is not immediately detectable, though a syllable count of each stanza’s first line will reveal an equal quantity. Then, too, interesting rhyming effects occur throughout: full or half-rhymes like “eyes – rise” (ll.4–5); “what – bat” (ll.11–12); “poetry – can be” (ll.19–29); “hand” – “and” – “hand” (ll.25, 27–28). While Moore shows that she is aware that one type of poetry can put people off, she also reveals that she can play with the techniques of poetry. Her initial conversational tone, for which adjectives such as ‘annoyed’, ‘bossy’, ‘impatient’, ‘dismissive’ and others might fit the case, gradually gives way to a more reflective view. Sound effects are deployed for dramatic contrast: lines 2–3, for instance, mark a change from the plosively emphatic “perfect contempt for it” to the slowed-down, observation that “one discovers in / it after all, a place for the genuine.” Moore, who was frequently described as a poet deriving from Imagism who wrote in syllabic verse, remarked “I do not know what syllabic verse is. I find no appropriate application for it.”241 She sometimes counted syllables in composing her lines, but, as Helen Vendler observes, the stanza, and not the line, was for her the poetic unit. Stanzas, she said, came to her first, unplanned: the words clustered “like chromosomes,” and she fixed stanzas until the tune sounded right. She was “governed by the pull of the sentence as the pull of a fabric is governed by gravity.”242

Critical focus on Moore’s syllabic or stanzaic arrangement of lines may distract us from effects such as those noted above that signal shifts of voice. 241

Voice of America interview with Howard Nemerov, published in Poets on Poetry, ed. Nemerov (New York: Basic Books, 1966): 10, quoted by Helen Vendler, in Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1980): 65. 242 Helen Vendler, “Marianne Moore,” in Vendler, Part of Nature, Part of Us, 65.

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Punctuation is another feature that signals such shifts. The same comment is true, of course, of Baxter’s poem: he employs semicolons, commas, full stops, dashes, and exclamation marks as tonal signposts. Baxter also uses shorter lines throughout, and the fourth line of each of his stanzas is something akin to a reprise or summary, rather like the refrain of a traditional ballad. Moore’s punctuation is less strikingly evident, but it is no less efficient. Commas, colons, full stops, and dashes function as markers of pace. It is impossible to read her poem at a gallop. Whatever we think of her ‘intention’ in general terms, we are directed to read the poem at the pace she indicates. The long opening two lines of each stanza convey the impression that she is writing prose, but she is playing a game with the reader. Her prose is not so different from that of the “business documents and / school-books” prose she mentions, but her reference to such prosy texts is cut-up by the leap across space between lines 17 and 18 (“and / school-books” – as if “school-books” were an afterthought). Her ‘voice’, which seems at first encounter so prosaic, is in fact exploiting the ‘poetic’ element (the multiple possibilities) of every ‘prosy’ word and its place in the poem. Moore was a prodigious writer of letters, and many of her poems – like the one under investigation here – strike us as being ‘letters’ addressed to anonymous readers. The very first line of the poem adopts the tone of a reply to a previous letter. When we read that she requires “the poets among us” to become “ ‘ literalists of / the imagination’” – to haul into living presence the products of our imagination – she is taking a slap at those who in their “insolence and triviality” fail to do so. Until such time as poets can prove themselves “literalists of the imagination,” she declares, those who demand both that poetry’s raw material exist in all its rawness and that “the genuine” be embodied in poetry are the people who are “interested in poetry.” I note that she does not say that such people are making poetry. To be “interested in” something is not to be an expert at producing that thing. Moore’s demand that the imagination be presented ‘literally’ is, at the very least, a paradox. The only vehicle a poet has is language – a verbal code that stands for what is translated to the reader – and interpretation (not just ‘appreciation’ or ‘liking’ a poem) demands thoughtful effort. Reading back through the poem (since poems acquire ‘meaning’ through our mindful attention to them), I find that Moore is suggesting that poetry exceeds the derivative, that words should be ‘useful’ to convey the mystery of things, just as hands, eyes, and hair are useful things for other purposes. Her ‘voice’, then, employs ordinary speech to suggest what speech strives to translate to the listener or reader. The shift in tense in the final two strophes from present to future suggests as well that

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Moore favours poetry that contains both the ‘raw’ and the ‘genuine’ – poetry that is, to use her word, “important.” At the end of the poem, the implied listener or reader of the first strophe is directly addressed. The “I” of the speaker in the first line has been replaced with two references to “you” in line 25 and the final line, and the bond between poet and audience is further cemented with the intimate and inclusive pronoun “we” in line 24. Whitman-like, Moore also emphasizes the flesh-and-blood element, in another reference to what has already been voiced. “Hands that can grasp,” referred to in line 4 of strophe 1, is echoed in the reference to “on the one hand” and “on the other hand” of lines 25 and 28; what we might call ‘literal’ hands have served an imaginative purpose. In insisting that the literal should serve art, and not the other way around, Moore makes her poem into an example of what she requires art to do – to have a life of its own. The critic Jean Garrigue called Moore’s 1924 collection of poems Observations “first and last a voice. The voice of sparkling talk and sometimes very lofty talk, glittering with authority.”243 Helen Vendler further observes that “‘Poetry’ is an indirect self-reproach for her painstaking absorption in ‘all this fiddle’,” and suggests that the poem is characteristic of Moore’s oft-expressed suspicions (elsewhere in her poetry) about some poets’ “passion for setting people right,” about “the wish of human nature to dominate,” to “stand in the middle of a thing,” and about “being diverted by the ‘mystery and construction’ from ‘what was originally one’s / object – substance at the core’.”244 The remark on “all this fiddle” can thus be read as a crucial topic in Moore’s conversation with herself about a habit of her own that annoys her. Reading the poem this way, we can say that the question of identifying ‘voice’ requires us to be alert to multiple possibilities. The voice in the poem is slippery, designedly so: when we are tempted to think of a poet addressing a wide audience, we might be kidding ourselves. In many cases, the poet is working through a problem or issue that must be resolved if the poet is to move on to other subjects, other issues. On this last point, Vendler notes that Marianne Moore “took a dim view, even very early, of human attempts at what we would nowadays call ‘communication’.” 245 The voice of a poet is frequently changeable. We recognize certain signature turns of phrase in some poets’ work, just as we recognize some characteristic themes, images, or attitudes, but we cannot assume that every poem is in fact 243

Jean Garrigue, “Marianne Moore,” in American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies, ed. Leonard Unger (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1974), vol. 3: 204, quoted in Helen Vendler, “Marianne Moore,” 65. 244 Vendler, “Marianne Moore,” 68. 245 “Marianne Moore,” 68.

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written in the poet’s workaday voice, nor that the workaday voice operates in a monotone. Voice reflects mood, and poets often adapt the words of others, for tonal variation. Emily Dickinson’s poems range in voice, as we observe by reference to her poems “Wild Night – Wild Nights!” and “What Soft – Cherubic Creatures”: the former conveys exaltation, and the latter scorn for the too-polite “Gentlewomen” with their horror of passionate commitment.246 Robert Browning, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot were adept at ‘taking off’ the voices of others, in poems such as “My Last Duchess,” “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter,” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” The same ventriloquial skill is at work in poems by Anne Carson (“ TV Men: Thucydides in Conversation with Virginia Woolf on the Set of The Peloponnesian War”247) and John Forbes (“Speed, a Pastoral”248). Elsewhere, Thomas Hardy (“The Ruined Maid”249) and Louis MacNeice (“Bagpipe Music”250) adopt personae or masks in which more than situations are changed: both poets employ dialect or provincial speech to convey their speakers’ class and gender, and both poets vary tonal effects that contribute to the ironic depiction of the bitter conditions the speakers experience. ‘Voice’, then, is not a straightforward matter. In describing voice, we have to consider the framing, sometimes the implied listener, and at all accounts every verbal, aural, and structural technique that contributes to the tone or mood of the poem.

——————— The Ventriloquial Muse251 ———————

F

OR M ANY Y E ARS N OW ,

I have been reading and teaching rhetorical analysis of the tactics of public persuasion – in speeches, public advocacy, political campaigns, editorials, and the like – and what philosophers, rhetoricians, and poets have said about the relationship of rhetoric to poetry. Some modern246

Emily Dickinson, “Wild Night – Wild Nights!” and “What Soft – Cherubic Creatures,” in Dickinson, Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson’s Poems, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston M A : Little, Brown, 1961): 32, 92. 247 Anne Carson, “T V Men: Thucydides in Conversation with Virginia Woolf on the Set of The Peloponnesian War” (1980), in Men in the Off Hours (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000): 115. 248 John Forbes, “Speed, a Pastoral,” Scripsi 1.3–4 (Summer–Autumn 1982): 60, repr. in Forbes, The Stunned Mullet and Other Poems (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1988): 28. 249 Thomas Hardy, “The Ruined Maid” (1901), in The Complete Poems, ed. James Gibson (London: Macmillan, 1976): 158–59. 250 Louis MacNeice, “Bagpipe Music” (1937), in MacNeice, Collected Poems, ed. E.R. Dodds (London: Faber & Faber, 1966): 96–98. 251  Blue Dog: Australian Poetry 7.13 (July 2008): 42–46.

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day persuaders have used the tropes and figures of memorable speech in questionable ways, adapting the arts of persuasion, defence, and praise to the black arts of spin-doctoring and deceit. In this discussion, I want to claim some of the ethical ground of rhetoric for contemporary poetry, and suggest a usable approach to talking about the way a poem sounds. Some time back, Brook Emery and I swapped observations on voice in poetry, a question that interested us because conversation about poetry so frequently invokes voice only to leave matters unresolved. Brook was writing an essay that became a talk at the Five Islands Poetry workshop, while colleagues at my university had asked me to talk to first-year students about ‘voice’. I preferred to speak about the way poets put on voices, because I don’t think students should be told there’s a voice in poetry and it’s their business to nut it out. That makes poetry out to be some sort of hard sum whose answer depends on applying the right equation, so they’re likely to run away from poetry as soon as they get shot of the syllabus. Furthermore, I’ve never met anyone outside a school or university whose first response to a poem is ‘what’s the voice of this poem?’ Nor do I think many poets start out thinking ‘Crikey, this is an interesting voice I’ve put in here’ – although a poet might think like that when the poem’s finished. Unless a poet is trying out the voice of a certain character or consciously mimicking the way another poet has created a particular effect, it’s a safe bet that he or she will commence a poem in a state of concentration and unstated joy to be writing again, and only later will reflect on how the poem may strike another person – and will correspondingly explore possibilities of adjusting the way it sounds. It is this matter of possibilities that interests me, because possibilities relate to style. In classical rhetoric, style concerns word-choice, and decision-making is crucial. I don’t expect that every poet thinks of this aspect of decision-making in rhetorical terms, but rhetoric is traditionally concerned with modulating the way an utterance will strike a reader or listener. In the case of poetry, the poet’s first audience is the poet in all of his or her chameleon moods: the poet looks at the poem, or ‘hears’ it at different times: it strikes the poet differently the day after it was written; at times, the poem may strike the poet as brilliant, clever, tedious or embarrassing. I’ll elaborate on this later; for the moment, consider that at some time, early or late in the process of composing a poem, the poet becomes alert to a plurality of possible responses and contexts into which the poem could fit. Every poet arrives at the point in writing where possibilities come to mind that will radically affect the way the poem will go out into the world. People give different names to what follows: revision, fine-tuning, redrafting.

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Focus on the ramifications of word-choice gives us a way of talking about poetry that critical and academic talk about ‘voice’ often overlooks, in positing ‘voice’ as expression of authenticity, or of ‘essential’ character. I guess poets wish to escape being labelled as wholly predictable, and that authenticity is something readers are more ready to impose on a poem to corral it into conformity with other work by the same poet. I understand that we can often identify a work as being by a certain writer because we have learnt to recognize predilections for characteristic topics, themes, regional references or syntactic, idiomatic, metrical or other patterns favoured by that writer. Within the same poems, though, I recognize the play of something analogous to ventriloquism – and I know from many experiments that confront readers with ‘anonymous’ poems how it’s not always easy to identify authorship. This ambiguity is not so mysterious. At some stage in writing a poem, poets come to an intuitive appreciation of Byron’s comment that poets are liars. Maybe the world intrudes at that point: a phone rings, a child or visitor arrives; a distracting event takes attention away from the poem. However short the absence, the poet discovers, on returning to the poem, that it is strange, as if something that another person has written. What was the poet thinking while writing such a thing? I think this phenomenon reveals that poets become aware that they ‘do’ voices, that they retrospectively see that they have unthinkingly assumed a dramatic ‘persona’ or character, call it what we may, in the moment of composition. This point of realization may be early or late, but it arrives. The assumed character may have everything and nothing to do with the private discourse of the poet in intimate conversation with a partner, parent, child or other familiar. The character that the poet becomes conscious of assuming in the act of composing has its everyday equivalent in roles the poet assumes at other self-dramatizing moments. I’m aware, when I read poems I wrote years ago, that I have been many people. Do I acknowledge them? Yes, though many of them embarrass me. In the past year I have written some poems that started out as perhaps all poems do: that is to say, they were provoked by an idea but gave no indication of where and how they might conclude. But the poems contained possibilities as to how they might wind up – possibilities that I was not always aware of even while I jotted down the lines. In some cases, I crossed out certain implications that I became aware of. They were taking a story somewhere I didn’t want to go, or they were making things too corny or too predictable. Mostly I prefer poems that push against convention, go feral for a bit, and come home like prodigals that have had a good time. And when I saw poems that contained signs of accommodating themselves to more conservative and regular form, I decided to

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let them find their form as sonnets (however eccentrically rhyming, internally or otherwise), sapphics or other varieties of stanzas, fake-haiku (fake because they weren’t in Japanese), and so on. The result has been that many of them look quite formal, and all sound exactly like, and nothing at all like, the way I might be heard speaking at a given time. Are poets hard-wired with one voice? How do we explain the varieties of speakers in poems by a writer who employs heteronyms – Fernando Pessoa, or a contemporary Australian poet like Philip Salom? Is the poet striking a pose? Which is the authentic Browning or Poundian voice in their dramatizations of others’ experience, real or invented? I may be allowed, like greater or other poets, to self-dramatize at times in this way. We recognize these moments when we find ourselves, at midnight or three a.m., mentally replaying the lines of a recent acrimonious or embarrassing conversation, or when we discover ourselves inadvertently entertaining the family by singing arias or rehearsing monologues in the shower; or when we engage in another colloquy with self during the reveries in front of the mirror while removing facial hair, arranging a coiffure, and otherwise composing our mask for another day on the stage of public life. This consciousness of encountering interesting alternative aspects of self at times compels us to destroy a letter and start again, or to offer an immediate apology for something that we have said in an unthinking moment and immediately realized could provoke grief, anger or outrage. As poets, we may be connoisseurs of our own or others’ mortification. Some friends experienced initial embarrassment and then hilarity when their six-year-old boy Qin De called, in his best put-on American voice at an Armidale supermarket checkout, “Out of the way, you floozies, we’re coming through.” This dramatism also surprises us when we catch ourselves taking stock of what we wrote a moment or minutes before. The knowingness associated with seeing one’s thoughts externalized is the point where craft – that is, everything one knows of rhetorical strategies – is concentrated at a pitch beyond the intuitive or willed that got the poem to that stage. We use this mindful attention to refine and foreground the poem’s self-dramatizer. At this stage the poem may be recognized as the production of the poet trying out a tragic, playful, macabre or facetious tone, even adopting a persona that may rarely or never be revealed in intimate or public discourse. Ann McCulloch observes that Alec Hope recorded in his notebooks how he considered “that interpretations of poems that are based on the belief that the poet is speaking in his own person or for himself have absurd results”: If I could get people to see that a poem is neither a “communication” nor a “document’ but a “performance” and a “creation”, he writes, “things would be easier.” He would prefer his poems to be treated as though they

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had been written for the hell of it, as though the poet had said “here’s an interesting idea, let me see what would happen if I developed it.” 252

Hope’s observation rings true to me, though he does not elaborate on the language he uses. I think language, and not just an ‘idea’ – which may be no more than ‘subject-matter’ – lies at the heart of the performance. Hope’s practice was to develop an idea by whatever means came to hand, with the result that he can variously sound like a preacher, an entertaining travel companion, a museum guide, a larrikin, a toff, a naturalist wondering at a wildflower or native bird, or a psychologist fascinated with inmates of the human zoo. How he gets these effects depends on his virtuosity with language. There is more to say about the language, but I take the question of the poem’s independent ‘voice’ to lie at the heart of such phenomena as the multiple voices and identities assumed by Hope and such voice experimenters as Emily Dickinson, Edgar Lee Masters, Fernando Pessoa, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwen Harwood, and others whose productions surprised their editors, critics or neighbours when poetic identity was revealed as being at odds with authorial identity. Elizabeth Bishop’s resistance to the ‘confessional’ approach to poetry in part stemmed from a sense that poetry can do more than foreground a psychoanalytic spin on one’s experiences, and in part out of a sense that poetry addresses common as well as peculiarly private needs. The separation of identities is something many poets have striven to maintain. Keats, whose multivocal poetic mentors included Spenser and Shakespeare, was alert to dramatic possibilities inherent in such distancing, and he was no more than frank in avowing to his friend Woodhouse that the “poetical character” is a “chameleon,” and “is not itself – it has no character” and that “a Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity.”253 Accordingly, I find it unsurprising that Keats’s poems variously reveal him enacting the roles of boon companion, Miltonic fabulist, ghost storyteller, melancholy lover, political liberal (at a time when the word signified ‘revolutionary’), lover of seasonal changes, stoical sufferer, and many others. No wonder some teachers, when asked who the ‘real’ Keats is in this or that poem, can’t find it in themselves to tell students that Keats is no single unchangeable thing but is all of the above, for the reason that he can be all the above.

252

Ann McCulloch, “A Lecture Given on the Eve of A.D. Hope’s Eightieth Birthday,” in Security of Allusion: Essays in Honour of A.D. Hope, ed. David Brooks (Canberra: Phoenix Review & Australian National University Faculty of Arts, 1992): 26. 253 John Keats, letter to Richard Wodehouse (27 October 1818), in Keats, Letters (London: Oxford U P , 1965): 172.

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In similar fashion, we are everything we find ourselves being in our poems. We generate selves when we work through drafts of our poems, weighing possibilities and trying alternatives so as to foreground or screen qualities we favour in the characters speaking the lines accordingly as our mood and cunning dictate. The American poet Jane Hirshfield, speaking of originality in poetry, remarks: Learning to trust the possible and to accept what rises, to welcome surprise and the ways of the Trickster, not to censor too quickly – all are lessons necessary for a writer.254

While she affirms the value of “playfulness and rebelliousness” and “intelligence and seriousness,” she adds that a “knowledge of tradition, perversely, helps.” I consider these (and other) traits and virtues ‘cunning’ or ‘knowing’. The expression we adopt conveys the character we assume for the moment. I don’t believe we’d want to stay forever in the heads of some of the ‘selves’ we spin off. We recognize this, and so, we hope, will anyone who sensibly reads us or hears us. We are trying something on, to see how it fits. A rhetorician would put the situation like this: when we write a poem, we speak as a member of the particular rhetorical community to which we belong at the time of writing the poem. That community may be entirely imagined, like the one we address when we sing in the shower. Some poets might, on occasion, have a specific ‘target’ audience in mind from the outset of composition, but my point holds good whether the audience is previously determined or not. The poem is contingent on many factors, the most urgent of which is that a poet has to speak, cannot help but speak, on a certain matter. The cause may be some private or public provocation that has assumed such urgency that the poet must speak at once. Just who the audience is can go hang until the poem is so well in hand that the poet is satisfied with the performance. Apart from occasions when a poet does have a specific ‘target’-group in mind and thinks ‘this will knock their socks off’ (or, ‘I hope this works’), the fine-tuning of a poem to appeal to an actual audience is probably a less conscious business than satisfying the imagined ‘audience in the head’. The re-direction of the poem to a particular audience (live audience, website, newspaper, magazine, newsletter, whatever) may become clear to the poet not while the poem is being ‘polished’ but only when it is resolved and the poet becomes aware that it could also suit the taste of a particular external audience or editor very well. The poet’s speech, then, is necessarily adapted to the situation at hand, the entire context, and it cannot be modelled on some simple ‘message formed, 254

Jane Hirshfield, “The Question of Originality,” in Hirshfield, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (New York: HarperCollins, 1998): 50.

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message sent, message received’ communicative formula. It seems to me that some reviewers are happier with such a mechanistic model of what a poet does and how a work is received: it saves grappling with complexity if the poet can be relied on to deliver a predictable ‘message’ that can be read in terms of a distinctive poetic ‘voice’. There is some analogy here with art and certain reviewers’ responses to art: a reviewer may be thrown off-kilter if a painter deviates from a formula that the reviewer has contrived to discern in the painter’s works, based on familiarity with certain tendencies observed in the works to date. It chanced, in Australia, for example, that some critics were less than happy with Brett Whiteley’s dark, gold-leaf-adorned crucifixes, painted around the time of his friend Joel Ellenberg’s terminal illness (1979–80). More familiar icons were the curve of a woman’s body or a rock-formation, more familiar tones the blue of the Harbour and the ochre of the Australian interior. Darker canvases, a tortured man and gold sheen didn’t cut much ice with reviewers who had backed the earlier works. They should not have been surprised. The painter, like a poet, can appear a chameleon. When Whiteley’s earlier constituency – read ‘discursive community’, ‘rhetorical community’ or ‘rhetorical commonwealth’ – welcomed his visions, it was because the visions accorded with a sense of what was appropriate in terms of a quasi-abstract depiction of what it was to be an ‘Australian’, even a ‘Sydney’ artist. The Christian iconography didn’t ‘fit’: that stuff was a throwback to some alien mannerist expression. The English poet James Fenton has a short poem called “An Amazing Dialogue” which, in its entirety, is this: But this poem is not like that poem!’ “No, you are right, it’s not.”255

So, with a poem considered by a reader as a poet’s ‘signature’ work, an artefact ‘signed’ or ‘authorized’ as the authentic voice of the poet. The American poet Barbara Guest speaks of a poem’s “concealed autobiography,” a “memoir of itself which is released as it becomes a presence existing in time.”256 This comes somewhere near my idea of the poem’s autonomy from the poet. I think that, no matter how much we’d like to think that a poem is the very heart and voice of the poet, the poem goes its way, and the poet stands amazed at it and the voice that speaks

255

James Fenton, “An Amazing Dialogue,” in Fenton, Out of Danger: Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993): 97. 256 Barbara Guest, “Shifting Persona,” in Guest, Forces of Imagination: Writing on Writing (Berkeley C A : Kelsey St., 2003): 40.

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out of it. Looking at our own earlier work, I think we will sometimes ask ourselves ‘What was I thinking of when I wrote that?’ and ‘Is that really how I sound?’

——————— How Poetry Lines Up257 ———————

S

have claimed that there is no distinction at all between the language of poetry and prose. That claim may lend aid and comfort to readers and writers who see many twenty-first-century unrhymed open poems only as wilfully chopped-up prose in language that is remote from earlier verse-practice. Wordsworth raised similar critical hackles when he claimed to write poetry in simple ballad forms, couched in the real language of men. He didn’t write anything of the sort in much of his verse: save for some ballads and lyrics written in language approaching the directness of children’s and peasants’ speech, much of his philosophical, political, and religious verse is noteworthy for toning-down some of the hackneyed poeticisms that passed for conventional badges of late-eighteenth-century poetry. If he took chances with language that, according to acidulous critics, sometimes led him to reproduce children’s babble, his sense of decorum also prompted him to attribute to nongenteel characters a language they never spoke. Adrian Mitchell’s poem “The Oxford Hysteria of English Poetry” is a caricature of what followed: OM E P OETS AND CRI TICS

Then suddenly – WO O MF – It was the Ro-man-tic Re-viv-al And it didn’t matter how you wrote, All the public wanted was a hairy great image. Before they’d even print you You had to smoke opium, die of consumption, Fall in love with your sister Or drown in the Mediterranean (not Brighton). My publisher said: “I’ll have to remainder you Unless you go and live in a lake or something Like this bloke Wordsworth.” After that there were about A thousand years of Tennyson Who got so bored with himself That he changed his name To Kipling at half-time. Strange that Tennyson should be Remembered for his poems really,

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The Line in Poetry Seminar, New England Writers Centre, 2003.

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We always thought of him As a golfer.258

Mitchell’s comic history skips over the achievement of Byron and others in promoting the resources of the English language through co-option of colloquialisms and slang, while still employing rhyme and metre. Victorian experimenters such as Browning, Whitman, Lewis Carroll, Dickinson, and Hopkins employed further variations of language, while retaining, for the most part (Whitman outstandingly apart), the semblance of inherited metrical forms. Geoffrey Thurley commented in 1977 that the works of certain Pre-Raphaelite and turn-of-thecentury poets like Wilde required only “the edge afforded by the dropping of quatrain-form to stand revealed as imagist.”259 The shift in emphasis from Wildean ‘impression’ to Imagism and other ways of foregrounding the poet’s apprehension and consciousness of process was not long in coming. The mere dropping of upper-case letters at the start of each new line was a notably audacious innovation in late-nineteenth-century verse; so, too, was Stephen Crane’s printing of all the poems in his 1895 collection, The Black Rider, in upper-case letters, By the end of the twentieth century, every register and nuance of language was employed in poetry – the language of advertising, graffiti, slogans, baby-talk, pidgins, creoles, email and text-messaging abbreviation, and every variation of standard or received forms of speech. As one variety of poetry passed through experimentation to mannerism and even prettification, others attained their moments of sway. It would be hard to assemble a cheer-squad for the once-fashionable view that poetry is characterized by a particularly ‘appropriate’ subject-matter and diction. Mitchell has a point, though, concerning the artificiality of idiom that settled on English poetry by the beginning of the twentieth century (he might have extended his observation to remark on the ostensible homogenization of idiom that appeared by the later twentieth century). Of the modernist reaction to Victorian idiom, Billy Collins writes: Timothy Steele’s study of the modernist abandonment of regular metre makes the point that the inflated, flouncy diction of much Victorian poetry was so closely identified with metrical composition that modern poets “felt that to dispose of objectionable Victorian idiom, they had to

258

Adrian Mitchell, “The Oxford Hysteria of English Poetry” (1979), in The Penguin Book of Light Verse, ed. Gavin Ewart (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980): 539. 259 Geoffrey Thurley, The American Moment: American Poetry in the Mid-Century (London: Edward Arnold, 1977): 109.

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dispose of metre.” So the baby of metre was thrown out with the bathwater of sentimentality.260

Some modernists (Yeats, Joyce, Lawrence, and such transplanted Americans as Pound, Eliot, and H D ) started out by imitating Victorian and earlier poets but rapidly abandoned mannerisms they considered inappropriate to the actuality they inhabited. In their conscious efforts to renovate English verse, they retained what assisted accurate representation of felt experience and rejected what impeded its direct communication. Against elaborately melodious and decorous verse, they offered more prosaic representations of reality characterized by ‘low’ as well as ‘high’ subject-matter, pared-down images, direct speech, slang, reportage, and snatches of old forms in a collage that reflected modernity – the speed and discordant harmonies of industrial machinery and electronic and other communication, including cinema-inspired montage. This seems to me what Jean Cocteau was getting at when he dismissed outdated modes with the remark, “A true poet does not bother to be poetical.” 261 Conservative readers and audiences were appalled – as were many viewers confronted with the sculpture of Epstein, Brancusi, and Gaudier–Brzeska, and listeners who protested and even rioted at certain inaugural performances of music by Debussy, Stravinsky, and Antheil. In his notebooks, Charles Simic outlines “the totalitarian theory of literature from Plato to the Inquisition to Stalin and his followers”: Separation of content and form, ideas from experience. Literature is primarily its content. The content needs to be unmasked, revealed for what it truly is. The cop slapping the young poet and demanding who ordered him to write like that is the secret ideal. Literature is propaganda for a particular case. Literature on its own terms is dangerous. Pure art is blasphemy against authority. The poet and the writer are never to be trusted. Trust the critic and the censor for constant vigilance.262

This, in extreme fashion, states the case for conservatism in poetry, but the premises may strike some resonance with those brought up on a diet of traditional 260

Billy Collins, “Introduction” to Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry, ed. Collins (New York: Random House, 2003): i. 261 “Un vrai poète ne se préoccupe pas d’être poétique” – Cocteau, “Le Secret professionnel,” in Le rappel à l’ordre (1922; Paris: Stock, 1948): 203. 262 Charles Simic, in The Poet’s Notebook: Excerpts from the Notebooks of 26 American Poets, ed. Stephen Kuusisto, Deborah Tall & David Weiss (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995): 276.

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and ‘canonical’ poetry. In any event, verse forms (and ‘content’) contain indications of the times and places in which they arose; as the English Imagist T.E. Hulme remarked, verse forms, like manners and individuals, develop and die.263 The New Zealand poet C.K. Stead put the hankering for clear distinction between form and content another way, in a facetious account of a London sojourn: and this poetry editor in his lovely Muse flat with a Sunday Times table set for 6 is talking about “the return to form”. Oh Form! honourable suitcase battered covered with labels have you anything to declare?264

Stead’s poem reflects the frustration that a poet like Mary Oliver records in her reflection on the way editors break carefully crafted lines in order to fit them into narrow columns or pages. Oliver writes: “The line is the device upon which the poem spins itself into being.”265 Put another way, the poet’s sense of the rightness of ‘form’ is intrinsic with ‘content’, and any attempt to rearrange the poem to suit other formal preferences is to destroy the work. It is not that the poet has set out with the intention of assailing preconceived notions of form and content, but that the autonomy of the writer is primary. The reorganization, by a critic or editor, of the line breaks of a poem is equivalent to inappropriate insertion of breath pauses in a speech. To rearrange Stead’s poem as a set of lines starting neatly in the left-hand margin, or to reorder the endings, would be to disrupt the effects wrought by the space-punctuation he has insisted upon that gives each line its weight. In commenting on poetry that overtly focuses on formal assault on authority, Geraldine McKenzie expresses concern that other potentialities of the art can be abolished as a result of the poet’s preoccupation with avoiding being appro263

Quoted in Noel Stock, The Life of Ezra Pound (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970): 65. C.K Stead, “Yes T.S.: A Narrative,” in Stead, Geographies (Auckland: Auckland U P & Oxford U P , 1982): 36–37. 265 Mary Oliver, in The Poet’s Notebook, ed. Kuusisto, Tall & Weiss, 225. 264

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priated by the status quo that the work opposes. (She instances the way such expropriation can occur, by reference to the annexation of music in Nazi Germany and the commodification of rap music by advertising and of painting by investors.) McKenzie points up the paradoxical link between the avant-gardism of Pound and the Futurists and “the worst aspects of conservatism,” while she allows that Marinetti’s “ranting macho” statements in The Manifesto of Futurism “should not blind us to the real achievements of the Futurists in extending the work of Mallarmé [his innovations with line and space].”266 Noting that poetry which aims to subvert “official verse culture”267 is subject to relegation, she writes: too great a focus on content can lead to narrowness, to exclusion, the linearity or argument; while an abdication from meaning, although occasionally delightful, risks becoming terminally marginal.268

McKenzie advocates poetry that expresses the polyphony of voices that constitute community, rather than any single voice (whether reflective of individualism, romanticism, or nationalism). This is a tall order, for, as McKenzie understands, no prescription can avoid being co-opted by normativeness in an age of mass media. Consumerism will take what suits its purpose from every kind of artist’s expression. In her observations on the silence of the spaces in contemporary poetic practice she makes a more cogent point: We have a history so full of imposed silences, one could even say there is a certain type of Australian who has so far absorbed the silences as to be rendered emotionally and spiritually inarticulate.

Thus, she argues, the way in which poets employ silence is as crucial as how “we characterize the emptiness of the Australian landscape once the original owners have been killed or displaced.”269 In such a reading of the ‘blank’ spaces of a poem, the ‘silence’ in the spaces between words and lines can let the reader or listener in to experience strategically arranged resonances that are, I believe, deliberately filled with the distracting ‘noise’ of what McKenzie labels “the status quo.” The question of ‘space’ between words and lines is, however, familiar to us from our reading of earlier poetry – poetry arranged in stanzas, couplets or other formal patterns. The pauses in modern poetry build on such visual and aural devices, just as the figures of speech employed in contemporary poetry utilize and in some cases extend the ancient rhetorical devices of persuasion. 266

Geraldine McKenzie, “Line and Space,” Five Bells 10.4 (2003): 27. Coinage by Charles Bernstein, “Anything Goes” (“Writing and Method,” 1986), in Bernstein, Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2011): 59. 268 McKenzie, “Line and Space,” 27. 269 McKenzie, “Line and Space,” 28. 267

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Some rear-guard claims have been made for the ‘poetic’ quality of certain figures of speech, such as metaphor, symbol, narrative, metre, musicality (accentual or rhythmic effects – lyrical or otherwise), and the image, all of which have variously been championed as poetic touchstones. All these, however, depend on the placement of symbols (words) conveying meaningful sounds within actual lines on a page (or imagined ‘lines’ – chunks of information shaped as lengths of speech) that variously constitute the building-blocks of poetry. Further, as the Canadian poet Dennis Cooley puts it, Poets need not leave punctuation behind, and most of them don’t, and employment of variations on breaking and entering the line “does not in itself eliminate metaphor or simile and […] metered verse is quite capable of using line breaks.270

Cooley identifies more than a dozen ‘types’ of line in poetry, ranging from the grammatical unit, the bardic or oracular line, through variations including “Ogden Nashing,” “Marianne Mooring,” arbitrariness, “‘false’ or premature closure on buried idioms,” word play, breath units, tentativeness, speech models, visual effects and “lines that defy left-to-right, top-to-bottom reading.”271 He outlines the principles behind each strategy and provides examples from his own and others’ practice in an effort to reassure sophisticated people whose resistance to formal departure (from ‘inherited’ forms) ranges “from panic to contempt.”272 Allen Ginsberg, some ten years earlier, had posited a similar catalogue of possible arrangements of open verse, some of which overlap with Cooley’s list. Ginsberg included heartbeat (exemplified by Robert Duncan’s verse), conditions of original notation (notebook, or other recording medium), and chance – for example, the results of fatigue, accident, or impulse.273 Like Cooley, I expect that what I have to say about the line in poetry is more or less old hat to practised readers of contemporary poetry, but I want to indicate the buried or implicit continuity between twentieth-century and more recent ostensible departures from received (‘inherited’) form and genres. If contemporary poetry strikes some readers as unintelligible because it upsets notions of metre, rhyme, image, conventional grammatical expression, metaphor, allusion, and other ‘bases’ of poetry itself, I expect that some explanation may 270

Dennis Cooley, “Breaking & Entering (Thoughts on Line Breaks),” in Cooley, The Vernacular Muse: The Eye and Ear in Contemporary Literature (Winnipeg, Manitoba: Turnstone, 1987): 102. 271 Cooley, The Vernacular Muse, 103. 272 The Vernacular Muse, 101. 273 Allen Ginsberg, “Some Considerations in Mindful Arrangement of Open Verse Forms on the Page,” City Lights Journal 4 (1978): 137.

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dissolve a little of the difficulty and resistance of such readers to poetry that challenges assumptions. Like Cooley, I also expect that some readers will choose not to be persuaded. I’ll start with a claim that, while appearing contentious to some readers, may lend comfort to others. The line and what can be packed into it differentiates poetry from prose and makes speech ‘poetic’: it’s the conscious division of speech into units according to some principle of unification. This claim is nothing new: whether speaking of lyric, epic or satire, or of the tragic, comic or sublime, ancient Chinese, Greek, and Roman poets who wrote on poetry considered the line as a fundamental poetic unit. Ancient Hebrew poetry employed the line, to the extent of setting out certain passages of texts in patterned blocks: printed Hebrew versions of the Song of Songs, the Psalms, and certain other Old-Testament works notably privilege the line in this way. The printing of English poetry in lines, rather than in blocks of prose, similarly sends a visual signal to readers: attention is drawn to words in a way that differs from their presentation in prose format. Prose poems, I would argue, arrange words in short blocks that deliberately mimic prose texts, but which function to highlight other traditional features of poetry. Works of prose fiction (and non-fiction) can incorporate ‘poetical’ effects. The opening pages of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! is a case in point; a more playful example is Ken Kesey’s rhymed account, in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, of the asylum inmates’ escapade.274 Typographical experimentation, familiar to us in the early- to mid-twentiethcentury poetry of e.e. cummings and such Australian practitioners as Alan Riddell,  , Richard Tipping, Laurie Duggan, and Ken Bolton, has a pedigree that extends through early-twentieth-century Dadaist, Surrealist, and other textproduction (by Hugo Ball, Kurt Schwitters, Christian Morgenstern, Mayakovsky, Apollinaire, and others), to Mallarmé’s 1897 poem “Un Coup de Dès” (A Throw of the Dice) and at least as far back as the eighteenth-century Russian poet Trediakovsky. Clear relationships between the lines in a poem do not require the added prop of rhyme, but the addition of rhyme to speech divided into lines of equal syllabic or accentual length was hardly shaken off until the mid-twentieth century (only to re-emerge as neoformalism). Earlier poets doled out unrhymed lines containing equal syllable count; Shakespeare uses both sorts, punctuating blank verse with rhymed lines for closure at the end of a scene or act (Ariel, at the end of Act II Scene i of The Tempest, says of Alonso, “Prospero my lord shall know what I have done: / So, King, go safely on to seek thy son”). In Milton’s 274

Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (New York: Viking, 1962): 199–200.

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Paradise Lost, blank verse employs equal syllable count, but we can observe internal rhyme, assonance, alliteration, and traditional rhetorical figures (not least apostrophe and personification of inanimate things) associated with the dominant strophic poetry that adopted a regular linear pattern. This is how Milton narrates the return of Satan to Adam, who has just held converse with Raphael: The sun was sunk, and after him the star Of Hesperus, whose office is to bring Twilight upon the earth, short arbiter “Twixt day and night, and now from end to end Night’s hemisphere had veiled the horizon round, When Satan, who late fled before the threats Of Gabriel out of Eden, now improved In meditated fraud and malice, bent On man’s destruction, maugre what might hap Of heavier on himself, fearless returned. (Paradise Lost, Book IX, 48–57)

50

55

The language employed here, the fanciful anthropomorphizing of the sun and the evening star (“Hesperus”) apart, sounds like good prose when read aloud. The monosyllables of lines 48 and 51 ground the flights of fancy in the adjacent lines and bring us (as well as Satan) back to earth. If the poem were printed as prose, we might still detect a rhythm that stems from the word-choice and punctuation: The sun was sunk, and after him the star of Hesperus, whose office is to bring twilight upon the earth, short arbiter ’twixt day and night, and now from end to end night’s hemisphere had veiled the horizon round, when Satan, who late fled before the threats of Gabriel out of Eden, now improved in meditated fraud and malice, bent on man’s destruction, maugre what might hap of heavier on himself, fearless returned.

Milton’s division of the account into lines of ten syllables adds an extra dimension to punctuation. At the turn of each line, we can choose to read on as if there were no turn at all, or we can momentarily pause, perhaps half-consciously, because the division into lines creates a series of separate sight-units, each of which we take in at a time even while mentally anticipating resolution of the entire narrative. The structure, in short, encourages or enables serial enjambment, so that successive small or large tensions are discharged as we read on, continually encountering more charged moments. The tension maintained by the surprising turns at every line encourages us to continue reading.

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Several surprises occur in the passage: the placement of “bring” provokes a momentary pause as we wonder what the star might bring. The answer, “Twilight,” is held over until the next line, so we have the pleasure of seeing a small mystery set up and exploded. A similar surprise comes at the end of the “Twilight” line (50): “and now from end to end” – and while we intuitively ask ‘end to end of what?’ or ‘what about this “end to end,” then?’ – the answer comes immediately at the start of the following line, “Night’s hemisphere had veiled the horizon round.” Perhaps the snappiest enjambment in the passage occurs in the line that ends with “bent.” The word aptly describes Satan as “bent” or deformed by “meditated fraud and malice,” but there is a further surprise: he is “bent” in another sense – bent “On man’s destruction” – in spite of what might happen to himself as a result. The enjambment – the completion of a line – does not signal the completion of a thought: we are drawn across the space to the next line, and the pause at each line’s end is significant: ambiguity resulting from such practice often appears felicitous, but we cannot assume that it is unwilled. In Sir John Suckling’s rhyming poem addressed to a woman, the following enjambment occurs: “Dost thou love / Beauty?,” so that what appears a straightforward question assumes additional import; at once, the poet addresses the woman as a “beauty,” asks her if she loves beauty, and asks if she is capable of loving anything or anyone. The verbal balancing-act is given point by the implicit (or virtual) pause that occurs after the word “love” concluding the line. Milton’s and Suckling’s playfulness with the possibilities of the line in poetry points to an uncanny sense of the equivocations of language and the ambiguities that stem from the situational disposition of a word – a sense that we might pride ourselves on possessing as we go about the business of disposing our own thoughts into poetic lines. We are not, I suggest, cannier than Milton with regard to tact – that is, knowing exactly how much we can get away with. Concerning more recent concepts of poetry, Robert Gray claimed (during a 1980 visit to the University of New England) to see no difference between poetry and prose, though his practice went some way towards undercutting his claim. Gray’s lines characteristically seek to highlight an image – so that what look like arbitrarily short or long lines are, in context, exactly right in terms of the work they do to foreground a succession of images or impressions. Like the Imagist poetry of Pound and Amy Lowell, Gray’s work exemplifies the effort to pare away ‘poetical’ language and superfluous decoration, including rhyme. His poetry often has the same objectivity as that of the Imagists who produced a literary equivalent of pointillism as practised by Georges Seurat, Camille Pissarro or Alfred Sisley.

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Just as the Impressionists aimed to depict only what the eye could see in nature, Gray’s work has consistently privileged conciseness, precision, and clarity: his “Homage to the Painters” consists of a series of noun phrases; no verb interrupts the poem in the following extracts: a blue jacaranda a lemon frost a yellow daybreak a red neon sign * a green sea a green pasture a torn green cloud a cream sky * a silver roof a brown paddock a loose brown river a hazy lilac forest * a blue tear a white page unfolded a white smoke a blue mountain range.275

And so on. The world appears as a succession of static images in such verse – as it does in Imagist poetry that aims to encapsulate a scene or event arrested as though by a camera or quick sketch – an ‘impression’. Of course, the poem is not static: the eye and mind take in the overview, as well as comparing the hues according to their contingent phenomena: we can ponder whether the blue of a “tear” is synonymous with the “blue” of a mountain range. Gray’s use of analogy might be read as an illustration of Mencius’s observations on analogy as a form of argument.276 The ‘impression’ of a thing seen in stasis was a conscious aim of Imagist practice – a practice that owed something to both contemporary visual art and to an 275

Robert Gray, “Homage to the Painters,” in Gray, Afterimages (Potts Point, N S W : Duffy & Snellgrove, 2002): 60–62. 276 Mencius, The Works of Mencius, tr. James Legge (tr. 1895; New York: Dover, 1970): 34–37.

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idea, perhaps mistaken, that Chinese and Japanese ideograms were actual images of the referents. Pound’s haiku-like 1913 poem “In a Station of the Metro” conveys an impression with such ostensible objectivity, by presenting two images in separate lines separated by a colon that argues an analogy: The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough

Pound probably did not know that two of his contemporaries, the Mexican poets Efrén Rebolledo and José Juan Tablada, had resided in Japan before 1910 and had sought to convey Japanese subject-matter and techniques in their own work. Tablada wrote poetry in haiku form that expunged sentimentality (and the ghost of analogy) by focusing on a concrete image in each line: Trozos de barro, Por la senda en penumbra Saltan los sapos... Bits of clay Along the path in shadow Toads hop.277

The attempt to ‘freeze’ an image while still suggesting activity creates a tension that inhibits the creation of any extended Imagist poem. The attempt to contain in verse the sense of the still frames of a movie film racing past the light-source at so many frames per second might hold a reader’s attention for a time, but the effort to convey abstractions such as ideas or emotions – as words do – as well as to convey pure ‘image’ led to the profuse ‘epics’ of Pound and William Carlos Williams in their respective Cantos and Paterson, which make considerable demands on a reader’s attention and willingness to inhabit the ‘movie’ of the poet’s mind. Williams, in some ways more interesting than Pound as an explicator of the line in poetry, saw the problem of combining poetry that presented ‘things’ with poetry that presented ‘ideas’. In 1958, he remarked: “I was interested in the construction of an image before the image was popular in poetry.”278 In a conversation recorded in the 1950s, he asserted: “I utterly reject the metaphysical,” and

277

José Juan Tablada, “Los sapos,” in Tablada, Los mejores poemas (1971; Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1993): 54. Cf. also Octavio Paz, “Viento entero / Wind from all compass points” (1970), tr. Paul Blackburn, in Paz, The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957–1987, ed. Eliot Weinberger (New York: New Directions, 1987): 261. 278 William Carlos Williams, I Wanted to Write a Poem: The Autobiography of the Works of a Poet, intro. Edith Heal (1958; New York: New Directions, 1977): 21.

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he reiterated his dictum “No ideas but in things.”279 Like Pound, Williams rejected the diffuseness of Symbolism, which sought to turn things in the world into embodiments of a poetical mood, and he emphasized the primacy of objects in the phenomenal world. Pound’s accretion of images and speech-grabs veered toward the metaphysical, toward the construction of an ideal realm crowned by poetry that had a distinctly didactic tinge. Williams repudiated such didacticism; at the same time, he saw that concern with presentation of a ‘thing’ for its own sake might constitute a precious aestheticism akin to the sort that Imagism had attempted to demolish. Williams’s 1923 poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” combines a statement and an implicit question: “so much depends” indeed on the assumption that the image of anything in the world of nature can be ‘translated’ to a reader without any of the ambiguous humanist sentiment – necessarily associated with language – distorting the precision of the image. The brevity of Williams’s line is underscored by jerkiness that may reflect his hesitancy to assert. Alternatively, the break after each word or phrase may represent a firm-footed march across spaces that declares, ‘this is a still-life that you will not forget’: so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.280

The arrested image is fixed in the reader’s mind more surely than countless longer poems by writers who had earlier relied on rhyme as an aid to memory. Williams declares the primacy of the senses at the same time as he embodies Keats’s “negative capability” – a refusal to be distracted by “fact or reason” as he proceeds to present the ‘thing’ that is his subject. Williams’s ‘line’ is extraordinarily attenuated: what can we say about the lines “upon,” “barrow,” “water” or chickens” except that their author’s sense of democracy extends to the commonest barnyard phenomena? Williams does not invoke the milieu of Pound’s 279

Linda Wagner–Martin, Interviews with William Carlos Williams: “Speaking Straight Ahead” (New York: New Directions, 1976): 64–65. 280 William Carlos Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow” (1923), in Williams, The Collected Earlier Poems (New York: New Directions, 1966): 277.

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London and Parisian sophisticates – a milieu that regarded the artist as supreme intelligence and which, in its political dimension, was more inclined to a retrospective feudal and reactionary vision than one that was progressive, technological, and egalitarian. What I have just said might seem a wild claim based on slender evidence. A reading of Williams’ lyrical and narrative poetry, though, reveals the extent to which he thoroughly rejected the conventions of verse that privileged the accentuated, syllabic or rhymed line that sought to represent, through elaborate description or symbolism, the mood or attitude of the poet toward the subject. In Symbolist poetry, the mood of the poet is the subject. T.S. Eliot was influenced by Symbolist practice insofar as he modified the notion of ‘correspondences’ to generate his concept of the “objective correlative” – the expression of emotion through discovery of a set of objects, or a situation or series of events that provide the ‘formula’ of a particular emotion. Such a series of events or circumstances might be seen at work in his “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” or “The Fire Sermon” section of The Waste Land, which commences with the following lines: The river’s tent is broken; the last fingers of leaf Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed. Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song. The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers. Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed, And their friends, the loitering heirs of City directors; Departed, have left no addresses.

Here, Eliot provides numerous ‘objective correlatives’ to his mood. The departing season is ‘imaged’ in absence of leaves on the trees on the banks of the Thames; the air is damp, a wind blows over the “brown land,” and, remembering the refrain of Edmund Spenser’s marriage poem (Prothalamion), Eliot throws it into the mix as an ironic comment on the departure of the women and their lovers from the river bank. The hint of the detritus associated with their lovemaking (“testimony of summer nights” is particularly suggestive) and the absence of the nymphs’ boyfriends (“loitering heirs of City directors”) who have left no forwarding addresses (we might ask why this is so) heighten the contrast between the pastoral world of Spenser’s joyful lovers on the banks of the Thames three hundred years earlier and the sleazy commercial present. The first three lines are showcases of what a line might contain. The first sentence begins with a metaphor and adds a second that is transformed into a personi-

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fication. The second sentence might almost stand as an Imagist conceit. The third sentence combines matter-of-fact statement (if we take “nymphs” to refer to actual London women) and classical allusion. The fragmentation of vision of a sweeter time than the present that the poem holds is implied not just in these shifts in modality but also in the abrupt shifts within each line. The heavy caesuras are visual and aural echoes or ‘images’ of the rift in sensibility that Eliot is at pains to convey. Like Pound confronted with a world of social change, where machinery, speed, money are worshipped and love is a fleeting commodity, Eliot posits an ideal world of order and ritual, wherein natural cycles are endowed with religious significance and marital love is a cornerstone of a hierarchical civilization. Eliot’s orderly world could not be more distant from that of William Carlos Williams, whose Paterson entertains no such illusions about a golden age located in the past. In Williams’s poem, early white settlers in America disappear over waterfalls, disastrous accidents befall honest labourers and burghers, and no good deed guarantees a reward. Like Pound, Williams is a magpie, dragging all manner of relevant bric-à-brac into his poem, so that the lines bear little relation to each other and the overall effect is of a scrapbook constructed around a theme. Where Pound strives for high-toned oracular speech (but frequently comes across as a mix of autodidact and wiseacre dispensing homespun saws), Williams writes in a less portentous idiom, thereby lending weight to the proposition that the language of poetry and that of prose are at times interchangeable, and that a column of journalism can be as colourful as anything the poet might invent. When I reflect on the poems that I have offered as evidence of the flexibility and purposefulness of the line in poetry, I cannot say how the lines came into being or why the particular line was developed in each case. I am in the same quandary about my own practice as poet. One works at creating a particular effect in each line and in the structure of the whole. Considerations of fixing upon a syllabic or metrical form impose themselves at some stage in the process. I suppose, for example, that José Juan Tablada was aiming for a particular effect, and that the form had become a matter of habit during his ‘Japanese’ period. This is not to say that I believe he wrote five, then seven, then five syllables straight off. Perhaps he did. The effect, in poetry, is everything; the work to achieve the effect of spontaneity and surprise can sometimes be excruciating. I don’t doubt that Tablada and Pound both wrote some poems they were not entirely pleased with, for every one they considered right enough to circulate. I presume that Robert Gray, influenced like Tablada and Pound by Japanese and Chinese practice, started with a fortuitous expression, and then worked at

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the sequence that kept or relocated the first line. The poem is tightly structured, for all its apparent lightness of touch. I could say the same about Williams’s “Wheelbarrow,” a poem containing an ‘impression’ that makes some demand on a reader’s sense of what constitutes a poem. Some readers have repudiated the work as an enigma designed to tease them rather than a poem that might give pleasure of the sort that Wallace Stevens demanded of poetry. Eliot’s poetry also makes demands on its readers; it assumes a degree of familiarity with a broad range of poetry that informs it. In the “Fire Sermon,” for example, a pastiche-like structuring principle is evident in even a handful of lines; once I have acquainted myself with Eliot’s borrowings and quotations and his ironic inversion of the Provençal raverdie or ‘return of the season’ poem, I am attuned to whatever will follow: the speaker’s chagrin, his contempt for ordinary people (‘the masses’), and his artist-as-hero role-play. The lines by Tablada, Pound, Gray, Williams, and Eliot are products of a widespread twentieth-century revolt against received form. The poets could have stayed with traditional poetic formulae – sonnets, sestinas, villanelles, and other stanzaic patterns involving rhyme or blank-verse patterns if they had chosen to do so. Pound, Tablada, Gray, Williams, and Eliot occasionally chose to write poems in received forms that impress me as sometimes admirable, sometimes absurd or embarrassing, by contrast with their freer verse. Robert Frost chose to work predominantly within traditional forms – rhymed and stanzaic verse, or blank verse that he employed in his longer poems – and, accomplished tennis player that he was, compared writing in free verse to playing tennis without the net. Within the constraints of such forms as he chose to write in, Frost skilfully manipulated enjambment, punctuation, and traditional figures to achieve the illusion of spontaneous speech. Like the Australian Roland Robinson, Frost persisted in ‘saying’ his poems, rather than reading them. To hear a recording of Frost reciting his poetry is, at times, to wonder where his wisecracking irony ends and the poem commences. It is possible, of course, to achieve a similar effect with verse arranged according to other principles. Robert Graves, John Betjeman, and Philip Larkin are cases in point: vernacular speech is not sacrificed to metronomic ‘beat’ in their tightly structured verse written in ‘received’ forms, as their recordings of their poetry make clear. In each case, the line steers the poet’s words in such a way that every utterance seems to grow inevitably from the one preceding, even when the language and ‘burden’ of the poem come to the listener as a surprise. Readers no longer demand that poetry employ elevated diction; among modernism’s legacies is the language of everyday discourse – vernacular, colloquial,

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slangy, or formal, according to the speech situation. Moreover, constraints relating to permissible subject-matter in poetry have disappeared. Since rhyme fell or was pushed out of fashion some time after 1910, the line was claimed, notably by Pound, as the vehicle for all of the other features I have mentioned: language (heightened or not), symbol, narrative, rhythmic emphasis, and image – a claim that Pound made good in practice in the poems in Cathay and the Cantos. In any representative anthology of poetry since the mid-1970s, the line will variously appear arbitrary in length and visual placement. An unversed reader of contemporary poetry might go along with Robert Gray in claiming that there is nothing between poetry and prose except that the words in prose run from left to right across the page from margin to margin and so continue down the page, while words in a poem are wilfully situated anywhere on a page, in randomly ordered groups, and they don’t always run from left to right. Formerly, it was easier for such readers to know what a poem was when every line started with a capital letter and every line was more or less equal in length or at least regularly patterned, and the whole contraption rhymed. I don’t disparage such readers. If much of the poetry published in the past one hundred years gives them pause, their bewilderment may be a function of other phenomena, including the greater accessibility of visual and spoken media that, consciously designed or not, employ ‘poetic’ features. If poets want to be read or heard, they must be at least as persuasive as their media rivals, or they will remain a beleaguered elite. Is the conservative reader right in believing that the poetry of John Ashbery, Bob Hicok, Pam Brown, or Gig Ryan has little to say about common experience? A reader who believes the balladry of ‘Banjo’ Paterson or Judith Wright to be the authentic poetry of Australia may be entirely at sea with Ryan’s poem “On Flight”: Every shore I land is ice Every dream’s his skin Where horses pound, gold rolls to rip my purpose out I turn against the sun and ply the round world’s cape and brim but where I traipse, lies follow His apotheosis now revoked Gods crash undone Squared brick shows where marble was Come down the hill’s soft side

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Here the ancient senate house I fought for task and deed.281

The jumble of archaic-seeming diction, inverted word-order, and apparently random punctuation and capitalization intensifies the poem’s obscurity. What is the reader to make of the enigmatic, apparently ungrammatical opening line, “Every shore I land,” or the third stanza’s juxtaposition of “Squared brick shows where marble was” and “Come down the hill’s soft side”? The reader might echo Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: “What men or gods are these?” This attitude is only partly explicable in terms of the pre-modernist expectation that a narrative will have a clearly delineated beginning, middle, and end. Ryan’s poem sets up an anticipation of chronological narrative or of a cause-and-effect relationship, but she subverts expectation, confounding chronology, causality, and characterization. Nor do the line divisions facilitate interpretation for such a conservative reader, who will prefer less tasking poetry where the relationship between each line and those before and after it accords with conventional logic. It seems paradoxical that some readers, presumably familiar with the centuryold disjunctions of cinema, choppy newspaper headlines, sound sampling, news grabs, and discordant prose of every sort, still prefer a plain unvarnished tale when it comes to poetry. Neoformalism may offer some relief to readers nostalgic for an older idea of order, but neoformalism can be a disappointing avantgardist phenomenon. It can trick out present concerns in a poetic that risks, in spite of occasional gracefulness redolent of accomplished light verse or striking elegiac and epic poetry, the whiff of the crypt and consequent limited appeal. Conversely, the contemporary lyric that finds its formulation in enigmatic lines that oppose readerly access cannot have the broad appeal of contesting media. Should poetry be always so accessible as to mimic contesting media? Hardly. Poetry is not ‘like’ other media. Even performance poetry, whose simplified lauds and plaints, clipped grammar, metronomic rhymes, and insistent rhythms draw on conventions of pop lyrics, does not strike a medium that guarantees pleasure for a broad spectrum of readers and listeners, for all its occasional agreeable surprises. This is ironic, when one reflects that much that passes for dub and rap has effectively reverted to one of the most conservative elements of traditional verse, the brief rhymed couplet or tercet, or string of assonantal rhymes.  281

Gig Ryan, “On Flight,” in Ryan, Pure and Applied (Brooklyn, N S W : Paper Bark /Craftsman House, 1998): 41.

P A R T 3 (2004– 2012)

——————— The Question in Poetry1 ———————

S

OME YEA RS AGO,

Pablo Neruda’s poems in The Book of Questions were the subject of a Five Islands Press poetry seminar held at Wollongong. Neruda’s enigmatic poems, completed shortly before his death in 1973, generally take the form of several sets of unrhymed couplets, each of which poses a question to which there is no apparent answer. William Daly’s 1991 English-language translations appear above the original Spanish versions in an edition published in 2001. The fourth poem illustrates the tone Daly sought to establish: How many churches are there in heaven? Why doesn’t the shark attack the brazen sirens? Does smoke talk with the clouds? Is it true our desires must be watered with dew?2

Some people who attended the Wollongong Seminar continued to explore the form, and Garth Madsen published a number of epigrammatic poems that offered suitably gnomic responses, and sometimes further questions, to several of Neruda’s questions.3 Neruda’s collection was a one-off effort that dazzles on account of its inventiveness, and I’m not aware that anything like it had previously appeared in print. The questions have produced other ‘answers’ than Madsen’s; in 2001, MTC Cronin published a lengthy sequence, Talking to Neruda’s Questions.4 I was struck by the persistence of the question-and-answer structure of many poems in recent magazines, poetry anthologies, and single-author collections. The Best American Poetry 2004 anthology, for example, contains works employing questions (and sometimes straightforward or unreliable answers) by Kim Addonizio, Alan Berheimer, Charles Bernstein, Olena Kalytiak Davis, John Hollander, Fanny Howe, and Henry Mathews. The Best Australian Poems 2005 anthology edited by Les Murray includes questioning poems by Clive James, M. Langford, John Mateer, Tric O’Heare, Sheryl Persson, Philip Salom, and Alan 1 

Five Islands Press Poetry Workshop Lecture series, 2005. Pablo Neruda, The Book of Questions, tr. William O’Daly (Port Townsend W A : Copper Canyon, 2001): 4. 3 Garth Madsen, “Extracts from Answers to Pablo Neruda’s Questions,” in Time’s Collision with the Tongue: The Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology, ed. Jan Owen & Peter Boyle (Wollongong: Five Islands/Coal River, 2001): 92–95. 4 MTC Cronin, Talking to Neruda’s Questions (Sydney: Vagabond, 2001). 2

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Wearne. These, and other examples by international and Australian poets, set me thinking about the impulse of poets, from Classical times to the present, to exploit the question in all its variety. In each case, the poet appears to be conducting an argument with self, as well as using the question to catch the reader or listener’s attention. Karl Shapiro’s observation that the poet’s business is with revelation of ‘self’ is incontestably right if we understand the business to be with revelation of ‘self’ to the poet more than, or rather than, to the reader. (Maya Angelou disagrees5 – or seems to – when she claims that the writer’s business is with language; she states that we write to find out what language can do for us, though I’d add ‘and what language can do to us’.) The inclusion of an overt or covert question in a poem is one form of what Shapiro calls “signposts” of the poet’s effort to distil experience. In an essay on “The True Artificer,” Shapiro holds that “Almost anyone can recover from experience: only the artist can arrest the quality of experience.”6 Forestalling criticism on this point, Shapiro writes elsewhere: poetry is not solipsistic knowledge, nor is it knowledge of the infinite, nor even of the distant. Poetry is knowledge of the self only, but there is no self without a world, and no embodiment of the self without art. To extend the poet’s meaning beyond this point is to render him and his work meaningless.7

Mere assertions of emotion are disappointing substitutes for revelation of the circumstances that give rise to an emotion. Shapiro rejects the reduction of the process to ‘communication’, claiming that “the poet does not communicate to the poem”: nor does the poem communicate to the reader. The very term ‘communicate’ is a propaganda word which expresses a false reality. A poem is a perfectly intelligible thing in itself: it is coherent; it is whole; it is beautiful; but it is not winking at anybody.8

Shapiro’s claim that the poem does not communicate to a reader may come as a surprise, but I think his meaning is clear: he does not hold with ‘inspiration’ or didacticism, but sees the poet in the act of writing as engaged in work towards embodying experience, work that constitutes the ‘artifice’ associated with poetry. 5

Maya Angelou, interviewed (1990) by George Plimpton in Women Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, ed. George Plimpton (New York: Modern Library, 1998): 298. 6 Karl Shapiro, “The True Artificer,” in Shapiro, Creative Glut: Selected Essays, ed. Robert Phillips (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2004): 212 (197–213). 7 Karl Shapiro, “The Career of the Poem,” in Shapiro, Creative Glut, 221 (214–30). 8 Karl Shapiro, “The True Artificer,” 211–12.

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I emphasize ‘work’ because the making of a poem is an effort to make some sense of the emotions that result from contact with the world. Shapiro writes: The poet leaves an actual record of his passion in the presence of world reality. He creates the image of himself, sometimes only a part of himself, sometimes his full self.9

This suggests that the act of making a poem is an end in itself. The work may take minutes or years. The poet may be satisfied or proud to be shot of the poem, and turn to another poem. The poem, once accomplished, will take its chances in the world, and it is there that its coherence, wholeness, and beauty may be perceived and debated in readers’ conversation about the poem. From the reader’s perspective, the poem’s ‘arrest’ of experience can take years to unfold: we go back to certain poems, astonished to find something new every time: our newer experiences contribute to each fresh reading. The conversation about the poem will concern the strategies the poet employs to reveal her relationship with the world. I’ll add that poets can also be surprised to see their own poems in another light when they revisit them after a long period. Because poems are arrangements of language, I see in them variations of timeless rhetorical ploys. This is particularly so in poems involving the questionformat: the poet is in effect addressing the problem of conveying experience not just by asking ‘What do I know about this?’ and ‘What can I say about it?’ but ‘How can I say it?’ And while the poet’s business is with satisfying some need to convincingly ‘arrest’ the quality of experience, claims and statements are often subjected to rigorous, even ruthless, testing for authenticity and proof similar to that which public ‘persuaders’ employ in their appeals to external audiences. Call this business ‘revision’. The re-visioning of a poem can take many forms; as Larissa MacFarquhar notes, for example, that when John Ashbery revises a poem, the words he substitutes are often ones that sound like the ones he’s replacing, or feel like them somehow, rather than synonyms. In recent poems, for instance, he has replaced “translucent” with “spiffy,” “prisoners” with “pensioners,” “unsurprising” with “undetonated,” and “Just a little bit longer” with “Just a little critical wondering.”10

Note the replacement of a declaration to suggest more edgy “wondering.” Questions suggest a state of mind: tentative, ambiguous, expressing possibility or desire – or sabotage of certainty. Questions seek information, but also test 9

Karl Shapiro, “The Career of the Poem,” 225. Larissa MacFarquhar, “Present Waking Life: Becoming John Ashbery,” New Yorker (7 November 2005): 96. 10

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opinions and suggestions.11 When Robert Lowell alludes, in his poem “Beyond the Alps,” to Pope Pius XI I ’s declaration of the bodily assumption of the Mother of Christ into heaven, he adds “But who can believe this?” – thus leaving his readers as well as himself open to meditate upon possibility and impossibility even when a reading of the poem has concluded. Terri Wittek, writing of such conclusions, observes: In one of Lowell’s most famous comments about Life Studies, he claimed that when he was finished with the book he was left “hanging on a question mark” and he didn’t know whether the question mark was a “death rope or a lifeline.” The metaphor is brilliantly simple and utterly characteristic: it dangles all the possibilities simultaneously right before our eyes. The poet’s identity depends on a sign, a mark on the page that represents something, yet what it represents is a mystery: the sign is therefore both fixed and free. The poet who is “hanging” (like a sign himself) isn’t sure whether the sign will be fatal or whether it will preserve his life: the terms “death-rope” and “lifeline” are deliberately matched in syntax, in syllable count, in rhythm. For Robert Lowell the opposite possibilities seem equally possible, equally impossible. The poet’s task is to preserve this essential mystery for the sake of “yourself.” 12

Lowell’s “hanging” metaphor posits poetry as more than an unambiguous ‘answer’ defining self. I am impatient with the notion of poetry as confession or ‘expression’: the word ‘expression’ may occasionally imply limited language skill or suggest conviction of “inspiration’, closure of an issue, infallibility. Plato thought poets who claimed inspiration were dangerous to a well-ordered state; in his dialogue Ion, he rejected ‘divine’ madness, asserting that poetry was no art at all if it came from somewhere outside the poet. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare plays with this idea when he has the Duke remark: “the lunatic, the lover, and the poet, / Are of imagination all compact” (V.i.7–8). Undoubtedly, some poets have gone mad: Christopher Smart, Friedrich Hölderlin, John Clare, and others share some of the symptoms, though their poetry can also indicate that the world of conventional society and not the poet is mad. Clearly, too, some modern theorists of poetry have tried to show that poetry reflects aspects of personality disorder: Edmund Wilson was not the only critic who thought literary creativity stemmed from neurosis,13 and an industry has 11

John W. Carroll, “Laws of Nature,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2003), http://plato .stanford.edu/entries/laws-of-nature (accessed 5 December 2005). 12 Terri Wittek, Robert Lowell and Life Studies (Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1993): 116. 13 Edmund Wilson, The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature (1941; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1978).

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grown around interpretation of Lowell’s, Plath’s, Sexton’s and others’ poetical accounts of their breakdowns. Aristotle regarded the notion of poetic madness as a myth (as did Freud and his Viennese circle), and emphasized poetry as a social act on account of its artful employment of common language. The poet, like the rhetor in public affairs, had something to say to a particular audience at a particular time on a matter of some urgency: it followed that the poet sought the best means of getting the case across; poetry, like rhetoric, should please, move, and teach the audience. This was not a case of ‘mere rhetoric’ – the narrow focus on eloquence (artistic force or technique) that eventually brought rhetoric into disrepute in the Middle Ages and which, in its born-again media manifestation, characterizes much of contemporary public discourse. ‘Mere rhetoric’ is generally understood to describe elaborate language designed to obscure rather than enlighten; it is characteristically inane and insincere. I don’t see poetry as having such a didactic role as Aristotle assigns to it; prose has long overtaken poetry as a vehicle for instruction. While I take it as given that readers and listeners hope that a poem engages their interest to the extent that they want to discover more, I am concerned at the urgency attached to the business of writing a poem. Even if the ‘trigger’ for a poem is an encounter with the world, I am not conscious of a need to announce my findings to the world. I am, though, reasonably alert to the strategies I employ to nail down experience, even if the strategies appear to me only when I have drafted the poem, or when I am making revisions, or long after I have put it aside. Poets share the language of preachers, editorial writers, politicians, lawyers, and anyone else who attempts to make informed choices. The reputed obscurity of John Ashbery’s poetry hardly negates such a statement: as MacFarquhar remarks, His syntax is conventional, even if the transitions are confusing: the meaning is elusive but only just, like a conversation overheard while half asleep […]. He seems not to be smashing up meaning, but rather, to be gently picking up old pieces of meaning he has found lying about. 14

When I talk appreciatively of rhetoric, I am not trying to remove it to some exalted sphere. Rhetoric proposes choices concerning things that can be debated. There is a rhetoric of restaurant menus: the matter is laid out for our inspection; we have a choice of entrees, mains, and desserts. There is logic in the ordering of courses and a logic in providing descriptions of the contents of each course. We don’t expect every dish to have universal appeal, but the choice is ours: What would sir or madam like to start with? 14

MacFarquhar, “Present Waking Life,” 96.

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I end that last paragraph with a question because a question in a poem throws the game open to us in the same way as the cunning waiter’s at the table. What follows from the question may be another: ‘What would you suggest?’ Now the game is in earnest; persuasion, if you didn’t know it before, is in full swing. ‘Does this contain monosodium glutamate? Is that a hot dish? Does it contain tomato? Is it kosher?’ “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” (Shakespeare, Sonnet 18); “I wonder by my troth what thou and I / Did, till we loved? were we not weaned till then, / But sucked on country pleasures, childishly? / Or snorted we in the seven sleepers’ den?” (Donne, “The Good Morrow”); “Little Lamb who made thee / Dost thou know who made thee / Gave thee life and bid thee feed” (Blake, “The Lamb”); “O, what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, /Alone and palely loitering?” (Keats, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”); “Has anyone supposed it lucky to be born?” (Whitman, “Song of Myself: 7”); “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” (Dickinson, Poem 288). We take each of these questions in our stride as we meet them now. They’re so clichéd as to be beyond surprising us. How did we react to them the first time we read or heard them? Can we imagine how they struck their first readers? What sorts of answers could those readers have anticipated? The poet’s craft was to surprise the reader with a scarcely-to-be-guessed response. That’s the sort of surprise we want to spring on our readers when we pose a question. Consider “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” The answer is equivocal: no, says the poet, I shall not – but the tack taken is to employ the vocabulary of summer throughout: Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough windes do shake the darling buds of Maie, And Sommers lease hath all too short a date: Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimm’d, And every faire from faire some-time declines, By chance, or natures changing course untrim’d; But thy eternall Sommer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that faire thou ow’st, Nor shall death brag thou wandr’st in his shade, When in eternall lines to time thou grow’st, So long as men can breath or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.15 15

Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Martin Seymour–Smith (1963; London: Heinemann, 1967): 49.

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Shakespeare’s ‘answer’ to the question takes the form of a brag that the person addressed in the poem is lovelier in his eyes and to his mind at the arrested moment of apprehension of the beloved person’s beauty than the changeable actual summer, and that person’s ‘fairness’ is guaranteed for eternity by virtue of being enshrined in the ‘eternal’ celebration that is the poem itself. The poet makes an outrageous claim for the poem’s longevity: anyone who reads the poem will ‘see’ the changeless object of Shakespeare’s love in it, so death cannot negate Shakespeare’s brag. ‘Death’ is made out to be a fleeting person who, having done his worst, can do no more to the loved one. The topic of the lyric is eulogy, but the poem sophistically presents a step-by-step argument that appears to follow logic. The poem’s tension and power stem from Shakespeare’s mimicry of logic: we recognize that the ‘answer’ given to the initial question is not in fact conclusive: it balances possibility and impossibility. It is perhaps unusual to consider lyric as an argumentative mode, but inspection of any lyric reveals the extent to which the poet is engaged in persuasion, if only self-persuasion that a certain state of affairs may be the case. In love lyrics, poets seek to persuade themselves, as much as any lover superficially addressed, of the intensity of an emotion. The emotion may take the form of begging, complaining, reviling, comforting or rejoicing. In similar fashion, lyrics that have the seasons of the year as their topics seek to encapsulate the poet’s depth of feeling (or absence of feeling) for the phenomena described. In medieval poems on the return of the seasons, summer was the ‘green’ time, the growing time, the blossoming time, and so on, while the vocabulary of winter spoke of the ‘brown’ time, the trying time, the dying time. In medieval times, as well as now, the vocabulary of the seasons, like the vocabulary of love, is fairly limited. A catalogue of features of the natural world, like a catalogue of body parts, the mechanical expression of love and other abstract emotions, is soon exhausted. The metaphors, as we understand from the language of popular songs, become tiresome with repetition. The poem that seeks to persuade had better combine surprising combinations if it is to satisfy the poet, or the jaded reader. One way of making it new is to include and even exploit the question, and, as I have suggested concerning Shakespeare, the answer to the poet’s question, if given, is hardly to be believed except insofar as it provides the appearance of fitting the poem’s logic – which is not to say that the logic is sound in law. How many types of question are there? Ancient rhetoricians included the question in their categorization of figures of speech. Other figures included metaphor, metonymy, antithesis, catachresis, allegory, irony. A workable approach to a definition might be that figures of speech present language in a way that differs from straightforward language usage. We could argue about fine-

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tuning this definition, of course; some linguists would say that all language tends to be metaphoric or metonymic, but there’s little space in this account to identify every plant in that forest. Quintilian proposed the existence of an “infinite variety” of questions; Peter Dixon outlines four common types in his brief guidebook, Rhetoric, which I’ll illustrate with reference to several poems, so the slippery matter of precise differentiation of the varieties will become apparent. First, what we know as the “rhetorical question” (interrogatio) is “a question which requires no answer, because it expresses a truth which cannot be denied.”16 This sort of question “implies and exploits agreement between the speaker and the audience,” and it sometimes receives emphatic assent or denial from the audience. Byron asks such a question in Don Juan: “Oh, Love! What is it in this world of ours / Which makes it fatal to be loved?” (Canto 3.2), and while we consider whether there might be some satisfactory answer, the stanzas that follow provide half-humorous observations on the growth and decay of love in marriage that provoke another question to which we might supply an answer from experience: “Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch’s wife, / He would have written sonnets all his life?” (Canto 3.8). A second type of question, which looks a little like the ‘rhetorical’ variety, is one to which an answer is immediately supplied (rogatio). Peter Dixon gives the example of Falstaff’s remark “Counterfeit? I lie, I am no counterfeit.”17 Another instance occurs in the opening lines of Karl Shapiro’s poem “Kleenex”: Without kleenex how could we cry, How could we let our hair down? This box of veils reduces us to tears, These tissues folding and unfolding hands. The bottom of the box is an empty grave. The gossamer kleenex is our comforter.18

Emily Dickinson’s poem on Nobodies and Somebodies also exemplifies this kind of argument: I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you – Nobody – Too? Then there’s a pair of us? Don’t tell! They’d advertise – you know!

16

Peter Dixon, Rhetoric (London: Methuen, 1977): 36. Dixon, Rhetoric, 36. 18 Karl Shapiro, “Kleenex,” in Shapiro, Selected Poems, ed. John Updike (New York: Library of America, 2003): 75. 17

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How dreary – to be – Somebody! How public – like a frog – To tell one’s name – the livelong June – To an admiring Bog!19

Byron, with much the same attitude to fame, used the same figure in Don Juan: What is the end of fame? ’tis but to fill A certain portion of uncertain paper: Some liken it to climbing up a hill, Whose summit, like all hills, is lost in vapour; For this men write, speak, preach, and heroes kill, And bards burn what they call their “midnight taper,” To have, when the original is dust, A name, a wretched picture, and worse bust. (Canto 1.218)

While a rhetorical question expresses a truth that cannot be denied and requires no answer, Byron’s question here supplies an answer. In an era as full as our own of popularly acclaimed or self-proclaimed heroes and idols, Byron argues persuasively along the same lines as Ecclesiastes (1:3): “For all his toil under the sun, what does man gain by it?” (Ecclesiastes provides countless answers to the question; the consistent refrain is “vanity and chasing of the wind.”) A third type of question Dixon distinguishes is a “string of questions uttered in rapid succession for the sake of emphasis (‘quaesitio’).”20 The English word ‘inquisition’ suggests its use in judicial processes. An example that superficially seems to fit the bill occurs at the end of the first stanza of “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” where Keats, slipping into the detective-inspector mode, puzzles over the scenes depicted on the vase: What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape? Of deities or mortals, or of both, In Tempe or the dales of Arcady? What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?21

19

Emily Dickinson, Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson’s Poems, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston M A : Little, Brown, 1961): 47–48. 20 Dixon, Rhetoric, 36. 21 John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819), in John Keats, ed. Elizabeth Cook (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1990): 288.

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Keats provides no answers; near the end of the poem, after another series of such questions, he declares “Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought.” The Keatsian dilemma is closer to that encompassed by the fourth type of question (percontatio), which Dixon defines as “an enquiry addressed to another person (or to oneself) in a tone of bewilderment or amazement, and allowing of no satisfactory or easy reply.”22 Dixon cites as an example Jane Austen’s authorial question in Mansfield Park when Sir Thomas Bertram’s return interrupts the theatricals: “How is the consternation of the party to be described?” This is not, to my mind, an outstanding example, because Austen’s bewilderment is playfully teasing: she proceeds to describe the scene in some detail. Pablo Neruda’s succession of ponderings in the 28th poem of his Book of Questions looks, at first glance, like a more satisfactory example: Why don’t old people remember debts or burns? Was it real, that scent of the surprised maiden? Why don’t the poor understand as soon as they stop being poor? Where can you find a bell that will ring in your dreams?23

This series is a hybrid – a succession of questions for some of which, such as the first or third, answers can be posited, but for others of which there are no straightforward answers. A clearer-cut instance of Dixon’s fourth type of question occurs at the beginning of Weldon Kees’s poem “Place of Execution”: Where are the marvellous cities that our childhoods built for us, With houses unlike those we have come to know, And the cathedrals and the violet streets? And all the rooms Miraculously designed, warm as our nights, with friends at every door? Great towers, rich and yellowing, and churning seas With cliffs to throw their breaking waves upon, And immense suns, burning through the palms?24

We’d all like to know the answers to such questions. At all accounts, Kees’s sequence grabs our attention and sets us thinking of our own childhood memories. 22

Dixon, Rhetoric, 36. Pablo Neruda, The Book of Questions, tr. William O’Daly (Port Townsend W A : Copper Canyon, 2001): 28. 24 Weldon Kees, “Place of Execution” (1947), in The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees, ed. Donald Justice (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P , 2003): 164. 23

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I don’t suppose all poets think like rhetorical critics. Poets who have a hyperdeveloped sense of formalism construct poems according to ancient patterns – sestinas, villanelles, sonnets, ballades – such as Alan Wearne’s “The Ballade of Easy Listening”25 – but for the most part, I expect, poets let the words fall where they will, so that form is what happens when focus is on content (‘expressing’ the idea). If countless free-form poems appear to sound to some listeners like ordinary speech, given a few emphases (courtesy of line-breaks), elaborately formal poems seem to other listeners like exercises in making words work in ways that sound quaint. In Clive James’s “Anniversary Serenade,”26 a playful tribute to the mother of their two daughters, a series of questions reprises every fourth line, punctuating some witty metaphors. At the same time, the insistent rhyme leads James to produce such odd syntax as “And all you do is wise and say is true.” It also leads him to speak of emotion in such archaic terms as “I have a debt of happiness to pay.” These are minor concerns; I am attracted to James’s inventive deflation of his hyperbolic assertions of delight, in the succession of questions that run the gamut of rhetorical usage – questions that require no answer (“Know what I mean?”), questions to which there can be no answer (“To Shangri-La?”), questions placed to express amazement (“Live if you stay?”) and, taken in all, questions that catch the spontaneity of relived experience. James’s poem endorses Shapiro’s comment on the poet’s arresting the quality of experience. James records himself in a world of alcohol, nicotine, affectionate marital back-scratching, child-rearing, and other elements that together hint at, but never quite convey, the entire relationship. In this sense, to summarize my argument, the possibility and impossibility of revelation of the self that the poet engages with in the act of composition is conveyed by questions expressing desire, and ambiguously tentative answers.

—————— Poetry and the Human Comedy27 ——————

A

S K E D T O T A L K O R W R I T E on humour in prose or poetry, I have frequently refused. Audiences generally expect that a discussion of humour should be humorous in itself, but that’s a matter for after-dinner speakers, paid comedians, and stand-up comics who work from scripts with another end in

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Alan Wearne, “The Ballade of Easy Listening,” in The Best Australian Poems 2005, ed. Les Murray (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2005): 175. 26 Clive James, “Anniversary Serenade,” in The Best Australian Poems 2005, ed. Les Murray (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2005): 69–70. 27  Five Bells 11.2 (2004): 9–12.

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view. I have reflected on comedy and humour for as long as I can remember, wondering less perhaps at the things that make us laugh or smile than at the fact that we do so. Like the nature of poetry, the nature of comedy compels selfreflection in those who practise it or are concerned by it. Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose hinges on the attempt to expunge comedy from the world, yet the joke, if one can call it that, is that the copy of the ancient treatise that lies at the heart of the novel’s interest kills those who inquire too deeply. It is as if humour is, in one interpretation of the medieval world-view (for that world is infinitely amenable to manipulation), a notion not to be countenanced. The novel itself is a disquisition on the mind of a puritan for whom the idea of a divine comedy is appalling; to such a mind, a comedic account of nature appears to call into question the seriousness of the creator–artist. Eco’s puritanical custodian of the book on comedy is a type of censor for the ages: closed-society guardian, book-burner, torturer and burner of people. Comedy and humour, so considered, are serious matters. I took on the task of collecting examples of Australian humour for a publisher some sixteen years ago and dutifully acquiesced in the public-relations beat-up that followed publication. The people who interviewed me on several radio programmes clearly wanted me to keep up a supply of funny remarks, but I was ‘funned-out’ by the effort of collecting the material and doubtless came across as someone who was as curmudgeonly as any of the professional humorists that I had anthologized. It was no surprise to me that many of the most entertaining writers have been utter swine in their private dealings with their intimates and with society at large. At the same time, I knew that some professional humorists, Australian or foreign, have been or remain thoroughly decent characters. Among the most eloquent and graceful comic works of the twentieth century are the creations of George Herriman and Walt Kelly: the poetical works, no less than the activities, of Krazy Kat and Pogo are marvels of bitter-sweet celebration of life’s vagaries. What these comic masters had in common was an acute sense of the comedy of human conduct – which they translated into beast-fables to heighten the self-delusory nature of people positing themselves as central figures in mutually exclusive worlds. It is as if each sentient being operates at once in an enclosed world that also overlaps on occasion, like a Venn diagram, with the world of others for the sake of advantage, tangible profit or knowledge that one’s existence is acknowledged to be real. Why do we seek the approval of others when we are so sure of the rightness of what we do? And how is it that we are embarrassed when our efforts attract only quizzical looks or guffaws?

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In refining what I was about in collecting Australia humour, I was as diffident as any of the crowd-pleasers whose biographies I had read by way of getting familiar with my subject-matter. Henry Lawson, Lennie Lower, Dorothy Drain, and Joan Lindsay appeared anything but funny people; their immersion in the hard work of comic writing testified to an alertness, shared with their American and other peers, to the comedy of human survival. My diffidence in collecting humour stemmed in part from my sense that there is little agreement as to just what humour is, and that I lacked the philosophical rigour that might define it in a way that fits listeners’ understanding. Where one person believes Rodney Rude or Austen Tashus the funniest person on the planet, another will regard such comic raconteurs as obnoxious boors. There may, though, be some common ground. Recently, a fellow member of a literary panel informed the rest of us that while reading a particularly affecting novel she had cried (“twice”). She followed up, after a moment’s pause: “I say this because it’s not like me to cry; after all, I’m a Presbyterian.” The remark cracked up her listeners. For some of us, that sense of awareness of one’s absurdity is about as close as a definition of humour gets. More frequently, we’re entertained by the risibility of others’ behaviour. There’s nothing essentially funny about someone taking a heavy fall as a result of slipping on a discarded fruit wrapper, but, as La Rochefoucauld observed, we all have enough strength to bear with the misfortunes of others. There is nothing inherently humorous about the fact that we drive cars, yet there is something that strikes us as droll about the way the personalities of drivers seem so well signalled by their taste in automobiles. A speeding hottedup Ford full of half-tanked teenagers wearing back-to-front baseball caps strikes some onlookers as confirmation of the strangeness of the species; so, too, does the sight of an open-top Porsche pulling up outside a fashionable Melbourne café and disgorging a fashion-accentuated alpha male or female with one foot about to collide with the dog’s business on the pavement. The near-accident that flashes through our minds seems to confirm our sense that we are all programmed to be unconscious comedians when we are most engaged with earnestly acting out our fantasies of self. We rejoice at any chink that appears in another’s amour-propre: the thought that the beautiful and the great are as human as we are lightens the burden of awareness of our own fragility. Hand in hand with the absurdity I observe and read about, there is a great deal of sadness. When, alluding to the history of drama and contemporary mores, Byron writes, “All tragedies are ended by a death, all comedies are ended by a marriage,” I agree on the basis of my experience of books and people. When he writes of shipwrecked mariners choosing lots to decide which of them will

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become food for the rest, and throws in the brilliant case of the master’s mate’s grounds for exemption, I find his humour impeccable: And next they thought upon the master’s mate, As fattest; but he saved himself, because, Besides being much averse from such a fate, There were some others reasons: the first was, He had been rather indisposed of late; And that which chiefly proved his saving clause, Was a small present made to him at Cadiz, By general subscription of the ladies. (Don Juan, Canto II.L X X X I )

Don Juan is crammed with such novel twists that propel the narrative beyond mere recitation, and the poem has never ceased to delight me with its blend of straight-faced commentary and description undercut with humour that ranges from mordant to hilarious. The poem has repelled wowsers who like their tragedy and comedy tucked into discrete boxes. Some of Byron’s early reviewers were outraged by his ‘impure art’ throughout the entire poem, but especially by his mingling of horror and jokiness. In a sense, the entire poem is a black joke: it masquerades as epic comedy, a humorous recasting of the Don Giovanni legend, but Byron refuses to tell a lie about recurrent human traits. On the level of action, nothing goes right for Byron’s hero: every time he reaches a pitch of enjoyment, he is riding for a fall. Like Voltaire’s Candide, Byron’s Don Juan is a portrait of optimism. At the end of Candide, Voltaire discloses his now-decayed cast of characters remaking their lives as peasant farmers on a small-holding on the shores of the Bosphorus, and he cannot resist the pleasant remark that they can see “decently impaled” heads (“têtes proprement empaillées”) of unfortunates from their farmhouse window, and that they enjoy pineapples, pistachios, and good Moka coffee – not the evil Batavian muck which, Voltaire adds as an aside, he has to put up with himself. These comic touches reveal the wisdom that comes with a broad view of humanity as a species that, in spite of all reversals resulting from external or human-induced catastrophe, insists on surviving or at least hoping to endure. Some readers of William Faulkner’s Nobel-Prize speech have interpreted it as a plea for a noble comic view of life; others as a piece of windy rhetoric testifying to self-delusion: I’ll chance the former view. This instinct for survival is at the heart of what I take comedy to be, and it occurs in poetry from the snappy one-liner to the expansive and protracted narrative of delusion and folly. Clearly, Byron revered that instinct. So did Spenser; along with other students of Renaissance poetry, I was initially taken aback at

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the thought that anything in Spenser’s Faerie Queene could cause a laugh, until I was directed to the scene where the old man Malbecco hides in the shrubbery to observe his naked wife cavorting with a group of satyrs. Describing Malbecco’s dilemma, Spenser writes: At night, when all they went to sleepe, he vewed, Whereas his lovely wife amongst them lay, Embraced of a Satyre rough and rude, Who all the night did minde his joyous play: Nine times he heard him come aloft ere day, That all his hart with gelosie did dwell; But yet that nights ensample did bewray, That not for nought his wife them loved so well, When one so oft a night did ring his matins bell. (The Faerie Queene, Canto X.X L V I I )

The situation is potentially sad, but the characterization of the cranky, crabbed old man and his lusty young wife, and the farcical comparison of the satyr’s erections with the bell calling worshippers to morning devotions owes as much to the final couplet’s rhythm and neat rhyme as to the blasphemy of the conceit. A similar intersection of situation and verbal interplay occurs in Nikos Kazantzakis’ Sequel to the Odyssey, at the beginning of which the poet reveals Odysseus and his surviving crew members, returned and settled in their island home and now bored witless and longing for adventure. The characters resuscitate their desire, man a boat, and with the imprecation “put in your oar, and pull,” set off for further unlikely adventures, including the establishment of a Marxist republic in Africa. The overarching idea is epic – as in Don Juan (or, for that matter, Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso): the point is to keep moving, keep dodging and survive. Part of the joke is that no central character can foretell what is coming next: a situation encapsulated in Burns’s remark on the best-laid plans of mice and men. The propensity to see humour in situations may be temperamental, though I am no psychologist to define the ‘type’ of such a person. Where ancient doctors saw the influence of ‘humours’ (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, black bile) as determinants of personality, it is less easy to ascribe heredity and locate a particular gene that disposes one person to see the humorous side of things more than another. For poets, humour consists in balancing words for effect, and the language of humorous poetry is the same as that of tragedy or epic: Earl Livings, Chris Mansell, Kenneth Koch, and Billy Collins have written poems that work language for comic or darkly humorous effect, just as they have used the same word-hoard for work we’d call elegiac or sombre reflections. The effect is a

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verbal construction, a matter of juxtaposition of words that trigger recognition (as in the ‘Have you heard the one about…?’ or ‘How many X does it take to change a light bulb?’ formulas that signal what is coming). Hemingway’s epigrammatic verse (such as “The Earnest Liberal’s Lament”) occasionally functions in this manner. More subtle is the interweaving of ostensible anecdote or narrative that turns on itself through a sudden reversal of expectation – as when an outrageous comparison, allusion or assertion falls into the stream of ‘straight’ recounting. e.e. cummings’ “next to of course god america i” or Robert Creeley’s “I Know a Man” are cases in point. In contemporary Australian verse, Eric Beach, Ania Walwicz, and Joanne Burns produce work that comically subverts consumerist fantasies. In “tableau vivant,” Burns invests whitegoods with sacramental import; the line breaks give the poem an air of portentousness that is undercut by the comic comparisons: big and white and comforting as the cherished gospels with their illustrated tales, the family fridge has replaced the family pew as the site of pastoral care; its giant door opens to illuminated providence, one thinks of the glowing revelations of jesus’ sacred heart, feast has conquered famine in this alimentary treasure chest – you marvel at the amplitude of its design as you once admired an evangelist’s cadillac.28

Such a poem (though it is far from typical of Burns’s entire repertoire) can appear to verge on the versified joke – much as a good deal of past or present Australian bush poetry does, or the kind of poem composed for an occupational in-group or an intimate friend. In all the privileging of and fixation on poetry designed for submission to magazines that are seriously ‘literary’, it is rare to see a poem that is really comic or that openly rejoices in the ridiculousness of behaviour. This strikes me as shutting the door on one of the fundamental elements of poetry that Wallace Stevens suggests – that it must give pleasure. We appreciate the intellectual pleasure of verse that is verbally clever in presenting certain situations in an ironic light because, as writers and readers, we value the

28

Joanne Burns, “tableau vivant,” in Burns, Aerial Photography (Wollongong, N S W : Five Islands, 1999).

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work that goes into any poem that succeeds in its intention. We are a long way, though, from experiencing the broadly democratic, vernacular comic poem that journals like the Bulletin sponsored from late-Victorian times to the 1930s. The rise of little magazines and their struggles for or against modernism knocked much of the wind out of the sails of balladry and comic lyrics. Among Australian poets celebrated for their more straightforwardly serious poems are several who produced comic by-blows. Among those of the last three-quarters of the twentieth century are Hugh McCrae, Mary Fullerton, Elizabeth Riddell, Ron McCuaig, Kenneth Slessor, Joyce Lee, A.D. Hope, Gwen Harwood, John Manifold, Elizabeth Jolley, and John Bray, all of whom admit into their work the full range of poetry’s possible moods. The work of the poet who seeks to be read or heard is to keep the reader interested, by upsetting expectation, shifting the pace, and – for the poet, I suspect – providing relief from the exaction of creation. In Byron’s epic, what he called mobility is signalled on every page, often in successive stanza. His famous lyric “The Isles of Greece,” which is smuggled into the third canto of Don Juan, might strike us as fervently patriotic, yet it is introduced by a throwaway line to the effect that the author of the lyric might sing some such “sort of hymn” upon request, and the performance concludes with the following lines: Thus sung, or would, or could, or should have sung, The modern Greek, in tolerable verse; If not like Orpheus quite, when Greece was young, Yet in these times he might have done much worse: His strain display’d some feeling – right or wrong; And feeling,, in a poet, is the source Of others’ feeling; but they are such liars, And take all colours – like the hands of dyers. (Don Juan, Canto III.L X X X V I I )

Byron was right to query unthinking patriotism – which was never the same thing as love of Heimat, or of one’s particular small patch of neighbourhood. His salutary comic dismissal of the lying poet also tilts at England’s poet laureate, and all laureates. Where Byron’s humour succeeds is precisely in its inclusiveness of possibilities: “Thus sung or would or could or should have sung.” A nicely judged indication of the sad fact of human endeavour and shortcoming elevates this humour to something like grandeur. It’s clear that humour of the sort I’m describing has little in common with a straight-out trigger for a laugh. Laughter is the sign of communal bonding. Even when we laugh alone, it is because we are making some conditioned identification as a result of our socialization – and we are often partly ashamed of giving

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way to the impulse. It is this sense of shame or guilt, I suspect, that makes us liable to relegate humorous poetry – or anything else that causes amusement – to an inferior genre. I weary of verse that is all comic, but I appreciate its place: poetry that emphasizes only the ‘funny’ (as distinct from poetry whose humour contains the human comedy that I am espousing) is probably best kept shut in anthologies, where it can be glimpsed at times rather than read at a stretch. Collections of comic verse have relatively brief currency, on account of their topicality. Many people reading this article may well have stray copies of collections of comic verse that no longer strikes them as in any way humorous. Certain subjects invite comic treatment. The poetry of sport is frequently comic by design, pitched at bonding those with an interest in games; if it were entirely reverential, we’d probably laugh at its pretensions to epic, yet I haven’t tumbled to many laughs in Pindar’s Odes. When I hear a recitation of “How M’Dougal Topped the Score,” or read other rhymed sporting jests of the past two centuries, I’m struck by the occasional flashy line or slapstick timing of the narrative, but I would find life hell if condemned to reading only such narrowband effusions: it would be the equivalent of reading only Philip Adams’s annual joke-books or watching endless repeats of Tim and Debbie, or Roy and HG Nelson. Perhaps the television of Hell is restricted to such programmes. So much of their humour is already dated because of its relationship to other times, other stereotypes. Similarly, we do not inhabit the same society as that which gave rise to the bush ballad: the journalistic and didactic narrative verse of the Victorians has much the same charm for us as nineteenth-century paintings of children’s deaths or the sentimental visual narratives of natural disasters and the hard lot of the picturesque rural or urban proletariat. The humour of poems pointing up incongruous situations that occurred within or between social classes of that bygone era provided some alleviation of tension for readers who recognized that others could see the absurdity of viewing life steady and whole on all occasions. In this respect, the popular comic songs and verses play a role as conservative as any Shakespeare comedy, where revolution never has a chance and audiences go home humming tunes or chuckling. If these reflections are steering towards some formulation of my ideas on humour, they are discounting fun as a tiresome concept and consigning laughter to the outward sign of recognition of the need for relief from the spirit of earnestness. We laugh at the gaffes of ministers, politicians, and CEO s. Office humour helps us survive the routine demands that we surrender our creativity to others’ purposes. Our private reality is not satisfied with virtual reality, which is another escape-hatch that allows us to imagine for brief intervals what we might be, except for the endless intrusions of others and surveillance of our

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lives. Poetry is better than that. We exercise our own ‘humour’ (in the medieval sense) by writing what no one else tells us to write; and because we know that we will be read somewhere, sometime, by others, we will eventually grow tired of emulating our models, tired of hectoring and urging and complaining, and write what we would like to hear ourselves, to the pitch of our craft. That pitch involves all the senses – including a sense of the comedy of our own lives and those of others. The humour does not have to be sweet: the ironies of John Tranter, the asperity of Ouyang Yu, the faux-jokiness of Lauren Williams, and the tragicomic juxtapositions of Bruce Dawe show different facets of humour, though I doubt any of these poets would wear the label ‘humorous’ or ‘comic’. Lauren Williams once gave a talk on ‘labelling’ and aptly dismissed the tendency of reviewers (and some poets) to slot writers into easy categories as a way of avoiding critical engagement and analysis. Journalistic laziness reaches for tags like ‘performance poet’, ‘comic poet’, and ‘rap poet’, shifting emphasis from the second word in each formula. A poet who ‘only’ performs, ‘only’ raps, or is ‘only’ humorous will invite relegation. Some poets are attracted to labels: we wait to see how the labels wear. Poetry that judiciously employs poetry will avoid the trap, by making humour work to better purpose than an end in itself. As a postscript, I would add that I am reluctant to attach a label to my own practice of poetry. I am drawn to verse that holds elegy and celebration of life in some equilibrium. Byron had such balance: And if I laugh at any mortal thing, ’Tis that I may not weep; and if I weep, ’Tis that our nature cannot always bring Itself to apathy, for we must steep Our hearts first in the depths of Lethe’s spring Ere what we least wish to behold will sleep. (Don Juan, Canto IV.I V )

I have read poems at events that have seemed dominated by readers determined to treat the occasion as a soapbox or confessional, and I have preferred to mingle lighter verse of my own or by others with the cooler reflections I favour, as a way of suggesting that poetry is not limited to mournful dirges, fundamentalist sermonizing or political rodomontade. This has led some readers and listeners to believe that I have a penchant for comedy. Such people are right. My benchmarks of comedy include the plays of Aristophanes, Shakespeare, and Molière, the fiction of Cervantes, Voltaire, and Twain, the poetry of Archilochus and Dante. In saying this, I risk being labelled antimodern, but, as I respect the intelligence of my readers, I hope they will sense a mind that rejects such tags and accepts the moment’s challenge.

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—————— The Poetry of Lauren Williams29 —————— 1. Context: The New Australian poetry A U R E N W I L L I A M S W A S T E N Y E A R S O L D when the poets of the ‘Generation of ’68’ were forming their networks through poetry readings, the creation of small magazines, a takeover of the important Poetry Magazine, and entry into the mainstream by way of appearance in Poetry Australia and older established literary magazines. Robert Adamson and John Tranter in Sydney, Richard Tipping in South Australia, and Kris Hemensley and Robert Kenny in Melbourne characteristically printed their own work and that of their friends in such magazines as New Poetry (the transformed, American poetry-inflected successor to the Poetry Society of Australia’s Poetry Magazine), Free Grass, Transit, Mok, Our Glass, Auk, and Flagstones. These male-initiated (and maledominated) publications were unlike the more staid, university-connected literary magazines of the period: Meanjin, Overland, Southerly, and Westerly. They expressed a dissident response to the still generally English-oriented and nativist Australian traditions distinguished by emulation of long-revered or contemporary English verse, composition of ambitious versified epics of discovery, and lingering ballad and realist verse that reflected what would now be called postcolonial Australian poetry. Many of the ‘new’ Australian poets also wrote in ignorance of conventional Australian modes: younger Australians were starting to look further than England for models, at a time when American popular culture was invading Australian homes and American reactions to the Vietnam War were mirrored by Australians’ divided loyalties to their American allies. The New Australian Poetry drew inspiration from the ‘New American Poetry’ anthologies promoted by Donald Hall, Donald Allen, Robert Creeley, and others. Bruce Dawe, Chris Wallace–Crabbe, Bruce Beaver, and Julian Croft had been stimulated by the work of American poets, but the real impact of the American influence was not widely apparent until the end of the 1960s and the early 1970s, when John Tranter’s anthology The New Australian Poetry and Robert Kenny and Colin Talbot’s anthology Applestealers announced the arrival of a poetry unlike that of such established figures as A.D. Hope, Douglas Stewart, and Judith Wright. The New Australian Poetry departed from traditional writing in its spirit of experimentation, its political dissidence, and its gaze beyond Australian academic and English models. It took more risks, broke with closed forms, emphasized direct address, and spoke to live audiences at cafés, theatres, political

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29 

Introduction to a Venezuelan edition of poems by Lauren Williams.

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rallies, and the blossoming community radio stations. Poetry readings were less occasions of reverential attention to established writers than lively and sometimes anarchic events where new works were tested against instant audience response. For poets of Lauren Williams’s generation coming soon after this expansion of forms and opportunities, hotels, cafés, and nightclubs were performance spaces. The boom in small magazines and underground publications of the 1960s and 1970s continued through the 1980s, now boosted by instant print shops, community presses, and student publications. Inevitably, many of the new-wave poets became in turn the arbiters of taste. A few, including Mal Morgan, Myron Lysenko, and successive promoters of La Mama Poetica readings at Melbourne’s La Mama Theatre, maintained the democratic impulse that had characterized the rise of the new Australian poetry, and they encouraged new, often younger writers. Others became entrenched gatekeepers of magazines and anthologies they continued to control through the following decades. 2. The poetry On her return to Melbourne from a year’s residence in London in 1978, Lauren Williams studied in Melbourne, where she wrote poems for performance. In 1983, she bought a printing press and published three issues of Big Bang, a poetry magazine distributed on the streets. Australia’s most energetic street-poetry and performance-poetry scenes were located in Melbourne when Williams began to take part in live readings. While Adelaide venues included the Friendly Street Poets, the Cathedral Hotel, and other sites, many South Australians were attracted to Melbourne by a larger range of metropolitan venues and poetry festivals, notably the Montsalvat Festival at the outer Melbourne artists’ colony at Eltham. Sydney’s poetry venues were lively, but Sydney and New South Wales performance poets were also drawn to travel to the southern city, where Shelton Lea, Eric Beach, and, later, Dorothy Porter took up residence. Adrian Rawlins,  , Tom the Street Poet, and other charismatic poets promoted poetry in ‘actions’ and publicity events that were reported in other States. Tom the Street Poet printed hundreds of poems culled from pub and café readings, and distributed them in the streets of Melbourne.   and a group of friends promoted working-class poetry through a magazine called 925 that deliberately set out to challenge assumptions that poetry was the preserve of schools and the academy. Lauren Williams worked as a bookseller and typesetter at Kris and Retta Hemensley’s Collected Works bookshop, the most eclectic international poetry bookshop in Australia, while she performed poems and songs with a rock group.

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By 1990, she was an associate editor of Going Down Swinging, a journal that still produces poetry and prose by emerging Australian writers. Some of her work was included in a group poetry show that travelled to Sydney: Call It Poetry Tonight had a cast of several Melbourne and Sydney poets who arranged their poems in a free-ranging dialogue. In 1991, her first collection of poems, Driven to Talk to Strangers, was published in a four-poets collection from Penguin Books. Her fellow performance poets Myron Lysenko, Kerry Scuffins, and John Acton were included in the volume, and Williams’s collection was awarded second place in the Fellowship of Australian Writers’ prestigious Anne Elder Award. Williams’s poems in Driven to Talk to Strangers testify to her claim that performance poetry is “the original poetic form,” with its immediacy and excitement: the poem in performance is transitory and, as she noted, it’s happening right now, no going back to ponder the last line, the poem is moving, it either works first hearing or not at all.30

I heard Williams at live performances several times in Melbourne in the late 1980s and after, and her impact on audiences confirmed the appeal of her topics, the theatricality and musicality of her performance, and the hold she maintained over her audience. She was savvy and sharp on social issues and used all the poet’s tools to connect – modulated tempo, volume, gestures, expression, irony, pathos, and humour. Her poems stayed fresh, and her first book signalled to a reading audience the arrival of a poet with integrity and verve. The first poem in Driven To Talk to Strangers mocked the indulgently self-referential expression that gives some poets and, consequently, poetry a bad press: Sometimes I get the feeling I’m on the verge of becoming a bum not get out of bed not go to work not have to wash not change my clothes not pay the rent forget guilt and blow my cash on dope and booze […] This is depressing

30

“On Performance Poetry,” in Williams, Invisible Tattoos (Wollongong: Five Islands, 2000): 52.

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I write a poem and wash my hair.31

The short lines emphasize the mock-serious confessional tone. It is her wit to adopt the diffident tone and provide such twists, especially in poems that develop broader themes. Her poem “Local” contrasts the attractions of Sydney and Melbourne and resolves itself unabashedly in favour of her home city: Sydney has “razzamatazz” and “the mess / of a village sprawl,” where “even dogs have ego”; in Melbourne, she declares, “We keep our perspectives classic / like our facades.” Williams favours thoughtfulness and detachment from glitter, including the false consciousness of artists who can talk passionately of revolutionary Nicaragua while deriding their fellow citizens at home. In a similar way, she bids farewell to rock and roll in “A Bad Night at the Sydenham,” after experiencing the roars of a macho crowd that demands lyrics that demean women and that Williams, the singer, strip for their entertainment. For Williams, language of rock and roll is “like smart graffiti in a highschool toilet,” and she resolves to “fly out of this barnyard / for good.”32 A cooler tone is apparent in “Reflection,” a poem about women’s courage to keep observing themselves in mirrors: vanity is “introduction to mortality.” In this poem and others about women’s lives, Williams repudiates men’s expectations that women exist for them. In “Shout” and “Fact Is,” she rejects the expected image of woman and asserts her individuality. Anger, in “Shout,” becomes a diatribe against the womanizer, while “Fact Is” states with epigrammatic brevity the paradox that in a man’s world, a woman’s brilliant mind is no substitute for prettiness33 – a theme she returns to later in “Seeing Elle Macpherson,” a poem written after a near-encounter with the Australian modelling star at an American airport. (“Seeing Elle Macpherson”34 also declares her identification of herself as Australian, a subject that is increasingly problematic for Australian poets in an era of global politics and Australian political alignment with the U SA .) At the end of Driven to Talk to Strangers, several poems consider aspects of love and sex. Williams sees sex as a sweet trap that simultaneously brings the 31

Lauren Williams, “Sometimes,” in Driven to Talk to Strangers, in John Ashton; Kerry Scuffins; Myron Lysenko & Lauren Williams, Live Sentences: Works by Four Performance Poets (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1991): 52. 32 Lauren Williams, “A Bad Night at the Sydenham,” in Driven to Talk to Strangers, 60–61. 33 Williams, “Fact Is,” in Driven to Talk to Strangers, 69. 34 Williams, “Seeing Elle Macpherson,” Going Down Swinging 16 (1996): 74–75, repr. in Williams, Invisible Tattoos (2000) and in New Music: An Anthology of Contemporary Australian Poetry, ed. John Leonard (Wollongong, N S W : Five Islands, 2001): 71.

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ecstasy of losing the body in orgasm and the chagrin that floods the mind with each small death. The brain dissociates itself from the body; the sex act is ludicrous, the pleasure fleeting, the aftermath bitter when the couple confront their inarticulate repletion. This theme is old, but Williams situates the experience in a world dominated by false images and expectations: instant gratification promised by television, movies, and all the apparatus of advertisements involves no commitment, no mutuality, when people are reduced to commodity. What she calls “the image feast” in the poem “These Weird Years”35 is a picture of an age of orgiastic consumerism and post-consumption tristesse. The poems of her collection High and Low36 further engage with the world of surfaces. “Dull Boys” (23) speaks of men as voyeurs rather than self-imagined voyagers, and of women as sailors who chart new courses, cutting free. The images that men and women have of each other are related to cars, rock idols, cocktails, and banter, the metalanguage that passes for the language of courtship and desire. “Montsalvat” (15) and “Go to the Back of the Class” (17–18) are poems that scrutinize failed artistic endeavour and dramatize stultifying control of emotional growth and creativity. In the latter, restraints on the imagination appear in the behaviour and language of teachers, property developers, tourist promoters, urban commuters and, in the former poem, poets solemnly attending a festival of poetry. Reading these early poems, I am astonished at the range of Williams’s subjects and her intensity. Like the poetry of e.e. cummings, Williams’s ranges from exquisite realizations of the tenderness of love to intense assaults on the crassness of contemporary culture. In “Distance” (33) and “Flamenco” (30–32), the partners engaged in loving and a pair of women engaged in a dance become contestants for attention. In “Sex,” Williams declares “Good sex is like winning an argument / by agreeing the whole time,” while “Not so good sex is like the scones didn’t rise / but you eat them anyway” (36). Why is such verbal cleverness as this not more celebrated? In all the poems in High and Low, a double consciousness is at work: the poet examines her emotions and thoughts, and invites others to be as thorough with their own lives, and the invitation to such rigour unsettles the critic–teacher she describes in “Go to the Back of the Class.” The Sad Anthropologist (1993) collected several poems that she included in High and Low and included many new ones published in a wide range of Australian magazines. Reviewers beyond Melbourne began to take notice of her work, and the book showed a deepening commitment to social criticism and 35 36

Williams, “These Weird Years,” Overland 123 (Winter 1991): 56, repr. in Live Sentences, 83–85. Williams, High and Low (St Kilda South, Victoria: Big Bang, 1992).

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exploration of the condition of women and men in a country that was tightly gripped by an ideology that glorified wealth and greed. In a poem about a television presenter, Williams deconstructs the monstrous advertising of media personalities who have only their image to offer: the announcer stares at the citizens of Melbourne from a huge billboard and Williams concludes: The billboard bares its teeth “I’m happy.” It says “I’m pretty. Watch me.”37

Williams’s scepticism about the culture of narcissism is consistent with her earlier observations of Australian society and permeates this book. Describing a journey to Sydney with a younger woman poet, she observes the way her companion attracts male attention during the journey – and later, the reaction of an audience to their performance on stage: After the reading I watch young male poets in rasta berets pant after her, old male poets pay serious attention to her opinions Suddenly I am depressed, my poems dull the poets irk me, predictable as weathercocks, while she catches all breezes in the bright spinnaker of youth I become bored with the prevailing wind and leave town, thumb a ride with Philosophy.38

The world-weary tone stems from the déjà-vu role-play of men and women in a sexualized ambience: the young males “pant” after the women, and the men are “weathercocks,” animated by the appearance of an alluring female. Williams’s retreat into “Philosophy” is the undercurrent of this book. Williams conveys a hunger for commitment and belonging in her poetry. Her vignettes of Australians portray hopeful but unfulfilled sexual desire and the

37

Lauren Williams, “Jennifer Keyte’s Face,” in Williams, The Sad Anthropologist (Wollongong,

N S W : Five Islands, 1993): 9. 38

“Young Female Poet,” in The Sad Anthropologist, 36–37.

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impossibility of engagement that requires commitment in other areas as well. Her Australians are hollow people, trapped in self-regard, unable to look beyond themselves and imagine the ‘Other’, whether person or country, as containing any intrinsic or authentic identity. Her Australians see their country as an empty place. D.H. Lawrence observed something of the same vacuity in the psyche of Australians he met in 1922. T.S. Eliot would have called these people’s description of Australia the ‘objective correlative’ of their emotions and ideas. In “Sightseeing for the Blind,”39 Williams writes of her journey with a party of tourists to Uluru (formerly Ayers Rock, the monolith in the centre of Australia). At Uluru, Williams avoids the tourists swarming over the rock, and contemplates the associations of the site for the Aboriginal inhabitants of the region. She experiences the “different light,” and “change in mood” as she recalls the their history and their reverence for the site. Returning to her point of departure, she meets fellow travellers who have climbed to the top of the rock and who announce that “there was nothing to see” except another landmark that they have already visited. Williams records the tourists’ shallow engagement with their country in matter-of-fact terms, understating their lack of comprehension and their failure to see anything but surfaces in their journey through their own country. Other poems trace the same disengagement of people from their environment. In the course of a residence at Varuna, a writer’s retreat in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, Williams wrote a series of poems about the extraordinary landscape that surrounded the retreat. The region is given over to tourism and property development, and Williams attempts to see beneath the veneer of commercialism to the mythico-religious significance of the landscape for the original inhabitants. In the poem titled “The Sad Anthropologist” (52–53), she contrasts the sense of awe she experiences on the edge of a cliff above “oceans of space” and the “overheated chaos” of a souvenir emporium. She photographs an ugly broken fountain, to remind her of her embarrassment at what her people have done to “Creation” and concludes “it breaks my heart.” Here, anthropology abandons objectivity; Williams sees ecological, social, and imaginative collapse in everything touched by humanity. This deeper note in her writing builds on the social observations of her earlier work, and reinforces her determination to invest in the transformative power of her art. In another of the “Varuna” poems (“The Greatest Song,” 54), she declares that the massed trees in the Jamieson Valley constitute a “mighty green chorus” that “lifts the blue roof / in perfect unison.” This is a new but consistent lyric departure for Williams, who steps out 39

“Sightseeing for the Blind,” in The Sad Anthropologist, 62–63.

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of the claustrophobic social milieu of her earlier work to become much more than a camera or recorder of the scene. Williams asserts the artist’s will against self-regarding conformism and the unthinking despoliation of natural beauty. She feels herself a ghost when she revisits the site of a wreck where she was almost killed, and considers “a parallel history haunting this place / like a fork in the road, never taken” (“Driving Towards Yass,” 57), but the course that she has taken in “The Sad Anthropologist” announces a refusal to become deadened to the unexamined life and the uncreative surrender to inauthenticity. The Sad Anthropologist rejects savagery between men and women, between white and black Australians (notably in the powerful narrative “Night Train,” 64) and the book concludes with some of her most important work. The final poem, “Vision” (68), is perfectly placed to announce the deceptiveness of assuming things are what they appear to be on the surface. Between The Sad Anthropologist and Invisible Tattoos, Williams published a chapbook called Bad Love Poems that revisited her earlier subject of encounters between lovers destined to disappoint each other. The tone is more insouciant, sharp-edged, assured. Williams says of one encounter with a sexual athlete: “I curled privately around myself / and willed my desire away” (“Killer Instinct,” 10); of another meeting with a former lover, “I pack him up / in a poem” (“Old Flame Extinguisher,” 12). The poems in this collection are remote from self-pity; they are bright, epigrammatic. In “Divorce,” the woman describes what she does with her new independence, a series of pleasurable activities, and she declares: Here I am. It’s either pathetic or I’ve got it together depending on what I think but that’s the last thing I want to do.40

The poem “On being ditched by a bastard” wraps up the situation even more tightly: If ever I have a dog it’ll be a bitch called Dignity. Here, Dignity. Heel.41 40 41

“Divorce,” in Williams, Bad Love Poems (Surrey Hills, Victoria: Soup, 1998): [9]. “On being ditched by a bastard,” in Bad Love Poems, [7].

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These poems and others in the collection have not been reprinted, and this seems a regrettable oversight. The poems reflect such common experiences of women’s relationships that they would win acclaim in any country. Williams is more sparing in providing specifically ‘Australian’ settings, but her language (in a title like “The Bullshit of Love” [8] or in lines like “I almost scratch my balls”) effortlessly draws on the profanity of the Australian vernacular. Williams’s more substantial collection Invisible Tattoos included poems she had published in international as well as Australian journals. Several had been broadcast on national and local radio programmes. In this book, the poetry has developed the themes of wisdom and human sympathy that characterized her earlier work. It is mature and assured in its treatment of love and everyday encounters. The poem “Eloquent” humanely records the efforts of an old drunk man to maintain his dignity and express his emotion.42 Williams also reflects on her childless status during a family gathering surrounded by children: she celebrates her “cold steel” difference from the women who feel sorry for her and her partner. Her poems about her profession of poet now turn more philosophical, as in “The Poetic O,” where she contemplates the mouth that forms the letter ‘O’, “releasing the sound of a circle / The egg that hatched language.”43 In poems about her engagement with Spanish, Williams speaks of being adrift from her “mother tongue” and, amusingly, of her “assassination” of Spanish in her effort to master the language: Forgive me, Spanish I am a poet with a machete lost in an enchanted forest.44

Williams studied Spanish for several years in Australia and Spain. She has also appeared at poetry festivals in Costa Rica, Colombia, and Venezuela, and poems that refer to those countries reveal her passion for the language and delight and sadness at encountering the contradictions of Latin American society. She writes of people’s celebration of life and their sorrow, though her language displays the unmistakable cadences of her country’s vernacular. In her meditations on the experiences of others, Williams questions her first impressions of individuals and reveals her idealistic hopes for their happiness. In “The Ever Popular Tune,” she observes an old poet and his young wife, and ponders the enigma of such an unlikely love story, which she compares to a fairy tale: 42 43 44

“Eloquent,” in Williams, Invisible Tattoos (Wollongong, N S W : Five Islands, 2000): 13. “The Poetic O,” in Invisible Tattoos, 19. “A Kind of Drowning,” in Invisible Tattoos, 20.

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It’s a happy tale, and who would begrudge happiness, that rare and beautiful bird that must be wooed wherever it lands?45

The question is left open, suggesting that, while happiness can be “wooed,” it may not endure. The flipside of such a poem is “Uncollected,” an account of her encounter with a connoisseur of fine objects: Williams is alert to the allure of the collector and is wary of becoming another specimen in his collection. 46 The note of wariness in this book has replaced the more strident criticism and rejection of unequal relationships in earlier volumes of her work. Williams more frequently explores the emotions of the strangely assorted humans she encounters as if seeing the world from their point of view. The verse has grown in stature, and while her meditations still portray some people, including herself, as comical, Williams is acutely aware of the fragility of people’s self-confidence and the intensity of their appreciation at being treated as wholly human. Justice is not an abstraction in Williams’s world: she records the suffering of a mother who has lost her son,47 of the woman dying alone in a suburban house, of the women seeking acknowledgment of something beyond sexual functionality. So many of Williams’s poems have an ostensible playfulness about them that it could be easy to see her as a writer of occasional verse or journalist of the emotions, but she constantly tests her purpose in writing, so that what one carries away from an encounter with her work is a sense of the plangency of life. A Williams poem is a phoenix arising from the ashes of experience to shine and soar. She shares her delight in being alive to the gamut of emotions and encounters that make them contingent with wonder at the gift of poetry. In her “Unformed Poem to a Potential Lover,” she captures the paradox of poetry’s embrace of opposites, and celebrates it in a surrealistic display of sparkling images: See how I hold this poem in my hands It is illusory a word hologram a winky toy Turn it this way, you see a flower that way, a wound like a rose tattooed on white skin Now observe My black petal words 45 46 47

“The Ever Popular Tune,” in Invisible Tattoos, 26. “Uncollected,” in Invisible Tattoos, 29. “Colombian Documentary,” in Invisible Tattoos, 23.

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unfold from a place unimaginably small Now look My black moth words see your beating heart like a light I suppose you noticed the black The poem is turning in my hands.48

———————— Byron’s ‘Deluge’49 ————————

U

G E O R G E S T E I N E R and a handful of late-twentieth-century critics and writers on theatre began to question long-repeated assertions about the failure of Byron’s late plays as actable scripts, reviews tended to write off his second “mystery,” Heaven and Earth, as a slighter, if rather less contentious drama than its immediate precursor, Cain (also subtitled “A Mystery”), and as a marginally less absurd production than its late successor, The Deformed Transformed. Heaven and Earth has not appeared on stage as frequently as Cain or The Deformed Transformed, both of which have been produced in Europe and elsewhere. Cain has been staged throughout the twentieth century and later, notably by Stanislavski in 1920 in Moscow, and by Jerzy Grotowski in 1960 in Cracow. The play was also staged by Lab Productions at the Newtown Theatre in Sydney, in September 2005, and drama students have produced the play at universities, including the University of New England. Steven Rumbelow directed the Triple Action Theatre’s production of The Deformed Transformed in the UK in 1970.50 Michael Joseph called Heaven and Earth “perfunctory,” and claimed that its “supernatural effects look tawdry beside The Vision of Judgment.”51 Heaven and Earth is, however, a more daring work than Cain in its free-ranging verse experimentation, and in its proto-existentialist focus on the dilemma of a sensitive human unable to act out of a conviction that all action is futile. Cain presented the Old Testament’s first family on earth in debate upon the purpose of life, the function of the will, and the goodness of the Deity and His preference in the matter of sacrifice. The drama is thus a “Morality” as well as a NTIL

48

“Unformed Poem to a Potential Lover,” in Invisible Tattoos, 61. The Byron Journal 34.1 (2006). 35–48. 50 See Boles¶aw Taborski, Byron and the Theatre (Salzburg: Institüt für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1972): 368–80. 51 Michael Joseph, Byron the Poet (London: Gollancz, 1964): 124. 49 

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“Mystery.” In the face of disappointing critical reception of Cain, though, Byron persisted in urging the publication of Heaven and Earth, so we can ask why he had such regard for a work whose theology and more problematic form could invite further rejection. Byron had not finished exploring tendencies of thought that had provoked the protagonist of Cain to commit the first murder. While Byron’s friend John Cam Hobhouse recorded in his diary, on 18 April 1822, Byron’s flippant claim that he had Cain kill Abel “that he might not have the bore of passing 200 years with him,”52 Byron provided his publisher with a more compelling rationale for Cain’s action when he wrote, on 9 November 1821: Cain is a proud man – if Lucifer promised him kingdoms &c. – it would elate him – the object of the Demon is to depress him still further in his own estimation than he was before – by showing him infinite things – and his own abasement – till he falls into the frame of mind – that leads to the Catastrophe – from mere internal irritation – not premeditation or envy – of Abel – (which would have made him contemptible), but from the rage and fury against the inadequacy of his state to his Conceptions – and which discharges itself rather against Life – and the Author of Life – than the mere living.53

Byron’s remark focuses on Cain’s awakening to his all-too-human limitations. In the course of a journey through space, Cain observes defunct or dying planets with their cargo of amazing dead or soon-to-be-extinct creatures. Lucifer works up Cain’s frustration to the pitch where the latter initiates an argument with his brother Abel, concerning the unquestioning offer of a blood-sacrifice of an innocent victim to a deity who, it appears, arbitrarily creates and destroys so many worlds. It is possible to see in the train of events not only a line of questioning about the sort of relationship one can have with such a deity, but also an ironic gloss on Lucretius’s dictum, “tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.” Byron’s further injection into Cain of speculation about the notion of election needled clergymen fearful about the effect of such impiety on susceptible churchgoers. Cain is from the outset troubled by the thought that he and his siblings must suffer as a result of their parents’ wrongdoing. Fine-tuned by Lucifer to doubt his ability to control the results of his actions, Cain comes to feel outraged at the idea of wor52

Ernest J. Lovell, Jr., His Very Self and Voice: Collected Conversations of Lord Byron (London: Macmillan, 1954): 316. 53 George Gordon, Lord Byron, Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand (London: John Murray, 1973–82), vol. 9: 53–54. Further references to the twelve volumes are in the main text after the abbreviation B L J .

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shipping a God responsible for the ruins he has seen. Abel, Adam, and the women of the play curb their desires out of faith; Cain, though, has been made painfully aware, through revelation of his infinitesimal stature in the scheme of things, of the bounds of human endeavour. Thematically, the play rehearses the pervasive concern with the limits of freedom that characterized Childe Harold I I I and I V , Don Juan, and the earlier dramatic works, where, as in Heaven and Earth, Byron portrayed individuals tragically (and at times comically) pitching their will against orthodox beliefs and structures. In Heaven and Earth, Byron gives the notion of election another twist: Japhet cannot understand why he and his family should be saved when his fellow humans, both innocent and wicked, must perish in a flood that destroys the world he loves. As if matching form to speculation, Byron jettisoned the regular blank-verse patterns of his ‘historical’ dramas and adapted a mélange of versification that he had employed in his 1817 drama Manfred, together with such lyric forms as Goethe had employed in Faust I, and Shelley in Prometheus Unbound. The miscellany of metres, particularly in the choruses, and the uneven, quasi-Pindaric lines spoken by individual characters make it Byron’s most experimental poem. Concerning the first modern Greek translation of Heaven and Earth in the 1860s, Eugenia Kephallineou notes that “the chorus lines of ancient tragedy contributed to [the unknown translator’s] choice as well as to the interest in eschatological subjects that arose during that period.”54 Byron referred to the drama as a “kind of Oratorio on a sacred subject” (BL J , 9: 81), while George Steiner wrote of it in 1961 as “a kind of dramatic cantata, rather in the manner of Berlioz,” describing its conclusion as “a foreshadowing of Wagnerian opera.” 55 Byron aimed for the directness and simplicity of Greek tragedy, and his combination of lines imitated from the Old Tragedy with lines imitated from biblical verse and prose created a mixture of rapid and ‘broken’ lines that were admired by Hazlitt and Goethe, but damned by other contemporary and later reviewers until relatively recent times. John Wilson, the play’s first reviewer, commended Byron’s handling of dialogue as one of the work’s strengths, a view reinforced by Steiner’s later observation that, given the revolution in theatre production, the play was suited to late-twentieth-century staging. Steiner proposed a Byron Festspielhaus to test the theatrical possibilities of the final dramas,56 and Martin 54

Eugenia Kephallineou, “The Reception of Lord Byron’s Dramas in Greece,” in Byron and the Mediterranean World: Proceedings of the Twentieth International Byron Conference Athens 20–21 September 1994, ed. M.B. Raizis (Athens: Hellenic Byron Society, 1995): 181. 55 George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (London: Faber & Faber, 1961): 209–10. 56 Steiner, The Death of Tragedy, 212.

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Corbett concurred with Steiner in maintaining that Heaven and Earth and Cain foreshadow future directions in drama.57 “In the climate of Brecht and Beckett,” Corbett remarked, The Deformed Transformed “seems now less eccentric and more stageworthy than when it first appeared.”58 In respect to form, Byron’s play was, for its period, as experimental a production as Dryden’s 1674 rendering of Milton’s Paradise Lost as an unactable verse play, The State of Innocence, and Fall of Man: An Opera. Dryden’s drama chiefly consists of dialogue in heroic couplets, between Adam, Lucifer, Eve, and the angels Gabriel and Raphael. The pace is smart, the tone witty and at times almost comic, as when Lucifer, having successfully prompted Eve to take and eat the forbidden fruit, remarks on her peremptory departure, “She flew, and thank’d me not, for hast: ’twas hard / With no return such counsel to reward” (I V .iii.142–143), which, as Dryden’s editor observes, is “Perhaps the first joke on the phrase, ‘Hardly anyone says thank you nowadays’.”59 Like Dryden, Byron extended the one-dimensional Old-Testament characterization of a religious drama and made the hero appear more human. Further, Byron’s angels, like Dryden’s, express sympathy with human frailty: they are, after all, set over them as guardians. This is not to claim that Byron drew upon Dryden’s “opera” as model. He frequently cited and even quoted from Dryden’s poetry, remarking as early as November 1813, in a letter to Lord Holland, “I have a thorough and utter contempt for all measures but Spencer’s [sic] stanza and Dryden’s couplet” (B L J , 3: 168), but for all his admiration of Dryden’s versification, Byron makes no reference to Dryden’s dramatization of the biblical account. In regard to subject-matter, Byron extends his gloss, in Cain, on the second Fall (the murder of Abel) to include the fate of Cain’s descendants, the “daughters of men,” punished by the Flood for their continuation in vice. Heaven and Earth now presents Cain’s descendants, reintroduces the idea of an inexorable God of vengeance who dooms the innocent as well as the guilty, and casts as his male protagonist Noah’s son Japhet, whose role is to interrogate the ways of God to men, women, and angels. Like Cain, Japhet is less a figure of rebellion than a hero in the line of Goethe’s Werther, Ugo Foscolo’s Jacopo Ortis, and Byron’s Sardanapalus. Japhet’s dissidence accords him some affinity with Manfred, but only remote kinship with Byron’s real-life ‘Promethean’ heroes such as Washington, Napoleon, and Bolívar. Japhet’s anguish at the thought of 57

Martin Corbett, Byron and Tragedy (New York: St Martin’s, 1988): 188. Corbett, Byron and Tragedy, 207. 59 Vinton A. Dearing, in The Works of John Dryden, vol. 12: Plays, ed. Dearing (Berkeley: U of California P, 1994): 375n. 58

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the eclipse of his beloved Anah and the world he inhabits (like Jacopo Foscari’s anguish at the thought of exile from his beloved Venice in The Two Foscari) marks Japhet as a new, passive hero of sensitivity. In the prominence given to the women Anah and Aholibamah, Byron similarly developed new female heroes: Anah bears some relationship to Astarte (in Manfred), Myrrha (in Sardanapalus), and Haidée (in Don Juan), but she commences more self-reflective and continues to develop throughout the play’s dialogues. Aholibamah is closer in character to Byron’s earlier male heroes of defiance; she repudiates selfabnegation and submission to the God proclaimed by Noah and Raphael. 

A plot outline does no justice to the verbal and poetic qualities of the work, and little to the complexity of the foregrounded issues, chief among which are the nature of ‘election’, free will, and the Deity who manifests himself in vast upheavals and disasters. Such a God has no personality to speak of, and Byron does not introduce God as a character. Byron had learned the lesson of his earliest verse-drama, Manfred, of attempting to portray embodiments of supernatural evil (the agents of Arimanes, the epitome of evil) through speeches designed to overwhelm the hero with fear, but which instead resembled histrionic rant. In the intervening tragedies and in “The Prisoner of Chillon” and Childe Harold II I and I V , Byron had represented supreme power, whether political or supernatural, as ominously faceless and subtly malevolent, thereby heightening suspense and the terror such shadowy figures evoked in his Promethean rebels and doubters. In Heaven and Earth, God’s agents appear only to threaten errant and innocent humanity alike with cosmic persecution. If the work is Voltairean in its iconoclastic thrust, it also conveys a sense of the psychological anguish of its chief protagonist, Japhet – and, to some degree, that of Anah, a more complex female ‘lead’ than her sister Aholibamah. The play proceeds through dialogues and monologues, about half and half. B.G. Tandon suggested that the monologues contain much that is stageworthy in terms of opportunity for histrionic enunciation and musicality, and they are used organically, “sometimes revealing character, sometimes speeding the action, and sometimes carrying the thought.”60 The essence of the drama’s tension lies particularly in Japhet’s soliloquies, where he debates his ethical promptings and choices. Nor does Japhet monopolize the monologues; the play notably favours the women characters. Tone in the monologues is extraordinarily varied. 60

B.G. Tandon, “Dialogue in Byron’s Dramas,” in New Light on Byron, ed. James Hogg (Salzburg: Institüt für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1978): 22.

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Anah and Aholibamah are distinctly individual in their grandiloquence. Elsewhere, speech registers underscore Japhet’s harrowing doubt and his rhapsodic evocation of the sublimity of nature, Noah’s canting evangelicalism, Raphael’s urgent adoption of rational argument, and the Chorus of Spirits’ mockery of human puniness. In short, the presentation of Jahwist spirits mingling and colloquially sparring with humans and each other constituted a more varied and entertaining ‘mental theatre’ than that of Manfred. For one thing, it is sometimes bleakly funny. Byron’s rapid exposition of events leading up to the Flood concentrates on Japhet’s appalled response to the ruination of earth and its inhabitants, and his reflections on divine goodness and justice. Japhet’s dilemma is that of Byron’s ‘Everyman’. He cannot comprehend why the innocent as well as the wicked must die while he and his family alone should live. As if to give point to this dilemma, Byron includes among the drowning mortals’ curses against God at the end of the play a prayer commencing with a line from Revelations (14:13), “Blessed are the dead / Who die in the Lord!” (II I .883–884). The prayer at first appears to counterbalance the despair voiced by others in the Chorus of Mortals; it clearly implies that there is a ‘good’ man or woman among the victims. It is also possible to read the prayer as evidence of the delusion harboured by believers in a benevolent Deity – a delusion intensified in the contrast between God’s sparing of Japhet, who has uttered “impious” words (I II .762), and his killing a man whose faith is, so far as one can estimate, genuine. Earlier, in an apparently irony-free exchange between Noah and Japhet, Noah rejects his son’s appeal to save the sisters, and instead berates him: Would’st thou have God commit a sin for thee? Such would it be To alter his intent For a mere mortal sorrow. Be a man! (III.691–694)

The idea that God’s will is so inflexible that for Him to change would constitute a sin is a refinement of logic that suggests to characters like Aholibamah that human morality is a chimera: there is no will but God’s, and to be human is to be abject. Noah’s injunction “Be a man!” is a refinement of Byronic wit. Byron’s disputants walk a tightrope between Calvinist justification of reason in matters of faith and a critique of that application of reason. Japhet’s misgivings about the judgment of Heaven derive from his unvoiced assumption of the paradox that faith must accord with reason, reason that can only stem from God. Unlike Cain, who is baffled by Lucifer’s equivocations in the earlier play, Japhet is not deflected by the Seraphs’ supercilious condescension at his inquiry

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into the cause of divine wrath. The Seraphs are less informed than they might be, in any case, as becomes clear when Samiasa is startled to hear that God has decreed earth’s destruction, and Raphael, in one of the play’s few comic touches, replies: Had Samiasa and Azaziel been In their true place, with the angelic choir, Written in fire They would have seen Jehovah’s late decree And not enquired their Maker’s breath of me: But ignorance must ever be A part of sin; (III.531–538)

By seeking to extend themselves, the Seraphs have become like humans, possessing limited knowledge. Japhet rightly concludes that, in their falling-away from God and sharing man’s sin, they must participate in man’s punishment or at least his sorrow (II I .354–355). In Cain (1.421), Byron had delineated the nature of angelic orders, in the phrase “seraphs love most, cherubim know most,” and he here turns the distinction to comic purpose. The angels’ conversation is literally down to earth, and the drama’s mood approaches that of “The Vision of Judgment,” in which the recording angel, confronted with the volume of human sin, “had stripped off both his wings in quills” (l.23) and augmented the celestial bureaucracy with six angels and twelve saints in an effort to keep up – until the heavenly clerks, disgusted at the crowning carnage of Waterloo, throw down their pens. Byron took a matter-of-fact view of the workings of heaven in “The Vision,” Don Juan, Cain, and Heaven and Earth. This should not be surprising: Byron had the example of Dante’s rational schema depicting the outcome of Heaven’s executive and administrative decisions and operations. It is hardly surprising that Goethe could wittily and accurately remark (on 20 June 1827) that “there is nothing in the whole of Cain that is not taught by the English bishops themselves” and of Heaven and Earth that “its beauty is such as we shall not see a second time in the world.”61 Earlier (24 February 1824), Goethe had observed of Cain: We see […] how the inadequate dogmas of the church work upon a free mind like Byron’s, and how by such a piece he struggles to get rid of a doctrine which has been forced upon him. The English clergy will not

61

Johann Peter Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe, tr. John Oxenford (London: J.M. Dent, 1970): 208.

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thank him; but I shall be surprised if he does not go on treating biblical subjects of similar import, and if he lets slip a subject like the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.62

Tension is established early in the drama through the assignment of different temperaments to the Seraphs’ earthly “brides.” Byron took the women’s names from Genesis 36:2: Aholibamah was Esau’s wife and a daughter of Anah, a Canaanite. The Canaanites were not considered true Israelites, and Byron perhaps plays on the verbal similarity to ‘Cainites’ (Canaan was in fact a son of Ham, a man cursed by his father Noah for telling his brothers he had seen Noah drunk and naked after the Flood). As John Wilson pointed out in the poem’s first review, “They are very different characters – Anah soft, gentle, and submissive – Aholibamah proud, impetuous, and aspiring – the one loving in fear, and the other in ambition.”63 While Anah fears that she “grows impious” (1.8), Aholibamah demands: “And where is the impiety of loving Celestial natures?” (1.9– 10). Leslie Marchand noted that Aholibamah, like the chief characters of Childe Harold and Manfred, shares with Cain a “bitter defiance and skepticism” and “divine discontent with the “inadequacy of his state to his conceptions.”64 The aspiration to deity is implicit in Aholibamah’s contempt for “dust’ (1.15–18), a contempt she shares more with Lucifer than with Cain. Some readers may agree with Marsula (Marcy) Guarino’s extrapolation of Marchand’s comment on Aholibamah’s longing for a love that is free “from the imperfections of the earthly state” that makes her the actual hero of the play. 65 I don’t endorse this. Both women, like Noah and Shem, adopt ‘fixed’ positions after all. Japhet is a Hamlet exemplifying Byronic ‘mobility’. Anah veers this way but, abandoning doubt, plunges for love. Anah’s initial fears echo Cain’s suspicions of Lucifer’s assurances – for example, Cain’s reply to Lucifer’s ironic assurance, “Have faith in me, and thou shalt be / Borne on the air, of which I am the prince”: “Can I do so without impiety?” (II .i.2–4) – and a more striking similarity becomes apparent. Cain is distinguished by his capacity to love, if not as selflessly as his wife and sister Adah, at least more than Lucifer and even Abel. Abel’s love is not fixed so much

62

Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe, 41. John Wilson, in Donald H. Reiman, The Romantics Reviewed: Contemporary Reviews of British Romantic Writers (New York: Garland, 1972), vol. 2: 196. 64 Leslie Marchand, Byron’s Poetry: A Critical Introduction (London: John Murray, 1965): 94. 65 Marsula (Marcy) Guarino, “Manfred, Cain, Heaven and Earth, and The Deformed Transformed: The Tragic Sublime in Byron’s “Speculative Dramas’,” Société française des Études de Byron: Bullétin de Liaison 3.6 (2005): 127. 63

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on any object in the world as on God. In Heaven and Earth, Anah’s love for Azaziel is Byron’s extrapolation of Adah’s for her mortal husband Cain: I should have loved Azaziel not less were he mortal; yet I am glad he is not. I cannot outlive him. And when I think that his immortal wings Will one day hover o’er the sepulchre Of the poor child of clay which so adored him, As he adores the Highest, death becomes Less terrible; but yet I pity him: His grief will be of ages, or at the least Mine would be such for him, were I the seraph, And he the perishable. (1.18–28)

Aholibamah, more pragmatic, suggests Azaziel will choose “another love” (1.29– 30). Where Anah puts her lover’s happiness before her own, Aholibamah’s love is self-centred: she desires immortality in Samiasa’s remembrance. In her invocation to her lover, Anah is self-effacing, calling herself the “least” of those “cast out from Eden’s gate” (1.58–59). Emphasizing her corporeality and her fear (1.67–74), she expresses the poem’s central theme, the attempt to “bridge the gap between earth and heaven” by love.66 Aholibamah is little concerned with a sense of sin; dissatisfied, like Cain, with Eve’s legacy and her own partial immortality (1.102–114), she is more assertive than her sister, and invokes Samiasa to share her lot. More than Cain, she has the assurance of immortality of the spirit (1.111–114); in the third Scene, she declares her readiness to undergo “an immortality of agonies” with Samiasa (I II .359–361). In giving her such fearless self-assurance, Byron thus pairs the most daring human female with the leader of the “fallen” spirits of Enoch’s account: a status first remarked on by George Brandes in 1875 and later by Samuel Chew, who spoke of Aholibmah as “Cain’s female counterpart.”67 When she alludes to the plurality of other worlds (1.86–89), Aholibamah goes further than Cain, who was shown such phenomena by Lucifer; remarking God’s callousness in letting his creations die, she declares eternal “warfare” with God. Anah, by contrast, alludes to the stars inhabited by Azaziel only insofar as they reflect his and God’s “glory” (1.38–39; 1.57–58). Referring to God, Aholibamah asserts: Change us he may, but not o’erwhelm; we are As of eternal essence, and must war 66 67

Jerome J. McGann, Fiery Dust: Byron’s Poetic Development (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1968): 263. Samuel Chew, Dramas of Lord Byron (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1915): 41.

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With him if he will war with us. (1.120–124)

The manichaean undertone in her invocation is muted and perhaps confusing; like Cain (and, earlier, Manfred), though, she rejects identification with a personification of evil, while opposing God, who would punish her for following the dictates of her presumably foreordained desire. It is noteworthy that Byron played down the idea of evil in Heaven and Earth: Japhet claims, in his first soliloquy: “The earth’s grown wicked” (I I .65), and Anah early remarks: “I love our God less since his angel loved me: / This cannot be of good” (I .13–14), but the nearest the play comes to identifying a principle of evil occurs in the mockery of Japhet by the Chorus of Spirits, who appear to represent Lucifer’s companions: Japhet prochronistically calls one of them “the fiend” ( I I I .67). 

The action of the play is rapid. When Japhet departs in Scene 2, Noah enters with Shem, his fear-ridden echo, and, like Adam in Cain, proclaims his orthodoxy while lamenting a son’s folly. Noah urges Japhet to accept the divine will and strikes a predestinarian note in pronouncing Japhet’s love hopeless (I I .91– 100). Robert F. Gleckner sees Cain and Heaven and Earth as intellectualized versions of the shipwreck scene in Don Juan II ; he points out the antinomies: man is both the destroyer and destroyed, victim and victimizer, and the gods (or God) made in man’s image but conspire to sink him in the vast deep of desolation.68

A ‘good’ man, Noah neither questions God’s intentions nor intellectualizes his faith. For Noah, the case is simple: the earth is “all evil” (1.92) and the mountain caverns are infected with evil spirits. As Leslie Marchand noted, Noah “combines all the platitudes of a stern father and an Evangelical parson.69 E.H. Coleridge remarked: “Byron said that it was difficult to make Lucifer talk ‘like a clergyman.’ He contrived to make Noah talk like a street-preacher.” If Adam and Noah have attended the same seminary, however, Japhet is not a Cain-figure, and his ‘revolt’, if we can call it such, is not as thorough as Cain’s. Japhet ultimately, though reluctantly, accepts his fate, so that the poem is more anticlimactic than the earlier play. Samuel Chew, the most astute earlytwentieth-century commentator on Byron’s dramas, observed that Heaven and Earth was, like The Deformed Transformed, “to put it succinctly, all rise,” a situa68

Robert F. Gleckner, Byron and the Ruins of Paradise (Baltimore M D : Johns Hopkins U P , 1967): 345–46. 69 Marchand, Byron’s Poetry: A Critical Introduction, 93.

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tion he regarded as a dramatic flaw.70 For Chew, the exposition of a drama is followed by a “rise” towards the climax, and that the rise “is sometimes introduced by a brief transition, called the ‘exciting force’ or ‘stimulus’” ;71 in the case of heaven and Earth, there is a lack of changes in the hero’s fortunes until the climax and subsequent catastrophe. While Japhet can identify antinomies in creation, he cannot act to change his situation, and Raphael consequently entreats Noah to reinforce the divine will when he appeals to him to “be still a father!” ( II I .764). For all his speculation about God’s nature and purpose, Japhet acknowledges his own election. At the commencement of Scene I II , Japhet soliloquizes, Who shall be left to weep? My kinsmen, Alas! What am I better than ye are, That I must live beyond you? (III.16–18) Shall yon exulting peak, Whose glittering top is like a distant star, Lie low beneath the boiling of the deep? No more to have the morning sun break forth, And scatter back the mists in floating folds From its tremendous brow? (III.22–27) And can those words “no more’ Be meant for thee, for all things, save for us, And the predestined creeping things reserved By my sire to Jehovah’s bidding? (III. 32–35)

Here, as elsewhere, lyricism suggests fondness for life and beauty, and mitigates the apocalyptic language. Drawing on Cuvier’s theory of ’revolutions’ in nature, Byron has Japhet foresee “some emerging world, / Reeking and dank, from out the slime, whose ooze / Shall slumber o’er the wreck of this” (II I .40–42). Significantly, Japhet laments that while he cannot snatch his beloved Anah from the impending “doom,” “some serpent, with his mate, / Shall ’scape to save his kind to be prolong’d, / To hiss and sting through some emerging world, / Reeking and dank from out the slime” (I II .38–41). Future “falls” are part of the predestined plan. In answer to his rhetorical questions, the spirits of the cavern deride him,

70 71

Chew, Dramas of Lord Byron, 52. Dramas of Lord Byron, 49.

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and when he announces that he weeps for earth “and all her children” (II I .66), the derision resumes, and Japhet reflects: How the fiend mocks the tortures of a world, The coming desolation of an orb, On which the sun shall rise and warm no life! How the earth sleeps! And all that in it is Sleep too upon the very eve of death! Why should they wake to meet it? What are here Which look like death in life, and speak like things Born ere this dying world? They come like clouds! (III.67–74)

The appearance of “death in life” echoes Coleridge’s marine apparition, but here Byron invokes the pre-Adamite creatures of Hades, visited by Cain, and the spirits of Arimanes who appeared in Manfred. At the conclusion of Manfred, when the spirits come to claim the protagonist, he spurns them, saying that he was not tempted by them, and no compact was made with “evil” spirits; rather, his power was purchased by his “skill / In knowledge of our fathers – when the earth / Saw men and spirits walking side by side, / And gave ye no supremacy” (I II .iv.116–119). Byron had identified the spirits in Manfred as fallen angels, distinguishing them from the earlier ‘elemental’ spirits of the Alps who derived perhaps from Shelley’s “dosing” Byron with metaphysics. In Heaven and Earth, the creatures that the spirits reveal to Japhet look like anachronisms from another era, living emblems of the Fall. The spirits reinforce Japhet’s sense of destruction of all he holds dear, when, as if paraphrasing Cuvier’s observations on ancient upheavals, they announce: The little shells, of ocean’s least things [shall] be Deposed where now the eagle’s offspring dwells – How shall he shriek o’er the remorseless sea! And call his nestlings up with fruitless yell, Unanswer’d, save by the approaching swell. (III.239–243)

The spirits also endorse Japhet’s prognostication that evil will not perish with the Flood: Shall thou and thine be good or happy? – No! Thy new world and new race shall be of woe – Less goodly in their aspect, in their years Less than the glorious giants, who

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Yet walk the world in pride. (III.128–132)

The spirit reminds Japhet that the perpetual curse will not be remitted after the Flood, that the Nephilim, the race of giants born of mortals and angels (“dust” and “deity”), will, like all earthly beings after the Flood, be diminished in size and years. Where he had drawn on Cuvier’s theory of degeneration of successive ‘creation’ for comic purpose in Don Juan (I X .37–40) and, more bleakly, when remarking on “our degenerate breed” in the same poem (XI I I .70), Byron now plays up the catastrophism: the earth will be a dreary spot for the survivors of the Deluge and further annihilations will ensue. Japhet, unable to endure such a vision, interrupts the spirit’s prophecy with one of his own, claiming that the divine purpose will be made clear when “the eternal will” chooses to expound the “dream / Of good and evil; and redeem / Unto himself all times, all things; / And, gather’d under his almighty wings, / Abolish hell!” (I II .193–198). In answer, the spirit intimates that “the same old tears, old crimes, and oldest ill” will meanwhile prevail, and that Japhet’s race will fall away from God after the Deluge. The irony is specifically Byronic; the post-diluvian world will in truth be less inclined to monotheism, and the Epicureanism of Sardanapalus is emblematic of the ‘watering-down’ of belief. Following his dialogue with the Spirits, Japhet examines his position, seemingly endorsing God’s judgment: God hath proclaim’d the destiny of earth; My father’s ark of safety hath announced it; The very demons shriek it from their caves; The scroll of Enoch prophesied it long […] and yet man listen’d not, nor listen. (III.272–275, 278)

Japhet by no means expresses subservience to God’s will; rather, in a nihilistic consideration of subjective time, he reflects on his own littleness and concludes that humanity is at the disposal or whim of Jehovah: Ay, day will rise; but upon what? – a chaos, Which was ere day; and which, renew’d, makes time Nothing! for, without life, what are the hours? No more to dust than is eternity Unto Jehovah, who created both. (III.300–304)

In Cain (I II .1.60–62), Byron had Cain utter another version of this topic: “The mind then hath capacity of time, / And measures it by that which it beholds, /

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Pleasing or painful; little or almighty”; his vision of “extinguish’d worlds” drives in upon him his puniness: “now I feel / My littleness again. Well said the spirit, / That I was nothing!” (II I .1.67–69). When Japhet encounters the women and Aholibamah announces her defiance of God and her readiness to undergo “an immortality of agonies” with Samiasa (I II .359–361), he at last recognizes his rival, and draws the moral that he will in part echo at the play’s conclusion: … unions like to these Between a mortal and an immortal, cannot Be happy or hallowed. We are sent Upon the earth to toil and die; and they Are made to minister on high unto The Highest. (III.369–374)

While Japhet’s declaration obviates hope, his wish that the angels save the women reveals selfless love and susceptibility to beauty. As Steffan notes, Japhet is like Cain in having an “intuitive confidence that Beauty cannot die.”72 Japhet declares, on the first appearance of the women and the angels, that their shapes are “all of heaven” (I II .311; my emphasis). In this respect, he deviates from orthodoxy as represented by Noah. Where Noah attributes evil to the earth itself, Japhet would restrict evil to some inhabitants. Later in the play, he questions even this assumption, asking how rage and justice can be reconciled in Jehovah (I II .762), a speculation that Noah brands “blasphemy” (III .763). Japhet draws closer to formulating his own capacity to reason moral criteria for himself. His ideal, that beauty might endure, is at best a vicarious ‘feeling’ of identification with the created world. The lovers appear to harbour no such attachment to earth. The women are ‘divine’ only in the sense that they are loved by heavenly creatures, while the angels have seen better worlds. With the destruction of the Nephilim, products of their union, and the annihilation of the angels’ human lovers, the angelic unions become mere emblems of an unattainable ideal, a Golden Age, which, like Eden, cannot again be realized on earth. 

Byron’s dramatization of the debate over election in Heaven and Earth is sharpest when Noah engages the sophistical Samiasa in dispute. Noah argues that the Seraphs’ presence on earth cannot be to save mankind, for salvation should 72

Truman G. Steffan, Lord Byron’s “Cain”: Twelve Essays and a Text with Variants and Annotations (Austin: U of Texas P, 1968): 281.

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then be “general” and not limited. Japhet, appalled lover of the phenomenal world, begs his father, “Let me die with this, and them!” (III .498). His sentimental wish is retrogressive. Noah is ready to take what advantage he can of the future, but Japhet’s incapacity to act distances him from his father and the lovers, architects of their own future. Japhet is not the sole conservative; when Raphael recalls the angels to their duty, threatening them with loss of eternity (eternal fellowship with Jehovah, as distinct from “immortality”), he remarks: … but oh! Why Cannot this earth be made, or be destroyed Without involving ever some vast void In the immortal ranks? (III.561–564)

Raphael cites the example of “Our brother Satan” ( II I .566); with each “revolution” there are more defectors from heaven. He further impiously wishes that Satan could have been forgiven (I I I .582–585): the good nature of the “milder” archangel strays into the same sin as Japhet’s. Raphael, of course, represents each defection or “fall” as a loss, but, as McGann observes, In Byron’s view, every “fall” occasions a convulsion of some sort and though the event seems to signal a recession in one sense, its truest function is to provide an occasion for further blessedness. Falls are evil only if they are not capitalized upon […]. Samiasa and Azaziel fall away from Heaven, but in doing so they become more admirable, indeed, more capable morally than the god whom they desert. Their “lower” state of being is represented as really more full. Similarly, Japhet defects from his father’s orthodoxy in the end and the play clearly argues that his retrograde behaviour is actually a gain.73

Byron ironically makes Raphael use as a threat what Aholibamah exalts as a preferable state to subservience. In response to Raphael’s remarks on man’s lower state, and on the catastrophe designed for all men, she voices Cainitic willingness to endure. In one of her finest speeches (I I I .620–628), bidding the Seraphs to return to heaven, she concludes that “which is best a dead eternity / Or living, is but known to the great Giver” (I I I .635–636). Aholibamah will take her chances. When Noah and Shem retreat to the Ark, Japhet is left with the angels and the women, and Byron’s images (echoing those of his poem “Darkness”) convey the progress of annihilation (I II .806–812). In a concluding couplet, Japhet describes the chilling scene: 73

Jerome J. McGann, Fiery Dust, 266.

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In the sun’s place a pale and ghastly glare Hath wound itself about the dying air. (III.811–812)

The Chorus of Mortals turns to Japhet for mercy; in a scene redolent of Poussin’s painting of the Flood (1660–64), a mother offers her child for his protection. The painterly nature of the scene was noted by reviewers from the outset, 74 and it was suggested that Byron perhaps “had an eye to Poussin’s celebrated picture.”75 In that painting, a man hands down a child to a woman in a boat. (Turner’s 1813 picture, “The Deluge,” has another instance of a parent attempting to save a child.) Whatever the source, Byron has the despairing woman demanding to know what the infant has done to merit “Jehovah’s wrath or scorn” (II I .839). Japhet can only rebut her curses with an injunction to pray. The Chorus, with irresistible logic, refuses to pray to “the implacable Omnipotent” (I II .860), pointing to his shame in killing them whether they pray or not. One single voice is raised in a hymn to God, but in view of the Chorus’s reference to Adam’s “first hymn of slavery” (I I I .869), the hymn may be interpreted equivocally. When a woman asks “Why was I born?” Japhet replies, with withering bitterness, “To die!” (II I .924) and calls her fate happier than his own. The Chorus of Mortals offer, in short, an epitome of ideas explored throughout the poem. Japhet has already referred to the “Omnipotent who makes and crushes” (I II .327), but the Chorus emphasizes the malevolent inconsistency of this type of Maker – a reprise of the consistent view of the Creator presented in Cain and throughout the earlier plays. If there is any ‘gain’ to counterbalance loss with each ‘fall’ that Byron recounts, it is in the increase in man’s awareness of his limits. At the same time, man puts further distance between himself and the Maker and turns, like Cain, to the earth itself. Heaven and Earth offers the tenuous possibility of an aesthetic of beauty in the face of catastrophe. Dryden’s recension of Paradise Lost similarly proposes tentative amelioration of suffering: in the final line, Raphael tells Adam and Eve “For outward Eden lost, find Paradise within” (V .iv.267).76 Where Cain advanced into the Miltonic and Drydenesque sphere of the mind as its own place, Heaven and Earth more rigorously tests the condition. Cain reveals the attendant sorrows and hardship of a life that is not anchored in some 74

Thomas N. Talfourd, Lady’s Magazine (January 1823), in Donald H. Reiman, The Romantics Reviewed: Contemporary Reviews of British Romantic Writers (New York: Garland, 1972), vol. 3: 1240. 75 Anon, Edinburgh Review (February 1823), in Donald H. Reiman, The Romantics Reviewed: Contemporary Reviews of British Romantic Writers (New York: Garland, 1972), vol. 2: 945. 76 John Dryden, The State of Innocence, and Fall of Man: An Opera (1690), in The Works of John Dryden, vol. 12: Plays, ed. Vinton A. Dearing (Berkeley: U of California P, 1994): 146.

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idea of the ‘divine’. In Heaven and Earth, the situation is more extreme, as the individual mind is threatened with annihilation. Peter Thorslev remarked that Manfred and Cain lie at the “nihilistic centre” of the “modern existentialist predicament,” and that, in Cain, “We are left with human love as the one sure value in this world of irrational conflict.” 77 At the end of Heaven and Earth, there is almost no sense in which we can see Japhet as a Cain-like figure clinging to that possibility. The woman who holds her child up to Japhet is a felicitous image of the desolating dilemma in Japhet’s mind: he can urge the woman to pray, but after seeing the world destroyed before his eyes, he cannot believe that prayer will effect any new life. For Japhet and for Byron, the Flood represents a provocation similar to that which the Lisbon earthquake occasioned for Voltaire and other sceptics. Japhet does not even have the surety of the world itself as a point of reference. He is tragically aware of the power of the “Maker,” and all his conceptions undergo a revolutionary change as the world is annihilated. Byron has advanced far beyond Cain, to present the spectacle of man bereft of any anchor: self and purpose are destroyed. Any tendency to see in a single character the predominant projection of Byron’s personality appears to me to be a wilful restriction of his capacity to encompass aspects of common experience in every character. In Heaven and Earth, Byron extends the characterization of the world of the Bible, to indicate universal moral sanctions that constrain the rational believer. In doing so, he strips away the biblical myth to demonstrate humanity’s essential confines. There is perhaps as much or as little of Byron in Japhet as there is in the character of Sardanapalus: the latter chooses to perish with his beloved: love is affirmed in the drama of Sardanapalus, as it is in Cain. Byron invests the chief characters of his dramatic works and Don Juan with varying degrees of consciousness of the results and limits of choice and action. Japhet is reduced to inertia, and the dilemma at the end of the poem is epitomized in the final stage direction: Japhet remains on a rock in a drowning world while the Ark floats towards him. Japhet is plunged into le néant; in terms of Byron’s era, the play might be read as a gloss on Locke’s discussion of the Law and Freedom in the Second Treatise of Government, which, speaking specifically of the “Care of the Parents due to their Off-Spring,” concludes: The Freedom then of Man and Liberty of act according to his own Will, is grounded on his having Reason, which is able to instruct him in that Law

77

Peter L. Thorslev, The Byronic Hero: Types and Prototypes (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1962): 198–99.

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he is to govern himself by, and make him know how far he is left to the freedom of his own will.78

It is by exercising “reason” that Japhet (like Cain) may perceive the limits of individual freedom. Byron admits into Heaven and Earth the primary notion of the “Law” to which Locke refers, and this should provide a caution against outright existential interpretation. In both Heaven and Earth and Cain, the presence in the minds of the characters of a transcendent “law,” represented as Jehovah’s will, is a distinguishing mark of the works, and Jehovah’s unknowable “will” offers only abjection. Heaven and Earth is significant among Byron’s dramas because Japhet’s predicament illustrates in most concentrated fashion an attempt to define the boundaries of freedom.

—————— John Tranter’s “Australia Day”79 ——————

O

N A N Y D A Y , M Y F AV O U R I T E P O E M

is the one I happen to be lost in, reading or writing. To be honest, the idea of a favourite Australian poem is absurd: it suggests that the favourite poem will sustain the spirit through every exigency – dutiful committee meetings, lingering ailment, cancer diagnosis, car crash, funeral. I don’t have a favourite song, symphony or opera, or favourite tipple. No favourite outdoor scene. In any locality, my favourite drink will be whatever’s local, my favourite music whatever the buskers are playing. It all depends, as the American feller said. I’ve read some knockout European, English, American, and other poems, but the damnedest poems come to mind at times for no immediately obvious reason: a compelling arrangement of words, rhythm, melody or other mental or physiological trigger. Many Australian poets interest me a great deal, and objective claims could be made for their significance. I can call to mind poems by John Tranter, Fay Zwicky, Gwen Harwood, Helen Power, Lesbia Harford, Ken Taylor, Roland Robinson,  , Bruce Beaver, Joanne Burns, Amy Witting, and perhaps another hundred. A particular poem by each of them could serve as focus for a weekly newspaper column for two years without repeats. But I can’t swing that in this little essay, so I’ll stick with the first poem that comes to mind as I write: John Tranter’s “Australia Day.”

78

John Locke, An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent and End of Civil Government (Two Treatizes of Government) (1690; New York: Dover, 1963): 352. 79  Five Bells 13.3 (2006): 42. The following remarks were written in response to an invitation from the editors of Five Bells magazine to contribute a commentary for a series by poets on Australian or other poems they considered significant.

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I’ll qualify even that introduction. Tranter’s technique is dazzling: he writes poems in sapphic metre that trump just about any neoformalist poet’s work that I’ve encountered. His “Dark Harvest”80 is a virtuoso tone-poem that insinuates itself into memory partly on account of its sheer rhetorical audacity: wandering through the poem I can fall into its mood, while conscious of the artistry – the inflected first syllable of every line that propels the speaker’s hop-stepand-jump from impression to impression, memory to memory, reflection to reflection. The language veers from hip to hyperbole. Does anyone talk like this, though: “thank the energy of the fiery hour, thank that / loose-lipped emotion”? Tranter has collaged a host of such sensibilities as his speaker embodies, and I return to his poems often, impressed by the way he does it: the Christopher Brennan de nos jours? Our Mallarmé? That, too, and neither: the poems in his book At The Florida (in which “Australia Day” occurs81) are too diverse to attract a uniform label. Colloquial mingles with high mannerist diction in many of the poems; sometimes one or the other predominates. “Australia Day” could be said to be significant for its subject alone: Alan Wearne and others have created interesting examples of the entrepreneurial cowboys of the 1980s and 1990s, but for conciseness Tranter does it better. In “Australia Day,” the voice of the “Sydney business identity” is familiar – inviting, patronizing, menacing, faux-friendly. The framing is magic: we could be at Watson’s Bay, Rushcutters, Shell Cove, any of the toney harbourside suburbs where yachts ride offshore while the power-brokers hold court in wizard cafés and the terraces of fabulous palaces and apartments. Tranter’s poem telescopes Australian history and dominant culture in a foreshortened landscape – make that a harbour-view. It’s one of the memorable ‘waterside’ poems I’d put in a dream anthology, along with Catullus’s poem on the view of his boat at Lake Garda, and lyrics all the way to Gwen Harwood’s “Threshold” pastoral, Robert Gray’s poems on Amsterdam and the New South Wales north coast, and Ouyang Yu’s brief “Still Lake” poem82 – along with satirical poems on the company one keeps,

80

John Tranter, “Dark Harvest (for Dana Gioia),” in Tranter, At The Florida (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1993): 30–35. 81 John Tranter, “Australia Day,” in Tranter, At The Florida, 18. 82 Gwen Harwood, “Threshold,” in Harwood, Bone Scan (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1988): 46– 47; Robert Gray, “A Port of Europe,” Island Magazine 31 (Winter 1987): 8–9; Gray, “Journey: The North Coast” (1970), “North Coast Town” (1985), and “Within the Traveller’s Eye” (1985), in Gray, Cumulus: Collected Poems (St Kilda, Victoria: John Leonard Press, 2012): 1, 38, 16–18; Ouyang Yu, “Still Lake,” in Ouyang Yu, Two Hearts, Two Tongues and Rain-Coloured Eyes (Broadway, N S W : Wild Peony, 2002): 4.

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from Horace’s account of his journey to Brindisi, Byron’s descriptions of Venice’s canal society, to Auden and beyond. The first speaker talks like a hoon; the built environment is “lovely” – result of what he calls “improvement”; the society that carried out the work comprised boatloads of crims – and screws, prostitutes, a few politicians to run the show and look after the profits. A set-up built to last.

The speaker situates himself in the “set-up” through his expansive manner. He exudes ownership, the confidence of success; his talk is prawns and lobster; another voice adds “oysters, chardonnay” and the grace-note reference to the impresario’s “former partner” drifting “in a concrete suit” to a “final bottom-ofthe-harbour scheme,” among barnacles and other bones. The patter in the middle part of the poem is comic; we’re getting the picture of a sort-of monster whose engaging bonhomie is further underscored by his casual remarks in the final lines. This guy has people in his pocket; his Sergeant pal will bust the rich kids on their “Daddy’s yacht,” and we guess he knows how to make a stash disappear. The middle section of the poem has shifted tense from present to past; the final section pulls both together. The final lines, “It’s gotta be the life of Riley. Go on, / have another prawn,” are one of the great conclusions: put all the inferences together, the poem suggests. Equate the first speaker’s rival with fish-food; reflect on what the company is eating. Earlier, the second speaker – the commentator on the scene – is neatly implicated. The lyricism of “A seagull sailed across a paler blue. / The rigging tap-tapped against the mast” is contrasted with “nearby, rich kids wasted a weekend / on Daddy’s yacht,” a remark that makes it anyone’s guess whether the commentator is observing independently or taking off the tone of the first speaker. The first speaker’s a creepy guy; maybe the commentator is, too. The ambiguity lifts the poem beyond description of a cushy set-up and insinuates the flavour of corruption. The title of the poem gathers spin, inflecting the events and nature of that summertime festival of indulgence with dodginess and sleaze. Sydney readers, tiresomely familiar with corporate scams and rorts, have an embarrassment of names to choose from that could fit the characters in this tableau. “Australia Day” is an admirable poem from start to end. Its theme, “go on, help yourself,” is reinforced in the loaded final words of every line; there’s mastery in this ostensible free form. Linguistically supple, imagistically rich, tactful in its rhetorical mounting-up of evidence for its argument, it’s a finer poem than any ‘commemorative’ poem on the Day that I’ve read.

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— How Poets Work: A Personal Note (Because I Was Asked)83 —

I

of twenty-five thousand citizens. A few of them know I write poetry. Some of them know what I write and like things that I write, but far fewer, including most of my students, read poetry. I sometimes think it odd that students who enrol to study literature inform me that they want to be teachers, but they don’t like the act of reading or writing. That’s their prerogative, and peer pressure and public dismissal of the arts and humanities conspire to encourage them to be philistine in their taste for a while, but it makes the business of encouraging them to see any merit in writing a challenging one. The idea that one writes poetry out of a consciously embraced and celebrated affair with language is alien: poetry is what happens in song lyrics manufactured somewhere else. Some of my students look on poets as sufferers from an affliction that shouldn’t be spoken about except in terms of platitudes about oddballs like Plath, whom schoolkids are trained to mug up on as part of the ritual of escaping school with a certificate. Perhaps I reciprocate. I make no show of writing poetry, and I don’t foist it on a captive audience. I’d be embarrassed to solicit the custom of people whose priorities are sometimes so much at variance with mine as to be unintelligible or unpalatable to me, though we may meet on other grounds than literary taste. I don’t write consciously for people who don’t read much, or for people who read a lot. I write because I can’t help trying out ways of getting things said right. Seen after the event, of course, much of what I set down at any time is garbage, but that’s the way of things. A lot of contemporary poetry is mere static, or white noise, and I don’t want to consciously add to that. I write a bunch of lines each day, and I trash most of them when I have time to look through them at leisure. Do I think of an audience? I don’t think of that when I write, but occasionally, when I’ve got a poem about right, I can think of it as suited to some particular audience or publication. Mostly, when I look at a poem I’ve written, I wonder how busy people – plumbers, electricians, fencing contractors, house painters, carpenters, doctors, dentists, and other acquaintances – might take it. It isn’t that I write with them in mind; but when I consider what such non-literary people as I know might think of what I write, I cut a lot of the crap that sounds merely beautiful or overheated. I treat the attention that any busy local person gives to a poem of mine as a gift. Sometimes, I think of what some friends who live a long way from New England, and whose trade is reading critically, might think. When I send them a poem, I hope I spare them the embarrassment of LIVE IN A TOWN

83 

Five Bells 14.4 (October 2007): 46–48.

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wondering how to tell me straight out that I’m inflicting self-indulgent garbage on them. I’m impressed by the standard set by the most profoundly thoughtful poets and writers on poetry: poets like Ovid, Dante, Chaucer, Byron, Dickinson, Moore, Bishop – poets whose works are known and memorized by countless readers. Some inspire music – Elizabeth Bishop has inspired at least one Brazilian singer to record a CD of her lyrics. Not great music, but music anyhow. We could aspire to that sort of popular appeal, even if we don’t make it. I wonder if anyone in Australia recites or sings whole poems by Dorothy Porter, John Kinsella, MTC Cronin or Les Murray. It’s charitable to think so. Eric Beach is to my mind the most singable male poet in Australia. This can’t be too widely known. ͒ I write at any time when I can, but I’m constrained by circumstance. When I’m engaged with teaching, time’s short. I tend to write at night, frequently well before dawn. I wake early and write letters, poems or prose as they occur. This piece is written at three a.m. I’d prefer to work in sunlight, but it’s not always possible. Near sunrise I leave home to walk a few kilometres to work, where I deal with day-job correspondence and unfinished business – revising lectures and study guides; reading drafts of postgraduates’ thesis chapters; marking undergraduate assignments, checking committee agendas: riveting stuff. Then I write to friends, and sometimes edit lines I’ve written in a notebook on the way to work. On the way to work, I take in other routines and wonder at the force that drives those I see as well as my own: they are linked. I pass creek-lands while I walk through fields where baseball and cricket, football and hockey are played in their seasons, through suburbs, past ploughed fields and fenced pastures where thoroughbred horses, black Wagyu bulls, pale Charolais, and now and then sheep and alpacas take turns on agistment. Beside and beyond the residential flats and colleges of the place I work at, an avenue of elms extends to a park that’s shared by a herd of fallow deer and some forty kangaroos and wallabies, close to the university’s centre. It’s true that we’ve got kangaroos in our top paddock. Another group, the North Hill mob, inhabits the sclerophyll woodland up behind the old decommissioned coal-fired boiler house where the university’s workshops, stores, and despatch and printery buildings stand. The North Hill kangaroos come down the sun-catching side of the hill each morning, sun or no sun, and stand in or beside the road, and then move up and over the crest in the path of the light. By the time the first town bus arrives, the mob is down the sou’west side, out of sight of the town commuters. So I get there early to observe the big grey family moving up. Sometimes the males fight to assert control of the harem; then the fur flies, literally, clumps of it cascading from their bodies as their hind legs kick each other while the females and the juvenile males look on.

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Walking, since I gave up motorbikes and cars years past, is how I like to let thoughts play. If I have to hurry, I go by bus or taxi, where it’s occasionally possible to scrawl an idea. For long trips, rail is what I like (especially in Europe, where flight isn’t in it): the rhythm’s conducive to the pace of certain writing. The pace of moving interests me: I like the dawdle and quandariness of Frank O’Hara’s poems, and poems of some other people who compose on the move. Out of the scraps of movement, and sensation, reading, doing everyday chores – teaching, talking, work in gardens, cooking – drinking, listening and thinking – I make poems. It’s nothing to carry on about. I write lines, as they come, that sound good at the time, on loose paper or wire-bound notebooks. I can flip over these quickly, though I generally see what is lousy as soon as it’s written. Every few weeks or so, I chuck much of it out, maybe most of it, and write out what still interests me, on writing pads, scrap paper, backs of circulars; whatever’s at hand. That lot has its home in a folder of drafts that I frequently cull. I like to leave stuff long enough so that I can discover it as if it’s written by someone else – which is how I’d like my poems to appear to me all the time. In a sense, of course, everything we write was written by someone we are no longer. I like that estrangement. I guess the result has analogies with the sensation of opening a bottle of wine that has been laid down years before: the taste is not the same as the first ’new-wine’ gulp at bottling time. ͒ When a bit of a poem forms, I push it around, sometimes ending up with a few variations, till I write one on a computer and make a few more drafts out of it on a hard copy, using a pen or pencil to try out alternative lines and words and shapes. I rarely think a poem looks or sounds right without being adjusted, sometimes in major ways. The computer’s useful for looking at different shapes of stanzas or gatherings of lines. Sometimes, wherever I’m writing, I think I’ve got a poem pretty quickly, and I don’t trust the results of that feeling, so I shove the thing into the pile of drafts. I check out such poems again after doing other things. The gap between writing and thinking that a poem might be publishable can be a few days or some years. I put a couple of poems from thirty years back in my latest book. They’d been published in journals but they sounded too contrived. I photocopied them and revisited them on and off for years – which mainly means excising words that don’t sound right or experimenting with the way they’re punctuated. Eventually, they seemed to be as right as I could cope with. I no longer wanted to see them hanging round like magpies crying at the back door for scraps. I don’t keep drafts once I’ve published a poem in a magazine or paper. I write drafts of newer things on the backs of them, or just chuck them out. At times, I’ve thrown out poems that I might have kept, but if such poems were any good

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I’d remember them. Sometimes I’ve recalled and written down a poem I’d tossed out, but the first instinct, to be shot of a poem that looks lifeless, is usually unerring. I don’t like to keep poems out of some sentimental attachment: when a poem’s published in a magazine, I can decide if I want to keep it on file or not for republication in a book. If the immaturity of it strikes me at once, and I can alter it, I’ll keep it. If it’s too awful, I reject it. When I assemble a collection, I get friends who read a lot to suggest what I can throw out. When it’s published, I feel relieved of having to deal with it any longer. Maybe it’s a bit like the feeling after children leave home: they’re still attached in obvious ways, but they’ve made a space that can be used for other things until they want to call back. I’ve read about the way Frank O’Hara was supposed to conceive of poetry as a spontaneous sort of effusion, like an abstract painting; but I’ve rarely heard of an abstract painter who just let the first stroke stay exactly as it hit the canvas or board – as if the process were like Chinese calligraphy, practised to a pitch of brilliant single-stroke effect. Mostly, with painting and writing, other strokes and swipes go into putting the composition together. So even abstract expressionism seems to me a worked-up effect: a brilliant visual-conceptual game with pattern and colour and texture and contrast shouting out life. Jackson Pollock was fiddly, loading palimpsest on palimpsest. Arshile Gorky went another way: painstakingly scraping off top layers of paint, repeatedly, with a razor blade to get the translucency. Drafts in poetry serve the same purpose as the workedover drawing or painterly gesture that grounds a painting – even if the ‘groundwork’ of a provisional, spontaneous, O’Hara-like poem may be altered by just the shift of a word or phrase. There’s a world of difference in terms of technique between the abstract painting and the provisional poem: one difference lies in the fact that the published or read-aloud or recited poem doesn’t come across as a palimpsest, any more than a painting by Pollock or Gorky reveals the first thought. Many painters I know toss out or give away their first sketches or ‘drafts’. Some use sketches to wipe their brushes. Some emphasize them in the finished work: takes all kinds; same thing with poems. Sometimes a draft is just about right, and seems so after years. Sometimes a draft can’t come right, so it serves another purpose: fire-starter. It takes a while to see that what I’m attempting to say is simply not worth saying. It’s annoying that this occurrence is so commonplace. ͒ Geoff Goodfellow once saw a big pile of drafts and lousy poems that I was throwing out from a house in Melbourne and asked if I didn’t want to sell the stuff to a library. I couldn’t think of anything less appealing. If I want to talk to people about the process of writing, I don’t have to go any further than their own first drafts of anything – prose, poetry – to make a point about style. As

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editor of thousands of poems by other people, I’ve read a lot of things that I wish I had composed, but many more that I would want to see played around with a bit more than their writers could be bothered to consider. Out of curiosity, I’ve also scrutinized drafts of poems by major British, American, Canadian, European, Australian and other poets, and I can see where the writers mucked away at making poor lines better. Some of their reviewers and critics were – and are – quick enough to show them where things might have been improved, and there’s an industry in dealing this way with dead people’s work. I think collected editions are overrated: only specialists want to read the bad poems by writers who knew when they were performing below par. The fad for posthumous ’collected works’ is a case in point: I don’t believe Emily Dickinson, Philip Larkin, and Elizabeth Bishop were well served by editors who have heaped everything they wrote into collected and variorum editions. Dickinson must have known she wrote some stinkers. Larkin and Bishop certainly knew they’d done so, and they kept things back that their idolaters later ferreted out to dilute the best work. I’ve written a lot of undistinguished poetry – light verse that doesn’t light up, satires and parodies that are less devastating or funny than they should have been, and experimental things that died at birth. These could be lumped into a collection of bad examples or warnings to others. I wouldn’t want to say which poems they are: reviewers have patronized some or all of my poems and execrated many of them. That sort of dismissal isn’t as useful as a review that is done by a careful reader who has sportingly picked out things that could be better, could be worse. It’s never worth writing for reviewers: few are well read enough to be able to detect depths and echoes, and their misreadings would be farcical if they weren’t embarrassing. I have reviewed prose fiction and nonfiction for a long time, and I know I’ve made some extraordinary misjudgements, along with some that seem pretty accurate. I’ve rarely reviewed poetry, though: I know how difficult it is to write anything that meets the standards I set myself. The first poet I ever met was Robert Graves, when I worked in his publisher’s Sydney office. I had read two editions of his collected poems, and asked why he had dropped from the later edition certain poems that I liked from the earlier book. He said he didn’t think much of them. I can relate to that.

——————— How Do Poems Sound?84 ———————

T

H E D E A F P O E T P E T E R C O O K remarked that there are two signs for poetry in American Sign Language: one for Hearing Poetry and one for Deaf

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Blue Dog: Australian Poetry 8/15 (2009): 16–22.

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poetry. The sign for Hearing poetry, poetry associated with rhythms and music, is almost identical with the sign for music; the sign for Deaf poetry resembles that for ‘Expression’.85 Deaf poetry is a physically expressive art of rhythm and balance, employing gestures and movements that recall mime, dance, and musical performance; through parallel or repetitive signs, it can suggest lines and even rhymes. Examples of such work by Clayton Valli and other ASL/ Deaf poets are easy to find on YouTube and videos. (A 1990 video series called “Poetry in Motion” includes the work of Valli, Debbie Rennie, and Patrick Graybill.) As with spoken poetry, sign languages – English, American, French, Swedish and others – differ and are not mutually intelligible. ‘Hearing Poetry’, our ‘spoken-word’ poetry, employs words that have conventional relationships to sound. Spoken languages differ in rhythmic organization according to patterns of phrasing in utterances, the pauses between utterance, the length of syllable groups, and the ordering of stressed and unstressed syllables.86 English has alternating stressed and unstressed syllables. Stress clashes or lapses (long sequences of stressed syllables or of unstressed syllables) are uncommon. Greek, for instance, contains more stress lapses.87 Rhythmic grouping has long been assumed to be innate, but the type of grouping seems to be culturally based: some employ an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one, and some employ stressed then unstressed. English and French, for example, have an unstressed function-word (usually an article, like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘un’, ‘le’, etc) and a stressed subject-word (‘cat’, ‘chat’, etc); Japanese and some other languages put the function word (‘ga’, ‘ni’, etc) after the subject word (‘hon’ = ‘book’). The rhythm that people hear in speech – and thereby in poetry – seems to be related to cultural immersion. Many people assume English poetry to be essentially iambic, according to the presumed hard-wiring of the language pattern. This last assumption could be why many – perhaps most – reviewers, critics, teachers, and even poets tend to speak more summarily of sound patterns than of other features of poetry. A poet and critic such as Ruth Padel is exceptional in focusing on sound in contemporary poetry. We are familiar with what poets say about themselves outside their poems, and we read what their reviewers say concerning personalities, themes, subjects, and influences. Often, what’s said 85

Bob Holman, “A Deaf Poetics: Part I I , an interview with ASL/deaf poet Peter Cook,” About.com Poetry, http://poetry.about.com/library/weekly/aa060397.htm (accessed 19 December 2008). 86 Aniruddh D. Patel, “Rhythm in Language and Music: Parallels and Differences,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 999 (2003): 140. 87 Patel, “Rhythm in Language and Music: Parallels and Differences,” 140.

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about a poem could be said about what’s going on in any prose work: gender, power, class, or race – familiar textbook staples. L = A = N = G = U = A = G = E poetry attests to belief that language refers only to itself and that the writer’s expressions have no relation to semantic meaning or the spoken word. That, at least, is interesting because discussion skirts an ancient debate about the primacy of the written word versus the primacy of sound. Except that we rarely get to see the implications teased out, and even less often do we get to see an effort to bridge the two contentions. In fact, we seldom read or hear anything much about the relationship of sound to poetry. We could be forgiven for thinking that many people who write about poetry have little interest in the sound of it, except to cursorily remark, if at all, that someone’s work is euphonious or not, or that it has slack rhythms. Dissonance in a poem may be deliberate, but if so, a reviewer may have no space or inclination to tell us why this appears so. Occasionally, a reviewer remarks on sonic quality as one aspect of effect; Judith Beveridge, for example, comments appreciatively on a book by the New Zealander James Norcliffe, but adds an awkward qualification: For readers who may like more rhythmical, musical or cadenced lines, they will only find this in a handful of poems. […] Sound is a feature of Norcliffe’s work, but it tends to be brittle and raw rather than euphonic.88

Beveridge quotes an example, and the caravan moves on. While the aural dimension is relatively peripheral in accounts of contemporary or other poetry, the Internet teems with comment by text poets, performers, and theoreticians interested in the interface of text, sound, and music. Some practitioners privilege sound rather than the semantic content of words; others break up phonetic content in ways that extend semantic content. This is stimulating because it takes us beyond the print-based conversation where all poems in print (and, one might almost add, all performance poems including rap) are described in ways that suggest they are pretty much indistinguishable from each other. No poet I know wants to be indistinguishable from any other. We ring the changes on familiar subject-matter and occupy overlapping mental territory. When invited to say how we go about our business, we are more likely to speak of the circumstances of the poem’s origin or the persuasiveness of its argument than of the sound-effect we sought. We might refer to a tone that we want in a poem but, like the reviewers, we probably find it hard to articulate exactly what we mean by tone. We don’t mean ‘tone’ in the sense that speakers of Chinese, 88

Judith Beveridge, “Poetry Survey,” Island 114 (2008): 47.

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Thai, African, and other tonal languages employ it. In these, a change of pitch in the spoken level can change the meaning of a word. Some European languages also have sonic capabilities lacking in English: Swedish and Serbo-Croat, like Japanese, alter meaning by shifting accent on a syllable; German employs stressed vowels and groups of consonants; Romance languages employ open vowels and are more fluent and elastic. We may note physical factors of expression also in terms of mouth shapes and elocution of speakers of such languages. Ostensible disadvantages of English aside, we can speak of more than the semantic content of our words and lines. We test every word and line and sentence and the whole contraption in order to get the thing to ‘sound’ right to our ears (even if, in some cases, ears seem made of tin). We can also explore what poetry is capable of in terms of musical composition, experiment in capture of speech, or (possibly) vehicle for emotion associated with particular sounds. Could there be some intrinsic force in the vowel ‘a’ in a line like Anna Wickham’s “My brain burns with hate of you”?89 Can one make any useful distinction between the ‘sound’ of a poem and the ‘sound’ of prose? How do the profoundly deaf ‘hear’ written poetry? Much depends on how we regard the relative status of speech and writing. If we think of written texts as representing efforts to capture sound (rather as musical notation is an attempt to suggest or record how live performance sounds), we thereby grant sound the greater status, but I don’t think poets who write predominantly or solely for the page have this in mind. Many do, however: some theorists of poetry and practitioners of ‘sound’ poetry believe that writing literally takes the breath away from poetry, and they urge the restoration of sounds that have been erased by the act of writing. In this view, individuality is rendered null by writing: one poem is interchangeable with another – a view that was corroborated at the 2008 poetry workshop at Bundanon, when I invited two dozen poets to identify the authors of some thirty excerpts (of up to twelve lines or so each) from poems by twenty-eight Australian poets on the theme of the beach. For the record, Jennifer Harrison identified an example – an excerpt from a poem she had written. It’s not surprising that avant-garde interest in sound-poetry should have coincided with and been accelerated by telephony, radio, and electronic amplification and recording of speech in the twentieth century. Poets and musicians were exploring the boundaries of speech, music, and noise before World War One and Zürich’s Dada; the dissonance and absurdity of many of their effects 89

Anna Wickham, “Paradox,” in Wickham, Selected Poems, ed. David Garnett (London: Chatto & Windus, 1971): 17.

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was directly related to conditions of industrialized and electrified modernity, mechanized warfare, and the hopelessness of public rhetoric in averting such aggression. Availability of relatively cheap sound recording and reproduction equipment such as variable-speed tape-recorders and phonograms opened the field for experimenters around the time of the Second World War. Conservative and predominantly print-oriented readers of poetry sometimes find the resultant sound-poetry bizarre, gimmicky, confronting or alienating. The same can be said for much twentieth-century music that pushes against boundaries. Serious rationales lie behind many experiments, to the extent that much has become mainstream. Consider the following. Sound poets such as Jas Duke, Dick Higgins, Guy Debord, and Bob Cobbings have emphasized breath; Jas Duke’s instruction for performance of one of his poems, “Ned Nasal,” runs: Australians are often sneered at for talking thru their noses. Make this into a virtue. Keep your mouth shut and let all the sound come out of your nose. Volume will be low so you will probably need amplification. Don’t open your mouth.90

Duke performed other poems foregrounding inhaled breath and sibilants; his work is in the tradition of Filippo Marinetti, Kurt Schwitters, August Stramm, and other European forerunners and contemporaries – Ernst Jandl, for example, who strenuously declaims every word when reading aloud from a script. One of Duke’s pieces instructed the performer to repeat a sound as energetically and loudly as possible until exhaustion set in and the poet collapsed. Years later, in 1998, Dick Higgins, the coiner of the term and practice of “intermedia,” performed a piece which consisted of his shouting for as loud and as long as possible. Such experiments make sense if we observe the theory behind them. (Higgins died shortly after his Quebec appearance, leaving a reputation as one of the most interesting all-round writer–artist–poet–performers of the twentieth century.) Breath-punctuated poetry has its ancestry in the oral tradition and drama, but purists regard even such breath-focused poetry as distracting us from the ‘inner’ or ‘true voice’, which operates in a stream that is not divided or interrupted by breath. Religious and spiritual connotations of breath also have kinship with such formulations: concepts such as the ‘breath of life’, pneuma, ‘the spirit’ (from the Latin verb stem spiro, to breathe, and the noun-form spiritus, in its senses of breath, breeze, ‘spirit’, soul, and mind). 90

130.

Jas H. Duke, “Ned Nasal,” in Poems of War and Peace (Melbourne: Collective Effort, [1989]):

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From this line of inquiry stems the use of disembodied sound-poetry, soundpoetry that gestures at the seamlessness and multi-layering of thought and the body’s constant activity, by means of multiple recording and loops of the poet’s words, breaths, and other sounds. Even the sounds of dead poets’ readings and conversations have been sampled and extended to convey something of the primacy of the ‘voice’: at once an illustration of the poet’s retention of individuality despite the bland effect of print documentation and a claim to outlive time itself. A recording of the sound of a poet’s breath, free of any phonemic or semantic structuring, may be considered a poet’s most perfect work: the poets Jaap Blonk and Joan La Barbara illustrate such abstraction in “Messa di Voce,” a 2003 interactive media performance piece in which speech and other sounds are played back as the performers’ bodily movements trigger the projection, on a screen behind them, of virtual objects – cartoon-like spheres – that vary in dimensions and duration of each sound. The performance is at once balletic and graphic, wordless and mouth-musical, as if showing off all the factors other than semantic content that contribute to speech acts. The poetry, it might be said, consists in the pleasure the performance accords; apart from its wittiness, it engages reflection of the complex nature of speech situations. Clayton Valli’s performance of his poem “Dandelions,” accessible on YouTube, is illustrative of these traits.91 By contrast with a view of poetry that privileges sound, the more common analytic and reviewing approach privileges the written word. Language is analysed and catalogued into grammar, syntax, and figures of speech, with the added dimensions, at times, of prosody or visual layout. Perhaps we can incorporate both of these approaches in our conversation about poetry: poetry considered as a string or stream of sounds, from the aural perspective, and written poetry considered as a line divided according to ‘feet’ or other units, and determined most of all by the exigency of the page-width. Either way, poetry is structured utterance. At the experimental edge of soundpoetry, breath structures delivery of sound, until breath fails. Less experimentally, we are compelled to pause to draw breath when delivering a poem aloud: when we write the poem for performance or for re-creation of the sound we ‘heard’ (or imagined) while composing it, we indicate pauses through conventional or slightly varied punctuation. Considered this way, neither approach wholly discounts the other: spoken poetry and written poetry are, so to speak, different if not equal. 91

Clayton Valli, “Dandelions,” Artdrop, http://artdrop.democratandchronicle.com/content /dandelion-asl-poem-click-here-video (accessed 1 May 2012).

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That the approaches are in fact far from equal is evident when we listen to a poem. Sound does not of itself command our full attention; language, narrative, and image draw us in, so we’re likelier to ask, ‘What did she say?’ than ‘How did she say that?’ We’re pragmatists where language is concerned; sound and rhythm are adjuncts of narrative, where we tend to seek meaning. In Walter Fisher’s controversial approach to rhetoric,92 the basis of all persuasion is narrative, whose hallmarks are coherence, fidelity, and unity. Whatever non-fictional or fictional form it takes – anecdote, joke, biography, autobiography, chronicle – and whatever its disguise (lyrical description or confession), narrative may be the dominant mode in human utterance. Even a sound-poem tells a story; we seek the cohesive factor, and we anticipate movement, however gradual, to some end, from some beginning. The sound-oriented poems of August Stramm expressed, through mimicry of harsh sound bordering on noise, the social scission and violence of war. The anti-poetry of the Zürich Dada artists mirrored the absurdity of polite language during the suicide of European empires. The ‘narrative’ in a Dada poem concerns the stripping-away of sense to sensation, and the imaging of sound and noise. The heirs to such ‘stories’ include Kurt Schwitters’s “Ursonate” (a voice performance employing vowels and consonants) and Ernst Jandl’s “schtzngrmm” – a play on the word ‘Schützengraben’ (the ‘combat trenches’ of World War One): vowels are abolished and consonants form images of battle. Story is ancient; the form is changed, and sound and image buttressed narrative in conventional ways long before the distinctions blurred: Homer, Dante, Tasso, Chaucer, Milton, and Byron exploited the sound-quality of strings of words; Spenser, Keats, and Swinburne emphasized sonority and mellifluousness; all could manipulate discord and cacophony to appropriate ends. Chaucer’s tale of “Sir Thopas,” for example, a stilted self-parodic effort at an old-fashioned romance in the Canterbury Tales, is interrupted by the Host with a series of oaths critical of the doggerel: “ ‘ By God,’ quod he, ‘for pleynly, at a word, / Thy drasty ryming is nat worth a toord!’.”93 Conscious manipulation of sound possibilities in poetry conventionally published on the page is evident in works proclaimed as ‘song’ of one sort or another. Types that imitate folk- and pop-songs may be thought of as sub-genres of new formalism. (Alan Wearne’s ‘songbook’ is one such example. 94) Rhythm – 92

See, for example, Walter R. Fisher, Human Communication as Narration: Toward a Philosophy of Reason, Value, and Action (Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1987). 93 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, in Chaucer’s Major Poetry, ed. Albert C. Baugh (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963): 351 (ll. 1119–20). 94 Alan Wearne, The Australian Popular Songbook (Artarmon, N S W : Giramondo, 2008).

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regularity of speech units – along with insistent beat – rap or other – may mimic a physiological state and conjure some atavistic memory (examples: war chants, wailing for the dead, festival dances). Considered in this way, rhythm may provoke certain cathartic associations for readers and listeners. Do poems with insistent sound-patterns, such as “The Destruction of Sennacherib” or “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” kindle nationalistic fervour? Does a poem like Wilfred Owens’s “Futility” arouse, in its blunted rhythm, pity for the victims of war? Contemporary anecdotal and personal lyric poetry does not always strike readers as having been crafted with conscious deployment of traditional metrical and rhyming effects. This in part explains why general readers do not patronize poetry as much as they patronize prose. The rhythm of free-form lyrics is more likely determined by other considerations – even a concern to produce poetry in updated Wordsworthian “very language of men” (and, of course, the ‘very language of women’). We exploit drone, discord, and cacophony as well as counterpoint, harmony, and euphony. Our manipulation of sound is developed to the end of inviting listeners and readers to consider things in a new way. Exploitation of sound for playing on thoughts and emotions may be no more than the homage that such poetry pays to ancestral oral forms of verse. Self-conscious orality is with us in the manufactured ambience of performance poetry, slams, voice-recordings on CD s, vinyl, e-zines, YouTube, Facebook, and individual poets’ home pages, as well as in archival sites like the British Poetry Archive, the American poets.org, pennsound, and the German lyrikline. Recordings testify to poets’ attempts to foreground the language of everyday speech, though perhaps testifying more to the highly artificial stance that the poet adopts when consciously competing for attention by performing a kind of enhanced ‘natural’ speech. The edgier performances proclaim rejection of the language of everyday life because of its debasement by media and political hacks: hence the exaggeration of paralinguistic elements such as whispering, shouting, or other mouth-music. Poets such as Henri Chopin, Jackson Mac Low, Yoko Ono, Jas H. Duke, and Chris Mann supplement and sometimes obviate conventional language by employing body sounds. At the heart of this proliferation of the possibilities of live or recorded sound-poetry, though, there’s a paradox. In spite of new media facilitation of orality and sound, the persistence and even primacy of the printed word is pretty much unchallenged: like bloggers, poets like to see their work in print, in hard-copy or on a screen. Sound poets meticulously document their works, so that performances can be re-created to

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some extent in other circumstances. Documentation includes videos, of course, but also artists’ statements, programme notes, museum and library catalogues, academic and specialist journal articles, dissertations and limited-edition monographs. To this extent, we’re Gutenberg’s children, much as we practise or acknowledge the possibilities of intermedia and multimedia. Writing may even have certain advantages over sound recordings, given the fluctuations in recording technology and preservation. Scraps of papyrus continue to emerge, on which archaeologists find fragments of plays by Menander and poems by Sappho, eighteen hundred years after their final use as wrappers for corpses. We may wonder at the durability of the CD or the corruptibility of the Internet: perhaps it is too early to say. The limitations of writing as a way of recording sound are obvious. We can ‘say’ our poems in a continuous stream of air (though we must eventually pause for breath), but we write our poems in lines across a page, and this is a poor representation of the experience of the said or heard poem. To suggest the continuity of that voiced expression, we require a page whose width allows the poem to be written as one line. (Some poets have published poems in editions that are effectively a set of sideways concertina’ed pages that extend to reveal the poem written as one line; Simon Cutts’s A History of the Airfields of Lincolnshire 1, printed in Florence in 1990, consists of repetitions of the word “poppies” in a single line. This will strike some people as provocative conceptual art or as simply ludic.) Yet the single line cannot be taken in as easily as the heard performance, no matter how we isolate the poem from its surrounding ‘noise’. (The traditional siting of the poem in an expanse of white space on the page is one such attempt to mark off the poem, though publication did not always take this form.) But we cannot convey the written line without segmentation that may be the equivalent of pausing for breath. The segmentation of the written poem on a conventional page has some analogy with the placement of one brushstroke after another in an impressionist painting that results in an ‘image’, the representation of a thing observed or conceived: the image is recognizable at once but, on closer inspection, resolves itself into myriad strokes of a brush. If painting can supply one analogy, another ancient association is that of poetry and music, whether relating to poetry’s adaptation to music or to the effects that poetry strove to embody in the rhythms of dance and other activity. Walter Pater remarked, in an essay on the painter Giorgione, that art is always striving to be independent of the mere intelligence, to become a matter of pure perception, to get rid of its responsibilities to its subject material and, further, that the arts including poetry may be represented

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as continually struggling after the law or principle of music, to a condition which music alone completely realizes.95

Pater’s claim is flawed insofar as the music is predominantly based upon repetition: one can listen to so many sonatas and concertos before the triple structure of repeated themes is so evident as to be predictable. (In my near-final remarks to this essay, I will refer to some rather obvious possible exceptions.) Poetry, like language itself, has no such basis in repetition – though a musician might, on the basis of familiarity with poetry on the page, argue that poetry appears to be similarly based. Further, as David Crystal observes, music also requires consistent pitch. People (not just poets) can vary the pitch of their voice and still deliver an intelligible message, whereas change in pitch in music (say, transposing a song or instrumental piece a semitone up or down) renders the composition ‘out of tune’, if not unrecognizable.96 Poets before Pater had not advanced claims for musicality in such radical terms, though Neoclassical poets like Dryden and Pope had accommodated rhetoric’s insistence on delivery as well as language, and strove to marry what Pope called “sound and sense.” Blake had experimented with variations on hymnody and psalmody in his “Songs” of Innocence and Experience and in his prophetic books. Wordsworth stated his aim as resuscitation of the simplicity of approximating “the real language of men” (without throwing away rhyme and metre), which he thought characteristic of the lyrical balladry of the Middle Ages. By the mid-nineteenth century, Tennyson, Browning, and Swinburne were experimenting with metre, rhyme, sonority, and song-measures as if to underline Walter Pater’s assertion; Swinburne pointedly composed sets of poems he called “Studies in Song.” Edgar Allan Poe had made a move toward linking poetry and music in his 1843 “Notes upon English Verse,” in proposing the spondee (“the very germ of thought seeking satisfaction in equality of sound”) as the basis of poetry, which he labelled “an inferior or less capable music.”97 From the monotone of the spondee, Poe claimed, grew the desire for relief, which led to the variation of poetic ‘feet’ and the poetic line. Verlaine, Mallarmé, Wilde, and Ezra Pound also posited musicality as a function of poetry. Pound’s ‘music’ embraced the ancient metres he experimented with in his early poems, and the bricolage and 95

Walter Pater, “The School of Giorgione,” in Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1888): 144–45. 96 David Crystal, “Speech and Music,” in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1988): 173. 97 Edgar Allan Poe, “The Rationale of Verse” [an extended version of his essay “Notes upon English Verse”], in Poe, Essay and Reviews (New York: Library of America, 1984): 34.

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‘sampling’ of his Cantos had some counterpart in extended scales, monody, atonality, world music, and serial music of the early-twentieth century. His 1954 version of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis pointedly emphasized the speakers’ intonation by such stage directions as “low cello merely sustaining the voice” to accompany the lines “O Y E Z , / Things foretold and forecast: / Toil and Moil,” and “contrabassi and drums muffled” to accompany the lines “ L O , beneath deadly cloud / Fate and the Centaur’s curse, black venom spread, / Dank Hydra’s blood.” 98 More conventionally, poetic and musical collaborations include libretti by Auden, Gwen Harwood, David Malouf, and Dorothy Porter, for serial and other contemporary music.99 I don’t propose that we all turn librettists. I began with the proposition that language has a phonetic as well as a semantic dimension, and that words in poetry represent an attempt to convey sound. In this account, all written words are a poor substitute for oral performance, much as musical scores are a poor substitute for an actual performance: the music is not in the notation alone, though the notation is a guide to the singer or instrumentalist. Perhaps there is no ‘ideal’ performance; perhaps poets resemble composers, in that composers generally are not performers on all the instruments for which they write: Mozart famously wrote for the flute, an instrument he did not play, and most composers are in a similar situation. Composers of music categorized as the ‘New Complexity’, such as Chris Dench, Richard Barrett, and Michael Finnisy, have created scores that push traditional notation and performers’ abilities to the limit. We can get closer, perhaps, to what the poet ‘heard’ if we listen to recordings of the poet reading – as, indeed, we can hear recordings of Grainger, Grieg, Rachmaninoff and others playing their own compositions. We will be shaken, in some cases, by ‘suprasegmental’ and paralinguistic aspects of speech that characterize the poets’ delivery of their own works. Other features that may surprise us include the extent to which the performance reflects conventions of verse speaking at the time of recording, and the state of the technology of the period. It is pointless to argue that poetry sits better in the written or the oral sphere, and I don’t foresee poetry’s abandoning the page or other visual formats; but what poetry on the page will not suggest are those paralinguistic elements I referred to above. These include regional accents and speech effects that cannot be represented easily in a textual code. Poets can write in dialect, use upper- and 98

Ezra Pound, Women of Trachis, cited in Denis Donoghue, “Ezra Pound,” in Donoghue, The Third Voice: Modern British and American Verse Drama (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1959): 216–17. 99 Harwood wrote the libretto for Larry Sitsky’s Fall of the House of Usher (1974) and The Golem (1993); Malouf wrote the libretto for Richard Meale’s Voss (1978); Auden (and Chester Kallman) collaborated with Britten (The Rake’s Progress and Paul Bunyan), Stravinsky, and Henze.

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lower-case letters, vary font sizes, play with typography, and yet not convey the ‘live’ performance. The written text may also omit aural features of the poem, including the poet’s gender and ‘signature’ voice, if a poet can be said to have a signature voice: a debate in itself. Similarly, the string of sounds that emerges from live performance of a poem does not allow meditation on the words as they occur in the way in which text does. I leave aside the puzzle as to whether poetry is more richly capable of or even reliant upon more sound-effects than prose. These, like the question of a poet’s development or adoption of different ways of ‘sounding’ throughout a career, are matters for continuing conversation. We might ask in what ways, say, Les Murray’s poetry or Fay Zwicky’s has developed (if at all) in terms of sound, and whether (or how) this is a function of its subject-matter, themes, and semantic ecology. I think we are still at an early stage in exploring the relationship between sound and poetry in an era of free-form and neoformalist text poetry, and performance and sound-poetry. Old theories of the brain proposed that localized areas, especially in the left hemisphere, were related to speech and vision. More recently, it’s been proposed that several areas, including some in the right brain, are associated with the production and recognition of such behaviour. Pater’s conjecture about art’s “aspiring” to the condition of music might fleetingly seem, in respect to language arts, to have some alluring basis in the overlapping of brain areas that recognize speech and music. But his analogy still poses questions beyond those that I’ve indicated: to what music might the art of poetry aspire? Some varieties of music, such as industrial, drone (for example, the Easterninflected music of Dylan Carson and his band, Earth), and the New Complexity variously reflect the sheer noise, harmonies, or near-unreproducible sonic textures of modernity. We live in an ocean of utterance. If we think of poetry as an art so faithful to the range of everyday speech as to differ in no way from it, we can understand why some contemporary poetry does not aurally impress us as more than everyday speech. If we can exploit the sonic possibilities, and even make it possible for listeners and readers to reproduce the work ‘live’, we might avoid our audience’s brusque reduction of the poem to semantic content alone. Postscript On a related trajectory, the argument concerning old and new poetry is fruitless: the styles, status, and appeal of poetry change with the times, and the debate is ancient. In 1653, Isaak Walton published a treatise on fishing called The Compleat Angler, in which Venator (a falconer), Piscator (an angler), and a hunter

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compare their respective recreations. Piscator recounts to his friend Venator the pleasure he has had fishing and watching the birds and animals about him, and then remarks: As I left this place, and entered into the next field, a second pleasure entertained me; ’twas a handsome milk-maid, that had not yet attained so much age and wisdom as to load her mind with any fears of many things that will never be, as too many men too often do; but she cast away all care, and sung like a nightingale. Her voice was good, and the ditty fitted for it; it was that smooth song which was made by Kit Marlow, now at least fifty years ago; and the milkmaid’s mother sung an answer to it, which was made by Sir Walter Raleigh, in his younger days. They were old-fashioned poetry, but choicely good; I think much better than the strong lines that are now in fashion in this critical age.100

The Milk-Maid’s “ditty” and her mother’s are, respectively, Marlowe’s “Come live with me and be my love” and Raleigh’s facetious response, “If all the world and love were young” – poems that struck Walton’s imagined eavesdropper as more mellifluous than the “strong lines” of Milton, Marvell, Cowley, and other poets of Protector Cromwell’s era. Whether “old-fashioned” poetry is in fact “much better” is a topic wise poets and critics will not venture to entertain.

———— “But Who Considers Woman Day By Day?” ————

T

H I S E S S A Y G R E W F R O M A S E M I N A R I held at the 4th Autumn Summer School on the New Literatures in English at the University of Osnabrück in 1998. The extent of Australian women’s poetry of war was revelatory to many participants, including Professor Sigrid Markmann, co-author with Dagmar Lange of a selective bibliographical guide to writing by and about women in England during the War.101 The sole poem there attributed to an Australian is “I didn’t raise my son to be a soldier!,” assigned to Adela Pankhurst on the basis of the poem’s inclusion in L.L. Robson’s The First A.I.F.

What is striking about Australian women’s war poetry written during or soon after World War One is the range of subject-matter, variety of moods, and extent of experimentation within and beyond received form. Just as striking is the extent to which Australian anthologists of war poetry have downplayed women’s contributions. It is less surprising that English and American anthologists of war poetry have ignored Australian male and female poets’ productions in general, though the reason has less to do with the quality of Australians’ writing than 100

Isaak Walton, The Compleat Angler (London: J.M. Dent, 1974): 68. Frauen und Erster Weltkrieg in England: Auswahlbibliographie, comp. Sigrid Markmann & Dagmar Lange (Osnabrück: H.Th. Wenner, 1988). 101

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with anthologists’ and others’ apparent failure to familiarize themselves with the output. My consequent aim is to place on record an account of some of the war-related genres of Australian women’s poetry. Some poems indicate the extent to which some (perhaps most) Australian women poets located themselves inside what Jean Bethke Elshtain calls “prototypical emblems and identities” that war brings to the fore. 102 In this view, men fight “as avatars of a nation’s sanctioned violence,” and women work and weep and sometimes protest within the frame of discursive practices that turn one out, militant mother and pacifist protestor alike, as the collective ‘other’ to the male warrior.103

The war-related poetry of women might serve as a test of this theory insofar as the texts reveal “webs of anticipated actions and reactions.”104 In effect, few poems elude the nets of rhetorical practices associated with wars prior to World War One, but those few reward discovery. (The exultant tone of a woman simultaneously expressing relief for her release from the power of a brutal husband as a result of his death in battle, and her pride in her new status as a hero’s widow, may indicate either the fulfilment or the blurring of “anticipated reactions,” depending on one’s alertness to irony.) It has to be emphasized, though, that studies of World War One grief and mourning rarely point up divergence from the concept of men’s business as warriors (or the obverse, ‘shirkers’ or ‘slackers’) and women’s as ‘sacrificial mothers’, “Beautiful Souls,” or guilt-haunted atoners for their loved ones’ deaths.105 I conceive of the majority of the collective body of Australian women’s poetry published in and shortly after World War One as reinforcing, with few exceptions, Jay Winter’s “central theme”: “The powerful, and perhaps essential, tendency of ordinary people, of many faiths and none, to face together the emptiness, the nothingness of loss in war.” 106 As my essay indicates, the poetry reflects a wide range of domestic, professional, and other backgrounds of the “ordinary people” who chose to record their reactions to the War in verse.

102

Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War (New York: Basic Books, 1987): 3. Elshtain, Women and War, 3–4. 104 Women and War, 4. 105 Joy Damousi, The Labour of Loss: Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1999): 26–45; Elshtain, Women and War, 3–12; Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1995): 108–13. 106 Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, 53. 103

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Two major anthologies of First World War women’s poetry in English or English translation have appeared since 1981: Catherine Reilly’s Scars Upon My Heart, and Margaret R. Higonnet’s Lines of Fire, an American collection that also includes poems and prose by women of other nations than Britain and the U SA .107 The former collection contains several American poets, but no Australian writer, and the latter only one: Olive ‘Jo’ King (1885–58), an ambulance driver in Serbia, represented by a single letter written to her father;108 King’s entire correspondence is contained in One Woman at War, edited by Hazel King.109 In Australia, women poets of the First World War are represented by a handful of poems in three anthologies. J.T. Laird’s Other Banners contains one poem by Dorothea Mackellar, two by Mary Gilmore, one by Nettie Palmer, and an excerpt from Zora Cross’s Elegy on an Australian Schoolboy.110 It is worth noting that Laird’s anthology otherwise represents the writing of twenty-seven male writers, eight of them non-combatants: Christopher Brennan, John Le Gay Brereton, C.J. Dennis, Henry Lawson, Ernest G. Moll, Kenneth Slessor, John Shaw Neilson, and Frank Wilmot (‘Furnley Maurice’). In his 1970 survey essay on Australian poetry of the First World War, Laird commented briefly on only Zora Cross and Mary Gilmore as producing “some quite good war poetry, which included poems in the pacifist tradition.”111 Chris Wallace–Crabbe and Peter Pierce included Mary Gilmore’s “Gallipoli” in their otherwise all-male anthology Clubbing of the Gunfire.112 Of seventeen poets in their World War One section, four (Les Murray, Roger McDonald, Geoff Page, and Chris Wallace–Crabbe) were born long after the War. David Holloway’s collection Dark Somme Flowing includes fifteen women poets and sixty male writers of the actual period. 107

Scars Upon My Heart: Women’s Poetry and Verse of the First World War, ed. Catherine Reilly (London: Virago, 1981); Lines of Fire: Women Writers of World War One, ed. Margaret R. Higonnet (New York: Plume, 1999). 108 In Lines of Fire, ed. Higonnet, 210–44. 109 Olive King, One Woman at War: Letters of Olive King, 1915–1920, ed. Hazel King (Melbourne: Melbourne U P , 1986). 110 Other Banners: An Anthology of Australian Literature of the First World War, ed. J.T. Laird (Canberra: Australian War Memorial and Australian Government Printing Service, 1971): 45, 49– 50, 129, 123–25. 111 Laird, “Australian Poetry of the First World War: A Survey,” Australian Literary Studies 4.3 (1970): 244 (241–50). See also Laird, “A Checklist of Australian Literature of World War I,” Australian Literary Studies 4.2 (1969): 148–63, and “A Checklist of Australian Literature of the First World War,” Australian Literary Studies 12.2 (1985): 275–87. 112 Mary Gilmore, “Gallipoli,” in Clubbing of the Gunfire: 101 Australian War Poems, ed. Chris Wallace–Crabbe & Peter Pierce (Melbourne: Melbourne U P , 1984): 60..

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Holloway claims that his selection is “not based on poetic worth”; he notes, though, the transformation in style from “laboured and artificial” writing in “the tradition of the colonial balladists and the Victorian romantics” (whose “tradition and techniques were scarcely fit mode for the new experiences offered by the War”) to “the highly personal and realistic” style exemplified by the poetry of Leon Gellert.113 Holloway includes women’s poems that also signal this change, in their reflections on personal loss. My survey of women’s war poems published in the Bulletin and elsewhere during World War One, and in books containing work of a further fifty women poets, corroborates this shift. While researching the possibility of compiling an anthology of Australian women’s war poetry that might redress the relative imbalance in existing anthologies, I considered the status and role of poetry in the early-twentieth century, as well as the ‘artistic’ merit of the poems, making allowance for period and subsequent critical standards. The question of what constitutes “quite good” war poetry admits contesting answers according to theoretical fashions, but it is a commonplace of rhetorical analysis such as mine that significance accrues even from the fact that someone chooses to publicly speak on a topic of public concern. From this angle, every poem published during the First World War testifies to the writer’s need to argue a case aloud, though clearly not all performances are of equal artistic distinction, whatever their moral or political merit. Australian women’s poems written in response to war constitute an area little explored, let alone theorized, by literary critics. The sole taxonomy of Australian war poems (or prose) is that of J.T. Laird, who listed responses under ten headings in his 1971 anthology: “Early Imperialistic Sentiments,” “Gallipoli,” “Nationalistic and Elegiac Responses,” “Training in Egypt,” “The Western Front,” “Desert Warfare,” “Disenchantment and Pacifism (1916–21),” “The Return to Civilian Life,” “Seeing the Lighter Side,” and “Disenchantment and Pacifism (1935–39).” Some of these categories are makeshift: “Nationalistic and Elegiac Responses” is a case in point. Others clearly will not ‘fit’ the experience of women writers of the period 1914–18, and no category (such as “Homefront”) takes specific account of their experience. The reasons for this state of affairs may include some commentators’ unquestioning acceptance of the premise that combat determines authentic war experience, a premise that Higonnet and others explicitly reject.114 Janis Stout 113

David Holloway, “Introduction” to Dark Somme Flowing: Australian Verse of the Great War 1914–1918, ed. David Holloway (Malvern, Victoria: Robert Anderson & Associates, 1987): 4–5. 114 Higonnet, “Introduction” to Lines of Fire, ed. Higonnet, xxi; Damousi, The Labour of Loss, 9; Janis P. Stout, Coming Out of War: Poetry, Grieving, and the Culture of the World Wars (Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P , 2005): 60.

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repudiates Hilda Spear’s contention that “second-hand experience [of the battlefield] cannot shatter illusions.”115 identifying such a view as discounting “the validity of other direct experience – experience of the loss of a loved one, of wartime deprivations, of moral horror”; the view further disregards the value of writing based on contemplation. Most obviously, insistence on the primacy of the battlefield excludes women from having a voice about war.116

This last contention echoes Damousi’s: grief leaves no one unaffected by [conflict’s] devastation: like combat, there is no place to retreat and take refuge from the havoc grief unleashes among those who give and those who receive the news of death.117

Damousi notes the decline in the 1930s of the regard in which women’s sacrifice was held.118 The press and the Returned Services League effectively rewrote women’s experience as passive and domestic and restricted (but could not quite abolish) their presence on the “holy ground” of male-orchestrated Anzac Day services.119 This situation is rich in irony: the suffering of the men was privileged on the grounds that women, who lived with its results, lacked the ability to imagine it. This curious state of mind is belied by the poetry of women that tells another story. My categorization of sub-genres therefore modifies Laird’s first two classes of response and replaces the rest with descriptors that better reflect the poets’ concerns. Women’s poems on circumstances and effects of wounding and death constitute a special category, as do poems that seek to make sense of the entire experience, and poems on homecoming. The resulting list is a closer reflection of women’s topics: The bond of Empire: early and late patriotic effusions; Hating the Hun; Mothers and sons; Gallipoli; Combat, death and wounds; 115

Stout, Coming Out of War, 58. Cf. Hilda D. Spear, Remembering We Forget: A Background Study to the Poetry of the First World War (London: Davis–Poynting, 1979). 116 Stout, Coming Out of War, 60. 117 Damousi, The Labour of Loss, 9. 118 The Labour of Loss, 35–36. 119 The Labour of Loss, 37.

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Wishes and prayers for loved ones; Women’s role and work at home; Shaming the shirkers (and the obverse: anti-conscription sentiment); A long view (the War in world history); The return of peace: Australia’s future. These categories accommodate poems that vary considerably in attitude and tone. All of the poems attest to the degrees of success of appeals that continued to relegate women to traditional roles dictated by an essentialist masculine ideology – a matter to which I’ll return. Several poems notably underline emerging disillusionment of succeeding generations of women with such roles. Women’s poems on the role that women can play after the War take both sides of the argument. Grace Ethel Martyr’s poem “Afterwards,” for example, urges women to exert themselves to make life bearable for their returning men, who will “often long and long in vain / For that high purpose of those dangerous days” – until they join their comrades at last in death. 120 I have structured what follows around these topics, some of which receive only fleeting attention. In most cases, my aim is to indicate that women from every State of the Commonwealth wrote poetry intended to meet a readership beyond the home. Private and public war poetry Many Australian women wrote war poetry that did not gain (and was perhaps never intended to obtain) public display, but which was diaristic, or directed at intimate family members or friends. Olive King, noted above, wrote poems and stories after her return to Australia from Serbia in 1920, but, as Celia Whitaker notes, King “was not confident enough to publish her work.”121 Other women wrote poems that were included in letters, albums or scrapbooks. While not seeking to dismiss the work of such unpublished writers or ‘amateurs’, I base my comments on examination of a survey sample of 125 poems by forty-five women who presented the public face of war poetry, in newspapers, journals, anthologies or individual collections during and after the War. Among these were some of the best-known Australian women poets before 1914. At the same time, many women writers produced work solely in response to their experience of wartime conditions and subsequently faded from the literary scene. In the

120

Grace Ethel Martyr, “Afterwards,” in Martyr, Afterwards and Other Verses (Melbourne: Australasian Authors’ Agency, 1918): 32–33. 121 Quoted in Lines of Fire, ed. Higonnet, 210.

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commentary that follows, I refer to the work by both sorts of writers. The women were predominantly middle-class – as Samuel Hynes notes, the great self-recording class, the class that keeps diaries and journals and considers that the preservation of one’s daily life is an appropriate and interesting activity for an individual.122

Many were engaged in professional careers as journalists, reporters or editors (Louisa Lawson, Mary Gilmore, Mabel Forrest, Nora McAuliffe, Mary Fullerton, Nellie A. Evans, Zora Cross, Marie Pitt, Lala Fisher), business proprietors (Emily Coungeau), teachers (Nina Murdoch, Helen Power, Marion Miller Knowles), and academics; several were Arts or Law graduates (Enid Derham, Ellie Wemyss, Lesbia Harford). Before and during the First World War, poetry was not so obscure or careerist a matter (certain modernist practices excepted) as it would variously become after the War and in the mid-twentieth century. Especially in Australia, aspects of the Victorian afterglow appeared in balladry and lyric forms, while Georgianism entered a lengthy half-life in the Bulletin, Lone Hand, Birth, Triad, Art in Australia and other ‘literary’ organs. The Lindsays’ postwar Vision hardly promoted the spread of modernism in Australian poetry; indeed, it was initiated to promote what Jack Lindsay called “a kind of Australian Renaissance” rooted in the art of ancient Greece, the Italian Renaissance, and the English Romantic movement.123 Memoirs and letters of soldiers, nurses, and others attached to the armed forces testify to a broad taste for traditional forms and popular mainstream effusions. The memoirs often include a few lines of their own, their comrades’ or others’ poetry. In her Letters of an Australian Army Sister (1920), Anne Donnell, a nurse attached to the Third Australian General Hospital, records poems she heard while on active duty, and she breaks into her account of her activities with apposite lines of remembered verses by Whittier, Byron, Kipling, Bernard O’Dowd, and an anonymous Canadian nursing sister.124 Another nurse on active duty, May Tilton, recorded in her memoir The Grey Battalion verses that included a rollicking poem “by an Australian sister who was on duty at Suez at the time”: 122

Samuel Hynes, The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War (London: Pimlico, 1984):

32. 123

Jack Lindsay, “Vision and the London Aphrodite,” in Cross Currents: Magazines and Newspapers in Australian Literature, ed. Bruce Bennett (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1981): 93 (91–101). 124 Anne Donnell, Letters of An Australian Army Sister (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1920): 31, 64, 95, 131, 253, 251–52.

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Another lad had broken bounds, and we all felt ashamed. We knew the bugs had carried him off, But Sister ––––––– got blamed. Oh, take us back to our own sweet land, Back to the new-mown hay, Back to where the crops have grown, And – “How do you do, to-day?”125

I quote this poem as an instance of the naturalness with which verse and rhyming were used to express, or make light of, even horrific circumstances. At the time Tilton records, her section of the Number One Australian General Hospital at Heliopolis held 210 soldiers, suffering from fever and “nerves,” who had been evacuated from the Gallipoli peninsula.126 Many Australian women poets writing and publishing before the First World War continued to publish prolifically during and after the War; some who commenced publishing during the War subsequently achieved wider recognition. The greater part of the output of these writers, whom I’ll call ‘professional’ poets, never addressed the specific topic of war. In 1930, Henry Kellow stated in his survey of Queensland poetry that, “Contrary to expectation, the Great War is not a great factor in production. Local subjects keep pride of place.”127 This observation is as true of women poets’ output as of men’s. Much of the women’s work relating to war was a product of the occasion, and while they sometimes later returned to the themes (and even produced their best ‘war poems’ long after the event), their life’s work represented an alternative, if not an antidote, to the experience of war. Emphasis on life’s other vagaries, for example, is apparent in the overall output of Mary Gilmore, Mabel Forrest, Emily Coungeau, Zora Cross, Nora McAuliffe, and Enid Derham (to mention a few). It’s worth correcting, here, the perception that most women’s poetry was, in Jan Bassett’s words, written to promote recruiting, to raise money for […] funds or to eulogise Australian soldiers, frequently described in dedications as “our boys’ or “our soldiers’ (and probably to relieve patriotic women’s frustrations caused by the limited participation allowed them in the war effort).128

125

May Tilton, The Grey Battalion (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1933): 40. The Grey Battalion, 17. 127 Henry Arthur Kellow, Queensland Poets (London: George Harrap, 1930): 17. 128 Jan Bassett, “‘Preserving the White Race’: Some Australian Women’s Literary Responses to the Great War,” Australian Literary Studies 12.2 (1985): 224 (223–33). 126

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Bassett selects eleven publications, issued between 1914 and 1917, which conform to her description, but they by no means represent Australian women’s total output of war poetry. The most prominent early War topic is the Imperial tie. The Sydney Bulletin, notably critical of anglophile sentiment before the outbreak of war, published several poems expressing patriotic affiliation with England even before the close of 1914. Not one poem expressed outright opposition to support for England and Empire, so a pattern initiated that would continue with small modification for the ensuing two years. Mabel Forrest’s poem “War” denounced war in general, on grounds that suited the paper’s initial view that “the flag – whether British or Australian – should be left, in a manner of speaking, in the locker”:129 The blare of bugles, and men talking big; And waving flags, and hurried medals struck; And vinous quarrels, and much corner chat, And “Rule Britannia” and “Vive l’Angleterre,” “Advance Australia,” and some heated prate Of dying for one’s country. This is War. Lean babes a-whimper in an unroofed house; Thin curls of smoke above a blackened tree; A Something swinging from a pallid limb With dangling boots and vivid mouth agape; A blazing hillside and a screaming horse, Gun-tortured on a starlit battlefield; Or wounds gangrening in a slow, cold rain. And someone piling money overseas From rotten stores and bayonets made of lead; And someone praying “Peace” (and loading guns), And bloated birds of prey, and starving men And ravished women…. This is also War.130

Before the War’s end Forrest would add her voice to those praising the heroism of England and the Allies, but her view was informed by a rare critique of politics and motives. Some poets who wrote affectionately of England had been born there or had visited and studied there – for example, Florence Hayward, Emily Coungeau, 129

Patricia Rolfe, The Journalistic Javelin: An Illustrated History of the Bulletin (Sydney: Wildcat, 1979): 156. 130 Mabel Forrest, “War,” Bulletin (24 September 1914): 3.

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Mary Fullerton, and Enid Derham. English-born Anna Wickham had settled in London in 1904 after spending fourteen of her first twenty years in Australia, while other writers had ‘virtual’ memories of England as a result of recent family history and upbringing. A surprising number, including Coungeau, Dorothea Mackellar, Dorothy Frances McCrae, Beatrice Vale Bevan, and Mary Gilmore, had lived or travelled extensively abroad and also regarded England as the Mother Country. Australia’s relationship to England at first appears straightforwardly that of a daughter to a mother – a metaphor grounded in traditional invocations of ‘Britannia’ and reinforced through the latter part of the not so remote reign of the Queen-Empress Victoria. In the War’s first year and a half, numerous women poets urged Australian men to arise and defend their motherland, England. As Jane Potter observes, the Queen’s widely publicized care for ‘her’ soldiers and especially for the wounded during the Boer War promoted her as “the ultimate exemplar of feminine behaviour in wartime.”131 The motherhood metaphor is complicated by some poets’ emphasis on their own maternal role or by their adoption of a motherly persona, so their appeal to their literal (or figurative) sons is to make Australia a safe refuge for mothers – a true ‘motherland’. Nora McAuliffe’s “Mater Triumphans” thus addresses her son: “Knee-deep in blood and mire, steel-like you stand, / That I may walk secure in this fair land.”132 L.L. Robson proposed, in connection with sentiment that encouraged enlistment in the First A.I.F., that the cause of the Empire (not just of Britain) became a thing nearly synonymous in some minds with the cause of Christianity.133 This was by no means a phenomenon unique to Australia: Gordon L. Heath, Carl Berger and others have commented on an infusion of imperial sentiment throughout English Canada and the Empire so pervasive as to convince latenineteenth- and early-twentieth-century imperialists that the British Empire was “a providential agency, the greatest secular instrument for good in the world.”134 The imperial sentiment leavening Australian boys’ and girls’ education was supplemented by recreational reading of hagiographical accounts of heroes of the Empire (in fiction and annuals like the Captains). In 1911, the Sydney 131

Jane Potter, Boys in Khaki, Girls in Print: Women’s Literary Responses to the Great War 1914– 1918 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2005): 24. 132 Nora McAuliffe, “Mater Triumphans,” Bulletin (3 February 1917): 3. 133 L.L. Robson, The First A.I.F.: A Study of Its Recruitment 1914–1918 (Melbourne: Melbourne U P , 1976): 18–19. 134 Gordon L. Heath, “Passion for Empire: War Poetry Published in the Canadian English Protestant Press During the South African War, 1899–1902,” Literature and Theology 16.2 (2002): 129 (127–47).

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sporting newspaper Fairplay underlined the value of such recreational reading by issuing a list of popular historical novels for “readers who want fairly grown children to get an inkling of history in a pleasant way”: titles by Lord Lytton, Charles Kingsley, Sir Walter Scott, G.A. Henty, Robert Louis Stevenson and others covered every reign up to Queen Victoria.135 Familiarity with English and Classical literature of war is evident in writing by teacher–poets and journalist– poets such as Zora Cross, Lala Fisher, Mabel Forrest, Nora McAuliffe, Nina Murdoch, and Enid Derham. (Derham, a classical scholar, lectured in English at Melbourne University: her war poems are characteristically epigrammatic and allusive.) Early in the War, some women writers expressed desire for more active participation even while asserting pride in mothering. Poems projected desire through injunctions to real (or imagined) sons to prove their manhood in battle. Few women questioned the “test.” Dorothy Frances McCrae’s 1914 poem “The Empire’s Call” voices a common sentiment: The Empire is calling, my son, my son. I heard it last night when I struggled to sleep. Will you stand idle, with battles unwon? With comrades unburied? and kingdoms to keep? Women have need of you over the sea Soldier, my soldier, march forward for me.136

In a poem of 1915, McCrae wished that she might watch her son drilling and join him in Egypt: “Would that I could join his army in the spring, / Be a man, and sling a rifle for the King.”137 Some women continued to voice such sentiments in poems in the form of prayers and hymns to God and the Empire throughout the War, though the tailing-off of vehement avowals is accompanied by a contraction in the number of poems that took such ceremonial forms. The artificiality of pseudo-liturgical language adopted to sanctify the dead, combined with the prayer-like importuning of the deity persisted chiefly in post-Gallipoli outpourings on Anzac Day. England’s gender shifts in the wartime verse, in accordance with the poets’ desire to portray Britain as a threatened woman or a John Bull assailed by foes. (Patriotic pageants and parades in Australian towns and cities variously 135

Anon., “History and fiction: How the average reader may learn history; A sequence of novels,” Fairplay (6 October 1911): 7. 136 Dorothy Frances McCrae, “The Empire’s Call,” in McCrae, Soldier, My Soldier (Melbourne: George Robertson, [1914]): 35–36. 137 McCrae, “The Shawl,” in McCrae, Soldier, My Soldier, 38.

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employed tableaux that included figures dressed as John Bull or Britannia.) By war’s end, further metaphoric shading arises in some poets’ appeals to England to send her surplus population to Australia. Emily Coungeau appeals, in “Australia to the Empire,” for such a mutually rewarding arrangement: “Oh! Mother of ours, thy children in thine islands of the west / Will find a home though Britain’s shore is where their hearts may rest.”138 Quality of the verse (is quality the point?) Much of the women’s poetry is as uneven as that of their male contemporaries and was recognized as such at the time. (Christopher Brennan’s violently antiGerman 1916 poem “A Chant of Doom” was considered by his literary peers unworthy of him, in point of subject and tone.) In her survey of the work of English women poets of the First World War, Dorothy Goldman observes that the quality of their poetry is poor not because they were so remote from the scenes of actual conflict, but because they could not find the appropriate aesthetic mode in which to express themselves (17). The comment holds good for Australian women poets’ writing – and failure to write in other than timeworn modes is also characteristic of many male poets, including some who had experience of the Front. For many writers, mannerism provided a safe mode of expression, and it catered to schooled expectation. It’s worth noting, though, that sincerity can be faked by the same techniques, so as to mask quite another agenda, as Lala Fisher acidly remarked in the question and answer that make up the brief final poem (reprinted from H.E. Boote’s Worker newspaper) in her 1915 collection Grass Flowering: Sincerity? The cross, the rack, the bloody thong, The cruel right, the stubborn wrong, These to sincerity belong.139

As well, mere assertion of heartfelt emotion can collapse into bathos, as it does in much of the wartime (and other) poetry of Martha Coxhead. (The quality of Coxhead’s collection140 is suggested by the inclusion of eight examples in The Barry Humphries Book of Innocent Austral Verse.141) War poetry overtly directed 138

Emily Coungeau, “Australia to the Empire,” in Coungeau, Rustling Leaves (Sydney: William Brooks, 1920): 53. 139 Lala Fisher, “Sincerity?,” in Fisher, Grass Flowering (Sydney: The Author, 1915): 18. 140 Mrs G.R. [Martha] Coxhead, Lost a Continent! Heroes of Anzac and Other Verses (Melbourne: Modern Printing, 1917). 141 The Barry Humphries Book of Innocent Austral Verse, ed. Barry Humphries (Melbourne: Sun, 1968).

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at persuading a broadcast readership generally employs the sanctioned clichés of popular forms (ballads, hymns, marching songs, and so on), and a critique that focuses solely on artistic standards may not adequately account for the work’s rhetorical force: moral, historical, political, and other standards bear on the matter. The Australian women poets’ work canvassed experiences common to women of other nations. Unlike most American and all British women, Australian women already possessed the vote and might take some part, however limited by modern standards, in public affairs. With the onset of war, though, Australian women were relegated to the status of what Goldman calls a “temporary matriarchy,” which was powerless to direct or influence critical political decisions.142 It became the lot of many to take a leading role in breadwinning and family maintenance, as well as in the rites of bereavement. With new awareness of additional tasks they could cope with came a statist and nationalist ideology urging their return to traditional roles. Several poems by Rita Sunyasee – for instance, “Our Jim”143 – pointedly and with some irony outline the role of women in maintaining a rural or suburban family economy. The wartime Prime Minister William Morris Hughes declared: Men may bear arms, while women bear the Army. The best gift Australia could give, not only to the Empire, but to the world would be, if every grown Australian woman would arrange to give birth to a lovely healthy baby.144

In the face of such propaganda, endorsed by conservative women’s organizations, the women’s movement in Australia faltered and retreated. Official women’s organizations such as the Australian Women’s National League, the Queensland Women’s Electoral League, and the Women, Soldiers and Patriots National League in Queensland had no doubts about the duties of women. Three years into the War, an article on behalf of the latter League in the National Leader rehearsed the by-then-familiar rhetoric of sacrifice: The mother who gives her son in war is noble, sublime … the noblest thing on earth today … sometimes I go to the Coo-ee café and I chat to women who are suffering a noble martyrdom and my heart thrills with pride at a heroism that seems to me to be stupendously great. They tell

142

Dorothy Goldman, “Introduction” to Women and World War I: The Written Response, ed. Goldman (London: Macmillan, 1993): 6. 143 Rita Sunyasee, “Our Jim,” Bulletin (16 May 1918): 3. 144 A B C Radio National, Warriors, Welfare and Eternal Vigilance: The History of the Returned Services League. Program 1: The Beginnings (A B C Radio Talks and Documentaries, 9 May 1982).

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me of their boys, of the letter they have had from them and I feel I am breathing in an atmosphere cleansed by a nobility which is sacred.145

Mary Bright’s wartime poem “The Song of the Women” triumphantly conjures up something of this Spartan image of motherly service to the state: What, we afraid to send you forth to die! [... ] That you had coward Women none shall say. Rather, like Sparta’s boy, each good right hand We offered to some ravening beast of prey. Courage triumphant banished all our fear. “ ’Twas soon forgotten – honour was too dear!146

Bright’s poetry is exceptional, though, in its sustained fervour (her book The Happy Warrior is, for single-idea fixation, perhaps the most outstanding collection of the War). Nina Murdoch’s poem “Socks,” a more temperate and resigned expression of options available to mothers, is far more characteristic: It’s little else a woman can do But bear sons and watch them grow, Till marching out of her life they go.147

Older, widely accepted assumptions relating to the ‘natural’ preserves of men and women conditioned literary responses to the crisis. While the war was in progress, the battlefield became the definer of male identity and wounds the guarantee. Wounds might also render a man a living gargoyle, on the fringe of ‘normal’ civilian life, as several poems on maimed soldiers affirm. For the generations of men who entered the conflict, manliness consisted of opposition to the mother, to femininity, and to passivity; this situation was exacerbated by the readiness of women to reinforce injunctions to be a man at every turn, including every turn of the page. Poems denouncing malingerers constitute a rich hoard of essentialist assumptions: To the Flag! To the flag! For the troops are embarking and shirkers but lag. 145

Carmel Mary Shute, “Australian women and the Great War: Aspects of ideological change, with particular emphasis on Queensland” (B.A. thesis, University of Queensland: Department of History, 1973): 57. See also Shute, “Heroines and Heroes: Sexual Mythology in Australia 1914–1918,” Hecate 1.1 (1975): 6–22. 146 Mary Bright, “The Song of the Women,” in Bright, The Happy Warrior (Melbourne: Robertson & Mullens, 1938): 84. 147 Nina Murdoch, “Socks,” in Murdoch, Songs of the Open Air (Sydney: William Brooks, 1915): 71–72.

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“To the Flag! To the Flag!” ere ye rally too late, And the enemy meet ye within your own gate.148

The Sydney poet Sybil Heydon declared: Look at them! Look at them! skulking along With shifty looks well knowing “tis wrong To squander their time when their country calls; Living at ease within four snug walls. We want more men with hearts brave and bold; Shirker means dross, and khaki means gold.149

By contrast, Marion Miller Knowles projected the laggard’s fate: The shirker knows not shame While safe is purse and home; One day his face will flame When nobler men come home!

Knowles’s emphasis on future shame was a theme of pro-Conscription propaganda, as in her poem on a fellow teacher, quoted above.150 In October 1916, as the Referendum loomed, the South Australian Ella McFadyen urged women to Strike hard, strike hard and stand beside your men! And you who tie your laggard to the apron, And leave our men to see the battle through – When the day dawns we greet our ragged victors, Stand by your coward, he’ll have need of you!151

The best-known woman writer resisting this line of argument was Queenslandborn Lala Fisher, poet, radical journalist, and editor of the Sydney Theatre Magazine. Fisher attacked the notion that manliness was coincident with militarism. In “December 20, 1917,” a poem opposing Conscription, she traced the development of the warrior mentality from kindergarten bullying to schoolboys’ attacks on cripples, adolescent males’ physical and sexual predations, and the rapacity of businessmen. Fisher’s poem considers that the dead soldiers of all nations “differ only as they lie there / In the kind of uniform they wear,” and 148

Zora Cross, “To the Flag,” Brisbane Daily Mail (15 November 1915): 16. Sybil Heydon, “Shirkers,” in Heydon, Verses (Sydney: The Author, 1915): 14. 150 Marion Miller Knowles, “A Tribute to the Memory of Campbell Peter,” in Knowles, Songs from the Land of the Wattle (Malvern, Victoria: The Author, 1916): Originally published in the Advocate, repr. in the Victorian Education Gazette (August 1915). 151 Ella McFadyen, “Stand By Your Men!,” in McFadyen, Songs of the Last Crusade: Verses of the Great War (including The Dead Chief) (North Sydney: The Author, 1917): 40. 149

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asks, “Why did they fight, and why did they die?”152 A poem of 1918 praises J.S. (“Jock”) Garden, New South Wales Labour Council Secretary, for having the strength to refuse pressure to enlist.153 The dominant mood of women’s verse in the early phase, though, is patriotic protestation, often accompanied by declarations of pride in sons, brothers or husbands who have volunteered. On the whole like the men, women poets maintained values they believed the war was being waged to defend. Where irony or sarcasm appears, in late 1915 and thereafter, the object is commonly the ’shirker’. There is small place for ’unwomanly’ roles, and next to none for resistance, in poetry that appeared in conservative papers and journals. Editors knew better than to challenge censorship by showing an even hand. The bulk of women’s poetry in conservative organs thus illustrates the broad extent of tribute (or lip-service) paid to women as supporters of the struggle, even where there appears to be a falling-off, towards the end of the war, in many writers’ adherence to 1914-style state ideology. If affirmation was a predominant mood in the early years, by 1916 the evidence of what their male relatives had been sent into was apparent in the death lists and the condition of the returned soldiers, and early optimism became tempered by moods of chagrin or desolation. Disillusion, rather than outright dissent, is the keynote of verse that reflects women’s weariness by 1918. Such a shift is noticeable in the contrast between the public-spirited early verse of Mary Gilmore (in a poem like “Australia Marching On”154) and poems such as “Measure” and “These Fellowing Men,” wherein she laments the death of “the young, the splendid young.”155 Throughout the War, Gilmore’s poetry oscillated between pride in the achievements of Australian servicemen and compassion for the suffering experienced by soldiers and civilians. Her work is a barometer of moods from exultation (at the defeat of the raider Emden by the battleship Sydney, for example) to revulsion at the carnage in France. Despondence was present in English and Australian verse of the pre-War decades; graphic depiction of harsh rural and urban labour conditions was not restricted to reportage and naturalistic and realistic fiction. The wartime elaboration of such poetical subjects as loss, bereavement and despair, to include mutilation and slaughter was unprecedented, and the scale of the experience contributed to the abandonment of Victorian and Georgian poetic diction and 152

Lala Fisher, “December 20, 1917,” in Fisher, Earth Spiritual (Sydney: The Author, 1918): 28–29. Fisher, “Progression,” in Fisher, Earth Spiritual, 11. 154 Mary Gilmore, “Australia Marching On,” The Worker (8 July 1915). 155 Mary Gilmore, “Measure” and “These Fellowing Men,” in Gilmore, The Passionate Heart (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1918): 1. 153

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its replacement with more realistic, even naturalistic language. In Australia, anachronistic phraseology continued to surface in men’s and women’s verse, though a gradual leavening of less decorous language and imagery marks the failure of clichés to express writers’ and readers’ first-hand experience of loss. Dissatisfaction with sentimental platitudes is especially evident in the succession of poems by more practised ‘professionals’. Early self-assurance gives way to measured reflection in the work of Zora Cross, for instance. Initial enthusiasm for patriotic gore is evident in “Follow the Flag: An Appeal to Arms”: Follow the march! Follow the march! A Briton has never failed In the thick of the fight, to follow the beat of the comrade who has hailed With a breaking Heart, in the reel of shell, for one to take his place, For one who answers the name of ‘mate’ – and the English fighting race.156

In her lengthy 1921 Elegy on An Australian Schoolboy, she wrote in quite different mood, as the broken rhythms and uneven line lengths indicate: I only know you, brother of my blood, Have gone; and many a friend, Trampled and broken in the Flanders mud, Found Youth’s most bitter end. God! You are not even one with the kind dust Before new war-horns blow And sleek-limbed statesmen in their halls break trust To tell of other woe.157

Another indication of the rise of realistic representation of emotions is the Tasmanian poet Helen Power’s “Killed in Action”: You failed me living; but now, in dying, There’s no more treachery, no more lying; No more women the worse for you, For the hearts of the dead perforce are true! So, freed from shame by your latest breath, I can love you proudly, at last, in Death.158

Clearly, such poems display mannerist elements but convey emotion in less formulaic language that the bombast or grandiloquence of the earlier war years.

156

Zora Cross, “Follow the Flag: An Appeal to Arms,” anonymous Queensland newspaper clipping (early 1916), Zora Cross Papers, Fisher Library. 157 Zora Cross, Elegy on an Australian Schoolboy (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1922): 17. 158 Helen Power, “Killed in Action,” Bulletin (13 December 1917): 3.

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Women’s accounts of combat and casualties are based, for the most part, on reports in the press and letters from soldier relatives and friends, and from verbal accounts by returned servicemen and nurses. An outstanding example of a poem that draws on the postal and conversational reports of army life is Eleanor MacKinnon’s “On Active Service.”159 Australian women doctors were denied a role in the Army Medical Corps, though some made their own way to England and served with Scottish and other medical services. Nurses and voluntary staff were present in some numbers in Egypt, England, France, Serbia and elsewhere, and Louise Mack and other women journalists reported such action as they observed. It’s worth noting that not all men’s poetry was written by soldier–poets; as authoritative anthologies indicate, interesting and even outstanding poems were written by civilians such as Laurence Binyon, Thomas Hardy, A.E. Housman, Rudyard Kipling, G.K. Chesterton, John Masefield, W.B. Yeats, and J.C. Squire.160 Women’s battle descriptions, like those of such men, generally follow the practice of earlier and popular novelists and poets, Imperial or otherwise, though even here realism can punctuate the account. Mabel Forrest’s proleptic poem “The Outpost” is redolent of set pieces in its opening lines: “A line of hills, a sudden spurt of flame, / A crackling volley, and from whence it came / A stirring.”161 The ready-made tone is transformed, though, by the inclusion of a train of “searching” ants passing over the slain soldier’s face, a detail similar to that of Mary Gilmore’s later poem “War,” which opens with the arresting image: “Out in the dust he lies; / Flies in his mouth, / Ants in his eyes.”162 Gilmore’s poem is the more memorable for its startling dramatization of a woman’s response to news of her son’s death in action while the image of a dog’s corpse in the street is fresh in her mind. A great number of poems express sympathy and pity for the soldiery in general. Particularly after the Australian forces’ first engagements at Gallipoli and France, the toll of dead and wounded mounted so rapidly that the sight of a clergyman in a suburban street became associated with bad news: Her son is fallen, gone her spirit’s light, The European wave has reached her heart – 159

Eleanor MacKinnon, “On Active Service: Bits from Jim’s Letters with an echo now and then from Mum,” in MacKinnon, Lilies of France and Other Poems (North Sydney: Winn, 1917): 17–23. 160 Represented in Poetry of the Great War: An Anthology, ed. Dominic Hibberd & John Onions (London: Macmillan, 1986); Poetry of the First World War, ed. Edward Hudson (Hove: Wayland, 1988). 161 Mabel Forrest, “The Outpost,” in An Austral Garden: An Anthology of Australian Verse, ed. M.H. Hansen & D. McLachlan (Melbourne: G. Robertson, 1913): 212. 162 Mary Gilmore, “War,” in Dark Somme Flowing, ed. Holloway, 67.

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The parson came and brought the news last night.163

In a later poem, Mary Fullerton records the transfer of this task to ordinary postmen: Young John, the postman, day by day, In sunshine or in rain, Comes down our road with words of doom In envelopes of pain.164

It is not surprising that some relatives as well as servicemen experienced crises of health and faith, and this is reflected in the proportion of the women’s poetry recording the loss or wounding of individual and often named relatives, friends, and neighbours. Zora Cross’s poem “Australia in England”165 is one example, recording the death of an Australian soldier in an English hospital; the poem is perhaps a first attempt to encompass the death of her younger brother, John Skyring Cross. The volume of such poems addressed to intimate acquaintances stands in stark contrast to the almost total absence of women’s poems commemorating male civilian or military leaders (the King is a notable exception). Early in the War, Emily Coungeau might celebrate Edith Cavell as a martyr,166 or Marion Miller Knowles pay tribute to two Catholic chaplains killed in action,167 but such memorials are of a piece with commemorations of ‘ordinary’ persons rather than great leaders of men. This focus on ‘ordinary’ fates is maintained in some poems that seek to situate the War in history. Especially as the immediacy of the conflict receded, writers reflected that the events would, like ancient wars, become inscrutable to later generations and take their place among the imponderables of human behaviour. Zora Cross’s “History” and Mary Gilmore’s “Battlefields” suggested how the War could strike future generations who had no part in it. Both poems contrast the implications of war for individuals engaged in it with the official rationales offered by politicians, financiers, military leaders and the clergy. Cross’s poem concludes, “ ‘ Ah, thus,’ I cried, ‘upon His grave God plays / The

163

Mary E. Fullerton [as ‘E’], “Next Door,” Birth: A Little Journal of Australian Poetry 2.24 (1918): 4. Mary E. Fullerton, “War Time,” in Fullerton, The Breaking Furrow (Melbourne: Commonwealth of Australia & Sydney J. Endacott, 1921): 29. 165 Zora Cross, “Australia in England,” in Cross, The Lilt of Life (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1918): 125. 166 Emily Coungeau, “Australia in England,” in Coungeau, Rustling Leaves, 108–109. 167 Marion Miller Knowles, “O Wondrous Love” and “Father Finn (Sedd-Ed-Bahr),” in Knowles, Songs from the Heart, 27 and 42–43 respectively 164

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mimic farce of everlasting Man’,”168 while Gilmore, in an imagined dialogue, acknowledges a dead soldier’s comradeship with “all the sacrificed: / We and the foe, and the Church’s outcast Christ.”169 Her poem “Battlefields” strikes a note similar to that of Siegfried Sassoon’s account of an English clergyman’s inadequate response to the reality experienced by the men.170 For Gilmore, “brothers” in arms included the soldiery faced by Australian men, and her poetry characteristically laments the futility of war, while acknowledging the inevitability of failure to resolve conflict by other means. In a late section of her Elegy on an Australian Schoolboy, Zora Cross pondered on the Australian boy’s “German mate” who also found “Youth’s most bitter end,” and on “every common mother’s son / Who died without a name.” Cross conveys her brother’s exuberant childhood patriotism: “England! For ever on your lips I heard Her praise above the rest,” and she distances herself from his enthusiasm: “Her boastful Saxon ways, Her bloody challenge to posterity, Her pride of other days.” Having established the scission between her brother’s dream and her disillusion, the speaker follows relentlessly, lamenting that her brother gave England “the boy-worship that a great land needs,” in return “For England’s cold, brown kiss.” The poet’s grief turns to anger, and she asks “Should I not dread to breed a living man / And give him to the world? […] But who considers woman day by day…?”171 Cross’s question may serve as a near-final word for this essay, though the breadth and depth of women’s World War One poetry clearly merits revisiting if we want to understand the withering of patriotic fervour that occurs in women’s poetry of subsequent wars. There was no wholesale conversion to pacifism in the women’s poetry during or immediately after World War One, and women and men continued to write poems commemorating ‘sacrifice’, Anzac, and Gallipoli long into the twentieth century. But the drift in the 1920s and 1930s to what Samuel Hynes has called “Wilfrid Owenism” and the “Myth” of the First World War grew apace in Australia, notably in women’s writing about the war.172 Their poetry after World War One expressed disenchantment with the 168

Zora Cross, “History,” unidentified newspaper cutting (no date), Zora Cross Papers, Fisher Library. 169 Mary Gilmore, “Battlefields,” in Mary Gilmore: A Tribute, ed. Dymphna Cusack, T. Inglis Moore & Barrie Ovendon (Sydney: Australasian Book Society, 1965): 191. 170 Siegfried Sassoon, “They,” in Georgian Poetry, ed. James Reeves (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981): 96. 171 Zora Cross, Elegy on an Australian Schoolboy, 22. 172 Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (1990; New York: Atheneum, 1991): 21.

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assumptions of security based on militarism, and the focus of their War poetry as such turned to accounts of the maimed and memorials to the missing. By the late 1930s war is hardly a topic of women’s verse. It would resurface after the ‘phony war’ and gather momentum through the Battle of Britain and notably after the fall of Singapore and Rabaul, but marked by melancholy and stoicism, not the enthusiasm of the first flush of verse in 1914–15. In subsequent wars, there was even less evidence of such patriotism as marked women’s poetry at the start of the First World War.

——————— Starting From Melbourne173 ———————

C

H R I S W A L L A C E –C R A B B E has always been an engaging literary critic and acerbic commentator on Australian culture, and his literary essays, criticism, reviews, and fiction have been generally discussed in isolation from his poetry. In this essay, I trace some of the illuminations that his essays, criticism, and writings on poetics shed on the preoccupations revealed in his poetry. These preoccupations, pervasive and porous, include the phenomenon of poetry, the exploration in his poetry and prose (and that of other writers) of what he calls “value,” the yearning for some system of belief of which language is a volatile expression, and the correspondence of images or myths of individual and national identity with changing circumstances. They constitute a unified and coherent pattern of testing language’s capacity to foreground desired ‘meaning’ while holding in balance accretions that threaten the overthrow of precision. One of Wallace–Crabbe’s referential markers throughout his verse is the character of his home city, which at times provides a filter through which other localities and modes of living are viewed, but which alters in the light of his actual and intellectual journeying. As a satirist and writer of verse that has sometimes been categorized as light verse, personal lyrics, or verse directed at fellow academics, he has expressed frustration with labels, including varieties of postmodernism and nationalism, which latter he has consistently probed in his poetry and prose writings. He has also waged polemic against what he sees as obscurantist or misleading ways of presenting or describing poetry, and the tone has correspondingly ranged from playful engagement through to impatient dismissal. Wallace–Crabbe’s prose, like his poetry, seems to me distinctively of Melbourne – by which I mean a certain tone of wry urbanity as he ruminates on the pleasures of parochialism and cosmopolitanism, tribal allegiance and truth to 173 

J A S A L 6.1 (2007): 104–19.

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oneself, high culture and pop culture, order and turbulence. He doesn’t muffle his blows against what he sees as ideologically driven literary critics, educators, bureaucrats or politicians, though he wields satire in his verse with élan that makes many of his best-known contemporaries’ efforts in the mode seem timorous, vindictive, or obtuse. He acknowledges, and seeks to clarify, with genial candour, apparent contradictory impulses that fire his enthusiasms. In his most recent collection of essays, Wallace–Crabbe counts among “ideological bullies” those schoolteachers and academics who dislike poetry because it is “an art not easily reducible to the coarse readings that they wish to impose on it,” and who correspondingly pass on their distaste to their students.174 In “Poetry, Prophecy and Vestiges,” another essay in the same collection,175 he endorses James McAuley’s view (expressed in a period “long before the arrival of serious managerial nonsense on our campuses”) of the propensity of the “scholar–teacher” to fall upon “an author who attracts him as a beast of prey upon a victim.” It’s demoralizing to be reminded of the intensity and longevity of the attack upon literature by its ostensible allies in the academy (and the struggle of poets and writers to defend their art against such treasonable clerks). In the matter of discerning and epitomizing what underlies a body of another poet’s work, Wallace–Crabbe more often than not offers a point of view with such clarity that one wonders why the matter hasn’t been scrutinized, assessed, and enunciated so well before. One such distillation occurs in “The Absence of Metaphysics,” a lecture delivered at (and published by) James Cook University in 1983: What I am asserting is that I find remarkably few Australian writers, even among the best, whose work bears witness to a system of metaphysical beliefs which genuinely informs that work. And this is intimately linked with the fact that there are no writers here whose work commands the kind of overwhelmed allegiance to a whole way of thinking and feeling that we find demanded by the work of Blake or Lawrence or Yeats or Shelley or Beckett or Proust.176

Wallace–Crabbe seeks coherence in poetry and life – difficult enough, as he often attests in his poetry, when one is in medias res. The interest in poetry that

174

“In the Pop Age Or the Battle Between the Weak and the Strong,” in Wallace–Crabbe, Read It Again (Cambridge: Salt, 2005): 46 (44–57). 175 “Poetry, Prophecy and Vestiges,” in Wallace–Crabbe, Read It Again, 21–32. 176 Wallace–Crabbe, “The Absence of Metaphysics,” in Three Absences in Australian Writing (Townsville: Queensland Foundation for Australian Literary Studies, James Cook University of North Queensland, 1983): 15 (15–27).

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embodies some “metaphysical belief” provides a clue to his concern to image forth in his own poetry a concern with values worth maintaining. It also characterizes his critical essays from the 1960s to the present. In an essay in Grahame Johnston’s Australian Literary Criticism, Wallace–Crabbe sought some firm “moral criteria” in Such Is Life,177 but, as W.M. Maidment observed, his search resulted in a moral judgment that appeared to confuse Furphy as author with Tom Collins as character.178 No such wobble appears in the JCU lectures, where Wallace–Crabbe gets closer to the various “systems” that underpin poetry of writers as various as Brennan, Baylebridge, McAuley, Stewart, Campbell, Hart– Smith, FitzGerald, Wright, Tranter, and Forbes. These poets’ “systems” range from idealism (Brennan, Baylebridge) through to anti-metaphysical modes of thought (Tranter, Forbes). En route, Wallace– Crabbe traces McAuley’s journey from “apocalyptic to sardonic late-Romantic and vision-hungry” early poetry through to belief in a mélange of mediaevalizing Catholicism (which included a firm sense of the ‘normal society’ and the ‘perennial poetry’) with Andersonian realism in epistemology and sceptical pluralism as a basis for social organization.179

Wallace–Crabbe could unpack this baggage in greater detail than the space of his lecture permits, but one senses that, for all that he appreciates McAuley’s commitment to holding a position, McAuley appears in the light of a Laocoön rather than as a light-bearer. In Stewart, Campbell, and Hart–Smith, Wallace– Crabbe finds positivist assumptions that enable convincing renderings of experience without offering any philosophy or ideas. If Wallace–Crabbe’s 1983 account could not locate any “systematic” ontology in the poetry of Judith Wright, he usefully discriminates between her “recurrent hunger for transcendence or immanence”180 that not even later commentators would convincingly argue was crystallized in a unified and unifying bio-aesthetic. Wallace–Crabbe’s comments on the “anaesthetic” poetry of Forbes and Tranter include the crispest encapsulation of what he calls this “self-destruct” poetry’s foundations in scepticism and nihilism concerning language. He can identify the joyous reception of such poetry while emphasizing its anti-

177

Wallace–Crabbe, “Joseph Furphy, Realist,” in Australian Literary Criticism, ed. Grahame Johnston (London & Melbourne: Oxford U P , 1962): 146 (139–47). Originally published in Quadrant 5.2 (1960–61): 49–56. 178 W.M. Maidment, “Australian Literary Criticism,” Southerly 24.1 (1964): 33 (20–41). 179 Wallace–Crabbe, “The Absence of Metaphysics,” 17. 180 “The Absence of Metaphysics,” 20.

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humanist and anti-metaphysical assumptions.181 The lecture underscores his probing, in his own poems, for a “human” resolution of contraries that will make of poetry more than a solipsistic exercise or jokey parlour game. He perceives the provisional nature of poetry and the world, and if we tend to see his recent essays as glosses on his own verse, or draft position statements (a “poetics”), I think it wise to watch the ball closely. In his most recent essay on John Forbes, he observes: One last point: few or no poets perform in fact according to the dictates of their poetics. Practice entails ambiguity: the truest poetry is the most feigning, or the most perplexedly yearning. And in this respect attention should certainly be paid to the fact that Forbes wanted to bespeak leftwing politics, but had to do so at the end in a poetry that by his definition could not bespeak anything in the external world. Did he contradict himself? Very well, he contradicted himself.182

This mode of criticism characteristically probes and worries in order to get at the bones of an argument. One of his consistent concerns is with why he writes about the things he does. Such self-reflexiveness may make him a writer’s writer, or an essayist’s essayist, but it’s more engaging than that. Wallace– Crabbe’s passions and doubts are infectious, and his writing is like good conversation with a speaker who is thinking on his feet, drawing effortlessly on a reservoir of cultural and social reference. Peter Steele noted, as early as 1970, that Wallace–Crabbe “broods in a world which broods in him,” and that he “doubts, as R.P. Blackmur said of Montaigne, ‘in order to bring his mind, not to obloquy or disuse, but to responsive action’.”183 It is this ruminative dialogue with self that pre-empts easy objections to his conclusions. While his poems may overtly appear to work through to conclusions that will strike some readers as wrapping up, in a didactic tag, the matter the works contain, the poems also contain dissonant elements that open out their argument even while the concluding lines neatly resolve the technical problem posed by each work. The self-questioning impulse runs through his writing about his city: proprietorial and defensive, it’s expansive enough to encompass the faultfinding that is the provincial’s prerogative. “Citizen,” a much-discussed poem from The Music of Division, portrayed a disgruntled suburbanite “numbly” picking his way 181 182

“The Absence of Metaphysics,” 23. “Strangled Rhetoric and Damaged Glamour,” in Wallace–Crabbe, Read It Again, 105 (98–

107). 183

Peter Steele, “To Move in Light: The Poetry of Chris Wallace–Crabbe,” Meanjin 29.2 (1970): 152 (149–55).

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among the traffic rolling “toward the solemn ritual of work,” “among the houses where the world had sinned.” The poem concludes: ‘Complacent city with your brazen bells and morning song…’ He called for words to cease, For citizens to know their proper Hells and anger to bloom green upon the trees.184

While the last lines lock down the poetical structure, the reverberation of “proper Hells” invites readers to contemplate each citizen’s private torment, though, as the focal character of the poem implies, their consciousness does not extend so far as his own. Whether we’re to believe that Wallace–Crabbe endorses such a conclusion is a moot point: that focal character is not so easily identified with Wallace–Crabbe himself, and the private hell may strike us after all as a figment of the character’s imagination. “Melbourne,” a poem included in the 1963 collection In Light and Darkness, ripens the thought, describing the city in terms of negatives and equivocations, as located “Not on the ocean, on a muted bay.” The matter of authorial positioning may be less ambiguous than that in “Citizen.” In “Melbourne,” the citizens’ blood, like the water of the bay “flows easily, / Not warm, not cold (in all things moderate).” The city stifles thought: “Ideas are grown in other gardens,” and “Old tunes are good enough, if sing we must.”185 Disgruntlement rises to curmudgeonly finesse in the concluding stanza: Highway by highway, the remorseless cars Strangle the city, put it out of pain, Its limbs still kicking feebly on the hills. Nobody cares. The artists sail at dawn For brisker ports, or rot in public bars. Though much has died here, little has been born.186

Wallace–Crabbe’s sometimes ambiguous accounts of Melbourne in such early poems are close-ups of one of the “five teeming sores” of A.D. Hope’s 1939 poem, “Australia,”187 though he does not always add the equivalent of Hope’s salutary grace-note. Wallace–Crabbe’s poetry would in subsequent years ring many changes on his own frustrations and impatience with Australia. “Traditions, Voyages” addresses a history of Jamaica, to claim: 184

“Citizen,” in Wallace–Crabbe, The Music of Division (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1959): 25. “Melbourne,” in Wallace–Crabbe, In Light and Darkness (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1963): 4. 186 “Melbourne,” 5. 187 A.D. Hope, “Australia,” in Hope, Collected Poems 1930–1970 (1966; Sydney: Angus & Robertson, rev, ed. 1972): 13. 185

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We had, perhaps, our Middle Passage too, Irishman and felon stank in the holds When frail barques ferried the Enlightenment, Already dim and faint.

In what is a near-trademark gesture by Wallace–Crabbe in these poems on his natal land, the poem concludes with a scrap of autobiographical reference: My heel grinds in the white sand As I am driven to confront Drab skyline, yellowing papers, a fat land.”188

The distaste is palpable, like that of Patrick White for the denizens of Sarsaparilla, that fictional suburb of the other great wen, Sydney. Both writers drew sustenance – Wallace–Crabbe still does – from this odi et amo attachment to place. David McCooey has noted that “the hells and anger” of Wallace–Crabbe’s suburban citizens “are presented through intensely suburban imagery, suggesting that the hell of suburbia is of a piece with the suburban paradise,” a paradise of nostalgic myth that ignores the “new suburb” that lies “just behind” even such idealizations as Streeton’s bucolic images of Heidelberg.189 Such contradictory sentiments (stubborn attachment to and sometimes desire to remove from one’s locality) are not limited to the Melbournian temperament, though Wallace–Crabbe has been consistent in canvassing the range for more than forty years. In his essay “Melbourne in 1963,” he noted that “Barbarous drinking conditions, dead Sundays, and an ineradicable cult of mediocrity deter [the citizens] not at all.” Further, “The prospect of going to a smaller State capital or to a provincial city seems like a living death and there is little impulse to emigrate to Sydney.”190 Many inhabitants of those smaller cities (and fanatical Sydney loyalists) might reciprocate the sentiment, but Melbourne has exercised allure for as many who have rejoiced in its contradictions and lived there for any appreciable time – even in that ‘dead’ era of the early 1960s. Wallace–Crabbe’s Melbourne soundings, though, in verse as much as in prose through the 1960s to the 1990s, record the resignation of a navigator stranded in mud. His 1990s poems and essays reveal another tack, to a stronger current bearing him and the raft of his city into international waters. In part, the fluidity 188

“Traditions, Voyages,” in Wallace–Crabbe, The Rebel General (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1967): 10. 189 David McCooey, “Neither Here Nor There: Suburban Voices in Australian Poetry,” Australian Literary Studies 18.4 (1998): 106 (101–14). 190 “Melbourne in 1963” (1963), in Wallace–Crabbe, Melbourne or the Bush: Essays on Australian Literature and Society (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1974): 165.

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of his work may reflect his frequent journeys abroad, which supply welcome derangement of fixed perspective that such travel confers. In those later poems, the very language he employs is scrutinized for its adequacy to contain a precise sense of place or time. That shift is evident in many of the poems in his 1988 collection I’m Deadly Serious, a book in which he takes stock of his father’s death and ponders his own and others’ fates. Impatience with received versions of history runs through “Sporting the Plaid,” concerning a Victorian-era military grandparent. Sarcasm tinges irony in the final lines summing up a life spent “ensuring the flood of opium / for a smoky god and fleshpink empire.”191 Here, Australia is a matter of “Caledonian societies, tatty diamond mines and a second family” for “the old buck” in his retirement from service of the Raj. Wallace–Crabbe’s avowed kinship with such a colonial founding father expands our sense of his uneasiness with contemporary Australia. An earlier poem, “Stuff Your Classical Heritage,” extends the argument over and with language: Gull, grevillea, galvo, Gippsland, grit – just singing out the chorus, bit by bit will get me some purchase on the primal scene.192

That first line’s catalogue of familiar dinkum touchstones will be reprised in poems throughout the 1990s and beyond, where Wallace–Crabbe rolls out a clutch of clattering alliterations like a kid disclosing a fresh-won handful of new marbles. The purpose, though, is intrinsic to his scholar–poet apologia: By naming, I seem to crush the past like a mattress, hard down to history’s rusty cabin-trunk: stick it in the cellar. In a way, I preach the destruction of Europe, that mental Europe which I love so much. Cancel it. Smother it with ripe new words or old ones triumphantly misapplied.193

The signal inclusion of “triumphantly” sounds a conciliatory note in a collection otherwise preoccupied with loss and liberation. In “Objects, Odours,” Wallace– Crabbe speaks of “the steady, flowing, / interminable guff / of your grey elders and betters” that darkens the schoolchild’s or adult’s awareness of the world until, contemplating the tangible “language of wood” in “an empty schoolroom / 191 192 193

“Sporting the Plaid,” in Wallace–Crabbe, I’m Deadly Serious (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1988): 33. “Stuff Your Classical Heritage,” in I’m Deadly Serious, 8. “Stuff Your Classical Heritage,” 8.

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or a webby toolshed’s / damp lattice,” one begins to “catch some crude gist / spot on, gingerly.”194 Such growth of individualism is a product of acknowledging the “rough concordance” of words and their relationship, however “crude,” with things thought and felt. It may be that other shifts occur in Wallace–Crabbe’s verse and critical writing around the end of the 1980s, but I note a more intense focus on language itself that will inform the writing of the next decade and a half. Concomitant with this concentration is the increasing tendency to dwell upon poetics rather than upon issues of nationalism in Australian fiction and poetry. Compare, for instance, the essay topics in Read It Again with the more restricted ‘national’ themes of those in Melbourne or the Bush, or Wallace–Crabbe’s editorial comment in Six Voices: Contemporary Australian Poets on his selection of poems that might reflect “how life is on this continent” – poems which might reveal that “the modes of desperation current in so much Western culture are not necessarily essential truth.”195 Another feature that will become apparent in the poetry towards the appearance of By and Large (2001) and The Universe Looks Down (2005) is the interest in expansive sequences of poems. The ten “Sonnets to the Left” constitute an easy discursive–digressive meditation on the idea of progress. Wallace–Crabbe can “rejoice” in “antibiotics, the dental drill, clean drains” and much else about modernity, while acknowledging the problem of Trying to find a frame in which to fit Large things that progress bundles out of sight: Grief, awe, terror, transcendent light.196

This is a striking statement: the nifty subversion of the idea of progress with reference to the “Large things” with which “deadly serious” poetry is concerned will serve as a leaping-off point for subsequent sonnets commemorating idealism that has taken a dive. These rueful poems address Judah Waten’s unreconstructed Stalinism, and other ‘isms’ of the left (“Sonnet II,” 27), as well as the contortions of theory by which the Left abandoned its vaunted roots in the proletariat and embraced “new brands of foreign cringe” and bourgeois manners (“Sonnet VI ,” 29). Wallace–Crabbe is dismissive of American claims of friendship, and the sonnets move through rejection of both American and Comintern priorities for other nations, to acclaim the “Fuckwit and smartarse, 194

“Objects, Odours,” in I’m Deadly Serious, 9. Wallace–Crabbe, in Six Voices: Contemporary Australian Poets, ed. Wallace–Crabbe (Sydney: McGraw–Hill, rev. ed. 1974): 4. 196 “Sonnet I,” in I’m Deadly Serious, 27. 195

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trendocrats and folk” element of the ocker temperament that he wryly celebrates in the person of “that bold Rhadamanthus” and “our patriot” Jack Lang (“Sonnet VI II ” and “Sonnet I X ,” 30–31). The sonnets don’t conclude with this “rough platoon of sonnetry / affirming Land Rights and democracy” (31), but with a capstone poem (“Sonnet X”) that offers a sort of vision splendid, of a nation-state that has hauled itself out of “fiscal mess” through its homespun ideals and effort, to a land “peacocked” with tribal sites (31). Nice try, one might say, in retrospect, recollecting certain optimistic projections of the Bicentennial era. In “Modern Times,” the acidulous series of forty sonnets at the heart of the collection By and Large, Wallace–Crabbe takes a shorter view of “progress”: “There rise in broken, dopey ranks / the newer generations of despair.” This dispensation is relieved only by a personal sense that one has been “reborn many times” by refusing to despair.197 The sustaining element in Wallace–Crabbe’s case is a growing sense of the absurdity of politics, deluded leaders and idealists, and the saving grace of comedy. In this respect, the tone of Wallace–Crabbe’s performance resembles that of Juvenal in his third Satire, a monologue on what Gilbert Highet called “the power and vileness of the big city,”198 a place where honesty was not rewarded, an impoverished underclass existed side by side with corrupt wealthy nobles, and the sacred native landscape was ruined and profaned by “expensive marble in the baroque style, gorgeous and unreal.”199 Taken together, “Modern Times” corroborates Wallace–Crabbe’s remark to Paul Kane that the role of the creative artist “may sometimes be cheeky, subversive or satirical but at root, beyond all this, the arts are concerned with value; or if you like, with values.”200 The ‘cheeky’, satirical, and angry moods of “Modern Times” are those of the decent citizen-worker, like Chaplin’s character in the 1936 silent movie, desperately trying to meet his employer’s increased demands and thereby exacerbating the conditions of subservience that culminate in rational collapse. Between the “Sonnets to the Left” and “Modern Times,” the romance with language has deepened. In “The Inheritance,” an “ostensible accommodation” appears in the easier vernacular, the self-deprecation and overall caginess of reflections on the Englishness of the English language. This is quite deceptive, 197

“Modern Times,” in Wallace–Crabbe, By and Large (Rose Bay, N S W : Brandl & Schlesinger, 2001): 62. 198 Gilbert Highet, Juvenal the Satirist: A Study (Oxford: Clarendon, 1954): 65. 199 Highet, Juvenal the Satirist, 69. 200 Paul Kane, “Paul Kane talks with Chris Wallace–Crabbe about poetry and other Australian topics,” Antipodes 12.2 (1998): 106 (105–107).

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though. “Dunked into life,” he claims, “I let this language buoy me up,” and the poem looks over inherited words again, as if they were museum specimens: “nasty, nice, nectarine, nasturtium, noun.” He remarks of his earlier saturation in the language: “I couldn’t see it didn’t fit, / making it do so anyway, / eliding what was grossly wrong.” In this review of earlier assumptions, Realpolitik is skewered: “City Fathers / had long conspired with Empirespeak / by cancelling native foliage,” and “Empirespeak,” “this international currency,” is now seen for what it is: “as cunning as a leaning dunny.” In a grotesque final comment, Wallace–Crabbe remarks, concerning this language, “We swim along with it. We swim and drown.”201 This excremental view of language is much more playfully, even joyously, reprised in “Puck Disembarks,” another poem of the era in the same collection. Here, Wallace–Crabbe conjures a Fellini-esque vignette that has Puck taking stock on arrival in Australia, of “a wilderness without fairies or dairies, / Whose Dreaming he cannot read,” a country where mosquitoes lead him to think of swallows, and where the “alien magpies can sing like Titania / In love with a kangaroo.” Puckish tricks include watering the gin and selling it to “snubnosed natives,” and daubing on the commissary tent “George the Turd,” until at length this transported larrikin sprite comes to love this “paradise of Schadenfreude.”202 The avowal of Schadenfreude catches the tone of Wallace– Crabbe’s earliest pensées: the postcolonial hero regarding fellow beings and taking consolation, if not pleasure in the thought that others most appear foolish when parading their self-esteem. In poems that precede “The Inheritance” and “Puck Disembarks” in For Crying Out Loud, Wallace–Crabbe seems, by contrast with his earlier lyrical practice, to toss the language in the air and enjoy its coruscations. Each stanza of “Puck Disembarks” is metrically neat, rhythmically supple, cunningly rhymed, and concludes with a brilliant phrase that undercuts the formal language of the preceding five lines, so that Puck observes: “The foliage looks pretty crook” and: “This land is all wombat-shit.” In “The Life of Ideas,” another plunge into childhood reading and fascination with language, Wallace–Crabbe ravels out strings of words relating to plants and their properties, words that jostle each other so as to highlight their arbitrariness. He concludes: “Language is the language of languages.”203 This view of language as a thing at once spontaneously utile, intellectually engaging and tantalizingly inexact stirs meditations on the poet’s craft

201 202 203

“The Inheritance,” in Wallace–Crabbe, For Crying Out Loud (Melbourne: Oxford U P , 1990): 27. “Puck Disembarks,” in For Crying Out Loud, 43. “The Life of Ideas,” in For Crying Out Loud, 2.

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in succeeding volumes, all of which contain works characterized by shifts in register from pungent demotic to sometimes noble speech. The poems of Rungs of Time (1993), Whirling (1998), and By and Large demonstrate increasing international perspective and global concern that situates the regional even more sharply as barometer of cultural and political pressures. David McCooey finds a “more elegiac, self dramatising persona” that characterizes Whirling,204 and the poems of that volume appear to bear out the disorientating effects of personal grief in almost every topic Wallace–Crabbe dwells on. “Modern Times,” the worry-bead of sonnets that gives weight to By and Large, illustrates the efficacy of taking the part for the whole. In the first poem of the series, “Canberra” turns to synecdoche: “Crumbs it is capital to be here, dozing / Through a dream city.”205 This comical twist on Whitman’s loafing and inviting his soul accretes irony as the poem tries on the varieties of language that might fit the local, national and global circumstances that propel the sonnets. In “Sonnet XXX ,” Wallace–Crabbe underscores this new “Song of Myself” with his opening line, “Starting from Canberra, we’re back in Melbourne, / My street as rich as a landscape by Bellini,” thus simultaneously sporting a maturer vision of his home city.206 By contrast, the township of Canberra is deployed like a classical symphony Over which the insufficiently mad ministers Are planning to unfuck the economy.207

Wallace–Crabbe’s cabined and confined city of Melbourne in the somnolent 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s has become a place of departures and arrivals where “the heart of freedom’s found / walking suburban streets at night,” while the federal capital provokes contemplation of the grander illusions that hold a nation together: a “bunfest on Mateship, / that oldest vessel in the Federation navy,” and similar myths.208 The physical descriptions of Canberra in the poem do not convey the lived-in feel of a city to anything like the extent of the images of Melbourne in the poem and elsewhere in Wallace–Crabbe’s poetic and prosaic accounts of the southern metropolis. Canberra is a site of memorials to mythical values (duty, nationhood, perhaps pragmatism) that may add up to a national imaginary. The punning affirmation that “it is capital” to be in Canberra is less 204

David McCooey, “Contemporary Poets: Across the Partylines,” in The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature, ed. Elizabeth Webby (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2000): 178. 205 Wallace–Crabbe, “Canberra,” in By and Large, 37. 206 “Sonnet X X X ,” in By and Large, 55. 207 “Canberra,” in By and Large, 37. 208 “Canberra,” 24.

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evidence of what Dennis Haskell sees as Wallace–Crabbe’s propensity to adopt an Audenesque distance from his subject209 than to cover his chagrin at the reality behind the myths in rueful irony. I think this sense of the capital’s unreality stems from Wallace–Crabbe’s authentic sense of what it is to live in an all-too-human entrepôt city, a fallible cosmopolis. Melbourne paradoxically provides Wallace–Crabbe and many of its littérateurs with an unusual sense that one resides in a civilized and civilizing enclave of however many millions. Perhaps because of rather than despite its notorious historical busts and booms, or the longueurs to which Wallace– Crabbe referred in his 1963 essay, Melbourne underwrites its poets’ confidence in their visions, whether O’Dowd’s optimistic faith in the coming fulfilment of Democracy, Furnley Maurice’s in egalitarianism of the sort exemplified in his “Melbourne Odes,” through to Vincent Buckley’s and Peter Steele’s miscellaneous visions of a Just City, or the rackety anarchism of Alan Wearne and  . All these poets are in a sense licensed, like Wallace–Crabbe, to criticize as well as celebrate as the mind and spirit dictate – perhaps in any other city but Melbourne, an avowal of a writer’s licence to speak on civic standards or moral values might provoke change of topic or laughter. The edge of self-deprecation in Wallace–Crabbe’s verse-satires and prose ruminations on the values associated with his city could suggest to some readers that, in his earlier work, he gives way to youthful frustrated idealism, and, in his later work, to merely sportive ambiguity. Such a reading would deny complexity; as Haskell notes, Wallace–Crabbe can simultaneously manifest detachment from the scene and reveal his own “heart.” 210 Wallace–Crabbe’s poetry is protean to a greater degree, I think, than has been remarked upon in reviews of individual collections or his Selected Poems 1956–1994 – though Peter Steele, in his review of Wallace–Crabbe’s earliest work, notes: The trouble with poets, from a critic’s point of view, is brilliantly served. […] The reason’s clear enough: particularly in the past ten years, few reviewers – McCooey is a notable exception – appear to have systematically read his works, both criticism and essays, from the first publications through to the most recent.

While individual collections of poems may be said to have about them a particular tone or mood (edgy or acerbic, perhaps, in the case of the first two or three 209

Dennis Haskell, “Poetry Since 1965,” in The Oxford Literary History of Australia, ed. Bruce Bennett & Jennifer Strauss (Melbourne: Oxford U P , 1998): 281. 210 Haskell, “Poetry Since 1965,” 281.

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collections; reflective, occasionally satirical, and even playful, as in the 1970s volumes through to the profound reflections on time, memory, and language in The Emotions Are Not Skilled Workers, The Amorous Cannibal, and I’m Deadly Serious in the 1980s), brief book-review summaries understate the variety within each collection and overall. The appearance in these and other volumes of poems that are, by some accounts, satirical in intent or ‘light’ in nature may account for mislabellings of Wallace–Crabbe. His appeal to a broad range of readers and listeners (at a wide range of venues) may make him unusually prone to be categorized by those who qualify the word ‘poet’ by ‘academic’: he is less likely than Peter Porter or Les Murray to send readers to their dictionaries and compendia. This business of mingling different approaches and modes within a single volume is crucial to any consideration of Wallace–Crabbe’s most recent poetry. What he observes concerning the poetry of A.D. Hope might be applied to his own poetry. He writes: Attempts to characterize A.D. Hope’s poetry fail very frequently because of a common tendency to see his oeuvre holistically. Simple caricatures emerge, portraying him in bold strokes as neoclassical, Parnassian, art nouveau, anti-modernist, remorselessly iambic or whatever.211

Martin Duwell wrote perceptively, if holistically, of “the familiar features” present in Wallace–Crabbe’s By and Large, listing a baroque and intense intellectual ambit combined with playfulness; a deep love of the sharp thinginess of the world combined with a love of the expressiveness of words we use to contain it; and, last but far from least, enjoyable phrasemaking.212

While acknowledging all these qualities, Duwell found that “the reader’s pleasure seems more attenuated,” and he proceeded to remark on the “intriguing” central section of the book, the “Modern Times” sonnet sequence, which he found “full of deliberate vulgarities: terrible jokes that only a Freudian could love.”213 The poet has hopped out of his box, and more worryingly gone off on a strange new tack, cracking awful jokes and, to the reviewer’s mind, even failing to complete one of the sonnets (number IX, concerning the Holocaust). This last failure is no lapse at all: the poem possesses fourteen lines – of which three consist of dieresis dots. In terms of technique, the poem has some 211 212 213

“True Tales and False Alike Work by Suggestion,” in Read It Again, 72 (72–83). Martin Duwell, “Jaffles or Cassoulet,” Australian Book Review 234 (2000): 51 (51–52). Duwell, “Jaffles or Cassoulet,” 51.

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kinship with Ezra Pound’s 1916 poem modelled on a fragment of papyrus,214 but it deals with a more lamentable fate. In terms of broken lines and fragmented grammar underscoring the theme of horror, loss, and dissolution of consciousness, the poem has more in common with a vast range of Jewish, German, Austrian, Russian, Polish, and other poetry recording the experience that Wallace– Crabbe broaches. In short, the poem works; following Sonnet VII I ,215 which conjures up the threatening intimation by a Kafkaesque bureaucracy that it has “noticed” the citizen-subject of the poem, the fragmented Sonnet I X seems uncannily apt. The ensuing poem takes up the theme of the failed Aufklärung with “The time comes when you want to start again; / Rewriting Western Civ is a bed of nails.”216 The poems in the first and third sections of the book, which sandwich “Modern Times,” might be characterized more easily in terms of those intellectual and technical features that Duwell enunciates. Cassandra Atherton, though, commenting on evidence of the reinvigoration of earlier themes in By and Large, emphasizes the “autobiographical nature of the creative process” and focuses on resurgence of a “visceral, sexualized” persona in many of the poems that frame “Modern Times.”217 What Duwell and other reviewers did not or could not (because of editors’ restrictions) make of such poems as “Cloud Chambers of Taxonomy” might be clarified in Wallace–Crabbe’s self-styled “rope of stories” that make up The Universe Looks Down. Here, the catholicity of allusiveness – including stylistic allusiveness that may stymie reviewers confronted with witty verse not written in blindingly obvious jokey form – seems to me bound to elude encapsulation in snappy reviews. Do we have any reviewers who can spot Ariosto’s Renaissance flying circus, Byron’s Pulcian, Ariostan, Bernian, and Whistlecraftian modes, and Auden’s Letters from Iceland all fleetingly and flytingly engaged in an extended serio-comic narrative that reads like an anime in which B.S. Johnson, Michael Moorcock, and the best sports writers in Australia have had a hand? Again, McCooey, observing “the ludic and stylistic elements” in Wallace– Crabbe’s work up to 1996,218 may be the exception that proves the rule. But one 214

Ezra Pound, [“Papyrus”], in Personae: The Shorter Poems, ed. L. Baechler & A. Walton Litz (New York: New Directions, 1990): 115. 215 “Sonnet V I I I ,” in By and Large, 42. 216 “Sonnet I X ,” in By and Large, 43. 217 Cassandra Atherton, “‘The Edge of Something’: Stasis and Rebirth in the Recent Poetry of Chris Wallace–Crabbe,” Antipodes 17.1 (2003): 38 (38–42). 218 David McCooey, “Leisure and Grief: The Recent Poetry of Chris Wallace–Crabbe,” Australian Literary Studies 17.4 (1996): 333 (332–43).

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doesn’t have to tabulate all the degrees and inclinations of wit in the tale in order to be able to read it at a gallop and admire the stretchy bounce of the stanza Wallace–Crabbe has invented that allows him to switch from story to story and from narrative to digression as the mood takes him. If this is Wallace– Crabbe’s most sustained essay in light verse, it’s his most serious single poem – the apogee, so far, of what he has to say that is profoundly worth saying. Its plain-dealing, often racy, sometimes hip language, as well as its abrupt changes of scene and perspective, mimic visual novels and comics, and it’s not fanciful to conceive of the poem as a movie, perhaps in the manner of the recent translation to film of Tristram Shandy, or some early film treatments of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. The Universe Looks Down, for all that it has some commonality with sciencefiction plots, is ‘grounded’ in the writer’s striving for language to convey the nature of artistic creation. The characters of this story – fictional emanations of the author, occupying a Star Trek-type craft capable of penetrating inner as well as outer space – no sooner conceive of things than those things are become real. Wallace–Crabbe plays with this notion from several angles, ‘realizing’ situations that have their foundation in personal and public history and even querying the concept of realism: the narrator remarks that he might, “with Brian MacFarlane,” long ago “have contracted realism, like a ’flu.” 219 He carries his imaginative quest to the end of the poem, when his characters “escape from lives inside my text […] into the various What’s Next / Aspects of what we mean by the world” (64). This is serious play under the guise of comic verse: at the conclusion, Wallace–Crabbe reveals his female hero, Milena, as himself, “framer of the dance in which this handful / Of heroes tried out, variously, What could be shaped” (67). The light-verse epyllion closes with an endorsement that “we are both what we love and what we mean”: in quasi-musical terms, one might say, the diapason closes full in love. The poem is witty, or ludic in the sense that Sidney’s “zodiac” of wit or Coleridge’s “imagination” proposes: it endorses the poet’s freedom to figure forth things that never had existence in such form. This serious business challenges our idea of creation, and, unsurprisingly, the characters in the poem turn to geometry, philosophy, and theology in their pursuit of ‘meaning’. The hero-figure Milena is at once beloved woman, perhaps muse, and counter-ego of the poet. Like Auden, Wallace–Crabbe uses light verse as a litmus paper of society. We might dispose of Auden’s view that light verse is the product of an integrated 219

Wallace–Crabbe, The Universe Looks Down (Blackheath, N S W : Brandl & Schlesinger, 2005): 61.

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society, if it were not for the fact that so much of what Wallace–Crabbe has packed into The Universe Looks Down is familiar territory for Australian readers navigating often discordant ‘information’ rather than congruent images from local, national, and global media. One of the most illuminating essays on Auden’s light verse is Wallace–Crabbe’s “The Good Christian Practises Light Verse,” a signal inclusion in his critical volume Toil and Spin. There, Wallace– Crabbe argues that Auden’s light verse covers “unmentionable private experience” while posing as a virtuosic game.220 Auden’s concern for order and calm is the counter to deeply unsettling events and promptings, and the essay reveals Wallace–Crabbe’s affinity with such an approach to the serious business of light verse. His earlier poems expressing alarm at the way Australian and European society has tended were marked by a note of disappointment that people behave the way they do. In The Universe Looks Down, he has exploded the scope. Now Asia and the Pacific, Africa and South America contribute their characters to the plot, playfully cocking snooks at postcolonial and postmodern theory, Wallace–Crabbe’s deep inner- and outer-space time-voyagers populate a virtual world that simulates the multi-dimensional world we in fact inhabit. In an early essay on A.D. Hope, Wallace–Crabbe noted, concerning “that extravagant piece, ‘Soledades of the Sun and the Moon’,” that It is rather like those bravura pieces which the Augustans wrote for Saint Cecilia’s Day, a species of light verse, but a light verse of elevation rather than of frivolity.221

If Hope was on occasion grandly bardic or baroque in his eloquence when he let the images play themselves out (as in the “Soledades”222), what Wallace–Crabbe sees as a Dionysian and Apollonian contest in the poet’s mind could subside into “beautiful nonsense.” This sort of nonsense, though, strikes me as different in degree from the ‘hits, skits, and jingles’ variety of late Victorian and early Federation period verse, or its modern equivalent, rhymed (or not) causeries on quaint folkways, such as Peter Porter’s “How to Get a Girl Friend,” or Murray’s “Vindaloo in Merthyr Tydfil,” “The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever” or “Downhill on Borrowed Skis.”

220

Wallace–Crabbe, “The Good Christian Practises Light Verse,” in Toil and Spin: Two Directions in Modern Poetry (Melbourne: Hutchinson, 1979): 47 (33–40). 221 Wallace–Crabbe, “Three Faces of Hope,” in Wallace–Crabbe, Melbourne or the Bush: Essays in Australian Literature and Society (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1974): 99 (90–103) 222 A.D. Hope, “Soledades of the Sun and the Moon,” in Hope, Collected Poems 1930–1970 (1966; Sydney: Angus & Robertson, rev, ed. 1972): 106–10.

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I don’t think that even the ‘fun’ variety of light verse is wholly free of a didactic streak, if, by ‘didactic’, ‘information’ rather than preaching is understood. What such verse clearly does is dismiss the esprit de sérieux that some minds associate with art worth attending to. In its more ostensibly ‘mock’ forms, light verse can be deadly serious, as Wallace–Crabbe’s earlier book title intimates. The Universe Looks Down may reinforce some readers’ perception of Wallace–Crabbe as a sharp analyst of individual and collective human folly. It will perhaps persuade others that he is a kind of skilful-slangy versifier of quirky or cranky observations on topical matters. To simplify his writing either way seems perverse. Wallace–Crabbe’s observation on A.D. Hope’s poem “Pseudodoxia Epidemica,”223 that “the house of suggestion has many mansions,”224 might be applied to this latest long poem of his own. Wallace–Crabbe’s criticism of others’ poetry illuminates more than those poets’ productions, and it seems to me useful to keep this in mind while reading his own. Of Heaney, for instance, Wallace–Crabbe claims that he “brings a native lustre to the tarnished grail of our imperial language by burnishing its ambiguities.”225 Here is the delight in language that Duwell perceived in Wallace–Crabbe’s verse, but with a twist: the polishing of the “imperial” grail is a recognition of the business that engages both Heaney and Wallace–Crabbe. From his earliest essays on Australian literary nationalists through to the urbane cast of local and international writers and artists (including those home-grown stylists Ned Kelly and Sidney Nolan) whom he considers in Read It Again, Wallace–Crabbe has turned over the language, puzzling at its curious ability to contain all of the contradictions of the past in words that signify something at once alien and familiar to its remote, post-imperial inheritor and user.

——————— A Touchstone in Auckland ———————

I

when Nigel Roberts asked me if I had something to contribute to a book that would contain the collected poems of David Mitchell. Mitchell was in a bad way in a hospital in Sydney; he was dying, which didn’t shock me so much as hearing about how he was dying. He couldn’t speak, and he was being kept alive artificially. That news was hard to fit with the images I retained of Mitchell from earlier times. My piece, like reminiscences of others, were not reproduced in toto, in the book that eventually appeared, but contributed to the editors’ general introduction. Paul Gray commented that my memoir caught the mood of the times. WROTE TH E FOL LO WING PIEC E

223 224 225

A.D. Hope, “Pseudodoxia Epidemica,” in Hope, Collected Poems, 174–75. “Inside Outsiders: From Mud to Malraux,” in Read It Again, 118 (106–18). “Inside Outsiders: From Mud to Malraux,” 118.

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Steal Away Boy: Selected Poems, edited by Martin Edmond and Nigel Roberts, was published in 2010 by Auckland University Press.

I have tremendous affection for Dave Mitchell, whose poetry and personality are mixed up with all the images that I recollect of Auckland and my excitement in just being there, when I think of the guy. My letter is probably too much about other aspects of self, but I’ll look into my own reasons for admiring Mitchell and all that bygone era. I recollect Dave Mitchell in several places around Auckland in the time I was working and studying in the city, especially between 1973 and 1976, and in the longer times that I spent there at the end of ’77, ’78, and later. I was employed on short-term contracts back in Australia, and generally got laid off over end-ofyear periods, so I went back to New Zealand every time. I still go back, and always to a different Auckland. When I heard that Mitchell was in Sydney this year (2010), I was surprised; I hadn’t connected him with Australia, though, years ago, someone in Auckland had said Mitchell had taught somewhere in that country. I can’t put a time or place on that beyond Auckland in the late 1970s or early 1980s. Maybe I’m confusing that story with someone else’s. The lyrical bent in his poetry would have fitted with teaching young kids, though: it’s impossible to read a lot of Mitchell’s poetry without picking up the song-quality that children instinctively warm to. I like to think Mitchell turned a lot of kids on to poetry – not by explaining it the way people do in schools and universities, but through the sheer enjoyment of just reading and listening to it. I asked some people in Auckland recently what they recollected of Mitchell, and the response that matched mine best came from the photographer John Fields. Fields worked in Auckland in the 1960s and 1970s and now lives in northern New South Wales. where we often meet. Fields and I ran into each other around 1974 at the Kiwi Hotel, where students and staff of Engineering, Medicine, Architecture, Art and other departments of the university gathered, especially on Friday afternoons, and mixed with journalists, railway workers, landscape gardeners, boat builders, mechanics and other regulars and day trippers before heading off to homes, haunts or parties. John told me recently that he’d never taken a photograph of Mitchell, but “Mitchell was always there.” That’s how I recall him – apart from one or two poetry readings where I heard him read in clear, fine voice from poems in a manuscript sometime after his Pipe Dreams in Ponsonby collection from Stephen Chan’s Association of Orientally Flavoured Syndics press.

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Mitchell was a kind of touchstone of where the most interesting ‘new’ New Zealand poetry was moving. I can say this in retrospect because I’ve run into some very interesting poets since then, such as Michael Harlow and Alan Loney, who were always beyond the fashionable and the gate-keepers. Mitchell didn’t get a mention in Kendrick Smithyman’s 1965 book on New Zealand poetry (A Way of Saying): the ‘New’ (i.e. tired of the old) New Zealand poetry hadn’t really arrived: it would, though, within a year or so of that book’s publication. By 1972, C.K. Stead wrote an appreciative review of Mitchell’s Pipe Dreams in Ponsonby, finding himself surprised that he found so much to like in Mitchell’s work226: the “extraordinary bursts of joy” in spite of experiences that left him bruised, the wry humour, and, most of all, the “courage of his emotions” that aren’t undermined by irony. Stead reached for words like “Thomasish sonority,” and “Shakespearean” to catch aspects of Mitchell’s prosody, and quoted Pound’s remark “by his language shall you know him.” There was, overall, “much to rejoice over in this rich and curious talent,” and Stead hit the right note, I think, in confirming that Mitchell’s poems were as “whole” on the page as when heard in performance. Stead wrote that Mitchell was an “ingratiating though not at all assertive or histrionic reader” – a remark that was simultaneously a slap at poets who were far from ingratiating, and who lacked the restraint and consideration for the art that Mitchell personified. I think many poets imitated Mitchell’s poetry and manner. It seemed to me at the time that he did have a lot of admirers, many beautiful women among them (lucky bastard) and people who, having heard him read, aimed for the same precision in even their way of talking; but Mitchell didn’t imitate anyone. Lots of people who were writing in the late 1960s and early 1970s were under the sway of someone or other, often English models like Eliot or Auden or David Jones or George Barker (I used to think of Owen Leeming as being like that: hung-up on damnation and religion), or under the influence of Baxter, who spawned dozens of people who caught one or other aspects of his poetry (I grabbed the double-barrelled lines of his “sonnets” and still work around that flexible arrangement much of the time). Others wrote as if they were hip Americans transplanted below the line, but a lot of their stuff sounded contrived. When Creeley visited New Zealand in 1975, he must have thought what he heard was old-hat. Mitchell knew his American and European poets and did what he liked with them, making chancy and appealing free-form poems that 226

C.K. Stead, “He Sing fr You,” Islands 1.1 (Spring 1972): 67–69, repr. as “David Mitchell: He Sing fr You,” in Stead, In the Glass Case: Essays on New Zealand Literature (Auckland: Auckland U P & Oxford U P , Auckland, 1981): 238–42.

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made lots of his contemporaries’ poems look and sound self-conscious and pretentious. I read only fugitive things by Mitchell before I ran into him. I never saw anything of his in the mainstream mags like Landfall, Islands, etc., though some people I knew who contributed to Cave, Outrigger, and other little magazines knew his work from earlier mags like Freed, as well as from hearing him read. I picked up a copy of The Orange Grove poems by Mitchell somewhere for a dollar and still have it: it was pretty fresh air after reams of poems I read by older NZ poets and some young ones, too. I put Mitchell in a different context, perhaps, than people who had known him all along. His writing was accessible, energetic, and more than hip. It was unlike the poetry I had heard in Australia, where work by younger people who wrote about sex and drugs and politics seemed so earnest and dutiful, as if they’d never heard of the exuberance of revolution. Mitchell’s poetry had music and sex, junk and politics wrapped up in it, in a way that had some counterpart in Dransfield’s poetry, but Dransfield’s seemed perennially adolescent while Mitchell’s was cooler and more melodious. And not much of the poetry by older New Zealanders conveyed anything like the cop-this flair and irreverence and bite that made ballads and love poems and satires by Fairburn and Glover so appealing. For all that he was supposed to have been a scourge of dour Protestants and Jansenist Catholic poetics, Baxter’s poetry up to Jerusalem Sonnets sounded like sermons and, afterwards, self-help meditations. Younger New Zealand poets, Michael Morrissey, Trevor Reeves, and Ann Donovan among them, wrote about their own and other people’s angst, though they all shifted ground (except for Morrissey, who later put his angst into prose); Haley and Manhire and Brunton and Wedde struck me as trying hard not to sound too-obviously literary, and the road poets (McCormick, Olds et al.) trying hard not to sound like Kerouac, Cohen, Ginsberg, and Dylan, but I think they’d all have been pleased to be seriously regarded as literary, in one case, and troubadours, on the other. Mitchell’s poems had more zip and irreverence and swing and were as sharp as memorable pop songs, and his satire and irony about New Zealand politics and the war in Vietnam were more incisive. I think the reason is that Mitchell never took more from anyone’s practice – songwriter as well as poet – than what he saw worked towards framing his own take on experience. If he was “the man of the moment,” as Stead claimed, Mitchell got fashionable among younger readers and writers by being unfashionable. I didn’t meet with Mitchell’s poetry at once when I got to New Zealand, though, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I read NZ poets voraciously, from

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earliest to current – one of the reasons why I ended up teaching NZ literature at Auckland University in 1976. Mitchell’s poems were scarce and I didn’t locate the small magazines until the early 1970s. First of all, I was excited by what I read of New Zealand poetry, and Auckland University, however dull to local poets who didn’t have anything to do with it, was refreshing after Sydney, because so many of the teachers were poets – Kendrick Smithyman, Allen Curnow, Mike Joseph, Stead, Riemke Ensing and others – an amazing number compared with Sydney University, where I’d studied part-time and tutored for a couple of years. David Malouf and Vivian Smith were the only poets I saw at Sydney, and, as far as I knew, they never read their stuff aloud. At Auckland, I heard just about everyone read, even quiet jokers like Curnow and Joseph. Students like Michael Williams, who hasn’t published poetry for years now, and Jan Kemp, who has, were among postgrads and others who read poetry at the university and nearby clubs and pubs. People read in pubs like the Kiwi and the Globe and in a Creative Arts co-op in Hobson Street on the other side of the city. Hone Tuwhare and Denis Glover and Sam Hunt read at the university café and in the other haunts, including theatres in the suburbs. I heard Stead and Tuwhare reading in a little theatre-hall out near Howick in 1974. I was interested in the younger poets, those around my age or so, but I was a late starter in publishing anything and what I published was pretty much all tripe. I knocked around with people doing jazz and painting and other arts, but I didn’t really make a point of hanging about with poets. The people I mixed with were quick to question work that sounded like crap. The poets I did meet were not in the avant-garde. Ron Riddell, a drummer who wrote introspective poems, ran a poetry venue at Titirangi, and I ran into him because I lived in a house of jazz and rock musicians and he knew some of the musicians from gigs around town. Through Riddell, I met some halfway good poets and a lot of Sunday-painter-type poets. Riddell himself was trying out poses: the introspective poet, the beat poet, the international cool cat, and so on: variously stagey and all with a touch of ‘How am I doing?’ Poetry readings in town had more zap, but were equally stages for self-conscious (or not) exhibitionists among audiences and readers. Riddell and Mike Morrissey were determined to be literary figures, and variously made themselves so later on, one as impresario and the other as tough-guy critic; their poetry melted into convention. Richard von Sturmer, who now and then appeared at performance venues, was genuinely experimental, writing poetry that looked and sounded like prose arranged to blur story and description; if he had any counterpart in Australia, it could be Tranter of the Florida period.

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Sam Hunt did his drunken-bard act on several occasions: he’d recite something by Yeats or Burns and then get off on his own riffs about women and booze: road-songs and rhymers. At the Mercury Theatre he forgot some lines and was prompted by a woman in the audience – his mother, I think. At the university café, he and Glover sat on a stage behind Hone Tuwhare, passing a bottle of rum back and forth while Tuwhare read, and Glover leaned back for a big drink and tipped his chair and himself backwards off the stage and onto the floor. Sam helped him up and they carried on again. Auckland was pretty lively like that. The Globe Hotel, where Mitchell organized poetry readings in the ’80s, earlier had amazing jazz bands like Dr Tree that packed the place out, and I heard Mitchell up there after I’d run into him in the Kiwi Hotel and at parties around town. I had a copy of his Pipe Dreams in Ponsonby by 1973, but it vanished quickly because I lent it to someone, so I have ended up with a secondhand replacement copy I bought in 1974. I think the book must be pretty rare by now; it was, and is, one of the best-produced things of the period, with its swish erotic Hanly illustrations that match the poems so well. That collection was less flamenco-theatrical and muse-invoking than the Orange Grove poem, which had some great lines and a nice one I specially recollect – “until the clock strikes up the hour / and I am faceless” – which could, of course, be taken any way – and all sorts of subtle things like references to the blue guitar and “wait not too well upon it maiden / lest you own it soon.” Mitchell used slashes and linebreaks in terrific ways in that poem. Though Stead and Smithyman also employed such tricks, I think Mitchell must have been about the first to pull the game off. Really impressive, then and more so in the Pipe Dreams poems, a really elegant collection that made a lot of people ache. He was so good with the loose-appearing though tightly balanced lower-case open-form lines, clipped “th” and taut diction, which Eric Beach also turned into a trademark. Beach was just a name then; I met him years after in Australia, when his poetry was astonishing for its musicality and he was about the best performance poet for timing and judgement of tone. All of this suggests to me that I never knew Mitchell alone but in connection with poetry and people. It’s not easy to separate him, in my memory, from scenes where he appeared. I kept a diary in 1975, which has disappeared in my shifts from city to country and back in New Zealand, but there were countless other times when I met Mitchell in company. In a 1976 diary, I recorded one such scene at the Kiwi Hotel on 8 October: Friday 8 October. University this morning, study for class. Afternoon, at a table in the sunshine at the university café with Murray and Vic Filmer,

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Bruce [Robertson] and Gray Nicol. Then a while inside the hotel, writing, then to Charmian’s house for wine, and home; read. Evening, went to the Kiwi again with Bruce Robertson: Ug Whipp and more brain damage, and Eyley, David Mitchell, Chris [Cottingham] and Carol from Waitakere in a pocket in a crowd. Mitchell tells Bruce that he was in a club that had no liquor licence. Operating late, and large on liquor, when the police arrived to raid the place. A policeman warned him and he said “I’ll bet if I was not a pakeha but any other Islander, you’d kick me in the gonads” – for which he spent last night in jail, but here tonight he’s out on bail – he makes a rhyme. At a party after the Kiwi, a woman with an injury meets us as we go in; inside, Leo Thompson and others: students, communards, Simon the bus driver (“proletarian animal,” says Thompson, never short of an insult), and others. Charmian says my Rhodope sequence [in a recent issue of Islands magazine] is sad and it reflects a sorry attitude: I seem to live for bottles. I say it reflects the Greek models/originals enough. Robert Leek discussed it with her, saying when he saw the poems he was envious – ça va.

Mitchell’s response to the police was consistent with his forthrightness. He didn’t like hypocrisy, and spoke straight. Later that month, I was at a demonstration in support of Pacific Islanders who were being targeted by the police for overstaying their visas. Police had raided every house in my street and neighbouring ones in Ponsonby, where a lot of Samoans and Cook Islanders and others lived, and we were outraged. Ted Stewart, a member of the Auckland Central Amnesty International group that I chaired, was one of the speakers; others were Joris de Brés, Grahame Whimp from the Trades Council, and John Prebble, Labour MP for Auckland. Police Minister McCready told the crowd that random (my diary note suggests “discriminatory”) checks had been made of Islanders in the Auckland area, and he offered an apology for the “inconvenience.” The crowd at the event was very large, and included a lot of people I knew in the arts scene. Afterwards, I met Mitchell and others who’d been at the event, and noted: [30 October] At Matthew Robertson’s house in Sansfield Street in Herne Bay, a crowded house, lots of noise, talk, lurching people: Leo Thompson, Wilton [Rodger] in conversation with a peculiar woman, and Frank, David Tossman, Bruce Robertson (looking uncustomarily ruffled by the push), Alastair and Ron Riddell, David Mitchell, Rob Giles and about six dozen others. I sat on the step and talked with Alastair about music; heard Ron’s story of his yearning for an unattainable woman. Eventually gave up; he invited me and others to his house; heard more of his tale of grief, and went to sleep there.

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The times were politicized; Canadian, English, and other Pǒkehǒs who were ‘overstayers’ wore their passports pinned to their shirts and jackets, as if to say ‘I’m in the country illegally: arrest me’. Of course, Pǒkehǒs weren’t arrested. The times were also gregarious beyond anything I’ve met in urban Australia. My house in Brown Street was a venue for many parties where musicians and artists and writers might turn up on a Friday or Saturday evening. Once or twice, I came home to find that someone in the house had invited an entire crowd from a club or pub after the place had closed. It was chaotic, and the police raided on occasion, once or twice to drag someone off and charge them for possession. Some of those who came to my place and others like it were freeloaders; others were people who were engaged with their art, took a stand politically, and were worth knowing. Mitchell is one of the latter. I regret that in later years Mitchell fell into lousy health; the last time I saw him, I was walking along Oriental Bay in Wellington and talking with my friend Chris Moisa, a poet and painter I’d known since Auckland thirty years ago. Mitchell was coming towards us, and was clearly in a shocking state: he was voicing something that didn’t sound like a poem; he didn’t pause or recognize us, but seemed possessed by demons I wouldn’t want to get to know. Chris and I were shocked. It’s not an image I want to end with. I prefer the guy as the poet I knew, however peripherally, at the height of his powers and charm: one of the best I ever heard.

———————— After Jerusalem227 ————————

I

1968 , J A M E S K. B A X T E R was by some accounts New Zealand’s most notable and productive poet. Following his first collection, published in 1944 when he was eighteen years old, Baxter had consolidated his reputation as a leading voice of the generation after Allen Curnow, with a succession of nationally and internationally published collections. Two books of essays, a further collection of poems, the production of several plays – all stemmed from his tenure of the Robert Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago in 1967. At the same time, Baxter was undergoing a crisis associated with his conviction, stemming from his professed Catholic faith, that words should be converted into action. In April 1968, he believed he was “called” to go to Jerusalem (Hiruharama), a mission station on the Wanganui River, and there to establish a community of Mǒori and Pǒkehǒ devoutly worshipping God, working the land, and living frugally without books. Abandoning family and regular employment as a writer of catechetical articles and material for the Catholic Education Office, N

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Journal of Pacific History 44.3 (December 2009): 365–67.

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Baxter first proceeded to Auckland, where he lived in a Grafton squat, trying to assist drug users, alcoholics, and self-orphaned young people, until the establishment was forcibly shut down. In the following year, Baxter moved to Jerusalem to begin his experiment. When I moved to live in New Zealand in 1973, Baxter was dead, a mythic being, and Jerusalem was spoken of in the past tense, even though, as John Newton now reminds us,228 it persisted, however etiolated as a community within a community, until it petered out between 1974 and 1975. I would have been grateful in those days for a book like Newton’s The Double Rainbow to help me understand the climate of cultural change in New Zealand that had coincided with and tempered Baxter’s thinking, and which he influenced in turn. I would have welcomed such a book later, too, when I taught his poetry in literature classes at Auckland University and the University of Southern Queensland, by which time the groundswell of critical opinion was that, if Jerusalem was not a wrong turn in Baxter’s poetical career, it was another striking phase along the way. In 1983, W.H. Oliver closed his study of Baxter with a catalogue of the man’s “roles” –talker, showman, drunk, philanderer, agitator, social critic and so on – to conclude that the roles “contribute[d] to the only dimension of his life that was not a role, that was his life, his existence and achievement as a poet.”229 In Newton’s radical revisiting of Baxter’s accomplishment, Jerusalem is more than a contributing factor to the poetry – in effect, it takes up where the poetry leaves off. Memorialization of Baxter commenced as soon as he was cold, though reconciling the personality, the public performances, and the poetry proved (and remains) far from straightforward. Alister Taylor was quick to publish an anthology of commemorative statements ranging from bewilderment to near-hagiography.230 There followed posthumous collections of Baxter’s works (including Collected Poems), biographies, and memoirs. All attest to the impulses that suffuse his work: the sublimity of his poems of place, the Jansenist distaste for the corruptible flesh in the Pig Island Letters (1966), the mannered self-flagellation of the Jerusalem Sonnets (1970), the frank obscenity of his satires and verse letters to young and old poets, the iconoclasm of his satire, and the poise of some of the final contemplative lyrics. Newton, a teacher of literature, does not analyse Baxter’s earlier poems, but takes the later work, especially the Jerusalem 228

John Newton, The Double Rainbow: James K Baxter, Ngati Hau and the Jerusalem Commune (Wellington: Victoria U P , 2009). 229 W.H. Oliver, James K. Baxter: A Portrait (Wellington: Port Nicholson, 1983): 156. 230 James K. Baxter 1926–1972: A Memorial Volume, ed. Alister Taylor (Wellington: Alister Taylor, 1972).

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Sonnets, Jerusalem Daybook (1971), and Autumn Testament (1972), as verse confirmation of sentiments Baxter expressed in interviews, letters, and conversations with friends. Explication of Baxter’s abandonment of the pursuit of pre-eminence in poetry in order to create a community in accordance with Mǒori and Catholic values has not been straightforward. Newton cites W.H. Oliver’s view that Baxter’s embrace of Mǒori in his poetry was “often a cosmetic device, or, worse, an earnest affectation”;231 others, including many of Baxter’s fellow Pǒkehǒ poets, have found his Mǒori focus, like his strident Catholicism, romantic, eccentric or plain wilful. Newton’s study is the first that aims to link the poetry directly with the experiment in communal living. Eschewing a focus on Baxter’s poetical personae, Newton breaks new ground in exploring what is truly radical about what he considers the extension of Baxter’s spoken and written poetry into a consummate performance poem embodying the idea of a just community, imaged in Pǒkehǒ community acting “under the aegis and terms of a Maori one.”232 Newton can find no equivalent community recorded in New Zealand history; further, suggesting what few if any critics or biographers might assert, he finds no contradiction in Baxter’s move, if move it is, from poetry considered as activist practice to activism per se. Bruce Morrison’s 1998 documentary 233 proposes a more broadly held view: that, at most, Baxter found a degree of peace at Jerusalem and in the final poems stemming from the experience. Baxter’s first period of residence at Jerusalem (February 1969–September 1971) ended with the closure of the commune following regional and local arguments over its nature and condition, and Baxter’s departure for Wellington. Following the re-opening of the commune in the summer of 1972, Baxter was concerned with the way it would operate after his next departure; on his final trip to Auckland, he was convinced that he was dying and, according to his son, had lost faith in the experiment.234 Newton does not let the matter rest with Baxter’s demise; his detailed account of the post-Baxter affairs of the commune and its relationship with the Ngati Hau iwi is especially illuminating. His blend of oral and documentary history has no parallel, not even in Sargisson and Sargent’s Living in Utopia.235 Newton draws on published and unpublished sources, 231

Newton, The Double Rainbow, 13. The Double Rainbow, 12. 233 Bruce Morrison, dir. The Road to Jerusalem (screenplay Paul Miller & Bruce Morrison; Morrison Grieve Productions, New Zealand 1998; 75 min.). 234 Newton, The Double Rainbow, 83. 235 Lucy Sargisson & Lyman Tower Sargent, Living in Utopia: New Zealand’s Intentional Communities (Aldershot & Burlington V T : Ashgate, 2004). 232

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notably on interviews with Baxter’s successors, Greg Chalmers, Ray Cleaver, Katerina Hohaia, Rae McLean and a host of others who took the idea of communal living into other forms at the dispersal of the Jerusalem establishment. These informants, together with the original Mǒori hosts and their successors, further highlight the extent to which the commune depended upon the forbearance, material assistance, and wisdom of the original hosts. Newton explodes any romanticism concerning the day-to-day transactions; the concern for practical matters like food, sanitation, and accommodation for the numberless visitors to Jerusalem put Pǒkehǒ members of Baxter’s “orphans” under deep indebtedness to Mǒori manuhiritanga and aroha. I never got to Jerusalem. I have encountered people who spent time there and drifted abroad: some who have lived as far as Darwin; another, a sojourner in the town where I live. A couple have spoken of their time at Jerusalem as an interlude best forgotten; others, as an episode that was unforgettable, even lifealtering. Newton’s book records a gamut of such responses. The extent of his interviews and researches is welcome. Few Mǒori chronicles of the experience of being participants in the experiment have been published. Michael King’s account of Baxter’s tangi236 told of how Mǒori responses struck him at the time – responses that are more extensively, and as sensitively, explored in Newton’s book. Other Pǒkehǒ writers than King recorded their experiences as visitors to Baxter’s commune, but perhaps none with such insight as King’s into the significance of the relationship between the ‘tribe of Baxter’ (Nga Mokai, the orphaned and self-orphaned) and the Ngati Hau, who first saw them as ‘Nga hipi’ (‘the hippies’, though phonetically also ‘the sheep’). Sargisson and Sargent provide the conventional thumbnail sketch of Baxter’s ‘commune’, highlighting his charisma, and declaring that, at times, “it seemed that a commune formed around Baxter every time he settled in one place for a few days.”237 Baxter’s first effort to provide short-term urban shelter for society’s needy and damaged members came unstuck as a result of police raids and the demolition of premises in Auckland. His dream of a rural safe haven would similarly attract the forces of the law, government officials, and the media. Sargisson and Sargent consider that the Jerusalem community failed because of its openness to any person in need, its constant turnover (which annoyed neighbours as well as core members who hoped to make something more lasting), and Baxter’s failure to establish it as a functioning community. Newton acknowledges these factors and offers a more nuanced history, looking beyond identi236 237

In James K. Baxter 1926–1972: A Memorial Volume, ed. Taylor, 44–51. Sargisson & Sargent, Living in Utopia, 38.

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fication of Baxter with the commune. He sifts Baxter’s romantic notions of the poet, of self-imposed poverty and the extent to which a Pǒkehǒ might ‘become’ ǒori in spirit, to trace the practicalities faced by commune members and local iwi alike. Baxter’s fetishization of the Mǒori as underdog, and his narcissism, silliness, and rudeness in giving too little credit to his first hosts, the Sisters of Compassion, and their founder’s achievement are made clear enough. At the same time, Newton shows why Baxter’s ideas of a just society continued to attract people to Jerusalem even in his absence, and why the commune did not close immediately after his death. Greg Chalmers and Milton Hohaia’s institution of work with and for the iwi and local farmers ensured that the integration of values deficient in the Pǒkehǒ world from which Baxter’s tribe sought refuge might come to fruition. Newton’s essay looks beyond the physical form of Jerusalem to the dispersal of the kaupapa – the ideal and the forms it took at Reef Point in Northland, at Whenuakura in Taranaki, and the multiple communities that sprang up during and beyond the final years of Jerusalem. The restoration of buildings on the marae on the Wanganui River and at Parihaka, the adoption of te reo Mǎori by certain members of the commune, the determination to carry Mǒori communalism into broader social context through the Ohu movement, gang activism, the handover of land to Mǒori owners, the formation of Mana Motuhake – these are, in direct or oblique ways, part of the spiritual legacy of the Ngati Hau community–Jerusalem commune nexus. Newton covers events that preceded and followed Baxter’s arrival at Jerusalem. The Catholic faith that impelled Baxter is shown to have withstood his shortcomings as husband and parent; his concern for others in need appears in the light of its advantage in bolstering self-righteousness and fulfilling emotional and other needs. Avoiding pop psychologizing, Newton conveys a sense of Baxter’s conviction that society’s losers – runaways, the emotionally disturbed, alcoholics, and addicts among them – presented problems not redressed by speaking in abstract terms but by direct action. At its heart lay a complex of impulses, perhaps none so unlikely as that every individual embodied what Baxter took to be the divine, even when his conduct fell below the ideal suggested by the insight. His family wondered why he needed to identify so fully with such cases as he adopted, to the extent that he left his suits behind when he left his family to attract such a following. The grief, perplexity, and anger felt by many, Mǒori and Pǒkehǒ, at the time of the Jerusalem commune is palpable in much of Newton’s account of the dayto-day functioning of the establishment. At the same time, the nuns and priest

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at Jerusalem, and the Ngati Hau among whom they lived, responded with extraordinary practicality when confronted with the problem of Baxter and those attracted by his presence. Newton’s essay treats all of the parties concerned. The conflicting idealism of commune members and visitors (those who saw it as a potential working community, those who saw it as a hippie crash pad, and those who saw it as a kind of ‘happening’ or media event) is balanced against the pragmatism of the Ngati Hau. Their concern to preserve the value of hospitality did not mean surrendering care for their reputation as hosts to visitors, even when the latter included some who abused their kindness, and threatened their security and authority over their own children. It is Newton’s achievement to have gathered so many stories – from the Mǒori community of Jerusalem and from as many former members of the Baxterian experiment as he can find able and willing to speak. In this respect, it’s a splendid multivocal story, beyond biography and literary investigation: it corroborates claims to constitute a bicultural history. As a bonus, it is lucid and candid, and it sent me back to other accounts with fresh insight.

——————— Subtle Conversation238 ———————

W

HEN THI S C OMMI SSI ON C AME,

I’d recently re-read Manhire’s poetry from Malady to Lifted and his prose – the clever fables of The New Land, somehow redolent of Diderot’s splendid This is Not a Story – and the Doubtful Sounds miscellany. What luck, then, to now see where that earlier work has tended. In Lifted, the latest collection I’d read before The Victims of Lightning, I found what had given me pause in older travels in the poetry: the wit and playfulness (“Two Literals,” “An Inspector Calls,” and “OE”239) masking plangency that has full voice in poems like “Opoutere” (20) and the marvellous “Still Life with Wind in the Trees”: “So much of the planet is fragile: / […] / I mean: abrupt, conditional, / and, as usual, brief.” This could be eco-lament, but the tone it is more like that of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, until its surprising conclusion: “And what’s joy? / Even a pencil will point to it.”240 That pencil is versatile in Manhire’s hands. In the fourth section of The Victims of Lightning, a poem called “The Lid Slides Back” recaptures the joy of creating an image. It’s worth quoting the whole:

238 

New Zealand Books 20.2 (Winter 2010): 7–8. Bill Manhire, Lifted (Wellington: Victoria U P , 2005): 49, 33. 47. 240 “Still Life with Wind in the Trees,” in Lifted, 25, and in Manhire, Selected Poems (Wellington: Victoria U P , 2012): 119. 239

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Let me open My pencil-case made of native woods. It is light and dark in bits and pieces. The lid slides back. The seven pencils are there, called Lakeland. I could draw a sunset. I could draw the stars. I could draw this quiet tree beside the water.241

This bears the hallmarks of so many of Manhire’s poems: the understated opening, with its invitation to intimacy, hinting of avowal or a shared find. The words are plain as can be, the demotic of a child possessed of what John Keats called snail-horn perception of things as they are. The pencil case is made of “native” woods: at once assurance of regionality and belonging, and the marvel of those “bits and pieces” of whole forests tessellated in the architecture of the box. The evocativeness of the brand name and the suggestion of what could be done with the tools at hand makes the artist–poet into a magician whose understated anaphora, “I could draw…” is simultaneously tentative and magisterial, a Prospero speaking in the ‘I do this, I do that’ tone of a poet of the city asserting the reality of the imagination. The self-consciousness and autobiographical elaborations that merge in earlier collections are present in each of the five sections of The Victims of Lightning. They may appear more fleetingly concerned with personal matters in the third section, a set of rhyming bluesy lyrics composed with specific performers in mind. I say ‘appear’ so because variations on long-familiar themes will resurface emerge in “Rarotonga Sunset” with its insistence that “There’s thunder in the human heart / That’s aching for relief” (58), and in “Pacific Raft” with its geopolitical refrain Water rising, water rising you have to look to see water rising, water rising, Pacific Raft will rescue me. (54)

Such lines as these recall the gaze on world affairs in poems like “For President Johnson on the Shores of America,” “Loosening Up Poem,” “Hirohito,” and “Entering America,” scattered through earlier collections.242 Manhire’s political 241

“The Lid Slides Back,” in Manhire, The Victims of Lightning (Wellington: Victoria U P , 2010): 90, and in Selected Poems, 143. For poems appearing only in The Victims of Lightning, page references are in the main text. 242 “Threnody; For President Johnson on the shores of America,” Landfall 85 (March 1968):

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acuity is evident beyond his sometime stances of word-game player, urbane citizen, or flâneur. The new lyrical ballads take chances. “Buddhist Rain” with its Dylanesque persona “pouring out my misery / In the Buddhist rain” (56) strikes me as pushing credibility as to emotional engagement to the limit. More startlingly inventive and attractive are “Crime Scene” (“I’m just a phase you’re going through,” 60) and “Warehouse Curtains” (62), a ballad about the separateness of partners that is anything but corny; so, too, the final song, “Across the Water” (69), which should delight authentic traditionalists with its echo of the sentiment and forms of the simplest early love songs in the language. Manhire’s traditionalism slyly buttresses much of the poetry that some reviewers have found wilfully obscure. As far back as Malady and “Declining the Naked Horse,”243 Manhire’s edgy takes on language have proved worrisome to those who appear to want words to stay still and to say only what the reader prefers. The Victims of Lightning is hardly likely to rekindle a “Wingatui” kerfuffle.244 Rather, the poems on language and misprision contain clues that point to depths that even the cussedest critic might find accessible. Thus, “The Cave,” the first poem in the book, opens a section that spans poetry’s origins and applications. Like Adrian Mitchell’s “The Oxford Hysteria of English Poetry,” “The Cave” charts the emergence of writing from speech. Marks on the cave wall in Manhire’s version are made by humans who frighten big creatures who “see we have thoughts,” and “Always these words come out of our heads.”245 The turns of phrase are fetchingly fresh in this foretaste of the whole collection’s fascination with language. A little later, a poem called “The School” displays a teacher “writing speech,” so children see “Inside the chalk … also a river” (26). Poems on children and generations state further themes for development. Sharp, taut poems on childhood recollected in tranquillity or agitation conclude the first section of the book. The catalogue poem “1950s” is a rhythmic, funny tour de force that follows poems on evening and bedtime mood from a child’s 24–25; “Loosening Up Poem,” Islands 8.4 (June 1981): 15–17, repr. in Manhire, Good Looks (Auckland: Auckland U P & Oxford U P , 1982): 36; “Hirohito,” in Manhire, Milky Way Bar (Wellington: Victoria U P , 1991): 53–57; “Entering America,” in Lifted, 50. 243 Malady (Dunedin: Amphedesma, 1970); “Declining the Naked Horse,” in Good Looks, 56. 244 Bill’s poem “Wingatui” (as the first of “Two Landscapes”), in Good Looks, 15 (repr. in Selected Poems, 39), first appeared in the Times Literary Supplement and was excoriated in Private Eye as a hoax or as obscure pretentiousness, when in fact its details make up a precisely rendered New Zealand (Dunedin) scene, accessible to any metropolitan reader with intelligence, a dictionary, and a gazetteer. 245 “The Cave,” in The Victims of Lightning, 13, and in Selected Poems, 130.

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perspective,246 while the “Song with a Chorus” displays concern for a sick child in a way that briskly restrains sentimentalism.247 The effect is somewhere between Betjeman’s rhythmic “A Child Ill” and Creeley’s pared-down meditations on mortality. If there is a motif in the first section it could be the evanescence of things, including words. The title poem declares, “Nature is full of mystery: ephemeral realm / with permanent effects.”248 In “Little Elegy,” Manhire writes “Nothing comes back without something sad.” In “A Round,” he rearranges the order of lines of the first stanza to make another that displays the shiftingness of purport according to context. “Yadasi Clips,” an extended reflection on alienation, language, and becoming, imagines the experience of a refugee engaging with officialdom and neighbours in New Zealand: perspective shifts from first to second person, as the character Yadasi seeks his bearings. “Frolic” is precisely what its title offers, sport with the way words sound.249 This sort of experimentation is far from obscure or meaningless: it’s a poet’s stock in trade, a way of escaping repetitiveness, expanding the reach of words and engaging the reader in co-creation. Conventional irony can do this, too: “A Married Man’s Story” has the following neat encapsulation of a relationship: “ Do you think I never think?” She said this cheerfully, certainly – with dark, distrustful eyes. (44)

The immigrant Yadasi might observe that “A load of ladders went by on a lorry. / So many people needing to climb,” but Manhire undercuts this possibility with “Life went by / but he could not see it” (18). There’s a Zen-like quality to such distillations as the lines about the ladder that recall the earlier ladder poem, in Lifted: “The ladder lies on its side / […] / And, as you can see, it is rotten. / Nevertheless, it longs to be lifted.” 250 The everyday is made amazing and again, as it is in “Visiting Europe” from the fourth section of The Victims of Lightning. Manhire asks his son what he thinks the Mona Lisa is thinking about: “Money, he says. Money.”251 The denouement of an Antarctic story is similarly told slant in the poem “Captain Scott.” Four lines suffice to convey the pathos and the matter-of-fact sequence of events at Oamaru 246 247 248 249 250 251

“1950s,” in The Victims of Lightning, 32, and in Selected Poems, 135–36. “Song with a Chorus,” in The Victims of Lightning, 30, and in Selected Poems, 134. “The Victims of Lightning,” in The Victims of Lightning, 14, and in Selected Poems, 132. “Frolic,” in The Victims of Lightning, ##, and in Selected Poems, 37. “The Ladder,” in Lifted, 19, and in Selected Poems, 114. “Visiting Europe,” in The Victims of Lightning, 82, and in Selected Poems, 140.

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where the explorer’s body’s is brought ashore. The fifth and last line (“I was made to sit beside him while he melted”) is a gift.252 As to longueurs, occasional lines may push contrivance awkwardly, but any such moments as I might designate are so few as to be inconsequential in the face of so much that appeals, including the many lines that clearly flaunt their audacity. The fourth section of the book contains some dutiful or commissioned pieces that play to particular rhetorical audiences. These appeal broadly and are situated among some of the book’s more memorable turns, such as the ballad “Poem beginning with a Line by Ralph Hotere,” in which the initial three-line stanza grows an extra line in each succeeding stanza, interspersed with a rhyming refrain (76). The fourth section also contains the astringent apologia “The Things I Did” (80), a tribute to Picasso, Lorca, Creeley, and other makers. Manhire has paid tribute to Creeley in his note on the poetic line in Doubtful Sounds,253 and the acknowledgement to Picasso and Lorca is among the clues that elucidate the curves and angles, and the intensity of thought and feeling, that distinguish Manhire’s work. “The Carpe Diem Poem” that initiates the final section of the book sets the tone of the profundity that follows: the book concludes with a treasure house of superb inventions. Reading the names and final illnesses of people in a graveyard, Manhire states: “I thought you had a life to live. / I thought you had those other things to do” (93). Tenderness is open, hedged with awareness of the oddity of speaking to the dead. A poem for his mother recaptures the slipperiness of words, and the strange appropriateness of even those that are misheard. In similar balancing acts, poems on teaching (“The Workshop,” 95) and the fruits of scholarship (“The Ruin,” 106) convey sympathy for those who strive for some perfection of their craft. I consider “The Ruin” a masterpiece of sophisticated conveyance of the value of the past, a value endorsed by a poem for his mother (“Saying Goodbye to My Mother,” 96) and the final, splendid autobiographical poem that finds the child Manhire “lost in a book” so far that he vanishes from sight (“After Class,” 108). Manhire’s view of the world of childhood is enriched by the discoveries that parenting brings. Like Randall Jarrell’s, his remembrances of infancy appear to be full of wonders. Images are made of common words performing unexpected twists and leaps. Concurrent with this realm, the world of work and wars and great catastrophes is never far but hardly ever dwelt on in such detail as Jarrell 252

“Captain Scott,” in The Victims of Lightning, 75, and in Selected Poems, 139. “The Poetry File: Lines,” in Manhire, Doubtful Sounds: Essays and Interviews (Wellington: Victoria U P , 2000): 85–86. 253

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showed elsewhere in his most harrowing poems – the drudgery, the misery and blood. Manhire’s lyricism has something of the ancient Scots and English minstrelsy, but also of Langston Hughes’s poetry, setting before us common lives with their everydayness, doggedness, and now and then their joy. The earlier rhetorical features, too, are here; the asterisks, the spaces readers must fill, and the rich allusions that will please the erudite, remain, with the sense that this is conversation of a subtle, most considerate, friendly kind.

———————— Page’s Primer254 ————————

G

P A G E ’ S S E L E C T I O N of ‘classic Australian’ poems255 is a brave effort to display the development and achievement of a body or work that will bear comparison with any in the anglosphere. Page also claims to focus on poems that strike him as “unequivocally enjoyable, even if that enjoyment is sometimes hard-won.”256 I doubt that all his readers will entirely agree. The book occupies a space somewhere along the spectrum of middle-school poetry text and teach-yourself poetry-appreciation manual. The same might be said of his 80 Great Poems from Chaucer to Now.257 The structure of each is strikingly similar to Ruth Padel’s 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem, a concatenation of poems with commentary culled from her U K weekly Independent on Sunday column.258 Page and Padel are enthusiastic teachers, but the whiff of the classroom is palpable in their methodological rigour and tone. The didactic impulse is rife elsewhere: in Neil Astley’s popular themed anthologies Staying Alive and its sequel Being Alive,259 in Edward Hirsch’s more discursive though to many minds overly pedantic How to Read a Poem,260 and a plethora of other books aimed at assuring readers that they can learn how to enjoy poetry. Astley’s collections constitute armchair, bedside or travelling companions; poems range across loss, physical or spiritual journeys, and so on, with tactfully brief introductory remarks on the matter of each grouping. Other collections and how-to volumes extend the pleasure further, by assuming that readers already enjoy poetry. Some omit or abridge the crash-course on metrics, EOFF

254 

J A S A L 9 (2009), https://www.unswpress.com.au/isbn/9781921410796 .htm Sixty Classic Australian Poems, ed. Geoff Page (Sydney: U of New South Wales P, 2009). 256 Page, “Introduction” to Sixty Classic Australian Poems, 12. 257 80 Great Poems from Chaucer to Now, ed. Page (Sydney: U of New South Wales P, 2006). 258 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem, ed. Ruth Padel (London: Chatto & Windus, 2002). 259 Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times, ed. Neil Astley (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2002); Being Alive, ed. Neil Astley (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2004). 260 Edward Hirsch, How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (London: Harvest, 2000). 255

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figures, and forms, to highlight images and the versatility of language: notable examples are Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux’s The Poet’s Companion and Kenneth Koch’s anthology appended to his essay collection Making Your Own Days.261 The editors celebrate the life of the poet and the joy of writing; their comments, short and illuminating, exuberantly convey their sense that every poem is an event rather than a subject for vivisection. Page’s distinction is to be first in the field focusing so closely on such a range of Australian poems, so I expect his book will have appeal in and beyond Australia. The poems easily stand comparison with any in Padel’s museum. Like Padel, Page adopts a straightforward pedagogical manner. The voice is nononsense, insistent that poetry is good for us, and that, while emotion is well and good, we must get a handle on the technical stuff that goes into a poem if we want to know what it’s really about. Like Padel, Page insists on the ‘classic’ status of poems that have been relatively recently hatched, and like her, he is determined to persuade those who believe poems should rhyme to see that blank verse and free verse can be more than cut-up prose. I wonder if anyone still considers rhyme the hallmark of poetry, and I confess that I’m with highschool and first-year university students in finding the foregrounding of technique a turn-off. Student writers of poetry can write in prescribed forms if asked to do so, but I’ve rarely met one who does so by choice, or one who is overly concerned to ensure that a reader might mistake the insertion of the odd dactyl for a daring abrogation of a centuries-old reverence for iambic regularity. The insistence on form compounds my curiosity about the book’s undeclared agenda: restoration of rules? Bracing calisthenics to build rigour in reading exercises? I don’t spontaneously turn every poem I meet inside out, making it a sortof verbal Pompidou Centre, its structural elements more evident than the purpose of the thing, but I may be out on a limb here. The senior English exam preparation modality at work in Page’s commentaries (as with Padel’s) could have broad appeal among educators of a different bent. English literature syllabus committees have perhaps reinforced the idea that poetry is a matter of Q&A, and bent discussion of it to a bureaucrat’s vision of an adequately ticked set of Q&A boxes. Perhaps this is unkind. At all accounts, Page’s and Padel’s collections follow an inexorable formula: first, and unexceptionally, presentation of a poem, then an abbreviated biography of the poet and a note on circumstances of the poem’s composition, 261

The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry, ed. Kim Addonizio & Dorianne Laux (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997); Kenneth Koch, Making Your Own Days: The Pleasures of Reading and Writing Poetry (New York: Scribner, 1998).

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then a paraphrase of the work, and finally, dutiful instruction in the structural, syntactic, figurative, and metrical characteristics of the exhibit. The earnestness is never in doubt. A dozen poems and commentaries into the book, I began to feel as if I were being chivvied for an exam by a diligent dominie; another twenty, and I wondered if Page had ever read the former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins’s memorable poem about teaching poetry, and contemplated its concluding lines: I want them to water-ski across the surface of a poem waving at the author’s name on the shore. But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.262

Like a fussy ballet critic, Page won’t let a wayward foot in the metrical dance go unremarked. We are repeatedly asked to pay attention to the tripping trimeter’s meretricious associations, or the suppleness of the four-stressed line; to recall John Donne’s unorthodox ways with the pentameter, Chaucer’s stamp on the aabb couplet, Pope and Swift’s adaptation of the same, Milton’s prior employment of blank verse, and, lest we forget, the extent to which we have read free verse in the King James Bible without a thought for its malign effects on our understanding that good poetry must rhyme. Page winkles out the spondees, anapaests, and dactyls from their hidey-holes in the lines, exposes them to the light, pops them back in their stanzas and often as not leaves us with a remark to the effect that other (even most) poets might have been happy to stick to more regular metre throughout, but the poem under interrogation evidences a different predilection. We’re also told how and where to see “well-chosen” sound and other verbal effects. The cumulative effect of such programmatic instruction is counterproductive. It is a relief to simply read the poems and skip or merely dip into the commentaries for some indication of the book’s purpose, or to see what Page makes of an expression or reference when curiosity is particularly piqued. Page’s stated aims include a resolve to “rejoice in Australian poetry as a ‘broad church’, to get away from narrow preconceptions of what it might or 262

Billy Collins, “Introduction to Poetry,” in Collins, Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems (New York: Random House, 2001): 16.

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should be” and “to focus on a group of poets who were prominent in the middleto-last decades of the last century but whose work is now in danger of dropping, undeservedly, into obscurity.”263 These are noble aims, and a few of Page’s choices support the former claim tolerably, though the selection is on the whole conservative, and some comments on the state of Australian poetry at different periods run counter to a “broad church” view. Few poems startle on account of their pyrotechnical style; none break taboos of any consequence (J.S. Harry’s “Mousepoem” contains “a four-letter word” – six letters, actually), and Page clearly favours plain unvarnished tales – first- or third-person narratives, monologues, and ruminations on family or other relationships. Almost one-third of the poems concern family connections: from Mary Gilmore’s “Nationality,” Christopher Brennan’s “We sat entwined an hour or two,” and Lesbia Harford’s “I’m like all lovers, wanting love to be” through to Robert Gray’s “In Departing Light,” Alan Wearne’s “A World of Our Own,” and Anthony Lawrence’s “The Drive.” (Some of these are truly extraordinary: Harford’s poem a thing to rejoice at on meeting again, and Gray’s a tour de force.) Another fifteen poems (from Adam Lindsay Gordon’s “The Sick Stockrider” to Bronwyn Lea’s “Girl’s Night on Long Island”) work the oracle on death. A further dozen, from Brennan’s “We sat entwined an hour or two” through to Stephen Edgar’s “Another Country,” concern love, marriage, and cognate afflictions (if C.J. Dennis’s “The Play” and Dorothy Hewett’s “The Witnesses,” a girl’s account of a rape, can be tweaked into such a labelling). As we might expect from Page, war and politics bulk sufficiently to admit works expressing moral outrage (Jennifer Maiden’s “Costume Jewellery,” one of her best), chagrin (Chris Wallace–Crabbe’s “Other People”), and varieties of nostalgia and alluring reconstruction (Clive James’s “In Town for the March” and Alan Gould’s “A U-Boat Morning, 1914”). A tone of moral earnestness, even what Page calls “secular Protestantism” (in relation to James McAuley’s ruminative memoir “Because”), infuses more than the poetry of war and politics, though. Three poems at the start of the collection, and a dozen others set in recognizably agricultural or rural locations, reinforce a dour Hesiodic note: one behaves decently as one can (observes the rites?), whether the gods are present or not, or even whether they exist or not, because doing so serves self-interest – whose unvoiced premise is patriarchal sentimentalism at the heart of social order. This premise holds true of the rapists who go off whistling after the act in Hewett’s poem, or the males in poems by Harford, McCuaig, Manifold, and Llewellyn, where women must assert, trenchantly, hopelessly or mockingly, 263

Page, “Introduction” to Sixty Classic Australian Poems, 12–13.

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their individualism. The final ‘masculine’ poems in the anthology reinforce this sombre drift: the show concludes – apart from Bronwyn Lea’s “Girls’ Night,” a different cocktail of griefs – with Philip Hodgins’s “Shooting the Dogs” and John Kinsella’s “Drowning in Wheat”: bleak themes to ring in the millennium, but if the collection is appointed to be read in schools, Page’s hope that certain works can be saved from dropping into obscurity may find fulfilment. I could wish, in the light of this last possible eventuality, that Page had amended some sweeping assertions. One instance is the remark that Lesbia Harford was writing at “a time when many Australian poets were still in the sway of late Victorian poeticisms.”264 Page is not alone in writing literary history with little recourse to the extensive periodical and monograph literature of before-Slessor Australia. A habit of cannibalizing previous anthologies (and, with some anthologists, of outsourcing the research in order to top-up the tired canon with a few contemporary ring-ins according to taste) maintains the hegemony of ignorance a treat. This custom is nowhere so evident as in the recycling of received wisdom, and I regret that Page seems not to have delved further into newspaper, journal (including dissident or underground poetry publications), and more obscure anthology and monograph publications to locate classics from other milieux than the mainstream press. Page admits Dennis’s rackety monologue “The Play,” as a sort of mould-breaking work on the strength of its slang infusion, though a dozen other pre-World War One and wartime poets might challenge his contention about Dennis’s refreshing avoidance of poeticisms. Little perusal of World War One-period publications suffices to see that, however stilted or old-fashioned “many Australian poets” might have been in 1917, many others were capable of the demotic at least as up-todate as Harford’s – or Dennis’s. Nor did a taste for tired conventions desert later poets than Harford; for inverted word order and preciosity of vocabulary approaching a variety of Gongorism, Francis Webb’s 1960s-vintage “Harry”265 takes the sacramental wafer. The matter of omissions from the anthology is hardly the point of my remarks. I take advantage of the occasion to flag a broader concern for the anthologist’s art. Page’s account of a classic, at least, is flexible enough to admit contemporary works that he would happily take with him into the future or which assist his getting there, and his “two inescapable criteria” for this condition are that the poem “must be: a. emotionally moving (often with moral implications);

264 265

Page, in Sixty Classic Australian Poems, 56. Francis Webb, “Harry,” in Sixty Classic Australian Poems, 131–32.

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or b. memorably entertaining.”266 This is hardly a dichotomy: it’s a gloss on the Horatian adage concerning poetry’s role in moulding the heart with kindly teaching (II .i.126). Page acknowledges the emotional effect of a poem like Bruce Dawe’s “Drifters,” and though he enjoys the comedy of A.B. Paterson’s “The Travelling Post Office,” Douglas Stewart’s “Leopard Skin,” and Alan Wearne’s “A World of Our Own,” he discerns the pure Hippocrene in even the lightest verse. None escape Inspector Page’s checklist of techniques that guarantee a poet’s assiduous attention to the important stuff. The U NSW Press blurb’s announcement that the book is “an outstanding introduction” (amended on the jacket to “superb introduction”) to Australian poetry from the nineteenth century to the present will leave the book exposed to sniping by literary barrowmen touting near-rival publications, but few editors have gone, or will go about, their business with the determination, bordering on doggedness, that Page brings to scrutiny and rationalization of every work selected. The collection does not aim to scope the progress of Australian poetry in the twentieth century, as Gray and Lehmann’s anthology does,267 nor the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as in John Kinsella’s268 and others; nor does it, despite its twentieth-century emphasis, predominantly represent relatively recent Australian poetry (e.g., the Tranter & Mead and Brennan & Minter collections), or as the in-press Puncher and Wattman anthology of recent Australian poetry will undoubtedly do.269 I expect high-school teachers will want to compare their readings of some of the poems with Page’s. Some may welcome a crib that provides ready-made responses to prac.-crit. matters. My municipal library and university library both hold copies. A university colleague, despairing of viable alternatives to the out-of-print Tranter and Mead anthology of modern Australian poetry, has set the Page collection for a course on Australian modernism – a feasible stop-gap, given Page’s hopscotch steps around a handful of nineteenth-century and earlytwentieth-century poets, in order to get to Slessor and the moderns as quickly as possible (a move that may cast the label ‘classic’ into critical contention). 266

Page, “Introduction” to Sixty Classic Australian Poems, 13. Australian Poetry in the Twentieth Century, ed. Robert Gray & Geoffrey Lehmann (Melbourne: Heinemann, 1992). 268 The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry, ed. John Kinsella (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2008). 269 The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry, ed. John Tranter & Philip Mead (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1991); Calyx: 30 Contemporary Australian Poets, ed. Michael Brennan & Peter Minter (Sydney: Paper Bark, 2000); The Puncher and Wattmann Anthology of Australian Poetry 1986–2008, ed. John Leonard (Sydney: Puncher & Wattmann, 2009). 267

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Although Page’s selection is relatively unadventurous, including many works that have appeared in others’ anthologies, some selections are so unusual as to border on eccentricity, and this will provide a talking point for reading groups as well as teachers and students. Page’s book points the way to further reading in a manner that highlights idiosyncrasies of the entire collection: he appends a six-page list of poets and titles that might form a further collection. I am fascinated to see my name up there with so many old and new luminaries, but my impression is that the list still remains a remarkably conservative one, even if it finds space for   and a small number of more interesting recent boundarypushers. I have carped at the pedantry of Page’s emphasis on the mechanics of versification, but I believe that anyone interested in the minutiae of such features may find his observations helpful. For my part, I’d have preferred less formula, fewer words, and more focus on how poets get their lines to sound the way they want them.

——————— Moving and Memorable270 ———————

L

A UNCH SP EECH ES A RE A G ENRE -IN -W AITIN G,

a hybrid creature that shamelessly plunders forms like the essay, book review, back-cover blurb, biographical sketch, lament for the state of the art, diatribe against rivals or hymn to the brave publisher. The flexibility of the worm is exhibited in Ralph Wessman’s Famous Reporter magazine, which has featured two or more launch speeches in each issue for several years. One of the most important things a launch speech can do is not be boring, so I’ll skip the critical essay, back-cover blurb, diatribe, and hymn. It goes without saying that we’re grateful to the publisher of Peter Lach Newinsky’s latest book: like the author, Picaro Press should be encouraged in the best practical way, through healthy sales.271 As for biography, Peter relates scenes from his family history in Europe and Australia so vividly that paraphrase sells them short. I’ll skip something else as well: I’m often struck by the way the launcher of a book usurps the poet’s reading of the works, so I’ll leave the readings to Peter for the obvious reason that when you hear him read, you will understand what Wallace Stevens meant when he said poetry must give pleasure. This collection does so – it lifts the spirit. I’ve admired Peter’s poems since I first heard him perform them, and I’m delighted that we now have a substantial body of work that confirms the excellent 270 

Book-launch speech at Thirroul Library, Wollongong, 7 January 2010. Peter Lach–Newinsky, The Post-Man Letters & Other Poems (Cardiff, N S W : Picaro Press New Work, 2010). 271

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judgment of the people who awarded him the Varuna Fellowship and accompanying publication. Reading the poems on the page alone can be a vertiginous experience. The sense of meeting with a mature intelligence that subjects ideas to scrutiny in precise, richly allusive language is so unusual that the appreciation expands with every page. The poems are engagingly varied in form – from haiku to rhymed epigrammatic mordancies and extended experimental parallel texts. They’re far-ranging in topic, and thematically every bit as urgent as they sound in Peter’s inimitable performances: they’re arresting, coruscating, and deeply concerned with the ways language can be used. He’s restoring importance to poetry, asserting its power to shake us out of our reveries and reverence into vital thought and action. I applaud the way the poems compel me to attend to what they say. They speak to me in language that I love: demotic, energetic, packed with rich accretions from all English’s resources and then some. I like his clever antitheses (“sex became a shopping list / and shopping lists became sexy”). Sometimes, a poem will reverberate with the original meanings of English words and their German, French, Russian and other cognates, so that phrases and images prompt our own cultural memories. Peter presents insights and narratives that seem familiar to us though we never were in all the places he conjures up. When he says “A poem walks on water” and “it knows the unknown like the back of its hand,” we do know what he means. In the title poem’s series of letters supposedly saved from arbitrary destruction by the Post Office, Pope’s proposal that we expiate what we have wrought is brought up to date in a way that makes the advice appear even more prescient and urgent. We meet Pope’s “Essay on Man” juxtaposed with essays by contemporary thinkers such as the Bengali physicist Saibal Mitra on multiple universes, the physicist Patrick Gill on time, and the economist David Nunnerley on debt. This is the thinking person’s poetry, a postmodern disquisition on the arbitrariness of human existence. The title, “The Post-Man Letters,” will give some readers pause; the poems point to the fragility and contingency of human existence on the planet. To speak of the “Post-Man Letters” in this generalizing way, though, is to miss the inventiveness and flair of the performance. At times, a poem will surprise with a cascade of similes and metaphors. “Sun” is a ‘list’ poem that exemplifies this. Another is the poem entitled “Writing poetry at six am is like being in a coma,” where an initial comparison introduces a movie-like panorama before moving to a Dickinsonian close-up vision: it’s a playful unfolding of how a poem comes into being. Image gives way to image with enviable grace and inevitability, driven by subtle sound-effects, nearrhyme, and brilliantly poised lines. The end-stops are an object-lesson in

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themselves. Clear through it all is the delight in language. Best of all is the poem’s turn at the end: the focus on the dreamt or imagined death of the self gives way to thoughts of others’ real deaths: “a child dying alone on a mat,” an insect unthinkingly squashed, a prison, a corpse left to the vultures on “indifferent mountains.” The pleasure is repeatedly endorsed in the collection. The punningly titled “A(way with Words” is a jeu d’esprit that, like the six a.m. poem, gets serious through its three sections: words are at first glittering playthings or arbitrarily allocated designators of meanings, until they’re revealed as “debris” when the poem turns to the world where speech gives way to sounds of insects, birds, and cattle: words can merely gesture at concepts like “compassion”; they cannot actually contain what they point to: the nature and experience of compassion. The poem’s paradoxical epigraph from the Austrian philosopher Fritz Mauthner gives us the clue to this proto-Wittgensteinian resolution: “Language has driven mankind out of paradise.” Peter’s sense of the arbitrariness of language underpins the serious game he enters in each poem. He celebrates in different modes the profundity of what a poem can accommodate. In his “Personae” series, Aristotle and Descartes are exercised by the mind of God, Leibniz ponders the world as a “wall of windowless things that communicate with nothing,” and Nietzsche is the Last Philosopher in his own mind, destroying what the mob believes for ever: “its truths, morals, slave religion, God.” Other portraits in “Personae” include the one-time Secretary of Defense and President of the World Bank, Robert McNamara; the painter Arthur Boyd, and the physician Eric Dark. McNamara is trenchantly denounced for eradicating people through perverse, weaselly named mechanisms like “structural adjustment” and “export-led industrialisation.” The poem reflects on normality and arrives at a chillingly cosy denouement. Irony is not cool and detached but sarcastic and hot for justice, the theme of much of the book. The poem on Eric Dark is one of the best things to come from a residence at Varuna. Previous visitors and Fellowship holders have commented on the picturequeness or spookiness of the setting, the calm they have experienced there, the life and work of Eleanor Dark, or the thoughtfulness of the donors of the estate, but in “Dark Tracks” Peter writes unexpectedly of Eleanor’s husband, a principled left-wing writer and doctor celebrated here for his enlightened campaign to end the disparity in health conditions between the rich and the poor. It’s clever and welcome. I could say more about the topics of the poems I’ve not mentioned, but I don’t want to engage in a sort-of ‘reader’s guide to all the good things in this book’. Reviewers will, I trust, acknowledge the depth and breadth of the

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collection’s topics and theme, sand I hope reviewers will also take time to remark on the fluidity and suppleness of the poems as poetry. There is a distinct musicality in these poems. Read rightly, as lines, stanzas, and other spatial orderings tactically arranged, the poems are alive with sophisticated wit that makes allowance for tragedy as well as comedy. If some poems nurse a jokey line or milk words for extra effect (like the “pretty dicey / theodicy / of sorts” in the title poem), the jokes have mordant punchlines that castigate the insensitivity of the powerful, the greedy, and the stupid. The poems aren’t didactic, but some serve as cautionary messages. They’re the work of a craftsman working though a range of forms and styles that makes a cornucopia of what Alexander Pope might have meant by a feast of reason and a flow of soul. The Post-Man Letters is a seriously good book which has poems that can happily converse with others by crafty poets like Charles Simic and Mark Strand, and such stars of the new English poetry as Simon Armitage, Robert Crawford, Jo Shapcott, and John Ash. At times it can seem that there is in Australia a dearth of really accessible philosophical poetry that has cosmopolitan appeal. It’s easy to think of poets whose work is predominantly lyrical and anecdotal, or so resistant to trusting and exploiting the demotic as to be impenetrable when heard live or read on the page. It’s not so easy to recall many truly rewarding encounters with a body of poetry that reaches beyond indwelling upon self and transitory culture to embrace questions of fine moral temper, of power and powerlessness, of the shiftingness and manipulation of language, and of life and death. Peter does this with wit and humour that is sometimes mordant or outrageously funny. Dada, Surrealism, Situationist, Fluxus, and other seriously critical movements are not far off. These are enviable poems. I wish every poet’s first book could be as moving and memorable, but I’m delighted that his is so. It’s an honour to launch his book; I trust others will thank Picaro Press for bringing it out and will admire Peter Lach–Newinsky’s achievement as much as I do.

———————— Inhabiting a Poem272 ————————

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N A PH ONE CON VE RS ATI ON ,

Martin Langford asked me what I thought about intuition. I was stymied. I’d not thought of intuition in connection with inhabiting a poem, and I said I thought ‘intuition’ was a word like ‘creativity’ – too broad or general to speak of. “One person’s creativity is another per272 

A talk at the Australian Poetry Symposium, Newcastle, September 2011.

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son’s cliché,” Martin suggested. “Yes,” I said, “but I don’t think in terms of creativity or intuition – I don’t get a Muse leaning out of a cloud and saying ‘Sharkey, take down the following’, or the Holy Spirit saying, ‘Now hear this’.” Where poems come from is imponderable. The Romantic view – ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity’, etc. – probably has a few adherents. For others, it can stem from intellectual inquiry into the arbitrariness of language, the slipperiness of words and the apparent impossibility of pulling anything new out of the conventional lexicon. This can result in engaging experiments in syntax, collage, translation, spatial arrangement, sound-effects, and much else. ‘Set’ or expected themes and topics can act as triggers. Some people seem able to write to order on a theme or subject; Keats and his friend Leigh Hunt competed to write a poem on a grasshopper and a cricket. The poems are not memorable. Sometimes the result can be several lines with startling images and turns of phrase. Anyone who has asked children to write on ‘set’ topics has seen such things: Kenneth Koch and others have published books of children’s productions that contain enviably fresh approaches to everyday things. But the result of such exercises is frequently a series of borrowed or conventional sentiments. Twentieth-century Poet Laureates’ ‘duty’ poems are in general dire. I’m wary of writing on demand about certain topics – parents or animal companions, for instance. A concern to do my dead parents justice provokes endless additions and qualifications. And I concur with the sentiments of the blogger who called petdom a kind of bling.273 So how do I get to inhabit a poem – a notation made with language that I did not invent? How does the poem make me, or reveal something of me even when I try to slip out of the picture? Whatever I do, if I attach my given name to a poem I am held responsible for it, and readers will take it as revealing my attitude to life at the time of self-attribution. I write mostly when an occasion and expression coincide – when an expression, a bunch of words, or a line occurs so insistently that I have to write it down to see what it says. I think it’s hard to keep up with the initial idea as fast as it unravels itself. The result may be a quick or slow notation, until the thought peters out; and then comes the working it over any number of times to try to convey the initial spontaneity of apprehension. If I think I can wait until later to recall and record the first line of thought, I’d be fooling myself. I might sometimes recollect the sensation or mood of those words, when I’m doing something else – speaking to someone, or travelling, or trying to get to sleep, or 273

One Man’s Mind, http://nanavati.eu/weblog/2011/02/petdom/ (accessed 26 August 2011).

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waking up at one a.m. And it sometimes happens that the words will come back again – and that’s fortuitous. A rush sets in that some would call a gift, others a curse, if they live in a world of blessings and curses. I suppose it’s a neurological process. Jennifer Harrison, who is a professional scientist, could enlighten people far more than I can on the origins and workings of such phenomena. Being in the poem, then, starts with a thing needing to be said, and then it’s work. The title of Siobhan Harvey’s 2010 collection of interviews with New Zealand writers is Words Carefully Chosen, a formulation that puts the matter fairly well.274 I’m sure people think of different things when they speak of inhabiting a poem. Poets could say they are occupied with the act of writing of a poem – that they’re in a strange zone. It’s an interesting situation, and certainly not like being ‘on stage’. The word ‘inhabit’ tapers off into original meanings such as ‘to be devoted or addicted to some one or something’, or ‘to be indwelling’ in a spiritual sense, or ‘to occupy some place or people’. And the word ‘occupy’ also embraces a special shade of meaning for anyone familiar with early versions of the English Bible and English writing up to about 1800 when the word was a euphemism for sexual relations. A typical usage was ‘Being partners, they did occupy long together before they were married’ – and Doll Tearsheet, in Shakespeare’s second play of Henry IV , laments the decline in use of “an excellent good worde before it was ill-sorted.” So we can be occupied in an erotic sense with what we’re doing when we write a poem. If writing is work, it’s rewarding for the pleasure of satisfying a drive or desire. This isn’t what’s conventionally meant by communication. Reading or listening to a poem also has to do with desire – to connect with something beyond oneself. This is not the same thing as ‘communication’, even when poet and reader speak the same language. Reading is more like with what Margaret Atwood calls “negotiating with the dead”275 in connection with the way writers relate to other writers: no reading of a poem will quite get at what the poet was thinking at the time: the poem is the record of an experience unique to the writer. The reader is in a sense a voyeur, a secret sharer of something the poet would be surprised to know about. So I doubt that any poem can be read entirely ‘right’. One can approach understanding the more one reflects on language, and the deeper one’s reading is. My experience of teaching literature reinforces a sense that reading is addictive, and the only way to read properly is to read everything possible. That way, one continually renews the pleasure of discovering something previously un274

Words Carefully Chosen, ed. Siobhan Harvey (Auckland: Cape Catley, 2010). Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (New York: Cambridge U P , 2002). 275

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known. I suppose that’s the Chapman’s Homer moment for Keats – and for every reader who lights on something astonishing, even if it’s already familiar to others more sophisticated. I’m astonished that some readers assume that I’d endorse every attitude spoken by someone called ‘I’, especially in poems that take off other people’s voices and even accents. My day job has been reading, reviewing, and teaching literature – as far as it can be taught – and analysing rhetoric, and encouraging literary composition. It is clear that there is a hierarchy of sophistication among readers and poets. Readers who restrict themselves to a narrow range of poetry sell short their capacity to appreciate more nuanced approaches to the genre’s potential to question, as well as to proclaim, entertain, warn or instruct. Poems, like other artforms to a greater or lesser extent, make demands on the attention of audiences or onlookers if they’re to appreciate what they’re observing. Some people are oblivious, for instance, to the features of architecture in which they walk, work, or otherwise dwell. You could argue that it’s not necessary to know how to ‘read’ or interpret architecture: we know when we’re comfortable and when we feel uneasy. If we can ignore the noise of the world, and attempt some understanding of the language of architecture, we might enlarge our sense of the complex ways in which we interact with the world. I think engagement with poetry works something like that: it can expand our consciousness of aspects of the world that are sometimes less than evident – including how language comes about, and why fascination with it can lead some people to dedicate their lives to employing it in ways that go beyond the ‘How much does that cost? Ditch the Witch, Vote For Me’ functionality. We don’t need to mug up on technical terms that scholars use to describe verbal acts, though a smattering of their metalanguage can help us explain something of our experience of inhabiting a poem – just as relevant architectural or musical terms can increase articulation of our experience of those arts.

————— Trans-Tasman Literary Relations276 —————

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U R I N G T H E S U M M E R O F 2011–1 2 ,

I lodged at the Frank Sargeson Centre in Auckland, proofreading a biography and initiating a longdelayed record of forty years of commuting across the Tasman. On nearly every visit, I’d met New Zealand writers, and we rambled around the context and products of the different cultures that had emerged from a language that, in large part, we share. Now, I was engaged in sifting and expanding observations I’d

276 

New Zealand Author 286 (April–May 2012): 13–16.

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recorded in reviews, essays, interviews, and articles on Australian and New Zealand writers, with a personal bias toward the conversation of poetry. I’ve long thought about the lack of knowledge of – or is it unconcern with? – the writing of the ‘other’ place on each side of the Tasman Curtain. How interested can any reader be in the products of a neighbouring culture? Few works by New Zealanders have been or are available in Australian bookshops, a situation mirrored on the New Zealand side. I supposed until recently that the august National Library of Australia was keeping up with New Zealand literary publications, but, to take three instances, the NLA holds two of Catherine Chidgey’s three novels, a scant three of Kapka Kassabova’s nine titles, and six of Michele Leggott’s thirteen. But my regional library group, servicing up to hundreds of kilometres from my hometown, holds none of their titles. One might expect educational institutions to take up the slack, but many barriers are in the way. From the late 1970s until 2010, I had taught New Zealand literature at Auckland University and Australian literature in several universities in Australia and elsewhere. Between appointments and sometimes concurrently with them, I’d worked for the Australian Book Council, library groups, and other organizations in four States, and conducted seminars and writing workshops in Australia, China, and Europe, often consciously employing the writing of New Zealand and Australian writers as illustrations or models rather than focusing entirely on better-known English or American writers. It seemed the least I could do to spread the word about writers in one region or hemisphere to readers in another. Although I might try to promote ‘otherside’ writers in my teaching schedule, the wariness or failure of academic booksellers to stock anything like a class set, of, say, Katherine Mansfield stories, a Shadbolt novel, or a ‘selected’ Baxter almost put a spoke in the wheel on any occasion. Terry Sturm, my former Sydney postgraduate supervisor and colleague, vented similar frustration with the publishers and suppliers of Australian titles he sought for Auckland University offerings in Australian literature. He could scarcely credit that Patrick White’s works were out of print, just as I lamented the non-availability in Australia of writers from Satchell to Shadbolt. It was, and is, unusual to see New Zealand books on sale in Australian bookshops, though anomalies occur. For a time, Keri Hulme’s first novel was everywhere; then, nowhere. Martin Edmond’s 2011 account of Colin McCahon’s ‘lost’ night in Sydney is on sale at the New South Wales Art Gallery bookshop, as I write, and Sarah Shieff’s edition of Frank Sargeson’s letters is available at Gleebooks in Sydney. These are unusual bookshops, patronized by relatively upmarket clienteles. All the same, I don’t expect to see either book on sale in my university town.

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The situation across the way is similar: anomalies stand out. In 1975, I was astonished to see copies of Poor Fellow My Country in a bookseller’s window in Queen Street, Auckland. One could be astonished nowadays to see that novel reprinted and available in any shop in Australia, where booksellers famously order local fiction in small quantities – which is preferable to the next-to-zero quantity, much of the time, of poetry and drama placed on display. The Australian poet Philip Salom, several of whose books have achieved more than one reprint, has commented that though poetry sells slowly, it nevertheless sells so long as bookshops actually keep it on the shelves. Teachers of Australian literature have experienced the difficulty of obtaining anything in print by writers like Patrick White, David Malouf, Christopher Koch, and a host of others: in some cases, books published and praised by critics a scant year before. A number of books keenly promoted by authors’ agents or cannier publishers remain on this or that State’s syllabus until the book and its content retain no excitement for successive generations learning cribs for exams. No one is surprised that Australian literary studies as such are going out the door in Australian universities. Reviewing books for Australian newspapers since the early 1980s, I encountered a number of New Zealand novels, short-story collections, biography, and, occasionally, drama scripts, and while I recommended much that pleased me, I had no way of indicating where, or for what duration, the books might be available. Neighbours and acquaintances have at times told me they’d ordered a book I’d recommended, though the bookstores in my town were not always inclined to order extra copies, for fear that they’d be stuck with a non-returnable item. This is still the case. There’s little space for display and storage of the torrent of new books appearing each week in Australia. Like Whitcoulls in New Zealand, larger Australian chains such as Dymocks and Collins have more buying power and distribution networks through their franchises, so they can trump the independents with respect to shifting copies from store to store. I was dispirited by the sight of stacks of books from Borders Auckland and Christchurch stores on sale for laughable prices in Auckland stores last summer, when Borders NZ followed the Australian branches’ collapse. My first thoughts were for the fate of the employees thrown out of work and, more comprehensively, for the loss of income from royalties for the benighted authors of so many locally produced books. It seemed indecent to buy a collection of New Zealand fiction and non-fiction at a fraction of the list prices. I experienced similar chagrin when I saw the last days of Roger and Helen Parsons’ bookshop in Auckland, an inestimable cultural loss for Aucklanders and others, all the more

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so in the light of the relegation of the Auckland City Gallery’s bookstore to the status of souvenir-shop. Bookselling in Australia is also fraught. As Michael Visontay has observed, The rise of digital books and distribution has thrown many established shops and publishers into freefall, symbolized by the collapse of the Borders group, the sharp decline in hard copy book sales and a new conservatism by publishers in response.277

Quite so, and Internet sales of hard-copy books have accelerated the shakeout of bookstores and publishers in New Zealand as well as Australia, though some Australia stores that specialize in languages, romance, science fiction, technical, and other subjects hang in there against the flood of mail orders from Alibris, Abebooks, and the Book Depository. As the Australian Book Industry Strategy Group’s September 2011 report to the Australian Government noted, These companies can sell books at a more competitive price in the Australian market than local booksellers. This is because they can buy books at a cheaper wholesale price; pay a low postage rate to Australia; and [are] not required to impose the 10 per cent goods and services tax on books when the total value is under $1,000.278

Desperate times for authors, publishers, and booksellers call for urgent measures. Among the 138 submissions to the BI SG by authors and their agents, booksellers, printers, libraries, educators, and publishers, there were such author-driven proposals as that the government legislate “to exempt all literary prizes, awards and grants that are funded and administered by government, whether local, state or Commonwealth,” and, more radically, that “the Government implement an income deposits tax measure, following the precedent of the rural (farm management) deposits scheme, to assist with management of fluctuations in artists’/authors’ incomes over time.” Les Murray long ago claimed “primary producer” status for his occupation,279 and the latest proposal relating to income averaging is attractive to writers whose cash flow is, to say the least, variable. Perhaps these, and other, more longstanding wish-list items among the proposals put to the Australian government late last year might be embraced in the 277

Michael Visontay, Australian Author 43.4 (December 2011), OpEd, 4. B I S G Final Report, Executive summary. 279 “Some of us primary producers, us farmers and authors / are going round to watch them evict a banker” – Les A. Murray, “The Rollover,” Weekend Australian (8–9 August 1992), Review: 6, repr. in Murray, Subhuman Redneck Poems (Potts Point, N S W : Duffy & Snellgrove, 1996): 20. 278

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interest of a robust literary culture. In 2006, BookScan measured sales of 53.3 million units to a value of $A1.05 billion from over 326,000 different titles; in a typical mid-year week, over 70,000 different titles, selling 890,000 copies, were sold, generating approximately $A17 million. This was how things stood before the Kindle revolution of 2007 upset all bets. Bookscan figures for Australianauthored books were not available, but it appears that the proportion of locally produced books is greater than that of New Zealand-authored books marketed in New Zealand – and the proportion of local fiction is correspondingly higher in Australia. In August 2011, Graham Adams reported in North & South magazine that Debra Millar was “perturbed” to discover, on taking office at Penguin Books in Auckland, that New Zealand fiction counted for only four percent of fiction sales in New Zealand. Trends in Australia include libraries buying from overseas sources because of the perceived exorbitant local pricing, which the BI SG sees as a sixteen percent disparity resulting from supply-chain inefficiencies including costs of wages, postage, freight, the Goods and Services Tax, shop rentals, and costs incurred by printers, publishers, and distributors – factors exacerbated by guessing quantities, oversupplying, return of stock, remaindering, and much else. I can’t say how the New Zealand supply chain works, but it seems to me that books are relatively cheaper and often better produced in New Zealand. It isn’t a matter of disparity in relative income: everyone I know remarks on the high quality of New Zealand books: their paper, design, type, printing, and binding. Of course, there are exceptions, but it’s striking to compare works of fiction or poetry published by Victoria University Press or Auckland University Press with those from the University of Queensland Press. Books from a handful of Australian small presses apart, those from the larger presses are frequently far from elegant, as if the book is less the breath of a master spirit, as Everyman editions used to boast, than a consumer item on a level with disposable napkins. Quality of paper and printing is one matter; a more interesting consideration is the switch in reading habits from paper to digital format. Are books, as a young friend told me, “so not surprised yesterday”? (The same person devours hard-copy fantasy fiction.) I’m not surprised that reading ebooks via Kindle, iPad or mobile phone has appeal for younger readers; it’s more than just cool; it goes with the habit of doing all leisure activity online. I don’t lament the invasion of the digital book. Digital publishing has produced self-published bestsellers that would not have got off the ground if their authors had continued a fruitless trudge from one hard-copy book publisher to another. Self-publishing has lost much of its

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bad reputation; authors can control release and use social networks to advertise their wares. In this respect, the self-published join the tradition of Beatrix Potter, Mark Twain, and others who prospered from taking matters into their own hands – and this seems the likely way of more writers on each side of the Tasman. Postscript: What Chance of a Trans-Tasman Literary Culture? Is it possible to think of a trans-Tasman culture? I hardly think so, if this means living easily in either country while maintaining a finger on the pulse. Stephen Oliver claimed to have coined the epithet ‘transtasman’ for poets, by way of analogy with ‘transatlantic’ country-hopping writers in another hemisphere.280 Oliver reckons that his invention has been taken “to suggest an anti-nationalist stance, and a hybrid culture that has come out of and belongs to, both countries,” and that, so far as his own work is concerned, “some indigenes” are upset “much in the way of saying ‘I don’t vote ’” upsets them. For him, “This is all to the Common Good.” Perhaps because one must drop anchor somewhere at length, Oliver has turned his back on the Australian experience, after giving it the greater part of his writing life. He initially paused in Sydney at the end of the 1970s while journeying to the Mediterranean and Europe, where he remained a couple of years before returning to New Zealand. He travelled again to Sydney in 1986, intending to stay until he made some money to buy a house in New Zealand, but he found himself still waylaid in Australia 2003. In recent times, he has returned to New Zealand and the postponed dream of home ownership. His website still records Sydney as his base, and fails to record the high praise heaped on him by Michael Morrissey, who, a couple of years past, claimed Oliver as the greatest living New Zealand poet. I’m aware that variations on the word ‘transtasman’ have been applied to interaction in earlier times. In 1986, with two other editors (Winifred Belmont and Simon MacDonald), I produced in Melbourne a single-issue magazine called Trans-Tasman Undercurrent, which included interviews with, and stories and poems by, writers from Australia and New Zealand. The same matters recurred in conversation: expatriatism, nationalism, the book trade, book distribution, readership, and much else. Several of the writers had travelled or worked in both countries, so Stephen Oliver’s comments in 2003 and his story,

280

Patricia Prime, “An Interview with Stephen Oliver,” J A A M : Just Another Art Movement 20 (2003): 135–42.

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with variations, has resonance with the experience of countless New Zealand writers who have crossed the ditch. The history of such trans-Tasman crossings records a virtual one-way traffic in books as well as authors. Some have been glad to shake the dust off their feet as they departed: most signally Katherine Mansfield, whose early prose appeared in the Sydney Bulletin, but whose contact with and impact on Australia, like that of her fellow countrywoman Lola Ridge, was far less than Oliver’s sketchy initial visit. Eric Beach, long resident in Australia, once remarked that “to be born in New Zealand was my greatest wish… so there I was, born with the gift of precognition.”281 Beach’s sentiment might be echoed by Rosie Scott, Gary Langton, Nigel Roberts, Martin Edmond, Jennifer Compton and a host of others whose awareness of difference has given their work a perspective and edginess that distances them from the sometimes unconscious self-assuredness and boosterism of stereotypical national traits, ways of speaking, depictions of place, or satire of easy targets that characterizes a deal of Australian fiction and poetry. Australians David Williamson, Les Murray, John Tranter, David Foster, John Birmingham and others play with stereotypes, revolving them and seeing the flaws in the opal, as effortlessly as Roger Hall, Vincent O’Sullivan, Bill Manhire, Michele Leggott, Craig Marriner, and Vivienne Plumb can incorporate in their writing the Rawleigh’s man or other walking billboards for New Zealand. Sometimes those characteristics of idiom and place can make the transition: Jack Hibberd’s play A Stretch of the Imagination struck a chord with Wellington and other audiences on account of its hilariously incorrect language and self-sendup: in that respect, it probably left for dead Barry Humphries’ effort to provoke laughter by mocking an audience. Like Hibberd, Roger Hall can tap a distinctive New Zealand idiom and self-conscious wit that translates across the Tasman and as far as London: he has shared successful seasons with David Williamson in Sydney and Brisbane. The ease with which writers can traverse the geological divide is demonstrated by the careers of Compton and Plumb; both are as likely to appear as holders of grants, awards or residences in either country. New Zealanders’ contribution to Australian literary life is outstanding, and Australians like to claim ownership of immigrant writers who please – much as Australians contest ownership of certain men and women in sport or other activities.282 This is by no means a trait unique to Australia; New Zealanders will 281

Eric Beach, headnote to his poems in Off the Record, ed. ஡ O (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1985): 115. 282 Cf., for instance, Jane Campion and Crowded House, not to mention Phar Lap.

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claim writers who succeed elsewhere as their own no matter how brief the writers’ time spent in New Zealand. Arthur Adams, David McKee Wright, and Douglas Stewart edited the Bulletin for appreciable periods in the twentieth century, though the two latter editors were ambiguously allowed to be fair-dinkum New Zealanders – Wright on account of his abjuration of balladry and embrace of Irishness, and Stewart because of his enthusiasm for all things Australian, including trout fishing: such treachery. Dulcie Deamer, Elizabeth Riddell, Eve Langley, Jean Devanny, and Ruth Park were luminaries of the east-coast Australian literary scene, and, at times, their New Zealand origins or early activities are conveniently ignored in Australian accounts of their careers: a pity, because the double heritage makes for a richer understanding of current exchanges. During my summer sojourn in Auckland, I encountered works I’d not previously read, by writers who’d held Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowships: an exciting discovery, for the most part, that led to further ferreting in new and second-hand bookshops to see what else writers such as Charlotte Grimshaw, Paula Morris, Emily Perkins, Catherine Chidgey, Nigel Cox, Chad Taylor, Kapka Kassabova, and Shonagh Koea had produced. Some authors, such as Chad Taylor, Ming Cher, and Craig Marriner, would clearly have cult appeal; others, like Catherine Chidgey and Kapka Kassabova, should have broader appeal for the balancing of their characters’ New Zealand and overseas experience, and for the deftness of their style. What the presence of so many new discoveries – my discoveries, at any rate – brought home to me was how few of these authors were likely to be available in Australian bookstores. Sydney and other Australian locations share a certain status, sometimes seedy, often racy or upbeat, in New Zealand fiction that reflects contemporary manners. It’s home to a large contingent of New Zealand expats in a way that is not reciprocated by Wellington or Auckland. Any attempt at a comparable list of Australians who have made the permanent or long-term transition to New Zealand would come unstuck. Australian-born writers like Bruce Beaver or Australian-experiencers like Welsh-born Philip Holden, and others who spent several years or extensive periods in New Zealand are far outnumbered by writers like John Sligo, Alan Loney, Jennifer Compton, and Martin Edmond (resident in Sydney since 1981) – whose most recent book is an attractive meditation on the two nations’ contribution to the focal character, the artist Colin McCahon, as well as its author’s outlook.283 For Australians, the names of New Zealand popular musicians and actors and those of certain high achievers in sport, medicine, commerce, and industry 283

Martin Edmond, Dark Night: Walking With McCahon (Auckland: Auckland U P , 2011).

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might strike more chords than those of New Zealand writers, artists, and composers. Keen readers might tackle Keri Hulme, Janet Frame, or earlier writers such as Ruth Park and John Sligo, but it’s likely more will have read John Clarke, Jane Campion, Annamarie Jagose, and perhaps Maurice Gee than have stayed the course with C.K. Stead, Sarah Quigley, Beryl Fletcher or Sarah Laing, assuming that local libraries and booksellers retain any of the above. In a long span of reviewing, I was pleased to see fiction by Alan Duff, John Cranna, and other contemporaries arrive among parcels of books from Australia and elsewhere. This is how it should be – only more often. My earliest contact with New Zealand writers pre-dated my later professional interest as teacher, reviewer, and writer. I started adult life, properly speaking, as an employee of a publishing house in Sydney that counted Maurice Shadbolt and other New Zealand authors among those it represented. In 1967, I read The Presence of Music when it was straight out of the crate from Britain. In those days, Australian as well as New Zealand authors were hardly considered pukka unless they were published in the U K . My employer’s main office was in Red Lion Square; it acted as agents for publishers of Patrick White, Thomas Keneally, Maie Casey, Tom Ronan, and other Australians, besides several New Zealand writers. It’s interesting to me now to think that I wouldn’t have heard of Shadbolt so early if he hadn’t been published in the U K . I could say the same about Patrick White; his first three or four novels were revelatory, as was Keneally’s Bring Larks and Heroes, which was among the first to be printed locally. Local publishers included Angus and Robertson, notable to me then for acquainting me with Ronald Hugh Morrieson’s The Scarecrow and Came a Hot Friday, and, through A & R’s bookstore, the works of A.H. and A.W. Reed, purveyors of earnest works (many by A.W. Reed) on New Zealand birds and nature, ǒoritanga (though the word didn’t exist in Australia, back then), Aboriginal myths and legends, and a slew of educational texts. Occasional sports came my way: Barry Crump’s early autobiographical yarns revealed a less gentrified, more extroverted New Zealand temperament that was difficult to reconcile with the images of politicians in cardigans and a populace whose summum bonum was watching rugby. No one I mixed with had read any New Zealand poetry, and New Zealand theatre was as much terra incognita as the local variety. Rugby apart, popular New Zealand culture was understood to consist of Mǒori concert parties who occasionally visited Australia, Ray Columbus and the Invaders performing in a tent at Sydney’s Royal Easter Show or appearing on a bland rock and roll show on TV , and the debate over ownership of the pavlova. Sir Edmund Hillary’s ascent of Everest made up the full hand.

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This changed for me when I gained a scholarship to attend Auckland University as a postgraduate under the supervision of Michael Joseph; previously, I had attended Sydney University as an evening student, ultimately commencing research under the guidance of Terry Sturm. Sturm took sabbatical leave in Auckland and suggested my transfer to the same city. I consequently owe both men my gratitude for further opening my eyes to the depth and appeal of New Zealand writing. While I awaited the results of my dissertation examination, Auckland University offered me an interim position tutoring evening students in New Zealand literature. For an entire year, I could extend my familiarity with New Zealand writing, in the company of luminaries like Allen Curnow, Michael Joseph, C.K. Stead, Bill Pearson, Ken Smithyman, Riemke Ensing, and fellow students Mark Williams and Jan Kemp. Visiting writers such as Hone Tuwhare, Denis Glover, and Sam Hunt enlivened the readings on campus, and people were full of anecdotes about the admired or reviled James K. Baxter. Up the road, jazz and poetry were interspersed at the Globe Hotel, where David Mitchell organized readings; Russell Haley, Michael Morrissey, the cantankerous Herman Gladwin and others convened at the Kiwi Hotel, where, one afternoon in the near-empty pub, Fleur Adcock sat writing her diary. Something of the excitement of discovery of that energetic culture has sustained my physical, intellectual, and creative journeys ever since. So, do I consider a ‘transtasman’ culture to be possible? Yes, if I can allow the term to encompass the actual or virtual meetings between writers and readers on each side. Readers and writers undoubtedly retain more than a vestige of their relevant emotional regionalism, however much they meet with each other in ‘real’ space. At the same time, their conversation through social networking sites or in actuality invariably turns to exploration of what and who they know and who they think worth knowing about among those similarly engaged on their own or the other side.

———————— The Rapture Endures ————————

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N L A T E J U N E 2012 , the American publisher RD Armstrong asked me if I could contribute something to the forthcoming edition of the American-born Queensland poet Billy Jones’s latest collection, Radiation (Los Angeles: Lummox Press, 2012). Knowing that Billy’s time was short, I wrote the following foreword, at once a record of my brief personal encounters with the man and a tribute to his poetry. The piece arrived in time for Billy to see it and endorse it. He died on 3 July, greatly lamented on both sides of the Pacific.

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What credentials do I have to speak of Billy Jones? Only those that are based on fleeting encounters over thirty years and longer-lasting admiration of a poet who went his own way, far from the flak and noise of rivalries, competitions, and unpleasantness that characterizes the ascent of so many of his peers in Australia. What am I saying? Billy has no peers in the type of poetry he writes and the calligraphic precision with which he records it. And he has few in his other sphere, of meticulous attention in coloured ink drawings of the women in his life and the fauna and flora at his doorstep. I met Billy at one of the national poetry festivals at Montsalvat in Victoria in the 1980s, where marathon readings by thirty or fifty poets take place. Thirty or fifty poets follow each other in a conga-line at the microphone and recite their lines to an audience of the other twenty-nine or forty-nine poets and their hangers-on. Billy stood out from the rush to be heard; quietly smoking, and talking to two or three people by the old stone swimming pool, and doing a lot of listening to those like him who wanted time out from the crowd. Billy’s conversation is all about what is happening in the present. There wasn’t any grandstanding or ‘Hey, I’m the poet’ signals. If I never got to be one of Billy’s intimate friends it was because of the great Australian distance, especially when I moved from Queensland – where I live way over a hundred kilometres from where he lived – to Victoria, and later to New South Wales. The distance closed every time I did meet Billy, and every time he published another book. I bought them and lent them to friends, saying, “Get on to this,” and the books disappeared. It’s shameful how some people like his poetry so much. The books contained sketches of beautiful women, amazing close-ups of frogs, kingfishers, wrens, and other creatures, vines, fruits, leaves, flowers, chairs, and books, a candle, kitchen walls and bedroom floors, matchboxes (with an image of Van Gogh collaged into the drawing). The drawings are spectacular, and friends and galleries have treasured them, as many have treasured his astonishing folio daybooks, artworks in their conception and execution. In desperate times, I wanted to own a drawing by Billy, and I paid a risibly small figure – all I could afford – for one that subsequently walked, like so many of his books that I showed to others. The drawings are Zen-pointillist penwork, lines and dashes and dots filling in light and shade. There is no crosshatching to sully the clarity of line and the intensity of contrast. What pens and nibs the man is master of: as with the large drawings, so with the smaller – fabulous control and patience. He told me once how many months it took him to draw a large jar of sunflower seeds, every one discernible and individual. William Blake, your eternity in a grain is here; in suburban Brisbane, Mary Smokes, or anywhere, a picture of Billy’s radiates its wonder in a room.

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The poetry evokes eternal things as well: attachments, even in exile. In “Snapshot,” Billy wrote: being an American expatriate living in Oz I have no relations here this snapshot sent by my mother means a lot to me.284

That gets to me. Lots of things and people mean a lot to Billy, as he means a lot to those who have met him. A gentle spirit in a deeply conflicted world; Billy’s problems are with all the usual suspects: any number of lovers, former de-factos, deaths, and children who are alive, and the state of his finances: in another poem, he writes: “I’ve written poems / dazed at the checkout stand / wondering if I had enough / to pay the bill.”285 He sings (and, yes, it is a singing poetry, the true lyricism behind any narrative he writes) his everyday and extraordinary heroes: a woman medic officer, a country postmaster, Sugar Ray Robinson, Dostoyevsky, a woman who knew Bukowski, a dingo howling at the moon – “sometimes more beautiful to me” he says, “than Beethoven or Mozart.” 286 Heroes of all arts and survival, whether human, animal or plant: the net is wide, and it’s why he speaks so clearly to non-poetry people and why other poets who encounter him see him as an original. If they’re honest, a lot of them would like to have the courage to let rip like Billy, ignoring the decorum and the protocols of machine poetry. Billy’s poetry and art are of the earth. He could be one of Whitman’s wild children, except that there’s more reflectiveness, less showmanship to the fore. The secret of his poetry: cowpats, cane-bottom chairs and clitorises, meteors, mudhens and marijuana please him, and, pleasing him, please others. Optimism underlines his sympathy for fellow creatures and respect for things in the natural world. He speaks of auras, halos, and spirit: This is Billy’s spin, perhaps, on “all that lives is holy.” This poetry is no throwback to Beatdom, though he writes of booze, hitchhiking, sex, and the rapture of being alive. That rapture endures and permeates this book, whose title, Radiation, says it all: take it every way, it radiates the spirit of wonder he recorded way back, in “Love at First Sight”: it all began when I wrote my first poem painted my first picture 284

Billy Jones, “Snapshot,” in Jones, Jet Lag (Pymble, N S W : Angus & Robertson, 1993): 90. “I’ve Written Poems in the Aisles of Supermarkets,” in Jones, Jet Lag, 13–14. 286 “Rambling Riversoul Rapture,” in Jones, Holocaust at Mary Smokes: Poems, 1975–83 (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1983): 78. 285

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unaware I was an artist or a poet it all began with so much magic so much soul so much sex it was love at first sight.287

It’s still like that. In a poem in Holocaust at Mary Smokes, he wrote: “sometimes / a feeling comes over me / more beautiful than orgasm.”288 Right, I say, and he stills wants us to experience the same. Go, Billy!

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287 288

“Love at First Sight,” in Jones, Jet Lag, 100. “the human body is,” in Jones, Holocaust at Mary Smokes, 89.

P A R T 4 (T H E P HOTOGR APH

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—————— “Something Of Value”: An Introduction to John Fields’ ‘Signature’ Photographs1 ——————

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that John Fields called his ‘Signature series’, depicting certain Auckland domestic interiors, grew out of his discovery in New Zealand of the possibility of what Peter Ireland called a distinctive “voice.”2 Fields’ individual style and insight united all his technical expertise – as a surveyor of New Zealand’s photography scene,3 and as a documentary and archival photographer, a recorder of significant social events and cultural moments, a scientific photographer of cellular and other organisms, and a dedicated and curious portraitist of people in their self-made environments. There is no precise separation of these elements that came together in the ‘Signature’ photographs. Nor is there any contradiction in his perception of the organic nature of each environment he portrayed in his work overall, and the interconnectivity of each of his subjects in relation to the larger cultures of which each is part, from the micro- to the macro-level. The material objects in the ‘Signature’ series attract the eye no less than the sub-microscopic life he photographed at Auckland University, the old houses listed for demolition in Basque Park, Freemans Bay, and Grafton Gully in Auckland, the Victorian buildings that he recorded in concert with the architectural historian John Stacpoole and published as Victorian Auckland,4 the old houses and public buildings of Thames, the rainforests of the Coromandel peninsula, and the rural scenes he photographed in the New England regions of America and Australia. We can marvel at the emphasis on the individuality revealed in each of Fields’ democratic range of subjects. But there is another dimension of 1

HE PH OTOG RAPHS

Much of the detail in the following is based on information provided by the following persons: (a) interviews and correspondence: John Fields, 25 November 2012 and 26 January 2013 (Guyra, NSW); 13 December 2012 and 28, 29 & 30 January 2013 (Armidale, NSW); Grant Coupland, 9 March 2013; Claudia Pond Eyley and Peter Eyley, 4 March and 13 March 2013; Jenny Goddard (formerly Jenny Eagles), 11 March 2013; Jim Keogh, 11 March 2013; Judy Wood, 13 March 2013; (b) email correspondence: Jenny Goddard, 10 March and 13 May 2013; David Langman, 31 January, 3, 18 & 19 March, 6, 9, 13 & 14 May 2013; Ivan Millett, 2 & 6 March 2013; Simon Scott, 8 February 2013; Iain Sharp, 26 February 2013; Kerry Traynor. Email, 27 February 2013; (c) postal correspondence: Judy Wood, 7 April 2013. I am particularly grateful to comments by readers Patricia Fields, Helvi Fields, Kerry Traynor, David Langman, and Peter Ireland. 2 Peter Ireland, “John Fields,” Photoforum, http://photoforum-nz.org/blog/?cat=14 (accessed 20 February 2013). 3 John Fields, Introduction to Photography: A Visual Dialect: 10 Contemporary N Z Photographers (Auckland: Lockley Offset, 1970). 4 John Fields & John Stacpoole, Victorian Auckland (Dunedin: John McIndoe, 1973).

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creativity in the framing, perspective, and proximity of objects in the ‘Signature’ series. We intuitively apprehend the art of such photographs even before we can articulate how this is so. Ideally, a book of photographs or an exhibition requires no text, but I think it useful to situate Fields in the context of his Auckland family and society and especially those friends and colleagues whose houses supplied the subjects of these photographs. Some of these people facilitated his work by lending cars and even the crucially important camera that recorded the series. The more useful part of the text of this essay, however, consists of Fields’ own record of what he sought and how his practice led to the choices he made. A brief prehistory: from America to Auckland John Fields, the second son of Sara Mae (née McDonald) and Ludwig Fields, was born on 18 January 1938, in Rockport, Massachusetts. John and his brother Charlie were closely bonded at the time of their father’s death in 1951 and their mother’s subsequent move with the boys to Squam Hill. Here, Fields spent much of his time adventuring with a friend or alone in the woods, observing light and shadow and the nuances of nature – skills that would become an integral part of his vision, as he was to later apply them through the lens. Throughout his adult life, Fields would also maintain detailed journals of his observations and reflections on the relationships between nature and society, vision and photography. First came the business of a living, and on 31 January 1955, he became a recruit at the United States Naval Training Center at Bainbridge, Maryland. He contracted rheumatic fever and was transferred to Anacostia Naval Station in Washington and from there to an Intensive Care Unit at Mare Island, California. On the mend at length, he flew to San Diego, where he reported to the Gearing Class Destroyer U S S Rowan (D D 782). Throughout the 1950s and ’60s, Rowan rotated between assignments with the Seventh Fleet in the Western Pacific and operations and exercises with the First Fleet off the west coast of the Americas and the Hawaiian area. On one visit to Sydney in 1956, Fields met his future wife, Patricia Hazelton, a professional singer who performed under the name Kerry Bryant. They became engaged in 1959, the year that Fields left the Navy with the rank of Gunners Mate First Class. Already committed to photography as a career, Fields returned to Massachusetts, taking on token positions to fund himself while establishing photographic exhibitions in Connecticut, Rockport, and Boston. He attended a course in colour photography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and studied documentary filmmaking at Harvard with the nonfiction filmmaker and photographer Robert Gardner.

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In 1965, Fields worked as a photographer at Massachusetts General Hospital, under the noted English cell biologist Dr Stanley Bullivant (1932–2006). When Bullivant transferred to the University of Auckland the following year, Fields was offered the opportunity to accompany him and, from the spring of 1966, he worked in the cell biology section of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (D SI R ) at Auckland University. In the same year, he and Patricia Hazelton were married in Sydney, and they returned to settle in Auckland, first at Kingsland, then, successively, in Mt Eden, Taupaki, and Blockhouse Bay, over a period of nine years. John Fields in Auckland: photography as documentary record and as art From the time of his arrival in New Zealand, Fields began recording in photographs and words his responses to a new land and society. He is on record as initially thinking of New Zealand as a cultural vacuum, an opinion that changed when he engaged with other creative members of a society undergoing rapid and radical change, as if impatient to shake off an outmoded identity. Fields’ meticulous diaries and photographic exposure and location records, especially those dating from 1969, chart his growing fascination with the landscape and with aspects of social transformation that by turns excited and appalled him. He took heart from meetings with fellow photographers Gary Baigent, Richard Collins, Simon Buis, and others in Auckland, including John B. Turner, who had worked in the historical photographs department of the Dominion Museum in Wellington. Several enduring friendships developed from these encounters. At first dismayed by the apparent slapdash approach of Gary Baigent – whose unconventional attitude to photography, he remarked to me, was like Baigent’s life at the time – Fields came to appreciate the candid approach first widely publicized in Baigent’s landmark book, The Unseen City,5 and the two photographers exchanged ideas and advice on technical aspects of photography as well as on intuition rather than premeditated compositional arrangement. Fields appreciated that all the Auckland photographers were similarly motivated to raise the profile of photography in New Zealand, primarily as an art but also as a record of society and the natural and built landscape. Fields’ initial sense of New Zealand’s cultural backwardness had shifted within two years of his arrival to something like hope for a revolution in outlook, to which photography might make a major contribution, as he recorded early in 1969: 5

Gary Baigent, The Unseen City (Hamilton: Paul, 1967).

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N.Z. is so far behind in what’s happening in the creative “art” photography movement, they’ll never catch up to what’s happening in the U S A or Europe. But does that mean a new trend, a new force, a new and vibrant movement might not evolve here? I’m inclined to think N Z could be shaped into a thinking community where photography has only to whisper and the world will listen.6

The year 1969 would culminate in a personal breakthrough in his discovery of the possibilities of large-format photography, which would result, five years later, in the landmark ‘Signature’ photographs. From his earliest days in New Zealand, Fields observed the urbanizing assault on the land and the tearing-down of old landmarks and residences around and in the city. His ecological consciousness permeates his diaries as well as his enduring love-affair with Thames and the Coromandel peninsula, to which he returned throughout his New Zealand sojourn. His sense of things worth conserving is also vividly present in his urban images. His documentary impulse had gripped him even before he undertook the ‘Victorian Auckland’ project with the architectural historian John Stacpoole to record buildings Stacpoole regarded as undervalued treasures at risk of destruction. Composing an independent draft introduction (which was not used in the eventual publication of Victorian Auckland), Fields wrote: It is my sincere hope that the book will help make people aware of what few historic places are left in Auckland, and that they take steps to ensure preserving those which warrant it. If by having shown them through my photography that this aim is worthwhile then I have succeeded in every possible way of at least making a beginning.7

Two months later, he surveyed the results of clearance of a predominantly working-class and middle-class precinct whose residences and commercial buildings he had earlier photographed: The changes around Newton Gulley are incredible. The remnants of the kind of life the gulley used to be can still be seen along Fourth St, but at the south end of it where it meets Don Croot Rd, all illusion ends. The new development there is what the future urban dwellers must contend with – a synthetic complex of rabbit hutches where the car outside, or the window “displays,” set the level of success. Progress indeed! 8

6 7 8

John Fields, Diary (2 February 1969–27 February 1971): 21 February 1969. John Fields, Diary, “Exposure Records” (Victorian Auckland logbook), 6 March 1973. John Fields, Diary, “Exposure Records” (Victorian Auckland logbook), 6 March 1973.

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In 1974, photographing around Titirangi, he noted orchards and farms being filled in and developed: “I can almost hear the wail of an unhappy society already, and they’ve just begun the terrible game of taking all the land.” 9 Victorian Auckland, for which Fields began photographing on 27 February 1971 and finished on 5 March 1973, remains a major part of his legacy to New Zealand, along with the thousands of photographs he simultaneously took of Auckland buildings deemed even less significant by the developers and urban authorities. Fields was sensitive to all the signs of pervasive cultural and political flux and possible expansion of national and global consciousness. A year after his arrival, New Zealand had adopted a second TV channel and embraced decimal currency. A youth culture had emerged, in concert with global impatience with Cold War rivalries, paranoia, and brinkmanship, and influenced by liberationist movements directed at concepts of colonialism, gender, and race. Resistance to New Zealand involvement in the war in Vietnam was mounting, and some of Fields’ documentary photographs record scenes of local political protests. An assertive Mǒori cultural resurgence accompanied these manifestations. On the individual level, changes in attitudes were increasingly expressed in fashions in clothes, music, drugs, and other lifestyle accoutrements, including choice of living spaces. New Zealand’s participation with the U SA and Australia in the war in Vietnam, and its apparent complacency with respect to American and French Pacific policy and apartheid regulations in sporting relations with South Africa, came unstuck in the years when John and Patricia took up residence in Auckland. Fields’ documentary formalism became inflected with his greater urge to creativity, what he called the “art spirit,” even while New Zealand culture was beginning to diversify and, to some staid minds, dissolve. The ‘Signature’ photographs and their forerunners, portraits of intimate scenes and spaces in the lives of Fields’ growing circle of friends and acquaintances, reflect the choices many fellow professionals and artists made in regard to living spaces and especially to modes of living. From financial constraints or with an eye to proximity to places of full-time or casual employment, many of the people whose homes he photographed preferred the then cheaper, Victorianera houses in the inner suburbs of Newton, Mt Eden, and Ponsonby, rather than project-built dwellings in the expanding outer suburbs. Many of the houses John photographed were former working-class cottages and middle-class homes on small allotments. Fields and his family occupied a flat that constituted one half of an old house in Horoeka Avenue in Mt Eden, a neighbourhood that counted many people 9

John Fields, Diary (March 1971–January 1976): 21 May 1974.

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destined to become key figures in New Zealand’s modernizing art, literary, and professional design movements. The painters Claudia Pond Eyley, Ralph Hotere, Pat Hanly and his wife, the photographer Gil Hanly, and Herman Gladwin and others lived nearby, and adjoining suburbs were home to Tony Fomison, Phil Clairmont, and an unusual number of writers, architects, and academics with whom John and Patricia Fields became friends. Such houses as theirs were rented or bought cheaply and were frequently made over in ways that admitted more light and spacious arrangement of furniture. The ‘Signature’ subjects’ houses were often sparsely furnished by their landlords or the new occupants, who removed or modified Victorian and Edwardian wallpaper and surface decorations, and knocked holes in interior walls, in line with a desire for more light and openness, reflecting a shifting mood in relation to restrictions and conformity in general. As the ‘Signature’ photographs reveal, some alterations appear to have been endemic. Landlords, previous owners, or the owner-occupants at the time when the photographs were taken had removed coal-ranges and closed fireplaces or reduced them to storage niches. Kitchen and bedroom mantelpieces served as bookshelves and sometimes additional workbenches containing disparate objects of aesthetic and practical value, whose distinctiveness, even quirkiness, Fields was quick to notice: a ‘Peanuts’ clock adjoining a Hotere drawing; motor parts and a colonial photograph; a teddy bear and an abstract painting; a light bulb, sewing kit, and machine oil. These personal touches complemented architectural details that registered a New Zealand vernacular. Fields was well placed to discuss older and newer architecture of Auckland with professionals, some of whom were in effect university colleagues. Pat Hanly and Claudia Pond Eyley taught drawing to students of architecture at the university. Fields’ diaries record social encounters with these friends, and with the architects Grant Coupland and Blair Smith, at the Kiwi Hotel in Symonds Street on Friday evenings, and in their homes that would provide subjects for the ‘Signature’ photographs. Smith and Judy Wood were friends of Grant and Ann Coupland, and of the boat-building landscape and garden designer Don Gifford and his partner Sue Crockford, whose house provided thematic subjects for the ‘Signature’ series. The evolution of the ‘Signature’ series For the most part, Fields’ ‘Signature’ photographs were made with a large-format (8x10 inch) dryplate Seebold Invisible Camera, which permitted extraordinarily high-definition photographs. Well before employing that camera, borrowed

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from Laurence Aberhart, Fields made a number of photographs with a 5x7 camera of his own, which he asked his brother to send from America, and which he at once refurbished, in his eagerness to attain mastery of the instrument. He later came to regard several of the early 5x7 photographs as belonging with the ‘Signature’ series, on account of their exquisite contrasting tones, balance, and finish. Fields’ decision to send for the camera stemmed from his dissatisfaction with the quality of 35mm negatives when enlarged to fashionable 8x10-inch-sized prints. On 27 May 1969, he recorded that enlargement of 35mm negatives to smaller prints (6¾ by 7½ inch paper) “has given some of my negatives an opportunity to show their quality. It’s brought me to the opinion that 35 m/m can match larger negative work only when the prints are small.” In the same diary, a month earlier, he had outlined the “bombshell” that tipped him toward largeformat photography: A book I found on sale at Minerva Book shop has been one of the most significant influences to come my way in some time. The book is, Walker Evans, American Photographer, with an essay by Lincoln Kirstein. While I had a familiarity with much of Evans work, I found his images in this book to be all new to me. The bombshell detonated in my mind was Kirstein’s essay. His words summed up feelings I’ve felt, but in no way could express. Needless to say perhaps, is the decided slant he gave toward Evans’ work, but taking his statements in a general sense, I found a whole new and promising avenue open to me. My decision was instantly shaped to have Charlie send my 5x7 camera here. I need to start using a large format camera in my work, otherwise much of the precious and meaningful details in my compositions will continue to be lost. I’ve worked with great care much of the time in order that I could squeeze so much detail as is possible from those 35 m/m negatives, but it’s physically impossible when any great enlargement is required. Since I prefer filling the frame with my selected subject in any given composition, the use of a large camera will offer unlimited control on those, so-called, controllable situations. The problem of mobility is going to present a serious hardship, but I don’t care, I can work something out, even if I have to drag the equipment around in a cart. This revamping of my directions in photography should come as no surprise to anyone who has looked at my work. I see detail, I love detail, and the unique property of photography is its ability to render the visual detail. I must qualify that, because there are some limits to certain cameras and film. In my new opinion, a large format camera is going to render the detail I want in my photographs. I’m well

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aware of the “disadvantages” to using such equipment, but it hardly matters since the “advantages” are of more importance despite the cumbersome and costly change.10

When the camera arrived in August, Fields cleaned it up and excitedly made an excursion around Mt Eden, photographing houses and objects including items at Peter Eyley’s garage and objects in an antique-shop window in Dominion Road. Early in October, he took two photographs of “wash house articles” (the washroom basin11 and “Vat 69 bottle with garden rake” at Horoeka Avenue), and he recorded, concerning one of the results: This negative has been my first attempt at zone system exposure and the reward has filled me with a new and greater excitement. Though the exposure was slightly short [6 seconds], that peculiar appearance of this technique came through, and I’m genuinely feeling the break is just ahead. Christ I’m excited about what’s coming.12

When a friend drove him to Freemans Bay on 22 November, to introduce him to the aspiring writer Ivan Millett, occupant of number 52a Union Street, Fields took twenty-six photographs, including eight portraits of Millett, and two of the rear of the building. The rest comprised studies of the interior rooms, hallway, and views through windows. In some of these, there are views of adjacent houses, all of which, like Millett’s, and many to the west, would disappear in the path of the North Western Motorway. Freemans Bay, unfashionable even by the mid-nineteenth century, had been, and in many places still was, home to working-class Aucklanders and numerous industrial concerns. Among the latter were foundries, sawmills, shipyards, sea-grass and wicker-weavers’ manufactories, a waste-disposal works, a gasworks, and the city morgue by the end of the century. Slum clearance, advocated by a Council Decadent Areas Committee in the 1930s, was accelerated in the mid-1950s when a motorway to the Harbour Bridge was constructed, and many good houses, along with the more ramshackle or neglected, were erased. The front door of Millett’s house still carried an ancient glass-painted sign advertising the building as the abode of a seagrass worker named Sanders. Two days after the session at Millett’s house, Fields wrote: 10

John Fields, Diary (2 February 1969–27 February 1971): 27 April 1969. “Wash House, Horoeka Avenue, Mt Eden, Auckland, 1970,” photograph 72 in Baigent, Collins, Fields: Three New Zealand Photographers, intro. John B. Turner (Auckland: Auckland City Art Gallery, 1973). 12 John Fields, Diary, “Important Photographic Exposure and Location Records,” 4 October 1969. 11

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Developing the first lot of negatives from Saturday’s shooting has left me on the brink of despair. I’m just not getting the results I envisage when setting up the shot. It is exasperating to say the least. A number of the images were good, simple studies but nevertheless, good. One in particular has me appreciating its culmination of seeing and technique, it was a single photograph of his bed.13

In March 2013, Ivan Millett wrote, concerning the location, that “This dilapidated residence has now long gone of course; a feeder motorway to the harbour bridge (Highway 1) now passes a good fifteen metres below where it once stood.” He added: I also vividly remember John’s ancient-looking plate camera, though I think it might then have actually been of a more recent vintage. It had unusually long bellows, which, as John explained, allowed him to adjust for perspective in planes higher or lower than the camera by tilting the plane of the camera body itself. It took post-card size images which gave them that rich magic quality which I imagine even the best digital cameras today would find difficult to match.14

Fields gave Millett prints of eighteen photographs he took at 52a Union Street. Two of these are portraits of Millett. Millett did not receive copies of the “bed”15 or the final “fireplace” photographs, which are now in the Te Papa collection (the latter labelled “stove”). The eighteen photographs given to Millett point the way to the twenty-five ‘Signature’ photographs that, according to the Galerie Langman website, have been acquired by Te Papa. In respect of composition and production values, many of the Union Street photographs are quite breathtaking, though it is easy to see why Fields settled on the two that he did as representatives of his new direction in photographing interiors as extensions of people’s personalities and values. The bed photograph is justifiably renowned for the framing of the image, its contrast, and the way it incorporates irregular and geometric shapes all at once. The wooden bedstead and the window on the far side frame the pillow and sheets inside the picture, drawing the eye to details such as the fall of the fabric and a patched repair to one of the sheets. The lighter shades or, rather, the range of whites, from the sharpness of the sheets and the light through the window, to the reflection highlights on the bed-timber and the shade of the wall below the window, create a study in 13

John Fields, Diary (2 February 1969–27 February 1971): 24 November 1969. Ivan Millett, email, 11 March 2013. 15 “Bed, Union Street, Auckland, 1969,” photograph 55 in Baigent, Collins, Fields: Three New Zealand Photographers, intro. John B. Turner (Auckland: Auckland City Art Gallery, 1973). 14

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dividing lines and tonal contrasts that inevitably and easily bears comparison with Walker Evans’ Depression-era portraits of Southern farmers’ beds. In remarks recorded in William McAloon’s Art at Te Papa, Fields later claimed that when he took the bed photograph, “he was simply winging it, working without any defined blueprint,” and it that was only afterwards that he came across the 1938 Museum of Modern Art publication on Walker Evans, with its essay by Lincoln Kirstein that argued for the “protestant” virtue of Evans’ “spare, measured, factual photography of the vernacular.”16 At all accounts, Fields had embarked on a consciously contemplative style of photography that would characterize the ensuing ‘Signature’ series and much else. Kirstein’s account of the impetus behind Evans’ work reinforced Fields’ turn to a mode beyond documentary, and toward a distinctive style of his own that would flower in the ‘Signature’ photographs. For me, a large measure of the appeal of the Union Street photographs and the ‘Signature’ series is their encapsulation of the too-often overlooked history of the everyday. In particular, the photographs capture for me a world of people and of many places I once knew, a world in which John Fields moved and charmed people while he photographed them and their homes. The photographs compel me, as they have compelled others who recollect those scenes, and those who were never there but sense something familiar, to take stock of time and change. They convey, in effect, a sense that the English photography critic Francis Hodgson expresses very well in his comments on the work of Fay Godwin, a photographer with a “passion for the traces of the past on the land”: Photography always has a smell of history about it: you photograph that which you know will change faster than the picture. That’s why, in a world where absolutely everything seems to be photographable and photographed, the odd things that escape are those which are just so familiar that it seems inconceivable that they might change. We photograph our holidays, and have done for many generations. But how many of us find once we move house that we have never photographed our neighbours, the nice guy who runs the corner store, the commute to work, even our own front door? The corollary is true, too: that pictures which are stumbled upon which have a particular redolence of a past we thought had gone have a hard emotional effect like a blow.17 16

Lincoln Kirstein, “Photographs of America: Walker Evans,” in Walker Evans, American Photographs (1938; New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1988): 43, quoted in William McAloon, Art at Te Papa (Wellington: Te Papa Press, 2009): 261–62. 17 Francis Hodgson, “Paola De Pietri and the Effort of Memory” (28 February 2013), http: //francishodgson.com/ (accessed 17 May 2013).

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This last observation is especially true. In Fields’ work, I perceive a depth of premeditation and urgency that belies the ostensible whimsy or ‘curiosity-shop’ air about a photograph like the interior of Herman Gladwin’s house. While, in some measure, both the “puckish, cartoonish impulse” and sense of irony that David Eggleton discerned in some of Fields’ New Zealand land- and city-scape photography are evident in the focus on unusual conjunctions of objects in a room, a more nuanced sensitivity is more to the fore in the ‘Signature’ series. It is of a piece with what David Eggleton saw as the “extraordinary sensitivity to fine texture as a way of registering delicacy” that allowed Fields “to penetrate beneath the merely decorative to textures that bristle at you from such surfaces as a haystack, a coal range and the back wall of the Auckland magistrate’s Court.”18 In all of the ‘Signature’ photographs, the individuality of the inhabitants is realized with what Eggleton calls delicacy, and what I would call tact, and even reverence for the people who have made these environments. Immediately following the weekend he had spent photographing interior scenes at Don Gifford and Sue Crockford’s house (for the second time) and Josephine Fillery’s, Fields wrote: This has been a good weekend session and the percentage is very high. The images are strong and the message very clear. What a beautiful way to discover people and their relationship to possessions. Robert Ruark’s classic title “Something of Value” remains pertinent to a fundamental need manifesting itself. There is, of course, more.19

Using available light, Fields created photographs in which it is possible to read the newsprint, letters, notes or book titles in views of Dick Scott’s office, Sue Poff’s printing room, Don Gifford’s bedroom, the Garritys’ and Jim Keogh’s workrooms or the Eyleys’ mantelpiece. The sharp focus can sometimes help fix a scene: the New Zealand Listener on top of the newspaper in Gifford’s bedroom is dated 22 August 1975. The comfortable clutter depicted in such photographs, as much as the more orderly arrangement of kitchen and other utensils revealed elsewhere in the series, attests to the residents’ active engagement with their environment. The camera angle in many of these interior views emphasizes intimate space, as in the photograph of the Poff bedroom, with its framing curtains suggestive of a curtained stage-set. Fields’ alertness to the potential of such dividing planes is especially evident in several ‘corner’ photographs, such as the 18

David Eggleton, Into the Light: A History of New Zealand Photography (Wellington: Craig Potton, 2006): 119, 121. 19 John Fields, Diary, “Important Photographic Exposure and Location Records,” 8 November 1975.

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Garritys’ workroom, the Eyleys’ bedroom, Coupland’s front room, John B. Turner’s office, Scott’s living room, and the Eyleys’ and Eagles’ window-photographs. All tell a story about their occupant’s creation of a space for creative work or display of personality. Grant Coupland told me of Fields’ working method at his and others’ houses. Furnishings, toys, clothes, and other household objects were arranged in tidy static order when Fields arrived with tripod and camera and set about making photographs. Several years earlier, Fields had commented in his diary on the camera’s sixty pounds (27.2 kg) weight, “Using the camera is quite easy once it’s set up, but oh what a terror getting to that stage. If it ever slipped a person could be seriously hurt if it fell on them.”20 In Coupland’s account, Fields photographed the ways in which rooms took on a more lived-in appearance, and this is borne out in the lounge-room photograph that reveals the slightly rumpled effect of comfortably adjusted cushions, sofa cover, and carpets. Another photograph, remarkable for the fall of light on velvet pile, shows a coat in the process of manufacture, while a companion photograph taken directly toward the light coming from a window onto a sewing desk illuminates the random disposition of the sewing machine, scissors, tape measure, bobbin, cotton reels, and other tools of a home dress-designer. The foreground focus is impressive, as is the clarity of light on the vegetation in the garden beyond the window across the table, and on the folds of curtain fabric framing the view. Other photographs at the Couplands’ house show how desk-tops, tables, and a chest of drawers take on surprising intimations of activity: a toy gun juxtaposed with two dolls, a child’s tea-set, and a New Zealand flag, again photographed directly into the light source. The asymmetrical ‘framing’ effect of the dark areas around the glass panes in such pictures indicates how far Fields was experimenting with effects of shadow and form. The Couplands’ front-room interior is another such study of light and shadow resulting from irregular shapes and soft and hard surfaces of objects in no composed order. Light from two sources interplays with the darkness of corners and niches, and a vertical strip of light bisects a Hanly portrait, from his “Figures in Light” series, of a recumbent nude. The photographs taken towards the light are unconventional in their daring, remarkable for the intensity of the light on the hard surfaces of glass, china, paper, wood, and other materials and at the same time on the softer non-geometrical surfaces of curtains, carpets, clothing, shoes, dolls’ hair, food, and other textures. The lit-up areas break the precise symmetry of any scene. A hallway 20

John Fields, Diary (2 February 1969–27 February 1971): 17 February 1971.

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detail is a collage of soft and hard materials, including a wall hanging, and another in print. Fields’ view also captures the grain of the wall itself, behind a photograph (by Fields, of a wedding party on the verandah at his own house), an erotic Japanese print, two Beardsley prints, a framed Robert Ellis painting, and strings of beads, the whole making up a crowded souvenir of a particularized shifting moment in an era. Fields’ photographs of house interiors characteristically comment on the artistry of the occupants’ arrangements of objects with aesthetic appeal. The many contemporary and other artists’ works reproduced in the views give us a clue to Fields’ awareness of their reflexiveness in relation to his own artistry. They include paintings, prints, and drawings by other Auckland artists: the painter Pat Hanly (in the Couplands’ front room and Crockford and Gifford’s kitchen); Hamish Keith (Gifford’s bedroom); Michael Smither (on Dick Scott’s sideboard); Claudia Eyley (in the Eyleys’ “View to Bedroom” picture); Ralph Hotere (in the Eyleys’ kitchen mantel); Jim Keogh (in his own house and in Blair Smith and Judy Wood’s house); and Colin McCahon (in the “Brigid’s Room” photograph). McCahon had given the Eyleys’ daughter a painting, which she insisted on keeping in her bedroom along with her piano-case dolls’ house, teddy bear, and self-made landscape. The representational or abstract images in such artworks, and in the many plastic forms of pots, bowls, light fixtures, switches, sculptures, figurines, and scattered writing or painting implements in the houses, suffuse the scenes with a sense of the pleasure that art affords their occupants. Fields juxtaposes the lines of soft furnishings – curtains, cushions, bed coverings, and the like – as much as the hard-edged geometry of fireplaces, doors, chairs, pictures in frames, and other furniture. Such images and objects evoke the absent inhabitants of Fields’ photographs, unselfconsciously absorbed in their engagement with creativity, yet signing their presence in every particular of their domestic environment. It is, incidentally, surprising how Fields discerns erotic and quasi-erotic depictions, in prints or paintings, in rooms in the Coupland, Poff, Gladwin, and Scott houses. In two studies of Scott’s office, the Mǒori woman at the waterfall appears, in what was surely ironic contrast, to Fields’ eye, with the distinctly parodic and anti-erotic “Ugly Duchess” painting attributed to Quentin Matsys. While some original features of the houses that Fields photographed remain intact – the generic window sashes, timber moulding, and wallpaper, or the gas lamp and fireplace at Dick Scott’s house, or the ancient stove and light switches at Crockford and Gifford’s – Fields was taken with the makeovers of mantelpieces his friends and acquaintances had made. His eye was drawn to such

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ornamentation and objects as linked houses and lives to earlier periods – for example, the “Taffrail Log and Cap, Schooner ‘L.A. Dunton’” photograph from his American period21 and the brass hardware on the Auckland Police Station door featured on the final page of Victorian Auckland. Dick Scott’s fireplace is a possible exception to the more randomly disposed objects on other people’s fire-surrounds, though its immaculate state of restoration suggests arrangement for contemplation rather than use – a purposiveness reinforced by the juxtaposition, on its top shelf and in the niches of the lower, of quotidian and elegant decorative items. The collection is displayed with a fastidious sense of eyecatching symmetry, underscored by Fields’ exclusion of anything beyond the fire-surround’s borders and shelves. Above all these carefully disposed objects is a framed copy of Emmet’s 1803 speech to Lord Norbury. The effect on the viewer is that of a privileged invitation to enter a connoisseur’s living room, one, moreover, that offers both a chronology of the occupant’s life and the sense that the occupant has of his own life in relation to a broader human history. As with all the ‘Signature’ photographs, what is foregrounded and backgrounded generates a dialogue with personal and public history. This is true of the subtler effects to do with wallpaper and painted surfaces, and the objects displayed on them. A new story is added to the pre-existing. Another index to Field’s sense of this process is the focus in several instances on fireplaces: the photographs record history in the making, as well as the tastes and class of the occupants. Few of the fireplaces and fire-surrounds in the other houses retained their original function, but were put to alternative use. The Shacklock stove at Crockford and Gifford’s house is a storage area for wine bottles and an electric frypan; the mantle is a similar repository for a miscellany of glass and ceramic objects and papers. The pumpkin, beer bottles, shoe polish, and papers in the foreground constitute a sort-of ‘still-life’ prequel to another unusual arrangement inside the stove alcove and a further arrangement on the mantel-shelf. By contrast, the Eyleys’ mantel and surround frame a bricked-up fireplace, and Jo Fillery’s tiled fire-surround has been superseded by an Activair electric heater that complements the angularity of the chairs and stands in stark contrast to the more old-fashioned moulded legs of the table in the foreground. Here again we are treated to a composition of light and shadow and of textures that compete for attention. The leaves and plants on and below the fire21

“Taffrail Log and Cap, Schooner ‘L.A. Dunton’, Mystic Seaport, Connecticut, U.S.A., 1965,” photograph 52 in Baigent, Collins, Fields: Three New Zealand Photographers, intro. John B. Turner (Auckland: Auckland City Art Gallery, 1973).

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surround, like the patterned rug, floral curtain pattern, and ornate table legs, break up the linearity without distracting from the oddity of the entire scene. The Garritys’ workroom appears to display another mantelpiece over a disused fireplace, though the crowded scene also features a box of matches beside the horse figurine in front of the painting. The Garritys’ gustatory predilection is indicated by the Twinings tea caddies, their literary tastes by the row of Greek and French authors and the stack of Russian authors in Penguin Classics editions, and the James K. Baxter plays and essays. The mix of portrait prints, Japanese boxes, and reproduction Renaissance Madonna and Child also affirms cultural affiliation. The wallpaper behind all these objects and the tourist-ware Sorrento donkey facing the Greek geometric horse figurine in the foreground heighten the surreal collage-effect of the whole arrangement. Fields’ frame includes a hint of the upright support of the shelf that divides the light-struck surfaces above the shelf separating the picture from the dark fireplace below – a personal ‘signature’, as if to say ‘Who else can do this?’ Another ‘Signature’ Garrity photograph draws attention to the patterned Japanese prints on the walls and among the piled-up books. The scene is so busy that we hardly know whether to direct our gaze at the prints, the inks, the shapes of stones and jars and cans or bottles, or the massive jar and plates in the lower right. A lone harmonica reposes where the upper shelf’s bric-à-brac recedes, but the point of interest lies increasingly in the photograph’s foreground where glass, ceramics, and the billet of wood holding up a shelf invite our gaze to rest. The moulded faces on the surround of the non-functional fireplace at Gladwin’s residence contribute to the near-bizarre effect of the assemblage. A blackened frying pan hanging beside the left-hand side of the fireplace offsets the pattern that catches the eye to the right of the fireplace and might suggest that the fire, in effect, works as a cooking facility, but the single-bar electric heater argues another use for the saucepan, a use confirmed by the saucepan and paintbrushes to the left of the portraits. This is a painter’s house, and the assorted objects above are indicative of impermanence and makeshift quarters. A suffusive reinforcement of the absorbing and pleasurable sense of location is reflected in Pacific, coastal, and maritime referents that appear to Fields’ and the occupants’ eyes in these domestic scenes. It is present in items like the carved Mǒori torso clutching a mere beside Scott’s lounge sideboard, and the painting above, of a littoral scene in colonial times. The theme is reprised in the folk-art illustration of the Mǒori woman on Scott’s noticeboard and the painting behind the ginger-beer flask in his living-room sideboard. On Scott’s lounge sideboard, a double-ended rolling-pin-shaped glass bottle is embellished with the engraving of a ship. The object is redolent of similar bottles created in

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Nantucket, and is thus, to historically minded viewers, a possible reminder of early American whalers in New Zealand waters. In Keogh’s house, a boat model and photographs of Auckland scows and schooners in the workroom attest to the intersection of his art and occupational engagement. Keogh’s workroom also conveys Fields’ eye for unusual juxtapositions, and for establishing a narrative within a photograph, with the inclusion of the ‘von Tempsky’-era helmet on a carved head, and the car tyre (Keogh’s make-do compressed-air container below the workbench), in a photograph remarkable for its self-reference. Above the sail-shaped geometrical instruments on the desk, a photograph shows Keogh aloft on a schooner mast, while an old photograph of Auckland’s Queen’s Wharf is a copy that Keogh told me Fields had made for him. Further concatenations abound. A curling card depicting an old-fashioned ship is tacked on the scrim above the truly strange collection of artefacts on Herman Gladwin’s mantelpiece. On the mantelpiece in the Eyleys’ kitchen, a sprig of black deep-sea coral hangs above a Hotere drawing. Additionally, the ‘Signatures’ contain abundant referents to the natural environment in the form of flowers and native plants: in Claudia Eyley’s “Rose Garden” paintings, glimpsed in a bedroom and a hallway in the photographs taken into the light at John B. Turner’s and the Couplands’ houses. Flowers and specimens of mineral and stone occur as table and mantel decorations throughout, adding to a theme of harmony. Cosmopolitanism sits easily alongside such situational, even regional, emanations of domestic style in these residences. They are at once personal documents and celebrations of the period’s shift from postwar conformism to individualism. Many of the houses’ occupants were, like Fields and his wife, immigrants; the Eyleys, Keogh, Couplands, Poffs, Eagles, Hanlys and several others were relatively recent settlers or returning travellers, bringing with them an acute sense of possibilities of asserting their talents. Fields’ domestic images reveal a sense of personal style in every case, a considered casualness bespeaking their occupants’ adaptation of environments to suit personal needs and taste. Herman Gladwin, London-born poet and ‘primitive’ painter, treats his living room as a ramshackle studio and digs. His correspondence is tucked into a butcher’s recipes wallet, beside a 1970 poster of Lenin, a photograph of two men and a dog, and a stylized female portrait above a shelf promiscuously populated with a flask of Jim Beam, jars of medicaments, grooming and clothing-repair items, machine oil, insect repellent, and miscellaneous pens, pencils, and art material. The photograph is, like all in the series, a narrative as well as a portrait. The photograph that Fields called “Jenny’s hat” and two others, of a child’s bedroom, and a bedroom interior seen through a window, frame objects that

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comprise subtle narratives of everyday life and wider history. The contrasting textures, as in other photographs in the series, hold the eye as much as the angular shapes, horizontal and vertical lines that meet more oblique lines and shapes where focus rests. In many respects, the ‘Signature’ photographs are also self-portraits; they inform us of their maker’s attraction to things that, taken together, connote a sense of living in a world of change where creative work strives for harmony. Fields’ broad tolerance and affection for his subjects is evident in them; he admits the quirky, oddball elements as well as the elegantly composed. A child’s rabbit sits on a professional’s bookshelf, and a straw hat rides on a high wardrobe’s wooden wave. Our gaze settles on one object or plane, only to be made aware of others, constructing as it does so a narrative that speaks of those who lived among these locations – and of the photographer’s connoisseur-eye, which revels in the detail and humanity, and shares the pleasure with us.

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———————— Onomastic Index ————————

“A(way with Words” (Lach–Newinsky) 571 Abalone Press 173 Abelard and Heloise 342 Aberhart, Laurence 597 “Aberrant poetics 4 – for Mark O’Connor” (Roberts) 126 “Aboriginal” (Reid) 224 Aboriginal Australians xvii, 6, 8, 45, 57, 58, 59, 60, 74, 79, 139, 140, 158, 189, 194, 215, 259, 302–303, 304, 305–307, 334, 356, 470, 583 “Aboriginal Simile, An” (Gilmore) 356 Absalom, Absalom! (Faulkner) 432 “Absence of Metaphysics, The” (Wallace-Crabbe) 531, 532, 533 Acharnians, The (Aristophanes) 374 Achebe, Chinua 316 “Across the Water” (Manhire) 560 Acton, John 466 “Adam and Eve” (Hart–Smith) 305 Adam and the Ants 39 Adams, Arthur H. 121, 248, 253, 581 Adams, Graham 579 Adams, Philip 462 Adamson, Cheryl 109, 114, 115, 116, 242 Adamson, Debra 90, 95, 96, 99, 114, 115, 242 Adamson, Robert 6, 7, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 82, 90–103, 104, 105, 107, 108, 112, 113, 114, 115, 117, 120, 121, 122, 123, 218, 220, 221, 241, 242, 332, 339, 358, 362, 372, 464 “Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude” 95 “Because she comes so often” 102 “Canticles on the Skin” 49, 112 Cross The Border 96 “The Home, The Spare Room” 100 The Law At Heart’s Desire 95, 100

Night Preaching 95 The Rumour 112 “The Rumour” 93, 95, 98 Selected Poems 98 Adcock, Fleur 235, 584 Addison, Joseph 404 Addonizio, Kim 445; & Dorianne Laux 564 “Address to the Pigeons in Hurtle Square” (Bray) 356 Adelaide 71, 106, 130, 131, 132, 133, 135, 136, 138, 140, 141, 142, 167, 190, 193, 196, 205, 215, 216, 221, 242, 318, 325, 332, 359, 465 Adelaide Festival of Arts 360 Adelaide Review 212 Adelaide University 359 “Adieu” (Anon.) 357 “Adventures in Paradise” (Duggan) 171 Adventures of Rock’n’Roll Sally, The (Soldatow) 68 “Advice to Young Poets” (Lehmann) 88 “After Class” (Manhire) 562 “After Lunik Two” (Elizabeth Riddell) 356 “After Many Marbles” (Salom) 316 After Martial (Porter) 83 “Afterwards” (Martyr) 515 Aitken, Adam 369 Aitken, Conrad 107 Akhmatova, Anna 68 “Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude” (Adamson) 95 Albéniz, Isaac 156 Albion, The (pub, North Carlton) 191, 214 Albiston, Jordie 367 Alexander, Patrick 105 Alexandra (N Z ) 298, 299 Alice Springs 221, 228 Alison, Jennifer 241

610 “All My Pretty Ones” (Sexton) 39 Allen & Unwin 212 Allen, Donald 107, 364, 464 Alpers, Anthony 143, 144, 155, 156, 263 “Altjeringa” (Robinson) 58, 60, 356 Alvarez, Al, ed. The New Poetry 107 “Amazing Dialogue, An” (Fenton) 425 Amazing Scaffold, The (McCrae) 113 Amnesty International 552 “Among the Roses” (Harwood) 340 Amorous Cannibal, The (Wallace–Crabbe) 542 “Anagrams” (Duggan) 169 Anatomy of Melancholy, The (Burton) 558 Andersen, Johannes C. 289 Anderson, Don 48, 51, 108, 241, 360, 361, 362, 363 Anderson, John 224 Angelou, Maya 446 Angry Penguins 51, 54, 331 —See also: Ern Malley hoax Angus and Robertson 240, 274, 276, 278, 282, 304, 324, 330, 331, 341, 350, 583 “Ankotarinya” (Aranda song) 356 “Anniversary Serenade” (Clive James) 455 “Annus Mirabilis” (Larkin) 361 Anon., “Adieu” 357 Anon., “The Bastard from the Bush” 377 Anon., “Convict’s Rum Song” 357 “Another Country” (Edgar) 566 Another Double Please (Shortis) 83 “Another Loser Leaves Town” (Benson) 20 Another Site to Be Mined: A New South Wales Anthology (ed. Norman Talbot) 204 “Antarctica” (Simpson) 357 Antheil, George, comp. 428 Anthology of Contemporary Australian Poetry (ed. Leonard) 365 “Anti Climax” (Goodfellow) 352 Antill, John, comp. Corroboree 259 Antony and Cleopatra 12 Anzac 70, 394, 514, 520, 521, 529 Anzac Day 394, 514, 520 “Anzac Day” (Forbes) 394 “Aorangi” (David McKee Wright) 293 Aorangi and Other Verses (David McKee Wright) 289, 291

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Apocalyptic poets 39 Apollinaire, Guillaume 432 Apollo 545 “Apologie for Poetrie, An” (Sidney) 393, 400 Applestealers (magazine) 119, 122 Applestealers (ed. Colin Talbot) 464 “Après-midi d’une Fille aux Cheveux de Lin, L'” (McCuaig) 313 “Aqueducts” (Lehmann) 86 “Aqueducts II” (Lehmann) 86 Archibald, J.F. 253 Archilochus 463 “Aria” (McCuaig) 315 Ariosto, Ludovico, Orlando Furioso 459, 543, 544 Aristophanes 89, 463; The Acharnians 374 Aristotle 391, 399, 403, 407, 408, 449, 571 Armand, Louis 370 Armatrading, Joan 39 Armidale 10, 28, 42, 48, 62, 64, 82, 106, 187, 208, 209, 247, 277, 278, 422, 494 Armitage, Simon 572 Armstrong, RD 584 Army Medical Corps 527 Around the Boree Log (John O’Brien) 131, 132, 133 Art in Australia (magazine) 516 Artaud, Antonin 224 Arthur, Jean 41 Ascham, Roger, The Schoolmaster 397, 399 Ash (magazine) 133 Ash, John 572 Ashbery, John 35, 107, 159, 321, 325, 441, 447, 449 Ashley, Melissa 367 Ashton, David 49 Askew, Marc, & Brian Hubber 237 Aspect (magazine) 121 Association of Orientally Flavoured Syndics Press 547 Astley, Neil, ed. Being Alive 563; ed. Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times 563 “At Sandalwood” (Stow) 7 At The Florida (Tranter) 492, 550 Atherton, Cassandra 543 Atlas, The (Thorne) 114 Atsuko Kouda 3 Attic, The (Wellington) 188

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Onomastic Index

Atwood, Margaret 39, 574 “Au Tombeau de mon Père” (McCuaig) 313 Auckland xv, 16, 24, 25, 143, 156, 190, 234, 247, 546–53, 554, 555, 556, 575, 577, 579, 582, 591, 592, 593–607 Auckland City Gallery’s bookstore 577 Auckland Grammar School 211 Auckland Star 211 Auckland University xvii, 277, 547, 550, 554, 576, 583, 591, 593, 596 Auckland University Press 16, 547, 579 Auden, W.H. xvi, 33, 38, 159, 197, 225, 319, 375, 493, 508, 541, 543, 544, 545, 548 “Letter from Iceland” 375 Letters from Iceland 543 Augustanism 4, 36, 239 Augustine, Saint 345 Auk (magazine) 464 Austen, Jane 38; Mansfield Park 454 Austin, Alfred 376, 394 “Australasia” (Praed) 239 Australasian Book Society 207 Australasian Post 259 Australasian, The 259, 275 “Australia” (Hope) 534 “Australia” (Lea) 221 “Australia” (Walwicz) 388, 395 Australia Council 67 “Australia Day” (Tranter) 491–93 “Australia in England” (Cross) 528 “Australia Marching On” (Gilmore) 525 “Australia to the Empire” (Coungeau) 521 Australian Book Council 576 Australian Book Review 208, 247, 326 Australian Bush Ballads (ed. Stewart & Keesing) 331 Australian Girls’ Weekly 275 Australian Journalists’ Association 255, 266 Australian National University 309 Australian Poetry in the Twentieth Century (ed. Gray & Lehmann) 568 Australian Popular Songbook, The (Wearne) 504 Australian Stock Horse Association 323 Australian War Memorial 69 Australian War Museum 69

611 Australian Woman’s Mirror 251, 256, 275 Australian Women’s National League 522 Australian Women’s Weekly 275, 311 Australian Worker 254 Australian Writers’ and Artists’ Union 255 “Autumn 1975” (Stead) 13 Ayler, Albert 40 Ayres, Pam 161, 181, 404, 405 Bach, Johann Sebastian 283, 343 “Backless Betty from Bondi” (Slessor) 363 Bacon, Lloyd, dir. Forty-Second Street 41 “Bad Break!, A” (Goodge) 310 Bad Love Poems (Lauren Williams) 471 “Bad Night at the Sydenham, A” (Lauren Williams) 467 “Bagpipe Music” (MacNeice) 419 Baigent, Gary 593 Baldwin, James 27 Baldwin, Suzy 276 Ball, Hugo 432 Ballad of Alan Bond (Robert Hughes) 378 “Ballad of Bloodthirsty Bessie, The” (McCuaig) 314 “Ballade of a Happy Bureaucrat” (Baxter) 19 “Ballade of Easy Listening, The” (Wearne) 455 Ballantyne, Gina 121 Ballarat 42 Balmain (Sydney) 45, 49, 95, 96, 104, 105, 122, 174, 242 Bandler, Faith 158, 208 Banning, Lex 334 Barbour, Douglas 370 Barker, George 39, 197, 319, 548 Barnard, Geoffrey 327 Barnes, Roger 109, 110 Barr, John 254 Barrett, Richard 508 Barthelme, Donald 128 Barthes, Roland 119 Bártok, Béla 344 Basho 349 “basho’s autobiography” (Beach) 349 Bassett, Jan 517, 518 “Bastard from the Bush, The” (Anon.) 377

612 Bataille, Georges 347 Bateson, Catherine 372 Batrouney, John 36 “Battalions Mass in the Hills” (Robinson) 60 “Battlefields” (Gilmore) 528, 529 Baudrillard, Jean 360 Baxter, James K. 9, 15, 19, 21, 22, 26, 27, 122, 159, 190, 192, 197, 224, 234, 328, 408, 409, 410, 416, 548, 549, 553–58, 576, 584, 605 “Ballade of a Happy Bureaucrat” 19 The Holy Life and Death of Concrete Grady 19 Jerusalem Daybook 555 Jerusalem Sonnets 9, 26, 548, 549, 554, 555 “Lament for Barney Flanagan” 408, 409, 416 Ode to Auckland 19 Pig Island Letters 554 “Spring Song of a Civil Servant” 19 Baylebridge, William 532 Baysting, Arthur 24, 190; ed. The Young New Zealand Poets 188, 348 Bazely, David 36 Beach, Eric 139, 140, 142, 170, 171, 173, 188–203, 214, 224, 228, 235, 348–50, 460, 465, 495, 551, 581 “basho’s autobiography” 349 “cabaret colloquy” 201 “Christchurch” 196, 200 “The Clerk” 200 “Converse Corolla” 199 “Fantasyland” 196 “gateway” 349 “I’ll tell on you” 195 Weeping for Lost Babylon 348–50 “When Lambton Quay floated out into the harbour” 200 “Beach Burial” (Slessor) 356 Bean, C.E.W. 206 Beans, Jerry 64 Beans, Mopsie 64 Beardsley, Aubrey 355, 603 Beat Generation 94, 107, 122, 586 “Beautiful City of Perth” (McGonagall) 381 Beautiful Veins (Morgan) 355 “Beauty / Truth / Genius & Taste etc.” (Roberts) 127 Beaver, Brenda 10

THE POET IC EYE



Beaver, Bruce 10, 123, 168, 359, 464, 491, 582 “Because” (McAuley) 566 “Because I Wakened” (Robinson) 57. 61 “Because she comes so often” (Adamson) 102 Beckett, Samuel 90, 277, 393, 477, 531; Waiting for Godot 90, 99 Beckmann, Max, “Woman with a Mandolin” 344 “bed, The” (Roberts) 126 Bedford, Randolph 254 Beethoven, Ludwig van 216, 239, 342, 354, 586; “Moonlight Sonata” (354 Beiderbecke, Bix 41 Being Alive (ed. Neil Astley) 563 Bell, Anne 240 “Belle Dame Sans Merci, La” (Keats) 450 Bellingen (N S W ) 48, 62 Bellini, Giovanni 540 Belmont, Newcastle 55 Belmont, Winifred 62, 166, 187, 323, 580 Benét, Stephen Vincent 334 Bennett, Tony 43, 47, 62, 278 Benson, Jon 15, 16, 18, 20 “Another Loser Leaves Town” (20 “Execution” 20 “Harbours” 20 “Late Afternoon Epilogue” 20 “The Road” 20 “Sarah” 20 Bentham, Jeremy 317 “Berçeuse de Newcastle” (McCuaig) 313 Berg, Alban 344 Berger, Carl 519 Berger, Sandor 219, 221, 223 Bergson, Henri 403 Berheimer, Alan 445 Berlioz, Hector 476 Bernhardt, Sarah 268 Bernstein, Charles 429, 445 Berrigan, Ted 35 The Sonnets 35 Tambourine Life 35 “Tambourine Life 1” 35 “Tambourine Life 61” 35 Berryman, John 359



Onomastic Index

Besier, Rudolph 263 Best Australian Poems 2005, The (ed. Murray) 445 Best of The Ear, The (ed. Hemensley) 168, 169, 170 Betjeman, John 214, 339, 440; “A Child Ill” 561 Betty Boop 38 Bevan, Beatrice Vale 519 Beveridge, Judith 328, 500 “Beware of the Penguins” (Goodfellow) 130 “Beyond the Alps” (Lowell) 448 Biarujia, Javant 370 Bible 248, 253, 286, 287, 340, 490, 574 Big Bang (magazine) 465 Bilgola (N S W ) 43, 44 Billeter, Walter 91, 93, 168, 169, 230 Binyon, Laurence 527 Birkett, Norman, Lord 40 Birmingham, John 581 Birth (magazine) 516 Bishop, Elizabeth 423, 495, 498 Bjelke–Petersen, Joh 378, 379 “Black Friday” (David McKee Wright) 384–87 “Black Life” (Jack Davis) 306 Black Life: Poems (Jack Davis) 306–307 “Black Madonna Motorcycle Two Wheel Gypsy Queen” (Dylan) 94 Black Mountain poets 27, 34, 92 Black Pepper (publisher) 366 Black Rider, The (Stephen Crane) 427 Black Sparrow Press 108 Blackmur, R.P. 533 Blackwoods Magazine 405 Blake, William xiii, 224, 230, 302, 340, 355, 450, 507, 531, 585; “The Lamb” 450 Blanc, Mel 37 “Blanket, The” (Robinson) 57, 62 Blay, John 105 Blight, John 45, 321 Blomfield, Geoffrey 278 Blonk, Jaap 503 Blow Out (Rae Desmond Jones) 49 Bly, Robert 359 Boake, Barcroft 298, 356 Boer War 212, 242, 300, 519 Bogart, Humphrey 124 Bohemian, The (magazine) 254, 269

613 Bolívar, Simón 478 Bolton, Ken 372, 432 Bonnefoy, Yves 98, 101, 243 Book Industry Strategy Group (Australia) 578 “Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered, The” (Clive James) 390 Book of Questions, The (Neruda) 445, 454 Boote, H.E. 206, 211, 272, 521 Booth, General William 299 Booth, Wayne C. 373 “Boots and Hat and Shirt” (Robinson) 57 Borders NZ 577 Bosch, Hieronymus 393 Boswell, James 144 Bottle Creek (Hunt) 21, 22 Boult, Jenny 139, 140, 142, 170, 193, 348 Bourke, John Philip 209 Bowden, George C. 263 Bowman, Geoff 168 Boyd, Arthur 571 Boys Who Stole the Funeral, The (Murray) 160, 328, 376 Bracken Country (Hunt) 21 Bradbury, Malcolm, Mensonge 360 Brady, Don 189 Brady, Veronica 203, 344 Brahms, Johannes 39 Brancusi, Constantin 304, 428 Brand, Gary 138 Brandes, George 482 Brandl and Schlesinger 366 Brasch, Charles, ed. Landfall Country 169 Brass, Tinto, dir. Caligula 84 Brautigan, Richard 101 Bray, John 310, 356, 461; “Address to the Pigeons in Hurtle Square” 356 Breakfasts in Shanghai (Croft) 278 “Breaking the Neck” (Stead) 9, 10, 14 Brecht, Bertolt 75, 477 Brennan, Christopher 5, 6, 81, 91, 92, 95, 120, 161, 261, 262, 312, 356, 492, 512, 521, 532, 566; & Peter Minter 568 “A Chant of Doom” 521 Musicopoematographoscope 91 “We sat entwined an hour or two” 566

614 Brereton, John Le Gay 120, 258, 512 “Bridge, The” (Crane) 93 Bright, Mary 523 The Happy Warrior 523 “The Song of the Women” 523 Bring Larks and Heroes (Keneally) 583 Brisbane 62, 72, 167, 189, 196, 208, 210, 211, 221, 228, 230, 259, 263, 265, 267, 268, 273, 274, 315, 330, 341, 581, 585 Brisbane Courier 211, 213 Brisbane Daily Mail 254, 265 Brissenden, R.F. 240, 308–11, 345, 346, 347 “The Canberra Blues” 309 ed. (with Philip Grundy) Oxford Book of Australian Light Verse 308–11 British Airways Prize 278 British Poetry Archive 505 Britten, Benjamin, comp. Paul Bunyan 508 Broinowski, R.A. 252 “Brolgas, The” (Robinson) 57 Brontë, Charlotte 162 Brooke, Rupert 333, 361 Brookes, Barbara 64 Brookes, Harvey 222 Brooks, Barbara 66 Brooks, David 94, 205 Brooks, Gwendolyn 404 Brown, Brian 193 Brown, F.C. 269 Brown, Nigel 143 Brown, Pamela 64, 68, 326, 372, 441; This World/This Place 326 Browne, Sir Thomas, Urne-Buriall 317 Browning, Robert 32, 37, 83, 106, 159, 228, 312, 313, 335, 338, 418, 421, 426, 507 “My Last Duchess” 83, 418 “Porphyria’s Lover” 83 The Ring and the Book 338 “Browns in Town, The” (Cross) 269 Bruce, Lenny 222, 223, 387 Brueghel, Pieter 127 Brunton, Alan 15, 123, 129, 549; “Letter to Harry Leeds” 15 Buchanan, A.J. 265 Buckley, Vincent 169, 343, 344, 404, 541

THE POET IC EYE



Buckmaster, Charles 112, 124, 241, 242 Buddhism 303, 389, 405, 406, 560 Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship 582 “Buffalo Bill’s” (cummings) 101 Buis, Simon 593 Bukowski, Charles 142, 351, 586; Love is a Dog from Hell 142 Bulletin 106, 121, 211, 248, 252, 253, 255, 257, 258, 260, 261, 270, 271, 272, 273, 274, 284, 287, 289, 300, 301, 320, 321, 328, 330, 331, 332, 383, 461, 513, 516, 518, 582 Bullivant, Stanley 593 “Bullshit of Love, The” (Lauren Williams) 472 “Bunyip and the Whistling Kettle. The” (Manifold) 71 Burger, D.J. 27 Burgess and Maclean 72 “Burial of the Reverend Gilfillan, The” (McGonagall) 381 “Burial, The” (Hewett) 70 Burke, Colleen 64 Burke, John Muk Muk 366 “Burning of the People’s Variety Theatre, Aberdeen, The” (McGonagall) 381 Burns Fellowship 27 Burns, Joanne 64, 67, 171, 460, 491 “Marble surfaces” 171 “tableau vivant” 460 Burns, Robert 206, 459, 551 Burroughs, William 171 Burton, Sir Richard 287 Burton, Robert, Anatomy of Melancholy 558 Burwood 263 Burwood High School 261 Bush Telegraph (magazine) 121 Busoni, Ferruccio 156 Butel, Elizabeth 379 Butterfly Press 305 Buttrose, Larry 64 By and Large (Wallace–Crabbe) 537, 538, 540, 542, 543 “By Marion’s Grave” (David McKee Wright) 295 Byrnes, Dan 324, 325 Byron, George Gordon Lord xiii, xvii, 11, 34, 71, 84, 160, 227, 228, 236, 281, 283, 288, 297, 298, 310,



Onomastic Index

335, 340, 375, 395, 404, 406, 420, 426, 452, 453, 457, 458, 461, 463, 474–91, 493, 495, 504, 516, 543 Cain 211, 474–76, 477, 480, 483, 486, 487, 489, 490, 491 Childe Harold xvii, 298, 476, 478, 481 “Darkness” 488 The Deformed Transformed 474, 477, 484 Don Juan xvii, 160, 228, 375, 452, 453, 458, 459, 461, 463, 476, 478, 480, 483, 486, 490 Heaven and Earth xvii, 474–91 “The Isles of Greece” 461 Manfred 476, 478, 479, 481, 483, 485, 490 “The Prisoner of Chillon” 478 Sardanapalus 84, 477, 478, 486, 490 The Two Foscari 478 “The Vision of Judgment” 71, 474, 480 “cabaret colloquy” (Beach) 201 Cabot, O.C. (aka Ernest McCulloch) 254 Cage, John 171 Cain (Byron) 211, 474–76, 477, 480, 483, 486, 487, 489, 490, 491 Cairns 221 “Calcutta Dreaming” (Mudrooroo) 303 California 187 Caligula (dir. Tinto Brass) 84 Call It Poetry Tonight (group poetry show) 466 “Calvus” (Lehmann) 89 Calwell, Arthur 334 Calyx: 30 Contemporary Australian Poets 368, 370, 568 Cam, Heather 326 Cambridge University 71 Came a Hot Friday (Morrieson) 583 Camões, Luis de 335 Campbell, Alistair 122 Campbell, David 310, 532 Campbell, Norman 265 Campbell, Roy 197 Campbell, Thomas 33 Campion, Jane 581, 583 Canada 371, 430, 502, 519 Canberra 47, 82, 94, 205, 208, 236, 309 “Canberra” (Wallace–Crabbe) 540

615 “Canberra Blues, The” (Brissenden) 309 Candide (Voltaire) 458 “Candle, A” (Suckling) 38 “Canoe to San Domingo” (Hart–Smith) 305 Canterbury Tales (Chaucer) 409, 504 “Canticles on the Skin” (Adamson) 49, 112 Cantos (Pound) 97, 148, 436, 440, 508 Cantrell, Leon 238 Capra, Frank, dir. It Happened One Night 41; It’s a Wonderful Life 37, 41; Mr Deeds Goes to Town 41; Platinum Blonde 41 Capricornia (Herbert) 4, 338 “Captain Cook Considers his Fete” (Tipping) 310 Captain Matchbox 193 Captain Quiros (McAuley) 60, 332 “Captain Scott” (Manhire) 561, 562 Carew, Thomas 312 “Carpe Diem Poem, The” (Manhire) 562 Carroll, John W. 448 Carroll, Lewis 185, 426 Carson, Anne 418, 419; “T V Men: Thucydides in Conversation with Virginia Woolf on the Set of The Peloponnesian War” 419 Carson, Dylan 509 Carson, Edward 287 Carter, Hilary 322 Carter, William 269 Casablanca (dir. Michael Curtiz) 124 “Casements of the Past, The” (Cross) 261 Casey, Maie 583 Cassell Australia 247, 318 Cassidy, Lucy 252 Cassidy, R.J. 206, 211 “Cat Love” (Mudrooroo) 303 Catalano, Gary 305, 370 Cathay (Pound) 440 Cathedral Hotel (Melbourne) 465 Cato, Nancy 44, 45, 121; The Darkened Window 45 Catullus 83, 89, 90, 312, 492 Caulfield (Victoria) 42 Cavafy, Constantine 85, 314 Cavalier poets 296 Cave (magazine) 549 “Cave, The” (Fairburn) 151 “Cave, The” (Manhire) 151, 560

616 Cavell, Edith 528 Caveman Press 24 Cecere, Louis 138 Celan, Paul 168 Celtic Renaissance 120 Celtic Twilight 60 Cenci, The (Shelley) 83 Central Otago 288, 295, 298 Cervantes, Miguel Saavedra de, Don Quixote 4, 463 Chaliapin 14 Chalmers, Greg 556, 557 Chan, Stephen 547 “Channel Nothing” (Tranter) 311 “Chant of Doom, A” (Brennan) 521 Chapel Perilous, The (Hewett) 120 Chaplin, Charles 538 Chapman, George 399, 574 Chaucer, Geoffrey 34, 158, 335, 395, 404, 406, 409, 495, 504, 565; Canterbury Tales 409, 504 Chesterton, G.K. 527 Chevron Hotel (Sydney) 222, 223 Chew, Samuel 482, 483, 484 Chicago Seven, the 107 Chidgey, Catherine 576, 582 “Child Ill, A” (Betjeman) 561 Child, Eric 40 Childe Harold (Byron) xvii, 298, 476, 478, 481 Chipp, Don 30 Chisholm, A.R. 261 Choate, Alex 203 Chockablock With Dawn (Lea) 220, 226, 231 “C H O G M – Melbourne 1981” (Tsaloumas) 309 Chook Chook (magazine) 192 Chopin, Henri 505 Christchurch 143, 148, 196, 284, 288, 289, 290, 291, 298, 299, 300, 577 “Christchurch” (Beach) 196, 200 “Christmas Carol” (David McKee Wright) 289 “Christopher Columbus” (Hart–Smith) 83, 304, 330, 336, 337 “Cicada Singing” (Jennifer Rankin) 243 “Citizen” (Wallace-Crabbe) 534 “City in the Sea, The” (Poe) 297 “City Nightfall” (Slessor) 219

THE POET IC EYE



City of Riddle-me-ree, The (Cross) 251 “City Suburban Lines” (Mudrooroo) 303 “City Woman” (Scanlon) 279 Clairmont, Phil 596 “Clancy of the Overflow” (Paterson) 329 Clare, John 35, 448 Clark, Manning 310, 317, 378 Clark, Thomas 302 Clark, William Nairne 209 Clarke, John Cooper 212–14, 310, 370, 382, 390, 583 The Complete Book of Australian Verse 212–14 “To a Howard” 382 “Class-Consciousness” (Philp) 210 Cleaver, Ray 556 “Clerk, The” (Beach) 200 “Cloud Chambers of Taxonomy” (Wallace– Crabbe) 543 “Clover Honey” (Hope) 309 Clubbing of the Gunfire: 101 Australian War Poems (ed. Wallace–Crabbe & Pierce) 512 Clyde (N Z ) 298, 299 “Coal, The” (Robinson) 61 “Coat, A” (Yeats) 62, 281 Coates, Eric 40 Cobbings, Bob 502 ‘Cobra Kaye’ (John Kasmin) 14 Cocteau, Jean 427 Cohen, Leonard 549 Colbert, Claudette 41 Colebatch, Hal 203, 240, 241, 380, 381, 382, 383; “A Poetical Gem (for William McGonagall)” 382 Coleman, Peter et al., ed. Quadrant: Twenty-Five Years 169 Coleridge, E.H. 483 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 34, 62, 80, 165, 340, 355, 363, 393, 485, 544 “Dejection: An Ode” 165 “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” 393 Collected Works bookshop (Melbourne) 465 Collingwood (Melbourne) 32, 173, 221 Collins (publisher) 577 Collins, Billy 427, 459, 565; “Introduction to Poetry” 565 Collins, Ralph 40



Onomastic Index

Collins, Richard 593 Collopy, Kevin 45 Colman, Adrian 104 “Colombian Documentary” (Lauren Williams) 473 “Colonial Ghosts in the Adelaide Hills” (Harris) 346 Columbus, Ray 583 “Come into the Garden Maud” (Tennyson) 313 Comedy Human, The (Shortis) 83 Comic Australian Verse (ed. Lehmann) 240, 308 Commonwealth Literary Fund 45, 47, 48, 104 Commonwealth Scholarship xvii, 247 “Company of Lovers, The” (Judith Wright) 356 Compleat Angler, The (Walton) 509 Complete Book of Australian Verse, The (John Clarke) 212–14 Compton, Jennifer 247, 581, 582 “Comrades” (Philp) 210 “Concessions” (Harris) 346 Condon, Eddie 41 “Congo, The” (Lindsay) 38 Congregational Union 293, 299, 300 Conquest, Robert 390 Conrad, Joseph 316 “Conscious and Verbal” (Murray) 376 “Converse Corolla” (Beach) 199 “Convict and the Lady, The” (McAuley) 310 “Convict’s Rum Song” (Anon.) 357 Cook, Peter 498 Cook, Sir James 336, 337, 338 Cooley, Dennis 430–31 Coonardoo (Prichard) 208 “Coorong, The” (Harris) 347 Cope, Wendy 212, 214 Corbett, Martin 477 Corners in Cans (Lea) 225 Coromandel peninsula 591, 594 Corris, Peter 240, 310 Corroboree (comp. Antill) 259 “Corroboree Song” (Nunggubyu song) 356 Corso, Gregory 224 Cosme settlement (Paraguay) 206, 207 “Costume Jewellery” (Maiden) 566 Cottingham, Chris 552

617 Couani, Anna 171, 392; “What a man, what a moon” 392 Coungeau, Emily 516, 517, 518, 519, 521, 528; “Australia to the Empire” 521 “Country Dance, after Corelli and Scarlatti” (McCuaig) 314 “Coup de Dès, Un” (Mallarmé) 432 Couper, Elizabeth 301 Couper, J.M. 46, 104 Coupland, Ann 596 Coupland, Grant 591, 596, 602; & Ann Coupland 602, 603 Courier, The 270 Cowan, Peter 225 Cowley, Abraham 510 Cox, Nigel 582 Coxhead, Martha 521 Cozzolino, Mimmo 170, 184 Crafter, Susan 240 Craig, Alexander 6, 7, 310; “The Silver Screw” 310 Crane, Hart 14, 41, 53, 93, 106, 334; “The Bridge” 93 Crane, Stephen, The Black Rider 427 Cranna, John 583 Crashaw, Richard 38 Craven, Peter 36 Crawford, Robert 572 Creek Water Journal (Gray) 7 Creeley, Robert 34, 35, 92, 107, 168, 460, 464, 548, 561, 562; “I Know a Man” 460 Cresswell, D’Arcy xvi “Crime Scene” (Manhire) 560 Crisp, Peter 21 Crittenden, Victor 236, 238 Crockford, Sue 596, 601, 603, 604 Croft, Julian 123, 240, 278, 322, 339, 348, 359, 464; Breakfasts in Shanghai 278 Croggon, Alison 367 Cromwell, Oliver 510 Cronin, MTC 369, 445, 495; Talking to Neruda’s Questions 445 Cross The Border (Adamson) 96 Cross, Arline 260, 261, 274 Cross, Douglas 255 Cross, Ernest William 260, 264

618 Cross, Jack 267 Cross, John Skyring 259, 528 Cross, Mary L.E.A. 259, 260, 274 Cross, Oscar 260 Cross, Victor 267 Cross, Zora 69, 120, 121, 206, 207, 209, 247, 249, 250–77, 284, 298, 512, 516, 517, 520, 524, 526, 528, 529 “Australia in England” 528 “The Browns in Town” 269 “The Casements of the Past” 261 The City of Riddle-me-ree 251 Daughters of the Seven Mile 258, 260 Elegy on an Australian Schoolboy 251, 267, 275, 512, 526, 529 “Epitaph for that Promising Young Australian Actor” 276 “Follow the Flag: An Appeal to Arms” (526 “History” (528 “The Idleness of Fiction” 264 “Impressions of Some Writing Women” 263 “Jim and I” 264 “The Leave Taking” 268 The Lilt of Life 251, 528 “Nails” (264 “Plain Paper” 274 “The Road of Labor” 264 “Robin Hood” 264 “The Sarcastic Charwoman” 275 “Silhouettes of War” 266 A Song of Mother Love and Other Verses 265, 270, 274 Songs of Love and Life 249, 250, 251, 256, 274, 275 “Sonnets of the South” (274 “A Strike Idyll” 262 This Hectic Age 259 “To the Flag” 524 “The Twilight of the Half-Gods” 269 “The Vision of Jehovah” 271 Crossing the Bar (Stead) 9 Crow (Hughes) 84 “Crowd Control” (Goodfellow) 138 Crowded House 581 Crump, Barry 583

THE POET IC EYE



Crying in Early Infancy (Tranter) 92 Crystal Palace Engineering School 286, 287, 288 Crystal, David 507 cummings, e.e. 94, 101, 125, 159, 173, 212, 214, 224, 314, 432, 460, 468 “Buffalo Bill’s” 101 “next to of course god america i” 460 Curnow, Allen 11, 123, 150, 233, 335, 338, 550, 553, 584; “Landfall in Unknown Seas” 335, 338 Curthois, Greg 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 108 Curtiz, Michael, dir. Casablanca 124 Cusack, Dymphna 205 Cutting Out (Fiona Farrell Poole) 235 Cutts, Simon, A History of the Airfields of Lincolnshire 1 506 Cuvier, Georges 486 Cvetkovic, Lidija 372 “Cycads, The” (Wright) 3 Dada 68, 159, 171, 432, 501, 504, 572 Daddy Cool 40 Daily Mail (Brisbane) 252, 254, 266, 268, 270, 271 “Daily Round, The” (McCuaig) 314 Daley, Victor 60, 261 Dalgarno, Roy 143, 147 Dalwurra: The Black Bittern (Mudrooroo) 302 Daly, William 445 Damousi, Joy 511, 513, 514 Dance of the Origin (Trussell) 156 “Dancers, The” (Robinson) 57, 60 “Dandelions” (Valli) 503 Daniel, Frank 324 Daniel, Samuel 399 Danielsson, Palle 40 Dante Alighieri 12, 77, 158, 395, 463, 480, 495, 504 “Dark Harvest (for Dana Gioia)” (Tranter) 492 Dark Somme Flowing: Australian Verse of the Great War (ed. David Holloway) 512, 513, 527 “Dark Tracks” (Lach–Newinsky) 571 Dark, Eleanor 571 Dark, Eric 571 Darkened Window, The (Cato) 45 “Darkness” (Byron) 488 “Darlinghurst Nights” (Slessor) 363 Darwin 198, 221, 277



Onomastic Index

Darwin Community College 55 Daughters of the Seven Mile (Cross) 258, 260 Davenport (Auckland) 152 Davies, Peter Maxwell, comp. Eight Songs for a Mad King (libretto Stow) 7 Davies, Tricia 108 Davila, Juan 66, 68 Davis, Beatrice 261, 331 Davis, Jack 305–307 Black Life: Poems 306–307 “Black Life” 306 The First-Born and other Poems 305 “Gino’s” 306 Jagardoo 305 Davis, Olena Kalytiak 445 Davison, Frank Dalby 255 Davison, Marie 255 Davison, Sophie 286 Dawe, Bruce 185, 186, 225, 240, 241, 279, 310, 311, 323, 359, 378, 379, 380, 382, 383, 463, 464, 568 “Drifters” 568 Enter Without So Much As Knocking 240 News from Judaea 379 “News from Judaea” 379 “Revelations Revisited” 379 “Dawn at Sea” (Harris) 347 Dawson, Fielding 169 “Day Lady Died, The” (O’Hara) 409 “Days of Violence, Days of Rages” (Hewett) 172 de Brés, Joris 552 De Rerum Natura (Lucretius) 160, 402 “Deadshits, The” (Rae Desmond Jones) 172 Deamer, Dulcie 252, 253, 255, 256, 257, 276, 582 Dean, James 26, 27, 94, 107 “Dear, will your love be true?” (David McKee Wright) 296 Dearing, Vinton A. 477 “Death Circus, The” (Tranter) 357 “Death in Custody” (Scanlon) 279 “Death of a Go-Go Girl” (Wearne) 36 Death of a Salesman (Miller) 29 “Death of Eisenbart, The” (Harwood) 343 “Death of the Bird, The” (Hope) 356 Debord, Guy 502 Debussy, Claude 428

619 “December 20, 1917” (Fisher) 524 “Declining Passions of Autumn” (McCormick) 18 “Declining the Naked Horse” (Manhire) 560 Deeble, Russell 225 Deep Image poetry 94 “Deep Well” (Robinson) 59, 60 “Definition Poem: Pissed as a Parrot” (Mansell) 310, 392 Deformed Transformed, The (Byron) 474, 477, 484 “Dejection: An Ode” (Coleridge) 165 “Del Espiritu Santo” (Robinson) 60 Deling, Bert, dir. Pure Shit 38 Deluge, The (Turner) 489 “Demos and the New Zealand Liberals” (David McKee Wright) 292 Dench, Chris 508 Dennis, C.J. 161, 226, 250, 253, 313, 333, 512, 566, 567 “The Play” 566, 567 The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke 250 Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (D S I R ) 593 Depasquale, Paul 238 Derham, Enid 516, 517, 519, 520 Derrida, Jacques 360 Descartes, René 571 “De-Tox Blues” (Goodfellow) 351 Deutscher, Isaac 144 Devanny, Jean 247, 582 Devonport (Auckland) 144 di Prima, Diane 225 “Dialogue with John Forbes” (Roberts) 127 “Diaspora” (Mudrooroo) 303 Dibble, Brian 204, 304 Dickins, Barry 233 Dickinson, Emily 314, 404, 418, 423, 426, 452, 453, 495, 498, 570 “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” 450, 452 “What Soft – Cherubic Creatures” 418 “Wild Night – Wild Nights!” 418 Dickson, John 235 Diderot, Denis 406, 558 Digger, The (magazine) 121 Dilworth, Mary 203 Dionysus 88, 545

620 “Distance” (Lauren Williams) 468 “Divorce” (Lauren Williams) 471 Dixon, Peter 452, 453, 454 Dobell, Alfred 207 Dobrez, Livio 363 Dobrez, Pat 359–65 Dobson, Rosemary 53, 310 Docker, John 161 Doctor’s Rock (Olds) 24, 25, 26, 27 Dominion (Fairburn) 148, 149 Dominion Museum (Wellington) 593 Don Juan (Byron) xvii, 160, 228, 375, 452, 453, 458, 459, 461, 463, 476, 478, 480, 483, 486, 490 Don Quixote (Cervantes) 4 Donne, John 126, 180, 221, 224, 347, 348, 391, 392, 393, 398, 399, 400, 406, 450, 565 “The Flea” 400 “The Good Morrow” 450 Donnell, Anne 516 Donoghue, Denis 508 Donovan, Ann 549 Dorn, Ed 107 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 144, 586 Doubtful Sounds (Manhire) 558, 562 Dow, Mary 204 Dowland, John 348 Dowling, Basil 166 Dowling, Kevin 241 “Downhill on Borrowed Skis” (Murray) 545 Doyle, Mike 16 Dr Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World (Mudrooroo) 302 Dragon Principle, The (Stephen Murray) 113 Drain, Dorothy 311, 390, 457 Drake, Elizabeth 68 Dramas From the Sky (Harris) 346 Dransfield, Michael 53, 74, 78, 79, 95, 105, 120, 121, 122, 205, 241, 319, 332, 358, 359–65, 376, 378, 549 Drug Poems 360, 362, 376 “Endsight” 360 The Inspector of Tides 360 Memoirs of a Velvet Urinal 362 Streets of the Long Voyage 359 “Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever, The” (Murray) 545

THE POET IC EYE



“Dreams” (Lehmann) 88, 89 “Drifters” (Dawe) 568 “Drifting Dug-Out, The” (Robinson) 58 “Drive, The” (Anthony Lawrence) 566 Driven to Talk to Strangers (Lauren Williams) 466, 467 “Driving Towards Yass” (Lauren Williams) 471 “Drowning in Wheat” (Kinsella) 567 Drug Poems (Dransfield) 360, 362, 376 “Drugs” (Forbes) 241 “Drunk, A” (Lea) 231 Drunkard’s Garden (Hunt) 21, 23 “Drunken Diatribe, A” (Lehmann) 88 Dryden, John 404, 477, 489, 507; The State of Innocence, and Fall of Man 489 Duchamp, Marcel 98, 101 Dudding, Robin 155 Duff, Alan 583 Dugan, Mike 225 Duggan, Laurie 36, 169, 171, 240, 241, 432 “Adventures in Paradise” 171 “Anagrams” 169 “North/South/ & After That” 169 Duke, Jas H. 37, 38, 171, 502, 505; “Shit Poem” 37 “Dull Boys” (Lauren Williams) 468 Dulwich College 287 Duncan, Robert 6, 34, 35, 76, 92, 93, 97, 107, 123, 168, 318, 431 Dunciad, The (Pope) 390, 397 Dunedin 24, 25, 154, 289, 290, 292, 295, 298, 299, 301, 560 Dunn, Douglas 37 Dusty, Slim 322 Dutton, Geoffrey 169, 309 Duwell, Martin 90, 119, 542, 543, 546 Dyer, Jack 31 Dylan, Bob 20, 27, 94, 102, 103, 107, 181, 549, 560 “Black Madonna Motorcycle Two Wheel Gypsy Queen” 94 “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” 103 “Masters of War” 94 “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” 94 Dymocks (Australian bookshop chain) 577



Onomastic Index

Eagle, Jenny 602 Ear in a Wheatfield, The (ed. Hemensley) 121, 168 “Earnest Liberal’s Lament, The” (Hemingway) 460 Earth Hold (Jennifer Rankin) 242 Earth Ship (magazine) 168 Earwig (magazine) 190 East, Alison 156 “Eating Out” (Wearne) 42 “Eating with Friends” (Lehmann) 90 Ecclesiastes 453 Eco, Umberto, The Name of the Rose 456 Edgar, Stephen, “Another Country” 566 “Edge” (FitzGerald) 356 “Editorial: Sunday Territorian” (Scanlon) 279 Edmond, James 253 Edmond, Martin 547, 576, 581, 582 Edmonds, Phillip 31 Edward II (Marlowe) 84 Edwards, Dick 44 Edwards, Jimmy 32 Ee Tiang Hong 204 Effects of Light: The Poetry of Tasmania (ed. Vivian Smith & Margaret Scott) 204 Eggleton, David 601 Egil’s Saga 60 Eight Songs for a Mad King (comp. Davies, libretto Stow) 7 80 Great Poems from Chaucer to Now (ed. Page) 563 “Ejenak the Porcupine” (Robinson) 58 El Rocco jazz club (Sydney) 173, 214, 220, 222 Elegy on an Australian Schoolboy (Cross) 251, 267, 275, 512, 526, 529 Elenberg, Joel 230 Elgin, Lord 98 Eliot, George 38 Eliot, T.S. xvi, 12, 14, 34, 151, 159, 248, 312, 313, 338, 344, 406, 407, 409, 410, 411, 418, 427, 437, 438, 439, 440, 470, 548 “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” 151, 418 “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” 437 The Waste Land 12, 23, 149, 151, 313, 409, 438, 439

621 Elizabethan poetry xvi, 398, 399, 404 Ellenberg, Joel 424 Elliott, Brian 54, 56, 59 Ellis, Robert 603 “Eloquent” (Lauren Williams) 472 Elshtain, Jean Bethke 511 Eltham (Victoria) 118, 353, 465 Emery, Brook 367, 419 “Emma in London, Ulla in Aachen, Theo in Athens” (Goodfellow) 350 Emmanuel Church 299 Emotions Are Not Skilled Workers, The (Wallace– Crabbe) 542 “Empire’s Call, The” (Dorothy Frances McCrae) 520 Empson, William 406 Enders, Robert, dir. Stevie 37 “Endsight” (Dransfield) 360 Endymion (Keats) 228 “English lecture” (Scanlon) 280 Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, The (dir. Werner Herzog) 37 Enlightenment, the 543 Enright, D.J. 377, 390 Ensing, Riemke 123, 550, 584 Enter Without So Much As Knocking (Dawe) 240 “Entering America” (Manhire) 560 “Epipsychidion” (Shelley) 95 “Epitaph for that Promising Young Australian Actor” (Cross) 276 “Epithalamium” (Lehmann) 89 Epstein, Jacob 304, 428 Ern Malley hoax 123, 205, 312, 317–21, 375, 377 “Eros Turannos” (Edwin Arlington Robinson) 34 Essay on Criticism, An (Pope) 397 “Essay on Man” (Pope) 570 Essendon (Melbourne football team) 31 Essery, Ray 324 “Etiquette” (஡ O) 241 Evans, George Essex 260 Evans, McQueen & Wedde, ed. The Penguin Book of Contemporary New Zealand Poetry 234–36 Evans, Nellie A. 516 Evans, Walker 597, 600

622 Evatt, H.V. 206 “Ever Popular Tune, The” (Lauren Williams) 472, 473 “Everytime it rains like this” (Hunt) 22 Ewart, Gavin 339, 390 “Execution” (Benson) 20 “Exit the Players” (Wallace–Crabbe) 309 “Explanation, The” (Harris) 347 Expressive Forest, The (Trussell) 143 “Eyes Have It, The” (Goodfellow) 350 Eyley, Claudia Pond 596, 603, 606; & Peter Eyley 601, 603, 604 Faber & Faber 34, 214 Façade (Sitwell) 313 “Faces in the Street” (Lawson) 164 “Facility” (David McKee Wright) 289 “Fact Is” (Lauren Williams) 467 Faerie Queene, The (Spenser) 459 “Fair in Love or War” (David McKee Wright) 291 Fairbairn, Anne 356, 357, 359 Fairburn, A.R.D. 143–56, 192, 549 “The Cave” 151 Dominion 148, 149 “To a Friend in the Wilderness” 148 “The Voyage” 148 “The Woman Problem” 152, 153 Fairburn, Edwin 155 Fairburn, Jocelyn 145, 146, 152, 153 Fairburn, Thayer 146 Fairclough, Mitchell 192 Fairplay (weekly magazine, Sydney) 254, 301, 520 Fall of the House of Usher (comp. Sitsky) 508 “Famous Tay Whale, The” (McGonagall) 381 Fane, Margaret —See: Beatrice Osborn Fane, Maud 257 Fanny Bay Gaol (Darwin) 218 “Fantasyland” (Beach) 196 Farrar, Jill 64 Farrell Poole, Fiona,Cutting Out 235 Fat Possum Press 49, 62, 64 “Father Finn (Sedd-Ed-Bahr)” (Knowles) 528 Faulkner, William 432, 458; Absalom, Absalom! 432

THE POET IC EYE



Faust I (Goethe) 476 Federation Square (Melbourne) 399 Feeding the Ghost (Salom) 315, 316 Feldman, Morton 8 Fellowship of Australian Writers 466 Fenton, James, “An Amazing Dialogue” 425 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence 26, 74, 221, 224, 318, 353, 355, 360; “Pictures of the Gone World” 26 “Fern Fronds and Mountain Daisies” (David McKee Wright) 284, 285 Festival of Sydney 62, 64, 66, 67, 68 Fielding, Henry 404 Fields, Dorothy 39 Fields, John xviii, 547, 591–607 ‘Signature’ photographs 591, 592, 594, 595, 596, 597, 599, 600, 601, 604, 605, 606, 607 Victorian Auckland 591, 594, 595, 604 Fields, Ken 106 Fields, Patricia 596 “50s Schoolboy Remembers, A” (Olds) 25 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem (ed. Ruth Padel) 563 Fillery, Jo (Josephine) 601, 604 Filmer, Murray 551 Filmer, Vic 551 Fink, Margaret 68 Finnisy, Michael 508 Fire on the Snow, The (Stewart) 333 First World War 69, 120, 122, 514, 529 First-Born and other Poems, The (Jack Davis) 305 Fisher, Andrew 299 Fisher, Lala 252, 253, 276, 516, 520, 521, 524, 525 “Progression” 525 “December 20, 1917” 524 Grass Flowering 521 Fisher, Walter R. 504 Fisher’s Ghost (Stewart) 333 Fisher Library 249, 258, 259, 261 FitzGerald, Robert 313, 330, 331, 336, 339, 356, 532 “Edge” 356 “Heemskerck Shoals” 330, 337 “The Wind at Your Door” 330, 336, 337, 338 Fitzroy 186, 240, 309, 324 Five Islands Press xvii, 366, 445



Onomastic Index

“Five Visions of Captain Cook” (Slessor) 330, 336, 337 “5 Poems from the Royal Hotel, Mornington” (Morgan) 355 Flagstones (magazine) 464 “Flamenco” (Lauren Williams) 468 Flaubert, Gustave 283, 361 Flaus, John 223, 230 “Flavour of the month” (Roberts) 126 “Flea, The” (Donne) 400 Fleeting Atalanta, The (Foster) 114 Fleming, William 139 Fletcher, Beryl 583 Flight of the Emu: Contemporary Light Verse, The (ed. Lehmann) 240–41, 308 Florence (Italy) 316 Fluxus 572 Fogarty, John 324 “Follow the Flag: An Appeal to Arms” (Cross) 526 Fomison, Tony 596 Footscray 196 Footscray Community Arts Building 193 Footscray Community Centre 180 “For Australia” (David McKee Wright) 383–84 “For Belinda” (Scanlon) 280 For Crying Out Loud (Wallace–Crabbe) 539 “for joel” (Lea) 174 “For My Goddess Given by an Unknown Admirer” (Lehmann) 89 “For Verritus, a Jockey” (Lehmann) 90 Forbes, John 127, 240, 241, 242, 321, 372, 374, 394, 419, 532, 533 “Anzac Day” 394 “Drugs” 241 “Speed, a Pastoral” 419 Foreman, Paul 28 “Forever the Snake” (Jennifer Rankin) 243 Forrest, Mabel 121, 252, 254, 266, 268, 516, 517, 518, 520, 527 “The Outpost” 527 “War” 518 Forth and Clyde (pub in Balmain) 49, 96 Fortunes of Richard Mahony, The (Richardson) 338 Forty-Second Street (dir. Lloyd Bacon) 41

623 Foscolo, Ugo, Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis 477 Foster, David 114, 115, 581 The Fleeting Atalanta 114 Moonlite 114 Foucault, Michel 360 “Four Cobweb Poems” (Hunt) 22 “4 Notes: Jim Baxter One Year Gone” (Olds) 26 4 V8 Poems (Olds) 24 Fowler, H.W. 402 Fox, Terry 138 Frame, Janet 14, 391, 582 Frank Sargeson Centre 575 Frank, Anne 355 Franklin, Miles xvi Fraser, Hilary 204 Fraser, Malcolm 379 Fredy Neptune (Murray) 376 Free Grass (magazine) 122, 464 Free Lance (journal) 253 Free Poetry (magazine) 93, 105, 121, 122 Freed (magazine) 549 “Freedom of Michael, The” (Philp) 211 Freeway (Olds) 24, 25 Fremantle Arts Centre Press 366 Freud, Sigmund 347, 449, 542 Friendly Street poets (Adelaide) 133, 465 “Frolic” (Manhire) 561 Frost, Robert 107, 376, 440 Fuller, Roy 328 Fullerton, Mary 461, 516, 519, 528 “Next Door” 528 “War Time” 528 Fundamentalist” (Monro) 310 “Funeral of the Late Ex-Provost Rough, Dundee, The” (McGonagall) 381 Furphy, Joseph xvi; Such Is Life 4, 532 Futurism 103, 429 Gable, Clark 41 Gallagher, Karl 217 Gallipoli 512, 513, 514, 517, 520, 527, 529 “Gallipoli” (Gilmore) 512 Galuppi, Baldassare 206 Garbarek, Jan 40 García Lorca, Federico 151, 226, 357, 562

624 “Garcia Lorca Murdered in Granada” (Manifold) 356 Garden of Gethsemane: Poems from the Lost Decade, The (Mudrooroo) 302–303 Garden, J.S. (‘Jock‘) 525 Gardner, Robert 592 Gardner, Sylvana 170, 171 Garner, Helen 179 Garrigue, Jean 418 Garrity, Tim 601, 602, 605 Garvey, Keith 120 Garvin, Lucy 265 Garvin, Norman 265 “gateway” (Beach) 349 Gaudier–Brzeska, Henri 428 Gay, John 312, 328 Gee, Maurice 583 Gellert, Leon 513 “Gemini” (Harwood) 341 “Gemini / Gemini” (Roberts) 129 Generation of ’68 119, 120, 121, 122, 169, 170, 172, 464 Genesis 481 Gentle, Don 62 Georgeff, Diana 233 Georgianism 79, 238, 249, 275, 319, 337, 346, 516, 525 “Ghost Gums (1)” (Robinson) 61 “Ghost Gums (2)” (Robinson) 60 “Ghostly Voters, The” (Philp) 211 Gifford, Don 596, 601, 603, 604 Gift of Blood, The (Harris) 346 Gilbert, Kevin 218 Giles, Rob 552 Gill, Patrick 570 Gillies, Max 212 Gilman, Ernest B. 392, 393, 399, 400 Gilmore, Mary 55, 205–208, 252, 257, 272, 331, 356, 512, 516, 517, 519, 525, 527, 528, 529, 566 “An Aboriginal Simile” 356 “Australia Marching On” 525 “Battlefields” 528, 529 “Gallipoli” 512 “Measure” 525 “Nationality” 206, 566

THE POET IC EYE



“These Fellowing Men” 525 “War” 527 Gilmore, Terry 93, 95, 105, 110 “Gino’s” (Jack Davis) 306 Ginsberg, Allen 24, 27, 66, 75, 78, 107, 125, 221, 279, 302, 355, 359, 360, 431, 549 Gioia, Dana 371 “Girl’s Night on Long Island” (Bronwyn Lea) 566, 567 Gladstone, William Ewart 265, 287 Gladwin, Herman 584, 596, 601, 606 Glagolithic Mass (comp. JanaDzek) 40 Glasgow 211 “Glass Boy, The” (Harwood) 341 Glazunov, Alexander 354 Gleckner, Robert F. 483 Gleeson, Bill 322 Glenbrook 275 Glenelg 215 Gliori, Mark 323, 324; “Queenie” 323 Globe Hotel (Auckland) 550, 551, 584 Glover, Denis 148, 152, 192, 549, 550, 551, 584 “Go to the Back of the Class” (Lauren Williams) 468 “God’s Grandeur” (Hopkins) 411–14 “Goddess of the Crossroads” (Harwood) 341 Godwin, Fay 600 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 476, 480; Faust I 476; The Sorrows of Young Werther 477 Going Down Swinging (magazine) 466 Gold Diggers of 1933 (dir. Mervyn LeRoy) 41 Golden Lover, The (Stewart) 333 Goldman, Dorothy 521, 522 Goldmark, Karl 354 Goldsworthy, Peter 133, 309, 404 “Good Christian Practises Light Verse, The” (Wallace–Crabbe) 545 Good Looks (Manhire) 560 “Good Morrow, The” (Donne) 450 Goodall, Johnny 93, 95 Goodfellow, Geoff 130–42, 193, 196, 348, 350–52, 497 “Anti Climax” 352 “Beware of the Penguins” 130 “Crowd Control” 138



Onomastic Index

“De-Tox Blues” 351 “The Eyes Have It” 350 “Grace” 351 “A Handful” 351 “The Heat” 352 “Home Ground” 351 “June in Hurtle Square” 133 “The Lemonade Kid and His Brothers” 350 “Me and Eddy” 350, 351 “Out of the Shadows” 350, 351 “Perished” 352 “Play the Game” 139, 141 “Qualifying the Theory” 352 “Reminders” 352 “Semaphore” 351 “Semaphore Sandra” 351 Semi Madness 350–52 The Sex Poems Unleashed 352 “Small Town Talk” 352 “The Songbird” 352 “Unsteady Eddy” 351 “Which Bank” 351 Goodge, W.T., “A Bad Break!” 310 Gordon, Adam Lindsay 120, 328, 347, 566; “The Sick Stockrider” 566 Gordon, Lee 223 Gorky, Arshile 497 Gorman, Sir Eugene 40 Gornall, Lola 206, 252 Goss, John 310 Gosson, Stephen, The School of Abuse 394 Gough, John 36 Goulburn Penitentiary 217 Gould, Alan, “A U-Boat Morning, 1914” 566 Gould, Bob 104 “Gracchiad, The” (Lehmann) 85 Gracchus 86 “Grace” (Goodfellow) 351 Grafton Penitentiary 217 Graham, John 372 Grainger, Percy 508 “Grand Tour of Greece, The” (Lehmann) 84, 85 “Granny Mary Came Our Way” (Mudrooroo) 303 Grant, Jamie 119, 311 Grant, Tom 196

625 Granville 263 Grass Flowering (Fisher) 521 Graves, Robert 34, 318, 319, 389, 390, 440, 498 “A Slice of Wedding Cake” 389, 390 Wife to Mr Milton 318 Gray, Robert 7, 45, 67, 105, 109, 110, 111, 112, 119, 121, 169, 241, 242, 370, 434, 435, 439, 440, 492, 546, 566; & Geoffrey Lehmann 568 Creek Water Journal 7 “Homage to the Painters” 434, 435 “In Departing Light” 566 Introspect, Retrospect 45 “ Journey: The North Coast” 492 “North Coast Town” 492 “A Port of Europe” 492 “Within the Traveller’s Eye” 492 ed. (with Geoffrey Lehmann) Australian Poetry in the Twentieth Century 568 Gray, Ugly Dave 31 Graybill, Patrick 499 Great Australian Whiting (magazine) 192 Great South Land, The (Ingamells) 338 Great War 69, 70, 210, 252, 254, 262, 265, 266, 267, 269, 270, 272, 284, 341 —See also: First World War, World War One “Greatest Song, The” (Lauren Williams) 470 Greek Anthology 89 Green Room, The (magazine) 253, 269, 271, 273 Green, H.M. 255 Greenlees, Gavin 219 Greer, Germaine 199, 238, 376; Greer et al., ed. Kissing the Rod 238 Gregory, Allen, “True Blue” 324 “Grendel” (Robinson) 60 Grey Battalion, The (Tilton) 516, 517 Grieg, Edvard 508 Grimshaw, Charlotte 582 Grono, William 208–209, 238; ed. Margins: A West Coast Selection 1829–1988 208–10 Groop, the 40 Groove, the 40 Grotowski, Jerzy 99, 474 Grundy, Philip 308, 310 Guarino, Marsula 481 Gudas, Fabian, & Michael Davidson 406, 407

626 Guess, Jeff 133 Guest, Barbara 425 Gympie (Queensland) 259, 260, 261, 262 Gypsies (McCormick/Benson) 15, 16, 18, 19, 20 Haig, Douglas 287 “Hairy Man” (Robinson) 58 Hakataramea Valley 289 Hale and Iremonger 91, 326 Haley, Russell 15, 549, 584; On the Fault Line 15 Hall, Donald, ed. New American Poetry 107, 464 Hall, Rodney 71, 72, 105, 360, 361 Hall, Roger 581 Hall, Steven 203 Hamilton, Ian 144 Hamlet (Shakespeare) 311, 355 Hammial, Philip, With One Skin Less 326 Hampton, Susan 240 Hancock, Bridh 174 Hand to Hand (Hart–Smith) 304–305 “Handful, A” (Goodfellow) 351 Hanly, Gil 596 Hanly, Pat 596, 602, 603 Hanna, Cliff 328 “Happy Birthday, Australia, 1988” (Mudrooroo) 302 Happy Warrior, The (Bright) 523 “Harbours” (Benson) 20 “Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, A” (Dylan) 103 “Hard. Bright. Clean, Particular” (Stead) 9 Hardy, Thomas 154, 419, 527; “The Ruined Maid” 419 Harford, Lesbia 339, 491, 516, 566, 567; “I’m like all lovers, wanting love to be” 566 Harland, Richard 116 Harlow, Jean 41 Harlow, Michael 548 Harney, W.E. 55 Harold Park Hotel (Melbourne) 196, 221 Harpur, Charles 4, 79, 239, 302, 356, 374, 375; “The Temple of Infamy” 374, 375 Harris, David G. 172 Harris, Max 56, 190, 318, 345–48 “Colonial Ghosts in the Adelaide Hills” 346 “Concessions” 346

THE POET IC EYE



“The Coorong” 347 “Dawn at Sea” 347 Dramas From the Sky 346 “The Explanation” 347 The Gift of Blood 346 “Lines to a Lady” 347 “Love’s Metaphysic” 346 “Mithridatum of Despair” 347 “On the Death of Mrs Adele Koh” 346 “The Pelvic Rose” 346 “The Prelude” 347 “Sleep Demeter” 346 “The Tantanoola Tiger” 346, 347 “The Traveller” 347 Harris, Robert 220, 358 Harris, Rory 133 Harrison, Jennifer 367, 501, 574 Harrison, Keith, “Picasso Bull” 310 Harrison, Launcelot 262 Harrison, Tony 107, 118 Harrison–Ford, Carl 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 108 Harry, J.S., “Mousepoem” 566 “Harry” (Webb) 567 Hartin, Murray, “Just Looking” 324 Hart–Smith, William 54, 59, 83, 105, 121, 124, 304– 305, 330, 331, 336, 337, 345, 532 “Adam and Eve” 305 “Canoe to San Domingo” 305 “Christopher Columbus” 83, 304, 330, 336, 337 Hand to Hand 304–305 “He Will be Lonely in Heaven” 336, 337 Selected Poems 1936–84 304 Harvard University 592 Harvey, Siobhan 574 Harvey, Tracey 192 Harwood, Gwen 281–83, 310, 339–45, 358, 372, 392, 404, 423, 461, 492, 508 “Among the Roses” 340 “The Death of Eisenbart” 343 “Gemini” 341 “The Glass Boy” 341 “Goddess of the Crossroads” 341 “Homage to Ferd. Holthausen” 392 “Later Texts” 342



Onomastic Index

“Little Buttercup’s Picture Book” 340 “Midwinter” 341 “Midwinter Rainbow” 343 “On Poetry” 341 “On Uncertainty” 343, 344 The Present Tense 339–43 “The Present Tense” 344 “A Sermon” 344 “Six Odes for Public Occasions” 340 “Songs of Eve” 341, 342 “Syntax of the Mind” 344 “Threshold” 492 “To Music” 343 Haskell, Dennis 204, 541 Hasluck, Nicholas 203 Hastings (N Z ) 188 Hathway, Cliff 322 Hawke, Bob 379, 380 Hawkesbury 113 Hawklet (journal) 253 Hay, R.G. 142 Hayden, Bill 379 Haydn, Joseph 313 Haynes, Jim 324 Haynes, Susan 212 Hayward, Charles W. Andrée 209, 331, 356 Hayward, Florence 518 Hazelton, Patricia 592 Hazlitt, William 396, 405, 476 HD (Hilda Doolittle) 427 “He Sing fr You” (Stead) 548 “He Will be Lonely in Heaven” (Hart–Smith) 336, 337 Heaney, Seamus 37, 57, 546 “Heart’s Needle” (Plath) 39 Heat (magazine) 368 “Heat, The” (Goodfellow) 352 Heath, Gordon L. 519 Heaven and Earth (Byron) xvii, 474–91 “Heemskerck Shoals” (FitzGerald) 330, 337 Heidegger, Martin 345 Heine, Heinrich 112, 283, 312 Heliopolis 517 Helios overture (comp. Neilsen) 40

627 “Hellas at Watson’s Bay” (David McKee Wright) 120 Hellyer, Jill, “Jonah’s Wife” 395 Hemensley, Kris 91, 93, 121, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 242, 332, 464, 465 ed. The Best of The Ear 168, 169, 170 ed. The Ear in a Wheatfield 121, 168 Hemensley, Retta 465 Hemingway, Ernest 179; “The Earnest Liberal’s Lament” 460 Henri, Adrian 37 Henry IV Part 2 (Shakespeare) 574 Henty, G.A. 520 Henze, Hans Werner 508 Herbert, Xavier xvi, 3, 4, 247 Capricornia 4, 338 Poor Fellow My Country 3, 4, 576 Herbert, George 224, 347, 348, 398 Herculaneum 297 “Herne Bay revisited” (Olds) 25 “Herons, Ma, Bright Spinnakers” (Hunt) 22 Herrick, Robert 212, 312 Herrick, Steven 171 Herriman, George 456 Hersey, April 255, 260, 261, 265 Herzog, Werner, dir. The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser 37 Hesling, Bernard 314 Hetherington, John 256 Hewett, Dorothy 6, 70, 113, 120, 172, 203, 566 “The Burial” 70 The Chapel Perilous 120 “Days of Violence, Days of Rages” 172 Heydon, Sybil, “Shirkers” 524 Heyward, Michael 318, 319, 320, 321 Hiatt, Ben L. 28 Hiawatha (Longfellow) 338 Hibberd, Jack 527; A Stretch of the Imagination 581 Hicok, Bob 441 Hiener, Wilhelm, William Street 45, 112 Higgins, Dick 502 Higginson, Stephen 27 High and Low (Lauren Williams) 468

628 Highet, Gilbert 376, 538 Higgonnet, Margaret R., ed. Lines of Fire: Women Writers of World War One 512, 513, 515 Hill, Barry 362 Hill, Geoffrey 321 Hillary, Sir Edmund 583 “Hirohito” (Manhire) 560 Hirsch, Edward 563 Hirshfield, Jane 423 “History” (Cross) 528 History of the Airfields of Lincolnshire 1, A (Cutts) 506 Ho Chi Minh 42 Hobart 106, 204 Hobhouse, John Cam 475 Hobo magazine 328 Hoddinott, Alison 281, 282, 283, 339, 341, 345 Hodgins, Philip 367, 567; “Shooting the Dogs” 567 Hodgkins, Frances 153 Hodgson, Francis 600 Hoffman, Dustin 37 Hohaia, Milton 556, 557 Holden, Philip 582 Hölderlin, Friedrich 448 Hollander, John 445 Holloway, David, ed. Dark Somme Flowing: Australian Verse of the Great War 512, 513, 527 Holly, Buddy 388 Holman, Bob 499 Holmes, Michael 371 Holocaust at Mary Smokes (Billy Jones) 586, 587 Holy Life and Death of Concrete Grady, The (Baxter) 19 “Homage to Ferd. Holthausen” (Harwood) 392 “Homage to the Painters” (Gray) 434, 435 “Home Ground” (Goodfellow) 351 “Home, The Spare Room, The” (Adamson) 100 Homer 335, 345, 399, 504, 574; Iliad 97; Odyssey 97, 184 Hood, Thomas, “No” 33; “A Nocturnal Sketch” 33 Hooton, Harry 68, 224 Hope, A.D. 4, 5, 43, 44, 51, 53, 71, 83, 89, 162, 166, 169, 206, 238, 309, 331, 332, 335, 356, 358, 360,

THE POET IC EYE



361, 363, 372, 378, 390, 422, 423, 461, 464, 534, 542, 545, 546 “Australia” 534 “Clover Honey” 309 “The Death of the Bird” 356 “Pseudodoxia Epidemica” 546 Soledades of the Sun and the Moon 545 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 180, 334, 376, 411–14, 426; “God’s Grandeur” 411–14 Horace 88, 89, 157, 165, 493, 568 “Horrors of Majuba, The” (McGonagall) 381 Hosier, Judith 321 Hotere, Ralph 596, 603, 606 Housman, A.E. 527 “How to Get a Girl Friend” (Porter) 6, 545 Howe, Fanny 445 Hsing Yun 389 Hudson, Flexmore 56, 59, 121, 332 Hughes, Billy 206, 207 Hughes, Langston 563 Hughes, Robert 193, 319, 320; Ballad of Alan Bond 378 Hughes, Ted 37, 84, 243; Crow 84 Hughes, William Morris 522 Hugo, Victor 355 Hulme, Keri 576, 582 Hulme, T.E. 428 Hume, Fergus, Madame Midas 269 Hummer (journal) 254 Humphries, Barry 67, 212, 241, 376, 521, 581 “Hunger” (Salom) 316 Hunt, Leigh 573 Hunt, Sam 15, 16, 19, 20, 21–23, 24, 166, 348, 550, 551, 584 Bottle Creek 21, 22 Bracken Country 21 Drunkard’s Garden 21, 23 “Everytime it rains like this” 22 “Four Cobweb Poems” 22 “Herons, Ma, Bright Spinnakers” 22 “Smash (for Meg)” 22 South Into Winter 19, 21, 22 Time to Ride 21, 22 Hunt, Sue 108



Onomastic Index

Hurst, Maurice 258 Hurst, William 275 Hutcheon, Linda 373, 376 Hyde, Robin xvi, 154, 199 Hydriotaphia, or Urne-Buriall (Browne) 317 Hynes, Jim 324 Hynes, Samuel 516, 529 Hyperion poems (Keats) xiii, 28 “I Am” (Mudrooroo) 303 “I Had No Human Speech” (Robinson) 57, 61 “I Know a Man” (Creeley) 460 “I’ll tell on you” (Beach) 195 I’m Deadly Serious (Wallace–Crabbe) 536, 537, 542 “i’m glad you’re not an actress” (Lea) 174 “I’m like all lovers, wanting love to be” (Harford) 566 “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” (Dickinson) 450, 452 “I’ve Written Poems in the Aisles of Supermarkets” (Billy Jones) 586 “Idleness of Fiction, The” (Cross) 264 Ihimaera, Witi 158 “Imagined Scenes from the Second Half of My Life” (Lehmann) 84 Imagism 428, 434, 435, 436, 438 Imminent Summer (Keesing) 45 Imperial Hotel (Tamworth) 321 Imperial Hotel Bush Poetry Contest (Tamworth) 321–25 Impressionism 434 “Impressions of Some Writing Women” (Cross) 263 “In a Station of the Metro” (Pound) 435 “In Auckland” (Olds) 24 In Cap and Bells (Seaman) 212 In Casablanca for the Waters (Roberts) 121, 124, 126, 127, 128 “In Certain Seasons” (McCormick) 18 “In Departing Light” (Gray) 566 In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do? (Sheldon) 299 In Light and Darkness (Wallace–Crabbe) 534 “In Residence” (Salom) 316 “In the Family Album” (Roberts) 124

629 “In the Pop Age Or the Battle Between the Weak and the Strong” (Wallace–Crabbe) 531 “In Town for the March” (Clive James) 566 “Inauguration of the Hill of Balgay, The” (McGonagall) 381 Independent on Sunday (U K ) 563 Ingamells, Rex 55, 56, 59, 332; The Great South Land 338 Innes, Harold 146 “Inside Outsiders: From Mud to Malraux” (Wallace–Crabbe) 546 “Inspector Calls, An” (Manhire) 558 Inspector of Tides, The (Dransfield) 360 “Introduction to Poetry” (Billy Collins) 565 Introspect, Retrospect (Gray) 45 Invisible Tattoos (Lauren Williams) 466, 467, 471, 472, 473, 474 Iowa Writers' Workshop 115 Ipswich Grammar School 260 Ireland 55, 57, 248, 249, 250, 266, 284, 285, 286, 287, 292, 294, 377, 582 Ireland, David 114 Ireland, Kevin 14, 591 Ireland, Peter 591 Irish Heart, An (David McKee Wright) 288 Irving, Campbell, “Our Spiritual Earth Mother” 324 Irving, John 353 “Is my gallant taken?” (Wearne) 70 Islands magazine 549, 552 “Isles of Greece, The” (Byron) 461 Issa 349 It Happened One Night (dir. Capra) 41 It’s a Wonderful Life (dir. Capra) 37, 41 Italian Gazette 252 Ivory, James, dir. Shakespeare-Wallah 39 Jaap & La Barbara, “Messa di Voce” 503 Jabès, Edmond 168 “Jacaranda” (Robinson) 59 Jacaranda Press 330, 331 Jacket (magazine) 368 Jackson, Glenda 37 Jackson, MacDonald 143 Jacobean poets 399

630 Jagardoo (Jack Davis) 305 Jagger, Mick 106 Jagose, Annamarie 583 Jamaica 534 James Cook University 531 James, Clive 241, 310, 376, 390, 404, 445, 455, 566 “Anniversary Serenade” 455 “The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered” 390 “In Town for the March” 566 “Will Those Responsible Come Forward?” 310 Jameson, Fredric 360 Jamieson Valley (NSW) 470 JanaDzek, Leoš, comp. Glagolithic Mass 40 Jandl, Ernst 502; “schtzngrmm” 504 “Japan” (Roberts) 124 Jaques, Judy 193 Jarrell, Randall 562 Jarry, Alfred 393 Jeffries, C.A. 254 Jeltje, “Pussycat Song” 172 Jenkins, John 348 “Jennifer Keyte’s Face” (Lauren Williams) 469 Jennings, Kate 172 “Jerusalem Bay” (Jennifer Rankin) 104 Jerusalem commune 553, 555–58 —See also: James K. Baxter Jerusalem Daybook (Baxter) 555 Jerusalem Sonnets (Baxter) 9, 26, 548, 549, 554, 555 Jet Lag (Billy Jones) 586, 587 “Jim and I” (Cross) 264 Jindyworobaks xvi, 54–62, 120, 304, 305, 310, 331, 332 “Jindyworobaksheesh” (McAuley) 309 Jingles that Jangle (Philp) 210 ‘John Plod’, “The Rabbits’ Refrain to the Poisoner’s Lament” 290 Johnson, B.S. 171 Johnson, Colin —See: Mudrooroo Johnson, Louis 122, 123, 278 Johnson, Samuel 144, 391, 392, 393, 398 Johnston, George 252

THE POET IC EYE



Johnston, Grahame 532 Jolley, Elizabeth 461 “Jonah’s Wife” (Hellyer) 395 Jones, Billy 103, 113, 584–87 “Love at First Sight” 586 Holocaust at Mary Smokes 586, 587 “I’ve Written Poems in the Aisles of Supermarkets” 586 Jet Lag 586, 587 Radiance 586 Radiation 584 “Rambling Riversoul Rapture” 586 “Snapshot” 586 Jones, David 548 Jones, Evan 358 Jones, Keith 322 Jones, Rae Desmond 48–54, 64, 65, 66, 67, 70, 119, 172, 242, 309 Blow Out 49 “The Deadshits” 172 The Mad Vibe 48 Orpheus With a Tuba 48 The Palace of Art 49 Shakti 48 Talking Blues 49 Jones, Rosemary 133 Jones, T. Harri 278 Jonson, Ben 74, 313, 398 Jordan, Richard D., & Peter Pierce, ed. The Poets Discovery: Nineteenth-Century Australia in Verse 236–39 Jorgenson, Justus 118 “Joseph Furphy, Realist” (Wallace–Crabbe) 532 Joseph, Michael (M.K.) xvii, 16, 123, 277, 474, 550, 583, 584 “Joss” (Salom) 316 Journal of New Zealand Literature 250 “Journey: The North Coast” (Gray) 492 Joyce, James 171, 180; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 180; Ulysses 338 Jump Cuts (Soldatow/Tsiolkas) 68 “June in Hurtle Square” (Goodfellow) 133 Jury, Charles 347 “Just Looking” (Hartin) 324 Juvenal 73, 83, 90, 538



Onomastic Index

k is for keeper a is for t.v. (Paech) 326 Kafka, Franz 223, 543 Kallman, Chester 508 Kane, Paul 538 Kangaroo (annual) 29 Kangaroo (magazine) 186 Kantarizis, Sylvia 113 Kardoorair Press 62, 278 Kassabova, Kapka 576, 582 Kavanagh, Patrick 57 Kazantsis, Judith 267 Kazantzakis, Nikos, Sequel to the Odyssey 459 Keats, John xiii, 11, 28, 61, 80, 88, 120, 228, 239, 294, 345, 355, 361, 364, 396, 399, 423, 437, 441, 450, 453, 454, 504, 559, 573, 574 “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” 450 Endymion 228 Hyperion poems xiii, 28 “Ode on a Grecian Urn” 441, 453 “Ode: To a Nightingale” 294 “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” 61 Kees, Weldon 33, 34, 454 “Place of Execution” 454 “Relating to Robinson” 33 Keesing, Nancy 45, 238, 331; Imminent Summer (45 Kefala, Antigone 242 Keith, Hamish 603 Kellaway, Frank 189, 224 Kellow, Henry Arthur 517 Kelly, Gwen 278 Kelly, Ned 242, 317, 546 Kelly, Walt 456 Kemp, Jan 123, 348, 550, 584 Kendall, Henry 4, 5, 81, 91, 162, 239, 328, 356 “Orara” 5 “Sydney International Exhibition” 4, 5 Keneally, Thomas 114, 247, 583; Bring Larks and Heroes 583 Kenny, Robert 119, 169, 464 Kent, Jean 370 Kenyon Review 370 Keogh, Jim 601, 603, 606 Kephallineou, Eugenia 476

631 Kern, Jerome 39 Kerouac, Jack 27, 94, 113, 202, 549 Kershaw, Alister 345 Kesey, Ken, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest 432 Kiley, Jim 324 “Killed in Action” (Power) 526 “Killer Instinct” (Lauren Williams) 471 “Kind of Drowning, A” (Lauren Williams) 472 “Kindness-to-animals Week” (McCuaig) 314 King, Governor Philip Gidley 378 King, Hazel 512 King, John 323 King, Michael 556 King, Olive ‘Jo’ 512, 515 King James Bible 565 King’s Dramatic Company 268 King’s School (Lagos) 287 Kings Cross (Sydney) 222 Kingsley, Charles 520 Kinnell, Galway 107, 359 Kinsella, John 335, 367, 369, 495, 567, 568 “Drowning in Wheat” 567 ed. The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry 568 Kipling, Rudyard 316, 426, 516, 527 Kirk, Geoffrey S. 129 Kirkpatrick, Peter 256, 314 Kirstein, Lincoln 597, 600 Kissing the Rod (ed. Greer et al.) 238 Kiwi Hotel (Auckland) 547, 550, 551, 552, 584, 596 “Kiwi Riposte, The” (Roberts) 311 Klee, Paul 344 “Kleenex” (Shapiro) 452 Knowles, Lee 203, 204 Knowles, Marion Miller 516, 524, 528 “Father Finn (Sedd-Ed-Bahr)” 528 “O Wondrous Love” 528 “A Tribute to the Memory of Campbell Peter” 524 Knox Church 284 “Koan” (Jennifer Rankin) 242 Koch, Christopher 577 Koch, Kenneth 32, 35, 376, 395, 459, 564, 573 Komninos —See under: Zervos

632 Kooning, Willem de 33 Korean War 334 Kossatz, Les 189 Krafft–Ebing, Richard von 347 Kramer, Leonie 4, 238 Kraus, Lili 153 Kristeva, Julia 127, 360 Kroll, Jeri 133 Kuala Lumpur 30 Kurosawa, Akira 159 L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry 369, 370, 500

La Barbara, Joan 503 La Mama Poetica (ed. Mal Morgan) 355 La Mama Theatre 68, 93, 105, 224, 353, 353, 355, 465 La Rochefoucauld, François, duc de 457 Lach–Newinsky, Peter 569–72 “A(way with Words” 571 “Dark Tracks” 571 Post-Man Letters & Other Poems 569–72 “Sun” 570 “Personae” 571 Ladd, Mike 140 “Ladder, The” (Manhire) 561 “Lady Lust Revisiting the Great Rock & Roll Nostalgia” (Olds) 25 Lady Moss Revived (Olds) 24, 28 Laing, Sarah 583 Laird, J.T. 69, 512, 513, 514; ed. Other Banners: An Anthology of Australian Literature of the First World War 69, 512 “Lamb, The” (Blake) 450 “Lament for Barney Flanagan” (Baxter) 408, 409, 416 “Lament on a Pedal-point” (McCuaig) 313 “Lament on the Death of Seneca” (Lehmann) 86 Lanceley, Colin 240 “Land, The” (Mudrooroo) 303 Landfall (journal) 549 Landfall Country (ed. Brasch) 169 “Landfall in Unknown Seas” (Curnow) 335, 338 Landsdown, Andrew 305 Lange, Dagmar 510 Langford, Gary 348

THE POET IC EYE

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Langford, Martin 445, 572 Langley, Eve xvi, 582 Language of the Sand, The (Robinson) 45 Lansbury, Coral 238 Lansdown, Andrew 203, 358 Larkin, Philip 32, 106, 214, 339, 360, 361, 390, 404, 409, 440, 498 “Annus Mirabilis” 361 “The Whitsun Weddings” 32, 409 Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis (Foscolo) 477 “Last Poem in Australia” (Stead) 11 “Late Afternoon Epilogue” (Benson) 20 “Later Texts” (Harwood) 342 Launceston 82, 106, 115, 116, 117 Law At Heart’s Desire, The (Adamson) 95, 100 Lawrence, Anthony, “The Drive” 566 Lawrence, D.H. 210, 243, 376, 470, 531; The Rainbow 338; “Snake” 243 Laws, John 212 Lawson, Elizabeth 282, 283 Lawson, Henry 81, 95, 133, 162, 164, 205, 226, 247, 248, 261, 272, 298, 302, 317, 323, 356, 377, 388, 457, 512; “Faces in the Street” 164 Lawson, Louisa 207, 252, 516 Lea, Bronwyn, “Girl’s Night on Long Island” 566, 567 Lea, Shelton 142, 168, 170, 173–74, 201, 214–33, 465 “Australia” 221 Chockablock With Dawn 220, 226, 231 Corners in Cans 225 “A Drunk” 231 “for joel” 174 “i’m glad you’re not an actress” 174 “nineteen sixty four” 216, 223 “on a conspicuous absence” 174 “palatine madonna” 226 The Paradise Poems 220, 229 “picnic day at the drouin races” 226 “poem on a peach melba hat” 173, 226 “poem to a hospital balcony” 227 Poems from a Peach Melba Hat 173, 216, 220, 223 “tonight” 226 (with Robert Harris) Poets on Record 220 Lear, Edward 185, 212



Onomastic Index

“Leave Taking, The” (Cross) 268 Leavis, F.R. Lee, John A. xvi, 296 Lee, Joyce 461 Leek, Robert 552 Leeming, Owen 548 Leggott, Michele 235, 576, 581 Lehmann, Geoffrey 83–90. 103, 121, 240–41, 242, 308, 394 “Advice to Young Poets” 88 “Aqueducts” 86 “Aqueducts II” 86 “Calvus” 89 “Dreams” 88, 89 “A Drunken Diatribe ” 88 “Eating with Friends” 90 “Epithalamium” 89 “For My Goddess Given by an Unknown Admirer” 89 “For Verritus, a Jockey” 90 “The Gracchiad” 85 “The Grand Tour of Greece” 84, 85 “Imagined Scenes from the Second Half of My Life” 84 “Lament on the Death of Seneca” 86 “Mother” 88 “My Maenads” 88 “My Singing Career” 85 Nero’s Poems 83–90 “The Night of the Wedding” 87 “Octavia” 89 “On the Beat” 87 “Proem” 89 “Rufus” 89 “A Vision of the Future Addressed to Emperors of the Future” 88 ed. Comic Australian Verse 240, 308 ed. The Flight of the Emu: Contemporary Light Verse 240–41, 308 Lehrer, Tom, “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park” 387; “The Vatican Rag” 387 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 571 “Leichhardt in Theatre” (Webb) 330 Leichhardt, Ludwig 338 Leichhardt Superior Public School 262

633 Leinster Arms Hotel (Collingwood, Melbourne) 173, 221 Leishman, J.B. 391 “Lemonade Kid and His Brothers, The” (Goodfellow) 350 Lennon, John 27 Leonard, John 365–67, 407, 568 ed. Anthology of Contemporary Australian Poetry 365 ed. New Music: An Anthology of Contemporary Australian Poetry 365–67 ed. The Puncher and Wattmann Anthology of Australian Poetry 1986–2008 568 “Leopard Skin” (Stewart) 568 LeRoy, Mervyn, dir. Gold Diggers of 1933 41 “Letter Endings” (Peter Murphy) 171 “Letter from Iceland” (Auden) 375 “Letter to Harry Leeds” (Brunton) 15 Letters from Iceland (Auden) 543 Leunig, Michael 212, 349, 354 Levertov, Denise 34 Leves, Kerry 105 Levin, Elius 62 Lévi–Strauss, Claude 129 Lew, Emma 367 Lewis, Cassie 366, 370 Lewis, Jeannie 113 Lichtenberg, George Christoph 390 “Lid Slides Back, The” (Manhire) 558, 559 “Life of Ideas, The” (Wallace–Crabbe) 539 Life Studies (Lowell) 448 Lifted (Manhire) 558, 560, 561 Lilburn, Douglas 154 Lilley, Kate 114, 370 Lilley, Norman 252 Lilt of Life, The (Cross) 251, 528 Lindsay, Jack 72, 248, 256, 257, 276, 312, 363, 516; & Norman 253 Lindsay, Joan 457 Lindsay, Norman 120, 248, 256, 257, 276, 320, 331, 334; & Jack 253 Lindsay, Ray 256, 257, 276 Lindsay, Vachel 38, 107; “The Congo” 38 Lines of Fire: Women Writers of World War One (ed. Margaret R. Higgonet) 512, 513, 515

634 “Lines to a Lady” (Harris) 347 Lismore (N S W ) 48 Literature Board 110, 112, 193, 220, 241 Literature Board of the Australia Council 45 “Little Buttercup’s Picture Book” (Harwood) 340 “Little Elegy” (Manhire) 561 Little Richard 27 Living Daylights (magazine) 121 Living Flame Gaslight Dance Company 65 Livings, Earl 459 Llewellyn, Kate 339, 566 “Local” (Lauren Williams) 467 Locke, John, Second Treatise of Government 490 Logue, Christopher 225 London 14, 35, 248, 286 London, Jack 27 Lone Hand (journal) 121, 261, 270, 271, 272, 273, 275, 516 Loney, Alan 348, 548 Long, Don 348 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth 213, 338; Hiawatha (338 Lonie, Alan 582 Loose Federation (Michael Sharkey & Julian Croft) 278 “Loosening Up Poem” (Manhire) 560 Lord, Mary 327 “Los Angeles Affirmation, The” (Roberts) 128 Lost Prima Donna, The (David McKee Wright) 300 Lothian, Rev. John 298 Louis, Yve 204 “Love at First Sight” (Billy Jones) 586 Love is a Dog from Hell (Bukowski) 142 “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The” (Eliot) 151, 418 “Love’s Metaphysic” (Harris) 346 Lovell, Ernest J., Jr. 475 Low, Jackson Mac 505 Lowell, Amy 434 Lowell, Robert 98, 107, 198, 448, 449 “Beyond the Alps” 448 Life Studies 448 Lower, Lennie 457

THE POET IC EYE



Lucretius, De Rerum Natura 160, 402, 475 Lunch Counter Lunch (Murray) 192 Lyre-Bird books 45, 109, 112 Lysenko, Myron 348, 465, 466 Lyttelton Times 291 Lytton, Lord 520 Macartney, Frederick T. 55 MacDonald, Alexander 314 MacDonald, George James 236; “On a Movement of Beethoven” 239 MacDonald, Simon 580 MacFarlane, Brian 544 MacFarquhar, Larissa 447, 449 Mack, Amy 252, 262, 263 Mack, Louise 252, 263, 527 Mackay, Jessie 291 Mackellar, Dorothea 512, 519 MacKenzie, John 292, 293 Mackenzie, Kenneth (Seaforth) 224 Mackenzie, Scobie 292, 293 MacKinnon, Eleanor, “On Active Service” 527 MacLeish, Archibald 197 MacNeice, Louis 197, 419; “Bagpipe Music” 419 Mad Vibe, The (Rae Desmond Jones) 48 Madame Midas (Hume) 269 “Madrigals” (McCuaig) 314 Madsen, Garth 445 Magritte, René 101 Maiden, Jennifer 113, 116, 169, 242, 358, 391, 566 “Costume Jewellery” 566 “The Mother-in-Law of the Marquis de Sade” 391 The Problem of Evil 113 Maidment, W.M. (Bill) 277, 532 Mail (Sydney) 270 Makar Press 48 Make Love in All the Rooms (Morrissey) 16 Malady (Manhire) 558, 560 Malamud, Bernard 27 Malaya 334 Malevich, Kazimir 103 “Mall Christmas, The” (McCormick) 19 Mallarkey, Ethel 263



Onomastic Index

Mallarmé, Stéphane 76, 81, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 96, 97, 98, 100, 101, 102, 103, 106, 159, 312, 429, 432, 492, 507; “Un Coup de Dès” 432 Malouf, David 199, 203, 508, 550, 577 “Man from Ironbark, The” (Paterson) 377 “Man from Snowy River, The” (Paterson) 328, 330 “Man, The” (Perceval) 345 “Manapouri” (David McKee Wright) 289 Mander, Jane 153, 199 Manfred (Byron) 476, 478, 479, 481, 483, 485, 490 “Mangoes” (Tipping) 310 Manhire, Bill xiii, 16, 168, 549, 558–63, 581 “Across the Water” 560 “After Class” 562 “Captain Scott” 561, 562 “The Carpe Diem Poem” 562 “The Cave” 151, 560 “Crime Scene” (560 “Declining the Naked Horse” 560 Doubtful Sounds 558, 562 “Entering America” 560 “Frolic” 561 Good Looks 560 “Hirohito” 560 “An Inspector Calls” 558 “The Ladder” 561 “The Lid Slides Back” 558, 559 Lifted 558, 560, 561 “Little Elegy” 561 “Loosening Up Poem” 560 Malady 558, 560 “A Married Man’s Story” 561 The New Land 558 “1950s” 560, 561 “Opoutere” (558 “Pacific Raft” 559 “Poem beginning with a Line by Ralph Hotere” 562 “Rarotonga Sunset” 559 “A Round” 561 “The Ruin” 562 “Saying Goodbye to My Mother” 562 “The School” 507, 560 “Song with a Chorus” 561 “Still Life with Wind in the Trees” 558

635 “The Poetry File: Lines” 562 “The Things I Did” 562 “Threnody; For President Johnson on the shores of America” 559 “Two Literals” 558 The Victims of Lightning 558, 559, 560, 561, 562 “The Victims of Lightning” 561 “Visiting Europe” 561 “Warehouse Curtains” 560 “Wingatui” 560 “The Workshop” 562 “Yadasi Clips” 561 Manifold, John 71–72, 240, 329, 356, 357, 461, 566 “The Bunyip and the Whistling Kettle” 71 “Garcia Lorca Murdered in Granada” (356 “Musicians” (71 On My Selection: Poems 71 “On the Boundary” (72 “The Red Rosary” 73 “What Bill Lewis Told His Grandson” (72 “Maniototo” (David McKee Wright) 294 Mann, Cecil 331 Mann, Chris 170, 171, 172, 505; “scratch, scratch” 171 Mann, Leonard 320 Mansell, Chris 48, 310, 392, 459; “Definition Poem: Pissed as a Parrot” 310, 392 Mansfield Park (Austen) 454 Mansfield, Katherine 12, 143, 144, 155, 156, 199, 247, 263, 576, 581 ǒori culture 154, 155, 158, 191, 194, 197, 211, 233, 234, 236, 249, 300, 324, 555, 556, 557, 558, 605 —See also: Jerusalem commune ǒori Wars 338 ǒoritanga 10, 583 “Maps” (Salom) 316 “Marble surfaces” (Joanne Burns) 171 Marchand, Leslie 481, 483 Margaret Barr Dancers 113 Margins: A West Coast Selection 1829–1988 (ed. William Grono) 208–10 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 429, 502 Markmann, Sigrid 510 Markov, Vladimir 159

636 Marlowe, Christopher 84, 224, 510; Edward II 84 Marquis, Don 173 “Married Man’s Story, A” (Manhire) 561 Marriner, Craig 581, 582 Marsden, Samuel 145 Marshall, Billy (Marshall–Stoneking) 64, 170 Marshall, Charles 324 Marshall–Hall. Sir Edward 40 Marten Bequest 114 Martial 9, 73, 74, 77, 83, 89, 157, 159, 241 Martin, Bernie 277 Martin, Clarrie 134 Martin, Philip 240 Martin, Tim 73 Martineau, Harriet 295 Martyr, Grace Ethel, “Afterwards” 515 Marvell, Andrew 12, 126, 510 Marvin, Lee 32 Marx, Karl 143, 147 Mas, Joan 46, 49, 51, 52, 105 Masefield, John 333, 527 Maskarade (comp. Neilsen) 40 Mason, R.A.K. 12, 147, 150, 197 Massachusetts 592 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 592 Massey, William Ferguson 301 Masson, Sophie 326 “Masters of War” (Dylan) 94 Masters, Edgar Lee 34, 423; Spoon River Anthology 34 Mateer, John 445 “Mater Triumphans” (McAuliffe) 519 Mathews, Henry 445 Matilda (magazine) 212 Matsys, Quentin 603 Matthews, Harry 263 Matthews, Lottie 263 Maugham, William Somerset 247 Maurice, Furnley, “Melbourne Odes” 541 Mauthner, Fritz 571 “Max Factor Pink” (Roberts) 126 Mayakovsky in Bondi (Soldatow) 68 Mayakovsky, Vladimir 68, 69, 432 Mazuma (Philp) 211 McAloon, William 600

THE POET IC EYE



McAlpine, Rachel 235 McAuley, James 44, 46, 60, 79, 169, 309, 311, 319, 321, 331, 332, 361, 375, 531, 532, 566 “Because” 566 Captain Quiros 60, 332 “The Convict and the Lady” 310 “Jindyworobaksheesh” 309 —See also: Ern Malley hoax McAuley, Shane 204 McAuliffe, Nora 516, 517, 519, 520; “Mater Triumphans” 519 McCahon, Colin 9, 576, 582, 603 McCarthy, Philip 166 McCay, Adam 254 McClure, Michael 107 McCooey, David 535, 540, 541, 543 McCormick, Gary 15–20, 26, 28, 549 “Declining Passions of Autumn” 18 “In Certain Seasons” 18 “The Mall Christmas” 19 Naked and Nameless 16–20 “Naked and Nameless” 18 “Remember February” 18 “The Rope” 18 “There are Two Kinds of Poem” 16 “What of the Day’s Possible Alternatives” 17 (& Jon Benson) Gypsies 15, 16, 18, 19, 20 McCrae, Dorothy Frances 519, 520; “The Empire’s Call” 520; “The Shawl” 520 McCrae, Hugh 285, 312, 313, 331, 335, 461 McCrae, Kerry, The Amazing Scaffold 113 McCuaig, Ronald 312–15, 334, 335, 461, 566 “L’Après-midi d’une Fille aux Cheveux de Lin'” 313 “Aria” 315 “Au Tombeau de mon Père” 313 “The Ballad of Bloodthirsty Bessie” 314 “Berçeuse de Newcastle” 313 “Country Dance, after Corelli and Scarlatti” 314 “The Daily Round” 314 “Kindness-to-animals Week” 314 “Lament on a Pedal-point” 313 “Madrigals” 314 “The Passionate Clerk to His Love” 314



Onomastic Index

“Schubertian Aria” 313 “Vaudeville” 313 McCulloch, Ann 422 McCulloch, Ernest (aka O.C. Cabot) 254, 266 McDonald, Roger 512 McDonald, Simon 103, 109, 110, 118 McDougall, Sue 171 McDowell, Colin 36 McEldowney, Denis 155 McFadyen, Ella, “Stand By Your Men!” 524 McFarlane, Archie 288 McGann, Jerome J. 482, 488 McGonagall, William 33, 324, 381 “Beautiful City of Perth” 381 “The Burial of the Reverend Gilfillan” 381 “The Burning of the People’s Variety Theatre, Aberdeen” 381 “The Famous Tay Whale” 381 “The Funeral of the Late Ex-Provost Rough, Dundee” 381 “The Horrors of Majuba” 381 “The Inauguration of the Hill of Balgay” 381 “The Miraculous Escape of Robert Allan, the Fireman, The” 381 “The Tay Bridge Disaster” 381 McGough, Roger 37 McGuiness, P.P. 361 McIntosh, Hugh D. 269 McKee, Rebecca 284, 286 McKee, Rev. David 284, 286, 298 McKee, Rev. Dr William 286, 287, 288 McKee, Robert J. 298, 299 McKee, Sarah Jane 284 McKee, William 298 McKenzie, Geraldine 367, 429, 430 McKuen, Rod 360 McLean, Ferma, The Old Inn and Other Poems 105 McLean, Rae 556 McNamara, Robert 571 McQueen, Harvey, & Ian Wedde, ed. Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse 233 McQueen, Humphrey 161 McRae, Kerry 105 McSkimming, Robert 288

637 “Me and Eddy” (Goodfellow) 350, 351 Meale, Richard, comp. Voss 508 Meanjin (journal) 119, 121, 464 “Measure” (Gilmore) 525 Melbourne xvi, 30, 31, 32, 36, 37, 38, 40, 54, 62, 82, 91, 93, 105, 107, 121, 122, 138, 159, 160, 166, 167–72, 174, 186, 189, 192, 193, 194, 196, 198, 208, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 230, 242, 249, 255, 268, 270, 315, 324, 325, 332, 353, 355, 379, 399, 457, 464, 465, 466, 467, 468, 497, 530, 534, 540, 541, 580 “Melbourne” (Wallace–Crabbe) 534 “Melbourne in 1963” (Wallace–Crabbe) 535, 541 “Melbourne Odes” (Maurice) 541 Melbourne or the Bush: Essays in Australian Literature and Society (Wallace–Crabbe) 535, 537, 545 Melbourne University 68, 220, 520 Melbourne University Press 207, 237 Memoirs of a Velvet Urinal (Dransfield) 362 “Memories of a Town Drunk” (Olds) 27 Menander 506 Mencius 435 Mensonge (Bradbury) 360 Menton 12 Menzies, Harold 30 Menzies, Robert 334 Menzies, Rosemary 236 Mercury Theatre 551 Meredith, George 32 Merri Creek or Nero (magazine) 168 Merry-Go-Round in the Sea, The (Stow) 7 “Messa di Voce” (Jaap & La Barbara) 503 Messhall Players 193 “Metamorphosis, The” (Robinson) 57, 60 Metaphysical Poets 87, 224, 398 Mexico 435 Michel, Christine 278 Michio Ochi 3 “Midsummer” (Walcott) 409 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (Shakespeare) 448 “Midwinter” (Harwood) 341 “Midwinter Rainbow” (Harwood) 343 “Mignonette” (David McKee Wright) 291 Miles Franklin Award 115 Milhaud, Darius 12

638 Millar, Debra 579 Miller, Arthur, Death of a Salesman 29 Miller, Duncan 105 Miller, Glenn 40 Miller, Henry 200 Miller, Maxwell 236 Miller, Rob, “The True Australian” 324 Millett, Ivan 598, 599 Milne, A.A. 213 Milton, John 84, 160, 185, 285, 335, 345, 404, 406, 423, 432–34, 477, 489, 504, 510, 565; Paradise Lost 160, 285, 432–34, 477, 489 “Minstrels” (Robinson) 59 Minter, Peter 370 “Miraculous Escape of Robert Allan, the Fireman, The” (McGonagall) 381 Missing Forms (ed. ஡ O) 170 Mitchell Library 210 Mitchell, Adrian 426, 427, 560; “The Oxford Hysteria of English Poetry” 426, 560 Mitchell, David 125, 166, 236, 348, 349, 546–53, 584 The Orange Grove 549, 551 “Penelope / Bright & Bare” 125 Pipe Dreams in Ponsonby 125, 547, 548, 551 Steal Away Boy 547 Mitchell, Joni 39 “Mithridatum of Despair” (Harris) 347 Mitra, Saibal 570 Mobile Poetry Workshop 139, 140, 141 “Modern Australian Verse” (Stewart) 332 Modern Australian Verse (ed. Stewart) 331, 332 Modern Jazz Quartet 318 “Modern Times” (Wallace–Crabbe) 538, 540, 542, 543 Modernist, The (journal) 270 Modigliani, Amedeo 161 Moir, John Kinmont 258 Moisa, Chris 553 Mok (magazine) 106, 121, 122, 464 Moll, Ernest G. 512 “Mona Lisa tea towel, The” (Roberts) 126 Monash University 35, 40, 42 Monk, Thelonious 222, 343 Monro, Hector, “Fundamentalist” 310

THE POET IC EYE



Montag, Tom 28 Montaigne, Michel de 533 Montesquieu, The Persian Letters 403 Monteverdi, Claudio 34 Montgomery, John 220, 222, 223 “Montsalvat” (Lauren Williams) 468 Montsalvat Poetry Festival 82, 103, 118, 353, 465, 585 “Moonlight Sonata” (Beethoven) 354 Moonlite (Foster) 114 Moore, Andrew 210 Moore, Marianne 359, 414–18, 495; “Poetry” 414– 18 Moore, Thomas 33 Moore, Tom Inglis 238 Moorhouse, Frank 77, 80, 101, 166, 168 More Than Enough (Sargeson) xv, xvi Morgan, Di 355 Morgan, Mal 224, 352–56, 465 Beautiful Veins 355 “5 Poems from the Royal Hotel, Mornington” 355 “Ophelia in Safeway” 355 Out of the Fast Lane 352–55 ed. La Mama Poetica 355 Morgenstern, Christian 432 Morrieson, Ronald Hugh 56; Came a Hot Friday 583; The Scarecrow 583 Morris, Jan 322 Morris, Paula 582 Morris, William, Sigurd and Volsung 338 Morrison, Bruce, dir. The Road to Jerusalem (1998) 555 Morrissey, Michael 16, 549, 550, 580, 584; Make Love in All the Rooms 16 Morton, Frank 312 “Mosman Nocturne” (Scanlon) 280 Mossop, Rex 31 “Mother” (Lehmann) 88 “Mother-in-Law of the Marquis de Sade, The” (Maiden) 391 Motherwell, Phil 217 Motion, Andrew 360 Moulton, John 62, 64, 65, 66 “Mound poems” (Jennifer Rankin) 243

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Onomastic Index

“Mousepoem” (Harry) 566 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 393, 508, 586 “Mr Alfred Austin” (Seaman) 394 Mr Deeds Goes to Town (dir. Capra) 41 “Mrs Noah Speaks” (Zwicky) 395 Mt Eden (Auckland) 593, 595, 598 Mt Ida 293 “Mud Hut” (Jennifer Rankin) 243 Mudie, Ian 56, 59 Mudrooroo 302–303, 305 “Calcutta Dreaming” 303 “Cat Love” 303 “City Suburban Lines” 303 Dalwurra: The Black Bittern 302 “Diaspora” 303 Dr Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World 302 The Garden of Gethsemane: Poems from the Lost Decade 302–303 “Granny Mary Came Our Way” 303 “Happy Birthday, Australia, 1988” 302 “I Am” 303 “The Land” 303 “The NAC Song” 303 The Song Cycle of Jacky 302, 303 “Stradbroke Island Dreamings 1989” 302 “Walls” 303 “What Happened to me and Bobby?” 303 Wildcat Falling 302 Muecke, Doug 373 Muldoon, Paul 57 Mulini Press 236 Munro, Rachel 64 Murdoch, Nina 263, 516, 520, 523; “Socks” 523 Murphy, Edwin Greenslade 209 Murphy, Peter 170, 171; “Letter Endings” 171 Murray, Les xiii, 6, 69, 70, 75, 79, 83, 103, 120, 160, 166, 168, 179, 185, 192, 205, 213, 233, 240, 241, 242, 277, 278, 305, 309, 328, 334, 339, 358, 361, 372, 376, 382, 445, 495, 509, 512, 542, 545, 578, 581 The Boys Who Stole the Funeral 160, 328, 376 “Conscious and Verbal” 376 “Downhill on Borrowed Skis” 545 “The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever” 545 Fredy Neptune 376

639 Lunch Counter Lunch 192 “A New England Farm” 69 “The Rollover” 578 Subhuman Redneck Poems 578 “Vindaloo in Merthyr Tydfil” 545 “Visiting Anzac in the Year of Metrication” 70 ed. The Best Australian Poems 2005 445 ed. Oxford Anthology of Australian Verse 309 Murray, Stephen, The Dragon Principle 113 Murray–Smith, Stephen, ed. An Overland Muster 169 Murwillumbah High School 335 Musgrove, Sidney 143, 144 “Mushrooms” (Plath) 409 Music of Division, The (Wallace–Crabbe) 533, 534 “Musicians” (Manifold) 71 Musicopoematographoscope (Brennan) 91 Mussing, Faith —See: Faith Bandler “My Last Duchess” (Browning) 83, 418 “My Maenads” (Lehmann) 88 “My own Araminta, say ‘No!’” (W.M. Praed) “My Singing Career” (Lehmann) 85 “NAC Song, The” (Mudrooroo) 303 Nagle, Shane 170 Nahhas, Raghid, tr. Whispers from the Faraway South 356–59 “Nails” (Cross) 264 Naisby, Tom 278 Naked and Nameless (McCormick) 16–20 “Naked and Nameless” (McCormick) 18 Name of the Rose, The (Eco) 456 Napoleon Bonaparte 478 Narogin, Mudrooroo 203, 302 —See also: Mudrooroo Nash, Margot 68 Nash, Ogden, “Reflections on Ice-Breaking” 401 Nathalia (Victoria) 264 National Leader 522 National Library of Australia 345, 576 “Nationality” (Gilmore) 206, 566 Ned Kelly (Stewart) 333

640 Neilsen, Carl, comp. Helios overture 40; Maskarade 40; Saul and David 40 Neilson, John Shaw 335, 356, 512 Neilsen, Philip 315 “Nell” (David McKee Wright) 295 Nelson (N Z ) 299, 300, 301 Nelson, T.G.A. 396 Nelson, Tim 396, 403 Nemerov, Howard 403, 416 Neoclassicism 406, 507 “Nerida and Birwan” (Robinson) 58 Nero’s Poems (Lehmann) 83–90 Neruda, Pablo 117, 118, 151, 445, 454; The Book of Questions 445, 454 Neville, Richard 361 “New Age Class Listings, The” (Roberts) 129 New American Poetry (ed. Donald Hall) 107, 464 New Australian Poetry, The (ed. Tranter) xiv, 29, 103, 119, 122, 348, 464 New Complexity, the 508, 509 New England (N S W ) 494, 591 “New England Farm, A” (Murray) 69 New Land, The (Manhire) 558 New Music: An Anthology of Contemporary Australian Poetry (ed. Leonard) 365–67 New Poetry (magazine) xiv, 48, 52, 53, 54, 76, 92, 93, 95, 103, 107, 109, 112, 114, 115, 116, 121, 212, 464 New Poetry, The (ed. Alvarez) 107 New Romanticism xiv New South Wales 177, 183, 204, 236, 247, 255, 264, 370, 374, 383, 465, 525, 585 New South Wales Art Gallery bookshop 576 New South Wales Gallery 45 New South Wales University 105 New Zealand xiv, xv, xvi, xviii, 8–28, 122–24, 129, 143–56, 158, 161, 165–69, 177, 183, 188–89, 190– 92, 194, 200–203, 210, 211, 233–47, 248, 249, 250, 253, 283–301, 304, 311, 331, 333, 335, 337, 338, 349, 428, 546–63, 574, 575–84, 591–607 New Zealand Chimes (David McKee Wright) 289 New Zealand Hotel (Sydney) 220 New Zealand Listener 188, 199, 601 New Zealand Mail 300 Newcastle (N S W ) 82, 278, 388 Newcastle Poetry Prize 374, 445

THE POET IC EYE

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Newcastle University 220, 221, 278 News from Judaea (Dawe) 379 “News from Judaea” (Dawe) 379 Newton (Auckland) 595 Newton, John 554, 555, 556, 558 Newtown Congregational Church 299 Newtown Theatre (Sydney) 474 “Next Door” (Fullerton) 528 “next to of course god america i” (cummings) 460 Ngati Hau (Maori iwi) 554, 555, 557, 558 Nicaragua 118, 467 Nicholas, John Liddiard 145 Nicol, Gray 552 Nietzsche, Friedrich 6, 269, 403, 571 “Night of the Wedding, The” (Lehmann) 87 Night Preaching (Adamson) 95 “Night Train” (Lauren Williams) 471 Nightmarkets, The (Wearne) 28, 29, 32, 33 Nilsson, Leslie 274 “1950s” (Manhire) 560, 561 “nineteen sixty four” (Lea) 216, 223 925 (magazine) 166, 465 Nissen, Rosemary 173 “No More Boomerang” (Oodgeroo) 376 “No” (Hood) 33 “Nocturnal Sketch, A” (Hood) 33 Nolan, Sidney 317, 546 Norcliffe, James 500 Norman, Lilith 261 Norman, Philip 388 “North Coast Town” (Gray) 492 North Otago Times 300 “North/South/ & After That” (Duggan) 169 Northern Daily Leader 324 Northern Territory 281 Northern Territory University 366 Northland (N Z ) 557 Norton, Rosaleen 219, 220 “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” (Stevens) 397 “Notes upon English Verse” (Poe) 507 Novak, Olga, “Ode to my sisters” 172 “Now we are Seven” (Wordsworth) 309 Number One Australian General Hospital 517 Nunnerley, David 570



Onomastic Index

“O Wondrous Love” (Knowles) 528 O’Brien, Gregory 235 O’Brien, John 131, 405; Around the Boree Log 131, 132, 133 O’Connor, Mark 93, 115, 119, 125, 372 O’Donohue, Barry, ed. Place and Perspective: Contemporary Queensland Poetry 205 O’Dowd, Bernard 6, 207, 516, 541 O’Grady, John 324 O’Hara, Frank 107, 159, 364, 409, 496, 497; “The Day Lady Died” 409 O’Heare, Tric 445 O’Hearn, Dinny 232 O’Sullivan, Vincent 16, 123, 235, 374, 375, 387, 581 Oakley, Barry 276 Oamaru (N Z ) 299, 300, 561 Oamaru Mail 300 Oatley (N S W ) 275 “Objects, Odours” (Wallace–Crabbe) 536, 537 O'Connor, Mark 358 “Octavia” (Lehmann) 89 “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (Keats) 441, 453 “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington” (Tennyson) 32 “Ode: To a Nightingale” (Keats) 294 Ode to Auckland (Baxter) 19 “Ode to my sisters” (Novak) 172 Odyssey (Homer) 97, 184 Off the Record (ed. ஡ O) 169, 170, 171, 172, 581 Offenbach, Jacques 354 Ogilvie, Will 323 Old Bush Songs, The (Paterson) 328 Old Bush Songs and Rhymes of Colonial Times (ed. Stewart & Keesing) 331 “Old Flame Extinguisher” (Lauren Williams) 471 Old Inn and Other Poems, The (McLean) 105 Olds, Peter 15, 16, 24–28, 190, 201, 224, 348, 549 Doctor’s Rock 24, 25, 26, 27 “A 50s Schoolboy Remembers” 25 “4 Notes: Jim Baxter One Year Gone” 26 4 V8 Poems 24 Freeway 24, 25 “Herne Bay revisited” 25 “In Auckland” 24

641 “Lady Lust Revisiting the Great Rock & Roll Nostalgia” 25 Lady Moss Revived 24, 28 “Memories of a Town Drunk” 27 “On Probation” 24 The Snow & the Glass Window 24, 28 “The Snow & the Glass Window” 28 “A Teenage Problem” 25 “To the End of the White Lady Piecart & Hamburger Joint” 26 “V8 Poem for Chris Howard” 25 V8 Poems 28 Oliver, Mary 429 Oliver, Stephen 580 Oliver, W.H. 554, 555 Olson, Charles 107, 125, 159, 168, 359 “on a conspicuous absence” (Lea) 174 “On a Movement of Beethoven” (MacDonald) 239 “On Active Service” (MacKinnon) 527 “On being ditched by a bastard” (Lauren Williams) 471 “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” (Keats) 61 “On Flight” (Ryan) 441 On My Selection: Poems (Manifold) 71 “On Performance Poetry” (Lauren Williams) 466 “On Poetry” (Harwood) 341 “On Probation” (Olds) 24 “On Seeing the Film Tom Jones” (Wearne) 36 “On the Beat” (Lehmann) 87 “On the Boundary” (Manifold) 72 “On the Death of Mrs Adele Koh” (Harris) 346 On the Fault Line (Haley) 15 “On Uncertainty” (Harwood) 343, 344 “Once Again” (David McKee Wright) 296, 297 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Kesey) 432 Only Sensible News, The (magazine) 68 Oodgeroo Noonuccal (Kath Walker) 158, 358, 376 “No More Boomerang” 376 We Are Going 376 Ophel, Phil 255 “Ophelia in Safeway” (Morgan) 355 “Opoutere” (Manhire) 558

642 Orange Grove, The (Mitchell) 549, 551 Orange Tree: South Australian Poetry to the Present Day, The (ed. K.F. Pearson & Christine Churches) 204 “Orara” (Kendall) 5 Origins Dance Theatre 156 Orlando Furioso (Ariosto) 459, 544 Orpheus With a Tuba (Rae Desmond Jones) 48 Osborn, Beatrice 249, 257, 275 Osborne, Bruce 240 Otago (N Z ) 290 Otago University 16, 27, 298, 550, 553 Otago Witness 284, 289, 293, 295, 298 Otatau (N Z ) 289 Othello (Shakespeare) 83 Other Banners: An Anthology of Australian Literature of the First World War (ed. Laird) 69, 512 Other Meaning, The (Vivian Smith) 45 “Other People” (Wallace–Crabbe) 566 Our Glass (magazine) 464 “Our Jim” (Sunyasee) 522 “Our Spiritual Earth Mother” (Campbell Irving) 324 Out Here (Wearne) 29 Out of the Fast Lane (Morgan) 352–55 “Out of the Shadows” (Goodfellow) 350, 351 Outlaw (magazine) 230 “Outpost, The” (Forrest) 527 Outrigger (magazine) 549 Ouyang Yu 367, 463, 492; “Still Lake” 492 Ovanoff, Mina Mikhailovna 267 Overland (journal) 117, 192, 464 Overland Muster, An (ed. Murray–Smith) 169 Ovid 13, 90, 399, 495 Owen, Wilfred 69 Oxford Anthology of Australian Verse (ed. Murray) 309 Oxford Book of Australian Light Verse (ed. Brissenden & Grundy) 308–11 Oxford Book of Australian Verse 348 Oxford Companion to Australian Literature 358 “Oxford Hysteria of English Poetry, The” (Adrian Mitchell) 426, 560 Oxford Literary Guide to Australia 239 Oxford University Press 155

THE POET IC EYE

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Pacific Book of Bush Ballads, The (ed. Stewart) 331 Pacific Islanders 552 “Pacific Raft” (Manhire) 559 Package Deal (magazine) 121 Paddington (Sydney) 240, 309 Padel, Ruth 499, 563, 564; ed. 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem 563 Paech, Neil 140; k is for keeper a is for t.v. 326 Page, Geoff 69–71, 241, 242, 310, 512, 563–69 ed. 80 Great Poems from Chaucer to Now 563 ed. Shadows from Wire 69–71 ed. Sixty Classic Australian Poems 563–69 Paine, Claude 287 Paisio, Franco 112 Palace of Art, The (Jones) 49 Palace Theatre (Sydney) 263 “palatine madonna” (Lea) 226 Palmer, Nettie 251, 252, 257, 258, 512 “Papyrus” (Pound) 543 Paradise Lost (Milton) 160, 285, 432–34, 477, 489 Paradise Poems, The (Lea) 220, 229 “Paradox” (Wickham) 501 Paraguay 206 Parihaka (N Z ) 557 Park, Ruth 247, 582, 583 Parker, Dorothy 39, 390; “Resumé” 395 Parkville 186 Parsons, Roger & Helen Parsons 577 “Passing Vesuvius” (David McKee Wright) 297 “Passionate Clerk to His Love, The” (McCuaig) 314 Pastoral Symphony (comp. Vaughan Williams) 40 Patel, Aniruddh D. 499 Pater, Walter 506, 507 Paterson (William Carlos Williams) 436, 438 Paterson, A.B. ‘Banjo’ 132, 133, 161, 324, 328–30, 356, 377, 388, 405, 441, 568 “Clancy of the Overflow” 329 “The Man from Ironbark” 377 “The Man from Snowy River” 328, 330 The Old Bush Songs 328 “The Travelling Post Office” 568 Paterson, Alistair 123, 235 Patten, Brian 37



Onomastic Index

Paul Bunyan (comp. Britten) 508 Pavlov, Ivan 345 Paz, Octavio, “Viento entero” 436 Pearson, Alan 143 Pearson, Bill 584 Pearson, K.F. 133; & Christine Churches, ed. The Orange Tree: South Australian Poetry to the Present Day 204 Peek, Andy 278 “Pelvic Rose, The” (Harris) 346 Penberthy, James 342 Penelope 12 “Penelope / Bright & Bare” (Mitchell) 125 Penfold, Merimeri 235 Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry, The (ed. Kinsella) 568 Penguin Australia 28, 324, 466 Penguin Book of Australian Humorous Verse (ed. Bill Scott) 308 Penguin Book of Contemporary New Zealand Poetry, The (ed. Evans, McQueen & Wedde) 234–36 Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry, The (ed. Tranter & Mead) 568 Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse (ed. McQueen & Wedde) 233 Penguin New Zealand 579 Pentridge Prison (Coburg, Melbourne) 174, 193, 194, 217 Perceval, John , “The Man” 345 Percy Grainger and His Whips (Sasha Soldatow, Elizabeth Drake & Pam Brown) 68 “Perished” (Goodfellow) 352 Perkins, Elizabeth 238 Perkins, Emily 582 Perrier, Robert ‘Bomber’ 113 Perry, Grace 42–44, 46, 48, 53, 104, 105, 278, 332 Persian Letters, The (Montesquieu) 403 Persius 84, 90, 157 “Personae” (Lach–Newinsky) 571 Persson, Sheryl 445 Perth 94, 380 Perth (Scotland) 381 Pessoa, Fernando 421, 423 Peter Finke (magazine) 106

643 Petersham (Sydney) 262, 263 Peterson, Will 169 Petrarch, Francesco 399, 452 Petrie, Barbara 304, 305 Petronius 86, 89 Phar Lap 581 Phelan, Nancy 252 Philp, James Alexander 210, 211 “Class-Consciousness” 210 “Comrades” 210 “The Freedom of Michael” 211 “The Ghostly Voters” 211 Jingles that Jangle 210 Mazuma 211 “The Prince’s Smile” 210 Some Bulletin Stories 210 Songs of the Australian Fascisti 210, 211 ஡  7, 9, 10, 13, 25, 27, 38, 74, 76, 78, 79, 80, 81, 126, 169, 170, 171, 172, 193, 198, 211, 240, 241, 242, 332, 367, 370, 394, 432, 465, 491, 541, 569 “Etiquette” 241 “Tekish men” 171 ed. Missing Forms 170 ed. Off the Record 169, 170, 171, 172, 581 Picaro Press 569, 572 “Picasso Bull” (Keith Harrison) 310 Picasso, Pablo 12, 35, 304, 562 Pickard, Tom 225 “picnic day at the drouin races” (Lea) 226 “Pictures of the Gone World” (Ferlinghetti) 26 Pie (magazine) 122 Pierce, Peter 236, 362, 512 Pig Island Letters (Baxter) 554 Pindar 381, 399, 462 Pinder, John 189 Pipe Dreams in Ponsonby (Mitchell) 125, 547, 548, 551 Pipp, Jim 204 Pirie, Mark, ed. A Tingling Catch: A Century of New Zealand Cricket Poems 1864–2009 311 Pissarro, Camille 434 Pitt, Marie 207, 252, 516 Place and Perspective: Contemporary Queensland Poetry (ed. Barry O’Donohue) 205 “Place of Execution” (Kees) 454

644 “Place Where I Was Born, The” (David McKee Wright) 287 “Plain Paper” (Cross) 274 Plastic Bertrand 322 Plastic People of the Universe 163 Plath, Sylvia 38, 80, 107, 213, 228, 409, 449, 494 “Heart’s Needle” 39 “Mushrooms” 409 Platinum Blonde (dir. Capra) 41 Plato 203, 395, 428, 448 “Play, The” (Dennis) 566, 567 “Play the Game” (Goodfellow) 139, 141 Plumb, Vivienne 581 Poe, Edgar Allan 92, 93, 101, 297, 407, 507 “The City in the Sea” 297 “Notes upon English Verse” 507 “The Raven” 407 “Poem beginning with a Line by Ralph Hotere” (Manhire) 562 “Poem for Hans Arp” (J Rankin) 243 “poem on a peach melba hat” (Lea) 173, 226 “poem to a hospital balcony” (Lea) 227 Poems from a Peach Melba Hat (Lea) 173, 216, 220, 223 Poet’s Choice (ed. Philip Roberts) 121 “Poetic O, The” (Lauren Williams) 472 “Poetical Gem (for William McGonagall, A” (Colebatch) 382 “Poetry and – Joy” (David McKee Wright) 301 Poetry Australia (journal) 43, 46, 48, 53, 54, 104, 105, 121, 122, 192, 204, 278, 332, 464 Poetry Magazine xiv, 42, 43, 46, 50, 52, 55, 93, 95, 104, 109, 332, 464 Poetry Review (U K ) 370 Poetry Society xiv, 42–46, 48, 49, 53, 55, 104, 105, 115–16, 464 Poetry Society (U S A ) 370 “Poetry, Prophecy and Vestiges” (Wallace– Crabbe) 531 “Poetry” (Moore) 414–18 Poets Discovery: Nineteenth-Century Australia in Verse, The (ed. Richard D. Jordan & Peter Pierce) 236–39 Poets on Record (Shelton Lea & Rob Harris) 220 Poets Union 128, 140, 193

THE POET IC EYE

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Poff, Sue 601 “Poisoner’s Lament, The” (David McKee Wright) 290 “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park” (Lehrer) 387 Politics of the Olympics (Soldatow) 68 Pollnitz, Chris 221 Pollock, Jackson 497 Pompeii 297 Ponge, François 168 Ponsonby (Auckland) 24, 25, 552, 595 Poor Fellow My Country (Herbert) 3, 4, 576 Pope, Alexander 179, 390, 397, 404, 405, 507, 565, 570, 572 The Dunciad 390, 397 An Essay on Criticism 397 “Essay on Man” 570 “The Rape of the Lock” 405 Pope’s School (London) 286 “Porphyria’s Lover” (Browning) 83 Port Augusta 135 Port Douglas 265 Port Jackson Press 95 “Port of Europe, A” (Gray) 492 Porter, Dorothy 465, 495, 508 Porter, Hal 273, 327 Porter, Peter 6, 7, 83, 199, 203, 209, 240, 241, 278, 310, 316, 330, 368, 393, 404, 542, 545 “How to Get a Girl Friend” 6, 545 After Martial 83 “Sailing to Corminboeuf” 393 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce) 180 Post-Man Letters & Other Poems (Lach– Newinsky) 569–72 Potter, Jane 519, 580 Pound, Ezra 12, 97, 107, 126, 148, 157, 159, 168, 224, 232, 248, 312, 334, 338, 376, 418, 421, 427, 428, 429, 434, 435, 436, 437, 438, 439, 440, 507, 508, 543, 548 Cantos 97, 148, 436, 440, 508 Cathay 440 “In a Station of the Metro” 435 “Papyrus” 543 “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” 418 Powell, Craig 105 Powell, Sian 312



Onomastic Index

Power, Helen 491, 516, 526; “Killed in Action” 526 Praed, Winthrop Mackworth 33, 239; “Australasia” 239 Pram Factory 189, 193 Prausnitz, Maja, ed. Velocity: The Best of Apples and Snakes 170 Prebble, John 552 “Prelude, The” (Harris) 347 Presbyterian Outlook 299 Presence of Music, The (Shadbolt) 583 Present Tense, The (Harwood) 339–43 “Present Tense, The” (Harwood) 344 Presley, Elvis 225 Preston, Margaret 161 Pretty, Ron xvii Prévert, Jacques 349, 350, 352, 353, 355 “Quelle connerie la Guerre” 353 “Vous allez voir ce que vous allez voir” 353 Prichard, Katherine Susannah xvi, 208, 25; Coonardoo 208 Prime, Patricia 580 “Prince’s Smile, The” (Philp) 210 Pringle, John Douglas 318 Prior, S.H. 263, 320 Prism (magazine) 111, 112, 114 “Prisoner of Chillon, The” (Byron) 478 “Prisoners, The” (Robinson) 59, 61 Private Eye (magazine) 560 Private: Do Not Open (Soldatow) 68 Problem of Evil, The (Maiden) 113 “Proem” (Lehmann) 89 “Progression” (Fisher) 525 Prometheus Unbound (Shelley) 476 Propertius 88, 312 Prothalamion (Spenser) 438 Proust, Marcel 344, 531 “Pseudodoxia Epidemica” (Hope) 546 “Puck Disembarks” (Wallace-Crabbe) 539 Puketoi (N Z ) 284, 289, 295 Puncher and Wattmann Anthology of Australian Poetry 1986–2008, The (ed. Leonard) 568 Pure Shit (dir. Bert Deling) 38 “Pussycat Song” (Jeltje) 172 Puttenham, George 400

645 Quadrant (journal) 119, 192, 304 Quadrant: Twenty-Five Years (ed. Peter Coleman et al.) 169 “Qualifying the Theory” (Goodfellow) 352 Quarles, Francis 38 “Queenie” (Gliori) 323 Queensland 72, 117, 159, 177, 178, 181, 186, 194, 205, 211, 249, 259, 262, 263, 264, 268, 271, 274, 323, 368, 378, 517, 522, 585 Queensland Figaro (magazine) 254, 269 Queensland Women’s Electoral League 522 “Quelle connerie la Guerre” (Prévert) 353 Quesada (Stead) 9, 13 Quickenden, Maureen 322 Quigley, Sarah 583 Quinnell, Ken 108 Quintilian 452 “Rabbits’ Refrain to the Poisoner’s Lament, The” (‘John Plod’) 290 Rachmaninoff, Sergei 508 Radiance (Billy Jones) 586 Radiation (Billy Jones) 584 “Radio priest / apple music” (Roberts) 125 “Railway Stationery, The” (Koch) 32 “Railway Train, The” (Narranyeri song) 356 Rain at Gunn Point (Scanlon) 278–81 Rainbow, The (Lawrence) 338 Raine, Craig 214 Rake’s Progress, The (Stravinsky) 508 Raleigh, Sir Walter 510 “Rambling Riversoul Rapture” (Billy Jones) 586 Rameau, Jean–Philippe 158, 393 Ramsden, J. 286 Randle, Marie R. 295 Rankin, David 95, 104, 105 Rankin, Jennifer 241–43 “Cicada Singing” 243 Earth Hold 242 “Forever the Snake” 243 “Jerusalem Bay” 104 “Koan” 242 “Mound poems” 243 “Mud Hut” 243

646 “Poem for Hans Arp” 243 Ritual Shift 242 “Rape of the Lock, The” (Pope) 405 “Rarotonga Sunset” (Manhire) 559 Raskin, Victor 395 “Raven, The” (Poe) 407 Ravlich, Robyn 105, 112, 242 Rawlins, Adrian 465 “Razor Wire” (Scanlon) 278 Read It Again (Wallace–Crabbe) 531, 533, 537, 542, 546 Reames, Mark 169 Rebel General, The (Wallace–Crabbe) 535 Rebolledo, Efrén 435 Red Cross 266, 267 Red Funnel (magazine) 253 “Red Rosary, The” (Manifold) 73 “Red Wheelbarrow, The” (William Carlos Williams) 436, 437, 439 Redfern, William 385, 395, 401, 402 Reed, A.H. and A.W. 583 Reed, John 224 Reed, Sweeney 223, 225 Reedy, Kuini Moehau 234 Reeves, Trevor 21, 549 “Reflection” (Lauren Williams) 467 “Reflections on Ice-Breaking” (Ogden Nash) 401 Regional Poets Co-operative 82 Reid, Barrett 224; “Aboriginal” 224 Reid, Barrie 189, 193 Reid, Ian 309 Reilly, Catherine, ed. Scars Upon My Heart: Women s Poetry and Verse of the First World War 267, 512 “Relating to Robinson” (Kees) 33 Remée, Vera 269 “Remember February” (McCormick) 18 “Reminders” (Goodfellow) 352 Rennie, Debbie 499 “Resumé” (Parker) 395 “Return of the Huntsmen, The” (Roberts) 127 Returned Services League 514, 522 “Revelations Revisited” (Dawe) 379 Review of Reviews 252 “Revolver” (Alan Riddell) 50

THE POET IC EYE



Rexroth, Kenneth 125, 359 “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” (Eliot) 437 Rich, Adrienne 161 “Richard Cory” (Edward Arlington Robinson) 313 Richard II (Shakespeare) 84 Richardson, Henry Handel, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony 338 Riddell, Alan 50, 247, 359, 432, 582; “Revolver” 50 Riddell, Alastair 552 Riddell, Elizabeth 247, 321, 356, 461; “After Lunik Two” 356 Riddell, Ron 236, 550, 552 Riddell, Thomas 282 Ridge, Lola 581 Riley, Bridget 159 Riley, John 169 Riley, Peter 168 “Rimbaud and the Pursuit of the Modernist Heresy” (Tranter) 92 Rimbaud, Arthur 92, 96, 97, 102, 173 “Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The” (Coleridge) 393 Ring and the Book, The (Browning) 338 Rish, Adam 111 Ritual Shift (Jennifer Rankin) 242 “River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter, The” (Pound) 418 “Road, The” (Benson) 20 “Road of Labor, The” (Cross) 264 Road to Jerusalem, The (dir. Bruce Morrison, 1998) 555 Robb, Douglas 146 Robert Burns Fellowship 16, 553 Robert Hardy’s Seven Days (Sheldon) 299 Roberts, Barney 117 Roberts, Nigel 48, 64, 90, 93, 95, 101, 102, 105, 119, 121, 122, 123–30, 167, 170, 219, 235, 240, 241, 242, 247, 311, 327, 332, 546, 547, 581 “Aberrant poetics 4 – for Mark O’Connor” 126 “Beauty / Truth / Genius & Taste etc.” 127 “The bed” 126 “Dialogue with John Forbes” 127 “Flavour of the month” 126 “Gemini / Gemini” 129



Onomastic Index

In Casablanca for the Waters 121, 124, 126, 127, 128 “In the Family Album” 124 “Japan” 124 “The Kiwi Riposte” 311 “The Los Angeles Affirmation” 128 “Max Factor Pink” 126 “The Mona Lisa tea towel” 126 “The New Age Class Listings” 129 “Radio priest / apple music” 125 “The Return of the Huntsmen” 127 Steps for Astaire 121, 123, 124, 127, 128, 129 Roberts, Philip, ed. Poet’s Choice 121 Robertson, Bruce 156, 552 Robertson, George 206, 250, 256, 257, 258, 274, 277 Robertson, Matthew 552 “Robin Hood” (Cross) 264 Robin, Isobel 310 Robinson, Edwin Arlington 34, 313; “Eros Turannos” 34; “Richard Cory” 313 Robinson, Les xvi Robinson, Roland xiii, xvii, 42–48, 49, 50, 51, 53, 54–62, 104, 105, 108, 109, 112, 321, 331, 332, 356, 440, 491 “Altjeringa” 58, 60, 356 “Battalions Mass in the Hills” 60 “Because I Wakened” 57. 61 “The Blanket” 57, 62 “Boots and Hat and Shirt” 57 “The Brolgas, The” 57 “The Coal, The” 61 “The Dancers, The” 57, 60 “Deep Well” 59, 60 “Del Espiritu Santo” 60 “The Drifting Dug-Out” 58 “Ejenak the Porcupine” 58 “Ghost Gums (1)” 61 “Ghost Gums (2)” 60 “Grendel” 60 “Hairy Man” 58 “I Had No Human Speech” 57, 61 “Jacaranda” (59 Language of the Sand 45 “The Metamorphosis” 57, 60

647 “Minstrels” 59 “Nerida and Birwan” 58 “The Prisoners” 59, 61 “Rock-Lily” 61 “Rock-Wallaby” 60 “The Sacred Ground” 60 “Shack” 59 “Swift” 61 “The Tank” 57 “The Tea-Tree and the Lyre-Bird” 57, 60–62 “The Titans” 57 “To a Mate” 57, 59 “To J.M.” 59 “Trunk Line Call” 59 “The Tumult of the Swans” 61 “The Unlucky Country” 59 “The Water Lubra” 58 Robinson, Sugar Ray 586 Robson, L.L. 510, 519 Rochester Castle Hotel (Fitzroy) 324 Rochester, John Wilmot 71 “Rock-Lily” (Robinson) 61 “Rock-Wallaby” (Robinson) 60 Rockwell, Norman 37 Rodriguez, Judith 241, 243 Roethke, Theodore 359 “Rollover, The” (Murray) 578 Romanticism, literary xvii, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 15, 20, 21, 28, 34, 62, 82, 120, 238, 249, 250, 283, 302, 400, 413, 516, 532, 573 Romberg, Sigmund 39 Ronan, Tom 583 “Rope, The” (McCormick) 18 Rose, Margaret A. 373 Rosenberg, Isaac 69 Rothschild, Baron Philippe de 12 “Round, A” (Manhire) 561 Rowbotham, David 45 Rowe, Gwen 255 Rowe, Normie 137 Rowlands, Graham 133, 170, 171, 172, 379, 380, 383 Rowley, Hazel 360 Royal Geographical Society 287 Royal George Hotel (Sydney) 223, 224 “Rufus” (Lehmann) 89

648 Ruhen, Olaf 247 “Ruin, The” (Manhire) 562 “Ruined Maid, The” (Hardy) 419 Rumbelow, Steven 474 Rumour, The (Adamson) 112 “Rumour, The” (Adamson) 93, 95, 98 Rungs of Time (Wallace–Crabbe) 540 Rusche, Ed 187 Russell, Bertrand 345 Ryan, Gig 36, 37, 38, 170, 369; “On Flight” 441 Ryan, Peter 318 Ryan, Ross 113 Ryle, Gilbert 282 Sackville, Sir Richard 397 “Sacred Ground, The” (Robinson) 60 Sad Anthropologist, The (Lauren Williams) 468, 469, 470, 471 “Sad Anthropologist, The” (Lauren Williams) 470, 471 “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” (Dylan) 94 Sade, Marquis de 391 “Sailing to Corminboeuf” (Porter) 393 Saintsbury, George 120 Salom, Philip 203, 204, 315–17, 421, 445, 577 “After Many Marbles” 316 Feeding the Ghost 315, 316 “Hunger” 316 “In Residence” 316 “ Joss” 316 “Maps” 316 “The Sex of Autostrada Driving” 316 Sky Poems 315 Samoa 133 Sandburg, Carl 107, 334 Sandinista revolution 118 Santiago de Chile 117 “sapos, Los” (Tablada) 436 Sappho 97, 98, 249, 506 “Sarah” (Benson) 20 “Sarcastic Charwoman, The” (Cross) 275 Sardanapalus (Byron) 84, 477, 478, 486, 490 Sargeant, Garry 241 Sargeson, Frank xv, xvi, 145, 154, 576; More Than Enough xv, xvi

THE POET IC EYE



Sargisson, Lucy, & Lyman Tower Sargent 555, 556 Sasko, Nicolette 205 Sassoon, Siegfried 69; “They” 529 Satchell, William 14, 144, 576 Satie, Erik 343 Saul and David (Neilsen) 40 Saunders, Julia 258 Savage, Randy 225, 226 “Saying Goodbye to My Mother” (Manhire) 562 Scanlon, Tony 277–81 “City Woman” 279 “Death in Custody” 279 “Editorial: Sunday Territorian” 279 “English lecture” 280 “For Belinda” 280 “Mosman Nocturne” 280 Rain at Gunn Point 278–81 “Razor Wire” 278 “Snapshots” 279 Scannell, Vernon 212 Scarecrow, The (Morrieson) 583 Scarlatti, Domenico 313 Scars Upon My Heart: Women s Poetry and Verse of the First World War (ed. Catherine Reilly) 267, 512 Scheikowski, Lisa 171 “Schizophrenic Highway” (Olds) 24 Schoenberg, Arnold 344 School of Abuse, The (Gosson) 394 “School, The” (Manhire) 507, 560 Schoolmaster, The (Ascham) 397 Schools Magazine (N S W ) 247 “schtzngrmm” (Jandl) 504 Schubert, Franz 283 “Schubertian Aria” (McCuaig) 313 Schwitters, Kurt 432, 502, 504; “Ursonate” 504 Scott, Bill, ed. Penguin Book of Australian Humorous Verse 308 Scott, Dick 601, 603, 604, 605 Scott, John A. 35, 36, 310 Scott, Margaret 204, 238 Scott, Margot 41 Scott, Rosie 247, 581 Scott, Walter 520



Onomastic Index

“scratch, scratch” (Chris Mann) 171 Scuffins, Kerry 466 “Sea Dreams” (David McKee Wright) 295 Seaman, Owen 212, 376, 394 In Cap and Bells 212 “Mr Alfred Austin” 394 Second Treatise of Government (Locke) 490 Second World War 99, 120, 502 Seddon, Richard 292 Sedergreen, Bob 193 See Page 207 (magazine) 192 Seed (magazine) 174 “Seeing Elle Macpherson” (Lauren Williams) 467 Seelaf, George 194 Segovia, Andrés 222 Selected Poems (Adamson) 98 Selected Poems 1936–84 (Hart–Smith) 304 “Semaphore” (Goodfellow) 351 “Semaphore Sandra” (Goodfellow) 351 Semi Madness (Goodfellow) 350–52 Seneca 86, 88, 90, 399 Sequel to the Odyssey (Kazantzakis) 459 Sergeant, Barry 62 Sergeant, Howard 10 Serle, Geoffrey 238 “Sermon, A” (Harwood) 344 Seurat, Georges 434 “Sex” (Lauren Williams) 468 “Sex of Autostrada Driving, The” (Salom) 316 Sex Poems Unleashed, The (Goodfellow) 352 Sexton, Anne 39, 213, 449; “All My Pretty Ones” 39 Sexuality Theory of Value, The (Soo-Lee) 327 Seychelles 115 “Shack” (Robinson) 59 Shackleton, Bert 46 Shadbolt, Maurice 14, 247, 576; The Presence of Music 583 Shadbolt, Tim 361 Shadows from Wire (ed. Page) 69–71 Shakespeare, William 39, 72, 83, 84, 158, 313, 335, 355, 383, 404, 406, 423, 432, 448, 450–51, 462, 463, 548, 574 Hamlet (311, 355 Henry IV Part 2 574

649 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 448 Othello 83 Richard II 84 “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” 450–51 The Tempest 432 Shakespeare-Wallah (dir. James Ivory) 39 Shakti (Rae Desmond Jones) 48 “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” (Shakespeare) 450–51 Shapcott, Jo 572 Shapcott, Thomas W. 54, 70, 103, 169, 241, 361 “Shapes of Gallipoli, The” (Wallace–Crabbe) 70 Shapiro, Karl 446, 447, 452, 455; “Kleenex” 452 Sharah, Jemal 366 Sharkey, Michael 126, 259; & Julian Croft, Loose Federation 278 Shaw, George Bernard 395 Shaw, Rod 45 “Shawl, The” (Dorothy Frances McCrae) 520 Shead, Garry 111 Sheldon, Charles M., In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do? 299; Robert Hardy’s Seven Days 299 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 28, 34, 83, 95, 159, 227, 236, 288, 289, 361, 476, 485, 531 The Cenci 83 “Epipsychidion” 95 Prometheus Unbound 476 Shieff, Sarah 576 Shipwreck (Stewart) 333 “Shirkers” (Heydon) 524 “Shit Poem” (Duke) 37 “Shooting the Dogs” (Hodgins) 567 Shore, Dinah 98 Shortis, Gregory B. 73–83, 129, 278 Another Double Please 83 The Comedy Human 83 Yarn, Rave and Red Herring 73–82, 129 Shostakovich, Dmitri 40 Shotlander, Sandra 240 “Shout” (Lauren Williams) 467 Shute, Carmel Mary 523 “Sick Stockrider, The” (Gordon) 566 Sidis, Boris 403

650 Sidney, Sir Philip 393, 400, 544; “An Apologie for Poetrie” 393, 400 Siebenhaar, Wilhelm 209, 258 Sierra Leone 123 “Sightseeing for the Blind” (Lauren Williams) 470 ‘Signature’ photographs (Fields) 591, 592, 594, 595, 596, 597, 599, 600, 601, 604, 605, 606, 607 Sigurd and Volsung (Morris) 338 “Silhouettes of War” (Cross) 266 Silkin, Jon 107 “Silver Screw, The” (Craig) 310 Simic, Charles 428, 572 Simpson, R.A., “Antarctica” 357 Sinn Féin 287 Sisley, Alfred 434 Sisters of Compassion 557 Sitsky, Larry, comp. Fall of the House of Usher 508 Situationism 572 Sitwell, Edith, Façade 313 “Six Odes for Public Occasions” (Harwood) 340 Sixty Classic Australian Poems (ed. Geoff Page) 563–69 Skinner, B.F. 345 Skinner, Gertrude 325 Skryznecki, Peter 112 Sky Poems (Salom) 315 Skyring, Mary Louisa Eliza Ann 259 Skyring, Zachariah 259 Sladen, Douglas 237 “Sleep Demeter” (Harris) 346 Slessor, Kenneth 97, 162, 219, 224, 252, 312, 313, 330, 331, 335, 336, 337, 339, 356, 358, 363, 378, 461, 512, 567, 568 “Backless Betty from Bondi” (363 “Beach Burial” (356 “City Nightfall” (219 “Darlinghurst Nights” (363 “Five Visions of Captain Cook” (330, 336, 337 “Slice of Wedding Cake, A” (Graves) 389, 390 Sligo, John 247, 582, 583 “Small Town Talk” (Goodfellow) 352 Smart, Christopher 367, 448 “Smash (for Meg)” (Hunt) 22

THE POET IC EYE



Smith, Blair 596, 603 Smith, Grace Cossington 161 Smith, Stevie 37, 213, 404 Smith, Stuart 262 Smith, Vivian 45, 204, 238, 550; The Other Meaning 45; & Margaret Scott, ed. Effects of Light: The Poetry of Tasmania 204 Smith’s Weekly 255 Smither, Elizabeth 235 Smithyman, Kendrick 16, 17, 123, 126, 235, 548, 550, 551, 584 “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” 39 Smollett, Tobias 404 “Snake” (Lawrence) 243 “Snapshot” (Billy Jones) 586 “Snapshots” (Scanlon) 279 Snow & the Glass Window, The (Olds) 24, 28 “Snow & the Glass Window, The” (Olds) 28 Snyder, Gary 129, 168, 169 Social Credit 147, 148 Socialism 143, 264 “Socks” (Murdoch) 523 Socrates 345, 395, 406 Soldatow, Sasha 64, 65, 66, 67, 68–69 The Adventures of Rock’n’Roll Sally 68 Mayakovsky in Bondi 68 Politics of the Olympics 68 Private: Do Not Open 68 (with Elizabeth Drake & Pam Brown) Percy Grainger and His Whips 68 (with Christos Tsiolkas) Jump Cuts 68 Soledades of the Sun and the Moon (Hope) 545 Some Bulletin Stories (Philp) 210 Somerville, Helen ‘Mid’ 255 “Sometimes” (Lauren Williams) 467 “Song” (David McKee Wright) 296 Song Cycle of Jacky, The (Mudrooroo) 302, 303 Song of Mother Love and Other Verses, A (Cross) 265, 270, 274 “Song of Myself” (Whitman) 450 “Song of the Women, The” (Bright) 523 “Song with a Chorus” (Manhire) 561 “Songbird, The” (Goodfellow) 352 Songs of a Sentimental Bloke, The (Dennis) 250



Onomastic Index

“Songs of Eve” (Harwood) 341, 342 Songs of Love and Life (Cross) 249, 250, 251, 256, 274, 275 Songs of the Australian Fascisti (Philp) 210, 211 Sonnet I” (Wallace–Crabbe) 537; “Sonnet II” 537;“Sonnet VI” 537; “Sonnet VIII” 538, 543; “Sonnet IX” 538, 543;“Sonnet X” 538; “Sonnet XXX” 540 “Sonnets of the South” (Cross) 274 “Sonnets to the Left” (Wallace–Crabbe) 537, 538 Sonnets, The (Berrigan) 35 Soo-Lee, Billy, The Sexuality Theory of Value 327 Sophocles, Women of Trachis (Sophocles) 508 Sorrows of Young Werther, The (Goethe) 477 Souper, Gerald Kay 263 South Australia 368, 465, 524 South China (Dane Thwaites) 326, 328 South Into Winter (Hunt) 19, 21, 22 Southam, Barry 348 Southerly (journal) 31, 368, 464 Southland (N Z ) 289 Southport (Queensland) 268 Spanish Civil War 197 Spectator, The 405 “Speed, a Pastoral” (Forbes) 419 Spenser, Edmund 335, 423, 438, 458, 459, 504 The Faerie Queene 459 Prothalamion 438 Splashes Weekly (magazine) 270 Spoon River Anthology (Masters) 34 “Sporting the Plaid” (Wallace–Crabbe) 536 “Spring Song of a Civil Servant” (Baxter) 19 Squire, J.C. 527 “St Bartholomew Remembers Jesus Christ as an Athlete” (Wearne) 36 Stacpoole, John 591, 594 Stalin 144, 428 “Stand By Your Men!” (McFadyen) 524 Stanislavski, Konstantin 474 Star Hotel (Newcastle) 220 State of Innocence, and Fall of Man, The (Dryden) 489 Station Ballads (David McKee Wright) 288, 289, 297, 298

651 Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times (ed. Neil Astley) 563 Stead, C.K. (Karl) 8–15, 16, 123, 126, 144, 150, 235, 247, 428, 548, 550, 551, 583, 584 “Autumn 1975” 13 “Breaking the Neck” 9, 10, 14 Crossing the Bar 9 “Hard. Bright. Clean, Particular” 9 “He Sing fr You” 548 “Last Poem in Australia” 11 Quesada 9, 13 “Twenty-One Sonnets” 9 “Uta” 9, 12, 14 Walking Westward 8–14, 126 “Walking Westward” 8–14 Whether the Will Is Free 11 “Whether the Will Is Free” 11 “Yes T.S.: A Narrative” 429 Stead, Christina 263, 360 Stead, G.G. 291 Stead, W.T. 252 Steal Away Boy (Mitchell) 547 Steele Rudd’s Magazine 253 Steele, Peter 533, 541 Steele, Sir Richard 404 Steffan, Truman G. 487 Stein, Gertrude 171 Steinbeck, John 27 Steiner, George 474, 476, 477 Stephens, A.G. 253 Stephens, Brunton 260 Steps for Astaire (Roberts) 121, 123, 124, 127, 128, 129 Sterne, Laurence 103, 404; Tristram Shandy 103 Stevens, Bertram 237, 253, 261, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272, 274 Stevens, Wallace 32, 34, 38, 396, 397, 439, 460, 569 “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” 397 “The World as Meditation” 32 Stevenson, Robert Louis 247, 520 Stevie (dir. Robert Enders) 37 Stewart, Amanda 369

652 Stewart, Douglas 3, 48, 79, 238, 247, 248, 252, 258, 304, 319, 320, 321, 330, 331, 332, 333, 334, 335, 336, 337, 338, 339, 375, 464, 532, 568, 582 The Fire on the Snow 333 Fisher’s Ghost 333 “The Golden Lover” 333 “Leopard Skin” 568 “Modern Australian Verse” 332 Ned Kelly 333 “Worsley Enchanted” 330 Shipwreck 333 ed. Modern Australian Verse 331, 332 ed. The Pacific Book of Bush Ballads 331 ed. Voyager Poems 304, 330–39 ed. (with Nancy Keesing) Australian Bush Ballads 331 ed. (with Nancy Keesing) Old Bush Songs and Rhymes of Colonial Times 331 Stewart, Kenneth 238, 252, 270 Stewart, Ted 552 Still Earth Press 225 “Still Lake” (Ouyang Yu) 492 “Still Life with Wind in the Trees” (Manhire) 558 “Still Talking about Jazz” (Wearne) 171 Stock Horse Association 324 Stock, Noel 428 Stockhausen, Karl–Heinz 143, 171, 206; Ylem 8, 14 Stokes, Leigh 64, 171 Stout, Janis 513, 514 Stow, Randolph 7, 203; “At Sandalwood” 7; The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea 7 “Stradbroke Island Dreamings 1989” (Mudrooroo) 302 Stramm, August 502, 504 Strand, Mark 94, 572 “Strangled Rhetoric and Damaged Glamour” (Wallace–Crabbe) 533 Stravinsky, Igor 428; The Rake’s Progress 508 Streeton, Sir Arthur 535 Streets of the Long Voyage (Dransfield) 359 Stretch of the Imagination, A (Hibberd) 581 “Strike Idyll, A” (Cross) 262 Strong, Geoff 40 “Stuff Your Classical Heritage” (Wallace–Crabbe) 536

THE POET IC EYE



Sturm, Terry xvii, 108, 277, 576, 584 Sturmer, Richard von 550 Subhuman Redneck Poems (Murray) 578 Such Is Life (Furphy) 4, 532 Suckling, Sir John 38, 434; “A Candle” 38 Sud (journal, Marseilles) 278 Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, The (Tennessee Williams) 241 “Sun” (Lach–Newinsky) 570 Sun, The (Sydney) 254, 262, 266, 301 Sun Books 54 Sunyasee, Rita, “Our Jim” 522 Surfer’s Paradise 114 Surrealism 101, 168, 174, 230, 243, 331, 332, 432, 572 Sutherland, Joan 64 “Swift” (Robinson) 61 Swift, Jonathan 404, 565 Swinburne, Algernon Charles 32, 328, 504, 507 Sydney xiv, xv, xvi, 12, 30, 31, 37, 42, 43, 48, 49, 62, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 77, 82, 90, 91, 92, 93, 104, 106, 107, 108, 110, 111, 112, 114, 116, 122, 124, 127, 150, 159, 166, 167, 173, 174, 192, 193, 194, 196, 208, 211, 213, 214, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 230, 247, 250, 254, 256, 260, 261, 263, 264, 265, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272, 273, 284, 288, 300, 301, 315, 325, 331, 332, 334, 358, 368, 370, 376, 377, 419, 425, 464, 465, 466, 467, 469, 474, 492, 493, 498, 519, 524, 526, 535, 546, 547, 550, 576, 580, 581, 582, 583, 592, 593 Sydney Girls’ High School 261, 263, 265 Sydney Harbour Bridge 190 “Sydney International Exhibition” (Kendall) 4, 5 Sydney Morning Herald 55, 66, 68, 112, 252, 259 Sydney Opera House 113, 114, 399 Sydney Stage Company 263 Sydney Teachers’ College 251, 261, 262, 263 Sydney University xvii, 105, 110, 221, 223, 258, 262, 277, 282, 335, 404, 550, 576, 583 Symbolism 5, 90, 91, 92, 102, 120, 332, 436, 437 “Syntax of the Mind” (Harwood) 344 Tablada, José Juan 435, 436, 439, 440; “Los sapos” 436 “tableau vivant” (Joanne Burns) 460 Taborski, Boles¶aw 474



Onomastic Index

Tacitus 399 Talbot, Colin, ed. Applestealers 464 Talbot, Norman, ed. Another Site to Be Mined: A New South Wales Anthology 204 Talfourd, Thomas N. 489 Talking Blues (Rae Desmond Jones) 49 Talking to Neruda’s Questions (Cronin) 445 Tambourine Life (Berrigan) 35 “Tambourine Life 1” (Berrigan) 35 “Tambourine Life 61” (Berrigan) 35 Tamworth Country Music Festival 322 Tamworth Poetry Group 322 Tandon, B.G. 478 “Tangi-hanga” (Tuwhare) 234 “Tank, The” (Robinson) 57 “Tantanoola Tiger, The” (Harris) 346, 347 Taoism 7 Tap Danz Press 62 Taplin, George 356 Taranaki (N Z ) 557 Tasman, Abel Janszoon 337, 338 Tasmania 67, 92, 103, 107, 111, 113, 204, 302, 368 Tasmanian Peace Trust Lecture (Harwood) 344 Tasso, Torquato 504 Tate, Allen 415 “Tay Bridge Disaster, The” (McGonagall) 381 Taylor, Alister 554 Taylor, Andrew 241 Taylor, Chad 582 Taylor, Edward 157 Taylor, James 358 Taylor, Ken 367, 491 Taylor, Squizzy 40 Te Papa (National Museum, Wellington) 599, 600 “Tea-Tree and the Lyre-Bird, The” (Robinson) 57, 60–62 “Teenage Problem, A” (Olds) 25 Teilhard de Chardin 225 “Tekish men” (Pi O) 171 “Telephone” (Tranter) 311 Tempest, The (Shakespeare) 432 “Temple of Infamy, The” (Harpur) 374, 375 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 32, 80, 151, 248, 284, 285, 289, 299, 313, 328, 426, 507

653 “Come into the Garden Maud” 313 “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington” 32 Territories, Australian 368 Tesauro, Emmanuele 392, 393 Thames (N Z ) 591, 594 Thames Star 211 “The Poetry File: Lines” (Manhire) 562 Theatre Magazine 253, 265, 271, 524 Theocritus 320 Theological Hall (Dunedin) 298, 299 “There are Two Kinds of Poem” (McCormick) 16 “These Fellowing Men” (Gilmore) 525 “These Weird Years” (Lauren Williams) 468 “They” (Sassoon) 529 Thiele, Colin 132 “Things I Did, The” (Manhire) 562 Third Australian General Hospital 516 This Hectic Age (Cross) 259 This World/This Place (Pamela Brown) 326 Thomas, Arthur 191 Thomas, Dylan 38, 226, 233, 319, 334, 548 Thomas, Edward 35 Thomas, R.S. 204 Thompson, John 43, 318 Thompson, Leo 552 Thompson, Tom 339, 341, 379 Thorne, Tim 53, 92, 93, 103–19, 242 The Atlas 114 “The What of Sane” 93 Thorslev, Peter 490 “Those Eyes, Such Mist” (Hunt) 23 “Three Faces of Hope” (Wallace–Crabbe) 545 “Three Sonnets” (Wearne) 171 “Threnody; For President Johnson on the shores of America” (Manhire) 559 “Threshold” (Harwood) 492 Thurley, Geoffrey 359, 426 Thwaites, Barbara 111, 326, 328 Thwaites, Dane, South China 326, 328; Winter Light 326 Tillett, Rob 106, 121 Tilton, May, The Grey Battalion 516, 517 Time magazine 319 Time to Ride (Hunt) 21, 22

654 Times Literary Supplement 560 Tingling Catch: A Century of New Zealand Cricket Poems 1864–2009, A (ed. Mark Pirie) 311 Tipping, Richard 48, 64, 106, 121, 171, 172, 241, 242, 310, 332, 432, 464 “Captain Cook Considers his Fete” (310 “Mangoes” (310 “When You’re Feeling Kind of Bonkers” (310 “Titans, The” (Robinson) 57 Titirangi (Auckland) 550 “To a Friend in the Wilderness” (Fairburn) 148 “To a Howard” (John Clarke) 382 “To a Mate” (Robinson) 57, 59 “To J.M.” (Robinson) 59 “To Music” (Harwood) 343 “To the End of the White Lady Piecart & Hamburger Joint” (Olds) 26 “To the Flag” (Cross) 524 Toil and Spin (Wallace–Crabbe) 545 Tolstoy, Leo 144 Tom the Street Poet 465 “tonight” (Lea) 226 Toorak 219 Toowoomba 186, 277, 323, 379 Topeka (Kansas) 300 Tossman, David 552 Toulouse–Lautrec, Henri de 355 Town and Country Journal 211, 259, 261, 262, 270 Townsend, Simon 98 “Traditions, Voyages” (Wallace–Crabbe) 534, 535 Transit (magazine) 106, 464 Trans-Tasman Undercurrent (magazine) 187, 580 Tranter, John 29, 53, 54, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 102, 103, 105, 106, 107, 119, 121, 122, 167, 213, 240, 241, 242, 311, 316, 328, 332, 357, 360, 367, 463, 464, 491–93, 532, 550, 581; & Philip Mead 568 At The Florida 492, 550 “Australia Day” 491–93 “Channel Nothing” 311 “Crying in Early Infancy 92 “Dark Harvest (for Dana Gioia)” 492 “The Death Circus” 357 “Telephone” 311 ed. The New Australian Poetry xiv, 29, 103, 119, 122, 348, 464

THE POET IC EYE



ed. (with Philip Mead) The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry 568 “Traveller, The” (Harris) 347 “Travelling Post Office, The” (Paterson) 568 Traven, B. 247 Trediakovsky, Vasily 103, 159, 432 Tree of Man, The (White) 241 Triad, The (magazine) 253, 274, 516 “Tribute to the Memory of Campbell Peter, A” (Knowles) 524 Triple Action Theatre 474 Tristram Shandy (Sterne) 103 Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (dir. Michael Winterbottom, 2005) 544 Troyat, Henri 144 “True Australian, The” (Rob Miller) 324 “True Blue” (Allen Gregory) 324 True Tales and False Alike Work by Suggestion (Wallace-Crabbe) 542 “Trunk Line Call” (Robinson) 59 Trussell, Denys 143–56, 236 Dance of the Origin 156 The Expressive Forest 143 Tsaloumas, Dimitris, “C H O G M – Melbourne 1981” 309 Tsiolkas, Christos 68 Tulips, Johnny 227 “Tumult of the Swans, The” (Robinson) 61 Turnbull, Ella 43, 105, 116 Turner, Ethel 252, 261, 262, 263 Turner, John B. 593, 602, 606 Turner, William, The Deluge 489 “Tussock and Asphalt Rhymes” (David McKee Wright) 298 Tuwhare, Hone 150, 158, 234, 235, 550, 551, 584; “Tangi-hanga” 234 “T V Men: Thucydides in Conversation with Virginia Woolf on the Set of The Peloponnesian War” (Carson) 419 Twain, Mark 463, 580 “Twenty-One Sonnets” (Stead) 9 “Twilight of the Half-Gods, The” (Cross) 269 Twilights, the 40 Two Foscari, The (Byron) 478 “Two Literals” (Manhire) 558



Onomastic Index

“U-Boat Morning, 1914, A” (Gould) 566 Ulster 287, 297 Uluru (Ayers Rock) 470 Ulverstone (Tasmania) 104, 106 Ulysses (Joyce) 338 “Uncollected” (Lauren Williams) 473 “Unformed Poem to a Potential Lover” (Lauren Williams) 473, 474 Universe Looks Down, The (Wallace–Crabbe) 537, 543, 544, 545, 546 University of Auckland 143 University of Canterbury 16 University of Iowa 115 University of New England 28, 42, 48, 55, 62, 67, 82, 117, 144, 277, 278, 434, 474 University of Osnabrück 510 University of Queensland Press 241, 324, 326, 579 University of Southern Queensland 554 University of Sydney 249 University of Wollongong xvii “Unlucky Country, The” (Robinson) 59 Unset, Sigrid 247 “Unsteady Eddy” (Goodfellow) 351 Urne-Buriall (Browne) 317 “Ursonate” (Schwitters) 504 “Uta” (Stead) 9, 12, 14 “V8 Poem for Chris Howard” (Olds) 25 V8 Poems (Olds) 28 Vallee, Rudy 98 Valli, Clayton 499, 503; “Dandelions” 503 Van Gogh, Vincent 355, 585 Vanderloos, Paul 323 Varuna (writers’ colony, N S W ) 470, 570, 571 Varuna Fellowship 570 “Vatican Rag, The” (Lehrer) 387 “Vaudeville” (McCuaig) 313 Vaughan Williams, Ralph, comp., Pastoral Symphony 40 Velocity: The Best of Apples and Snakes (ed. Maja Prausnitz) 170 Vendler, Helen 416, 418 Verlaine, Paul 507 Vibrants, the 40

655 Victims of Lightning, The (Manhire) 558, 559, 560, 561, 562 “Victims of Lightning, The” (Manhire) 561 Victoria 177, 264, 277, 368, 585 Victoria University of Wellington 188 Victoria University Press 579 Victorian Auckland (Fields) 591, 594, 595, 604 Victorian Ministry for the Arts 220 “Viento entero” (Paz) 436 Vietnam war 98, 106, 107, 189, 190, 464, 595 Viidikas, Vicky 105, 221, 241, 242 “Vindaloo in Merthyr Tydfil” (Murray) 545 Virgil 335, 345 Vision (journal) 516 “Vision” (Lauren Williams) 471 “Vision of Jehovah, The” (Cross) 271 “Vision of Judgment, The” (Byron) 71, 474, 480 “Vision of the Future Addressed to Emperors of the Future, A” (Lehmann) 88 “Visiting Anzac in the Year of Metrication” (Murray) 70 “Visiting Europe” (Manhire) 561 Visontay, Michael 577, 578 Vleeskens, Cornelis 116, 128 Voltaire 458, 463, 478, 490; Candide 458 Voss (comp. Meale) 508 “Vous allez voir ce que vous allez voir” (Prévert) 353 “Voyage, The” (Fairburn) 148 Voyager Poems (ed. Douglas Stewart) 304, 330– 39 Waddell, Rev. Rutherford 298 Waihemo (N Z ) 293 “Waitangi” (David McKee Wright) 293, 294 Waiting for Godot (Beckett) 90, 99 Wakefield Press 326 Walcott, Derek, “Midsummer” 409 Waldrop, Rosemary 168 Walker, Denis 189 Walker, Kath 158, 305 Walker, Robert 41, 305 Walking Westward (Stead) 8–14, 126 “Walking Westward” (Stead) 8–14 Wallace–Crabbe, Chris xiii, 70, 240, 241, 309, 311, 464, 512, 530–46, 566

656 “The Absence of Metaphysics, The” 531, 532, 533 The Amorous Cannibal 542 By and Large 537, 538, 540, 542, 543 “Canberra” 540 “Citizen” 534 “Cloud Chambers of Taxonomy” 543 The Emotions Are Not Skilled Workers 542 “Exit the Players” 309 For Crying Out Loud 539 “The Good Christian Practises Light Verse” 545 I’m Deadly Serious 536, 537, 542 In Light and Darkness 534 “In the Pop Age Or the Battle Between the Weak and the Strong” 531 “The Inheritance” 538, 539 “Inside Outsiders: From Mud to Malraux” 546 “Joseph Furphy, Realist” 532 “The Life of Ideas” 539 “Melbourne” 534 “Melbourne in 1963” 535, 541 Melbourne or the Bush: Essays in Australian Literature and Society 535, 537, 545 “Modern Times” 538, 540, 542, 543 The Music of Division 533, 534 “Objects, Odours” 536, 537 “Other People” 566 “Poetry, Prophecy and Vestiges” 531 “Puck Disembarks” 539 Read It Again 531, 533, 537, 542, 546 The Rebel General 535 Rungs of Time 540 “The Shapes of Gallipoli” 70 “Sonnet I” 537 “Sonnet II” 537 “Sonnet VI” 537 “Sonnet VIII” 538, 543 “Sonnet IX” 538, 543 “Sonnet X” 538 “Sonnet XXX” 540 “Sonnets to the Left” 537, 538 “Sporting the Plaid” 536

THE POET IC EYE

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“Strangled Rhetoric and Damaged Glamour” 533 “Stuff Your Classical Heritage” 536 “Three Faces of Hope” 545 Toil and Spin 545 “Traditions, Voyages” 534, 535 True Tales and False Alike Work by Suggestion 542 The Universe Looks Down 537, 543, 544, 545, 546 Whirling 540 ed. (with Peter Pierce) Clubbing of the Gunfire: 101 Australian War Poems 512 “Walls” (Mudrooroo) 303 Walton, Izaak, The Compleat Angler 509 Walton, Kim 140 Walton, William 40 “Waltzing Matilda” 388 Walwicz, Ania 171, 242, 388, 395, 460; “Australia” 388, 395 Wanganui River 553, 557 Wangaratta 189 Wantling, William 27, 28 “War” (Forrest) 518 “War” (Gilmore) 527 “War Time” (Fullerton) 528 Ward, Joseph 301 Ward, Russel 72, 278 “Warehouse Curtains” (Manhire) 560 Warhol, Andy 107 “Warrandyte Scene” (Wearne) 36 Washbourne, Mona 37 Washington, George 478 Waste Land, The (Eliot) 12, 23, 149, 151, 313, 409, 438, 439 “Water Lubra, The” (Robinson) 58 We Are Going (Oodgeroo) 376 “We sat entwined an hour or two” (Brennan) 566 We Took Their Orders and Are Dead (anthology) 121 Wearne, Alan 28–42, 70, 83, 170, 171, 241, 242, 362, 446, 455, 504, 541, 566, 568 The Australian Popular Songbook 504 “Ballade of Easy Listening, The” 455

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Onomastic Index

“Death of a Go-Go Girl” 36 “Eating Out” 42 “Is my gallant taken?” 70 The Nightmarkets 28, 29, 32, 33 “On Seeing the Film Tom Jones” 36 Out Here 29 “St Bartholomew Remembers Jesus Christ as an Athlete” 36 “Still Talking about Jazz” 171 “Three Sonnets” 171 “Warrandyte Scene” 36 “A World of Our Own” 566, 568 Webb, Francis 77, 330, 334, 336, 339, 372, 567 “Harry” 567 “Leichhardt in Theatre” 330 Webber, Margareta 38 Webby, Elizabeth 237, 238 Wedde, Ian 123, 168, 549 Wedde, Ian, & Harvey McQueen 233 Weekly Press 291 Weekly Press (Christchurch) 284, 290 Weeping for Lost Babylon (Beach) 348–50 Wellington 16, 188, 190, 234, 299, 300, 301, 553, 581, 582, 593 Well-Tempered Wombat series (Fat Possum Press) 49 Wemyss, Ellie 516 Wentworth, William Charles 90, 239 Wertheim, Lucy 153 Wessman, Ralph 569 West Coast (N Z South Island) 290 Westcott, John 36 Westerly (journal) 464 Western Australia 208–10, 302, 305, 315, 323, 331, 368 Wharton, Edith 38 “What a man, what a moon” (Couani) 392 “What Bill Lewis Told His Grandson” (Manifold) 72 “What Happened to me and Bobby?” (Mudrooroo) 303 “What of Sane, The” (Thorne) 93 “What of the Day’s Possible Alternatives” (McCormick) 17

657 “What Soft – Cherubic Creatures” (Dickinson) 418 “When Lambton Quay floated out into the harbour” (Beach) 200 “When You’re Feeling Kind of Bonkers” (Tipping) 310 Whenuakura (Taranaki, N Z ) 557 Whether the Will Is Free (Stead) 11 “Whether the Will Is Free” (Stead) 11 “Which Bank” (Goodfellow) 351 Whimp, Grahame 552 Whirling (Wallace-Crabbe) 540 Whispers from the Faraway South (tr. Raghid Nahhas) 356–59 Whitaker, Celia 515 Whitcoulls 577 White, Patrick 34, 114, 241, 247, 535, 576, 577, 583; The Tree of Man 241 Whiteley, Brett 127, 424, 425 Whitlam, Gough 193 Whitman, Walt 74, 107, 157, 162, 224, 302, 355, 383, 417, 426, 450, 540, 586; “Song of Myself” 450 “Whitsun Weddings, The” (Larkin) 32, 409 Whittier, John Greenleaf 516 Whittle Family 192 Wickham, Anna 501, 519; “Paradox” 501 Wife to Mr Milton (Graves) 318 Wiggins, Adrian 370 Wilbur, Richard 359 “Wild Night – Wild Nights!” (Dickinson) 418 Wildcat Falling (Mudrooroo) 302 Wilde, Oscar 426, 427, 507 Wilde, W.H. 205, 206, 207, 208 Wildgrass Press 103 Wilding, Michael 94, 96, 97, 110, 111, 221 Wilkes, G.A. 238 “Will Those Responsible Come Forward?” (Clive James) 310 William Street (Hiener) 45 Williams, Lauren xiii, xvii, 325, 348, 367, 463, 464–74 Bad Love Poems 471 “A Bad Night at the Sydenham” 467

658 “The Bullshit of Love” 472 “Colombian Documentary” 473 “Distance” 468 “Divorce” 471 Driven to Talk to Strangers 466, 467 “Driving Towards Yass” 471 “Dull Boys” 468 “Eloquent” 472 “The Ever Popular Tune” 472, 473 “Fact Is” 467 “Flamenco” 468 “Go to the Back of the Class” 468 “The Greatest Song” 470 High and Low 468 Invisible Tattoos 466, 467, 471, 472, 473, 474 “Jennifer Keyte’s Face” 469 “Killer Instinct” 471 “A Kind of Drowning” 472 “Local” 467 “Montsalvat” 468 “Night Train” 471 “Old Flame Extinguisher” 471 “On being ditched by a bastard” 471 “On Performance Poetry” 466 “The Poetic O” 472 “Reflection” 467 The Sad Anthropologist 468, 469, 470, 471 “The Sad Anthropologist” 470, 471 “Seeing Elle Macpherson” 467 “Sex” 468 “Shout” 467 “Sightseeing for the Blind” 470 “Sometimes” 467 “These Weird Years” 468 “Uncollected” 473 “Unformed Poem to a Potential Lover” 473, 474 “Vision” 471 “Young Female Poet” 469 Williams, Mark 584 Williams, Max 113 Williams, Michael 550 Williams, William Carlos 34, 353, 437, 438, 440 Paterson 436, 438 “The Red Wheelbarrow” 436, 437, 439

THE POET IC EYE

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Williams, Tennessee, The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll 241 Williamson, David 581 Wilmot, Frank 512 Wilson, Edmund 448 Wilson, John 481 Wilson, Philip 144 Wilson, Scott 15 “Wind at Your Door, The” (FitzGerald) 330, 336, 337, 338 Windsor, Tony 321 “Wingatui” (Manhire) 560 Winter Light (Dane Thwaites) 326 Winter, Jay 511 Winterbottom, dir. Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (dir. Michael 2005) 544 Winters, Yvor 106 Wisps of Tussock (David McKee Wright) 289, 297, 299 With One Skin Less (Hammial) 326 “Within the Traveller’s Eye” (Gray) 492 “Witnesses, The” (Hewett) 566 Wittek, Terri 448 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 282, 283, 340, 343, 571 Witting, Amy 491 Wollongong 171, 445 “Woman Problem, The” (Fairburn) 152, 153 “Woman with a Mandolin” (Beckmann) 344 Woman’s Budget 270 Women of Trachis (Sophocles) 508 Women, Soldiers and Patriots National League 522 Wonderland of the North, The (Cross) 268, 271 Wood, Judy 603 Woolloomooloo 219 Wordhord: Contemporary Western Australian Poetry (ed. Haskell & Fraser) - BEGIN 203– 205, 208 “Words on a First Waking” (Hunt) 22 “Words to a Lover” (Harris) 346 Wordsworth, William 4, 15, 289, 293, 294, 295, 309, 370, 393, 425, 426, 505, 507; “Now we are Seven” 309 Worker, The (newspaper) 206, 211, 262, 263, 272, 275, 301, 521



Onomastic Index

“Workshop, The” (Manhire) 562 “World as Meditation, The” (Stevens) 32 “World of Our Own, A” (Wearne) 566, 568 World War One 69–71, 211, 501, 504, 510–30, 567 World War Two 145, 530 Worrell, Eric 55 Worsley, Commander Frank Arthur 337, 338 “Worsley Enchanted” (Stewart) 330 Wreckless Eric 322 Wright, Annie 286 Wright, David McKee xvi, 60, 120, 121, 149, 206, 211, 247, 248–50, 251, 253, 254, 255, 257, 258, 261, 271, 272, 274, 275, 276, 283–301, 331, 382, 383– 87, 581 “Aorangi” 293 Aorangi and Other Verses 289, 291 “Black Friday” 384–87 “By Marion’s Grave” 295 “Christmas Carol” 289 “The Cycads” 3 “Demos and the New Zealand Liberals” 292 “Facility” 289 “Fair in Love or War” 291 “Fern Fronds and Mountain Daisies” 284, 285 “For Australia” 383–84 “Hellas at Watson’s Bay” 120 An Irish Heart 288 The Lost Prima Donna 300 “Manapouri” 289 “Maniototo” 294 “Mignonette” 291 “Nell” 295 New Zealand Chimes 289 “Once Again” 296, 297 “Passing Vesuvius” 297 “The Place Where I Was Born” 287 “Poetry and – Joy” 301 “The Poisoner’s Lament” 290 “Sea Dreams” 295

659 “Song” 296 Station Ballads 288, 289, 297, 298 “Tussock and Asphalt Rhymes” 298 “Waitangi” 293, 294 Wisps of Tussock 289, 297, 299 Wright, David McKee, Jr. 301 Wright, Jane 287 Wright, Judith 3, 238, 332, 356, 358, 361, 372, 441, 464, 532; “The Company of Lovers” 356 Wright, Robert J. 288, 301 Wright, Rev. Dr. William 284, 286 Wright, Ullin McKee 256, 257 Wyse, Imogen 46 “Yadasi Clips” (Manhire) 561 Yarn, Rave and Red Herring (Shortis) 73–82, 129 Yarwood, A.T. (Sandy) 278 Yasbincek, Morgan 367 Yeats, W.B. 22, 57, 59, 62, 120, 213, 281, 340, 343, 427, 527, 531, 551; “A Coat” 62, 281 “Yes T.S.: A Narrative” (Stead) 429 Ylem (Stockhausen) 8, 14 Yoko Ono 505 “You Have A Lot To Lose” (Stead) 9 “Young Female Poet” (Lauren Williams) 469 Young New Zealand Poets, The (ed. Baysting) 188, 348 Young, Loretta 41 Younger Australian Poets, The (ed. Gray & Lehmann) 121 Your Friendly Fascist (magazine) 48 Z Cars 32 Zagni, Ivan 156 Zen 6, 7, 11, 12, 14, 174, 325, 349, 354, 405, 561, 585 Zep, Jo Jo 39 Zervos, Komminos 196, 348 Zwicky, Fay 203, 204, 367, 395, 491, 509; “Mrs Noah Speaks” (395

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