Spatial Relations. Volume One : Essays, Reviews, Commentaries, and Chorography [1 ed.] 9789401209380, 9789042036772

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Spatial Relations Volume One

C

ROSS ULTURES

Readings in Post / Colonial Literatures and Cultures in English

161 SERIES EDITORS

Gordon Collier (Giessen)

Bénédicte Ledent (Liège) CO-FOUNDING EDITOR Hena

Maes–Jelinek

Geoffrey Davis (Aachen)

Spatial Relations Volume One Essays, Reviews, Commentaries, and Chorography

John Kinsella Edited with Introduction by Gordon Collier

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2013

COVER PAINT INGS: Shaun Atkinson Right: “Wallcliffe Road Series 2” (2007; oil and gold leaf on panel, 185cmx55cm) Left: “Wallcliffe Road Series ‘Blue’” (2007; oil and silver leaf on canvas, 65x165cm) Courtesy of Jahroc Galleries, www.jahroc.com.au COVER DESIGN: Gordon Collier Copyright in the original material remains with John Kinsella. Copyright in this collection resides with Rodopi. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. Volume I ISBN: 978-90-420-3677-2 Volume I + II ISBN: 978-90-420-3676-5 E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-0938-0 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2013 Printed in The Netherlands

Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction

ix xi

On Australian Poetry and Poets Generalities Literature of Australia Past Quarantined Spaces, Groups, and a Crisis of Modernism Towards a Contemporary Australian Poetic The Newer Australian Poetry

5 8 38 51

Florilegia Hybridizing Zones Idiosyncrasy and the Craft of Poetry The New Penguin China’s Australia Anthology Talking Islands (with Alvin Pang) Sighting The Poetic Pulse of Western Australia Pulped Factions: Rivalries in Australian Poetry Notes Towards Anthologizing the Australian Pastoral Poem “Farther off than Australia” (with Tracy Ryan) Breaking Down the Barriers On the Prospects of Keeping Good Company Fremantle Press New Poets We Have to Have

65 71 78 100 103 107 122 125 127 130 135 138 142

Longer Views on Individuals Robert Adamson — A Juxtaposition of Essences — On the Collaboration of Robert Adamson and Juno Gemes David Brooks — Urban Elegies — The Balcony — The Sons of Clovis Michael Dransfield — A Retrospective Lionel Fogarty — The Hybridizing of a Poetry Dorothy Hewett David McComb — In Between Words — Beautiful Waste Les Murray — Incalculable Influence — Speaking to People Ouyang Yu — The Space of the Tale — Letter to Ouyang Yu Charmaine Papertalk–Green — Simply Charmaine — Charmaine Papertalk–Green Peter Porter — Crossing Between Worlds — Outdoing Himself — In Memoriam — The Rest on the Flight — Master Missed — The Rivers Project Randolph Stow — Randolph Stow (1935–2010): An Introduction to His Poetry

151 165 167 171 174 181 190 201 203 214 218 222 224 231 236 239 241 247 258 261 270 274 278

Andrew Taylor — On Commissioning the Collected Poems for Salt Publishing Judith Wright — The Complexity of Design

325 329

Points of Contact — INTERNATIONAL Vanishing Points Preface to Salt International Regionalism and Poetryetc A Poet Laureate for Australia? God Forbid! The Work of Robert Sullivan The Steady Vision of a Modernist Makar On Patrick Lane, and Patrick Lane on Himself Plagiarism: A Beginner’s Guide From Assimilation to Multiculturalism A Poet of Understanding

343 345 348 353 357 361 366 376 378 384

— ENGLISH POETS Wound Responses (with Rod Mengham) “Rich in Vitamin C” Primary Evidence A Panegyric

— POETS

IN

391 394 396 399

NORTH AMERICA

Correspondents by the Metre The L A N G U A G E Poets Memento Mori Show Me the Way to Go, Homer Geographies Seen and Unseen Healing the Damage Done Brooding Consequence Pastoral Metaphysics

407 412 417 425 427 431 437 439

442

Codex of Myth The End Is Affirmation

449

Reviews & Short Pieces: Australiana Fair Enough?

461

Witness to Restoration

464

Poetaction of Desire Out of ‘Thraldom’

466

“This Enquiry Into You”

468

Launch Speech as Object: On Niall Lucy’s Pomo Oz

472

Seams of Confirmation and Doubt

476

Missing the Boat

480

A Book of Edges

483

Fringe Benefits

486

On the Poetry of Kate Lilley

489

Seeing the Light: Redemptive Language

491

Peaty Richness

495

Driving and Binding

498

Back in Black

501

In the Wings Theatre Reviews

507

A Picture of Doctor Faustus

530

A Gesture Towards a Poetics of Theatre

536

My Comus, Milton’s Comus

539

Onomastic Index

543

Acknowledgements

John Kinsella wishes to thank the University of Western Australia, where he is a Professorial Research Fellow. A warm debt of gratitude is owed to Dennis Haskell and the Westerly Centre. Special thanks go to Rod Mengham, Philip Mead, Peter Pierce, and my editor, Gordon Collier. And as always, special thanks to Tracy Ryan, to whom I [and Gordon; Ed.] dedicate these volumes. John Kinsella wishes to acknowledge that his references to Indigenous literature, knowledges, and place are subjective, and that readers wishing to inform themselves better of the issues discussed should consult the increasingly wide and always rich body of knowledge and information published by Indigenous authors. Further, for specific information relating to specific places, Indigenous people, especially elders, should be consulted, and dialogue entered into. I have done this where possible, and with enthusiasm, belief, and commitment. Further, I wish to acknowledge and pay my respects to the traditional custodians of the land I write, and signal my gratitude for my living on and moving through traditional lands. My appreciation to Alvin Pang and Ethos Books (Singapore) for allowing his coauthored piece to feature here. And thanks to Ouyang Yu for permission to republish my pieces in this volume. Special thanks to Chris Hamilton–Emery at Salt Publishing and to Clive Newman, Ray Coffey, and Georgia Richter at Fremantle Arts Centre Press. And special thanks to the University of Queensland Press, Véhicule Press, and my various editors at newspapers and journals over the years, and also to Niall Lucy. “Groups and mavericks” appeared in briefer form in The Cambridge History of Australian Literature, ed. Peter Pierce (Cambridge, New York & Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2009): 473–97. The essay “Randolph Stow (1935–2010): An Introduction to His Poetry” was commissioned by Fremantle Press, Western Australia in 2012 to introduce The Land’s Meaning: new selected poems of Randolph Stow and is reproduced in the present essay collection by arrangement with the Press.

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Much expanded in the present book are the “Introduction” and section notes to the Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry, ed. John Kinsella (Camberwell, Victoria: Penguin, 2009): 1–13. Many thanks to Carcanet for the “Introduction” to Judith Wright, A Human Pattern: Selected Poems (1990; Manchester: Carcanet, 1992): xvii–xxvii.

Reprinted by courtesy of Signal Editions / Véhicule Press (Montreal): the “Introduction” to George Ellenbogen, Morning Gothic: New and Selected Poems, ill. Helene Leneveu & Irving Ellenbogen (2007). Most of the remaining pieces in this volume appeared under the following imprints, to all of which thanks. Journal of Commonwealth Literature Kunapipi Limelight The Long Poem Newsletter Macmillan Manhattan Review Midwest Times Notre Dame Review The Observer Otherland Overland Poetry (Chicago) Poetry Review Salt Publishing Semtext Siglo Southerly The Spokesman Sunline Press Sydney Morning Herald Thumbscrew Turnrow University of Queensland Press Véhicule Press W.W. Norton The West Australian The Wolf

American Book Review Arc Publications Ars Interpres Artes Artful Dodge Australian Literary Review Australian Book Review The Australian’s Review of Books B B C Radio BBC3

Bloodaxe Blue Dog Brandl & Schlesinger Carcanet Craftsman House Denver Quarterly Ethos Books (Singapore) Folio / Salt Fremantle Arts Centre Press Fremantle Press Fremantle Arts Review Fulcrum The Guardian Heaventree Press Herla Publishing Indigo Island

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Introduction

— OPINION —

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I R E A D T H E W O R D ‘ V E G A N ’, I idly imagined a humanoid creature out of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (is there a star called Vega?) in syncretistic combination with some New Age adherent feasting on veggies. It therefore came as a pleasant surprise, when John Kinsella visited my university during a stay in Europe (long ago now), to find a healthy, normal- and good-looking man with hair of a patrician, premature grey, engaging energetically with my students, proactively clarifying his statements but making no concessions to relative German ignorance about Western Australia or aspects of the breadth and depth of the intellectual world he touched on. There were a few quietly tense moments at my favourite Chinese restaurant, but luckily there was a microscopic range of relatively vegetarian dishes on the menu, and John made his – veganized: i.e. rigorously modified – selection with grace. John’s choices of what to write on, and his ductus in doing so, are likewise blessed with grace – grace of articulation and of engagement. His fascination, for example, with the nexus between the writer’s life and the life (craft) of the writer is revealed in the intensity of his conversation with the Canadian poet Patrick Lane, where his interview questions are acutely tuned to Lane’s similar readiness to explore the textures of his life-history. Apropos conversation, it may appear curious to draw attention to the words of others when it’s John’s writing that is on display in these two volumes, but the dialogues with Tracy Ryan and Rosanna Warren (poet–artist and scholar, and daughter of Robert Penn Warren) are absorbing for the intense, rich reflection and argument generated by his interlocutors – thoughts that possess their own character and precision, yet are there because John’s own commitment to his craft is being conveyed with disarming, infectious openness. He is sensitively observant about the ‘bio-ethology’ of Australian poetry – the socio-cultural mechanisms that produce allegiances and groupings and, conversely, resistant ‘maverick’ or ‘larrikin’ attitudes, programmes, and poetics – as well as to American influences on this poetry, although he marshalls the HENEVER

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names of both Australian and American poets and groupings as simple, for him self-evident, counters, rather than feeling any need to demonstrate and illustrate affinities and contiguities of style and thought. By the same token, he takes a pretty sotto voce, even modest, approach to his own political espousals – environmentalism, animal rights, republicanism, anarcho-socialism – some of which might still look alarmingly radical for Ocker sensibilities. Although a likeably stylish writer, John is not a stylist, in the way of (to reclaim a now disinvested New-Critical context), say, a Lionel Trilling or Allen Tate or John Crowe Ransom (all, like John, both academics and creative writers), or (to cleave closer to one of John’s more recent shibboleths, the New York School), say, a John Ashbery (also, like JK, a poet and, in a different way, an art critic). I don’t mean that John’s ductus is slap-dash, but that there is a disjunction between the rigorous exuberance and precision of his poetry and the ways in which his language reaches out to the reader in his criticism. It is ‘occasional’ criticism, for occasions and on the fly, as it were. Very often the sentence-structure and idiomatism are relaxed to a fault. Although many of his themes are ‘aesthetic’ to a point where a tall-poppy-severing curmudgeon might level the charge of ‘elitism’, the language seems intent on being part of a ‘vernacular republic’. There is no didacticism, but there is almost always a pulse of casual out-reach to a readership that John generously and unpatronizingly assumes will have open ears and eyes and a class-room willingness (I know that this is a vain wish these days) to be amiably instructed. The reader will at times perhaps have the impression that my function as editor has involved wilful dereliction of duty – in some sections (particularly those devoted to poetry anthologies and individual Australian poets) it can be déjà lu all the way. There’s no point in putting the patient on an editorial gurney and wheeling it into the operating theatre, save perhaps for some minor plastic surgery.1 Judgments, praise, factual framings, mantras, even af1

It should be said, however, that John, although largely preserving the integrity of such pieces for the sake of the ‘historical record’, has, in the case of book reviews and pieces devoted to personal reflection and recollection, undertaken considerable reworking, so that this material, in both volumes, is often quite different or longer (sometimes much much longer) than in the original journal / newspaper manifestations. Conversely, there have also been acts of restoration, in the not infrequent cases where newspapers cut them down to fit their space. There are also other exceptions such as the Peter Porter Max is Missing and Lionel Fogarty pieces, which John expanded somewhat at my request. With regard to editorial annotation, it should be mentioned that the nature of most journalistic and essayistic contexts precluded detailed biblio-

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fectionate obsessions – these recur, and can assume a catechistical quality, but they are wellnigh inescapable if one is dealing with the same range of subjectmatter because of the exigencies of what is ambiguously termed ‘occasional’ publication. ‘Occasional’, because John has so often written for particular publishing occasions; ‘so often’, because John has been, and remains, serenely intent and even Methodistically devout (I am thinking here particularly of the protean yet consistent journalism of Derek Walcott or Gabriel García Márquez) in his far from ‘occasional’, prolific writing. He is, at times, a sort of inexhaustibly hyperactive, proselytizing politician, moving from tent-show to train-stop to stump speech, delivering electioneering policy-points in his own reiterative words, without benefit of a ghosting speech-writer. For me as editor (and apropos of “mantra”), the matter of the déjà lu often has a magical quality to it, when professional ‘facts’ and aesthetic evaluations dropped in casually here, and again there and there, begin to nudge one towards a true awareness of their centrality in John’s life and ethos. This is particularly the case in the circlings and re-circlings of memory involved in reflection on childhood and youth, and on home landscapes and their natural and human occupants. Here especially, the light of local context, both constant and shifting, makes the scintillae, facets, and fondly polished gemstones of past and present sparkle and gleam with fresh radiance. John’s generosity is boundless to a fault (apart from global indictments of colonial and colonialist depredation en passant, there is an absence of the bracingly unfair, the exhilaratingly vicious, that can so often pass for critical discrimination). There can be – a highly exceptional mood: flurry of pigeons in a broad, accommodating sun-benign piazza – anger, an insurrection against ethical principles betrayed, as in his broadsides against Tim Flannery, Inga Clendinnen, and Frank Welsh. There can be finely differentiating reservations (as when discussing Coral Hull’s poetry), but always in a constructive spirit and always bracketed by appreciation. He risks being Janus-faced in his understandable (because internationalist) valorizing of the hybrid: tacitly spurning the Bloomian hypothesis of the anxiety of influence (though he clearly is otherwise on the best of terms with Bloom, a similarly compendious thinker), he can note favourably the manifold influences on specific Australian poets of the work of specific British, European, and American poets, graphical references for authors, thinkers, artists, and works mentioned in passing. Wherever I have felt that such information would be of profit to, or still the curiosity of, the reader, I have inserted footnotes.

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and in the next breath praise his chosen poets for their uniqueness. ‘Unique’ here, for the tired cynic, runs the risk of becoming debased coinage rather than well-rubbed valid currency, but the epithet does prompt the question of whether the responsibly creative writer is not likely to turn out to be his or her own singularity; and does yield the conclusion that ‘unique’, for John, is his way of expressing his personal, almost emotionally freighted admiration for the ‘stand-out’, seriously eye-catching, and mind-holding nature of a given writer’s thought, aesthetic, and /or poetic. Emily Apter, in “On Translation in a Global Market” (Public Culture 13.1/33, Winter 2001), has observed, of the way in which writers can fall through the grate of today’s exoticizing niche readerships, that “a strong, institutionally well-connected, London-based Australian poet like John Kinsella routinely fails to warrant inclusion in the global canon even though his poetry uses his native landscape to brilliant effect as the stage for futurist visitations by robots and psychics. Naturalized in the British and American literary market, his writing is not exotic enough, while a poet like Lionel Fogarty – whose dense, compelling verse incorporates Aboriginal language – fails to cross over because his writing remains too exotic for mainstream taste.” Apter’s acuity here pinpoints a number of serendipities, not least John’s deep respect for the almost autistic creativity of Fogarty, which I share, and which in large part derives from a sense of embattlement at historical Aboriginal marginalization. Lionel writes a new, post-Murri Indigenous ecology, setting up the boundaries of his own environment, reclaiming the terra nullius. I would hesitate to say that John is an outlaw spirit of this kind (though I suspect that Fogarty’s is a voice he would like to have had), but he does indeed push at frontiers of expression in his poetry (the exuberance reminds me of the earthbound yet intellectually high-flying energies of Ian Wedde) and at the midden of crass materialism rising from Australian insouciance about the natural environment. I’m not so sure that John’s writing is not ‘exotic’ in a paradoxical way, at least against this backdrop of postmodern technological reification, where poetry that follows in the grand tradition of nature-writing may seem out of place, or in its own place, not ‘ours’ any more, particularly when he then synthesizes this commitment, this love, with a comet’s tail of illustrious intertexts (Dantean, at least, as with Derek Walcott, if not reaching Homeric pitch, though all his energies are epical). These miscellaneous lucubrations have perhaps been prowling the boundaries of biography and the self (so absorbingly on display in John’s pointillistic explorations of Geraldton, a Western Australian wheatlands umbilicus

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he shares with Randolph Stow, on whom he writes discerningly). So it might not be a bad idea to provide some immersion in life-facts at this juncture, in the (obvious) expectation that such data may shed light on John Kinsella as a poet – and, here, prose writer – in and beyond the terms of Emily Apter’s characterization of him. — FACT — John Kinsella is the author of more than thirty books. He has also edited and / or introduced dozens of poetry volumes by other poets. His many prizes and awards for his own work include the Grace Leven Poetry Prize, the John Bray Award for Poetry from the Adelaide Festival, the Age Poetry Book of the Year Award, the Western Australian Premier’s Book Award for Poetry (three times), the 2006 Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards /Arts Queensland Judith Wright Calanthe Prize for Poetry, a Young Australian Creative Fellowship from the former Prime Minister of Australia, Paul Keating, the 2008 Christopher Brennan Award, the 2012 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry, and senior Fellowships from the Literature Board of the Australia Council. His Poems 1980–1994 and The Hunt (a Poetry Book Society Recommendation) were published in 1998. His other books of poetry include (this is not a complete listing) Night Parrots (1989), Full Fathom Five and Syzygy (both 1993), The Silo: A Pastoral Symphony (1995 / 98), The New Arcadia: Poems and The Radnoti Poems (both 1996), Lightning Tree and The Undertow: New & Selected Poems (both 1996), Fenland Pastorals (1999), Visitants (1999), Wheatlands (with Dorothy Hewett) and Zoo (with Coral Hull) (both 2000), The Hierarchy of Sheep (2001), Speed Factory (2002), Doppler Effect (2004), America, or Glow (A Poem) (introduced by Peter Porter, 2006), Fast, Loose Beginnings: A Memoir of Intoxications (2006), Derrida Poems (introduction by Niall Lucy, 2007), Studies of the Sublime and Beautiful and Divine Comedy: Journeys Through a Regional Geography (both 2008), and Jam Tree Gully and Armour (both 2011). Most recent is The Jaguar’s Dream: Translations, Adaptations, Versions, Extrapolations, Interpolations, Afters, Takes and Departures (2012). He was commissioned to create a textual adaptation of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung for the 2003 Perth Festival, and is the author of four verse plays (collected as Divinations, 2003). Two novels, Genre (1997) and Post-colonial (2010) go hand in hand with short stories, gathered in Grappling Eros (1998), Conspiracies (with Tracy Ryan, 2003), and In the Shade of the Shady Tree: Stories of Wheatbelt Australia (2012).

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Founding editor for the international literary publisher Salt, John is also a Consultant Editor to Westerly (C S A L , University of Western Australia), Cambridge correspondent for Overland (Melbourne, Australia), and International Editor of the Kenyon Review. He was senior poetry critic for the Observer newspaper (U K ), wrote reviews for Scotland on Sunday and The Scotsman, and now reviews for The Australian. He has co-edited special issues on and of Australian poetry for the American journal Poetry with Joseph Parisi (1996) and for Poetry Review, co-edited with Peter Forbes (1999), an issue of Kunapipi on intercultural poetics (1999), a pastoral issue of TriQuarterly with Susan Stewart (2003), further special issues of international literary journals, and The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry (2009), along with numerous other anthologies and editions of Australian poets (such as Michael Dransfield and Rodney Hall), the introductions to which are contained in the present two-volume selection. He was appointed the Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College in the U S A for 2001, where he was Professor of English until 2005. He has been a Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia, where he is a Professorial Research Fellow, and is also Adjunct Professor to Edith Cowan University, Western Australia, where he was a founding Principal of the Landscape and Language Centre. His work has been or is being translated into many languages, including French, German, Chinese, Dutch, Spanish, and Russian. His volume Peripheral Light: New and Selected Poems (selected and introduced by Harold Bloom), was published in 2003 by Norton in the U S A and the U K , and by Fremantle Arts Centre Press in Australia. Peripheral Light was shortlisted for the A L S Gold Medal and won the 2004 Western Australian Premier’s Book Award for Poetry; it was also a Washington Post recommended poetry book. His prose works – critical, ecological, and autobiographical – include Auto (2001), Fast, Loose Beginnings: A Memoir of Intoxications (2006), Disclosed Poetics: Beyond Landscape and Lyricism (2007), Contrary Rhetoric: Lectures on Landscape and Language (2008), and Activist Poetics: Anarchy in the Avon Valley (edited by Niall Lucy, 2010). He has an M A from Cambridge University and an M A and a P h D from Edith Cowan University. He originally studied as an undergraduate at the University of Western Australia, where he has worked on a variety of projects over the years, including the On-line Anthology of Western Australian Writing through the Scholars’ Centre at the Reid Library, a project coordinated and originated by Dr Toby Burrows. He has served as Judith E. Wilson Fel-

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low in Poetry for the English Faculty at Cambridge University and remains a Fellow of Churchill College. Apart from committee work and teaching at Cambridge, he was also on College Council for a year. At Kenyon College, he originated a number of teaching courses. Among his numerous academic and writing appointments are a Hurst Visiting Professorship at Washington University, Saint Louis, and residencies at Brown University, Rhode Island, and Georgia State University, Athens, Georgia, U S A . John’s commitment to issues of ecology in the broadest sense was underscored in 2011 when, in the wake of the same decision by the poet Alice Oswald, he declared his withdrawal from the shortlist of the Poetry Book Society’s T.S. Eliot Prize (for his book Aurum) in protest at the involvement in the Prize of the investment management (hedge-fund) firm Aurum Funds. If this is a reactive gesture, he is also proactive – for example, in establishing two annual awards open to Cambridge University students (the John Kinsella / Tracy Ryan Poetry Prize and The Other Prize, the latter for play-writing). Together with his partner, the aforementioned poet Tracy Ryan, he runs the ecoblogspot Mutually Said: Poets Vegan Anarchist Pacifist. John has worked with Forrest Gander on Redstart: An Ecological Poetics (2012), an exploration in poetry and prose of the ‘killing of the land’. This psychogram of the intimate relation between man and his environment followed closely on a similarly, but more phenomenologically themed book, Sand (2010), a collaboration with the Melbourne-born, Western Australian fiction writer Robert Drewe. The notions of the underdog and of white rapprochement with Indigenous Australia are reflected in a lively historical account, co-written with Niall Lucy, of a colonial outlaw, The Ballad of Moondyne Joe (2012). These are all commitments reflected, along with many others, in the essays, reviews, manifestoes, and memoirs that follow. a

O N A USTRALIAN P OETRY

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P OETS

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– G ENERALITIES

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Literature of Australia Past1

T

in universities is often, strangely, a fraught business when it comes to deciding which works should be prioritized and what contexts they should be taught in. Comparative with other contemporary works in the same language, from the same country? In terms of cultural coordinates, political and ethical similarities and differences? In terms of aesthetic and prosodic qualities or subterfuges? Or just because the teacher just likes or respects a particular work? Whatever the approach, teachers of contemporary writing inevitably make some form of qualification against or through edifices of historically established literatures and thought, and new writing must necessarily speak in that context whether it likes it or not. However, although the mapping of communal, regional, national and even international literary trends is de rigueur in most universities, it seems to me problematical to declare what should be taught when attempting to survey and comprehend a particular environment of creative writing activity. Of course, literary history proffers its salient and pivotal points, its literary highlights that branch off into a myriad of new directions through their influence. But once we start declaring what they should be, especially when foisting a national literature on students /readers, and how and why they should be taught in universities, we are blatantly gatekeeping: setting agendas of control and manipulation. The teacher becomes an extension of the state in more ways than being its employee or citizen. In the light of these issues, it is surely vital to think in terms of a national literature, historically or contemporary, with flexibility and an openness to change and reassessment. To have a literary heritage declared, embodied as essential, is stifling in so many ways. In a recent article in The Age newspaper, Michael Heyward rightly lamented the under-appreciation of literary works of earlier Australia.2 But surely it

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HE TEACHING OF CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

“An Australian canon will only damage Australian literature,” The Guardian (8 March 2012). 2 Michael Heyward, “Classics going to waste: Out of print, out of mind? That's hardly the way to treat Australian literature,” The Age (22 January 2012).

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should be ‘Australias’, plural? This is part of the problem I have with Heyward’s argument, which I agree with, insofar as I feel all literary works should be made available, where such availability doesn’t come at too great a cost to environment or people. In fact, though I am no great fan of the online world, it seems to be the ever-expanding repository of all out-of-print, ‘lost’, ‘neglected’, or non-commercially viable literature. What’s more, out-of-copyright should be ‘free’. Australia has not been backward in this, as is proved by the early ‘historical’ work on the Sydney University S E T I S site (http://setis .library.usyd.edu.au/). Sure, some of this ‘early’ work of colonized Australia is as far from a ‘classic’ as you can get. Some is racist, sexist, and bigoted, and might only have ‘academic’ interest; but it’s there. The declaration of a nation’s ‘classics’ becomes part of nation-building and the politics of control and exclusion that are part of that machinery. A text used in that way may well be worthy of being reprinted or read – a text does its own thing, however it is bent to a cause (though this cause may be denied) – but it should live outside the argument of ‘heritage’. Kenneth Slessor (1901–71), a fine Australian modernist poet, is used as a case in point. Well looked-after by posterity, he saturates anthology after anthology of Australian poetry (another mode of continuance and reverence for heritage). He fulfils the script of Australian ‘classic’ because he has qualities of Australian ‘place’ (from the enigmatic and somewhat mysterious ‘country’ and mythological colonial to the matter-of-fact, from the Harbour to the war dead in foreign lands), which merge with a modernist international consciousness. He was a journalist of note, a war correspondent, an editor, and he didn’t ‘over-produce’ (less dilution of ‘classic’ status). To be Australian and worldly at once, to project outwards as well as inwards, helps. And I agree with this; but it worries me if it’s merely to reinforce ‘who we are’, when who we are is often violent, racist, environmentally destructive, and collectively – in an ongoing colonialism exemplified by mining and pastoral companies – thieves (Indigenous Australians, including Indigenous writers – have still received no systematic compensation for the theft of land and all related to it). The fact is, there is no one Australia and never has been. Nor is there an English-language-only Australia, thank goodness. Australian English-language authors have often looked to Britain (and America), not only because of a cultural cringe or a belief that the authority of the entire English canon might filter out and leave them a minuscule amount of space in the Grand History,

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On Australian Poetry and Poets: Generalities

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but because Australia’s is such a small literary market. You don’t potentially sell as many books. Now, I think this is repugnant thinking – a book is as strong as its reader anywhere at any time, but few writers don’t hope for a pay-day. And some will happily have that pay-day in editions in as many countries as possible. What they write about may be more at issue here. Australian ‘classics’ are too often limited to texts that work as (whether intended to do so or not) affirmation of Australian identity: about being Australian, if not being in Australia. Australians writing of Australia from beyond its shores show the angst and anxiety they should (apparently) show about not being ‘home’. Their absence becomes positive reinforcement, even if there is a critical tone to their work. In fact, the much-lauded Miles Franklin Awards for a novel are unapologetically nationalistic: “published novel or play portraying Australian life in any of its phases.” Which is not to say that it has to be landscape-specific – rather, that it needs to deal with Australiannness in some way. That’s what ‘classics’ are about in this context, and it’s what worries me. And I say this as a poet almost entirely concerned with place, and a specific (wheatbelt) place at that, which I write of inside and outside Australia with varying degrees of anxiety and tension (for all the above reasons and more). Today I was supervising Australian literature at Cambridge. One student recognized the anxiety in a story by Henry Lawson (who sought the literary way in London); with another, I pointed towards Henry Handel Richardson (who found her literary self in Europe). And with yet another, I discussed feminism, nationalism, and racism in Miles Franklin. But the most significant recommendation I made was to read Lionel Fogarty, an Indigenous Australian poet who doesn’t feed nationalism, affirms his community and people, and reinforces identity without pursuing ‘classic’ status. In using the recuperation of literary works as part of a canonical ploy to create a sense of national identity, to define the ‘classics’ by which we might anchor our own vicarious and precarious identities, we run the risk of affirming the many other dubious tenets of any nationalism. Nationalism is about exclusion, about quarantine, about forms of community in which consensus, the right of all to have a say, is ceded to bodies of authority. Nothing exemplifies this more than condemning universities for not teaching enough of the literary texts of the nation (which help fund them, and which they are supposed, in varying degrees, to ‘represent’). If a book is out of print, it is difficult for a university to set it as a text. There’s a circular logic

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at work here, with publishers relying in part on course settings and teachers relying on publishers. Digitized versions are changing the dynamic somewhat. I have nothing against the teaching of ‘Australian literature’, and have, indeed, taught a great deal of it myself in America, Britain, and Australia. But not teaching those ‘classic’ texts doesn’t mean one is doing a disservice to Australian writing. In fact, teaching them alongside non-classics, or, indeed, teaching works that weren’t part of the zeitgeist in their time, can often be more illuminating, more challenging to the status quo, and more generative. One could start by trying to track down, and trace through, texts written in, say, Vietnamese, Australian Greek, Chinese, or German, or even by endeavouring to understand the politics of appropriation involved in materials transliterated (with and without consent) from Indigenous creators /speakers /singers who might well have different versions of what constitutes ‘writing’, and, indeed, of what constitutes the ‘literature’ of a people.

Quarantined Spaces, Groups, and a Crisis of Modernism3

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U S T R A L I A N P O E T R Y A F T E R T H E S E C O N D W O R L D W A R has been strangely isolated from other poetries in English. The usual arguments are that the war, with its massive influx of American troops and the expeditions of Australian soldiers overseas, broke up the intactness of Australian arts in the same way as happened with its economic and social intactness. Similar arguments are made in the context of the Great War, but these are often more enthusiastic than factual. Reaching back further, though so physically isolated, especially prior to air travel, post-settlement/ invasion poetry in Australia has been seen as an extension of primarily European, particularly British /Irish poetries; in essence, an ongoing colonial poetry. I believe, however, that this is untrue. The isolation of Australian poetry and poetics has evolved more by choice than out of circumstances, and its quality comes about from very specific relationships between a consciousness

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“Groups and mavericks,” in The Cambridge History of Australian Literature, ed. Peter Pierce (Cambridge, New York & Melbourne: Cambridge U P , 2009): 473–97.

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of the uniqueness of the Australian landscape and the enormity of dispossessing Indigenous peoples whose relationship with that land is so specific, so varied, and so complex. This is not to say that such conditions haven’t existed elsewhere in the world, but Australia has been resistant to (if deeply troubled about) its place in the broader international community. Even now, in an age of easy air travel and ready communications of diverse kinds, a reiteration of uniqueness and separateness still underlies much Australian writing. It seeks to set itself apart. And even in cases where anthologists seek to be inclusive, or connect with other parts of the world, Australia is constantly defined as such a different space that connection must come through the migrant experience, economics, or other material exchange. An example is an anthology I recently co-edited with Alvin Pang, Over There,4 which juxtaposes contemporary Australian and contemporary Singaporean poets while keeping them in their respective country spaces. Pang and I discuss the many connections between the two countries in our introductions, and seek to encourage further interaction, but still wrestle with the geographical and cultural barriers that exist. This is the result not only of the negatives of nationalism, or a desire for national intactness, but also of the perceptions of Australia as quarantined space. Australia, historically and physically, has been constructed as separate, and this notion underpins an entire continent’s poetics regardless of its sources. The poet Ouyang Yu constantly challenges the hegemony of this Australia in his poems of ‘the Chinese migrant in Australia’. Yu has been highly effective in showing the hypocrisies of the Australian literary establishment (and society at large) in creating a separation between Australians of Anglo-Celtic and European heritages as being historically integrated with the land, and the relationship between, say, Chinese migrants and the Australian land. This connection goes back to before the middle of the nineteenth century and yet is given a minor place in the canonization of a defining national literature. This is especially true with poetry. Ouyang Yu is a maverick – he speaks out and suffers the consequences of his volubility. His declarations against Australia, his country, are often seen in the light of ‘us and them’, and he receives such comments as ‘if he doesn’t like it, why did he come here in the first place?’ Why did any of us come here in the first place? Here’s an extract from Ou4

Over There: Poems from Singapore and Australia, ed. & preface John Kinsella & Alvin Pang, intro. John Kinsella, tr. Eva Sallis & Alvin Pang (Singapore: Ethos, 2008).

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yang Yu’s poem “Fuck You, Australia,” “a country flowing with gold and fuck-holes” – “you thought I had wanted to learn your english that called me nimes / that fucked whenever you could anybody especially us.” Having said he’s a maverick, it’s clear that Ouyang Yu is closely connected with the Chinese community, not only in Melbourne, where he lives, but in Australia at large. As founding editor of the ground-breaking poetry journal Otherland, which publishes poetry in Chinese, primarily written in Australia, and through his extensive translation of English-language Australian literary works into Chinese, Yu delineates a form of group participation that is multi-directional. Some years ago, I wrote an essay on conflicts between different groups in Australian poetry. This included considerations of publishing biases, and associations with particular anthologies and anthologists, and concluded with the notion that poets are self-serving, defensive, and opportunistic. Nothing new in this, and it could apply to any poetry in the world. What is relevant, though, is one of the many responses I received. Deb Comerford, who was writing a thesis on innovative Australian poetry anthologies, decried the fact that I had articulated such friction. She maintained that it was essential for poets to stick together, and that, always in the minority, they need to cherish collaboration, cooperation, and community. She said that there were “lines of gossamer’ connecting poets. I agree up to a point. In establishing a poetry discussion list (poetryetc) via the internet back in the mid-1990s when these things were not common, by working collaboratively with many poets around the world, and being an habitual anthologist, I obviously believe in community of poetry. That said, it is easy to ignore the individualist compulsion of the poet, the desire to be a maverick and to break free of groups. As Australian poets, we have a tradition of internal connection, and a suspicion of the international. I believe the origins of this are in a crisis of identity, that Australian poetry is actually Indigenous poetry (spoken, sung, written on the body, written in sand, transliterated and written in English or whichever language), and that means all others writing out of Australia do so with anxiety. This is why even a basic grand narrative such as ‘modernism’ skews when applied to Australia. The twentieth century has parallel modernisms. In the European sense, there are two major strands, and no doubt many more. There are the false self-advertising placard-waving versions of Pound and Eliot and their ilk, and then there are the technologists of language. Pound used modernism as a smokescreen to promote his own agendas. He was not a combatant in the Great War; nor was Eliot (which is not to suggest that ‘combatant experience’ was the only source of modernist ‘war poetry’). They left the

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modernity of America, went to the anciens régimes and value-systems of colonization, and held their word-placards up, a little like Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg in that favourite clip of Dylan’s. A promotional exercise to become one with the conservatives of their new homelands, their modernism suggested loss and scepticism while always obsequiously planning to belong. On the other hand, the mapping of the destructive powers of modernity in the poetry of Wilfred Owen horrifically goes hand-in-hand with a new freedom of expressiveness about loss; a technology of the word eases open the spaces in the poetries of patriotism – from Rupert Brooke back through to the nature places of Wordsworth and Keats, which still contained the pride of place, no matter their own revolutions in language. The thread of modernism through Owen finds extensions in Russian Futurism on the left, and even Italian Futurism with its militarism and praise of war on the right. A class of modernisms, but parallel to the placard versions of Pound and Eliot – the robber barons come out of the New World hungry for what’s left of the Old. Mina Loy is modernist in the sense that Eliot is not. In the Australian condition (and that’s what it is when we set it up to play against the Euro models), Kenneth Slessor is seen as the modernist agent provocateur. He was of the Eliot and Pound placard-waving kind, and his modernism is a materialist dupe. When he witnessed war first-hand it stopped poetry in him. His silence was modernist, not his poetry-writing.5 The real Australian twentieth-century modernists were all poets directly or indirectly associated with the Great War: Leon Gellert, Zora Cross, and Lesbia Harford. The crisis of Australian modernism in poetry is said to be the Ern Malley hoax, perpetrated by James McAuley and Douglas Stewart. These two soldiers conspired in 1944 to dupe Max Harris and the modernist journal Angry Penguins by making a bricolage and pastiche poet spring like a genius from nowhere. Although both McAuley and Stewart are presented as conservative

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Slessor, one of the greatest Australian poets, is to my mind actually at his most individualistically ‘modernist’ in his (often considered) ‘lesser’ occasional poems published in Smith’s Weekly. His early ‘modernist’ poetry is often lushly imitative and strongly driven by its style. Eliot’s and Pound’s consciousness of a modernist compulsion in literature takes on an aspect of cultural engineering I have always found limiting. Given space, I would explore Eliot, Pound, and Slessor together in the context of Freud’s ‘A level within the ego’ from Mass Psychology and Analysis of the ‘I’. I accept that these are inflammatory statements and accept that many critics see Slessor as a father of Australian modernism. [J.K.]

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poets seeking to show the stupidity of modernists, both are arguably more innovative and modernist, in the Australian sense at least, than many of their more apparently radical contemporaries. It is doubly ironic that these mavericks, who formed a conspiratorial group of two, have spawned so many imitators, imitators who are often instigators, or who at least connected themselves to groups of other poets. I would say that not a crisis in modernism but, rather, a definitively postmodern moment is located in the Ern Malley hoax. A poet such as Francis Webb – anxious both about his Catholicism and his deteriorating mental state, and his search for the quiddities of language and their relationship to historical events, music, myth, horror implicit in even calm events, and a crisis of maintaining composure and control – is not directly connected to the Ern Malley poems, but is certainly congruent with them in affect. Webb was always perceived as a loner, and his mental illness both isolated and differentiated him. We might not impose this on a reading of the poems, but they were conditions imposed on his writing of them. An anecdote: I was talking with one of Webb’s supervising doctors about his time in West Ryde Hospital, and he told me Webb had told him that when he had written the beautiful lyrical poem of new-born life, “Five Days Old,” he had held the child and was tormented by the beauty of the moment and a desire to dash the child against a wall. There is none of this tension in the poem. Or is there? It seems an important question to ask.

International Regionalism Webb’s poetry was appreciated up to a point in Australia, but his real recognition came through the English critic Herbert Read, during his sojourn at an Australian university. Read took the word back to Britain. Webb had been a pilot and had served in Canada during the Second World War. He also spent time in an asylum in England. His internationalism was of a peculiar kind: out there, but locked in. Read’s encomium of Webb did not make him a household name in Britain. Few Australian poets have become very well known outside Australia. Their regionalism is not only by default, owing to the isolation of Australia, but, I would argue, is implicit in the regionality of their poems themselves. Judith Wright once said, roughly, that she wrote poems to be read in Australia. But Australians have also been internationalists, and someone like John Tranter, with his writing of Australia through the lens of European and American modernisms, and the abstractions and interests of the New York School of poets, is a prime example. Tranter is a traveller. But

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then, so too is Les Murray, whose interests are so parochial and local, even if his travelling experiences inform a large part of his poetry. In struggling with what I see as a crisis between the international and the regional in Australian poetry, I have coined a simple term to assist in the consideration of this. The term is ‘international regionalism’, and it has a distinctly positive angle: the creation of international communication conduits (if you like) between regional spaces, but with an emphasis on respecting regional integrity. It comes out of a pacifist anarchism, though its application is general and increasingly adaptable (or so I’m finding!). It’s about language and cultural preservation in the face of globalism: creating a universal language of resistance, on the one hand, but a language of interaction and cooperation, on the other. It’s what I call a ‘liminal’ theory. The term ‘international regionalism’ has been adapted and used in many kinds of discourse now. The anthology Landbridge: Contemporary Australian Poetry was the first mainstream publication to make direct reference to it, though I had discussed it in various essays, letters, and on email lists long before that book was released. I originally devised the theory to discuss land-rights issues re settler /invader cultures, appropriation, and Indigenous rights in Australia re the rest of the world. As would be arguable for most national poetries and poetics, it seems that one of the fundamental dynamics observable in Australian poetry, at least retrospectively, in considering any given period, is that between poets operating primarily as individuals and those who see themselves as part of some larger group (or, to use Philip Mead’s term, ‘network’, in a decontextualized sense) in which they form a nodal point in a conversation.6 Of course, often a poet is not even really conscious of being part of some larger movement, but is lumped in by critics or others after the fact. However, many poets see themselves as literally interconnected and part of broader conversations which they drop in and out of as they choose, or feel impelled to engage in. Is there much difference between this collective modus operandi, where participants can operate unseen and at vast distances, and, say, the intimacy of the Melbourne

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The dynamics of contemporary poetics in Australia necessarily take in broader innovative debates ranging from L A N G U A G E poetry through to the ‘Cambridge School’, and many other collective ‘discussions’ ascertaining to how and why poems are written. Interestingly, the rise of the world-wide web stifled conversations around the L A N G U A G E school, rendering it ‘post-’ after only a short while. Alienation of text was supplanted with linguistic innovation: a generative challenge to the problems of the lyrical self. [J.K.]

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clubs in which literary figures such as Henry Kendall and Marcus Clarke drank and chatted over the literary and other issues of their day? Quantitatively, there is, but in spirit, probably not. The technology, which seems so distancing to a previous generation, doesn’t necessarily seem so to a generation engaging vigorously in its use. This is stating nothing new, but in order to go where we are going, this premise needs to be established. Australian writers of whatever ethnicity, or however long they’ve been in Australia, seem quite prepared to make reference to and intertext with not only what has come before in Australian literature but also whatever literary history they have come out of. When a poet such as Ania Walwicz, a migrant from Poland, writes ‘about’ Poland, or ‘about’ Australia from the migrant experience, the two locations are intertwined and in constant conversation. In the tour de force Boat (1989), Walwicz takes seemingly independent prose poems of no more than a few pages each, in a book running to 266 pages, to create a narrative of belonging and exclusion without a clear storyline. The poet works through accumulation of events, observations, experiences, and investigations of language that, paratactically, rhythmically, and with a dramatic music, create an illusion of an independent language, a kind of creole that is neither English nor Polish, but a language with its own terms of reference and even its own speakers. Although intensely ‘personal’, these poems seem universal, as if the reader is naturally a speaker of their language. This results from an intense ability to anticipate reader-response prosodically, in sound and expression. Metonym, metaphor, myth, and mimesis are bound together, compelling the reader. In the poems, we journey via slippage between languages of the migrant in the ‘new’ linguistic environment that also creates connections akin to Piaget’s relationship between child and object. This is, of course, deeply ironized, but so divergently that it works on its own terms: polish words don’t answer they go away goodbye forever then see you again dowidzenia ciao they return little letters typed in my head hidden in drawers put away they return bit by bit ten facet fellow painter jacek malarz pokojouwy house painter is going to paint my house renovate looking for right word page mister right word but he doesn’t come yet. . . 7

Walwicz can be read as a feminist poet and certainly could be ‘collected’ under a rubric of feminist activist verse, but she is also a writer of language,

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Ania Walwicz, “translate,” in Walwicz, Boat (North Ryde, N S W : Angus & Robertson, 1989): 83.

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one of personal identity within community, and an innovator looking for alternative ways of expressing cultural transition, displacement, and belonging. She is a maverick – there is no one quite like her, though, ironically, probably the closest in sheer flexibility and range of formal innovation in language is Lionel Fogarty, the Murri poet – but her concerns place her within a broader group dynamic. This does not necessarily mean that she interacts with likeminded poets – she may or may not – but that her work can be taken as communicating within a wider community. Another recent ‘migrant’ poet, John Mateer, who came from South Africa to Western Australia in his youth, doesn’t always create intertexts in poems between the places of his origin and migration, but he certainly juxtaposes poems in collections relating to both places, and other places and cultures in the world where he has spent time. He sees this transculturality and internationality as a fact of his poetic condition. One of the vibrant and deeply intelligent characteristics of Mateer’s verse, even in bleaker moments, is the revitalizing nature of words themselves. He switches comfortably between English and languages of location, but this shouldn’t necessarily be seen as a celebration of the power of language to redeem; in fact, often in the case of Afrikaans the language carries an ominous weight that is almost invasive – as does English itself. Rather, language can ironize its own terms of production and allow us to see the faults in those who use it, including the poet himself. Mateer’s verse has been controversial because of what is seen by some as an appropriation of other cultural registers and identities. In a number of poems, Mateer writes through the voices of Indigenous figures, in an effort to empathize with issues of being dispossessed, and to register the resistance to ongoing ‘white’ colonization. My mention of this is not arbitrary, because in many ways this is the core issue of identity and nation in Australian poetry. The Jindyworobaks, in their annexing and appropriating of Indigenous culture to create a shamanistic connection with the ‘primal’ Australian land, were overtly appropriative and, depending on the poet, racist. Mateer is clearly not a Jindyworobak, and an opposition to racism in all its forms around the world informs his poetic. So this would make the line drawn between the two, between the movement and the maverick individual, seem inappropriate. But I would argue that such a line is necessary in order to understand how readerships are formed for either poetries (that is, poetry of the Jindyworobak movement in, for example, its anthologies, and of a maverick such as Mateer in his individual poetry volumes).

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In Kayang & me,8 Kim Scott strongly objects to Mateer’s poetic use of Nyungar language at a reading from one of Mateer’s poems when they were both performing at an event in Canada. Scott speaks of the distress he felt at hearing a language that is only just being reconstituted and reclaimed by Nyungar people themselves, being spoken by, as he says, a white South African. There are important issues in this. First, Scott, as a Nyungar, is in a position to criticize what he sees as an inappropriate use of a language that has been placed under massive pressure by the machinery of colonization. However, his isolating of Mateer’s South African origins does not take into consideration the fact that Mateer is, both poetically and in terms of self-identity, as much a part of ‘Western Australia’ as of his land of birth. Mateer, in Loanwords, utilizes borrowings and usages from a number of languages in order to reconstitute their original implications, while also building in the agency of new meaning in the language in which they are being deployed.9 This transnationality is the main driver of his work. Mateer meant no disrespect, I believe, but the issues are at the core of contemporary poetics. What is and is not available to the poet in creating a poetic language that carries its own intactness and its own implications for reading?

‘Attention and Scrutiny’ Kevin Gilbert, in his introduction to Inside Black Australia, begins: Over the last two decades the Aboriginal voice has received quite a remarkable amount of attention and scrutiny in the European Australian world of literature. Many, especially those exercising a critical overview and expecting something different, more exotic perhaps, from a people whose traditional expression was an oral tradition, have not come to terms with this often raw, certainly rugged, and definitely truthful subjective material drawn from the creative impulse. There are a number of difficulties in perception and analysis, the most difficult of these is to attempt rationalisation of hundreds of thousands of years of oral tradition against the last twenty years of limited access to white education and education in the English tongue.10

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Kim Scott, Kayang & me (Fremantle, W A : Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2005). John Mateer, Loanwords (Fremantle, W A : Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2002). 10 Kevin Gilbert, “Introduction” to Inside Black Australia: An Anthology of Aboriginal Poetry, ed. Gilbert (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1988): xv. 9

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It is arguable that Indigenous Australian poetry in English is at least evident in missionary documents of the mid-nineteenth century, but in essence the rise of this writing as a poetic force in Australia dates from the 1950s. Poets such as Jack Davis and Oodgeroo (Kath Walker) were criticized early on for using ‘traditional’ European versification to convey messages specific to Indigenous social, spiritual, and political concerns. I and others have argued that this use of form actually enhances and strengthens the message of resistance in these poems by juxtaposing the restraint of one tradition with the reiteration of a tradition (or traditions) placed under extreme pressure to sustain continuity. The works of both poets were complex acts of reclamation and affirmation. Even their more open-form poems, with seemingly linear expression, play with the conventions of English-language syntax. Take Davis’s poem “One Hundred and Fifty Years,” which bears the subtitle “Written in protest at the non-inclusion of Aboriginal people in the celebrations of 150 years of European settlement in Western Australia, 1829– 1979,” thus ironizing the state celebrations that resist acknowledgement of Indigeneity. In the poem, the free-verse niceties of evoking place with references to the presence of a lyrical ‘I’ that is ‘encountering’ the surroundings (“I walked slowly along the river,” “a flock of gulls quarrelled over debris”) while a picture of obvious distress is building (“juggernauts of steel and stone”) are countered by the initial employment of a rhyming refrain that seems to parody a British folk chant (“Please to remember the Fifth of November,” pertaining to Guy Fawkes) and highlights the overlaying of Indigenous resistance with imagery of British military ritual: So now that the banners have fluttered, the eulogies ended and the tattoos have rendered the rattle of spears, look back and remember the end of December and one hundred and fifty years.

This refrain, with its metonymic substitution (of tattoo, both marking of the body and military ritual) allows a segue into an unexpected ferocity of language that will lead to confrontation and accusation of murder, presumably coming out of the massacre at Pinjarra (the so-called ‘Battle of Pinjarra’ in 1834). The poem shatters the conventions of English-language poetry by using those conventions against themselves. This conscious poetic process will later be heightened by Mudrooroo (his rejection as a legitimate voice for Indigenous culture is beside the point here) and Fogarty. The latter takes the

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de-hybridizing of English-language poetry to its most extreme as a form of resistance. Of the Murri people, and born on the Cherbourg Aboriginal Reserve in Queensland in 1958, Fogarty is a leading spokesman for Indigenous rights in Australia through a poetry of linguistic uniqueness and overwhelming passion. In resisting the colonizing force of English, he has reterritorialized the language of the invaders and made of it a language that speaks for his people. I argue that Fogarty is the greatest living ‘Australian’ poet, forging a poetic that captures the orality of his people’s millennia of song-cycles and spirituality, and also engaging with codes and tools of international modernism. Fogarty is at once verbally affronting and celebratory of his identity. A deeply ‘political’ poet, he is also a singer whose poetry seeks healing and redemption for the many wrongs done to his people. There is a rage in the work, and the death of his brother Daniel Yock, in the back of a police van in 1993, as well as the plight of his people, compels his poetic spirit. In a significant interview that Philip Mead conducted with him in 1994, Fogarty said: Daniel was a Song Man and he used to make songs up from his own dreaming, and he knew a lot of different languages. He was a really special person to my children. A very culturally talented guy, very dedicated to his culture.11

And it’s that dedication to his culture that Fogarty carries into a poetry that is cyclical and declarative, deeply metaphoric and metonymic at once. The ‘timelessness’, the “dreaming,” the conversations between story and land, between the totemic and people, are beyond labelling. He has managed to confront the persistent attacks by imperialist language, and (still) colonial culture/s, on his people’s voice by preserving its identity and by creating something entirely new (an extension of what existed before), to fight the invader. He is a liberator, an innovator, and a writer with a purpose as crucial as the existence of his people. Fogarty has de-hybridized his own language by hybridizing English with his people’s language. It’s a poetry that demands respect. In the poetry of the twentieth and twenty-first century, he is as essential and skilled as any. All of us should listen. The consolidation of Indigenous poetry across Australia gives the impression of a unified movement rather than a series of maverick poets. One should 11

“Australian poet Lionel Fogarty in conversation with Philip Mead,” Jacket 1 (October 1997): online.

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be wary, though, of conflating different language-origins and tribal belongings in the construction of a ‘reconciled’ voice. The achievement of an apology to the Stolen Generations, earlier aspirations for a treaty, and the occasional success in land-rights battles do not make for one Indigenous nation. The symbolism of the Aboriginal flag and of committees and councils that meet to help resolve Aboriginal issues internally should not be seen as a totalizing process; difference must be respected. The Yamaji poet Charmaine Papertalk–Green writes of Aboriginal issues but with specific reference to her own people (in Western Australia, around Geraldton), but obviously also in the context of Aboriginal/black rights in Australia. The interconnection with Indigenous Australian poets outside her people and community is clear. But although Papertalk–Green has travelled widely around Australia, and worked in cities a long way from home, she remains, in her life and poetry, closely connected with where she comes from. She writes her land and her community. She is a singer of her place and culture not only in herself but as an extension of her family and Yamaji country. She is always willing to take risks – she’ll criticize herself and her own (if she feels it will help), as well as the colonizers, but in the end she is trying to sing the community together with a respect for all the other songs out there that are others’ to sing. Papertalk–Green is a social commentator – and she is willing to stand up for what she believes. She is a risk-taker and an activist in language and in what she does, and in her work with young people she tries to rectify the problems she explores in her poetry. Papertalk–Green writes because she has to. Speaking for the living and the lost, she is trying to save the knowledge, and laments the forgetting – what has been taken, and also what is being lost through circumstance. Papertalk–Green embraces her community, yet writes out of a determined individualism. She is as prepared to critique issues in her own community as in the non-Indigenous communities that interact with or, indeed, oppress them.

Non-Indigenous Anxieties With the last two decades of her life dedicated to Indigenous rights issues, it seems appropriate to draw at least a thin line of connection to the in many ways definitively ‘white’ poet, Judith Wright. Despite being highly individual, she was used specifically to delineate a national poetry. Wright’s poetry has been part of school curricula for three generations now. Her objections to the constant reproduction of an early poem like “Bullocky,” and what she sees

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as its misrepresentation as part of pioneer nation-building white hegemony, largely constructed by the poet Vincent Buckley (who, as Philip Mead has said, “lamented her change of direction in ‘Woman to Man,’ away from topics of ‘settler’ and ‘historical’ significance”12), show the tension between the maverick and her subsumed poetic. Wright was never closely part of literary cliques. This is not to say she didn’t connect with other Australian poets, but her life was very much a private one through to the mid-1960s, when she helped found the Wildlife Protection Society of Queensland and became a public activist for conservation causes. By the 1970s, she had become radically involved in Indigenous-rights and land-rights causes, including helping found, and sitting with Nugget Coombs and others on, the committee for a treaty with Aboriginal people. Wright’s early support for the poet Oodgeroo (Kath Walker) and deep respect for her friend’s poetic, and its interconnection with Oodgeroo’s desire for her people to reclaim their land on Stradbroke Island off Queensland, became a life commitment to Indigenous causes. Everything Wright wrote was informed by her political engagement, whether it was the Canberra Tent Embassy (1972–), and the interconnection between Kevin Gilbert’s role in that long-term protest and his poetry, or reconsidering her writings on her pastoral past, on what she called being members of the pastoral aristocracy. This took place through a reappraisal of her early classic, The Generations of Men (1959), now taking into account Indigenous perspectives, as in The Cry for the Dead (1981). This is significant because Wright herself claimed that her poetry was totally removed from her politics or, rather, that poetry should have nothing to do with politics. Always suspicious of what she termed ‘post-post-modernism’ (perceiving John Tranter as the head of that mythical school), Wright was wary of allowing the emotions of a poem to be lost to rhetoric. It is clearly impossible to separate a text from its environment of creation, and from the politics that inform its writing, but Wright resisted this conflation to the end of her life. However, her last collection other than Selecteds or Collecteds, Phantom Dwelling,13 she did perceive as being an innovative book, and this innovation is as much in the political subtext as in her use of more open forms and uncharacteristic syntax. Wright is rarely seen as an innovative poet in any way, but I believe she was, as this final book illustrates. 12

Philip Mead, in private correspondence with the author (August 2008). Judith Wright, Phantom Dwelling (North Ryde, N S W : Angus & Robertson, 1985). 13

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The sequence “For a Pastoral Family,” part I I , “To My Generation,” could only be described as directly, rhetorically, and descriptively political: If now there are landslides, if our field of reference is much eroded, our hands show little blood. We enter a plea: Not Guilty. For the good of the Old Country, the land was taken; the Empire had loyal service. Would any convict us? Our plea has been endorsed by every appropriate jury.

The irony is as brutal as the subject-matter it is investigating. Wright always acknowledged her Australian poet-predecessors; whether championing Charles Harpur, introducing the work of Shaw Neilson, or writing the poem “Brennan” (in Phantom Dwelling), she interrogates her relationship with the poetic past. As she says in this last poem, History’s burning garbage of myths and searches sends up its smoke-wreath from the city dump. It stings in our eyes too.

Wright had reservations about Brennan’s poetry, but the tragic aspects of his condition surely attracted her sympathy. We will see later how Tranter has utilized Brennan as a thread of connection in his poetic and that of Sydney itself. In her later poetry, Wright tried to lay bare the sources of much non-Indigenous anxiety in Australian poetry. Whether it is of the early ‘settler’ kind or that of more recent migrants, this is the inevitable and essential anxiety about the displacement of Indigenous peoples and their cultures. It could be argued that a characteristic note in Australian discourse, coming out of Dark Side of the Dream,14 has been the ‘hebephrenic’, which the authors use to mean an attitude that denies anything is problematical; they suggest the need for an approach to Australian literature that is instead ‘paranoid’ – believing that the repressed in Australian literature, or its obsessive underlying interest, is not primarily the theme of exile from the ‘mother country’ of Britain, as Wright once suggested, but the knowledge of what it did to take possession of 14

Bob Hodge & Vijay Mishra, Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the Postcolonial Mind (North Sydney, N S W : Allen & Unwin, 1991): 218.

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the land – a subconscious recognition of the oppression of Australia’s Indigenous people. If we read a text in a ‘paranoid’ manner, we can detect ways in which it signals this obsession, and so on. I once asked Les Murray how he felt about ‘paranoid readings’ of his poems, and he insisted that these were irrelevant. However, I have found Hodge and Mishra’s idea of paranoid reading, with regard to Australian literature, disturbingly illuminating. In a poem such as Murray’s “The Grassfire Stanzas,” which seems to have absolutely nothing to do with Indigenous dispossession (though it needs to be said that awareness of the issues around this has been a preoccupation of Murray’s throughout his working life), one can locate an entire discourse on this issue. For example, in the stanza Eruption of darkness from far down under roots is the aspect of these cores, on the undulating farmland; dense black is withered into web, inside a low singing; it is dried and loosened, on the surface; it is made weak

we are receiving, on the one hand, a literal if also figurative description of burning-off. The action of the fire as it moves across the grassed paddock is being observed and described, evoking a series of meditations not only on cause and effect but also on the mythic, the subconscious, and the relationship between observer and place. Even more than this, the maverick becomes part of a broader community which we see defined in an earlier stanza, when the poet writes: The man imposing spring here swats with his branch, controlling it: only small things may come to a head, in this settlement pattern.

It does not take a leap of faith to draw a connection between the darkness and the “dense black is withered into web” of the later stanza, cited first above, and these two earlier lines with their description of ‘settlement’ order. The rhizomatic allusion – in the Deleuze and Guattari sense – evoked in the first line, “Eruption of darkness from far down under roots,” drawing together the chthonic and the visceral experience in which we are vicariously participating, creates a schematics that surely allows us to read subtextually. One might add that the word “singing” has a particular implication in the context of dispossession. Songlines, singing that comes out of law, and narratives of a poetry that pre-existed re-migrant presence in Australia by tens of thousands of years, are louder than the crackling of the burning grasses and Murray’s skilful evocation of them.

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Murray is a particularly interesting figure in the context of the maverickvs-group construction. Murray is always identified as maverick, with a populist poetic and politics that seek to relate not only to the individual Australian but especially to the impoverished and barely landed rural ‘settler’ community. His work is not orientated towards, say, Chinese market-gardeners, but comes primarily out of depictions of European encounters with ‘the bush’. Murray is seen as conservative in politics, though he aspires to an Australian cultural sovereignty and what he has called a ‘vernacular republic’. He is a fierce nationalist, and his predecessors in Australian literature might well be Henry Lawson, Banjo Paterson, and, strangely, Harpur. Although a highly public figure, Murray has something of Harpur’s disconnection from the literary community, despite seeming a literary lion in Australia. Whether it’s been editing anthologies, being poetry editor for Angus and Robertson, or acting as a spokesman for Australian poetic issues on an international scale, Murray has operated out of his own beliefs and poetic, drawing all to that centre rather than necessarily being inclusive. Perhaps this makes him more of a Lawson than a Paterson. In his ‘debate’ with Peter Porter in the early 1970s, over the ‘Boeotian’ and ‘Athenian’ binary, Murray aligned himself with the Boeotian, which he understood as rural and shamanistic, as opposed to the rational, ‘scientific’, and urban Athenian Porter. This has been extensively explored elsewhere. But it is relevant because, in creating an opposition to Porter, who lived in London since the 1950s and is often cited as the definitive example of an expatriate Australian writer, Murray is also creating a ‘group’ or community through apposition. Although it seems that this is a binary difference, Murray is building community through what are tolerable differences of attitude in terms of language and of how external material is absorbed into the poem. Murray and Porter have much in common. Porter’s use of European art, post-Renaissance ideas, wit, logic, irony, crispness in seeing, and resigned fatalism, offset Murray’s lyrical ruralism and its polemical framework. The offsetting makes them complementary.15

15

Peter Porter is often described an Australian expatriate living almost in ‘cultural’ and ‘spiritual’ exile. Porter is an immensely sophisticated and complex poet who has published poetry over many decades. Living in London from the 1950s to the present day, Porter in recent years made more frequent visits back to his native Australia. His concerns with European art and music, with issues of high and low culture, with wit and form, at times obscured his intense considerations of the relationship between his

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Pulped Factions and New Poetries The much-cited friction between Murray and Tranter, and Tranter’s creation of, or connection to, the so-called ‘Generation of ’68’, is a quite different case. ‘The Generation of ’68’ was a term coined by Tom Shapcott, attributed to Tranter (who later used it), and accepted by critics to refer to a group of poets who came to prominence during the Vietnam War and who loosely shared a number of political, social, and aesthetic viewpoints. These poets were anthologized by Tranter in his New Australian Poetry in 1979. There is no doubt that there are distinct differences between the poetry of Murray and the poets collected by Tranter, on aesthetic, formal, and political levels. It is a mistake, however, to consider that it is Murray vs the new poets, because Murray as a potent figure in Australian poetry has had many imitators and supporters who have ‘sided’ with him in this apparent binary. This does not mean that there is any validity in the ‘camps’ conflict or rivalry, but, rather, that en-bloc differences likely existed. Troubled by this, I wrote an article in the mid-1990s for the Australian Book Review entitled “Pulped Factions” (see below): One could doubtless list groupings of poets with common interests, creating some kind of map of the Australian poetryscape that would indicate directions in contemporary poetic thought and response to the Australian condition.

Yet it’s usually those poets who manage to lift themselves out of these groupings, or define groupings through attracting imitators, that become the voices best identified with the generative side of the age. They possess a desire to explore language and notions of meaning outside the acceptable. Poets like John Tranter, John Forbes, Gig Ryan, and Robert Adamson, who in many ways exemplify a whole period of poetry, have really established their own voices that have made them enduring poets. The same can be said of J.S. Harry, Jennifer Maiden, and John A. Scott. It’s not by chance that I group these poets together; they are of the age of factionalism. But one can admire any particular association of poets one desires without having to be an ‘adherent’. There seems to be a need, as part of creating a literary identity, to create lines of influence in a nation’s literature. I don’t necessarily still subscribe to these views, but my piece was actually part birth home and his adopted home. The binary between Murray and Porter is a false divide in so many ways, but will be consistently articulated out of national and aesthetic convenience. [J.K.]

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of a broader debate about whether a new generation of poets, one that would go on to produce Peter Minter, Kate Fagan, Michael Brennan, Louis Armand, and Margie Cronin, and most recently Jaya Savige, was actually imprisoned in earlier conflicts and disagreements or whether they were able to start afresh. The new poetry in Australia is much more about individual voices drawn together in loose affiliations, where the anthology is less a manifesto than an exercise in pluralism. Awareness of Indigenous poetry, ‘migrant’ poetries, and ‘sub-cultural’ poetries has gone hand-in-hand with an acceptance of gender equity in publishing. The personal conflicts might be there, but something broader and richer has evolved. In fact, although it is well recognized that the late 1960s and early 1970s saw something of a revolution in small-press poetry publishing in Australia, working outside longer-term established publishers such as Angus and Robertson which mentored an author over a lifetime (and which, a senior Australian poet recently lamented to me, was no longer the case in Australian publishing), small-scale publication has always been part of the Australian literary scene. Barron Field’s First Fruits of Australian Poetry (1819) and Michael Massey Robinson’s Odes (1826) were clearly ‘small-press’ publications. Although these earlier works were clearly along the focal lines of colonial expression, they were also statements of a form of postcoloniality. From the modernist Angry Penguins publications of the 1940s, through to the Poetry Australia publications of the 1970s, and, even more so, the breakaway New Poetry, with its strong inclination towards innovative contemporary American poetry largely (but by no means exclusively) arising out of the American Black Mountain school, the New York School, and the San Francisco Renaissance, an internationalism or, rather, perhaps, a bringing-in of poetry from elsewhere in the world was de rigueur. However, one would be mistaken to see this as a broader internationalism. It was more a consolidation of Australian content through giving it a place on the international poetry spectrum. The split in the Poetry Society that led to the New Poetry, impelled by the lyric poet Robert Adamson, was as much about a consolidation of power in a particular group or community by creating a splinter group or community – sub-set – as about aesthetics. This is not to say that Adamson and his followers were not innovative in their aesthetic, but that personal relationships and disagreements also played their role. It is impossible to separate personality and ego from any of these collations of poets and poetics we ‘posthumously’ interpret as movements or group. Opposition makes the strangest bedfellows. More recently, conflicts in Austra-

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lian poetry have been largely personality-based. Amalgamations of poets with little in common in terms of their poetics work in opposition to other poet/s, because of personal animosity. Groups are retrospectively identified, when in fact the association between these poets is not as part of a general aesthetic manifesto – they are extremely different poets. Adamson has spent much of a lifetime writing out of a specific place, his home and life on the Hawkesbury River. In essence, he brought into Australia a working knowledge of Black Mountain poetics. Adamson is something of a contradiction, in that he is both maverick and very much an instigator of group-think. His influences, ranging from Hart Crane to Robert Duncan, are broad, yet he skilfully locates what might be termed the sub-lyrical gesture in every poem he writes, whatever its subject-matter. Birds, the river, family, love, poetics, and a wistful, elegiac tone go hand-in-hand with a mapping of the self that has created a narrative of place unlike any other in Australian, non-Indigenous poetry. Adamson, with his prison background, was seen as something of an enfant terrible during the 1960s, from his then base in Balmain confronting, outraging, the imagined poetry establishment with a Rimbaud-like assault on niceties and good order. His first book, Canticles on the Skin, began a process in which this publisher–poet carved out his own space in Australian letters. Adamson has written: There are two kinds of poetry in my first books, poems that were drawn from memory, basically descriptions of reality, and poems made up from art and the imagination. Since Canticles on the Skin (1970), I have been trying to work out what is real and what is imagined. Writing poems that escape intelligence ‘almost successfully’.16

There is an irony in associating Adamson with Rimbaud. Adamson has always been obsessed by the poetry of the second-wave French Symbolist Mallarmé, whereas a poet often thought of as inspired in some senses by Mallarmé, John Tranter, is actually more empathetic with, and influenced by, Rimbaud. Tranter’s poetry, starting with his second volume, Red Movie (1973), has displayed the almost paradoxical combination of surface calm and underlying conceptual torment. Strongly influenced by John Ashbery and other New York School poets, he has created poems which are sculpted as almost objets 16

Robert Adamson, personal communication, 1996. [J.K.]

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d’art, that stand up to being looked at, as in a gallery, but undermine cultural, political, and artistic givens. Making use of other poets’ work, even investigating random word-association programs like Babel, before many other poets had even heard of them, sampling the experiments of the Oulipo group, while writing into an Australian poetry history, in a metatextual way, Tranter has spawned many would-be imitators, none of whom has really succeeded in applying his approach. To understand fully Tranter’s complex intellectual concerns, we might consider the poem “Christopher Brennan.” In this sestina, Tranter plays against the restrictions of form by combining a populist with a serious subject. Brennan is in many ways the Sydney precursor to Tranter. This mixing of high and low cultures was not characteristic of Brennan’s verse, other than in maybe a few poems for his mistress, Vi. Brennan’s notoriously turbulent private life was counterpointed by the rigour of his scholarly writing as well as by the Symbolist removals of his poetry. Tranter often chooses the commonplace as his subject-matter, be it film noir, drinking around the pool or elsewhere, flying in a Lufthansa aeroplane, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, high school, literary tropes and figures; but all of these subjects are distanced by an ironic suspicion of what might be construed as beauty or as ‘effable’ and thus digestible by the mass culture that his persona is always part of, though standing slightly aside. The “Christopher Brennan” poem ironizes Anglo-Australia’s monolingualism while also ironizing the affectation of using knowledge to acquire personal gain. In the end, though, this is a poem about the elusive nature of inspiration set against the complexities of relationships and aspiration, and yet it is told with a wry, good-humoured ease that belies its almost tragic implications. This poem, in some ways a drinking song, relies on the knowledge that Brennan essentially died of alcoholism. Characteristically, Tranter creates a literary connection that questions his own authorial position, while satirizing the Australian philistine scepticism toward imagined European effeteness. He is actually having his cake and eating it. This is the paradox of a Tranter poem and in part the aesthetic that led him to become both group-leader and inimitable maverick. To track an evolution of a Tranteresque poetic is not difficult. Tranter’s path from rural Australia to urban Sydney, strangely, takes him closer to the trajectory of Les Murray than to that of, say, John Forbes, with whom Tranter would later be associated. To unpick the ‘rules’ of the poetic field that Tranter entered and in many ways helped foster, one need look no further than his

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own comments. In a special Australian issue of Poetry (Chicago), published in 1996, Tranter made the following points about the Generation of ’68. Noting that the repressive atmosphere of the 1950s in Australia was “a milder version of the McCarthy period in the U.S.,” he adds: No poet in Australia in the late Fifties and early Sixties could get a poem published in any magazine if the editor thought that it might in any way give moral offence to the average person; and there were few outlets of any kind for experimental verse.17

Tranter pinpoints the effect of a backlash from the Ern Malley affair as part of this reaction. He particularly notes American culture during the 1960s as having a liberating effect on Australian poetry, while characterizing the rebellion against the draft and the Vietnam War as concurrent drives towards counter-cultural activity. Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry (1960) and Donald Hall’s Contemporary American Poetry (1962) were influential. Tranter says: “No other generation of poets in Australia’s history had produced such a sheer mass of published writing.” He also observes that older writers such as Dorothy Hewett, David Campbell, and Bruce Beaver went with the new flow and became more experimental. This was the period of the post-Second World War ‘baby boomers’, with an increase in tertiary education. New technologies (for example, the gestetner duplicating machine) enabled little-magazine publications. New venues for readings opened, and drug culture provided its own strange impetus. It was a vital climate: Poetry was not seen as a pastime by the new poets. It wasn’t regarded as a hobby. It was not seen as a pleasant diversion from an academic routine, or a skill to be developed simply for its own sake. It was seen by many poets as an integral part of a wider struggle for freedom and individuality: freedom from conscription (Australia was at war with North Vietnam at the time, and conscription was part of that war), freedom from the censorship of imported books by the federal Customs department, freedom from police harassment, freedom to experiment with drugs, to develop a sexual ethic liberated from authoritarian restraints, and freedom from the handcuffs of rhyme and the critical strictures of the university English departments.18

17

John Tranter, “Australian Poetry 1940–1980: A Personal View,” in “Contemporary Australian Poetry,” special issue of Poetry (Chicago) 169.1 (October–November 1996): 89. 18 Tranter, “Australian Poetry 1940–1980: A Personal View,” 93.

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Possible Transgressions The New Australian Poetry was not the only anthology to have a generative effect. Mother, I’m Rooted, the Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets, and, later, the Oxford Book of Australian Women’s Verse were landmarks in the affirmation of a collective notion of women’s poetry in Australia.19 Many poets in these volumes operated in relative isolation, and may not have seen themselves as part of a group, or even of the drives of feminism or the Women’s Movement of the time. But the editors’ objective was certainly to identify threads of concern that can be traced back to nineteenth-century Australian poetry and possibly beyond. It is characteristic of historical overviews (which this current piece is not) to separate and investigate women’s poetry as an entirely distinct entity. This may reinforce the notion that the mainstream of Australian poetry has been male, and that there was only belatedly a rise in a conscious female collective poetic. This is patently untrue. A large number of poems to be found in newspapers during the nineteenth century, as well as in individual collections, were by women. In Western Australia, for example, the most noteworthy poet writing in the mid-nineteenth century was Elizabeth Deborah Brockman (publishing in the Church of England Magazine), who wrote of family, depression, place, and spirituality. The connections between such a poet and her twentieth- and twenty-first-century counterparts is stronger than is ever made clear. The Oxford anthology mentioned above is particularly good at drawing subtextual threads between these poets across the years, but there is still much work to be done. Dorothy Hewett, whose earliest poetry was written in her home place of Western Australia, was certainly aware of her isolated position as a woman writer in a predominantly male writing environment in Perth, and in Western Australia at large. However, this did not stop her from creating a mythic and also realistic universe (the relation between these two is at the core of her poetic) which operated both in a maverick or independent sense and in defi19

Mother, I’m Rooted: An Anthology of Australian Women Poets, ed. Kate Jennings (Fitzroy, Victoria: Outback, 1975); The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets, ed. Susan Hampton (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1986); The Oxford Book of Australian Women’s Verse, ed. Susan Lever (Melbourne: Oxford U P , 1995). For a brilliant analysis of early-twentieth-century women poets and modernism in Australia, see Ann Vickery, Stressing the Modern: Cultural Politics in Australian Women's Poetry (Cambridge: Salt, 2007).

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ance of the local literary patriarchy. This was achieved by writing ‘about’ wheatbelt Western Australia, through tracking the stories of her family, often juxtaposed with the half-heard stories of dispossessed Aboriginal people (though it wasn’t until later life that she really articulated her concerns about this), and creating a highly imaginative world of the self, in which all transgressions, gender and sexual, were possible. Hewett was always characterized as a rebel in her personal life, and her poetry reinforces this by allowing a full run of possible transgressions. Despite this, even long after she had left Western Australia, Hewett saw herself as connected with its writing, more especially with the Western Australian wheatbelt about which she wrote so intensely. She achieved this by being both an imagistic colourist (of birds, seasons, flora and fauna) and a storyteller. Also, her Communist politics engendered portrayals of the working class and the ‘ordinary’, usually set in ballad or other popular stanzaic forms that evoked a deep sympathy across genders and with specific working conditions and places. I am thinking here of poems like “In Midland Where the Trains Go By” (set in Western Australia) and “On Moncur Street” (set in Sydney). Hewett’s novel Bobbin Up, written when she lived in Redfern, in Sydney, and felt the tensions (and the joys) of participation in and compliance with the Communist Party ethos, is an empathetic depiction of working-class women’s experiences and conditions. This novel is considered a feminist classic, and much of Hewett’s writing, for theatre as well as her poetry and prose fiction, is concerned with the conditions of women, emotionally and pragmatically. But still, she wrote on a human canvas, and her concerns were ultimately to do with the individual vis-à-vis this canvas. So she is at once part of a group, in the sense that she writes out of women’s and leftist concerns, and is so individuated as to be constantly under scrutiny and attack for being ‘selfabsorbed’ and romantic (in the sense of self-mythologizing). Her life in Sydney drew her into the circle of Adamson and the New Poetry magazine, and, indeed, Adamson published Hewett’s remarkable Rapunzel in Suburbia (1975), but she nonetheless stood at a tangent to all groups. Adamson is frequently identified as the ‘Nim’ in Hewett’s ‘Alice’ poems, and is said to function as the enfant-terrible character in these poems’ transgressions. The personal subtexts of Hewett’s poetry draw in a number of literary and other figures, but always operate within the private mythic universe that she spent a lifetime constructing. This does not distract from the highly public concerns of this private poetry. Hewett always attracted followers and imitators, in both

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the east and the west, and when she lived in the Blue Mountains she was a patron and mentor-figure for the Varuna community; she was present at what were almost weekend ‘salons’, with poets and general audience coming from far and wide when they knew she would attend. As the long-time poetry editor for the Melbourne Age newspaper, Gig Ryan has commented on and fostered many poets, whose work ranges across generations and styles. In conversation, she has enthusiastically endorsed younger innovative poets such as Michael Farrell. Ryan has been associated with The New Australian Poetry, albeit really a generation later. Her connections with other Melbourne poets, particularly Forbes, who moved from Sydney to Melbourne. have, curiously, led to her being read through the group dynamic (a double irony, because she has in fact led and played in a number of ‘rock’ bands). Ryan is distinctively a maverick poet. Her urban concerns draw on bars, drinking, driving cars, money, relations between often unidentified people, set against sharp or sardonic political observations, the mundane usually mixing with ‘high-cultural’ references: history, mythology (especially Greek), eating, and a critique of capitalism. Her poems tend to be short, compacted, and elliptical. When longer, they work in sequences arranged in similarly compact and elliptical sections. What is particularly remarkable about her poems’ approach to the so-called unified self is that the ‘I’ is always distanced but the reader gets the feeling that this may be a safety measure to protect against a disclosure of intensity in personal feeling. This is more than a ploy; it is an aesthetic statement. Ryan may or may not consider herself a feminist, but this action may be interpreted as a political choice. The persona does not discount the possibility of equitable relationships between men and women, but often doubts this or, at best, finds it paradoxical. It’s almost as if genders cannot be reconciled. In the poem “Two Winters,” Ryan writes: “Without him I feel empty and alive / the happy eighteenth-century clocks, the desk skulls.”20

Against the Grain Beneath the discourse of ‘Australian poetry’ as defined by prize culture, readings, internet conversations, university networks, and general canonical processes, there are many poets in Australia who operate in their own space

20

Gig Ryan, Pure and Applied (Brooklyn, N S W : Paper Bark / Craftsman House,

1998): 21.

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against the grain. This does not mean that they are not part of broader conversations, but that they often function at a tangent to the conversations that they themselves prompt. David Brooks is an interesting case. Extensive critical writing on Australian poetry, teaching Australian poetry at Sydney University, and the co-editorship of one of Australia’s flagship literary journals, Southerly, would all seem to place him at the centre of this canonical process. In terms of his poetry, this is not necessarily the case. The poetry operates outside these other discourses in many ways. In The Balcony (2008),21 Brooks conveys a sense of strong or vicarious connection which is affected by those who might be watching the persona, who might see him, and who he in turn is conscious of. Brooks, like Tranter, draws on lines of literary connection by invoking Henry Lawson as Australian literary predecessor. The central symbol and motif of the book is the balcony, a place of viewing the world and being viewed. Two important references come to mind throughout the subtexts and intertexts of balconies in this book. The most obvious is Baudelaire’s “Le Balcon,” particularly these lines: Les soirs illuminés par l’ardeur du charbon, Et les soirs au balcon, voilés de vapeurs roses. Que ton sein m’était doux! que ton coeur m’était bon! Nous avons dit souvent d’impérissables choses Les soirs illuminés par l’ardeur du charbon.22

The question becomes, how much of one’s love does or should become available to the outside world? The balcony is a public and private space in which a two-way mirror is effected, as is the often-public performance of our most intimate relationships. Brooks deals with scrutiny of choice by opening the balcony doors. But don’t be fooled. No matter how intimate some of these poems, how strong the sense of the crumpled sheet, you only get as close as the poem and your imagination allow. A less obvious reference in terms of the balcony subtexts of place is Lawson’s poem “Faces in the Street.” This definitively Sydney poem surely 21

David Brooks, The Balcony (St Lucia: U of Queensland P , 2008). Charles Baudelaire, “Le Balcon” (c.1856), in Les Fleurs du Mal, tr. Richard Howard, ill. Michael Mazur (Brighton: Harvester, 1982): 218–19. “Evenings illustrated by living coals / and evenings on the balcony, pink mist / rising, your soft breast, your gentle heart, / while we rehearsed the imperishable words – / evenings illustrated by living coals” (41). 22

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echoes the pain of this public / private exploration. Indeed, Brooks has a poem in this collection that goes by the same title, and though it is socially distant from Lawson’s poem, there is that sense of looking from behind the curtain, and discovering oneself. Where Lawson writes: And cause I have to sorrow, in a land so young and fair, To see upon those faces stamped the marks of Want and Care; I look in vain for traces of the fresh and fair and sweet In sallow, sunken faces that are drifting through the street,

in Brooks we read: Often, in the faces of young women I pass in the street I see the faces of young women I once loved or made love with years ago, and I wonder whether they, now in their forties or fifties, ever see, in the faces of young people they pass, those of young men or women they once loved in their turn

positioning the persona as one who recognizes a commonality not only with other males but with women as well. This is particularly characteristic of the challenges to the masculine ‘certainty’ that is investigated throughout the book. In Lawson’s poem, the persona sees distress and wants this overcome in a revolutionary way. Although it may seem less strident, Brooks’s poem, through empathy, demands as much for each generation to understand that those who have come before also contain “all of the the ages inside them.”23 Another poet who has operated in a similar space but with a very different poetic is Dennis Haskell, editor of the literary journal Westerly, and an academic who teaches Australian literature. His poetry often deals with domestic and interpersonal matters that do not fit the frequent male posturing of isolated, authorial confidence and distancing. In “At Greenwood, a Meditation,” the title, though referring to a Perth suburb, does double duty by suggesting something rural and tranquil. We see the ‘natural’ constantly reiterated, even

23

The Balcony is set in both Slovenia and Australia. [J.K.]

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down to the apparent contradiction of “suburban, lupin dressed hills. . ..”24 This poem is an urban pastoral, but one in which the two worlds don’t fit comfortably together. The poem is about the nature of inspiration. It begins “In a humdrum household’, yet there’s something threatening at work – “these dark creatures.” The “occasional cats jackknife over fences” – they don’t simply step over them. As the poet contemplates, inspiration doesn’t come in a sweetly sonorous traditionally ‘pastoral’ way, but “sharply,” broodingly, and startlingly, to extend words used in the poem. This is a poem about a familiar scene suddenly becoming alive with difference, or, rather – and this is the true nature of inspiration – the difference that is always there is seen again in a fresh way. This idea of urban pastoral takes us into the territory of the pastoral in contemporary Australian poetry and its contra-indication in ecological poetry. Coral Hull was genuinely eco-poetical long before the term became part of a trend and a less genuine, largely academic discourse of involvement and apologia for poetic acts that sell themselves as making a difference but defend their own space of production. Although Hull completed a doctorate in creative writing, she has nothing to do with the academic world. She has very consciously set herself outside cultural elites in all their guises, to function as poet-activist. She has been possibly the most maverick non-Indigenous poet to write from Australia. Her concerns for animal rights, vegan ethics, peace, and human rights have led her to withdraw her books from print to avoid participation in profit culture, instead making them available through her website /journal/foundation, Thylazine. Hull’s poetry, with its slippages between vivid imagery and reportage, takes the reader inside the suffering and marginalization of both animals and humans, caused by those who are indifferent to, ignorant of, or exploitative of their condition. She also witnesses mental and physical trauma, and writes out of a need for survival against aggressive agency. The poetry should not be mistaken, though, as defensive, because it is resistant and activist in the most forceful sense. In the affirmation of the oppressed, great beauty is also possible. This is not poetry purely of loss but, rather, one that is also impelled by celebration of and respect for the oppressed. Hull frequently ironizes popular culture’s vicarious participation in exploitation, or uses it to juxtapose a par24

Dennis Haskell, “At Greenwood, a Meditation” (from Abracadabra, 1993), in Haskell, Acts of Defiance: New and Selected Poems, preface by Robert Gray (London: Salt, 2010): 23.

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ticipant’s complicity through irony. We see this very clearly in “The Zoo Ark”: ‘Oh my god, they’ve killed Kenny!’ A tiger urinated after being shouted at. Captives choke, plastic straws lodged in their throats. Their blue faces now unbarred. Throw things at them. The cage is full of cigarette butts, popcorn packets.25

Hull, if peripherally, connects with a tradition of Australian pastoral that has operated on its own terms of displacement. Hers is a radical pastoral in which surface is engaged with as much as subtext. Like Wright, she makes direct observations but deploys figurative language to take them out of rhetoric and into the suggestive. You take a Hull poem with you a long time after having read it, and since she writes so much about the problematical nature of the rural world, you are likely, willingly or unwillingly, to bring into comparison with Hull’s observations all Australian rural poetry you encounter. One could make a long list of poets who touch on broader group categories, forming sub-sets or, indeed, working as ‘sets’ entire in themselves. However, the overwhelming impression the reader of Australian poetry as a whole receives is that notions of Australia, positive or negative, link most of these poets. One does not have to write about Australia to be aware of it. And even the most maverick poet still belongs to some group or other within this consciousness. This is not to affirm ‘nation’, or even ‘nationality’, but to articulate a connection that cuts across lines of community, subculture, and personal difference. Lionel Fogarty certainly works within his community, and the already noted death of his brother Daniel Yock has driven his poetic activism, emotionally and spiritually, on a deeply personal level, as well as in the political and spiritual knowledge of his own people. And yet his poetry is like no other’s. Poets I have not had the space to consider, who shine as beacons of contradiction in the model I have suggested, include Harry Hooton, Michael Dransfield, Dorothy Porter, David Campbell, A.D. Hope, Bruce Beaver, Vivian Smith, Rodney Hall, Thomas Shapcott, Judith Rodriguez, Philip Salom, J.S. Harry, Fay Zwicky, Andrew Taylor, Pam Brown, Alison Croggon, ʌ O, Geoff Page, Jennifer Maiden, and Gwen Harwood. Porter has found a significant

25

Coral Hull, “The Zoo Ark,” in Coral Hull & John Kinsella, Zoo (Brooklyn, N S W : Paper Bark, 2000): 18.

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following among lesbian, bi, gay, and queer readers, at least since The Monkey’s Mask (1994), a lesbian-detective verse novel whose sparse, thin poems build narrative suspense as they work toward novelistic resolution. Porter has since written other verse novels, most recently El Dorado (2007). She is a significant figure in this argument because her early books, including Night Parrot (1984) and Driving Too Fast (1989), attracted a feminist audience, a general poetry and popular readership, and would later gain near-iconic status among lesbian-bi-gay-queer communities. This is not to say that there is a firm boundary between these readerships, but to acknowledge the flexibility and sophistication of Porter’s voice in terms of its appeal. Dransfield’s Drug Poems (1972) was strongly influential and engendered its own iconicity (though arguably a false one). Dransfield’s drug-related death made him a definitive figure of poetic counter-culture when in fact his poetic was strongly informed by traditional European poetry and culture, embedded in the psyche of an Australia awakening to mass-cultural modernity, a poetic that drew from him both sharp satire and neo-Romantic indulgence. Dransfield was an incredibly wide-ranging poet who is under-recognized for his innovative use of the line and frameworks in which images circulate, interconnect, and resolve as story or as narrative. An example is the Courland Penders poems, in which a house serves as a function of Dransfield’s propensity to mythologize with stories working almost as folktales within the structure. (I am thinking of Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folk Tale here.) In Dransfield’s poetry and letters, and through the biographical work of Patricia Dobrez, Michael Dransfield’s Lives (1999), we see the importance to Dransfield of friendship and interaction /communication with other poets. Drugs, through the need to ‘score’, bring their own community, but they also drag one into their own extreme isolation, as in “Bum’s Rush”: take a last look at the effigy collection say farewell to friends you may have made among the graven images then walk as a human lemming would out across the bay to where the ice is thinnest and let yourself vanish.26

Dransfield once declared that all his poems were posthumous. How many of these poets wrote or write for posterity, one can’t ultimately tell. But they certainly, in their group-connectivity and maverick individuality, speak out26

Michael Dransfield, “Bum’s Rush” (c.1969), in Dransfield, Collected Poems, ed. Rodney Hall (St Lucia: U of Queensland P , 1987): 31.

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side their own lives and writing. Poets, like all writers, end up in the hands of editors and publishers – maybe if they are lucky enough, or is this an unlucky outcome? Gwen Harwood, taking the Heloise and Abelard story as vehicle for writing companion poems that served as a hoax attack on the Bulletin (according to the notes included in her Collected Poems, 1943–1995 [2003]), played on Buckley’s religious imagery to implant her own distortions of the letters of the two medieval figures. These poems, with their acrostics reading “So long Bulletin” and “Fuck all editors,” are most often mistakenly seen as mere disguises for an attack on modes of publication and reception, when in fact the effect of the poems, regardless of Harwood’s intention, is a struggle between the material and spiritual, the problems of setting up love and denial in aesthetic frameworks, particularly emphasized by the constraints of the acrostic and the sonnet form. It must be remembered that Heloise and Abelard, after their separation, communicated by letters, in which she lamented the loss of their physical love, while he, who had been castrated, urged her to transcend this concern and focus on God. A poet cannot take on this story without some import of passion and relationship being read into it. The original medieval letters are allusive, and, one might argue, so are Harwood’s texts; perhaps the acrostics are the distraction rather than the purpose. To me, this is where the maverick in Harwood resides, and not in the hoaxing of ‘Walter Lehmann’ (her pseudonymous alter ego for these poems), which fits into a long tradition of groupthink. I realize that my model is one of convenience, but I have tried to demonstrate that relationships between poets in Australia are anything but straightforward, and that they by necessity locate themselves in groups and communities but also inevitably and paradoxically position themselves against these.27

27

This essay has not touched on the immense paradigm shifts and challenges resulting from maverick engagement between public and private spaces in performance / slam-culture jamming poetry and poetics. While these are thought of as contemporary phenomena, there is significant work to be done on the history of performance in Australian poetry in relation to traditions of Indigenous song and ritual and storytelling as well as ‘colonial’ and ‘postcolonial’ aggregations. My not considering them here does not mean I wish to separate these aspects from a general poetic; it is simply due to the need to select certain threads to trace. They are of equal relevance and are entirely interwoven through other aspects of poetic presentation and activity. [J.K.]

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Towards a Contemporary Australian Poetic28

T

H E F I R S T A U S T R A L I A N P O E T W H O S E P A T H I C R O S S E D was Judith Wright. My mother was a teacher of English literature, and Wright was de rigueur on high school and university literature courses during the 1970s. “Bullocky,” “South of My Days,” and “Metho Drinker” were as familiar to me as Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” and Milton’s “When I Consider How My Light is Spent.” The formal nature of Wright’s verse made it acceptable to sit on the syllabus with the ‘greats’ of English poetry. But she did, of course, in tone and theme, deal with particularly Australian notions. This was what separated her from earlier poets such as the Henry Kendall of “Bell Birds” etc., who not only imitated English verse techniques but retained a very English way of seeing landscape. Though it should be noted that it is not as cut and dried as this, because the concepts of Australianness that evolved gradually in Australian verse can actually be found in the poetry of Kendall, Harpur, and their contemporaries. In this phase of the Australian ‘cultural cringe’ when Australians were coming to grips with what it meant to be Australian both socially and artistically, the acceptability of an accomplished poet like Wright speaks of the evolution of a poetic voice that is recognizably Australian but internationally ‘respectable’. Of course, the same kind of acceptability and respectability had been assumed with earlier Australian poets such as Kenneth Slessor, A.D. Hope, and James McAuley, who had to varying degrees obtained overseas recognition and thus validity in the eyes of those teaching English literature. This is not to say Australian poetry had not long before this been part of the curriculum, but it had been as a kind of extension of nationalistic sentiment rather than being chosen purely on literary grounds. It was with pride in being Australian (read: a white, homogeneous society with an entirely separate ‘native’ population as an appendage) that we read poets, or heard them perform, such as Adam Lindsay Gordon, Banjo Paterson, and the jingoistic rhymes of “The Boree Log.” Occasionally a gem of a poem such as Shaw Neilson’s “The Orange Tree” would sneak in via an anthology, but its symbolist leanings (entirely unintentional, of course) were at this stage an aberration rather than something to be expected. To return to Judith Wright, it is worth considering that the Wright

28

“Towards a Contemporary Australian Poetics,” Poetry (Chicago) 169.1 (October– November 1996): 94–107.

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of this period (mid- to late 1970s) was ‘disowning’ poems such as “Bullocky” and “South of My Days” because of their apparently patronizing tone toward the Indigenous people of Australia and because of the white-nationalistic sentiment that might be inferred from the poems. It should not be assumed, however, that the 1970s were actually retrograde in terms of social, artistic, and cultural expression generally. In fact, it was the most vital period of all in Australian poetry. But there was a wide gap between what was happening ‘on the ground’ and what was being taught in the schools. As John Tranter discussed in his introduction to The New Australian Poetry, in 1979, there were a group of poets associated with “a wave of poetry readings, ‘underground’ magazines” who held “a generally expressed antagonism to the established mainstream of the time, which they saw as too conservative”: The readings attracted a large and varied audience, and the magazines, being cheap and open to almost anything in the way of new poetry, were an ideal breeding-ground for ideas, argument and experiment.29

Tranter referred to this group by the collective title of the ‘Generation of ’68’, a concept to which I will return, both positively and negatively, in due course. The point I am trying to make is that what was being received at the coalface, by which I mean your school student or average reader outside the cliques of poetry, was a very different picture of where Australian poetry was from what was actually the case. This applies to any poetry in any country, but probably more markedly so in a (post)colonial society such as Australia’s, due to the inability to shake free of the defining poetics of the ‘centre’. To add a Tranter, a Murray, a Harwood, or any other of the Australian poets active during this period, was to displace a member of the Australian (English-influenced) academy’s canon. Of course, these poets were added, but only slowly, and usually only with those poems that best accommodated this notion of the English poetic sensibility. Regarding the inclusion of Australian poetry on the syllabus, a profound change occurred between the early and the late 1970s, by which time I was reading Australian poets as diverse as Robert Adamson, Michael Dransfield, and Rosemary Dobson. One also became aware of the fact that there had been significant movements in Australian verse throughout the century, and that

29

The New Australian Poetry, ed. John Tranter (St Lucia, Queensland: Makar,

1979): xvii.

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we’d even had our own celebrated scandal regarding modernism and its threat to the central English canon as Australia perceived it, in the Ern Malley affair. From the point of view of the young student and poet, this was both a revelation and a moment of excitement. In a sense, a book that changed it all was Alexander Craig’s Twelve Poets,30 which even included a West Australian poet, Randolph Stow, who seemed to manage not only to have formal control over his poems but to introduce elements of modernism, Taoism, a European aesthetic, and an entirely Australian voice and painterly eye into the process. It was in the Twelve Poets anthology that I first read Les Murray, Francis Webb, Gwen Harwood, and Michael Dransfield. One of the poets in that anthology who had a profound effect on not only me but on a whole generation of senior high-school students was Dransfield, who is also seminal to an understanding of the Generation of ’68 and the politics that emerged as a consequence of the Poetry Australia–New Poetry dichotomy. At this stage it is worth briefly noting that on one side of the equation poets such as Les Murray, Geoffrey Lehmann, and Robert Gray were ‘pitted’ against the new wave of modernist poets (those influenced by the non-formalists poets of the U S A , particularly in the 1960s, the New York School being the main centre of attention – Frank O’Hara through to John Ashbery). These modernist poets included John Tranter, Robert Adamson, Jennifer Maiden, J.S. Harry, John Forbes, Laurie Duggan, and Alan Wearne. (There is a decade of variation in the ages here, but they have influences as well as the energy of the period in common, as much as any general aesthetic.) Despite the plethora of small magazines that arose in opposition to the established literary journals (such as Poetry Australia, Southerly, Meanjin, Westerly), there was no common manifesto of defiance. If any were penned, it was very much after the fact. But still, there was the feeling that the new influences of American culture, particularly popular music and the art of consumerism (pro- and anti-), formed a loose confederacy against the Englishorientated poetic canon. In much the same way that the American poets of the L A N G U A G E school would identify themselves with certain shared linguistic interests and methodologies, in association with a particular kind of political outlook, so this new generation of Australian poets drew energy from the potential of the individual to influence policy. The anti-Vietnam War marches, a rising social consciousness regarding Aboriginal rights, feminism, and the en30

Twelve Poets, 1950–1970, ed. & intro. Alexander Craig (Milton, Queensland: Jacaranda, 1971).

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vironmental – all these entered their dialogue. This was to become more pronounced in the early 1980s. The new generation reclaimed the poet as a public figure whose job it is not only to comment on the self or on the position of the self regarding nature (that is, using the lyrical ‘I’), but also to function as a kind of mouthpiece for contemporary culture and the aspirations of the individual per society. Thus, these younger poets followed a long tradition of poetry of protest in Australia, such as the polemics of the socialist left from the latter part of the nineteenth century to the present day. Michael Dransfield and Richard Tipping were among the first poets of this new phase to incorporate socially relevant personae for their generation, one that we encountered at school through the Twelve Poets. A poet like Vincent Buckley, included in that volume, also made and was making strong political statements while retaining the lyrical edge that made his work readable and recognizably poetic. However, to someone in his mid-teens he seemed of another era. By contrast, the youthful Dransfield, in this book shown in a photograph dressed as a monk, and the ‘cool’ Tipping, with his dark glasses and a biographical note pointing out that he edited a journal named Mok, were altogether more believable (even if Tipping’s ‘cool’ photo turned out to be a shot of Peter Fonda). And because one knew that only good poetry was taught alongside the greats of the English canon, we felt safe in enjoying their poems. This set us searching for more material in public and university libraries. A poem like Dransfield’s “Endsight” became something of an anthem with its acidic dedication reading “for Union Carbide, A.D. Hope & Sir P. Hasluck Askin Clutha etc.” (Its final lines invoke “the works of the Official Poets, whose genteel / iambics chide industrialists / for making life extinct.”) To the older, more established poet writing in the late 1970s and early 1980s, this would have seemed in many ways old-hat; these issues had been raised and explored by numerous poets, and the Australian poetic had absorbed this and was moving elsewhere. However, one must put the horse before the cart (to use that particularly cruel image) and realize that if we are talking about a new generation of poets that emerges during the 1980s and 1990s, these were the first broadly available utterances of the new Australia. The early 1980s represented a time of consolidation for both the poets of the new wave and those who had been working in more formal and traditional modes. John Tranter’s Selected Poems, published by Hale & Iremonger, had brought together an extremely diverse and stimulating collection of poetry influenced not only by the American writing with which he was politically as-

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sociated but also by the poetries and poetics of a broad range of English and European writers. Throughout the 1980s, Tranter would increase his range of investigation and experimentation across the landscape of international poetry, whether it be the bizarre and historically interesting form the ‘trenter’, or the ‘haibun’, a verse-prose form from the Japanese. What Tranter would find fascinating about American poetics is its ability to incorporate, in the truest postmodernist sense, a great variety of cultural, technological, social, and linguistic influences into the machine of the poem. By extension, one could look to the French theorists such as Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida for an approach to how a culture gains stimulus from raw material and its appropriation. However, in Tranter’s case, and that of other poets of his period, such as Laurie Duggan, Alan Wearne, John Forbes, and Gig Ryan, this comes via modern American poets rather than from the actual theorists themselves. And via the television (as icon). I recall John Tranter once saying that one could describe a particular aspect of poetry and postmodernism by looking at the advertisement on television for Rank Arena: “Deep Image. . . Deep Image. . . Deep Image. . . ,” gradually fading away. Where a poet such as Les Murray will use the material at hand in a rural setting or via a European cultural inheritance (both positively and negatively) to develop an image, Tranter and the other poets I have mentioned will frequently claim those things immediately to hand. It has been argued that this dichotomy is largely one of a rural (‘Boeotian’) and urban (‘Athenian’) divide. In this formulation, Les Murray ‘views’ culture through the particularities and collective identity of rural communities. By exploring the relationship of the individual with the landscape and his or her inheritance, Murray seeks to speak for those who make their living off the land. This does not mean that he draws exclusively from the rural environment; quite the contrary: his imagery and themes range across a broad spectrum of sources. But the way of seeing is often particularly rural ‘Australian’ and seeks to define a specific national identity. It is international poetry, but with little of the conscious internationalism of much of John Tranter’s verse. While, in Tranter’s Selected Poems, a poem with a title such as “Rimbaud and the Modernist Heresy” goes a long way towards defining this popularly and commercially fetishized, charisma-driven ‘internationalized’ (americanized /Western) culture, we find a poem such as “Bulahdelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle” in Les Murray’s book Ethnic Radio, and later in his ‘Selected’, The Vernacular Republic, going some way towards defining a sense of place in a pastoral

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world that is being affected by post-pastoral notions of occupation (to name is to claim ownership). For Murray, the landscape of a spiritual culture is grounded in the land, and inheritance is something keenly physical, whereas for Tranter it is something that might exist or not in the one-and-a-half hours of a piece of film noir (and while watching this one might also be affected by the advert on a distant radio played by a Col Joye lover sitting by his pool). There is an element of the absurd in this, but Tranter’s poetry is laconically designed to cater for such tastes. The word ‘laconic’ might also be suited to Murray’s colloquialisms, but it is usually associated with the assumed inability of the urbanite to comprehend those from the rural environment. The interaction between these two poets and the ‘schools’ they represent (I would maintain that these are wholly artificial categories) is infinitely more complex than this, but it gives some idea of the perceived split in ways of seeing in Australian poetry. That is, those who work in more traditional forms and are concerned with sculpting the image as a thing in itself are associated with Australia’s pastoral inheritance, and those willing to innovate and incorporate a vast variety of cultural, technological, and literary influences are associated with the urban. For John Forbes, it is nostalgia that makes us look to the centre (read: the bush) for national identity, as opposed to the city, where most of us in Australia live. This was probably the prime debate of mid-1990s Australian poetics, certainly among male poets. One of the significant shifts since Tranter’s The New Australian Poetry (1979), and one with which, as a student, I was entirely unfamiliar until I got to university, was the development of a feminine and/or feminist poetics. That is not to say a poetry of women working within a male hierarchy, or necessarily a poetry that is a mere extension of a poetic mode of expression which is ostensibly male – the English poetry of the centre which schools were so concerned about setting up as a measure of what is good and what is not. In the 1970s, important volumes such as Kate Jennings’ anthology Mother, I’m Rooted came onto the market in an attempt to expose something outside this central male tradition, by working against expectations of what makes a poem valid. Though not much of this poetry has prevailed beyond the confines of the anthology, the principle behind the work has had marked ramifications. The way one reads a poem is significantly affected by what one thinks a poem should do. While there has always been a core of important Australian women poets, certainly in the twentieth century, the feeling by women poets that they must

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write in a particular way or not at all has been dispelled with the coming of second-wave (and ‘third-wave’?) feminism, whether they would call it that or not. From the point of view of 1996, as a reader of this generation, one is not so conscious of the concerns of what constitutes a ‘good’ poem as, say, one would have been in the 1950s, 1960s or even 1970s. ‘Good’ is a variable that is highly dependent on context, and may have hidden presuppositions behind it. One looks to the words ‘effective’ and ‘relevant’. A poet such as Jean Kent is considered to work in the formal tradition. Her voice is recognizably ‘female’ – however, it could be argued that this has no effect on the actual process of composition (that is, linguistically) despite ‘feminine’ sentiments. Conversely, a poet such as Wendy Jenkins is conscious of the potential not only in subject-matter but also in language itself, on the formal level, to represent a new feminist aesthetic. Ours is a society that in the last decade has undertaken significant retrospection and now wears the mantle of multiculturalism, confronting if not resolving the relationship between post-settlement (or invasion) communities (all of which are essentially immigrant!) and Australia’s original inhabitants. Contemporary Australian anthologies and journals reflect this in the homogenizing of disparate elements in Australian literature. They give the impression that Australian society is multi-faceted and capable of containing a complex variety of world-views and practices. I find it fascinating to look at recent ‘mainstream’ Aboriginal and black Australian poetry (that is, poetry published by established publishing houses), which moves from an amalgam of the 1960s and 1970s protest voices of Jack Davis, Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Kevin Gilbert, Bobbi Sykes and others to the still decidedly ‘protest’ voices of Mudrooroo and Lionel Fogarty, where revolution on an aesthetic level is as important as the general political imperatives addressed in content. What is generally referred to as ‘Australian poetry’ usually means white Australian poetry, and there is not a great deal of rapprochement on the literary level, any more than there is on the social and political, despite what certain critics would like us to believe. Whether whites should, anyway, be making attempts at such rapprochement while the social and political divides remain largely unaddressed is questionable. These attempts often become tokenistic in the process. The writing of the periods I have been discussing have variously influenced the new generation of Australian poets. In my own case, the influences of the formal/traditional school are as profound as those of the new wave; I am a reader of Les Murray and of John Tranter, of Gwen Harwood and Gig

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Ryan. In fact, it’s not the names that are relevant so much as a general poetic ambience on which I might draw – and, as I will show, I believe this to be the case for many of the poets of the 1980s and 1990s. That is not to say that the poets and the movements and anthologies of the 1960s and 1970s were not highly influential, but, rather, that they are merely one aspect of a broader process of formation. Whether consciously or unconsciously, the postmodernist ethos of borrowing and adapting has allowed for a broad base from which to draw material and an almost unlimited thematic spectrum. In a sense, there is decolonization through reterritorialization. Where the energies of the 1960s and 1970s are particularly relevant, however, regardless of the influence of particular poets on individuals, is in the broadening of the school syllabus and popular canon. The incorporation of contemporary Australian poetry, based on the successes of this previous generation of poets (as well as on increased national self-confidence, and the changing education of teachers), has meant that poets writing now feel they have some real contribution to make in defining a uniquely Australian poetic; it is no longer established purely from ‘outside’ and alien to their own practice. In my own poetry, as I have said, I absorb influences from the diverse schools of thought on Australian poetry and also look to influences from poetry, science, and culture generally from numerous overseas sources. I work often within a pastoral mode (or maybe anti-pastoral), but one that is recognizably influenced by the ‘urban’. To think that one can be sitting in the middle of the Australian outback attached to the Hubble telescope via the World Wide Web! Or processing the latest dialogue on the Buffalo University Poetics List. To Australians living outside urban areas, for whom ‘the tyranny of distance’ is a defining social and cultural factor, these newer technologies make a particular epistemological difference. The poet Anthony Lawrence is a similar case. He owes his influences to both pastoral and urban poetries, and reads across an immensely diverse range of poetries, be they Irish, American, English, Australian, or anything else that crosses his path. But there are divisions that should be recognized here. For, like the ‘Australian formalists’ rejecting the new wave, Lawrence rejects the influences of some American and European avant-gardists. On the other hand, the European surrealists and post-surrealists, particularly, are of great interest to him, and he will at times write with a surrealist bent himself. What one imagines he is sceptical of is the process of theorizing the method. A poet who has changed and developed with the times is Robert Adamson. Intensely interested in poetic theory, though firmly grounded in the lyrical

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tradition, he is a poet who moves across generations. His songs from the Hawkesbury River are complex and harmonic. Heavily influenced by the tradition of Hart Crane, the work of Robert Duncan, and the American Black Mountain school, in particular Charles Olson, he has moved in recent times towards an investigation of L A N G U A G E poetry. But Adamson is eclectic, and it is the spirit of poetry he is so passionate about, and he is willing to look in diverse and even heterogeneous places for inspiration. In a sense, this attitude is in keeping with what I would see as the defining characteristic of the new generation. It is as if the Generation of ’68 had broadened to include those they rejected, as if Dransfield’s lines from “Endsight” had been played out. The establishment, rather than hierarchizing and appropriating what was deemed suitable, has in fact received a dose of its own medicine. It is a fast-moving world, and poetry reflects this. Not to say, of course, that those still, timeless moments are no longer there. And maybe they are written in spite of the pace of the times. Adamson is full of them. John Tranter has always had poise, though this is more of a controlled gesture, like knowing exactly when to make the appropriate witty retort. John Forbes thrives on being in the cultural ‘fast lane’ but always at a polite distance behind the ‘madding crowd’ so he can make his deft and often cutting commentaries. Forbes complies with the dictum that the satirist must work from within, but realizes that ‘within’ is a fairly loosely defined entity. He plays variations on the cultural specific. These ‘still’ moments, however, are obviously most clearly defined in the use of image. Robert Gray has exemplified the ‘imagist’ school in contemporary Australian poetry. There is a great sense of the visual, of the meditative moment, in his verse. His work is popular on school syllabi. He is most often associated with the formalist tradition and, along with Les Murray, Jamie Grant, and Geoffrey Lehmann, is seen as a spokesman for the non-postmodern in Australian verse. It is easier to define what they are against than what they are for. The non-referential poem is clearly questioned, and a sense of ‘form’ felt as desirable. But once again, despite recent anthologies, new poets have a sense of a previous generation trying to define their interests for them when the old arguments are no longer seen as relevant. Some of the more ‘formalist’ male poets generally still perceive ‘women’s poetry’ as either an appendage to the Australian poetic or else part of it as long as gender issues are not central to the work. Gender politics and the ‘canon’ are elements in a complex argument, and one that is currently defining its terms of discourse. It becomes a question of form versus content.

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Three poets who value the ‘image’ as a thing in itself, Tracy Ryan, Sarah Day, and Jill Jones, are interesting. Jones has elements of the postmodern and possibly the ‘surreal’ in her work, though she can create the meditative image with ease. All work comfortably within more traditional structures. Sarah Day is generally seen as being the most ‘formal’ of these three, but this probably has as much to do with her ‘Englishness’, her occasionally ‘non-Australian’ way of seeing, as with any political stance. However, one can sense the influence of the English canon profoundly in her works. Jones and Ryan tend towards the American. Ryan, in particular, questions the relevance of the traditional modes of expression regarding her feminist aesthetic, though she works within a generally familiar linguistic framework. Her innovations are more in the juxtaposition of notion and image, with influences including Sylvia Plath, Margaret Atwood, and Adrienne Rich; and, at the same time, writers such as John Donne, George Herbert, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Along with Kevin Hart, she is a writer whose concerns are both spiritual and temporal. Ryan and others often cite as influences poets such as Jennifer Strauss, whose strong, taut lines get to the point, without fuss, though they are rhythmic and consciously poetic; indebtedness is also traceable to the immense range, technical control, and powerful renderings of the human condition by Judith Wright and Gwen Harwood. Ryan names as a haunting influence Harwood’s “Barn Owl,” in the sense that it is a ‘confession’ and approaches the question of the inherent power of and desire for destruction. This is an unexpected allegiance, if you think in terms of traditional notions of ‘women’s writing’, where one might assume a poem like “In The Park” to be more influential – “She sits in the park. Her clothes are out of date. / Two children whine and bicker, tug her skirt. A third draws aimless patterns in the dirt. . . ” – because of traditional expectations on the level of subject-matter. But, of course, the newer poets are resisting the gender associations of material for the making of imagery. In varying degrees this is applicable to the poetry of Diane Fahey, Jennifer Compton, and Caroline Caddy. Caddy’s lines are precisely placed on the field of the page, and her imagery interacts in a most interesting way with her meticulous use of form. It’s a technique that was very popular in the 1960s and 1970s, but Caddy has persisted with it and taken it further, to the point where one of her books was reproduced as a facsimile of her manuscript typeface.31 31

Caroline Caddy, Conquistadores (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1991).

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Katherine Gallagher happily considers herself a product of the women’s movement, but not in any limiting sense. Her work is traditionally formal, at least in terms of line-length, rhythm, and stanza patterning. Gallagher, like Peter Porter and David Curzon, writes from outside of Australia; she does, however, retain strong connections with Australia, and frequently visits it. What I am trying to define, and what is rightfully resisting definition here, is a more fluid and complex poetic than has previously existed, at least in the public eye. The rules are changing. A poet who has remained unique and yet paralleled the movements in Australian poetry over the last few decades is Dorothy Hewett. As her recent Collected Poems has revealed, her earliest poems, published in the 1940s, were quite experimental, and more reflective of the modernist inheritance than the later phase of socialist-realist verse that preceded the way she now writes, a poetry that ranges without constraint from personal experience to political critique. Hewett was profoundly influenced by the Americans Robert Lowell and John Berryman; she still deeply admires Lowell’s Life Studies and found John Berryman’s Dream Songs a liberating experience. Coming from Western Australia, Hewett descended on the diverse cultural world of Sydney during the early 1970s, and soon found a kindred spirit in the poet Robert Adamson. Stimulated by Adamson’s eclectic tastes and driving energy, she produced a number of books, such as Greenhouse and Rapunzel in Suburbia, that introduced an entirely new voice into Australian poetry. While sometimes accused of being self-mythologizing, Hewett resisted contemporary critical velleities to forge on in her own direction, having laboured for too long in earlier days under ‘Party’ dictates to have anyone stipulate what she might write. Hewett, also a successfully innovative playwright and novelist, has, arguably more than any other poet, defined the possibility of being an individual outside the politics of division in Australia. The poets writing in the mid1990s probably have more in common with this modus operandi than with any other of the established figures. The influence of regionalism is fast gaining momentum. There has long been a sense of particular place in Australian poetry (such as in Judith Wright and David Campbell), but it is only in recent years that this has been more systematically represented. Local presses with national and international outlooks, such as the Wakefield Press in Adelaide, South Australia, and the Fremantle Arts Centre Press in Western Australia, have sought to bring regional writers to wider audiences. I use the word ‘regional’ here in the Frostian sense of the local being representative of the greater world in microcosm. An

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interesting recent volume of poetry that has fused disparate regionalisms (the east and west coasts) into a more ‘universal’ language by creating discourse between landscapes and different ‘emotional spaces’, linked by the picaresque journey of the poetic sensibility, and a poet’s subtle ‘rites of passage’, is Andrew Taylor’s Sandstone. The most prominent regional poet is Les Murray, with his focusing on Bunyah, New South Wales, as a paradigm for the world in general. This applies to a great extent to Robert Adamson, his hunting-ground the Hawkesbury River region in New South Wales. It is worth noting that Murray considers that the voice of country-folk is consistently misunderstood and often ignored by the city-orientated State and national governments, the media, financial institutions, and the general cultural dictates of the urban centres. Murray seeks to give voice to what he considers a disempowered minority. Australian critics often play this aspect of Murray off against the urban(e) ‘international’ interests (particularly European, and with a focus on art, literature, and music) of Peter Porter. Porter is seen as the self-imposed exile (he left Brisbane for London in the 1950s and has only returned to Australia for brief stints) and Murray as the ‘homeboy’. A case of the ‘centre’ and the ‘fringe’? It is interesting to note that the ‘Boeotian–Athenian’ dichotomy actually arose out of a review written by Porter on Murray’s work, with Murray developing the idea and the theme during later discussions and debates. Despite the way in which some assert its centrality, the Sydney–Melbourne axis in Australian poetry might well be an overblown case of regionalism. These cities are obviously the centres of population in Australia, but there are rich and diverse poetries that operate quite independently of their influence. Even the distinctions between the two ‘great cities’ are blurred. Sydney is generally portrayed as being lively, hip, multicultural, and postmodern, much more willing to absorb outside influences (at least from other city-based cultures) than Melbourne, which tends to be depicted as old-world and academic (conservatively ‘more Oxbridge than Oxbridge’). The briefest demographic review of which poets are situated where will belie these contrived divisions. For example, Melbourne is the home of Alan Wearne, Laurie Duggan, Gig Ryan, and even, for most of the 1990s, John Forbes, as well as many of the L A N G U A G E -influenced and performance-oriented (John Cage, et al.) avantgardists such as Chris Mann. Chris Wallace–Crabbe, and R.A. Simpson have long-established Melbourne reputations, though they are are read widely in a larger Australian context. (Chris Wallace–Crabbe publishes with Oxford in England, as Peter Porter did.) Peter Rose is of a younger generation of Mel-

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bourne poets and is both urbane and witty. His influences are classical, he has an immense knowledge of European art and literature; his books The House of Vitriol and The Catullan Rag were almost ‘surprises’ at a time (the early 1990s) when younger poets were not generally working from these influences. It is no overstatement to suggest that his influence is already considerable. John Tranter’s work epitomizes what is commonly called the ‘Sydney poem’ – slick and witty in ways reminiscent of the New York School of poets. However, as I have mentioned before, Tranter’s influences are much more diverse than this; rather than defining a particular school, his commentaries concern a mode of perception. Sydney, in a sense, is both symbol and metaphor in his poems. Robert Gray, the meditative imagist, is also firmly entrenched in the Sydney identity, yet in many ways no two poets could be less alike. More recent poets are generally considered to be Australian rather than proclaiming allegiance to a particular region within Australia, even when they are published by regional presses or write out of a specific area. This is not to say that the sense of place has become one vast blur – rather, that there is a common ‘language’ that makes the immense variety of Australian poetries recognizably Australian. With the influences of feminism, non-heterosexual perspectives (as in the detective-verse-novel The Monkey’s Mask by Dorothy Porter, a recent bestseller in Australian poetry), Aboriginality, environmentalism, contemporary theory, and a willingness by the ‘reader’ to explore interactions between Australian cultures and outside cultures, particularly those of South-East Asia and the Pacific Rim, the question of ethnicity (and for this a so-called ‘Sydney’ poet like Adam Aitken is an interesting case in point), there is a much broader sense of what constitutes the so called ‘Australian voice’ or poem. This essay is a brief introduction to the diversity of contemporary Australian poetry and poetic landscapes. The senior poets whom I have mentioned as being among the major figures of the 1960s and 1970s have mostly continued to be influential and flexible. In a sense, they are also part of the new generation I speak of. Then there is a poet like Peter Boyle who, in terms of age, belongs to John Forbes’s generation but has only recently published his second volume of poetry, after the highly successful booklet Coming Home from the World. His is a rich and refreshingly ‘new’ poetry. The South Australian poet Peter Goldsworthy’s tight, clever poems belong as much to a European mode of seeing as to an Australian, though firmly anchored with an Australian sense of wit. The poet Geoff Page, who lives in Canberra, is another

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whose range is immense and who mixes a range of subject-matter with extensive formal control. He is able to take the apparently commonplace and render it with respect and poignancy. He also works with much ‘greater’ themes, and has numerous books to his credit. Another poet particularly adept at investing the ‘commonplace’ with meaning is Dennis Haskell. Despite his comparatively modest output of individual collections, he has actually been publishing in journals since the early 1970s, and is an established and respected figure in Australian literature. Haskell doesn’t believe in fireworks and goes quietly about the task of writing poetry. Strongly influenced by Keats (on whom he has published a study) and Yeats, Haskell enjoys the challenges of formal control and the force of understatement. It should be noted that the subtle, contemplative, and balanced verse of Kevin Hart and the mythologizing and individual voice of Fay Zwicky earn both of them an important place in Australian literature, and are both read with interest by many newer poets. A previous generation of anthologists and poets who are still actively writing includes Rodney Hall, Thomas Shapcott, and Judith Rodriguez, the last of whom edits the poetry list for Penguin (Australia) and is a major encourager of fresh and unusual poets such as Coral Hull. Taking recent volumes by Hull, Adam Aitken, and Judith Beveridge, I’d like now to examine the ‘newer’ Australian poetry in more detail. 32

The Newer Australian Poetry

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A U S T R A L I A that will have ramifications concerning what is read and how it is read into the next century. As major literary journals struggle against funding cuts, seek to validate their existence, and contemplate their relevance, a vibrant, informed, and active poetry subculture is emerging. With a few exceptions, it bears with ease the mantle of, or at least a familiarity with, internationalism – being of the generation of email and the internet – and is not so 32

HERE ARE STIRRINGS IN THE POETRY CULTURE OF

“Post-Generation of ’68,” American Book Review 18.4 (1997): 1+. The springboard for this essay was consideration of the following books: Adam Aitken, In One House (North Ryde, N S W : Angus & Robertson, in association with Paper Bark, 1996); Judith Beveridge, Accidental Grace (St Lucia: U of Queensland P , 1996); Coral Hull, William’s Mongrels in the Wild Life (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1996); John Mateer, Anachronism (Fremantle, W A : Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1997); Bobbi Sykes, Eclipse (St Lucia: U of Queensland P , 1996). [J.K.]

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easily pigeonholed by the slow and previously definitive process of anthologizing. The canon, if not cracking, is mutating. It is a far more flexible, even fluid, entity; the pace of communications means that it has to be. This doesn’t invalidate the meditative voice but, rather, makes it more available. Just as the small-press revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s enabled the representation of many ‘new’ modes of poetry: i.e. allowed them to be circulated and talked about, and read against the lists of established publishers with their eye on school curricula and the various notions of cultural appropriateness, so, too, do the internet and desktop publishing. And it’s not only in terms of what is published, but of how available the material is and what an audience is willing to read. It is accepted that reading material now comes in a variety of forms, rather than merely as the perfect-bound codex. A quick look at a few of the new literary journals that have appeared in Australia gives a good idea of the flexibility that has entered the ‘marketplace’. I use this expression hesitantly, because in some sense the internet has deflated profitdriven economics, although, as things advance, I’m sure ‘marketplace’ mechanisms will begin to make themselves felt. The journals Heat (edited by Ivor Indyk), Cordite (edited by Peter Minter and Adrian Wiggins), and Tinfish (edited by Susan Schultz) are interesting examples. All pursue an internationalism – the first two based in Sydney, with Tinfish being published through the University of Hawai‘i, though carrying notable Australian content. Heat has just published its third issue and includes a healthy mix of overseas authors with home-grown talent. Design is a strong point. The ‘book’ as aesthetic object is integral to its claim of relevance, of contemporaneity. Poetry is read against and among articles, prose fiction, and reviews. Cordite, in its first issue, contained primarily Australian material, though it is looking to increase overseas content. It is a poetry tabloid that aims to be innovative while also cheap and available. Tinfish, appearing both in hard copy and on the internet, is a U S journal that is happy to recognize Australian poetry as vibrant and relevant to poetry readers anywhere (internationalism works both ways. .. ). If worse comes to worst and its funding were cut, it would still exist on the internet. Each of these journals is willing to tackle the idea of audience as a thing in itself. Readership should not be taken for granted. People don’t have to read poetry. Poetry can be rewarding and often a ‘total’ and ‘necessary’ experience, but it is not sacred, despite the propaganda (though I think it is good for poets, at least, to think this is the case). Readers (and listeners) need to be given the choice, to be given the chance, and convinced.

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The batch of recent releases that are sitting on my desk at the moment is in some ways a testament to the desire for variation in said ‘marketplace’. From the meditative and steady poems of Judith Beveridge’s Accidental Grace through to the insistent ‘power’ poetry of Bobbi Sykes’s Eclipse, from the irony and roving eye of Adam Aitken’s In One House to the confrontational and almost aggressive flexing of John Mateer’s Anachronism, what interests me in these poets, and the other half-dozen titles, as a whole is that they resist pigeonholing. Although I constantly hear that Beveridge’s poems are of the formalist school, that they are in a lineage only compatible with the anthologizing of Robert Gray and Geoffrey Lehmann, I find myself saying that it is really poetry of itself. Whichever age or environment Beveridge had written in, one would have expected a patient, almost hesitant concern for craft. This does not mean that she writes purely in traditional verse forms (another myth) – much of her work is free verse – but that she is obviously a poet for whom spontaneity is an experience or an impression rather than a method. Take the poem “Incense,” a characteristically deft, image-rich meditation: it is in fact the irregular verse form, the fragmentation, that gives it movement. Beveridge captures the moment, so to speak, but is not caught in it: In a confetti of ash and petals I hunt out your memory. In each decimal spark in the moods beyond surveillance I close my eyes to the tips of infant roses, to the smoke of burning leaves uncurling like vines in an orchard where light is the light of hillsides in yellowy May. * But in the betrayal of falling suns, the thin stems eaten by red tips on an insect timescale, stars drop and burn tips grow amber with decay. In a long red chamber you are inner oils already burnt.

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It is useful to compare Beveridge’s acute observation of the complexities and almost mathematical precision and infinitude of nature with that found in Coral Hull’s William’s Mongrels. Hull’s voice is in many ways the opposite of Beveridge’s – it is confrontational, charged, unrelenting. But the two poets share this ability to see the dots in a pointillist painting both as individual entities and as part of a greater picture. Rather than there being opposed poetics, there is much in common on this level. I believe that the politics of divisiveness will not be tolerated by a reader who is actually exposed to both poetries, and in such a way that each work is read on its own terms. It is the externalizing aspect of Beveridge’s eye that allows her to weave rich images, but it also leads to a kind of culturally specific reading. We know she is the outsider, and in a poem like “The Tea Vendor” we glimpse a tinge of the Other at work in the persona’s relationship with the ‘exotic’: “but now his / eyes are a teaspoon each / of Darjeeling. ... ” Nothing like this occurs in the poems found in Adam Aitken’s In One House – not just because he is able to articulate and critique dialogue between cultures, but also because irony provides a safe distance for scrutiny. The New Australian Poetry, edited and introduced by John Tranter, was published by Makar Press in 1979. It was in this work that Tranter immortalized the collective ‘Generation of ’68’, indicating a kind of connection between a diverse group of poets who began, in an energetic and ‘new’ way, to respond to the political and social climate and to the New American Poetry of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Without entering into the politics and characteristics of that grouping of poets, and its assumed or imagined opposition, suffice it to say that just as Tranter correctly recognized a new direction in Australian poetry and poetics, so now we might do the same. If the late 1960s and 1970s are seen as being a particularly active time for the publication and development of poetry in Australia, the 1990s must be considered so as well. Maybe not in such a dramatic way – the ideological friction between the flagship poetry journals and their followers of that period (Poetry Australia and New Poetry) isn’t there, and Australia has to some extent reconciled itself to the assimilation of poetries outside the English literary canon – but nonetheless in just as profound a way. The newer Australian poets – and this is not a question of being young, since many of these poets are from very different generations and relate to the present moment in different ways – are far more international in their outlook and generally more accepting of diversity. There are, of course, differences: some prefer the more formal approach to prosody and theme, others are inspired by avant-gardists such as

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the American L A N G U A G E poets, and yet others might (almost!) consciously call themselves post-Generation of ’68 poets; but there is still a belief that it is healthy for different poetries to coexist. In the U S A at the moment, there is a conflict developing between the ‘New Formalists’, who are vigorously promoting ‘a return to rhyme, metre, and meaning’ in poetry, and the ‘post-L A N G U A G E poets,’ who are in favour of a detached voice operating through the codes of language. If this sounds a little like the conflict between the traditionalists (promoters of sense and meaning, the value of the lyric) and the American-inspired free-verse writers of the late 1960s, then it should. But the ‘revolution’ has come and gone. (Post)modernism has caught up with Australia; the troubling aspect of the ghost of Ern Malley has been exorcised and is in fact regularly invoked as mentor and inspiration. The bête noire of Australian modernism in literature has become its cause célèbre. In the 1991 Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry edited by John Tranter and Philip Mead, he even rated fifteen pages. Canonized at last. In the recent anthologies The New Oxford Book of Australian Verse (edited by Les Murray) and The Oxford Book of Modern Australian Verse (edited by Peter Porter), the blurbs mention representing the emerging writers of this period. Journals are consistently and consciously carrying the work of the newer Australian poets. Fremantle Arts Centre Press is due to put out an anthology in 1998, edited by myself, that represents poets likely to influence a new generation of writers and readers. Apart from an obvious millennial impetus, and the multiculturalism of the 1980s, one must also look to the energy and enthusiasm of small presses and people like Judith Rodriguez at Penguin, who have actively promoted the representation of new poetry. Five Islands Press, for example, with its Scarp / Five Islands New Poets Series, edited by Ron Pretty, has allowed poets who would be unlikely to find mainstream publication (due to a lack of a track record and the highly competitive nature of poetry publishing) to be read, reviewed, and talked about. This series only requires a handful of poems to have been previously published in journals, and its books are no more than thirty or forty pages long. A recent volume, Peter Boyle’s Coming Home from the World, shared the N S W Premier’s Award and the N B C Poetry Award. It is interesting that this first publication was by a poet in his forties, whereas others are by people like Peter Minter, Adrian Wiggins, and Karen Attard who are in their twenties and thirties. But they are read together, and people think of them as being of the new poetry.

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Another important factor to consider when looking at why one should state that there is a ‘new poetry’ emerging is the publication of women’s poetry – by which I don’t mean women writing in inherited patriarchal modes but, rather, poets who are redefining how poetry can be read and actually widening the scope of the poetic. Gig Ryan, most often seen as of the previous generation, but really part of a cross-over group of poets, was instrumental in establishing a basis for such work in an Australian context. Poets such as Catherine Bateson, Alison Croggon, Melissa Curran, and M.T.C. Cronin, Karen Attard, and Tracy Ryan are all working with voices and prosodies that are energetic and fresh. A book which I think will have a strong influence on Australian poetry in the coming years is the New and Selected Poems of Lionel Fogarty, the Murri poet from Queensland. Fogarty’s work is linguistically exciting as well as politically charged. His cadences and use of song are genuinely new in English-language poetry. He uses hybridity of language as a tool for change – there is nothing expedient or defeatist about it. His poetry defines and defends a traditional spiritual territory but remains ‘real’ and contemporary in its observation of the political forces it resists and which oppose it. The Koori poet Lisa Bellear has something of the same in her work, though she is less linguistically digressive and less involved at this stage with the overt use of song and orality. As with the emerging poets of the late 1960s and 1970s, this new energy comes with the emergence (and collapse) of literary journals and reading venues. Apart from the already mentioned Heat and Cordite, journals such as Salt, Siglo, The Famous Reporter, Imago, and Ulitarra are endeavouring to be representative and also to stimulate interest in poetry. I’d hazard a guess that, as things are particularly difficult in the mainstream poetry publishing world in Australia at present, we’ll see more small-scale desktop publishing, as well as an increase in the number of chapbooks that find their way onto the market, or are distributed through reading venues. It is also interesting to note that the more established journals, such as Westerly, Island, Southerly, and Meanjin, have undergone facelifts over recent years – cosmetic renewal that means someone is sensing a change in the atmosphere. As I’ve suggested, internationalism is the key to all of this. Since my first days of publishing poetry in the early 1980s, I have looked overseas for journal publication, as well as in Australia. My contemporaries at first found this a little strange. (A degree of cultural amnesia is detectable here, as smallmagazine publishing in Australia of the 1960s was often wide open to Ameri-

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can influences.) Now it’s not so uncommon, and, as I said earlier, the allimportant increasing access to the World Wide Web means that people are speaking and publishing more in international spaces. The idea of preserving one’s regional identity and conversing with other regional identities is challenging and appealing. This is what makes internationalism a positive force pouring fresh water into a potentially stagnant pool of sameness and regularity. It is a linking of diversities – creating room for dialogue. It is interesting that anthologizers and journal editors seem to be more aware now (or again) that the Australian poetry community goes beyond the eastern seaboard and that poets with distinct voices are to be found right across the map. When one defines a ‘new poetry’, or a new anything for that matter, qualification is called for – who’s in, and who’s not. I’d like to think the ‘new’ is a state of mind and that any poets who wish to enter can do so. There is an active core of enthusiasts that includes publishers like Black Pepper, editors of literary journals, and poets such as Anthony Lawrence, Peter Rose, Tracy Ryan, and myself, but there are many others who haven’t consciously considered themselves to be part of anything. There are times when poets like John Forbes, Robert Adamson, and J.S. Harry are as new as anyone around. And John Tranter, though in many ways seen as epitomizing at least one side of the conflict between poets in the 1970s, is always new and has always been international. They move in and out of this ‘newer poetry’. But so do more apparently formal poets such as Sarah Day and Anthony Lawrence. To be new doesn’t simply mean reading avant-gardists from the U S A , the U K , and France and adopting their practices. It means feeling part of something that defines the possibilities of the future, as well as representing the current scene. An awareness that something different is taking place is often marked by a sense of confrontation – that something has shifted. In most cases, I feel change as something subtle and gradual, but some poets step outside this process and ‘announce’ presence. As I have indicated, many would consider the poetry of Coral Hull to be highly confronting. Of course, on one (major) level this is Hull’s intention. She is not happy with things as they are, and sees poetry as the most direct of political acts. There is a programme here, one turning on cause and effect. The immediacy of her poems is such that the occasional flatness and relentlessness of her rhythms do not subvert the intended catharsis for the reader. It is not merely a process of reading, but of experiencing Hull’s verse. And, as a consequence, if one is not swayed by Hull’s argument and rhetoric, one is at least aware that deeply moral concerns have been voiced.

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In a recent discussion with George Steiner,33 I made the claim that an accurate rendering of the Australian environment in all its variations (and climates) meant that some fragmentation was necessary to give an ‘authentic’ picture. He replied that while, indeed, this would give a picture, there is much more to a poem than simply illuminating or framing an observation: it must have moral intent. A poem could not be merely a vignette, but must have a sense of completeness about it. Hull, at her best, fulfils Steiner’s requirements regarding the ‘good poem’. However, it is in fact the moral roundedness of her poems that I find problematical. Despite personally empathizing with their standpoints, I find Hull’s poems at their most impressive when they are fragmentary. This is not only a visual thing, but also one of rhythm. When her senses are a little more ‘deranged’ than usual, there is an ambiguity and vitality that suggest possible alternative readings. Hull’s use of the slash, enjambment, and irregular line endings contributes to the rhetorical stance she often takes. She is very much in control of her voice, though I believe generally that, were she to play a few variations, she would both qualify and emphasize her themes more dramatically. Hers is a dramatic voice. However, sometimes the drama is too burdened with stage directions. What I mean here is that one knows which way the poem is going to go. The exceptions to the rule, such as “Pornography,” when they make a change of direction that is almost unexpected, tend to become decidedly polemical, as if to stress the point that was originally intended. Another poem that I find intriguing is “Praying Mantis,” because it effectively links an external observation –her father’s finding a praying mantis while working “digging in the front garden” – to something quite disturbing happening behind the scenes. One asks: are we disturbed because of the association made between two parallel incidents, or because they are in their own right malignant? In the poem “In Brewarrina Nothing Is Sacred,” we see many of Hull’s themes and concerns at work. Within the overall structure of the poem there are wonderful colloquial asides; she has a good ear for common speech. In that catching sound-and-sense way, Hull’s patented slash works dynamically in this piece: bre/ like what? / like leprosy / bre has a sports centre but no sports equipment / locals go down the 33

Both Steiner and Kinsella have taught at Churchill College, Cambridge, and Steiner has made notably enthusiastic endorsements of Kinsella’s poetry.

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streets to the t.a.b. / & bet & bitch about the weather & whether it will rain or not / see it did rain two days ago / no it didn't / locals go down the street to the sunday 4 p.m. r.s.l. raffle / jerry is

It forms that hiatus in repartee that gives a sense of genuinely being in on the conversation. It has an edginess, an immediacy, and a familiarity about it. It is the familiarity, actually, that can be a problem. The issues that Hull is exploring in this poem are highly sensitive. In examining race relations in a small country town, there is an ‘expected’ dynamic involving the white voice of the father whose point of view is presented and played against. If this father-figure had been a respected authoritative voice, then it would have seemed as if the speaker were colluding with his dismissive analysis of things as they ‘are’. But Hull skilfully avoids this by ‘experiencing’ a constructed white /black binary with its implicit contradictions. The title with its negating of the ‘sacred’ for any in Brewarrina problematizes her position as observer and ours as reader. Her resolution that she is “angry at the white cotton farmers & the black glass smashers” others everyone but herself, creating a misanthropy that struggles to undo the racism of which it is conscious. What she has over any other poet writing in Australia today is not so much the ability as the willingness to see things as they present themselves to her. This is rather ironic, considering that much of the opposition to her verse has been that it is too moralistic in its presentation; that it doesn’t allow for alternative readings (the ‘preaching /proselytizing’ problem). In terms of talking about a newer Australian poetry, what Hull offers is a voice that is not anti-canonical – because it actually doesn’t in any way work with or against the English canon – but takes as its point of departure what Veronica Brady has called the ‘isness’ of being.34 That is, the picture that presents itself to her, and the experience that evolves out of that picture, constitute the stuff of her poems. This makes her a uniquely Australian voice. She is more at home with the Australian environment than any poet I know, other than Indigenous poets such as Lionel Fogarty.

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Veronica Brady, “Art and Spirituality,” New Renaissance 8.1 (1998): 4. See also Brady, “Gender and the Sensus Fidelium,” in Proceedings of the Inaugural Conference of Australian Reforming Catholics (Occasional Papers 1; Abbotsleigh, Wahroonga: Australian Reforming Catholics, 2002): 18. (Referring to the Old-Testament philosopher Balthazar.)

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Another thing that I find striking about Hull is her ability to make dramatically ‘feminist’ statements without thesis; she is all about praxis. This is not to demean the process of theorizing but, rather, to qualify its opposite: the poems in William’s Mongrels. In “Separation Landscape,” a poem addressed to a violent partner, Hull is able to say e.h. binda chased rabbit / & i rolled out my sleeping bag & rolled into it / i will admit i smelt the chest of your faded black sloppy joe / in the same way i smelt my dog’s collar after he died / kindi went to sleep on it

– while still protesting that partner’s violence. This duality is quite characteristic of Hull; she has that uncanny ability to make a moral statement and still recognize the other side of the ‘argument’. What is at issue here is the fact that the relationship between ‘victim’ and ‘oppressor’ is more complex than it may appear on the surface. This, of course, has importance for any feminist theorizing on the subject. Other reviewers have noted that Hull seems to have almost ‘total childhood recall’. Her ability to deal with the detail of issues like that in “Separation Landscape” may very well arise out of this, the relationship between persecutor and persecuted being so relevant to a child’s experience. Two significant poems in this context are “Sharpies” and “Toys.” In examining the map of Hull’s poetic, it is impossible to ignore the ‘suburban’. Hull trains on suburbs the same critical eye she uses when writing of nature; things are explored up close. For example, in the poem “Liverpool,” a kind of ars poetica in terms of this stream of Hull’s work, we find such wonderfully acute and unrelenting observations as the flannelette shirts & indian skirts / panel vans, old holdens & V8s / & cigarette packets pushed up beneath the sleeves / peter jackson’s, winfield 25s & a marijuana earring & what are you smilin’ at? / & why doesn’t anybody write poetry about us? / super aggressive – traffic mongers – tow trucks – insurance -pink slips, green slips / slip over in the factory – fracture your neck – claim compo, pension, sore back -pay rego / pay your own way into revesby workers, into parents without partners /

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& if they overtake you in the peak hour rush on the hume hwy / on the canterbury road thru milperra / then get out – walk over – punch ’em thru the window – kick in the mudguard – it’s aluminium /

Hull is able to make her critical commentaries and exploit irony to the full because she is of the place. She never becomes distantly or flippantly satirical, but nonetheless takes to her inheritance with a hard edge. Alongside the constant compilation of negatives there is a sense of triumph and overcoming; an anti-deterministic voice that allows for an out. The determination of a defeated environment to pull ambition down is rejected. Toward the last lines of “Liverpool” there is a kind of prophetic utterance. In her un-showy way, Hull is a visionary both of the city and of the bush, without becoming their proselytizer. She doesn’t see herself as a shaman but, rather, as someone working from the inside out: abusers & losers i’m telling you straight, ‘cos I’m a westie’: you gotta be rich to live in sydney – you gotta be smart to go to uni – & you gotta be famous to be in the movies/

In terms of my thesis of the newer Australian poetry, Hull is a kind of wild card, insofar as she owes no obvious allegiance to the Australian poets who have preceded her. She in no way imitates or mimics, nor even alludes to the creation of an Australian popular canon during the 1970s and 1980s. By contrast, Adam Aitken is very much a poet who works from an awareness of something called ‘contemporary Australian poetry’. In some senses this is ironic, as his material and way of seeing are almost entirely outside the poetics he has absorbed. What he actually has in common with an earlier generation of Australian, predominantly male poets, is tone. Maybe this is what the back-cover endorsements on In One House are pointing out: “Adam Aitken is from a new generation who have learned from the innovative poets of the last fifteen years. . . ” (publisher’s text?); “With the hip technique of John Forbes and a sensuous passion to define his subject, every line he writes is infused with meaning” (Robert Adamson). There is an obvious handing-on of the baton here. Of course, by legitimizing the ‘next generation’, one is validating and verifying the presence of the previous one. If there is ‘influence’, then there is at least implied presence. This is very much the stuff of the canon; the anthologized become the anthologists – that kind of thing. Having

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said this, I am not implying that the results are negative; in this case they are not. Aitken draws on his Thai heritage and childhood in Malaysia in such a way that his observations include viewpoints other than the overdetermined European Australian ones. He is an urban poet, but takes his voice into a vast array of landscapes and tableaux. His ability is not so much in creating a mise-en-scène (although he attempts this on many occasions) as in observing cross-cultural tensions and frictions. But, as the book’s title suggests, there is a kind of internationalism at work, an optimism that underlies the at times acute irony – irony such as James Bond flies into Phuket, which he pronounces Fukit and this announces the demise of the colonial era. ... American linguists in a helicopter, dropping ration packs of Chicklets and brand new grammar. (“Saigon the Movie”)

Irony in Aitken’s work acts as signifier. It seems to be what allows him to approach sensitive topics with safety. In poems such as “Fable,” “The Inn of the Sixth Happiness,” and “Indochine,” there is a distance between voice and material. However, when considered as a whole, Aitken’s work does much to raise an awareness outside the lineage of a settler ‘voice’, and consequently allows him to engage convincingly with a wide range of material and ideas. In considering the place of these innovative poets in the schema of the ‘Newer Australian Poetry’ I’d point again to their internationalism. In Hull it is an unconscious force – the colloquial language, the specificity of place and interaction with experience suggest hers is a regional poetry. And, of course, it is. But it is part of a global poetry insofar as it owes allegiance to the ‘need to be said’, to speak the unspoken, and, finding success outside Australia, is not bound to a national inheritance. Aitken’s poetry is often ‘international’ in locale, and in its interweaving of Australian vernacular with idiomatic American and ‘colonial’ English. More than that, it speaks to communities whose experiences intercept and interact with each other.

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in the context of an international poetic. It is considered by many Australians and non-Australians to be vital and unique, and one of the ‘growth areas’ of English-language poetry. This anthology has been put together out of a desire to identify the diversity and energy of Australian poetry, and to show how the development of individual voices into the next century will contribute to a collective poetic. I have no interest in re-stating the history of Australian poetry, as is done in many anthologies. The notion of appending Aboriginal oral traditions to just over two hundred years of post-settlement poetries to create some kind of nation-making canon has more to do with the politics of power, conquest, and unease than with identifying a particular poetic voice. I find such canonmaking appropriative and artificial; it tends to be exclusive and consequently dismissive. Australian poetry, from the point of view of this anthology, is a geographical and psychological entity rather than a purely historical one. If the poet is from Australia, lives in Australia, or perceives him- or herself to be part of Australia, however they might envisage it, then they are worthy of being considered for inclusion. From this starting point I have looked to those poets who are likely to develop and expand their oeuvre into the next century, who are likely to contribute to the language in some energetic way, given favourable conditions. I have no specific inclination toward the experimental or the formal, and in fact am most interested where the two meet. I often find the experimental where it’s not supposed to exist, and the strong formalist tendencies in the reputedly avant-garde. So the binary is upset, even irrelevant, from the outset. The reader will find many of the established ‘names’ writing Australian poetry today – including Les Murray, Peter Porter, John Tranter, Dorothy Hewett, Fay Zwicky, Robert Gray, Gig Ryan, Kevin Hart, and Robert Adamson – in this anthology, as well the names of those who’ve made relatively recent appearances but have already shown that they will help shape the evo-

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USTRALIAN POETRY IS RAPIDLY FINDING A PLACE

“Introduction” to Landbridge: Contemporary Australian Poetry, ed. & intro. John Kinsella (Todmorden: Arc, 1999): 15–21.

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lution of an Australian language and poetic over the coming years – Alison Croggon, Peter Minter, Margie Cronin, Tracy Ryan, and many others. The often customary and reflexive rules of thumb of anthologists such as gender, ethnicity, and class have been been rejected in favour of a focus on multiple and varied approaches to the handling of language – one usually finds that flexibility on this level allows for a less forced and more accurate reading of variety in these other ‘categories’. I have looked for language that is alive and vital, that adds something new to our reading experience, that escapes from the trap of telling the reader how a text should be read. This isn’t a collection of identities, but of poems. The text wins hands-down for me. Above and beyond everything else, each poet included has been given basically the same amount of space and has been offered the opportunity to make a statement of intent and include a biographical note. This is meant to assist in moving with the poet’s ‘project’ and to take the place of the canon-making pronouncements of the anthologist. I hope this volume, through the poets and their words, will dictate its own boundaries and determine its own areas of influence. My aim has been to retain the integrity of regional identity and at the same time to facilitate lines of communication between regions, on a global scale – to create an atmosphere of international regionalism. I want ‘this’ Australia to be read in an international context. I am interested in poets who represent aspects of the protean Australian voice. Whatever this might be, it’s not fixed or representative – diverse cultures merge to make it a growing and interactive language. As a consequence of the progressive nature of this anthology, it is with regret that some significant voices of recent years aren’t included, such as those of Gwen Harwood and Philip Hodgins, whose deaths have meant a great loss for poetry in general. I have decided to include only those poets actively writing at the time of compilation. The late John Forbes, whose witty metaphysical poems (I note that this term is becoming increasingly associated with his work) have astounded more than one generation, and whose voice is undoubtedly one of the most individual in late-twentieth-century Englishlanguage poetry, has been included, as he was still alive while the volume was being compiled. We were able to discuss his selection personally, and this book is dedicated to his memory. For me, the most significant voice to emerge in the closing years of this century is that of the Murri poet Lionel Fogarty. Fogarty has managed to use English as a weapon against its own colonizing potential. He has created a positive hybrid that undoes the claim of linguistic centrality, and registers the

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primacy of the oral tradition and the song-cycle. In many ways, his project of reclamation and autonomy, strongly political in nature and dynamically active on the language level (if the two are even separable), has led me to see the necessity of an anthology that is active and operates outside the usual canonical guidelines. As part of the regional-integrity aspect of the selection, I looked across Australia rather than just at the eastern seaboard. In the end, however, I included only those poets I felt would also have appeal outside ‘their’ places. The book as a whole is interactive, something like a gallery space in which each work enhances our reading of another. A few years ago I wrote an article for the Australian Book Review entitled “Pulped Factions” (see below), in which I argued that the factionalism of Australian poetry was of little interest to the present generation of Australian writers. The divide between the ‘Generation of ’68’ and the ‘Lehmann, Murray, Gray’ camp, the animosities between the poetry ‘scenes’ of Sydney and Melbourne, have been well documented elsewhere and their signatures presented in a number of anthologies. Suffice it to say that wonderful poets come from both sides of the ‘divide/s’, and that such animosities arose for good reason, but they are of relatively little concern in the grander scheme of things. New rivalries and divides have appeared and will continue to do so. Philosophical differences and questions of style and form abound, but these are endemic in any time. Difference is healthy as long as it generates debate. Many of the poets included here were willing or conscripted combatants in those ‘wars’, but many aren’t. I’d like to regard them as having been collected here under a new banner: Australian poets exploring Australian languages. The internet has already become the most significant medium for the internationalization of Australian poetry. In running the Poetryetc.org international poetry email discussion list, I’ve noted the enthusiasm with which poets and critics from other cultures have responded to the geographical, demographic, and cultural particularities of Australian poetic voices. There is a fascination with the variety and breadth, the fact that it’s not all ‘wheat, sheep, and kangaroos’ or ‘Sydney’. Not that people don’t look for those aspects, too, but there’s an admiration for Australian poetry’s flexibility and fluidity. It is seen as a growth area. The net has overcome such obvious problems as the difficulty of achieving overseas publication and the expense of overseas communication. For all isolated cultures, this has been a boon. Obviously, access isn’t universal, but it is increasing. It’s worth mentioning the excellent Australian literature site

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Austlit (http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/) and that hypertextual growth area that does so much for creating an international space through which Australians might move with poets from elsewhere: John Tranter’s web magazine, Jacket. The culture of the literary journal is of particular interest to me, and quite a few of the poems selected for this anthology first appeared in literary journals, with a number coming from the one I edit, Salt. Australia has had a fairly dynamic literary magazine culture, but one highly vulnerable to the vagaries of federal and state government funding. The ‘big’ journals such as Meanjin, Southerly, Westerly, Island, and Overland have been solid and reliable despite their funding ups and downs, while newer journals such as Siglo, Heat, and Cordite have maintained a climate of cultural integrity and artistic potential. Above and beyond everything else, a literary journal culture is indispensable to the vitality of poetry and language itself. These are the testing grounds and places for juxtaposition and comparison. The crucibles of the word. One of the most commonly imposed divisions, not only in Australian poetry but in Australian society in general, is that between the country and the city, the rural and the urban. The Boeotian–Athenian playoff that’s been going on in Australian criticism, using the Porter–Murray model, since the 1970s, has got a little long in the tooth, and I’m sure both poets would be frustrated by the reductive nature of the model as it is haphazardly applied by critics in various circumstances. The idea that Murray represents one school of thought and Porter another has been a division of convenience. I have no interest in this. Murray is obviously a poet concerned with the rural, but he is also a linguist and deploys the language of science and mechanics frequently in his verse. Porter, urbane sophisticate, is intimately familiar with the riches of the pastoral inheritance. Critics use polarities to divide and conquer. It’s the poets’ voices we are listening to here. In many ways, it is possible to read Australian poetry through and against the landscape, rural and pastoral models. I’m using ‘pastoral’ here in the sense of the urban construct of the rural myth – as opposed to a specifically rural poetry. The Australian ‘bush’ identity is as much a construct of the city as it is of bush balladeers and sing-alongs around the campfire under the Southern Cross. It is at the core of our national identity, the propaganda that has so effectively excluded outside interaction and has marginalized Indigenous peoples. As ‘British’- and ‘Irish’-ness become Australianness in the poetry of Harpur and Kendall – the Australian landscape coming into its own – we recognize a movement toward the eventual consolidation of national identity.

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The work of the poet David Campbell has been used to emphasize this transition, and inheritance. But, as I’ve suggested, this is also a process of exclusion. Assimilating and absorbing landscape is the signifier for an Australian poetic, as it is for its art and culture generally. It’s not surprising that the language of landscape should underlie much of our verse. And it is present in the work of many of the poets included here – Mudrooroo, Murray, Hewett, McMaster, Adamson, and so on. Even when not referring to it directly, the Australian poet is most often conscious of its overwhelming presence. John Forbes, however, argued that Australians, having a nostalgic vision of their independence and wealth coming from the wool on the sheep’s back, forget the great contribution made by the ‘city’ to Australian identity. But I’d argue that he and poets like Peter Porter and Gig Ryan are urban pastoralists whose poetry is deeply informed by this signature, even if they work against it. Once again, what specifically interests me is the crossover territory between different kinds of poetry. Between the rural and urban are the fringes, and the fringes produce the most interesting hybrid languages. So, whereas anthologies tend to be retrospective or attempt to capture the identity of a particular theme or time, it is actually my aim in this volume to look the future, to look towards these hybridizing zones. There is a millennial fervour to capture the essence of modernity and to package it neatly – the conceptual rubicon formed by the year 2000 will prove to be exactly that. The effects of 2000, I’d guess, have more to do with approaching it than crossing it. This anthology is prompted not so much by a potential new poetic accompanying a new millennium as by the inherent movement in poetry regardless. And this movement need not be ‘progressive’ or on a broad scale. It might be personal or cumulative, it might be a return to the traditional or an engagement with an avant-garde. This is not to say that the demographics of poetries haven’t changed with the times, because they have. The internet in particular has increased not only the potential of the ‘amateur’ poet to participate in a ‘public’ space but also the potential to collaborate and interact. The defusing of the ‘lyrical I’ throughout the 1970s–90s, particularly in American poetry, has reinforced a tendency to a polymorphous ‘voice’. Poets have become conscious of how central they are, as individuals, to the pulse of the language they use. Some reject the need to move away from the ‘I’, and have dug in against linguistically innovative verse such as that of the American L A N G U A G E poets, asserting that the emotive authority of the self is at the core of what it is that constitutes poetry, and that all attempts to move away from this are misguided.

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On the other hand, the elevation of language to a thing in itself, providing its own terms of reference, being simultaneously the signifier and signified, has become a distinctly political process. And in the same way in which the L A N G U A G E poets ‘grew’ out of a reaction to a society that engendered the Vietnam War and Watergate, linguistically innovative poetries in many languages and places have associated themselves with a movement away from the empowering and consequently oppressive politics of self – the freedoms of the individual being best asserted through an analysis of what constitutes the self. Australian poetry in the late-twentieth century – at least that available in the mainstream press and literary journals – has tended to skirt these issues. Innovation has mainly come from within the traditions of the ‘lyrical I’ poem – working with or against the lyrical and /or narrative structure, though there are major exceptions (such as with concrete, sound and L A N G U A G E influenced poets in Melbourne, Sydney and elsewhere). There’s an important epistemological difference to be made here. A poet like Robert Adamson with his radical poem of the early 1970s – The Rumour – was working within the conventions of normal poetic expression. The concepts he examined may have been radical, but the deployment of language wasn’t; the words worked in a specific, linear way. They didn’t define themselves, or generate their own meanings – at least on a macro-level. One could say the same of John Tranter’s “Red Movie,” a revolutionary work in the Australian context in its systematic defamiliarization of the object. Like much of Tranter’s work, it is concerned with the social politics of the material. It examines the processes of visual, verbal, and ultimately cultural fetishization. Innovation has always been part of a developing poetic, but it wasn’t until more recent years that signs of what we might call the ‘linguistically innovative’ – a term I originally acquired from translation texts, though claimed by a number of anthologists and critics – became more common in both Adamson’s and Tranter’s work, and among Australian poets on a broad scale. An increasing number of poets have begun to focus on language itself and its means of production – Wendy Jenkins and Peter Minter are strong representatives of this tendency. The historical birthmother, in an Australian context, is possibly Anna Wickham, via Christopher Brennan, Harry Hooton, and Francis Webb. All in all, I’ve tried to make this the poets’ anthology. It’s not a definitive statement, and there are many other poets I’d like to have included. I haven’t highlighted any individual poems, not because there aren’t stunning pieces that leap off the pages here, but because there are so many, with each poem

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succeeding on its own technical terms – I feel these are all well-crafted pieces. Finally, what’s made this a particularly exciting volume for me is the fact that many of the poets took up the offer to submit new, uncollected poetry for consideration. In many cases, poets are represented by one or more ‘fresh’ offerings, in addition to the tried and tested pieces, stressing the forward-looking nature of the project as a whole.

Idiosyncrasy and the Craft of Poetry37

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N T E R M S O F A U S T R A L I A N P O E T R Y A N D I T S P L A C E in the English-language poetry canon, Australia is a fiercely protectionist place. And protectionism has been a strong part of its social and economic history as well. I find it interesting, as an advocate of ‘open borders’, not only in the anglophone world but between all national and idiolectal poetries, that the first question one feels one must ask when reviewing anthologies of national verse is: in what way are they representative of the poetry that has been or is being written in that country? But also – and this is especially relevant in the case of Les Murray’s The New Oxford Book of Australian Verse – how representative of a culture, per se, are they? Les Murray is a well-known cultural sovereigntist, but at no time does he see the ‘island’ of Australian poetry existing without connection to the rest of the world. Murray is a widely read poet here in England, one who has developed his own readership while retaining his particular vernacular. And Peter Porter, editor of The Oxford Book of Modern Australian Verse, is an expatriate Australian, who is as much at home among English poets as he is among Australians. In many ways, this combination is ideally suited to painting a portrait of Australian poetry that is as readable in England or elsewhere as it is ‘back home’. The point would largely be irrelevant if these were anthologies published only in Australia, but they have been released here in the U K as well by Oxford. The resistance within Australia to outside evaluations of Australian culture/s is profound. A telling example, if a minor one, can be found in the reaction by a subscriber to an Australian literature studies list on the internet

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“Full of Contrarieties,” Poetry Review 87.3 (Autumn 1997): 75–77. Review of The New Oxford Book of Australian Verse, ed. & intro. Les Murray (1986; Melbourne: Oxford U P , 3rd ed. 1996); The Oxford Book of Modern Australian Verse, ed. & intro. Peter Porter (Melbourne: Oxford U P , 1996).

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who asked, on the death of a prominent overseas author, “What has this to do with Australian literature?” It has to do with the need to consolidate a literature on its own terms, to throw off the colonialist shackles and create an ‘identity’. The fringe becoming its own centre. What I like about these anthologies is that neither of them ‘cringes’ in the face of ‘European’ culture (i.e. perceptually the dominant parental ‘culture’), but neither of them sets itself up as overtly self-conscious tub-thumping. In a sense, given Porter’s position in English poetry, this would be impossible, but some may find it surprising, in view of Murray’s supposed jingoistic view of Australia. But, like much else with Murray, such perceptions have more to do with portrayal by the media than with the actual beliefs of the man. Murray may be self-conscious in terms of cultural rivalries within Australia, and also rivalries between states of mind symbolized by the Athenian and Boeotian divide of European and NewWorld cultures, but at the heart of the issue is the sheer pleasure he gains from participating in and experiencing the vernacular. Central to Murray’s work is this notion of the Athenian and the Boeotian (terms that arose directly out of a “dialogue” with Peter Porter). Briefly, Athens symbolizes the new, the crass, the commercial. It is the abstracting part of the brain (the ‘forebrain’), the producer of Rationality, while Boeotia is that part of the brain that is imagination, dream, and inspiration; it is the place of ritualism and ancestral inheritance (the ‘poem’). Murray examines history as a struggle between these two forces or states of mind. Peter Porter, who had come to symbolize the ‘exodus’ to the place of ‘enlightenment’ and rationality – the Old World – in his poem “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Hesiod,” drew an analogy between Hesiod and Les Murray; he said, “Yes, Australians are Boeotians.” Porter was referring to Murray’s 1972 poem “The Boeotian Count.” Given the background, given that one publisher is publishing two anthologies – be it covering different time-scales, though still considerably overlapping – it is worth examining the selection and editorial rationale against such a backdrop, especially from an English poetry reader’s perspective. But to impose this ‘Athenian’/‘Boeotian’ binary on a comparative survey of these anthologies invites problems – the temptation is certainly there, but it is one that should be carried out with caution and circumspection. Both men are more generous than such a divide would allow. Well, there is the rural tone in the Murray anthology, there is definitely a Boeotian way of looking at things; but there’s plenty of the city. Although there’s not a lot of ‘high culture’. From transliterated Aboriginal song-cycles,

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to popular rhymes, to poems of the ‘city’ and poems of the ‘bush’, Murray captures the spirit of free expression that he values so highly in the Australian idiom. It is a personable and ‘friendly’ anthology. Porter is also ‘broadminded’ – we find plenty of the country, but also the urban and ‘cities of the world’ tone. Porter’s criteria seem to have been the best that the best of the time can offer. Apart from the omission of the odd poet I would have felt inclined to include – particularly Harry Hooton – Porter has managed to capture much of the ‘new’ and outward-looking spirit of Australian verse from Robert Fitzgerald and A.D. Hope, writing in the middle of the century (from August 1945, to be exact), through to Tracy Ryan and Judith Bishop, very recent poets. What is particularly exciting is that it is not a stagnant, retrospective anthology. It suggests and almost pleads for progress. One is left not with the feeling of ‘this is what we’ve /they’ve managed to do’, but of ‘it’s a substantial accomplishment, and much more is possible’. This is also evident in the updating of the original Murray anthology of 1986 – there is a breadth of possibility, especially in the language of poems which deal with familiar themes found throughout the book. But Murray’s book is more about a cultural feeling than about developments in craft. In many ways, Murray’s volume is concerned with poetry as reflective in a specifically cultural way, and Porter’s focus is on the state of poetic craft in Australian poetry – though the picture is somewhat more complex than this. Murray may go out of his way to choose unusual pieces from poets, or what he terms a poet’s “Strange poem,” as opposed to the poet’s most ‘accomplished’ or frequently anthologized piece, one seen as representative of good and Australian poetry. He writes in his brief foreword: “Australian readers will notice that I have tended to steer clear of standard anthology pieces, and have been sparing with the established classics.” This is not to say that some of the ‘great’ Australian poems aren’t there but, rather, that Murray’s view of the poetry anthology is more representative than canonical. He qualifies by saying: These latter [that is, the established classics] did present problems, as some of them are so obviously their authors’ best work and so clearly part of the nation’s essential heritage, that to omit them, even for the sake of freshness, would have been merely perverse.

The key here is “the nation’s essential heritage,” for it is the cultural sovereignty of Australia that concerns Murray. His is, above and beyond all else, a book about the evolution of an Australian vernacular.

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One of the features of this anthology that was much talked about when its first edition came out in 1986 was that it included translations of Aboriginal song texts and contemporary English-language Aboriginal poetry, the latter beginning with David Unaipon’s “Song of Hungarrda.” As an extension of this, I think it would have been interesting to counterpoint these renditions against contemporary Aboriginal poets who make use of the song-cycle, such as Lionel Fogarty or Mudrooroo. The second-last poet featured is the Aboriginal poet Charmaine Papertalk–Green, but it is with a poem that does not counterpoint the presentation of ‘translation’. The irony is strong, though:

Wanna Be White My man took off yesterday with a waagin He left me and the kids to be something in this world said he sick of being black, poor and laughed at Said he wanted to be white have better clothes, a flash car and eat fancy He said me and the kids would give him a bad name because we are black too So he left with a waagin

One of the important aspects of the Porter anthology is the inclusion of Fogarty. He uses the colonizing language superbly against itself:

Farewell Reverberated Vault of Detentions Tonight overturned hells brang surface innocent olds Tonight my people don’t wait for successions of society But yell, sing souls to our endless dreaming Today my people have a Murri Thirtieth century culture but with care safe and snarls Today my people feel precious as human beings burials and birth

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Mankind demands imperative love for all, And my people never wants to escalating barbarous century. For now Today up home they free: Tonight they will learn to fight consciences.

Getting away from the process of anthologizing, and examining the poems instead, it seems fair enough to say that it is hard to find a poem in either anthology that isn’t interesting or competent. And in many cases, the poems are good and even stunning. I find it a pleasure to discover those ‘strange’ or not usually anthologized poems that Murray talks about in his introduction. From John Shaw Neilsen one might expect to find “The Orange Tree” and “Crane” but instead we are offered “May,” “Schoolgirls Hastening,” and “To the Red Lory,” though many would argue that “May” is indeed one of Neilsen’s finest:

May Shyly the silver-hatted mushrooms make Soft entrance through, And undelivered lovers, half awake, Hear noises in the dew. Yellow in all the earth and in the skies, The world would seem Faint as a widow mourning with soft eyes And falling into a dream. Up the long hill I see the slow plough leave Furrows of brown; Dim is the day and beautiful; I grieve To see the sun go down. But there are suns a many for mine eyes Day after Day: Delightsome in grave greenery they rise, Red oranges in May.

Here we find the delicacy, whimsy, and mystery of the best Neilsen poems. It is a lyric that paces itself, is neat without being overly tight, and has just that touch of awkwardness that conjures up the characteristic ‘naive’ vision. It seems strange to read an anthology of modern Australian poetry and to find no Kenneth Slessor – considered by many, despite the claims of Ern Malley, to be Australia’s most influential modernist poet. “Five Bells,” one classic which is found in the Murray anthology, doesn’t fit into the post-1945 ap-

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proach of Porter’s The Oxford Book of Modern Australian Verse. But recent innovators in verse are to be found in force in the Porter volume. You’ll find good work from John Tranter, John Forbes, Jennifer Maiden, and Robert Adamson. There is also fine work, on the flipside of the coin, from Robert Gray, Geoffrey Lehmann, and Fay Zwicky. Something that becomes obvious from Porter’s selection is how artificial the divisions are between different faces of modernism. The post-imagist Gray and the postmodern Tranter may differ fundamentally in tone and content, but when read against the hybrid work of Francis Webb and even Bruce Beaver it is clear that the work shares a common ancestry. And Jennifer Maiden is a poet who refuses almost all labels:

Anorexia Kelly sharpened is powerful, asexual and yawns, curls up on tartan cushions with pick-me-up arms, viewed by no one but cat, video, grandmother. She is cranky with Nan’s tabby. He is sleek and haughtily whores, meanwhile demanding all the messy food and closeness they can muster. She ate last night and will not eat this week. Her body lives off itself like anger. It was too dumb, too soft, too tall. She bites her mouth because it’s still a stranger.

Most of the ‘newer’ poets who have gained recognition in recent years are there, with particularly good material from Peter Rose, Gig Ryan, and Philip Hodgins. A poet well represented in both anthologies is the almost archetypal Michael Dransfield, who, after a reasonably public life of excess, died in 1973 at the age of twenty-four, having produced a substantial body of work. Much of this work has been rejected as being rough or trivial, but certain pieces have become firmly canonized. Dransfield epitomized, in many people’s minds, the ‘freedoms’ and concerns of his time. His poems were often overtly political – both socially and culturally, both caught in the moment and conscious of a poetic inheritance (particularly Swinburne, Keats, and Tennyson) – and personal. He was seen as Australia’s almost legitimate poète maudit, that romantic we just had to have. But Dransfield did write some important verse. “Fix,” which is found in both anthologies, may not be one of his major poems, but in the context of a ‘modernizing’ Australian poetic, and in terms of the process

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of mythologizing the poet as ‘sufferer’ – its ‘anthemic’ quality – it was and is an important one:

Fix It is waking in the night, after the theatres and before the milkman, alerted by some signal from the golden drug tapeworm that eats your flesh and drinks your peace; you reach for your needle and busy yourself preparing the utopia substance in a blackened spoon held in candle flame by now your thumb and finger are leathery being so often burned this way it hurts much less than withdrawal and the hand is needed for little else now anyway. Then cordon off the arm with a belt, probe for a vein, send the dream transfusion out on a voyage among your body machinery. Hits you like sleep – sweet, illusory, fast, with a semblance of forever. For a while the fires die down in you, until you die down in the fires. Once you have become a drug addict you will never want to be anything else.

Both anthologies are accomplished on their own terms, and each reads well against the other. If the competence of the Porter anthology strikes through, the breadth and variety of the Murray anthology are equally satisfying. Together, they bring a collective sense of timelessness and change, of movement and permanence. The first poem collected by Murray is a translation of “Lalai (Dreamtime)” recounted by Sam Woolagoodjah, with the opening lines “Dreamtime, / The first ones lives, those of long ago”; while the second is “The Kangaroo” by Barron Field, written in 1819, which ends with the lines: “Be still the glory of this land, / Happiest work of finest hand!” The disjunction between the two pieces characterizes Australian poetry, or, as Richard Whately writes in the early days of the colony, There is a place in distant seas Full of Contrarieties: There, beasts have mallards’ bills and legs, Have spurs like cocks, like hens lay eggs.

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The New Penguin38

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compiling an historical anthology of Australian poetry? What’s more, one with such an iconic history as a Penguin anthology of Australian verse? If there is such a thing as canon-making, this might well be perceived as one of its definitive confirmations – past editors, including Kenneth Slessor, Judith Wright, and Harry Heseltine, are all figures who have contributed to a notion of what Australian poetry is. However, while I can’t answer for their ultimate intentions, I can say that mine are not to attempt to define, qualify, reinforce or confirm what it is that constitutes an Australian poetry. In making my selection for this volume, which begins with poets born in the eighteenth century and runs through to one born in the late 1970s, I have tried to avoid the prescriptive expectations of the academy, of popular notions of what Australian poetry is, and of the poets themselves. This does not mean that old favourites and ‘canonical’ poems aren’t included; they are. There is also conscious overlap with predecessor volumes, especially Harry Heseltine’s Penguin Book of Australian Verse (1972) and the more recent John Tranter and Philip Mead selection, The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry (1991). Various points of contact seem essential to me, whether it is including an influential feminist poem such as Judith Rodriguez’s “Nu-Plastik Fanfare Red,” anthologized by Heseltine toward the end of his volume, or a more recent poem such as Ania Walwicz’s brilliant “Little Red Riding Hood,” included in the Tranter/Mead selection. Both these poems seem to me to serve as examples of the zeitgeist, as well as, through their being popularly anthologized, influencing an era of poetry and ideas. It is cause and effect in both directions. They are included because of their significance, but their very inclusion brings a broader awareness and contributes to that significance. Each of these poems speaks of different moments in the affirmation of women’s poetry in Australia, always strong but coming more to the fore from the 1970s on. Further, in terms of my project of creating connection with previous notions of what constitutes an Australian anthology of poetry, and offering possible departures from the normative, I argue that much Australian poetry 38

O, WHAT IS AN ANTI-NATIONALIST DOING,

This is a much longer version of the “Introduction” and section notes to the Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry, ed. John Kinsella (Camberwell, Victoria: Penguin, 2009): 1–13.

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has, historically, been consciously or unconsciously experimental and innovative. Even poems most conservative in form are often radical in content. This radicalism does not have to be a major departure from the expected, but may be an innocuous one, and, over time, these minor changes become cumulative. From the earliest Australian poetry, which of course we can only trace through received memory, song-cycles, rock paintings, and traditions of body painting, dance, and other manifestations of poetic spirit, through to the hypertextual computer innovations of many contemporary Australian poets, performance and slam poetry, and the increasing urge toward international collaboration in writing poetry from different places via the internet, there is a sense of urgency about communicating the uniqueness and significance of the Australian landscape, and the relationship between individuals and community and country/places. It is true that in the nineteenth century there was plenty of Australian verse of markedly British derivation. But rather than seeing all earlier non-Indigenous Australian poetry as poor replications of European, especially ‘British’, poetry, one could argue that the obvious shift toward the local in the nature of theme also brought with it a change in rhythm and prosody in general. In terms of content, poetry began to include local referents, beyond specifically occasional verse such as Michael Massey Robinson’s odes – for example, “Song (To Celebrate the Anniversary of the Establishment of the Colony).” Such local referents were not simply on the level of scrutinizing the ‘bizarre’ nature of the natural environment, as in Barron Field’s poem “The Kangaroo,” which has much in common with other colonial poems comparing unusual ‘new’ animals and plants with the known, either mythologically or in reality. It was also on the level of an Australian ‘sensibility’ regarding belonging, place (light, flora, fauna), and consciousness of Indigenous presence that evolves most strongly from the poetry of Charles Harpur onward. What are often seen as poorer examples of verse need to be reconsidered in the light of their context – of the time and conditions and ‘receptivity’ during which they were written. The processes of publishing, and poetry’s availability to the growing colonial readership – the mode of presentation – would dramatically affect the nature of that receptivity across the colonies. It is said that Barron Field’s small book First Fruits of Australian Poetry, published in 1819, was the first independent volume of Australian verse. In fact, Michael Massey Robinson’s “royal birthday odes,” published in 1810 by the New South Wales government printer George Howe, might lay claim to this. The first separate publica-

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tion of a poetry book by an ‘Australian-born’ was Wild Notes from the Lyre of a Native Minstrel in 1826, by Charles Tompson. Many critics have noted that Australian content in local poetry increased considerably because of the growing audience of the non-Indigenous ‘native-born’, the so-called ‘currency lads and lasses’. As the century progressed, publication opportunities increased significantly. So often, Australian poetry of the nineteenth century, as published in newspapers, journals, and books, is seen as relatively unadventurous in an international sense. We apparently have no equivalent to Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson, to Baudelaire or Rimbaud, to Hölderlin. I would say this is dramatically untrue, and that we just haven’t looked at Australian poetry in the best possible way. Charles Harpur is often regarded as the marker of the nativeborn poet who first successfully evolves a genuinely ‘Australian’ poetic. In a poem like “The Creek of the Four Graves,” the clash between Indigenous and ‘settler’ culturalisms becomes a mapping of greater uncertainties and anxieties over the presence of settlers on Indigenous land. Of course, it is not articulated in such a way, though Harpur was certainly sympathetic to Indigenous interests. This poem, which is long, is included in Heseltine’s anthology, but not here. But other examples of Harpur’s wrestling with and celebrating of place – specifically Australian and not European – are here. I see ‘experimental’ as referring to a conscious movement away from critically and publicly accepted standards of ‘good’ poetic practice in any given period. This is evidently subjective, but we may always submit critical discourse and publishing tendencies to scrutiny (who and what was being published by ‘mainstream’ and ‘small’ presses), to assess what that ‘standard’ might have been, and why a piece of writing might venture away from that standard in content and technique. This scrutiny is vital not only when considering apparent ‘deficiencies’ in early Australian colonial poetry as compared to the British poetry that was critically valued at ‘home’, but also in the age of poetry on the internet, where national boundaries are far more fluid, and text less ‘stable’. What passes as authoritative is variable and changeable in both cases. The range of ‘experimentation’ in Australian poetry recognizably changes after Federation in 1901, with the new developments in communications and connectivity brought by ‘nation’. There are mutual influences between poetic experiment on the one hand, and, on the other, visual art, music, and technology. I have included here “to a telegraph pole,” an über-modernist poem from the 1930s by Furnley Maurice, poised between lyrical ode and almost

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‘found object’, making use of this symbol of technological progress, and mass communication, which has often been called the internet of its time. Regarding technology, we may note a Sydney Push writer of the 1950s like Harry Hooton (whose poem “Words” is included here) and his important ‘manifesto’-piece on “Anarcho-Technocracy.” In the same way that comparisons may be made between paintings of the late-nineteenth-century Heidelberg School and the realistic impressions and colourings of poetry extending back to the 1840s, especially in Harpur, and through to Kendall in the 1870s (Harpur especially has that Romantic pleinair feel about his nature poems), so might we note conversations, dialogues, between art practice and poetry during later periods – for example, the profound effect of 1920s and 1930s European surrealism, and local art of the 1940s and 1950s such as Sidney Nolan’s, on work contained in the Angry Penguins, as well as that of American abstract expressionism on a number of poets of the Generation of ’68. There is also much work to be done on the implicit conversations between Indigenous poetry and Indigenous art, ranging from the ‘outback’ representations of Albert Namatjira to sand painting and painters such as Rover Thomas and the Warmun School.39 The visual is highly important in the panoramic context of Australian poetry – large skies, large spaces, drenched colours, treated with varying degrees of sensitivity to whether these spaces are ‘empty’ or replete. The pastorality of Australian rural verse and its distortions have gone hand-in-hand with a desire to impose order, to make familiar – this has been a visual process. Dorothy Hewett, always something of a renegade and enfant terrible, brought numerous threads of Old-World tradition and its New-World variants into play in her wheatbelt (Western Australian) poetry. It is intensely visual, almost painterly, poetry, but also consciously connected with the Australian ballad traditions, with a pastiche of gossip, myth-making, Romanticism, and hard-nosed left-wing politics. Speaking of Dorothy Hewett, I am reminded of R.G. Howarth’s introduction to The Penguin Book of Australian Verse (1958), co-edited with John Thompson and Kenneth Slessor, in which he connects Adam Lindsay Gordon (“an Englishman [. .. ] the Byron of the southern clime, the perpetual self39

The influence of Kimberley Rock Art on Rover Thomas and his art as part of the ‘palga’ coming from his instructive dreams of the spirit journey of his deceased mother are an essential example of the interstices between poetry and art in spiritual (and political) matters. [J.K.]

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exile”) and his “jogging along in the saddle” to a new tranche of bush balladists (“Gordon fathered a whole line of bush balladists, led by the friendly rivals Henry Lawson and A.B. (‘Banjo’) Paterson, that still straggle over the horizon”). Dorothy Hewett, though certainly not ‘straggling’ over any horizon, is connected to Adam Lindsay Gordon and that line, especially in his “hard and ringing” (Howarth’s words) verse; Hewett’s poetry is much tougher than some have allowed. She is also connected to that line of Australian poets in the celebrations and stories and reportage of the bush-balladeers, as well as through her schooling in English Romanticism. It is a complex map of overlaid lines, of tracks and conversations. In many senses, her radicalism makes her an exile poet, even one with empathy for early Australian convict poetry; convicts, it must be remembered, came later to her home state of Western Australia, which was the last to relinquish convicts: they had proved so useful to the state’s ‘development’. Poetry written under the harsh conditions of convict life throws up a poetic that is adaptable, pragmatic, often ironic, and inevitably desperate. “Frank the Poet” and other convict poets take their skills from the Old World and reinvent them to speak out of the new hell. A poetic is forged, much like Blake’s “mind-forged manacles.” The experience of new environmental conditions, isolation, relationship to ‘home’, posturing for power in the colonies – all affect and pressure standard poetries. What we might term the convict poetries of resistance were often consciously written against a poetic of authority. The ‘anonymous’ poet becomes a figure of alterity in the nation-making canon, at once claimed as part of the Australian character and identity and often resisting those. Whether anonymous or using a nom de plume, or their own names, however, poets of the nineteenth century predictably engaged with the social mores of their time. Sadly, such social mores inevitably betrayed a strong streak of bigotry. If you scan the newspapers and publications of the mid-nineteenth century, they are full of racist and patronizing poems written by whites on Aboriginal and non-European peoples such as the Chinese. Such poems are commonplace in that colonial phase and, one could argue, are still to be found in the publications of the mid-twentieth century in poems by such prominent figures as James McAuley, in the supposedly deferential appropriations of the Jindyworobaks in the 1930s–50s, and even in very recent poems found on bookshelves today. The obsession with ethnography and ‘race’, and with the purities of settler culture, conveys a significant guilt about what has been done in dispossessing Indigenous people and in resisting the immigration of non-

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Europeans. A contemporary poet such as Ouyang Yu, who is an Australian of Chinese background, has defined his poetic around qualifying and resisting this history of bigotry and affirming alternative canons of Australian literature. Of necessity, this is an anthology of Australian poetry in English (though it includes a translation), but I have tried to recognize the impact of different language-cultures on English here. Australia is a pluralistic, multicultural, and linguistically diverse country. It is not monolithic. One might draw a parallel between the introduced monocultures in agriculture that have so damaged the land, such as in wheat- and sheep-farming, cane-growing and cotton-farming, and the seeming wish to canonize a certain thread of European poetic practice in anthologies of Australian poetry. So much of the latter is concerned with the rural – specifically, a pastoral construct of a European idyll transcribed (dysfunctionally) into Australian conditions. It is often seen that what makes early Australian printed poetry more ‘Australian’ is the increase in references to local flora and fauna, local events, and so on, whereas the most radical departures from the norm are frequently to be found when the transcription of this idyll is challenged. You get this in poems of seemingly conservative structure such as Eliza Hamilton Dunlop’s “The Aboriginal Mother” and “The Aboriginal Father,” which, while obviously including Australian reference, in being laments for the massacre, mistreatment, and abuse of Aboriginal people shatter the form they are presented in, and challenge this Western pastoral idyll on all levels. A comparison may be made with criticisms of Oodgeroo’s (Kath Walker’s) and Jack Davis’s poetry – criticisms made by those who saw them as supposedly trapped in the Western tradition, and thus compliant with Western sensibilities, through the use of traditional English verse-structures, rhythms, and poetic devices. However, I would argue that these poets, by using Indigenous concerns as content in such verse-structures, were consciously undermining English prosodic traditions themselves. This is a resistant and deconstructive act. Poems like theirs frustrate positively any project to create a national canon of hegemonic literature. The roots of much modern Australian innovation in poetry can be found in a single document published as a preface to the poems of Adam Lindsay Gordon. Marcus Clarke, primarily known as the author of the novel For the Term of his Natural Life, was also a journalist, critic, and poet, and one of his poems is included here. Fascinatingly, he was a school friend of Gerard Manley Hopkins back in Britain. His remarks regarding “weird melancholy,” originally made about Australian art – visual art and poetry being inextricably

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interwoven in the Australian condition – disturbingly pinpoint much of the anxiety of the ‘settler condition’. “What is the dominant note of Australian scenery?” he asks, and then answers himself: “That which is the dominant note of Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry – Weird Melancholy.” In some ways, his remarks might be seen as a corollary to the astute investigations of academics like Hodge and Mishra (in their Dark Side of the Dream) with their view that through “paranoid readings” we might find an underlying awareness of and anxiety about the occupation of indigenous land in the most apparently celebratory, conservative, rural (for example) poem in the settler tradition. There are conscious breaks in the canonical strand of Australian poetry of European derivation we have been critiquing, and these prove to be intense points of dispersal and redirection. One example from the mid-nineteenth century (though not published in book form until the early twentieth century, and then rapidly forgotten) is the work of Elizabeth Deborah Brockman, an entirely neglected though major poet from ‘bush’ Western Australia, who was, among other things, a translator of Petrarch. Brockman’s “On Receiving from England a Bunch of Dried Wild Flowers” fits in a genre of flower poems written in Australia during the period, which compare the native blooms of Australia with the delicate beauties of especially British gardens. But the poem carries with it an intensely unsettled sense of belonging and estrangement. It is almost as if a paranoia were being written down, in that the Old World is no longer a living reality, as the New World is a ghostly reflection of it; it is as if the “other hands” back in England are feared to be lifeless, even though it’s only the speaker’s touch they will never again feel: But in my hand these frail memorials Lie closely pressed; a slight electric link, By which thought over-passes time and space, To other hands that plucked them: other hands That never more to any touch of mine Shall thrill responsive. Blessed be those hands With prosperous labours, fruitful through long years, Of all life’s truest, tenderest charities. E. Western Australia, 15th September, 1868.

Brockman’s small oeuvre is full of poems of visceral connection to place. I write this introduction sitting in the shadow of the “purple mountain” she describes elsewhere in her poetry. It is highly characteristic of Australian poetry

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of the period, from any of the colonies, to fuse an immediate sense of place with elements of uncertainty and disconnection. Even the ‘native-born’ poets (Brockman came to Australia as a child, so was not ‘native-born’) convey this uncertainty, if for no other reason than that they are writing in received / inherited mediums evolved for other spaces. From Brockman to the Australian-born Judith Wright, writing in the 1940s and 1950s, is not such a huge leap. Wright, like Brockman, came from a wealthy, landed family; she wrote about the conditions of her relationship to place. What is remarkable about Wright is that her awareness of living on land stolen from others steadily grows as it is enters her poetry; it is activist verse, though, I would argue, so can Brockman’s be. A Wright poem such as “At Cooloolah” is a case in point. Without wishing to contribute to hierarchies, I feel the most vital poetic voice in Australia today is the Murri poet Lionel Fogarty. Fogarty, as attested by Mudrooroo, writes a ‘guerrilla’ poetry that undermines the status quo of English as dominant language. Fogarty writes in an idiosyncratically creolized English that intentionally follows none of the ‘rules’ of standard English. Through this method, he resists the colonizer. For Fogarty, colonization is not a thing of the past, but an active and ongoing process that must be challenged. I think this is at the core of the persistent ‘experimentalism’ of Australian poetry, considered in its great breadth – that there is no postcolonial, that colonizations in many forms are ongoing, that oppression of many kinds is still widespread in Australia: interventions in Indigenous communities in northern Australia and elsewhere, the treatment of refugees, the ludicrous testing of potential immigrants for ‘Australian values’, the gap between wealthy and poor, gender inequality and discrimination on the basis of sexuality – sadly, the list is endless. What I so value in many of the poems in this collection is that, although very few are polemical, they all touch in some way on issues of humanity. Even imagistic poems describing animals or the environment tell us a great deal about how we see and ‘feel’ the world and our responsibilities therein. This is how an anti-nationalist anthologist can collate an apparently national anthology of poetry. Underscoring the nationalist agenda in creating an ‘Australian literature’ are much-celebrated venues like the Bulletin magazine, and A.G. Stephens’s championing, in the 1890s, of local writers. The so-called city–bush debate between Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson, even the declaration of the goldfields poets of Western Australia, became part of the language of binaries that consolidated a national literature in dialectical fashion. A later nationalist like

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Judith Wright shared some qualities with the Jindyworobaks, for instance, valuing the inherently Australian. Les Murray, a believer in Australian cultural sovereignty and the declarer of a “vernacular republic,” has described himself in the past as a contemporary Jindyworobak. In an age conscious of issues of appropriation, the straightforwardness of this relation is thrown into question. Murray has always insisted on and valued what he perceives as his connection to the traditional owners of the land, and their cultural values. The Jindyworobaks of the 1930s, qualifying Australianness and a ‘prehistory’ of connection (and appropriation), implement a shaping of a poetry to the land and Australianness, inevitably producing its own shapes of poetry, its own rhythms, and content. The crisis of modernism, much discussed with regard to the Ern Malley hoax, is crucial to this portrait of experimentation, but is really a side journey – an aberration (important, interesting, and also hugely influential, but still a deviation) while other innovations are (often slowly) taking place. Consideration of the role of the expatriate in experimentation, of writers like Ada Cambridge and Peter Porter, allows for comparative models with genuine conduits and connections to what is happening ‘over there’ and ‘over here’ to be created. Peter Porter’s poetry is often seen as traditionally formalist, especially given his connections with the Movement of the 1950s in London, but his being an Australian writing in London with increasing reference, as time has gone on, to his Australian origins has meant this ‘formalism’ is not all it seems. World events significantly affect the content of many of the poems in this anthology, especially war – from Leon Gellert’s World War One verse through to Kenneth Slessor’s “Beach Burial” written when he was a war correspondent during World War Two, to Bruce Dawe’s “Homecoming” from the Vietnam War, to Yahia al-Samawy’s poem of exile with its overtones of a wartorn contemporary world. Australian poetry is influenced by the horror and the changing nature of communications, and the ‘travel’ that comes about through world events affecting life ‘back home’ – not only in what is brought home, but in what is sent out (C.J. Dennis’s poetry into the trenches of Gallipoli). Although her poem included here may be read as an observational, lyrical ‘moment’, Jennifer Maiden, a highly innovative contemporary writer, has actually spent her writing life protesting against imperialism and war. Essentially, however, ‘events’ at ‘home’ and ‘abroad’ are but one aspect influencing the shaping of poetry. The conscious creation of a canon of national literature is the biggest influence on radical experimentation.

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C.J. Brennan, writing in the late-nineteenth century through to his death in 1932 though completing most of his important work by 1904, is, in his assertion of symbolist models, both experimenting (and reiterating) and struggling with national identity. The absence of obvious Australian material in his work, though it is there if one looks closely, gives rise to a discussion of classicism and tradition that, re-invented in the Australian writing environment, becomes of necessity textually innovative, even radical. In other words, old traditions can become innovations when decontextualized and re-invented. Mallarmé, new in France, is not simply rehashed in Australia, but re-invigorated and made new again. I have included here one of Brennan’s late poems written for his lover, Vie, “Because She Would Ask Me Why I Loved Her,” an exquisite lyric conveying a personal intensity, a Brennan up close that is often denied in his earlier livre composé. I would argue that Brennan was a proto-modernist. When it comes to looking at the ‘modernist’ period, there are in Australian poetry numerous points of connection and comparison with modernist poetries and poetics outside Australia, though Australian modernism had its own directions and triggers, and any model for comparison with other modernist poetries /poetics from beyond Australia needs to be reconsidered in this light. It is often argued that modernism in Australia has its origins in Kenneth Slessor, and while Slessor is a great exemplar of the ‘modernist urge’, we might look earlier to the antiwar and love poetry of Zora Cross, or, as I have suggested, to early Brennan. A discussion of what constitutes the origins of modernism is particularly apt when examining Australian poetry. If we look at the Baudelairean dandy of the 1850s as a salient trigger point to European modernism, we might well find a correlative in what the critic Michael Ackland locates as the “shining band” in Melbourne, with Marcus Clarke and his literary associates.40 The same applies to the highly productive and generative period of the 1960s and 1970s, with which many critics of Australian poetry would associate the term ‘experimental’. This period’s obvious digressions, challenges, and deconstructions of ‘standard English’ poetry have been well anthologized and discussed. Its tendencies are not actually maverick but connected to the urge to innovation prevalent from the earliest poetry written in Australia, and also, well before the arrival of European-style writing, in the text of body and surfaces implicit in Indigenous song poetries and poetics. There is a pre-exist40

Michael Ackland, That Shining Band: A Study of Australian Colonial Verse Tradition (St Lucia: U of Queensland P , 1994).

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ing template for innovation prior to European settlement/invasion, and, importantly, much of the innovation of the mid-to-late twentieth century comes about through the so-called ‘multicultural’ or ‘migrant’ voice/s interacting and rewriting, overlaying, English-language poetries and poetics. The desire by both critics and poets themselves to categorize their practice in historical, social, and cultural contexts is not unique to Australia. The labelling of movements and ‘isms’ allows critics or poets to see poets as belonging, departing, or defining themselves through the activities of their peers. With this in mind, it is not surprising that Les Murray should have connected himself to the nationalist concerns of the Jindyworobaks and their annexing of prehistory in Australia, to their agenda of making a new cultural Australianness. Murray famously engendered, with Peter Porter, the debate between the Boeotian and the Athenian as dichotomous between country and city, old world and new world, creativity and rationality, and other binaries.41 A construct such as the Generation of ’68 is broadly used now to define a group of poets who emerged from the generational changes of the 1960s marked by rock music, access to drugs, consciousness of the Vietnam War and its implications, availability of cheap printing technologies, and increasing access to poetries from elsewhere in the world, who perceived themselves as able to change social conditions through poetry. Some, of course, were far more sceptical than others. John Forbes, with his acute intelligence, ear open to popular culture, and extensive knowledge of poetic traditions, carved metaphysical lyrics out of the crises of late modernity. The term ‘Generation of ’68’, which Thomas Shapcott claims he first used in the Australian Book Review but is more broadly associated with John Tranter’s seminal anthology The New Australian Poetry, with its feeder-influences from Donald Hall’s Contemporary American Poetry and elsewhere, seeks to define itself against such a binary and to contribute to a discourse of decon-

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Philip Mead, in a private communication, has noted that the Athenian / Boeotian exchange includes Porter’s poem “On First Looking into Chapman’s Hesiod” and Murray’s response to that poem in an essay of 1978, “On Sitting Back and Thinking about Porter’s Boeotia” (later reprinted in Les Murray, A Working Forest: Selected Prose [Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove, 1997]: 121–29). Porter’s subsequent response to this first exchange, “Country Poetry and Town Poetry: A Debate with Les Murray,” was published in Australian Literary Studies 9.1 (May 1979): 39–48. For other details of this debate, see Bruce Bennett, Spirit in Exile: Peter Porter and His Poetry (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1991): 146. [J.K.]

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struction in Australian poetics, although in many ways one could argue that it remains within the binary on the Athenian side. The consequence of this is that, from the late 1970s on, poets are constantly labelled as being in one camp or the other: that is, either that of the rural lyric or that of the urban nonlyric. Of course, Australian poetry is inevitably a mixture of both of these, so that we see the growing presence of lyrical hybridizers such as Peter Minter, Michael Brennan, and Margie Cronin. The critic David McCooey has picked up on this ‘new lyricism’, which has also been prevalent in American and French poetry criticism over the last twenty years.42 McCooey’s assessment seems to be independent of these tendencies outside Australia. Contemporary experimentation in poetry is frequently transgeneric, and often determines itself as transfigurative or transformative. That is, the end result is to bring not only textual but also social change. This has always been the agenda of innovation and experimentation, to differing degrees. What certainly can be calibrated is how consciously this agenda is expressed by poets in their poems and commentaries. The meta-textual exploration of the politics of subjectivity necessarily means the separation of the self from text. The concern generated by L A N G U A G E poetry in America from the late 1970s on, scrutinizing and challenging the position of the lyrical ‘I’, of the unified self, has been the basis of much experimentation in Australia also. I would suggest that the ‘balance’ between influences from Europe and America should also be contested. If Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” was influential, was it more so than Mallarmé and Baudelaire? Does the Beat Generation equate to the influence of Pound and Eliot on the 1920s Australian modernist? Does John Ashbery’s influence on poets like John Forbes, Gig Ryan, and John Tranter equate to the growing influence of a late-modernist poet like the Cambridge-based J.H. Prynne on Peter Minter and Kate Fagan (also influenced by Lyn Hejinian, a founding L A N G U A G E poet on whose work Fagan wrote her doctoral dissertation)? And what of the influence of European and Japanese innovation on Michael Brennan? It is interesting to note that in recent years Australia Council funding has allowed Australian poets to travel to innovative and experimental poetry conferences in various parts of the world. What are the implications of statefunded experience of the innovative elsewhere? How does this affect the process? What end-results are desirable? 42

David McCooey, “Surviving Australian Poetry: The New Lyricism,” Agenda (London) 41.1 (2005): 22–37.

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In searching for a linguistically innovative poetry as a response to a set of political and ethical desires or prerequisites, it becomes necessary to place the canon under pressure. Australian poets have long histories of creating models to work against models – the poet ʌ O, for example, asserting a dialect poetry that transfers performative speech onto the page, or John Tranter as an Australian wrestling with the values of the New York School he esteems and in many ways departs from. Migrant or refugee poets in Australia, as of old, since all non-Indigenous poets here are of some degree of migrant origin, confront the inability of their new country to absorb their differences and what they offer, as much as their rejection of certain ‘national’ values of Australia (Ania Walwicz, for example). It is both affirming and negating to refer to a poetry as ‘migrant’; the reference identifies in a positive sense, but also marginalizes in the national context. Ali Alizadeh, an Iranian-born Australian, writes out of a consciousness of Iranian community but also within the broader community as well. His poem “Rumi,” anthologized here, is specific about an historical poetic figure, but has obvious subtexts about the Australian landscape and experience. Ouyang Yu is often seen as rebarbative, but his experimentation has opened new possibilities of discourse that is outside and belonging at once: he has made his work ‘inside out’. Australian poetry not written in English may become experimental outside its own language-community, in terms of the questions it asks of publishing opportunities and venues in a primarily English-speaking country. Eva Sallis’s translation of al-Samawy from the Arabic is an example of this. The publication or presentation of innovative verse-novels, prose poetry, hypertextual poetry, multimedia and performance poetry, installation poetry, concrete poetry, and many other cross-genre forms is standard in Australia now. Experimentation is the expectation rather than the departure, but this surely leads us to question what actually constitutes the experimental, and to begin looking elsewhere for what is truly working against the status quo. It will probably strike readers of this selection that it is unusual for so many contemporary writers to be represented in an historical anthology. I have chosen to do this because I feel that the late-twentieth and early-twentyfirst centuries have proven and are proving to be incredibly fertile periods for poetry. I have had to leave out numerous poems I would have liked to include. I made a policy decision to use single poems from most contemporary poets. This is not intended to ‘represent’ their work, but to give a sense of the diversity, strength, and character of much of the poetry that is available today

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through books, journals, internet, and performance. A poet’s having more poems included here doesn’t mean he or she is ‘better’ than any other. Omitting any poet from the anthology is not a statement about the relevance or significance of that poet. Clearly, the choices here are subjective and personal, and the barrow I am pushing is that Australian poetry has often been much more experimental and innovative than has been hitherto appreciated.

1700s Previous explorers had ‘discovered’ Australia from a European viewpoint, but James Cook’s 1770 voyage of discovery fired the imagination of Empire. He claimed the east coast for England’s King George I I I . Colonization and occupation of this “new land” by the British began with the arrival of the First Fleet at Botany Bay in 1788 with the establishment of a penal colony of New South Wales. What was “Sydney Cove” to Governor Phillips and the colonists was the land of the Eora people of the Cadigal tribe of the Dharug language group. Despite ‘trade’ and a certain amount of cultural interaction, even ‘sharing’, the movement was towards the English language and customs of the invaders, not the other way. This is not to say the languages of the Indigenous peoples that the invaders and their prisoners encountered did not influence their written language and speech, but generally they were given little chance. It is important to register this dynamic, as it deeply informs the underlying trauma of Australian poetry that is so often hidden and almost impossible to detect. But these are the facts, and they matter. The story is repeated in a variety of ways throughout the continent through the years of ‘exploration’ and colonization. The non-Indigenous poets collected in this section were migrants, most of them born in Britain. Each had his own motive for “migration,” be it Barron Field’s taking up the position of Supreme Court Judge of New South Wales, or Fidelia Munkhouse, who became Fidelia Hill, born towards the end of the eighteenth century in Yorkshire, who would arrive in Australia on the ship Buffalo with her husband, Captain R.K. Hill. Fidelia Hill was not only the first woman in Australia to publish a book of verse but also the first to include poems written out of the colony of South Australia. After the death of her husband, she eventually remarried, and moved to Tasmania. In the main, these poets born in the 1700s primarily took their sensibilities from being children of the British Empire. Generally, these are poems of colonizers, those who were part of spreading the ‘pink’ around the globe. They carry points of connection with the southern land, but the values of

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where they come from still hold the poems firmly in place. They are talking ‘home’ in so many ways. But this relationship is not necessarily straightforward, and there are differing degrees of participation in colonization. Michael Massey Robinson is an interesting case. Oxford-educated, he actually arrived in Sydney in 1798 as a convicted blackmailer but, having clerked on the transport for a judge-advocate, was granted a conditional pardon. His duality persisted, for he continued his criminal ways, and in 1802 was found guilty of perjury, only to escape sentence again because of his unique skills in a colony hungry for such talent. And, as they say in television ads, ‘there’s more’: he was up for forgery in 1805, and sent to Norfolk Island. Back in Sydney, he was tolerated by Bligh, and ended up being head clerk for the Police Department. Robinson’s Odes (1810–20) are often recognized as “the starting point of Australian literature.”43 The apparent contradiction of his unreserved praise (as a transportee) for George I I I and Queen Charlotte certainly captures the anxiety of the colonies to connect to their parents; Robinson’s ‘situation’ also emphasizes the irony of this praise. The arrival of these poets early in the colonies, in the penal zones, defines their relationship to ‘home’, to what they left behind. Of course, concurrently, tens of thousands of years of poetic and singing tradition continued among the many Indigenous tribes throughout Australia. Song-cycles, stories of the dreamtime, rituals of spiritual significance, the telling of the law, all passed through what might be interpreted and respected as the ‘poetic’. That is why this volume begins with Aboriginal songs.

1800s Non-Indigenous poets born in the 1800s will bring their values, their belongings, their ways, from the ‘old world’ to the new land. Many hope to make their fortunes. Or, born in the land they see as theirs, they make poetry of what they know: of the bush, of the stockrider and the selector, the woman isolated as her husband pursues itinerant work, their children listening to the birds and watching out for snakes, the swagman and trooper, the traditional owners of the land being pushed further and further away from their lands by these same intruders. Some of the poets of European heritage lament their 43

E. Morris Miller, Australian Literature: A Bibliography to 1938 ... Extended to 1950 ... by Frederick T. Macartney (1940; Sydney: Angus & Robertson, rev. ed. 1956): 407.

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‘fate’. The balladeer rises to the forefront of popular versifying. Harsh conditions make for their own poetry. The cities, still small by modern standards, are growing, and from tents come the wooden and stone buildings, and with them a different poetry again. Poetry is born of pragmatics: what is available to read, the conditions under which it is read. Necessity really is the mother of invention. Traditional ballads and songs are remade, reinvented to suit the time and place. The nineteenth century was a period of flux, in which new colonies were founded and eventually all colonies worked together to become a federation, finally emerging as the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901. It was a century of constant migration from all parts of the world, especially from Britain and Ireland. It was an age of the formation of Australian mythologies such as convict irreverence, the bushranger, the Eureka Stockade, squatters, gold rushes, and land-clearing. So much of this is about resisting the status quo, the authority of the ‘mother country’. The tyranny of Britishness. But it is also an age in which the values of Britain are foisted on the general population – identity is born out of identity-crisis. This move towards nation brought with it its own problems, though, and the exploration and occupation of Indigenous lands continued at a rapid, overwhelming pace. There was resistance, and there were massacres. Remains of deceased Indigenous people were shipped back to Britain as curios and collectibles, as the centre of Empire took stock of its ‘holdings’. It has been convenient to label all Indigenous peoples in Australia as one people, but although there is a sense of shared origin, purpose, celebration, and resistance, Australia is a land of many Indigenous peoples. The small representation here reflects the limitations of such anthologizing, and the overwhelming context of the colonial and its control of ‘history’, reception, and voice. There are strong ‘colonial’ voices of protest as well, however, as is evidenced in Dunlop and others. Although this is an anthology in English, many colonists and visitors, convicts and officials, traced their origins outside Britain. This was also the century of significant Irish migration. Many of the poems included here turn on migration, though we also see the first poems of the so-called ‘native-born’ of non-Indigenous ‘Australianness’. It is easy (and convenient for some) to forget that this was also a century of strong and powerful Asian presence in Australia, especially Chinese, and that other languages of poetry also travelled here. Disturbingly, much English-language poetry of the period is overtly racist. As a rule, for this volume, I have avoided including such work, as I am

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trying to engender an inclusive yet positive picture of the movements of Australian poetry. In previous anthologies of Western Australian poetry and Australian poetry through to 1920, I have included some of this material so that readers do not get a delusive picture of how tolerant and pluralistic poetry of this period was: it generally wasn’t. When it was, it is worth celebrating and even recognizing as visionary. Until the last few decades, women writing poetry in Australia who were born in the 1800s generally got a rough deal in terms of critical recognition. This is odd, given the power and drive they gave to the literary identity (and readership) of the period. Those born towards the latter part of the period, whose work did not actually appear until the early twentieth century and later, tended to fare better. They were generally picked up as part of the contemporary interest in the ‘modern’, and its inevitable connection with national identity and modernity; finding ‘our’ place in the world. Mary Gilmore, national icon who graces our currency, serves as an example of a ‘woman poet’ who has long managed to avoid such marginalization. Her lifespan straddles the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; she was born in 1865 in New South Wales, and died in 1962. While her poetic style and use of language remained fairly consistent and even conservative throughout her long writing life, her content was always challenging to the conservatisms of the generations she crossed. Larger than life, she was one of those who followed William Lane to Paraguay to help establish what was intended to be a socialist utopia. She was a feminist – editor of the women’s feature in the Sydney Worker – and also concerned with the well-being of Aboriginal people and others she felt had been treated unjustly. But, like so many of this birth-period, she carries an inherent contradiction, at least to some contemporary eyes. An overt nationalist, she loved an Australia that was nonetheless a product of the colonies, and she herself grew out of a colony. Such Australian nationalism did not preclude love of Empire (she was made a Dame of that Empire), Those born in the 1800s are the generators of what we understand as an Australian literature now. The moderns find their feet there, but so do many who prefer to retain a world-view from previous eras. The post-Enlightenment values of science, industry, and self are in the mix, but so are the genealogical obsessions of fealty to Church and country, and a classical education. So isolated from the sources of these values, the mimicry of ‘old’ European models (in particular – certainly on an official level), formed hybrids and distortions that necessarily generated their own values and mythologies. By the

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time we reach the turmoil and affirmation of the 1890s, with strikes and solidarity among workers, and within the machinery of industry (railway lines, telegraph etc.), in the move towards Federation, the claim to a character that is quintessentially Australian, based on egalitarianism, mateship, and other nowclichéd constructs of Australian identity, have well and truly been established. Such an identity drew its characteristics from its origins, but was in many ways defined against them. This is the age of the Australian landscape’s becoming a subject of value in itself. It is the age of the Australian-born Harpur and, later, Kendall, who so wrestled with the specifics of the Australian environment in their poems – though the old world of which they were never a part constantly reached through to the new world they were writing. They were sophisticated poets dealing with complex issues of dispossession and usurpation, with recognition and claim, without fully working out their positions, and remaining caught in the values of expectation – what readers wished to read – as well. This is the age of Henry Lawson, born in the bush, out in the New South Wales gold diggings, evermore resentful of the bush but truly part of it. It is the birth-age of the-city-and-the-bush dichotomy, with all its frictions and its popular currency in the agendas and discourse of nation-making. Some of the greatest Australian poets were born during the 1800s. And it is the crash-course in modernity and the colonial impress and allure of the bush as a place apart from the rest of the world that make this mixture unique in the world. We see the rise of John Shaw Neilson, that poet with no education, almost no eyesight, who as an itinerant labourer recited his poems to fellow workers for them to copy, whom many compare to the Symbolist poets of France, but who probably never read them.44 He was maverick, unique, delicate, and strangely robust as well. There’s David Unaipon, claimed to be the first Aboriginal person to write books in English (though this is arguable), but who certainly brought Indigenous tales to a broader audience.45 His tales are superb poetic renderings of the stories of his people. It’s the age of that symbolist-modernist C.J. Brennan, who wrote livres composés of incredible complexity, as great as anything written in the same period elsewhere in the world. An intellectual and academic, he took his knowledge of languages to Australian poetry, and, without having to include overtly Australian referents, especially its flora and fauna, 44 45

This assumption is becoming increasingly contested. [J.K.] David Unaipon, Native Legends (Adelaide: Hunkin, Ellis & King, ?1932).

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cast them into the realm of the symbolic, making his readers look closer at home by seeing that what was being written in Europe was being achieved close at hand. This is the birth period of the great war poet Leon Gellert, who within twenty-two years of his birthdate would be on his way to the trenches of Europe. His poetry stands up there with that of Sassoon and Owen. This is the century that saw the birth of the radical and unique Lesbia Harford, whose poetry of ambivalent sexuality, working-class values, and tilted syntax would open the doors to modernism in so many ways. Zora Cross is born (1890) then as well: modern love that has the urge of Meredith’s brilliant “Modern Love” sequence, but with a feminist drive and a sensibility born of the destruction and madness of global war.

Those born in the 1900s For those born in the 1900s, the century of world wars and the nuclear bomb, of the Holocaust and the Vietnam War, of the Great Depression and the Cuban Missile Crisis, of the Stolen Generations and nuclear weapons testing on the Montebellos and at Maralinga, it has been an apocalyptic era. At no other time in world history did the end seem so inevitably near at times. At the century’s close, millennialism was as vehement as it was during the English Civil War. Humans had developed the means of total destruction, and it seemed that we no longer needed to rely on God’s judgment (exception to be made for American fundamental evangelicals) for humanity to come to its end. In a century of bitter conflict between peoples, all humans seemed bound to the same fate. We are still living with that threat, and also with the legacy of massive environmental destruction, which was gaining pace rapidly during the nineteenth century and reached epic proportions in the twentieth. Climate change is that legacy. This is the realm of the modern poet. Many poets seemed to remain in denial, at least in their literal subject-matter, and wrote a poetry that appeared untouched by history, untouched by reality, while others spoke of such issues in every poem. Most poets are a mixture of both. There is also the fact that poems need to be read in broader contexts for one to be able to appreciate fully the range of their potential meanings and implications. Celebrations of modernity, of progressive thinking, inform our best poets, but doubt is in there as well. A celebration of the natural environment often goes hand in hand with a lament for the damaged and the lost.

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In Australian poetry, the articulation of differing viewpoints – idiosyncratic and individualistic, collective and community – departed from and engaged with the great narratives that informed the twentieth century. In Australia, the predominance of the Anglo-Celtic gradually lessened as the two world wars, particularly the second, prompted concerted migrations from Europe. With new cultural coordinates etching themselves into the status quo, first-generation migrants from non-English-speaking backgrounds began the difficult process of defining difference and becoming part of their new places. As a result of the Vietnam War, the genocide in Cambodia, and the traumas of the Middle East, migration from those regions increased in the last thirty years of the century. And with those migrations came new poetic voices that added new notes to Australian poetry, redefined its scope and possibilities, and made it richer. Only recently have Australians as a whole started to accept that its people come from all over the world, and, further, that Australia is part of the Asia–Pacific and Indian Ocean regions. Tension between the ideas of multiculturalism and assimilation is one of the generative points of modern Australia. Poems written in ‘new’ Englishes appear. Indigenous Australian poets start publishing widely – Kath Walker, who, at the Bicentennial, changed her name to the tribal Oodgeroo as a statement against the colonial celebration; Jack Davis, who spoke out against the dispossession and oppression of the Nyungar people in Western Australia; later, Kevin Gilbert and Lionel Fogarty, who resisted the English language itself, vehicle of invasion and oppression; through to Lisa Bellear, making use of the form of the epistolary petition that had appeared as early as Bennelong’s dictated letter of exchange and request to a couple he had stayed with during his visit to England in the 1790s (also connecting with convict petition letters and poems). Australia’s first parliament opened in 1901, and its first piece of legislation resulted in the ‘White Australia’ policy. This abject point in time created a binary of conflict in the ensuing century as poets (and others) fought against the strictures placed on what constituted Australia. It is a wide-ranging journey from the classicist Augustan renderings of old-world Europe in A.D. Hope, and their complex and troubled engagement with modern Australia, through Kenneth Slessor’s invigorations of language – utilizing the full range of modernist techniques to sing the individual versus the mass, the primal and chthonic nature of the country (‘South’ and ‘North’) versus the constructed organism of the city (almost as living entity), personal alienation and the new language of technology – through to the pastoral, quasi-metaphysical render-

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ings of such mid-century (and later) poets as David Campbell, to the layphilosophical and musical utterances of Gwen Harwood, or the investigations of nature and belonging and dispossession in the activist poetics of Judith Wright. In Jas H. Duke, in ʌ O, in the slam and performance poetry of Miles Merrill. In all these, political constraints and the containments of language and culture are explored, questioned, and constructively subverted. Out of threat, danger, and bleakness come the positives of language itself, of the drive towards poetry. It’s the age of the new Romanticism, which by the end of the century will lead to the linguistic innovations of Peter Minter, Michael Brennan, and Margie Cronin. The poets born in the early part of the century who make their mark by its mid-point are essential to understanding the picture of a contemporary poetry that can readily encompass the radical sexual politics of Gabbie Everall, and the lyrical hybridizations of Jaya Savige. We might look to Grace Perry, Rosemary Dobson, and Dorothy Hewett for a range of voices that share an impulse to investigate and clarify, particularly the female experience, and a desire to tap into many different sources for poetic craft, aesthetic programme, and inspiration. The twentieth century’s is a poetry of variety and difference. One of the crisis-points of the modern in Australia was the Ern Malley Hoax. It is true that it provided amusement for those opposed to the abstractions and ‘indulgences’ of the modern, of rampant free verse and free ways beyond rules and regulations, but in many ways it was also a clarification, a point where visual art and sound finally erupted in poetry, re-creating rules of thumb that had long been observed in the automatic writings of the European surrealists, the Dadaists before them, and the French Symbolists before them. Ironically, more than in the great modernist Slessor, it was in the nationalistic and jingoistic Jindyworobaks, for all their appropriative use of Indigenous myth and presence, that the larrikin streak of Ern Malley might be found. In their verse of place, undercurrents of dream and chthonic imagery well up from the very body of the poems themselves, and the borrowings reflect the techniques of McAuley and Stewart in their pillaging of Shakespeare and mosquito-extermination manuals as soldiers in World War Two, as much as anything else. The anonymity of the hoax, the revelation of it as a construct, and the ensuing trial for obscenity of Max Harris and the Angry Penguins – these have become as much part of poetry and the ‘Australian tradition’ as the Ern Malley poems themselves. In many ways, the peak periods of poetic activity in Australia have been over-identified. It is true that the 1920s and the 1960s were vibrant periods,

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but even that decade usually seen as flat and conservative, the 1950s, has its own intense energies. I have gone back to the late 1940s and through the 1950s to rediscover the energy of these poets, with their postwar sensibilities. They are largely born in the post-World War One period, recovering from the shock their parents got and passed on to them – the large voluntary forces going off for adventure, and to defend Empire, who had their world-view tragically and definitively changed at Gallipoli and on the Western Front. In the same way, many of those parents’ poet-offspring themselves experienced the Second World War and its appalling consequences, emerging into a world of potential apocalypse. In a century of political extremes, of allegiances to fascism or communism or the ‘middle way’, political and ethical subtexts proliferated. Quite frequently, though, the poems were imagistic and observational. Often they undertook to differentiate: what is Australian? In what is by and large an urban country (what little of it is at all densely settled), the pastoral world is celebrated and yet examined closely. The pastoral and anti-pastoral live hand in hand. Les Murray, with his book The People’s Otherworld, invigorates the language of post-settler culture, and opens new ways of reading this double presence. John Tranter brings New York to Sydney, and his deeply intelligent urban ironies resonate all the way back to his rural origins. The influence of Asian poetry, aesthetically and stylistically, the concentrations of American and British Imagism from the early part of the twentieth century, and the rendering of the ‘bush’, the natural world, into ‘nature’ poetry, strengthen as the century progresses. A diversity of religious belief becomes more widespread, and Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, and local spiritual sensibilities inform the English-language poem along with the Christian. Indigenous culture is celebrated, and continues to celebrate the land. And it resists. And lays claim to the land that has been stolen. In essence, against a backdrop of horror, Australian poets have looked to understand where they are, what they have and what has been lost, and, most importantly, how poetry might talk about this or even replace the lost. It has become a major world poetry because it has reached out to the world, but has set out in its own directions out of isolation, or a notion of isolation. The world has grown smaller, but that has made no difference. Australians and Australian poets are part of something ‘global’, but differently and uniquely. Astonishingly, though, it was not until the referendum of 1967 that over 90% of Australians supported the inclusion of Aboriginal people in the national census. Yet it is becoming an age in which traditional ownership of the land

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will be recognized, if gradually. A multicultural society is acknowledged in vital ways, women claim their autonomy and are accorded some equality, and environmentalism gains a foothold. From the mid-1990s onwards these values were under threat, but hope has emerged in some quarters that they will consolidate and move Australia in a positive and pluralistic direction.

China’s Australia Anthology46

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F T E R Y E A R S O F A N T H O L O G I Z I N G A U S T R A L I A N P O E T R Y , I had grown sceptical of the process and had decided not to do it again. Anthologies of a nation’s poetry reinforce ideas of nation, and, even if consciously deconstructive in presentation and selection, the anthology inevitably participates in a power struggle for authenticity, legitimization, and ‘official’ sanction. The primary language used in Australia today is English or, more accurately, ‘Australian English’. What is this language? Australians of European, in particular Anglo-Celtic, heritage might lay claim to the evolution of a settler Strine that incorporates (or appropriates) words and even expressions of Australian Indigenous languages, and maybe even mainland European terms and inflections. Since the Second World War, due to the large number of American troops billetted in Australia and to the globalization of American values, an increasing range of ‘americanisms’ have also entered this English. In other words, it’s primarily a ‘white’ language of occupation, engagement, and exclusivity. Of course, this is a false picture, as Australian English has also developed to incorporate Asian-English expressions, and to be adopted pluralistically by second-language Asian communities in Australia as a public, if not private, language to be used alongside their pre-migration language/s. Australia is a multilingual country, and has been for a long time. Indigenous Australian languages, with upwards of 110,000 years of Australianness to back them, are numerous, and, though sharing linguistic features and words with neighbouring languages in Australia, have had their own regional integrity and ability to adapt.

46

“Introduction” to Contemporary Australian Poetry in Chinese Translation, ed. John Kinsella & Ouyang Yu, tr. Ouyang Yu (Shanghai: Shanghai Arts and Literature Press, 2007): 4–7.

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Any living language adapts. And this is what attracted me to anthologizing again, and to rethinking my sceptical position. Although this is an anthology of English-language poetry translated into Chinese, it does not mean that the originating language for a poem was necessarily English. I increasingly believe that a community of poets who feel connection between themselves do so not only because of language but because of a variety of shared (and opposing) factors, ranging from the political and social to the creative. The issue of movement, of emigration, is a point in common for most Australians. A desire or need to be associated with particular places /spaces in Australia is clearly strong in much Indigenous poetry, but for settler /invading /migrant and even invited communities, relationships between a person / people and the land become highly relevant. Place starts to identify who we are. How we relate to where we are informs the need or choice to migrate or, indeed, stay – whether in the context of the ‘God’s own country’ of settler thinking, the ‘lucky country’ of ‘modern’ Australia, the damned hell-hole for many convicts of penal Australia, a place of hope for refugees driven from their original homes, or a new start – a connection with family already there; or whatever ‘relationship’. Then there’s the need to articulate the disappointment, rejection, and neglect that many people experience on coming to Australia. Those rejected by the ‘majority’. This anthology is also for them. In other words, issues of belonging precede the language we use to describe or explore this matter. I have been a reader of my fellow editor on this book, Ouyang Yu, for many years. What has interested me in his poetry is this very issue. Ouyang Yu confronts the ironies, contradictions, paradoxes, and hypocrisies of a nation that is largely made up of immigrants, that also seeks to police and homogenize what that nation is. Culturally, Australia is a truly varied country, and I feel that recognition of this constructively undermines the negative ‘values’ of Nation, but reinforces the spiritual, creative, and human richness of community, or indeed communities coexisting. Some of us choose to live outside many social conventions of our own communities, only to find connections with communities that would have seemed ‘foreign’ to us growing up. I believe this poetry collection makes those connections. The Chinese have likely been visiting Australia for many hundreds of years – there is much evidence to suggest not only trade but also physical interrelationships between Indigenous Australians in the northern coastal regions of Australia, and Chinese (and Arab and Indian) traders as well as regional peoples. There were many Chinese migrants and “visitors” (miners, other

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workers) in Australia from the first half of the nineteenth century. ChineseAustralians are as much a part of ‘Australia’ as any other migrant group; the collective contribution has been massive. Australia has a white-dominated racist history which found expression in the White Australia policy in 1901. But this was always an act of fear and desperation, a desire to retain a certain kind of power. This attitude has always been an absurdity. Unfortunately, it has been reflected in the nature of Australian poetry anthologies since the nineteenth century. ‘Migrant’ poetries (ironically, often not recognizing that those of English-language origin are also migrants) have slowly been incorporated into anthologies over the last forty years, but it’s been a slow process. Indigenous poets writing in English were ‘let through the anthological door’ by the 1960s, and are often used to legitimize connection with an ‘ancient’ Australia. Most Indigenous poets have tackled this ‘recognition’ head-on. On the one hand, the external acceptance of a brilliant tradition of poetry through the transliteration of song-cycles (by anthropologists, in the main), and their inclusion in ‘mainstream’ anthologies, has brought an awareness to a broader audience of the first (and present, and ongoing) Australian poetries; on the other hand, there have also been accusations of tokenism. It comes down to an issue of respect – of thinking outside the hierarchies of European poetry traditions, of being invited into a poetry rather than appropriating it to suit a nation-making agenda. Australia was never what those who devised and enacted the White Australia policy thought it was (the historian Henry Reynolds is astute on this point). There is a lot of English-language, locally published material among nineteenth-century Australian poetry that exploits racial stereotypes for the edification of the few, but that is now seen for what it is: racial propaganda designed to perpetrate a white imperialist vision of state (and later nation). Poetry based on bigotry will, thankfully, never survive, other than as an historical curiosity. The poetry in this collection is an affirmation of what Australian poetry might be, and what is. It’s still only a snippet, but it’s a start. Ouyang Yu has been a pathfinder in Australia – someone who has been vigilant and determined to question what ‘Australianness’ is. Many of the poets in this collection probably wouldn’t care whether they were defined as Australian or not (I don’t, for example – though I am so often associated with a specific patch of the Australian landscape), but the moment they are collected under a nation’s rubric, readers are invited to conjecture about what kind of nation is being presented. I hope a tolerant one, beneath the government

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propaganda. And, I hope, one that sees poetry as the ultimate expression of liberty, equality, fraternity, and diversity.

Talking Islands (with Alvin Pang)47

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connections between the cultures and literatures of the Asia–Pacific region are regrettably minimal. Much of this has to do with a certain protectionism in the English language, but even among English-using communities in the region – Australia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, and Singapore – interaction is hardly extensive. We feel that it should be. Singapore and Australia have long had a special relationship. Many older Australians will cite the defence of Singapore, and its fall and consequent imprisonments, as a core reason why Singapore matters to them, while Singaporeans today would readily cite Australia as a destination of choice for travel, education or emigration. Singapore imports much of its food from Australia; its young people thrive in its universities; many families have relocated there. It seems timely – given the strong bonds that have formed through migration, family, the workings of community, commerce, sport, and other cultural forms – for literature to enter the discussion in a salient way. Our spaces need to communicate. As writers and editors, we have admired the poetry coming out of each other’s territories for some years, and yet we feel that not enough has been exchanged to facilitate a more informed understanding and dialogue. A joint anthology of conversation seemed the natural answer to this lack. Furthermore, there is much to suggest that the two territories, despite dramatic difference in size and cultural makeup, have something to say about one another, and to say to each other. Singapore and Australia are both islands – if of vastly differing size. Someone in Tasmania would think very differently about the notion of ‘island’ from someone on the ‘mainland’. Someone living in central Australia, with thousands of kilometres to the sea, would have a different view of ‘island’ from that of someone living on Bondi Beach or Singapore’s Katong and Changi, yet we remain islands all the same. Being islands 47

T SEEMS THAT, AT THIS MOMENT IN HISTORY,

Over There: Poems from Singapore and Australia, ed. & preface John Kinsella & Alvin Pang, intro. John Kinsella, tr. Eva Sallis & Alvin Pang (Singapore: Ethos, 2008): 6–7.

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creates a specific way of thinking about exclusion, belonging, and intactness that bears deeper examination. For instance, all too familiar in the literary tradition of both cultures is the sense of being outside the centres of world influence; of being desert islands, ‘out there’ in the terra incognita. Exotic, alien, peripheral. Yet these are places we know as home and hearth, and which inform our unique modes of thinking, living, and acting. Both Australia and Singapore also have colonial pasts, with ‘developed economies’ functioning in English set against a backdrop of multicultural richness. Indeed, their poetry may share a resistance to the blanket concept of the ‘postcolonial’ – which does not not do justice to the sheer diversity of the experiences at play – the commingling of immigrant as well as ancient regional cultures – that is part of the Singaporean and Australian heritage. In a poet like Miriam Wei Wei Lo, for instance – born in Canada, raised in Singapore, and living in Australia – we find a kind of cultural and textual bridge between cultures. Her poems form the connection, a kind of energized field – a synaptic gap – across which the poetries leap and charge each other. As the political desire in both Australia and Singapore to constitute nation as ‘history’ increases, their artistic output becomes increasingly seen as product and part of that historicizing. Anthologies can so often become extensions of this process. We do not wish this to be the case, and see the intercountry anthology as one way of interrupting what in essence becomes a mono-historicizing, an ironing-out into a controlling nationalism. Poetry, to us, has been about resistance to the stability of language – it is about change in the elusive sense of not being pinned down to an agenda. The poets in this anthology may share many things as poets, but would very likely have greatly varying political views on both the micro- and the macro-level. All would surely support a notion of difference as generative – they do not want to read their own poems over and over, but to broaden their horizons. Anthologies are about broader reading experiences. We feel our selection is technically and linguistically diverse – though it is entirely challengeable as not going far enough on each of these levels, in the sense, for instance, of how different poets and poems speak to each other. It is quite possible that a more jarring or disruptive dialogue between poets and poems may prove effective. Discourse should produce its slippages and challenges: that is how language moves and grows. We wanted to speak from a position of equality – this is why we have devoted an equal number of pages to the poetry of each territory. One obviously regrets the overall lack of space – we could keep adding more and more mate-

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rial, if not for economic realities; but there is always a time to stop. The thread may, of course, be picked up later on – not only to keep up with change and new voices and to correct omissions (for whatever reason) but also to critique the idea of the anthology itself, and our positions as editors. We hope that this, our first joint effort, will become an open invitation for others to come forward and to share their own perspectives. This is not a closed exhibition; it is an open letter, and it looks forward to the conversations to come.

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that it is part of the Asia–Pacific region, still keeps its literary practice relatively quarantined from South-East Asia. Fortunately, things are changing, with visual and performing arts as well as literature a dynamic part of the interactive process of sharing and connecting, but there’s still a long way to go. I’d like to think that the Australian selection here is part of this process. Individual Australian poets whose first, primary, or ‘default’ language is English have long been making South-East Asian ‘place’ and cultural themes part of their poetics. There is also a strong tradition of Australian writing in Chinese and other languages of the region that extends well back into nineteenth-century Australia. It takes an activist bilingual poet like Ouyang Yu to impress on the English-speaking regime that this fact cannot be ignored, and that such poetries are part of an ‘Australian poetics’ as well. The suitability of a poem for inclusion in the Australian section of this anthology does not reside in thematics – the poems I have selected vary greatly in content, location, and outlook – but in the process of being part of an anthology of cultural sharing. In my quest for material, I was sent a lot of poems about visiting Singapore. As a general rule, I didn’t include them; they seemed too much part of a touristic sub-genre, though many were exciting, keenly observed, and cultural relevant. Each poem, however, remains its own poem. I did include John Mateer’s sequence on Singapore, as his wanderings of the world give him a unique way of seeing places he visits: an outsider who becomes familiar through carrying that status wherever he goes. It furnishes sharp insights. Mostly, I selected the Australian material simply on the basis of poems that I thought were effective in themselves, regardless of subject-matter. I would

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Over There, 10–11.

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have included another fifty poets if we’d had the space. As it was, I chose to give people less space and include more poets. There are so many fine poets, diverse in approach, writing in Australia, that selecting is always a subjective and difficult task. As we agreed to make it an English-language anthology (while asking the important question: what is ‘English’, anyway?), there are other poets missing whom I would have liked to include. I did make exceptions, though. I so deeply admire the English versions wrought by Eva Sallis out of Yahia al-Samawy’s poems in Arabic that I felt they would serve as an example of how translation is an active part of language as well – no language is fixed in its lexicon and sensibility; each relies on input of sensibility from other languages. There are many other poets’ work I could have selected in this capacity, but I had to make an editorial judgment-call in terms of space and intention. I am particularly pleased to be able to include Merlinda Bobis’s trilingual visual–musical notated texts, which break down so many of the gates put up by keepers of ‘nation’. Some of the poets here are bilingual or multilingual. They also write in other languages. Australia is a multilingual country, and has been for tens of thousands of years. Old and new languages, languages of hybridity, creoles, dialect. . . all are languages of place and displacement, and all are in the mix in Australian poetry. Lionel Fogarty, in his resistance to ongoing colonization of his people and all Indigenous peoples, sees reclamation as a matter not simply of recovering lost ground – cultural and literal – but of reaffirming the fact that connection has never been lost, that as an occupied people his people have the right and obligation to rejuvenate their relationship to land, to assert their presence. Song and dance are one in resisting the consuming colonial culture. The Australian poems in this selection have come from earlier book publications or journals, or are more recent unpublished work. I have tried to keep it an open field. ‘Field’ – of the page, in the way the poets and their words interact. I hope I am using the word ‘field’ in a fresh way, though – as something lifted outside the constrictions of nation and specific idiom. There is broader thinking to be done here. Australia is also – increasingly – becoming a nation of travellers, and Australia as place is defined as much by looking outside as by looking in. I was surprised and disturbed by a recent article that claimed Australia was no longer strongly regional – writing this from wheatbelt Western Australia, I would strongly contest such a claim (regional in the antagonistic sense and also in the connection to local community and ‘country’ – land).

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In so many ways, this book is about region, but there’s also a clear internationalist tendency in what we are trying to achieve – between countries, and also with regard to how we speak about the places we come from. I insist, as I often do: this is another example of international regionalism. It sounds like a contradiction, an oxymoron really, but the two factors can coexist and, I feel, need to. A concept of regional identity, retaining a sense of immediate spatiality, doesn’t mean we should – or really can – close ourselves off from what happens in the world at large. In these pages are poets standing up for the rights of individual and community, for the local and international. It’s an ongoing conversation. They all talk the talk in their own determined ways.

Sighting — The Duplicity of English, and of the English-Language Poem in Southwest Australia49

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M A R C H 2001 , at the beginning of the south-western Australian autumn, I sighted a thylacine (a native marsupial believed extinct on mainland Australia for over two thousand years and last seen in Tasmania in the 1930s) in the Avon Valley district during a visit to my home from America. Realizing few would believe me, and that logic dictated I should doubt this sighting and interpretation myself, I suppressed the desire to discuss the issue at length. Almost ten months ago I started writing this essay, only to end up scrapping it after a few paragraphs. Maybe it was simply a case of transfer interrupted. I have been resisting a return to the text because of the need to feel an increase in doubt, to foster an environment of scepticism. Distance is a way of testing credulity. In reconfiguring the experience, a number of issues became paramount in terms of both the articulation of the moment of contact and what its significance might be. Always trying to find a language that might express my respect for Indigenous claims to custodianship of the land, I considered how easy it is to conflate issues relating to extinction of animals and plants, to the decimation, even attempted genocide, of peoples. To reduce or even consider

49

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“Sighting: The Duplicity of English, and of the English-Language Poem in Southwest Australia,” Thylazine 3.1 (2002). Part of the section on Henry Clay also appears in Kinsella, Contrary Rhetoric: Lectures on Landscape and Language (Fremantle, W A : Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2008).

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such an analogic model is insensitive and destructive, but the ease with which such a comparison might be made became my concern. This essay is an attempt to bring contradictory and disassociated reflections and implications into play, and is a critique of the role of invader, commentator, and self in the processes of occupation and exclusion. The Avon River is the unifying thread, and its flows – now polluted with chemical fertilizer, spray residue, outbreaks of blue-green algae, and salinity – feed the Deleuze and Guattari-like body without organs, illuminating the corpse by the suggestion of functional internal organs that are really in terminal decline. The sighting of a thylacine is an event in itself, but also symptomatic of my own limitations of perception, of the need to create a unified self and measure the field of occupation – of all human interaction with place. The guilt of non-Indigenous Australians collides with their wish to correct wrongs and simultaneously belong, all of which sadly weakens their ability to recognize intrusion as violation. The thylacine is like a marker moving across the grid-work of ‘settlement’, across the title deeds of ownership. The signifying event was the sighting of an animal along the Avon River that bore a distinct resemblance to the now almost mythical thylacine – last seen alive in Tasmania in the 1930s, having been hunted to near-extinction shortly before that. Australia over the last two hundred years has become a land of extinction and attempted genocide, which is not to say there weren’t extinctions before this, but surely not with such systematic and ‘artificial’ application. And the linking of Indigeneity with the extinction of native animals and plants is something that no amount of guilt can rewrite. The association of blackness with darkness /corruption /evil by European writers was evident in settler /invader literature from the earliest ballads, and by the mid- to lateeighteenth century had become part of the clichéd Empire-speak that made subject and object interchangeable, with the only externally available unified voice being that of white authorial edict. In the Western Australian poet Henry Clay’s poem “Two and Two,”50 we read: ‘O, the black rascal never said a word, But looked as pleasant as a native-dog 50

Henry Ebenezer Clay (“H.E.C.”), “Two and Two,” in Clay, Two and Two: A Story of the Australian Forest: With Minor Poems of Colonial Interest (Perth: M. Shenton, 1873). “First author of a separate publication of verse in Western Australia”; E. Morris Miller, Australian Literature: A Bibliography to 1938 ... Extended to 1950 ... by Frederick T. Macartney (1940; Sydney: Angus & Robertson, rev. ed. 1956): 150.

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Down-ridden with a lamb between his teeth; And sneaked along to cover the Bush: Then, turning suddenly, looked back on me, And shook his supple arm, and lingoed out A guttural hate-song, – angry recitative, That closed with a wild yell; – so turned about, And like a black snake thro’ the thicket slid, And vanished into darkness.’ (64)

The lamb is not just the child of imperialism, Christianity, and righteousness, but also the replacement land-text for territory, landscaping. Without denying the land-management interpretation of fire-stick farming, we can say that the specificity of measurement and calibration, of breaking up land into zones of possession, undid the custodial relationship to place, the organic relationship of self and community to space. The renaming of place is a tangible inscription of reterritorialization, but it’s the re-measuring and apportioning that dictate total exclusion. It’s a combination of verbal and mathematical language displacement: a language of exchange, of economics. Indigenous people ‘owned’ in a way that Crown law negated or ignored, but their presence in a particular zone indicated connection. They were removed, and it was not until Mabo that terra nullius was overturned in law. The thylacine ate sheep, so it was eliminated. The presence of photographs, drawings, and preserved body parts (D N A revival tropes) does not delete the law of profit (‘survival’ and improvement) that led to its destruction and extinction in the first place. It remains to be rediscovered so it can be made extinct again. Boustrophedon entails the line of text that is the furrow. Poetry written by the non-Indigenous Australian – even when deploring occupation /possession – is the blessing of the field, the paddock, the roads, the farm houses. The control of language implied in the creation of the poem (no matter how ‘deranged’) becomes an attempt to roll back the darkness, to ‘illuminate’ the Bush, position the rural as desirable other. It is seductive and fetishistic. In “Two and Two,” the lamb of the poem is sacrificial and stoical and made to be eaten. It is the sacrifice by the settler for his beliefs, for his sense of right. The native dog is a foul offshoot of the Fall, a violator that makes the landscape anything but Eden (the settler has to work hard to reclaim the Eden that’s buried beneath the pollution), and its consuming the cultural lamb is pollution, invasion, and murder. The reality of colonization is inverted. The scenario is set on the goldfields, with “black Wallace” one of two thieves

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trying to steal the takings of a pair of settler lads who’ve lifted themselves beyond their limitations (in one case, physical impairment and loss) to make good by their own hands, to test their luck. The codes of exploitation and gain are confused, as much as the animal and human, the extinction and genocide, sacrifice and murder. It is against such code-scrambling that the extermination and potential rediscovery of the thylacine should be seen. The use of “guttural hate-song,” the suppression of language through inarticulacy and inaudibility, emphasizes the removal of cognitive privilege, and thus ‘equality’ and selfdetermination. The language of abuse directed at animals is transferred. It’s an expression of disgust and ownership; a fetishization into language to enhance the value of ‘English’ or Western language generally. The poetry of the body: the ceremonial markings, initiation scars – a written language – are buried beneath text. Text is occupation. The painting of the body – ornament or decoration – is the sign; the meaning of the sign differs between communities. The totem animal of an individual human three thousand years ago might have been a thylacine, and the spirit conjoined with its human counterpart. The language is written in the stripes on its flanks. In seeing the supposedly extinct animal, I potentially became its preserver – its exact location a secret. There is evidence of thylacine presence on the mainland, though it’s been suggested that there may not have been large numbers for thousands of years, and that it vanished about 3,000 years ago. Maybe the biology of the creature goes some way towards explaining this, or maybe, as some might argue, it was in retreat from an evolutionary perspective. A marsupial dog, the male had a so-called rudimentary pouch, and though dog-like in appearance it is often called the Tasmanian Tiger or Tasmanian Wolf – its striped flanks giving it a superficial resemblance to the tiger in particular. The other biological distinction was a massive gap between jaws. Thylacines were ‘sheep killers’ (lamb slaughterers), and were extinct by 1936. In 1993 a thylacine was supposedly sighted in Western Australia on a road in the south-west. In 2002 I sighted a thylacine, had my mother photograph its tracks, mentioned it to a couple of people, was predictably mocked, and then determined that I’d keep it to myself to protect the animal and to allow time to increase doubt. What fascinates me is why people have such an investment in this now quasimythical animal’s existing, or not existing. To ‘own’ something supposedly lost comes with its own language of ego and property. If it existed in numbers and was killing sheep, there’d be a cull, no doubt, as was the case in Mount Barker with a rare native cat that was culled by state wildlife officials because

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‘local farmers had complained’. At least part of the answer to this can be found in the racism implicit in the Clay poem as it continues: ‘Then I fear The fellow means some mischief. He can work As well as any whiteman, and ’tis said He’s half a king, – and so he got his name: – But he’s as stubborn as a forest boar, If you but anger him…’ (64)

The subtext is an opposition to Scottish nationalism by the English identity of the lyrical narrative voice, and the equation of “black Wallace” with William Wallace (and indigeneity) and a war of freedom works ironically in both directions. It is a negative, and intended so, but also one of grudging respect – almost suggesting that the white prospectors rely on the ‘Other’, the semiregal Aboriginal person, to validate their identity. The young men go forth to be tested and prove themselves against…. The animalization and potential bite-back of the ‘enemy’ places him on the level of the semi-mythical beast that must be defeated for the wealth (the treasure, the quest totem) to be released. The discovery and defeat define self, community, and spiritual power. The stanza finishes with: ‘... I had my task To win and master him; and after all He left his work, with Max, because they heard I could not follow them.’ (64)

There is another inversion here. The taming of the beast, but also the bête noire factor of the untameable – the inability to track the tracker: i.e. the stereotype of Aboriginal functionality in the landscape – the use to the settler. Frank, the white settler who has lost ‘control’ of ‘his’ land due to injury incurred by fighting a bushfire (at his ‘home’ property), has become emotionally and physically reliant on his friend Ralph’s goodwill. Because of this injury, Frank cannot follow “black Wallace,” but subtextually it is possibly because he cannot read the Bush. “Black Wallace” works with the white thief Max – both ex-employees of Frank’s who have left his block after Frank sustained the injury and couldn’t return to work it. Max and “black Wallace” set off together for the recently opened gold diggings, where Ralph and a recovering Frank also end up. Max and “black Wallace” in turn attempt to rob their former ‘masters’ of their considerable takings (good clean-living boys like Frank and Ralph do not lose their money to the vices of the goldfields).

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There is an interconnecting series of binaries here, with sub-sets that distil into Greek heroic codes of behaviour – hubris, pollution, and Fate – as well as Biblical temptation, evil, and retribution. These codes are fused together, as part of a language of conquest, ownership, and spiritual validation. Clay’s poem is complex in its construction of roles of authority and servitude, with the injured Frank (as hero, then shade of a hero wallowing in his own misery, then his resurrection through apparent humility, bravery, loyalty, and strength of character) taking a subaltern role in order to be elevated again to his status of master: And Ralph came here to ask if you could spare Old Jonathan, to mind the tent for him; But now he is to wait for me, and I Will wash the gold and guard the tent; and he Shall be to me as David, – for myself Will be his Jonathan. (56)

The pairing of the ‘demonic’ Aboriginal and the corrupted white Max is an attempt to assert the polluting nature of ‘blackness’. Though Max actually injures Frank in his efforts to steal the gold, Max is simply described as cowardly. “Black Wallace” can only ever be a demon, a demi-figure against which the hero competes or is corrupted. Max is of the chosen, though corrupted and fallen. He is literate, thus ‘civilized’, despite having been corrupted: ‘Now hark ye,’ says the doctor, as he marks A tinge of color to the cheek returning, And the breath coming freely; – when that hand Can dash off an epistle, stroke and dot As true as ever, – you can write a note To that big, cowardly Max, and thank him for The ugly shock that gave you back an arm Himself may feel the weight of, any time He ventures to your presence!” (72)

A recognition of the duality and duplicity of such representation is actually figured in a set of gender binaries posited in this long poem. The recognition of settler crimes and injustices (where ‘settler’ is the generic ‘white’) is presented by Ralph’s mother when he and Frank find bush blocks away from their family holdings, and wish to venture out to develop them. It’s another inversion, with the stage for her recognition being set by fear and distaste:

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‘Dear, brave boy!’ The mother says, and strokes his curls With loving pride; – ‘This seventy miles away You youngsters count as nothing; but I wish ’Twere not so far. Those inland savages Know little of the whiteman, and I fear They will be troublesome.’ (11)

We then get a riposte from the father: ‘Nay, fret him not,’ The father says: the boys will never know The roughing of their fathers; when the men Were always armed, and muskets cleared the way While Women journeyed. (11)

And the rejoinder from the mother: ‘Ah!’ the mother said,– And a dark shadow o’er her visage fell, – ‘There are wild stories sealed upon the lips Of some who landed first, should make men blush, And women tremble: tales of cruel scenes Where whitemen played the traitor, and surpassed, In subtle guile, the dark man’s treachery; When hunters forayed – not for fox or hare, Or rebounding roebuck, – but for men, – aye man Made in G O D ’S image; tho’ they saw it not, Who sought and trafficked for a black man’s head As Saxon Edgar sought the heads of wolves. ‘So eager horsemen and lighthearted girls Dash among timorous groups of kangaroo, With dogs and rifles, – pleading poor excuse For needless slaughter, – till the pitiful Night Over her blushing face spreads her pale hands, And moves them to forbear; the plain all strewn With carcasses that taint the wilderness; None feeding save the wild dog’s howling pack, Or the grim laughter of the carrion crow.’ (11)

This astonishingly explicit and terrifying account is immediately rejected by the father, as authority and master, by a revisionism with familiar echoes. The

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use of ‘metaphor’ implodes the language, undoing the accusation by the ‘truth’ of the poetic as the most intense and purified form of language usage. It is a specific deployment by the poet of poetic validation. The idea of the metaphor exploding is beyond the fabric of the poem – that is, the risk of failure to contain must be prevented. This is what form does in the poem of unified self, of linearity. ‘Mother, you paint one side,’ the old man said; ‘Your metaphor explodes, for you rammed Both charges in one barrel. Sure you know When spears are whistling round, and blood is hot, It flows the sooner; and ’twere sorry task To parley sentiment with savages Who gladly would have swept us to the sea.’ (13)

This is the language of propaganda, and the language of war. It is also characteristically highly sexualized, and the penetration symbolism of gun barrel and spear is mixed and overlaid. The barrel being double-loaded is as threatening as the spears – the repression of the female becomes framed in the same light as the repression of the ‘savage’. Throughout the poem there’s a sexual tension wrapped up in images of injury and healing: between Ralph, Frank, and their respective sisters Elsie and Ruth – each male loving his friend’s sister, and vice versa. There’s also the homoerotic bonding between the males, the sexualization of the demonic Other, and the struggle we have seen over truth and representation between Ralph’s mother and father. The driving inwards, the movement away from the coastal edge and the typical fear of the ‘dark heart’ of the land, is emphasized in the flows and sweeps of blood and water, the assimilation of passion and retribution. In the same way as we assume that the native cat and forest boar (introduced species, or transcription of Euro-motif) are there to be defeated, punished, or captured, we assume the capturing, in the end, of the Other. The taming of the dark side of self. The need to see the thylacine, feeding the side of ego that extinguishes threats to territory, fits the same racist discourse. The language of racism is the language of the oppression of animals. And in the same way that the non-vegan excuses the use of animals out of necessity, so, too, does racist discourse excuse the need for hierarchies and suppression of individual contrary identity. a

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The Sighting I have said, and I say, that I have a spiritual connection to the land. I do not mean a Nyungar spiritual connection; I mean a spiritual connection mediated by the rejection of Christian religious orthodoxy, the spiritual environment of one’s upbringing. Animals come to me because I do not eat them. That’s what I think. So, there are cross-pollinating relationships with place. This is countered by my need to not-belong, to recognize the undercurrent of ownership, of property, that informs my sense of place and displacement. As an anarchist I reject individual ownership; but what constitutes the community of occupation? Adam Shoemaker writes of Les Murray: Murray is intrigued by, and concerned with, White Australian myths about Aborigines and with the mythology of the Black Australians themselves. He appears far less interested in portraying Aborigines as people, or in reflecting their characteristic rural or urban speech patterns. For example, his poem “Thinking About Aboriginal Land Rights, I Visit the Farm I Will Not Inherit” is a personal evocation of the pain that the dispossession of land can cause: By sundown it is dense dusk, all the tracks closing in. I go into the earth near the hay shed for thousands of years.

Here it is implicit that Murray’s feeling for the farm which he will be denied is akin to the sense of loss which has afflicted Black Australians confronted with white encroachment into their continent. He feels very intensely that White Australians view their land as far more than an investment: “It’s bullshit to say that ‘property’ is the concept that whites have for land; I couldn’t live in another place from where I’ve come from.” While it is true that White Australians have developed a real and heartfelt feeling for their sometimes unlovely land since 1788, Murray’s reference to ‘thousands of years’ pushes the parallel too far. The sense of belonging of which he speaks is of a different order of magnitude to the sense of being owned by the land, which is the traditional Aboriginal concept, with all the sanctity of religious veneration…51

I have heard Murray’s feelings reflected by many non-Indigenous land-owners who have lost their land through inheritance, economic disaster, or ill-health. The problem with this is obvious, given the dispossession that allowed or led to their possessing the space in the first place, but there’s also a problem in

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Adam Shoemaker, Black Words White Page: Aboriginal Literature 1929–1988 (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1989): 199.

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Shoemaker’s language, a language that speaks as much in terms of occupation as does the evasive language of Murray’s poetry. The conflict between being owned by the land – an expression of convenience used by English-language critics (of whatever cultural background; the use of the language itself will always brings its own subjugation and compliance) – and an expression like “confronted by white encroachment into their continent” is the language of the defensive imperialist having the tables turned on himself. The Nyungar people of what the State now calls the Avon Valley would not necessarily have thought in terms of ‘continents’. This is not splitting hairs; this is recognizing the limitations of using the colonizing language to express the concerns and crisis of the occupied. The problem is in the application of a language of enquiry that is founded in the Western tradition, which allows Murray and others who ‘feel’ displacement and seek to identify their loss with those of a people who have experienced extreme loss or have been placed under intense cultural and physical duress. This is not to suggest a victim mentality, but to clarify obvious and subtle injustices. It becomes increasingly clear to me that non-Indigenous people have no right to discuss Indigenous issues – other than facing up to their own complicity in offence – without approval and permission, or invitation from Indigenous people/s. By association, I layer myself around these discourses of Murray and Shoemaker that I criticize: and it is something I must confront and absorb in terms of everything I write or say. There are many different forms of silence. A language of dislocation becomes necessary. A belief in the unprovable, the non-scientific. I saw the stripes of the thylacine as the creature moved up through a dry riverbed, over an island of she-oaks, into a patch of paperbarks. I saw its prints, had them photographed. It is a language I need not translate. I recite to myself, as mantra, these lines of Foucault’s: Once the existence of language has been eliminated, all that remains is its function in representation: its nature and its virtues as discourse. For discourse is merely representation itself represented by verbal signs. But what, then, is the particularity of these signs, and this strange power that enables them, better than any others, to signalize representation, to analyse it, and to recombine it?

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What is the peculiar property possessed by language and not by any other system of signs?52

Habitation To test memory and certainty, I went back to the site six months later. A different season – water in the river. I stood and stared for ten minutes, maybe longer. Maybe hours passed. Intrusion. A farmer wandered up to me eventually and said, I’ve seen you here before. You’re X’s nephew, aren’t you? Your mob has been here as long as mine. Over a hundred years. I own that place upriver. There are a lot of snakes around here, during the hot weather. What are you looking at? Nothing, I’m a poet, just looking. He tells me of how young trailbike riders have been tearing up the place. I belong to a river preservation group. I don’t use spray near the banks. I count the birds. This was a regular camping spot for the Aborigines, he said. He sounded sad. He owned most of the land surrounding the river, though no longer the river itself. My property used to go to the middle of the river – an imaginary line. But the government reclaimed the water and the banks – and a lot of good they’ve done with it. They scraped it clean and killed it. It will never repair. I have Aborigines in to stook at haytime, he added, and left me to my staring. The thylacine didn’t pass by again, even though it was dusk.

Possibilities Nah, it would have been a mangy fox or a feral cat. Or maybe a dog. Could have been a dingo but there have been none around here for years – that’d be rare enough. Best forget it. I probably wanted to see it: to have imagined it creatively. To dream it. The word hangs there, like ritual slaughter. I cannot dream. At night, when I sleep, the compilations of images that break through to be verbalized upon waking are restructured to suit my waking needs. The thylacine looked: furtive, scared, defiant, elusive, downtrodden, combative… indifferent? It did ‘run’ or lope, weighted into its tail, its back legs doing the work, and it did stop and glance back towards me, then lope again. Its eyes were deep and

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Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Les Mots et les choses: Une Archéologie des sciences humaines, 1966; New York: Pantheon, 1970): 81.

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black. We cannot use black unproblematically here. Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra write: The role of Aborigines in the construction of Australian social identity illustrates a different kind of tendency. Non-Aboriginal Australians’ attitudes to Aboriginal people have been dominated from the beginning by a mixture of guilt and hypocrisy. With other instances of the characteristic Australian paranoia the majority are victims of double messages, but in relation to Aborigines this majority benefits from them. There are vested interests in not seeing through this set of double messages, in maintaining a rigorous policy of hebephrenia, which then serves to sustain hebephrenic strategies elsewhere in the culture. But this in fact is the greatest cost of White racism. To no small degree the chains of hebephrenia that still bind many Australians are held together by wilful refusal to acknowledge the injustices inflicted on Aboriginal people in the past and the present, and to recognise the legitimacy of their aspirations for the future.53

The assumption that Indigenous peoples are locked into the time of ‘contact’, that their social and artistic and cultural languages would have remained constant if ‘settlement’/invasion had not taken place, is as devastating as the racism of incursion. The identification of the thylacine by a community with ancestral connections of tens of thousands of years; the elucidation of residual memory, the reclamation of totemic identity, is a language outside the discourse. The Nyungar elders of the Avon region should be informed of this sighting. This is not to negate the independence of the thylacine, of the family group it must be part of (a mate, cubs…?), but to provide it with potential support for survival, to reinforce its chances. I’d like to imagine there would be a totemic respect. To hand the information over to a wildlife ranger (a State-employed official) would make the thylacine vulnerable – it would depend on the individual conscience of the ranger vis-à-vis State practice, as opposed to the probable communal and collective concerns of the Nyungar community. Perhaps I’m imposing my own assumptions here, but seems a vital consideration. Maybe this sighting is only intervention from the perspective of one who laments the loss of the family farm, who might make parallels with the loss of spiritual materials. This is an attempt to translate a sighting I do not under53

Bob Hodge & Vijay Mishra, Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the Postcolonial Mind (North Sydney, N S W : Allen & Unwin, 1991): 218.

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stand. The ‘sighting’ becomes the process, the signifier, and then supplants the thylacine as the sign itself. There’s ego-fulfilment and cultural necessity at work here…? It is not to become part of a tea-towel super-model advertising campaign for Western Australia. Denise Groves has illustrated how Aboriginal identity and presence become commodified. The conflation of object and person, the marginalization of a person’s humanity, are played out by the media: Thus the obsession with the categorisation of indigenous peoples continues – the ‘authenticity’ of Aboriginality is now legally determined on the basis of the ability of indigenous people’s being able to ‘prove’ their spiritual connection to country. Yet no recognition or compensation exists for those indigenous peoples whose ‘spiritual relationships’ with ancestral lands were severed as a result of them being forcibly removed and relocated by the State. It is as if they have forgotten. Such forgetfulness is what Brown terms ‘refracted knowledge’ (1987:61). That is, rather than having to address ‘black’ political issues, the colonisers surround themselves with ‘comfortable and familiar’ images of the colonised. For the colonisers, Aboriginality has become essentialised in a series of ‘familiar’ metaphors – postcards, teatowels, Aboriginal gnomes and, more recently, in television commercials, as ‘ochred, spiritual, and playing the didgeridoo behind the heroic travels of a black land cruiser’ (Dodson, 1994:3). As Brown so eloquently states, ‘it is as if a camera has been pushed through a gap in the mission fence.’ (Brown, 1987:61).54

The thylacine would be subtextually associated with aspects of Indigeneity and exploited in this way, in turn exploiting the Indigenous people themselves. There’s a template already waiting for it. Come and see ‘didgeridoos and the rediscovered thought-extinct thylacine’, whether didgeridoos were used in the area in question or not…. The folding of quotation within quotation in the Groves excerpt indicates the disconnection through the mediating English languages. Discourse takes over. The points of oppression, as indicated, become sequestered to the evolution of the language.

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Denise Groves, “To What Extent is Contemporary Aboriginal Identity Political?” in Those Who Remain Will Always Remember: An Anthology of Aboriginal Writing, ed. Anne Brewster, Angeline O’Neill & Rosemary van der Berg (Fremantle, W A : Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2000): 137.

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The thylacine symbolizes a particular kind of loss; the metaphor extended, the attempted genocide of Indigenous peoples becomes a trope. A comparison engenders diminution of the person. Comparison to the condition of the extinct animal, and the desire to address the wrongs perpetrated, being perpetrated against Indigenous peoples, become tangled. The comparison cannot be made. But the association of Aboriginal people in both nineteenth- and twentieth-century ‘settler /citizen’ poetry and contemporary media, with animals of ‘the land’, outside the laws of totemic relations between an individual and a particular animal, is commonplace. I have seen many advertisements in the British media linking the snake and the goanna with the desert-dwelling Indigenous elder. The creation of media stereotypes like this does not respect any specific relationship that might exist, but creates (or maybe re-invents) a notion of Bush and Outback that potential tourists (explorers) find exciting, exotic, and comforting. It is the classic formulation of the Other. The condition of speech, of translation into English, is to create connections between the disparate. Cause and reaction: the implication of making language in a place that is tormented by the lack of willingness to address an ongoing crime is disrespectful, indifferent at best. The thylacine is a memory that’s fading, replaced by a notion of injustice. The language of loss compensates for the extent of the crime. It is a celebrated memory of loss. The potential of rediscovery invigorates and negates the extermination. Hope is provided, wrapped in a healthy scepticism – without the scepticism there’d be recognition of ongoing crime. What is Australian English? Aboriginal people may make English as well, as may all Australia’s migrant peoples, whenever they arrive, and whether or not English is their birth-tongue, or indeed even one they use. The language is growing and deconstructing itself. Maybe I mean the English of the State: the English that speaks to its ‘citizens’, but also instructs them, formulates and regulates their views. This official language is replicated by quasi-official organizations. To create authority it separates itself from the diction of the people, from the colloquial. State-language is anti-poetic language, though bad poems are full of it. The language of racism is reinforced by it, often by subterfuge. There is more poetry and language in the apparently ‘inarticulate’ than in the State-sanctioned direction. The ‘guttural’ language is a language of poetry. Coleridge said “the best words in their best order,” without allowing for decontextualization. a

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Truth and Lies Truth is, the thylacine is not extinct. My conviction has returned, increased over the course of writing this essay. The sighting is an image of clarity. There is no intentional decoration in the language I am using to express this, and I am saying exactly what I mean. The thylacine is not extinct. This is an idea and a cadence. What I must ask is, despite my intent: is English so corrupted, so much the tool of avarice and conquest, of the violation of the other’s rights, that it is incapable of expressing a truth? Can I only speak this gutturally? Can I see it unspoken? Can I see it written in sand as an image I might recognize from an encyclopaedia, a book of zoology, of anthropology? The listing implicates. Moving the ashes of our family from the farm when it was broken up and sold off in sections, my Auntie said, “Now I know how the Aborigines felt when their land was ‘lost’.” The same problems that Shoemaker points out in the Murray are evident here, but my Auntie did not bring to it the nationasserting belligerence that Murray emphasizes with his “bullshit” statement. Hers was a desire to empathize, and to placate and contextualize her own pain and loss. Property was sold, a new house was bought, and the family remained intact. There are no comparisons. What’s left is a vestigial language of loss. We might feel fear and pity for this small thylacine group (we can assume there must be others), but we can share its suffering and isolation. The traps, the poison, the diminishing habitat. Guilt manufactures the simulacrum interconnection between the thylacine’s position and that of the dispossessed Nyungars. But this can go nowhere. It is only knowledge within language, and its spiritual implications are unknown by me, the ‘us’ referred to. It is an experiment in transference that leaves my voice empty, my sighting hollow and irrelevant. Well-meaning intrusion (even), would remove the remaining freedoms lefts to the thylacine. I have seen nothingness, the death of language. I am, and was always, inarticulate. The language cannot speak. There is at least a group of thylacines in the wheatbelt area of Western Australia, living in remnant bushland. I know the specific location and have evidence that would excite the scientist and entrepreneur. I will not share it with them. The Latin name for this animal is Thylacinus cynocephalus. Within this exists the lie. I would also like to acknowledge the Indigenous people of the region known as the Avon Valley as the custodial keepers of the land, and to indicate my respect for their cultures and traditions. I will share this knowledge with them, should they lack it and want it. I have no doubt that at least some of the community, or various individuals, are already aware.

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The Poetic Pulse of Western Australia55

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O R M A N Y P O E T S , the publication of a volume of their own poems is a singular aim – a statement of breadth of vision and dedication to craft. In reaching this end, they usually publish individual poems elsewhere: journals, newspapers, even specialist newsletters and the like. Somewhere along the way, they might find themselves appearing in an anthology that collects a variety of poets with common purpose. This might be a national anthology, an anthology of a specific location (city, town, region), a particular social or cultural demographic. The anthology publication is sought after because it is perceived as defining something: not only is one’s work showcased, but a greater principle is highlighted. To my mind, the most significant anthologies are not those that collect the validated and verified work of book publication and its attendant critical reception but, rather, those that encourage and stimulate poets to think of themselves as being destined for eventual personal collections. The Weighing of the Heart is one example. The editors have invited work from a specific region (one that is very large and diverse, in every sense of the word, in Western Australia), and selected from a large number of submissions. There are book-published poets in this selection, but in the main they have not yet released a monograph. On so many levels, The Weighing of the Heart is an interactive and interconnecting anthology. In identifying talent, editors follow their own educated subjective inclinations, but, in drawing connections and illustrating correlations between poems and poets, they are making broader statements about what is happening in the wider poetry community. Many of the best poets are never read: and this is a way of showing how the few big-name poets that occupy the stage are themselves part of a broader phenomenon, and a broader range of poetics. Western Australia has produced some fine anthologies of poetry over the last thirty years, especially in the case of Fay Zwicky’s selection Quarry and the selection Wordhord, edited by Dennis Haskell and Hilary Fraser. Foundational work in terms of a poetics of contemporary voice and place has been performed by Veronica Brady, of historical origins in William Grono’s highly

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“Introduction” to The Weighing of the Heart: An Anthology of Emerging West Australian Poets, ed. Roland Leach, Shane McCauley & Donna Ward, intro. John Kinsella (Cottesloe, W A : SunLine, 2007): 14–19.

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important Margins: A West Coast Selection, and by other anthologizers such as Bruce Bennett, and through organizations such as the Fellowship of Writers, W.A. (Glen Phillips, Pat Darby, and others). The need for these anthologies is obvious – not only because of the ‘tyranny of distance’ and because Western Australian poets deserve to be presented to the bulk of the Australian readership in the eastern states and beyond, but because Western Australian poets should have a forum in which to speak among themselves; and to do this, they need to find each other. In creating this volume, the editors have helped create community. Anthologizing is necessarily a selective art, and few poets (or readers; or selectors even) are ever completely happy with the outcome: those left out may feel aggrieved, those selected often feel that their best work is not being represented, those who didn’t hear about submitting in the first place will say it was not properly advertised. And so the list goes on. Every anthology suffers from such criticisms. Having noted this, I think readers would be hard put not to celebrate the diversity and pluralism of this selection. The range of subject-matter is beyond anything I have seen in a single anthology for many years. Primarily written in irregular and free verse of ranging line-length, these poems utilize lineation and the line-break in varied ways to stress observation and sensuality, imagistic concentration, and emotive emphasis. One has a sense that craft is vital: honing the poem down has left us no more than we need, even in the more chatty, colloquial poems. Of course, this reflects the mind-set of the editors, but clearly something is at work across the poetic landscape. Language is modern, immediate, and accessible. Even in more esoteric pieces, the aim is to communicate, to connect. It strikes me that poets in the earlier stages of their publishing lives are often at their peak in terms of their willingness to approach a wide range of material: to write poems about whatever appeals to them. A piece of music, a stone, time, art, body-piercing: poetic language can be extracted, observed, rebuilt. Anything is possible. I am being wholly sincere when I say that I was surprised and delighted by the rollercoaster ride of ‘juxtapositions’ (to use the editors’ word) presented in this book. The seemingly incompatible becomes immensely compatible through the medium of language itself. The anthology broadens and stimulates the possibilities of things we take for granted. Rarely have I seen the personal pronoun ‘I’, for example, so widely used: from the personally sincere ‘unified self’ to the fully detached and dispassionate self. And this applies to pronouns in general.

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It is always difficult to select individual poems for praise when an anthology is so much a conversation between poems and poets, so what I’d prefer to do is mention a few poems that sit next to each other in particularly interesting conversation /dialogue. The wonderful contradictions and interlocutions between Horst Kornberger’s surreal earthiness of thing and place in “Outback” and James Quinton’s tone-shifting self-doubt (and more) in the superbly titled “The Great Thing About a Hypothetical Self”; or between a poem dressed with irony (and yet compassion) like Jennifer Kornberger’s and the moving age-transitional “Late sonata” by Ross Bolleter. When one gets to the pared-back language of Rose van Son, or the personal mythology of Desmonda Kearney (including the title poem), or the richly evocative prose poems of Helen Hagemann, or the phenomenological and linguistic investigations of Kevin Gillam, so anchored in sound, one must also read what surrounds them. They are equally significant: part of the polyphonic whole that makes this anthology more than the sum of its parts. By way of conclusion, I say – as a poet so often connected to a specific place – that while quite a number of these poems deal with ideas of ‘place’, it is not the raison d’être of the volume. Too often Western Australia – an artificial construct, like all nations and their internal boundaries – is seen as ‘space’ and nothing more. For me, even the ‘emptiest’ space is full – as I am sure many Indigenous people would agree. Vastness is not the only qualifier, as within vastness innumerable signs are there if we want to take a look, to hear. .. . There is a connectedness between the diverse places these poems come out of that contributes to the picture for me. The spaces that make up Western Australia are diverse and of many peoples, and that sense of ‘here being the world’ and ‘the world being here’ is strongly evident. The house, “distant war zones,” the river, beach music, suburban street, the moon, abuse, loss, painting, spirituality, the body, storms, company, thresholds, imagination, and metamorphosis – all inform the varied, changing picture.

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Pulped Factions: Rivalries in Australian Poetry56 “I’m going through a transitional period. . . ”

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U S T R A L I A N P O E T R Y I N T H E L A S T F E W D E C A D E S has been notorious (at least in the minds of Australian critics and fiction writers) for being self-serving, fraught with factionalism, and plagued by poisonous personality clashes. Furthermore, what actually constitutes an ‘Australian poetry’ has come into question. There are many fine writers here from various traditions, and writing in many languages other than English. These are as valid and as influential as those from the ‘English tradition’. It is interesting to consider how we as poets have been influenced by European, Chinese, and other poetries in translation; or by American models. The poets of the 1960s to the 1980s paved the way for the non-English tradition here. They have created a varied anthology to select from. It’s almost valid now to write ‘L A N G U A G E poetry’, or work as a concrete poet, or even incorporate other media, and, of course, ‘performance poetry’ has a strong following at reading venues across the country. The poet ʌ O’s massive 24 Hours will be a testament to years on the reading scene. I am sceptical about talking of movements in Australian poetry. So many divisions have been artificially applied, or retrospectively qualified . There is no equivalent to the Futurists, or the Surrealists, and so on, though all European (and American) movements have their followers and subgroups here. Recently I wrote a brief article on L A N G U A G E poetry, stating that it was an American movement that could not really be equated with the work of those Australian poets who are influenced by, or use, its techniques. Some Australian avant-garde-identified poets wrote to me saying they’d been ‘doing it’ for years. But that doesn’t make this something new; rather, something imitative. The same applies to those writers who call for a return to ‘poems with meaning’, to admiration and imitation of the traditional canon. It’s fine, but it doesn’t amount to being a group or movement. Such calls have been heard since day one. This all shows a healthy, desirable debate about what constitutes a poem, what meaning poetry has in our time. One could doubtless list groupings of poets with common interests, creating some kind of map of the Australian

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“Rolling Column: Pulped Factions,” Australian Book Review 178 (February– March 1996): 35.

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poetryscape that would indicate directions in contemporary poetic thought and responses to the Australian condition. Yet it’s usually those poets who manage to lift themselves outside of these groupings, or define groupings by attracting imitators, who become those voices best identified with the generative side of the age. They have a desire to explore language and notions of meaning beyond the acceptable. Poets like John Tranter, John Forbes, Gig Ryan, and Robert Adamson, who in many ways exemplify a whole period of poetry, have really established individual voices that have made them endure. The same can be said of J.S. Harry, Jennifer Maiden, and John A. Scott. All inventive, ‘hybridized’ voices, with a keen awareness of the canon but urgent promptings to re-invent it. These poets, so grouped, are of the period of factionalism (with Ryan on its cusp) in Aus Poetry. It would be assumed that, to counter this, I would place Les Murray, Geoffrey Lehmann, Rosemary Dobson, Robert Gray, and possibly Kevin Hart on the ‘other side of the fence’ – those poets who apparently represent a more lyrical, meditative (‘religious’?), conservative (‘traditional’?) poetic. In between the two we’d have Gwen Harwood. Peter Porter forms a ‘school’ of his own (European, Augustan, and urban/e), while Dorothy Hewett exists outside all of these, though obviously associated with the new romantic traditions of Adamson and his ‘followers’. The point is, I don’t think even these contrived groupings are relevant now, though there seems to be a need, as part of creating a literary identity, to create lines of influence in a nation’s literature. The influence of anthologies on the shape of Australian poetry has, of course, been significant. Shapcott’s Australian Poetry Now redefined what was ‘allowable’ in anthologies. Experimental and vibrant, it welcomed many new readers and practitioners. Likewise Kate Jennings’s Mother I’m Rooted ; despite its containing much that would rate poorly on the scale of ‘literary’ poetry, it redefined what was readable as poetry, showed that there existed many voices and subject-matter outside the patriarchal ‘tradition’. Anthologies are a regular, expected part of the poetic landscape, with many variations on and against the canon emerging at any one time. Of interest in recent years have been the dichotomy between the clear expression of the Lehmann /Gray volumes and the postmodernist touches of Tranter /Mead, both worthy of particular attention, and influential in schools. It’s great to see more women’s writing in general anthologies, though a natural level of inclusion is still to come: there remains a sense of obligation or tokenism in contents pages. The ‘academy’ still needs to broaden its reading beyond the

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inherited, patriarchal way of seeing that comes with Eng. Lit., an ostensibly male tradition. The Oxford Book of Australian Women’s Verse (edited by Susan Lever) will be a welcome addition to The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets (edited by Kate Llewellyn and Susan Hampton). Aboriginal poets, too, are inventing almost a new language to communicate between cultures – Lionel Fogarty, for instance. His New and Selected was recently awarded the inaugural Poetry Book Club Award for best volume of poetry in the quarter: much deserved. I met him when we were both on a panel at last year’s Melbourne Writer’s Festival, and he was mercurial. His influences are many, but he is a unique force. He will influence many in turn. Then there’s the east–west state dichotomy. Many poets here complain of this divide. There is undeniably a belief, in Sydney and Melbourne, that those outside are poor country cousins, but it’s something of the old Australian Anglo-Celtic cultural cringe to let it affect the way you work; it’s the responsibility of the writer to overcome this. And the publisher – Fremantle Arts Centre Press, for example – has placed many W.A. writers on the national stage and helped bridge this ‘factional’ gap. And the Five Islands Press New Poets series is bridging all sorts of gaps: cultural, social, gender, and regional. Perhaps the growth of pluralism in Australian poetry means that it is successfully negotiating its ‘transitional period’, that personality-based factionalism is a thing of the past.

Notes Towards Anthologizing the Australian Pastoral Poem57

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NDERSTANDING HOW THE AUSTRALIAN PASTORAL POEM WORKS is essential to understanding the Australian psyche. Ours is a poetry through which poets have attempted to define – or not – a national identity. Along with the tradition of the bush ballad, Australia also has a tradition of the city defining itself against the vulgarities of the outback. The inheritance of Virgil (and Theocritus, Homer, and Hesiod) is the backbone of Western imperialism. And it is the city that creates and focuses concepts of Empire. We might call this the Man from Ironbark syndrome.

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“Towards Anthologising the Australian Pastoral Poem,” Australian Book Review

186 (November 1996): 33–34.

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Definitions of the pastoral vary significantly, though the Theocritan rendering of Sicilian songs into something that would appeal to the wealthier, more literate, and town-orientated readership is the line I wish to pursue (see John Barrell and John Bull’s introduction to the Penguin Book of English Pastoral Verse). That is to say, the pastoral is ostensibly created by a non-rural society. It is an idealized view of how the country ‘should’ be.58 Though, of course, the intended impression is that the lines are delivered with the simplicity of the shepherd, that the concerns may be wide-ranging but rendered in a particular kind of voice. A common error is conflating the pastoral with the Georgic. In his An Essay on the Georgics, Joseph Addison wrote: A Georgic therefore is some part of the Science of Husbandry put into pleasing Dress, and set off with all the Beauties and Embellishments of Poetry.

He also qualifies the didactic nature of Georgic verse: “that Class of Poetry which consists in giving plain and direct Instructions to the Reader. . . .” Dr Johnson defined the pastoral in the following way: If we search the writings of Virgil, for the true definition of a pastoral, it will be found a poem in which any action or passion is represented by its effects upon a country life. Whatsoever, therefore, may, according to the common course of things, happen in the country, may afford a subject for a pastoral poet. (Rambler 37, 24 July 1750)

Australian rural poetry is pastoral in mode but with an often Georgic undercurrent. The poetry of Les Murray, for example, while not directly didactic, often has a strong moral inflection. It intends to instruct by impression. Metaphor is employed as a tool of parable. Within this classification of the country is the split notion of the Arcadian and the Wilderness, the harmonized and what is beyond the cordon sanitaire. There are interesting hotspots or points of confluence between these divisions in agricultural pursuits, such as forestry, where the wilderness is subjected to modern farming practices. Numerous poems of this sort exist in Australia, for the obvious reason that farms were from the beginning being carved directly out of the Wilderness. The divisions that were already apparent between the Wild and the Tamed when the English pastoral poem evolved were not pres-

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Along with its characters’ desires, lusts, sexual high jinks, ‘filth’ and wholesomeness, competition and subservience. An excuse to watch the peasants / lower classes perform their acts ‘in nature’ / rurality. [J.K.]

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ent when Australian poets such as Kendall were defining a uniquely ‘Australian’ voice. Romanticizing and anglicizing the ‘bush’ by artists and writers became the means of creating distinctions between the primitive and the civilized. The desire for a distinct identity, for the preservation of a ‘culture’, made this necessary. Later, groups such as the Heidelberg School of artists clarified this separation by working to create a more harmonious interaction between the ‘real’ landscape and its new inhabitants. Rather than merely exploring ‘visions’ of the Australian rural environment (or the search for an English one, or even just a purely conceptual English rural environment that shared no relationship with the Australian condition), it is more fruitful to highlight the town–country struggle, the defining of a national poetic voice through visions of how things should be as much as how they were. The Lawson–Paterson dichotomy, Les Murray’s Athenian–Boeotian division (and the relationship of Peter Porter to this argument, and on a broader scale, as an example of the fringe meeting the centre and reterritorializing). Then the coast–centre concerns of a poet like John Forbes, who argues that, having a nostalgic vision of their independence and wealth coming from the wool on the sheep’s back, Australians forget the great contribution made by the ‘city’ to Australian identity. It’s worth noting that much rural verse was published by that city institution, The Bulletin. The evolution of the pastoral poem in Australia has often gone hand-inhand with political intentions. A fear that the country as a political entity is losing its gerrymander, that it needs propping up because with environmental concerns and economic rationalism it’s not what it used to be, is an issue the anthologist must deal with. When Les Murray or Philip Hodgins or one of dozens of Australian poets who have written from ‘within’ the rural highlights the struggles, wonders, ‘sprawls’, and microcosms in the grand perspective of what Forbes would call nostalgic Australia, are they doing so to define their place against the city, against the urbanized coast, or are they writing from the true bucolic standpoint? Are they talking among themselves – composing eclogues – or perpetuating highly specific and targeted propaganda? The self-questioning pastoral poet usually has a notion of the city, and has the modern rural community’s reliance on it firmly in mind (Rhyll McMaster can be interesting here). Australian pastoral is based firmly on the visual – the blues here are bluer and harder than elsewhere, the sky is bigger, etc. – and a very particularly Australian ‘language’ that has evolved from a wrestling with Nature, a desire to tame and harmonize it. If I were choosing a cover for an

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anthology of Australian pastoral verse I’d go for John Glover’s “A View of The Artist’s House and Garden, in Mills Plain, Van Diemen’s Land” – the irony is obvious, and the light in the painting disarming. It could be argued that all Australian poets, no matter how removed from notions of the pastoral, write with it in mind. It is impossible to avoid it when the rural, regardless of what is said about the sheep’s back, is indeed such a large part of our national identity. In fact, one defines oneself against it. In selecting material across two centuries for the anthology, one would find oneself concentrating on this notion. It would include relatively few ‘idyllic’ poems (but enough to qualify such visions as Hope’s “Australia”) but many that wrestle with this concept of idyllicism. A poet such as David Campbell, while often celebratory, still confronts this country–city dichotomy – even if the city is the place in which one is corrupted. An Aboriginal poet like Lionel Fogarty is interesting in his reterritorializing of the city space from a space which whites define as ‘rural’ but which for his people is in no way a polarized point on the societal scale. These qualifications are important. It is interesting to consider the development of an anti-pastoral in this light: i.e. associating national identity with the aspects of the Australian landscape that cannot be controlled, ‘harmonized’, and predicted (drought, flood, salt, extremes of climate). One can trace a line of such poets through Judith Wright, the Jindyworobaks, and others, to the present. But there’s a case for the antipastoral to be called a Georgic. Hard work, moral truths, and so on... .

“Farther off than Australia” (with Tracy Ryan)59

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WA NT TO TAL K A B O UT T HE INTE RN ALI ZA TION OF P L ATH ’ S P OET R Y , the fact that its system of references is in many ways quite neoRomantic, and that it’s also more political than people choose to read. By this I mean that, apart from ‘personal’ psychological anguish and her trademark dark and nihilistic images, her vocabulary, once it reaches outside her immediate environment, becomes almost idealistic. Exotic references in her work are precisely that: exotic. When she speaks of the ‘Other’ it seems unproblematical; it’s as if people outside her own experience aren’t real. And there’s also a distinct tone of racism (“the swarmy feeling of African hands” in “The Arrival of the Bee Box,” or the way “Chinese yellow” in “Wintering”

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Thumbscrew 9 (Winter 1997–98): 43–49.

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is juxtaposed and near-punned with “Black asininity”), or, at the very least, complacency along the lines of Angela Carter. It’s oddly fitting you should mention Angela Carter right there, since, as you were speaking of the people not seeming real, I was remembering Angela Carter writing about the difference between a short story and a ‘tale’, and situating her own work firmly within the tradition of the tale: the unreal, the exaggerated, the gothic, the overblown. I am as uncomfortable with those images you just mentioned as I am with, say, Carter’s depictions of Irish people in “The Magic Toyshop” in terms of physical repulsiveness. I am not excusing racist shorthand or stereotypes, though there is a sense of the deliberate use of types. Some of the unreality is not necessarily a failure of human perception on the poet’s part, but may well be a strategic literary device. There are poems of Plath’s that suggest she was consciously ironizing this process. It’s rare that she attempts any realism at all in terms of depiction of people in her poems. Well, that links up with the point I was trying to make earlier, in the sense that there’s a kind of literary artifice at work in her poetry. She has a very sophisticated method of referencing that allows her to build conceits, as in the poem “Cut.” Yes, one doesn’t normally think of a bandaged thumb as belonging to the Ku Klux Klan. But what I find especially interesting is that there’s a kind of progression of connection. So that it’s a layered conceit? Yes, because, as you said, you can make a clear connection at “my thumb instead of an onion,” but the rest starts pushing it, and in an amazingly successful way. “Little pilgrim, the Indian’s axed your scalp” is actually a superb undoing of a racist binary – but even so, it is a borrowing from a childhood narrative – even though the irony works implicitly, there is still a distinct sense of disengagement from the pilgrim/Indian trope. In fact, it is this disengagement that I admire so deeply in Plath. Far from being self-absorbed, there’s a sharp and distant and discerning self-irony that goes on here. When I say ‘self-irony’, I mean as herself being focal ‘subject’; she is channelling all irony through her ‘self’. Thinking of reading Plath in Australia, I remember hearing students at high school saying that she was “wicked,” which was a colloquial word for powerful beyond comprehension, cutting to the bone, getting right to the heart of the matter. “Cutting to the bone” is appropriate, given the poem you just mentioned. Now, the way some people have read her in Australia, and I am talking about various sources – conversations with poets, students, hearing teachers when I was at university, as well as reading reviews that constantly invoked her name, for better or for worse – seems to lead inevitably to a personalized, pathological interpretation that locates the poems’ meanings in

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some imagined defect of their ‘author’s’. Hence, I would hear and read poems like “Cut” being understood as, for example, an expression of female masochism – what a reduction of a complex text! Reading it specifically from my position as a white Australian – that is, from a colonial society – I cannot help but be struck by the deployment of imagery from colonial discourses. Now, I think that “Cut” is only one example; there are many, many poems of Plath’s that are grossly reduced by insisting on the pathological-female, supposedly biographical reading. As you well know, the ‘reading’ of Plath met huge resistance from not only the general public but also the academy in the years immediately following her books’ becoming available in a broad sense. But eventually it would be the W A S P -ish aspect of Plath that made her digestible in the canonical sense. It is interesting also to consider that when I first started reading her at high school it was almost ‘allowed’, because her negativity and ‘suicidally prone’ lyrics were from another culture. Un-Australian, you mean? Yes; the fact that she was neither English nor American, at least insofar as she was taught to us, also made her less culturally threatening. And her landscape, conceptually and physically, was outside our experience, though we had a kind of borrowed landscape via English literature. (One poem tells a foetus in the womb it is “Farther off than Australia.” Does this perhaps come from her living in England and being married to an Englishman – Australia ‘conceived’ as farthest-flung outpost of Empire?) In a sense, she was made to sit outside. But as I pointed out, this was to change, and she is certainly now considered part of the English canon; maybe this has something to do with the broadening base of the so-called English canon. The ‘myth’ of Plath was the first thing we heard of at school, even as a preface to the poems. I remember being given a roneo’d sheet that had “Lady Lazarus” on it; it was handed out to the class, and before we had a chance to work through the poem we heard the run-down on her suicide. A decade later I wrote a poem, in my book Eschatologies: “Lilith Considers Two Who Have Died Young,” including a section called “Sylvia Plath,” that ironizes this ‘teaching’. I hope Plath would have approved! ‘My’ first experience was not through school; Plath was not taught at my school. But at age sixteen while staying at a friend’s house I came across an anthology with an extract from The Bell Jar: “That shadow would marry this shadow.. . ” – it was the funeral of Joan Gilling, the grave dug in the snow. It literally took my breath away, and I thought, ‘I have to discover more of this writer’. So I had the good fortune not to encounter the myth first. I couldn’t avoid it for long, though. The Magic Mirror Theatre in Perth staged a production of “Sylvia Plath: A Dramatic Portrait,” which was

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built up out of pieces of Plath’s own writings, and which constructed, as I remember it, a pathological persona for her, but which nonetheless exposed me to more of her writings, albeit in fragments. That was in 1982 or 1983. I grew very interested in her work and had to contend against much disapproval for that interest, which riled me, because it was mostly from people who had read almost nothing she’d written. They seemed to think she would lead me to kill myself! I’m also familiar with this, but in quite a different way. It was considered to be very strange for a boy to like Plath. In fact, I learnt that one couldn’t talk about Plath even among students who were generally interested in poetry. The boys seemed to think her ‘hysterical’ and, I’d say, felt extremely threatened. This, of course, attracted me more! Do you recall that review by Geoff Page, the Australian critic, where he says of your recent book of poetry Bluebeard in Drag: “Plath of course is always a dangerous influence. . . ”? Yes – I could hardly forget it – I think something similar was said in another context in an earlier issue of this very magazine. Now, it’s a curious statement, because it’s repeated so often as a truism, without giving the evidence. In what ways has she been a dangerous influence? Well, I suspect that what some writers mean when they invoke this idea is the danger of excess in writing: all of us who have worked as poetry editors for magazines have experienced the would-be-Plath beginner-poets bombarding us with bad imitations. That doesn’t really make her a dangerous influence: most serious art treads a fine line, or a border between potential parody of itself and bathos. The problem there is in the immaturity of those poets, not in Plath. If they mean a dangerous influence in life, where is the evidence to back this up? I’m entirely steeped in her work, and I’ve made it at least to the age of thirtythree. . . . Margaret Atwood said in an interview that there was a stage where, as a woman poet, you were reviewed only in terms of being ‘like Plath or not like Plath’, as if this were a benchmark. I have certainly found this to be true; I have also done it to other women in reviews, hopefully not too loosely. In this sense, the limiting readings of Plath are probably not specific to Australia, but have much in common with reception elsewhere. As Australians, though, we have added impetus to read her from a postcolonial context (and perhaps to consider where that kind of theorizing overlaps with feminism). Re-reading The Bell Jar, I am disturbed by its apparently blithe characterizations of, for instance, African Americans, its use of negative imagery of Asian facial features, and so on. This is throughout the poems, too. Yes, this connects with what I was saying when we started talking – it’s the W A S P thing. But more than that, it’s an inability to see beyond eurocentrism. Plath comes at the end

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of a tradition; she obviously belongs more to Robert Lowell than she does to, say, a poet like Jean “Binta” Breeze, or Imtiaz Dharker. I can connect that with my experience of teaching her work in a university poetry course in Australia, in terms of feminism: the syllabus had a required component of ‘feminist poetry’, and while I scarcely felt she could be omitted, being so crucial to the whole enterprise of women’s poetry, I decided to teach her as what I then called ‘proto-feminist’, in the same way that I would describe the (very, very different) poet Anne Sexton as proto-feminist. Content-wise, they were raising a lot of issues that would be examined by the women’s movement, but they were at that point without the language to do it in a manner called feminist. Not that the ideas hadn’t already been raised (Dale Spender says they are raised and then re-buried in cycles of fifty years at a time), but that you can’t interpret Plath wholly comfortably as being ‘about feminism’ – which I think some people have tried to do, to overcome the pathological model. However, some feminist emphasis is appropriate, to act as a corrective to the tendency we have both experienced, to have to learn her ‘alongside’ the work of Ted Hughes – almost as if that ‘danger’ thing, that threat the critics keep fearing, had to be kept in place. Of course, one should recognize that if one is examining the poetry in a contextual sense then it is impossible to do so without looking at Hughes’s poetic, because of his role in constructing her posthumous books. Also there is the added interest of ‘process’, where you have two accomplished poets attacking the same material, as in their respective pig poems – Plath’s “Sow,” and Hughes’s “View of a Pig.” But linking her poems too closely to her life, or to the male figures in her life, can distort their political aspects. Take a poem like “Gulliver,” which I see, as I do many of her poems, as examining the negotiation of relationships between subject and object, self and other: a dialectical processing. There is, of course, a colonial aspect to any poem dealing with the figure of “Gulliver”; this recalls for me Firdous Azim’s book The Colonial Rise of the Novel, which talks about the enterprise of colonialism and that of novel-making as being not only analogous but intricately of the same fabric. The way in which narrative constructs the notion of monolithic self: ‘I’ am not this, not this, not this and not that, all that is other: thus, the colonizing subject defines itself. As in Gulliver’s Travels. This kind of monolith occurs all the time in Plath as an image (“The Colossus,” or in “Daddy”: “ghastly statue with one grey toe, big as a Frisco seal”), and is severely narrowed in meaning if we take it to refer only to ‘her’ father, Otto Plath. Likewise, if we take a poem such as “For a Fatherless Son” only to refer personally to Plath’s own son and her husband’s depar-

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ture, we miss the complexity of the references: the monolithic figure of the father under patriarchy, and of the ‘homeland’ or ‘centre’ in its relation to the colonial space: You will be aware of an absence, presently, Growing beside you, like a tree, A death tree, color gone, an Australian gum tree – Balding, gelded by lightning – an illusion, And a sky like a pig’s backside, an utter lack of attention.

Breaking Down the Barriers60

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‘S P E C I A L I S S U E ’ I S A N I N T E R E S T I N G C O N C E P T . It has a twofold message. First, that it is out of the ordinary, and second, that it is a significant event. The relationship between Britain and Australia is a specific one, though one that has fundamentally changed, and will continue to do so. As Australia moves towards a republic, and the inevitable displacement of the Queen as its head of state, there is a consciousness both in Britain and in Australia that ‘difference’ is increasing. But this is an odd way of looking at things, since difference was always there. And the question of a paternal relationship vis-à-vis the colonial and the centre is one that was, at least in theory, ended by Federation, if not before. Some years ago I co-edited a special double issue of the American journal Poetry. The dynamic was different, as one would expect. The relationship of the U S A to the English language resembles that of Australia to English. The question of national language and identity is one that has been worked over time and time again. Australian poetry was presented on that occasion as having certain historical and cultural elements in common with the American, but also as another grouping of poetic voices in an international context. With this special issue of Poetry Review, these factors are also evident, but the centre–fringe binary is far more obvious and present – it’s the uneasy and complex relationship between the ‘old country’ and the ‘new country’. In Australia, the question of cultural sovereignty, of the ‘vernacular republic’, to use Les Murray’s expression, of Macquarie English, informs much of 60

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the literature of white national identity. What increasingly makes Australian poetry different from canonical British poetry? There are the different building blocks, the different environment and social concerns, and so on, but, more than that, the way language itself is changing and consequently altering the way Australians think about themselves with respect to the rest of the world. As with the U S A , the importance and relevance of non-English-language cultures is an evolving focus. The recognition that there are ‘unofficial’ literatures, that Australia’s voices are multicultural and not so easily pigeonholed, is paramount. Of prime importance is the relationship between settler or invader cultures and indigenous cultures. The framing of these relationships is especially complex, given that gradations of rights of presence give rise to other forms of racism and exclusion – for example, the Hansonite voice of anti-Asianism being linked with anti-Aboriginal sentiment. Lyn McCredden’s excellent piece here explores the growth of an Aboriginal English-language poetry of protest and community and humour, of relationships to ‘the land’ and white culture specifically. The question of isolation is being turned on its head in Australian society. Apart from increasingly efficient transport and communications – especially the global village of the internet – we are asking: From what, indeed, is one being isolated? More pollution than we have, ideas that belong to different geographies and histories? There is a growing sense that presence in the now is as relevant and productive as living in a state of mind elsewhere. In recent times I’ve been developing a theory of ‘international regionalism’ – global interaction while retaining and protecting regional identity. I think much of the work contained in this issue supports this world-view. Australia as national concept is there – even external views of Australia – but it’s also there in an international context. This is not a culture looking for security, but one confident about embracing and exploring other literatures and cultures without minimizing the worth of its own. But it’s also increasingly aware of its own failings – of racism, of gender inequality, of the need to stand alone yet still be an active player in world affairs. Further, there is the question of the environment. Paradoxically both robust and vulnerable, the Australian environment has been severely affected by European farming practices, logging, and mining. Glen Phillips, in an article on landscape and contemporary Australian poetry, examines some of the ways Australian poets deal with this legacy. There are voices of criticism; there are also voices of celebration. All are part of the picture. And there are the voices of the urban landscape – most of Australia’s population is concen-

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trated in its capital cities. Rod Mengham’s deft consideration of some aspects of the poetry of John Forbes, Gig Ryan, and John Tranter – poets whose work arises out of the great metropolises of Sydney and Melbourne, as well as an often ironic relationship with the Western tradition – is to be savoured. In his inimitable, ironic style, John Tranter captures much of this Australian take on internationalism in an article on his internet journal Jacket. It is evident, too, in many of the poems. Peter Porter is an interesting focal point, in that he is still perceived as an Australian poet in cultural exile. But I think the time of exile has passed, and he, at least to my generation, is an Australian poet who has made a life abroad. And why not – he can only enrich the culture he has physically left by feeding it information about the one he has chosen to live in. It is especially pleasing to see something of a cross-generational representation of Australian poetry in this special issue. There’s Frank Kermode’s choice of A.D. Hope, one of the few Australian poets of his generation to be known outside Australia. And Judith Rodriguez writing on Hope’s nearcontemporaries, the brilliant Judith Wright and Gwen Harwood. Plus two fine poems from the great senior poet still writing in Australia, Dorothy Hewett. Equally pleasing is the breaking-down of barriers. Australian poetry has been fraught with division, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s, but I see that split as gradually closing. The camp of Les Murray and the camp of Tranter– Adamson, or what Murray might once have referred to as the ‘Balmain poets’, are less decided now. People like Peter Minter, Alison Croggon, Coral Hull, Tracy Ryan, and Louis Armand belong to no ‘camp’, and have wideranging influences and ‘allegiances’. They might read Philip Larkin and Lyn Hejinian on the same evening. French or Korean poetry in translation or the original, linguistically innovative or canonical four-line stanzas: all are in the mix. This issue features two prose poems from Croggon and Hull. Form is active and negotiable right across the board of Australian poetry. I have long seen Les Murray as an innovative user of language. John Tranter himself might be bemused when told he was head of a camp. His efforts through the medium of the internet have done much to break down barriers and divisions. And he’s always been a Sydney poet willing to visit Melbourne. Finally, it is worth noting the increasing availability of Australian poetry in Britain. Apart from editions of Peter Porter, Les Murray, Judith Wright, Chris Wallace–Crabbe, Gwen Harwood, Dorothy Hewett, Dorothy Porter, and myself, there has recently been publication of Robert Gray and John Tranter, with editions due from Bloodaxe of Tracy Ryan, Kevin Hart, and a multiple

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volume that will include Gig Ryan, John Forbes, and John Scott. Arc also have a healthy Australian list pencilled-in for the next few years, as well as the anthology Landbridge. But in addition to the publication of Australian poets in Britain, it is my hope that more titles of contemporary British poets will become available in Australia. And of those poets who would not normally find circulation, since they are not published by major companies. The co-publication of J.H. Prynne’s Poems by Bloodaxe, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, and Folio (Salt), is just one such example. May there be more cultural exchange between the nations, without the prejudices and discomfort of the past. Each has something to offer the other.

On the Prospects of Keeping Good Company61

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was written before the editors of this vital anthology of Western Australian writing had started selecting and compiling the material. It was delivered as part of an opening gambit at the Fellowship of Australian Writers to help see the anthologizing process on its way. As patron of the F A W , I see it as my role publicly to support the various activities of the Fellowship. During the six months or so that have passed since I made this speech, the editors, and others at the F A W , have done an excellent job in selecting, collating, and preparing the text for publication. The second part of this foreword is a brief reaction to their efforts and the materials they’ve managed to glean. HE FIRST PART OF THIS FOREWORD

1. Prior to the Task Commencing The editors, Glen Phillips and Julienne van Loon, have both an easy and a difficult task ahead of them. Western Australia has a unique ‘Australian’ literature, and a diverse and plentiful one. There is no shortage of material in all genres, and across genres, to select from. That’s the easy part. The difficulty will come in whittling it down to a manageable size from the perspective of book publication. When editing the historically based Western Australian Online anthology for the University of Western Australia, I had no such problem, and those of us involved are, in fact, still able to add to that anthology 61

“Foreword” to Lines in the Sand: New Western Australian Writing, ed. Julienne van Loon & Glen Phillips (Cottesloe, W A : Fellowship of Australian Writers, 2008): v–viii.

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and make it grow. A print book, however, is a print book. And though we might support a print publication with a website carrying extra material and information, it will, inevitably, be read as a Ding an sich, as Kant says, a thing-in-itself. Since an anthology is a space of struggling between personal taste and issues of representation, every anthology of the same region or even theme will necessarily be different. I think that, in selecting the editors for Lines in the Sand, whose working title was ‘In Good Company’, a balance of similarity and difference has been got ‘right’. A poet and a fiction writer, different generations, different genders. .. we could make a list of differences. As we could make a list of obvious similarities – writing in Western Australia, being familiar with the ‘scene’ and literary history, and, vitally, both having a sensitivity to literatures outside the mainstream. For starters, apart from the tensions over what makes a ‘literature’, which I am sure the editors will able to deconstruct, there are also the issues of the diversity of cultures that make that (or those) literature/s. Western Australia is a multicultural and pluralistic place, I am very glad to say. I expect this will be reflected in the anthology. Western Australia is also a division of the Australian continent that contains and cuts across the lands and language groups of many Indigenous peoples. How an anthologist who is not Indigenous shows awareness and submits these colonizations to scrutiny and how s/he ‘represents’ the literary cultures of these peoples is vital to the relevance of such an anthology. Lines in the Sand will be an anthology that celebrates Western Australian literature, but also, importantly, the seventieth year of the Western Australian chapter of the Fellowship of Australian Writers. It is appropriate for the Fellowship to be the vehicle for such a publication, given its advocacy for and support of Western Australian writers over its lifetime – as a reflection of this support, but also as an extension of its role in generating literary activity. An anthology should never purely be a retrospective consolidation; it should invite action, invoke a future. It is fascinating to look through a list of Western Australian literary anthologies, a few of which I list below – so many of them celebrate an occasion. Indeed, Celebrations, an anthology with a strong connection to the Fellowship, came out of the bicentenary. Fine anthology that it is, I am sure Glen Phillips, co-editor then as now, would have some reservations about what 1988 actually stood for, whose histories it may sometimes have deleted. I see the new anthology as a wonderful opportunity to celebrate outside the history of colonization, yet at the same time inside the history of a universality in

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writing that has come out of a specific regionality. Some of the best anthologies of recent years have been collations of Indigenous work, and that consciousness should never be far away from an anthologist’s conceptualization of place. So, I think back to an early Western Australian anthology published in the 1930s, Jarrah Leaves: A Literary and Artistic Annual Wholly Written and Illustrated by Western Australians (Perth: Imperial Printing Company, 1933), and its eclectic though entirely ‘white’ European sensibility. Sure, it becomes a pillar of an idea of a state literature, but it’s really a stepping-stone to expansion and breadth, to a wider consideration of what constitutes an anthology of a broad grouping of people/s and their writings.62 a

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For the record, other selections of Western Australian writing over the years have included, in chronological order: Sandgropers: A Western Australian Anthology, ed. Dorothy Hewett (Nedlands: U of Western Australia P , for the F A W W A , 1973); Soundings: A Selection of Western Australian Poetry, ed. Veronica Brady (Fremantle, W A : Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1976); New Country: A Selection of Western Australia Short Stories, ed. Bruce Bennett (Fremantle, W A : Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1976); Summerland: A Western Australian Sesquicentenary Anthology of Poetry and Prose, ed. Alec Choate & Barbara York Main (Nedlands: U of Western Australia P , 1979); Wide Domain: Western Australian Themes and Images, ed. William Grono & Bruce Bennett (Sydney & London: Angus & Robertson, 1979); Quarry: A Selection of Contemporary Western Australian Poetry, ed. Fay Zwicky (Fremantle, W A : Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1981); Celebrations: A Bicentennial Anthology of Fifty Years of Western Australian Poetry and Prose, ed. Brian Dibble, Don Grant & Glen Phillips (Nedlands: U of Western Australia P , 1988); Margins: A West Coast Selection of Poetry, 1829–1988, ed. William Grono (Fremantle, W A : Fremantle Arts Centre, 1988); Wordhord: A Critical Selection of Contemporary Western Australian Poetry, ed. Dennis Haskell & Hilary Fraser (Fremantle, W A : Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1989); Those Who Remain Will Always Remember: An Anthology of Aboriginal Writing, ed. Anne Brewster, Angeline O’Neill & Rosemary van den Berg (Fremantle, W A : Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2000); From Our Hearts: An Anthology of New Aboriginal Writing from Southwest Western Australia, ed. Jan Teagle Kapetas et al. (South Fremantle, W A : Kadadjiny Mia Walyalup Writers, 2000) ; Western Australian On-Line Anthology, ed. John Kinsella (U W A Library, 2004); The Weighing of the Heart, ed. Shane McCauley, Roland Leach & Donna Ward (Cottesloe, W A : SunLine, 2007). [J.K.]

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2. After the Task Has Been Completed So, the text is ready and the introductions written. This is a fascinating and vibrant selection of contemporary Western Australian writing. Many of the established Western Australian writers are in there – ones whose reputations precede them (not the easiest burden to carry), and others whose reputationsto-be will be tracked back to this anthology. The idea of a ‘State’ literature is complex: a gathering of regional voices, but one that is ultimately separated off from other regions by the machine of government. I don’t see this collection as imprisoned within the boundaries of official versions of ‘State’ but, rather, as a collection of writers with a shared sense of geography (diverse, greatly differing – it is a massive catchment area), a shared sense of ‘history’ and of not belonging to the other parts of Australia. The connections are numerous and complex, not least with voices so clearly identified as ‘West Australian’ but also writing from outside Western Australia. Robert Drewe is a powerful example of this. A sense of earlier generations of Western Australian writers has been captured here, as noted by Glen Phillips and Julienne van Loon in their introduction, through pieces that convey ‘biographical’ aspects of revered earlier writers. It should be noted that these pieces also reflect their own writers, and that’s one of the great treasures of this book. I hope very much that Lesley Dougan will take her writings on her sister Dorothy Hewett and, indeed, herself much further. A good anthology should always be a stimulus for further writing. As I write this note at the beginning of a hot summer’s day in the wheatbelt, crows hacking at the ear and wagtails already jiddering about, York gums scratching the resonantly blue sky, I think over Lesley Dougan’s powerful celebration, which also contains carefully sown seeds of warning: The beauty of those surroundings, before the depredations of salt and drought, is hard to imagine today, but I believe for both of us it cemented a life-long love of that Australian countryside and, for Dorothy, the ability to revisit that landscape in her poetry and descriptive writing.

It’s also worth noting that, despite the vastness of Western Australia, the connection between writers across generations is strong. In this anthology we have not only Lesley Dougan writing on her sister Dorothy, but we also have Lesley’s daughter and Dorothy’s niece, a fine poet in her own right: Lucy Dougan. I think it is intriguing how writers cross-pollinate and inform each other through family and community, and how they may

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share the writing life yet branch off distinctly on their own. There are many other connections, both subterranean and obvious, between writers collected here – friends, partners, probably the odd ‘enemy’. The point is that human relations are taken into the process of communality in writing. This anthology is beautifully shaped and balanced, the curating of it a piece of art in itself. It has rhythm from the opening moments of Liz Byrski’s crisp prose through the shapings of poetry and prose in its fiction and nonfiction guises, to a superb conclusion in Fay Zwicky’s piece of memoir or, rather, self-perspective in situ. Home is elusive for Zwicky, but, in the same way that memory is necessary, so is the consideration of what home is. Somewhere near the centre of this anthology, a reader will find Miriam Wei Wei Lo’s poem “Searching for Words.” Therein, the crux of place, of trying to put words to where we are wherever we are: Perhaps it’s colloquial. Most of the vegetable seedlings brought in from the shops get chewed up by slaters or snails. What survives comes up from the compost. There must be a word for this. Something specific to a time, a place. Something idiomatic.

This seems like an ars poetica for the present anthology as a whole. From inside or outside, there’s a sense of being part of something. And that makes this volume essential.

Fremantle Press New Poets We Have to Have63

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to see the latest Westerly poetry round-up summarize the 2010 Fremantle Press collection of three ‘new’ poets with the general label “competent.” After lamenting the lack of “variety” in the Fremantle list in recent years, the review leaves us with the simple assessment that the three-in-one collection was surely done for reasons of cost.64 Now, in an age of declining poetry book sales (which is, true, matched by an exponential rise in web interest and performance interest in poetry), the

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presentation of three full-length collections, in an attractive and intelligently edited and introduced single volume, is a gain rather than a loss. Let me express my connection to this volume before I begin – allowing that most collections published in Australia have at most one or two degrees of separation from a reviewer. The volume was edited by Tracy Ryan, my partner. One of the poets collected, J.P. Quinton, has assisted me in various tasks, and another, Scott–Patrick Mitchell, I adjudged (anonymously) the winner of a poetry competition some years ago. I have only briefly met the third participant, Emma Rooksby. Dismissing each of these collections as ‘competent’ reduces the possibility of newness, innovation, and breadth of publishing vision, far more than binding them within one cover in what will be an ongoing series (the 2011 volume has just been published, including two poets, and next year’s volume is a collection of performance-driven poets). Westerly has a long history of supporting Western Australian writing, rightly placing it in a broader ‘Australian’ and regional context. The latest issue includes a wide selection of Australian poetry, with Western Australians coming off particularly well. What’s more, after questioning why Fremantle has tended to publish ‘established’ poets over recent years, the poetry roundup spends all the ‘Western Australian’ time concentrating on examples of those very poets. If it’s difficult to open a gambit with new poets and there’s no discourse to slot them into, let me provide a series of possibilities which will be just as much about how not to ‘slot’ them in as about how to ‘read’ them. The first New Poets volume was part of a process that saw the submission of many manuscripts by journal-published poets looking for the publication of their first full-length collection. The process not only fostered the three poets included in this volume, but also resulted in a master class, in which a number of other poets presented and discussed their work in a supportive context. The fact that Rooksby, Mitchell, and Quinton are dramatically different practitioners is a double plus in terms of their being collected together. It signifies diversity and cross-talk; it is about associations and clarifications of how we might read poetic cultural subtexts by creating context. In her collection Time Will Tell, Emma Rooksby is what I would call an ‘internalizing’ poet. The title’s colloquial familiarity captures much of the subtle tension between public and private that emanates from her poems. Pithy, compacted language, with a strong sense of ‘turn’ of phrase and idea, works image and rhetoric with equal skill and determination.

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The external world is often presented in vivid sketches, but always folds in on the private or even intimate moment. Often there is the sense of a private conversation going on between the ‘voice’ of the poet and one with which s/he is intimate. But it would be wrong to think that these poems are simply making private communiqués public. Rooksby is concerned with how much private knowledge becomes something else when it is painted within the public frame of shared experience and awareness. Hers is not a poetry of the material, though she is concise and precise in her empirical observations; nor is it a poetry of metaphysical aspiration. Rather, it’s a poetry of grounding, pinioning those hermeneutic fragments and moments that compile a life. The poem becomes a record of uncertainty locked within the apparent certainties of language (but that changes, too). Memory is unreliable, but that doesn’t stop us constantly trying to validate and confirm memory in thought, in speech. This is structuralist poetry, in which subjectivity is a nagging doubt. Try, but the quality of memory decays. Somehow each incident that’s set aside for treasuring gets furred with motes of dust

In short, sharp, seven-line poems such as “Early Afternoon,” “Winter,” and “Guardians,” interspersed through the collection, we are given imagistic glimpses and moments, interludes in the repetition of days. Rooksby’s uneasy relationship with closure in form, and her persona’s relationship with those towards whom it directs its voice, are epitomized by the closing line or lines of these pieces: “Surfacing, you see the long path back, in fading light” (“Early Afternoon”). Rooksby’s skill is in taking the quotidian and showing its necessity to a greater, almost spiritual vision. She doesn’t demean or diminish the ‘ordinary’; the reader feels privileged to be part of the ‘quiet’ accumulation of detail and observation built across poems. The process is not passive; it’s a wrestling with how and why we privilege one perception over another. Scott–Patrick Mitchell’s {where n equals} a determinacy of poetry is a collection in which (or maybe through which) poems are part of a broader display. If Rooksby delights in bringing the details of life into focus, Mitchell delights in graffiti-ing the streets of the psyche’s inner city (I use ‘psyche’ in its analytical sense, not as a vague sense of something). This is not so much in his specific references to inner-city spaces or markers (though they are there), but in his creating a street-map of language-play and public displays of pri-

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vate art. Mitchell’s elliptical and paratactic play on line and expression is as much about the ‘domestic’ moment, the private encounter with language and occasion, as Rooksby’s poetry. His work ranges from poems with a self-ironizing edge (consider his love poems and poems of desire in the light of Rooksby’s opening poem, “Drink,” and the aesthetic of de-romanticism: this can manifest itself in so many ways) through to a struggle with the validity of the symbolic versus the representational, in poetry and artistic expression in general. Mitchell’s syntax and grammar are about beginnings rather than endings. By no means the first poet to place his punctuation at the start of a line rather than at the end, he’s nonetheless one of the most able practitioners of this approach. This invites a line to begin rather than end, and asks for an inverted reading, as well as encouraging us to read against meaning that has so often already been expressed or investigated ironically. Which is not to say that Mitchell takes himself less than seriously – or expects the reader to do so – but that he is fully aware that creating poetry is a self-conscious act of display and performance the moment it is spoken or is committed to the page. Mitchell’s constant linguistic play on subjectivity advances beyond mere questions of the lyrical self or unified self, and plumbs the subjectivity of the recipient subject. He takes a ‘confessional’ mode and reinstates the very doubts expressed by confessional poets themselves (e.g., Robert Lowell). Take the poem “dew” — a play with a Victorian romantic cliché, a selfreflexive love poem, and the medieval traditions of the aubade: it is morning & you twitch at each kiss from these lips placed ethereal on ridge & slope of body i dote

The ‘landscape’ solidity of “ridge & slope” in the context of the body not only maps flesh on place but also links sensibility to surroundings and occasion. The you is as implicated as the “i,” but is also separated off as an idea, a notion, an extension of the “i.” The “you” only exists because of the display of the poem. This attains a deadly self-irony that still operates in the realm of need and desire in the seemingly off-putting (though not) “alopecian dreams”: I dreamt last night I had hair

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; long ocean-dipped , arse tickling

The play of classical literary tropes with the slightly ‘off’ familiar is at the core of Mitchell’s poetic. Its best expression is actually found in a poem of more overt ‘beauty’, the wonderful “heliography,” which reminds me of Callimachus’s (c.305 B C E –c.240 B C E ) “Hymn to Apollo.” Mitchell’s great skill resides in his poems’ openings – like Rooksby, his frustration is with the need for poems to end at all (which is not a bad thing!). “heliography” opens thus: ball me up in a ball of light so I can write how our sight foresaw this new beginning

The Steinian repetitions, the gentle sound-play, the nursery-rhyme explosion into what amounts to ontological clarity, launch us into a tour de force of odemaking fused with the ironies of ordinariness. Performance in the light of the sun matters to Mitchell. The colloquial gets a full workover if not makeover in J.P. Quinton’s Little River. I feel confident in saying there’s nothing quite like Quinton’s voice (including his own) in Western Australian poetry, and possibly Australian poetry as a whole. If you can imagine aspects of John Forbes and Nigel Roberts coalescing with Les Murray and maybe John Tranter, you might get some way toward unravelling its studied intricacies. In terms of environmental sensitivity, you could be rewarded by looking to John Anderson and maybe even Charles Buckmaster. Which is not to say Quinton’s ‘voice’ is the result of absorbing his models; rather, he always writes meta-textually and always with an ironic awareness of how ‘voice’ can only ever be derivative and comparative. He says it as he hears it, and as he ‘speaks’ to his mates, the bloke in the street, in the bush, on the road. This is Quinton’s genius; this most ‘voiced’ poet really writes outside poetic voice. He writes and speaks in his poem as he sees and experiences it. It’s what we used to call, in my ‘out-of-it days’, a ‘no-bullshit voice’. You believe it, whether it’s true or not. It counts as witness. When I said ‘studied intricacies’, I meant that Quinton’s ‘talk’ in the poems is both casual and immediate, and highly studied. He is a master of open-form poetry that gives the impression of having been written in stricter forms. In his work there is a kind of formal and tonal mimesis which are not replicable. At its most blunt, you

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might even think: Charles Bukowski or Banjo Paterson; at its most sharpened and deadly, you might think: John Donne. Little River is a book of range and variation. From engagements with localized popular culture in which tropes work hand-in-hand with the blunt reality of their application (or where ideas and theories of their nature derive from), through to environmental poems, poems in which the relationship between the ‘self’ and the transcendentalized ‘natural’ world is pondered and troubled over (the Swan River in Perth is a vital focal point for Quinton), through to elegies that overwhelm with their bluntness and clarity, their almost brutal confrontation with the loss of an older brother. To give a sense of how a Quinton poem fuses casual language with formal (seemingly almost accidental) constraint, the ‘throw-away’ observation with sharp, cutting insight, and a simultaneous respect for and trashing of ‘art’, we might consider the devastatingly ironic “Art for Life’s Sake.” Quinton can be gauche, brutal, frank, and razor-sharp in the same line. Once again, as is characteristic of Rooksby and Mitchell, Quinton is a deft poet of beginnings: Your brain-damaged neighbour checks the mail ten times a day for a bill he knows is due next week. Here, the sky is forgotten.

But Quinton is a poet of endings as well, perhaps because loss and death are never far behind an observation, a thought, a recording. The last three lines of “Art for Life’s Sake” say it all, and more. And it’s the more that comes out of confronting loss every time you wake that does it: Having kids means spending all your time trying not to hand down the malignant shit your parents gave you. At least with art you’ve only got yourself to blame and perhaps Mr Imagination will stick around.

One gets the sense that there is no other way to write it. Take these lines from the elegiac “All the Albums We Listened to Together”: Is it you Your deadness Or me My unforgiveness. Air-drumming along In your kombi With its over-adjusted headlight

The first strophe here shows inversion and play on primary and all-encompassing ‘values’: death and forgiveness. The person addressed is dead. For-

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giveness has not been forthcoming. And yet the absoluteness of the dead is questioned in the irony of the “ness,” and the failure of forgiveness is countered by the guilt of the “un.” Suffix and prefix become the values, rather than the concrete reference. In the second strophe it’s the “over-adjusted headlight.” The light works, but doesn’t work right. This contains condemnation and understanding without saying so: nothing is precise, there is no exact measurement of death and its causes, and of how we deal with loss. Quinton is a landscape architect, and his poems are landscapes. The persona is out in nature to remake and qualify himself, to give purpose. But the intellect behind this subjectivity can’t give way to ‘feeling’. Feeling is brutal. Reality is all-consuming. The poem “The Lookout” shows up closure for what it is, and the architecture of place, emotions, and ideas cancels itself out. We survey place from our privileged position of life. We begin: Ice melts, green belts. Alpine cold, frozen eucalypts mountains near and far off.

and thirteen lines later we close off with: Not so long ago siphoning the world my brother broke down and gassed himself — a total, fucking, gas.

Endgame. Quinton will be one of the most significant poets of his generation. So, one asks how three such vital poets can be merely described as ‘competent’. These are groundbreaking poets in a groundbreaking collection. Tracy saw it when she selected their work, I saw it while she was doing so. It has to be said: these poets have to be heard.

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– L ONGER V IEWS ON I NDIVIDUALS

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Robert Adamson: A Juxtaposition of Essences65

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L A N G U A G E O F O Y S T E R S B R I N G S T O G E T H E R the metaphysical lyrics of poet Robert Adamson and the deeply layered photographs of Juno Gemes. The theme is the river, specifically the Hawkesbury. It is a metaphoric work that deals with the essences of place. The metaphors are built out of comparisons, or juxtapositions, made between the myriad of elements that give it identity. The mist (“The Serpents Breath”) rises over a black glass river which meanders by an old oyster farmer’s hut. There is continuity, but also change. Things are working for and against each other. Beauty can be found in the toughest images. Gemes and Adamson decode place and its mystery, reinforcing its spirit, giving it language. This work is more than a collaboration, it is a major artistic initiative that sees different artistic mediums interacting with each other. For both, there is the continuum of their art. As Adamson writes in “The Language of Oysters,” and as Gemes signifies in her visual techniques, there is continuity, with reference being made to a greater art. But there is also the voice that arises from the interaction of text and image; another, entirely sublime voice. Where Adamson is able to write in the ‘spirit’ of Charles Olson, an Olson who is an oyster farmer, as much part of Hawkesbury as Adamson himself: HE

Charles Olson sat back in his oyster-shed, working the words, “mostly in a great sweat of being, seeking to bind speed” – looked at his sheaf of pages, each word an oyster, culled from the fattening grounds of talk. They were nurtured from day one, from the spat-fields to their shucking, words, oysters plump with life. On Mooney Creek the men stalk the tides for corruption.

Gemes is able to give voice to those who inhabit her images.

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“Introduction” to Robert Adamson, The Language of Oysters, photographs by Juno Gemes, preface by Rodney Hall (Sydney: Craftsman House, 1997): 11–19.

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When Deleuze, talking of Bergson, refers to the notion of duration (durée), of things looked at in terms of time rather than space, he notes that change brings constantly with it new essence, new substance.66 While the documentary photography of Walker Evans, in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, captures in a social-realist way the true grit of the American idiom, Juno Gemes’s work observes place and people both in terms of their ‘period’ and in terms of their individual identities. So place and personality are intertwined. The scene and its players are entirely necessary to each other. Rather than being a case of the captured image, it’s a matter of images being organic. And as this is art and not reportage, so there is also a third element – that of the artist or, more appropriately, the spirit of the ‘artist’. Things are happening beyond the frame of the picture, things are happening before and after the picture. We have a moment in time, caught, but still the pictures allow a difference according to the context in which they’re seen. In a sense, Gemes is a symbolist photographer as well as an honest interpreter of the real. A strange combination, but I’d argue Gemes is as much poet as photographer, and it is through the interaction of these twin poles of the creative curve that such a contradiction can work. It is not surprising that the poetry of Robert Adamson is so at home with Gemes’s images, and vice versa. In fact, at times they are almost necessary to each other. The Language of Oysters shows this connection at its strongest. With imagery firmly embedded in the immediate, or even immediacy, of the scene, the mouth of the Hawkesbury, where Gemes and Adamson have been working together for over seven years, there is still a sense of the universal, of an artistic pursuit of grand truths. In the cameos of the river and river life – those accumulations of miniatures which add together to give an impression of the chthonic nature of the land referred to by Roslyn Poignant in Mangrove Creek 1951,67 which Gemes became aware of five years into her project – we see a language at work which can be spoken and understood anywhere. There is mystery and truth here – the two are inseparable. In her pursuit and observation of the moods of the river and its inhabitants, Gemes is constantly looking for those subtleties of change a casual observer 66

Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, tr. Hugh Tomlinson & Barbara Habberjam (Le Bergsonisme, 1966; New York: Zone, 1988): 48. 67 Axel & Roslyn Poignant, Mangrove Creek 1951: a day with the Hawkesbury River postman (exh. cat.; Sydney South, N S W : Hawkesbury River Enterprises, 1993).

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so often misses or even ignores. The material collected by her lens is much like the inspiration that goes into a poem. The inspiration that is transferred to the page and then drafted to the point where it makes contact with its audience. Like the poet redrafting a poem, the photographer redrafts through the darkroom. Gemes does not work by subterfuge. There is an honesty and integrity in her interaction with her subjects, be it with a local fisherman or with the texture of a surface. In a sense, it is the opposite of Baudrillard’s statement, “The sensuality of behind-the-scenes power: the art of making the other disappear. That requires an entire ritual.”68 Gemes does not want things to disappear. Like Adamson, she is a conjurer, drawing hidden meanings out of her subjects. In both poem and photograph we find layer on layer of meaning, and potential meaning. Gemes invests in her images all the work that she has done before. Though they are not linked by an A–B–C-type chronology, there is movement. These are not just stills but really frames from a discontinuous narrative. The sequence of events distils into moments that live for themselves, moments that are unique, whole in themselves. But necessary to other moments. Gemes does not isolate these, but juxtaposes and enjambs. Her art, in this, is postmodern, her techniques, especially in her use of light, at times impressionistic. Gemes does not need to ‘assume’ another’s identity, as she is comfortable with her subjects, and they with her. This volume is as fresh and vital as it is because she is trusted. The camera’s eye is an extension of her own. It does not intrude; she is not prying; she is not desecrating. It is not the ritual, it does not suggest the ritual, it allows, through the sensitivity of the artist, the ritual to speak its own language. The artist is there as translator. And, as we know, there are good and bad translations. Gemes is a great translator. Susan Sontag writes, in On Photography: Whatever the moral claims made on behalf of photography, its main effect is to convert the world into a department store or museum-without-walls in which every subject is depreciated into an article of consumption, promoted into an item of aesthetic appreciation.69

68

Jean Baudrillard, “Please Follow Me,” in Sophie Calle, Suite Venitienne, tr. Dany Barash & Danny Hatfield (1983; tr. Seattle W A : Bay Press, 1988), repr. in The Jean Baudrillard Reader, ed. Steve Redhead (New York: Columbia U P , 2008): 72. 69 Susan Sontag, On Photography (1973; Garden City NY: Doubleday, 1977): 110.

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A photograph does not have to be of the place where it is taken, nor does it have to be an item that represents merely its subject. To be an item of purely aesthetic appreciation it must, in a sense, devalue the material of its making. This is the crime of the popular aesthetician, not the photograph as thing-initself. The Language of Oysters is not stagnant and reminiscent; it does not support Sontag’s statement: Photographs turn the past into an object of tender regard, scrambling moral distinctions and disarming historical judgements by the generalized pathos of looking at time past.70

Like the poet, the photographer of A Language of Oysters is interested in universal, timeless themes. Their place in the Duration is relevant, because they are visited afresh and given added meaning. What Sontag talks of is, in fact, industry, or capitalism’s exploitation of what appears to be (though is not) an instantaneous medium. When she talks of photography, such a versatile and complex art, she is in fact talking of art in general. Her argument is with capitalism and its exploitation of ‘art’ – photography being a convenient and available scapegoat. Gemes’s photographs manage that delicate blend between the investment of time and the freshness of immediacy. I suggest that this is because they live outside the concerns of Sontag’s Western capitalist world, despite being conscious of that world. They are not so concerned with this, but aware enough to ‘see’ the effect this usage, fetishization, has. It is the consciousness of poetry that does this. Adamson himself is of the river; in it we see his people. Gemes is working from both the inside and outside. On a broader scale, her mentor Lisette Modell (of whom was said: “I know of no photographer who has photographed people as inwardly”71) and the photoactivism of Tina Modotti, so admired by Gemes, have allowed her to construct an investigation of her subject quite independently of preconceived notions; as has her Europeanism, to use her eye to examine a different landscape anew, while also being invested with a direct lineage, if you like, to the place. Gemes is aware that there is no definitive picture any more than there is a definitive poem. There are many. And a photograph will only be art if it is not lost to reminiscence, to the past. She is not of Sontag’s sentimental recollec70

Sontag, On Photography, 71. Berenice Abbott, “Preface” to Lisette Model: An Aperture Monograph (New York: Aperture Foundation, 1979). 71

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tion. There are some tough images working in this volume, “Great Tattoo” being a fine example. Adamson’s poems are also harsh and confrontative when they need to be. The impact of poems like “What’s Slaughtered’s Gone” counters any idea of sentimentality. The photographs, like the poems, project. They can and will do these things, but also do more. One should consider how the photographs are presented to a viewer. Arrangement – context –is everything. When Sontag talks of scrutiny, she ignores the possibility that the photograph might ‘look back’ on itself, that it has a life of its own. The viewer, in scrutinizing the content, is also scrutinizing self. How do we decode this internal identity from what we view? Memory, in a sense, is a series of photographs that re-arrange themselves. Memories are tainted and influenced by different lights, as are photographs. The content is the same but the exposition differs. Sontag would be right if she were to refer to the empowered use a society makes of its images. They must have worth. Worth can be something either of general value or of value to a particular person. Photographs have both of these. But so would ancient fingernail clippers; a general functional worth, and collector’s value. But if they were archetypal images, and as such commented on their own position in the scheme of things, they would have another worth. As does the photograph. Because it is a ‘modern’ art, too much is made of photography’s being part of commodity fetishization. It is an art-form. The camera is as the brush, the pen, the instrument upon which a composition is played. It is the composition that matters. And to compose does not mean one needs to intrude or manipulate deceptively. It means that one sees and arranges. There is a difference. The consciousness of interaction between these visual and non-visual forms is exemplified in Adamson’s poem “Meshing Bends in The Light.” This is a case where the craft of the photographer has actually become the stuff of metaphor, where the language moves not only through the way a photographer sees but also through the technicalities of the craft. The conscious link between the flesh and blood of the animal, of the river, and that of the organic growth of the photograph, is intriguing. This is where a ‘third’ artist is involved – the sublime artist. The creation of collaborators that exists quite independently. Conjured, it directs its own speech. It is the parallel text running with the river. The turning moon is up-ended in the silver gelatin and sets. The hook stops spinning through the space.

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Consider the notion of the aspect of memory’s being not only in the subject but also in the observer. This does not make the frame nostalgic in itself, but a medium for considering the way memory moves between experience, the seen, and association. A stream of light pours from the sky into the mouth of Mooney Creek, the river flows in to the memory of whoever looks into these frames.

The river flows. Memory is cumulative, it keeps flowing. With every return to the images it flows again. It has a new essence. The time of day is set, but we look at it anew. We compare and contrast. It is, like language, active. Sontag says, “To photograph is to confer importance.”72 Gemes would say importance is conferred on the photograph if you photograph what is important to you. And important is what is real. And what is real is what appears in the image. This does not mean we have to recognize it, or put a name to it. But the poet will attempt to do so. And in this process the inner self behind the portrait is doubly illuminated. There is both the tone of light, so all-important to Gemes’s craft (especially her river still-lifes, where planes of light interact and intersect with planes of water, where surfaces are defined by the interpreting eye – for each, the way of viewing is different), and the tone of language – the gradations and variations of emotion, experience, observation, perception, and interpretation – melded and transformed into poetry. Although Gemes admires the resilience and courage of the river dwellers, she does not attempt to idealize. She and Adamson are river dwellers themselves and see from the inside out. To communicate this culture with honesty, with total dedication, is a matter of negotiation, of maintaining a constant dialogue with subjects and the environment, with the source of the imagery. They are active occupants of the field of vision, conferring meaning on place, scaping our appreciation, generating an aesthetic. It is interesting to consider that a fisherman as subject in a Gemes photograph is as much an embodiment of the river, in every line of his face, in the light on his skin, as he is the person. You photograph a fisherman and you get the river. And the meanings of a river are endless.

72

Sontag, On Photography, 28.

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Gemes has described the culture of the river as being “invisible” to most of those who live beyond its reaches. Gemes and Adamson, through being part of this culture, are able to make it visible, to give it voice. Gemes sees this mediation of place through experience and participation as a kind of activism. It is important to consider that Gemes, in identifying this culture, does not see it as the only culture. It is simply one to which she has access, and is one that accepts her presence. Without this acceptance her constructions would not be possible. It is also important to consider that she is also aware of an ‘unseen’ culture that is up to 100,000 years old acting on and with the manifestation of inhabitation as she now finds it. It is there if one looks. There are many images which directly approach this Koori presence (it is more than heritage; in its duration it maintains its past manifestations and holds a new essence for every ‘new’ time: i.e. it is all-pervading). Images such as “Ancient Koori Rock Carving,” which is juxtaposed with a sweep of the river, boat cutting whitely through the water suggesting incursion and in its subtle quietness the possibility of coexistence, the juxtaposition and interaction of “Buffy’s Mulloway” and “Stingray Dreaming,” the “Fish Dreaming” image and “Poem Rock Carving with Kevin Gilbert.” Juxtaposition is the key here. Gemes allows us to draw the parallels. We recognize the archetypal images, the unspoken inferences of connection, the inchoate registration of the land in human life. The river isn’t read but reading its inhabitants. And this is universal. The book’s construction is paramount in the way we read these relationships. What elevates Gemes into the realm of the truly great photographers – those who have retained the integrity of the observed but instilled something of themselves into the observation (from Stieglitz through to Cartier–Bresson) – is that she can observe without intervention and yet invest herself in the construction without distorting its integrity. She is there in the shadow, in the light in the eyes of her subject, and the balance of the image. But she is only there insofar as it conveys the truth in her subject. A major theme of Gemes’s work has been that of social injustice, particularly in relationship to Koori culture. In an interview with Gemes (October 1995), I asked her about the relationship between her project and that of Koori identity with place, specifically the Hawkesbury: We mentioned the Mangrove Creek book, and we were talking before about your work with Koori people, their culture and art, and social aspects – white domination. . . Social injustice. . .

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Yes. As it says in the Afterword of that book, The rugged terrain of the lower Hawkesbury very forcibly imprints the natural land formations on the mind. During those few days in 1951 the dominance of the enclosing bush was reinforced through all the senses, and intensified by heat. Although the Aboriginal presence had been physically obliterated, it seemed as if it had been reabsorbed into the land itself, as a deep chthonic layer, and that the spirit of place had long since claimed the more recent white arrivals and rendered them indigenous.

I quote this because I notice some of your images have that Dreamtime and that deeply spiritual aspect, not only conceptually but texturally. You seem to develop even an Aboriginal art sort of feel about it. I think that’s very true, because it is here in this country. That may be true – I’m reflecting what I perceive, through experience, about this country, this particular landscape. As I became familiar with the oyster-farming and fishing culture that is prevalent here, and is to a large extent an invisible culture – it simply is not visible to the rest of society or to the community – I became aware that here were seven generations. There were people who had lived in this landscape for seven generations, and whose relationship to the River was very respectful and guardianlike. This idea has been strongly with me throughout the work – it was clear then, it’s still clear now. I also feel very strongly the Aboriginal presence here. . . . It is a pristine country, and as I know from a surveyors’ map from the Australian Museum, and that actually dates back to 1890. . . this land is covered with over 260 Aboriginal rockcarvings. So that the Aboriginal presence for me is very strong, and the relationship between the oyster-farming community and their feeling for country, I found to have some similarity to Aboriginal relationship to country. But having said that, it’s only now that Aboriginal people are coming back into this country. Do you see with the multiple generations, of oyster-farmers for example, that have been here, a ‘parallel’ between Aboriginal land inheritance and continuity in the land (albeit of much longer standing), and this continuity within the families? Is there a cultural parallel in any way; or a spiritual parallel, maybe? You’ll have oyster-farmers who can read the River. They can know from looking at the surface what’s going on underneath. And it’s that kind of specific knowledge of the River that is handed on from generation to generation that has a similar resonance to 40,000 years of Aboriginal occupation and relationship, specific relationship, in a guardian / custodial sense, to country. I have to be careful here, because it’s not the same. But there are some similarities.

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What is clear is that in Gemes’s work there is a consciousness of everything else that might be going on in a picture. There is a sense of the potential and likely, a consideration of the subtexts that are operating on the primary, or seen, image. It is important to realize that Koori spiritual continuity is of the land and not of the camera. Gemes is sensitive to the presence and its meaning but does not suggest that it requires ‘capturing’ to persevere. Rather, she acknowledges its power and invites it to work on her constructions. She knows that without this link any interaction with the place would be infertile. It is part of her collective imagination and there is no sequestering it or bending it to her purpose. It holds the energy. Gemes is merely an active conduit for its speech. It is, in fact, because of its ‘non-literalness’ that a photographic image that is not directly related to a poem can illuminate the text by suggestion, juxtaposition, that enhances and illuminates. The Language of Oysters is very much an example of photographs prompting, or, to use a word of Gemes’s, “provoking,” the poem, while, with the Mooney Sequence, we have the poems provoking photographs. It is interesting to note that there is something of the modus operandi of Adamson’s 1989 volume of poetry The Clean Dark in this book. The idea of the image interacting and enjambing the text can be seen here. In The Language of Oysters there is a more conscious presentation of this process. In a review of The Clean Dark,73 I alluded to the process of interaction between the visual and textual planes, and referred to the use of image as signifier. It is relevant to quote sections of this piece: Robert Adamson opens The Clean Dark with a quotation from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: Two pictures of a rose in the dark. One is quite black; for the rose is invisible. In the other, it is painted in full detail and surrounded by black. Is one of them right, the other wrong? Don’t we talk of a white rose in the dark and of a red rose in the dark? And don’t we say for all that that they can’t be distinguished in the dark?74

The notion illuminated by Wittgenstein has been pressed by Adamson through the silkscreen of language. The darkness of the page, the light of inspiration. A

73

“Shadows in the Water: Robert Adamson’s The Clean Dark,” Salt 1.1 (June

1990): 83–90. 74

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations: Second Edition, tr. & ed. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953): Part I.515.

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focal point, to be sure, but no answer, no solution. And this positive equivocation is carried throughout the collection, despite something of a refutation in the final poem. Or is this the reaction made necessary, the details anchoring the magic?

The piece goes on to reference the link between image and text: The dust cover offers us death suspended, netted. Each section in turn opens with a photograph by Juno Gemes. The first, a camera mounted on a tripod aimed at a tin shed, a distillation of the art. The black and white Symbolist cross-over, a tease, a tempting desire. The camera is there for a shot to be taken, the image and attainment, a result of intention. But maybe this shot will not be executed, it is as the red and the white rose, the darkness.

And: The final section of the book, “No River, No Death,” is introduced by the most effective, to my eye, of the photographs. Life-shift, the wreckage of shadow and light, the plumbed depths, stilled ripples, Trees, sky, shed and shack, collapsing inward, though with a poise that is almost graceful. And, somewhere, there is death. Language “licking its flesh wounds.” “No River, No Death,” the first poem, consolidates the Stygian imagery: Now leave from a jetty, souls going where souls go

and The wharf sags with tar-drenched oyster racks and a fisherman’s punt rocks as its side for Charon.

Though, in spite of these reflections on death, a matter-of-fact wonderment retains a place (beyond the “microwaved” voices of politicians / civilization): the larrikin prawn bird starts to sing

This last line so much captures the spirit of the river dwellers. Even in death they look to the wider world, to its mysteries and wonders. There is always a dignified humour to be found in their austerity. What is fascinating in The Clean Dark in the context of this discussion is that the river, a place that has ‘always’ been Adamson’s and to which he has given his signature, is the dynamic that has developed between him and Gemes. Each has enriched the other’s vision. Gemes has brought another history to Adamson’s. In terms of duration, there’s a new essence to complement those that have passed before. As with the two roses, we are talking about notions of presence. The dynamic between the concept and the observed ‘thing’ is the crux of this, as it is in the collaboration between poet and photographer.

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The dialogue that occurs between Gemes and Adamson is very much about giving voice and illuminating the unseen. Mangroves are a fascinating sourcing of the unseen. In Adamson’s poem “Phasing Out The Mangroves” we sense that the language of the mangroves (“The great hunched mangroves / will no longer tend/ the instincts of kingfishers;”) is comprehended by the swamp children but not the language of destruction, of the intruding “modern civilization” (“the swamp children / speaking a language of arithmetic in cracked syllables”). Ecologically, there is loss here, but the faces of the river are resilient and will build around change. In Gemes’s photographs we find image after image juxtaposing the trappings of the modern world, subtly, with those of the ‘old’. It’s as if the spirit of the mangroves will still be struggling up into the light from beneath the “bent glass and metal domes.” Gemes’s mysterious and almost breathtakingly silent photographs (the ‘silence’ is almost threatening) of mangrove shoots pushing up through the mud echo these themes most profoundly because they make reference to nothing but the mystery of the mangroves themselves. It is because we subconsciously form juxtaposition ourselves, through being familiar with the construction of the book and the nature of Adamson’s verse, that we make such observations and feel such impressions. They are ghostly and mysterious but have a primal power that is of the instinct of kingfishers. There is a strength there, as there is in any of the portraits of the river people. It’s as if they are of the dark room, these otherworld creations. But of course they are the guts of the river itself – the art is there in nature, with all its force and wonder. One thing that is striking in Adamson’s river verse is his confluence with the river. It flows through his blood and over the page with the sleekness of a fish run. The flathead emerging from his hands in the image Adamson’s Catch (52, Section V) suggests that it’s difficult to separate the two. It’s interesting to note that such communities are based on a cyclical understanding of survival. The predator and the predated are necessary to each other. The sense of comfort with this is not always there, and death isn’t always matter of fact. There are those nagging doubts. The grandmother tells her grandson that “the prawns will eat you / when you die on the Hawkesbury,” and the ocean is something which the river requires but which is like a truth that is too awesome to face – where “The colour of their skin / mingles with the blood of their predators” and “Our bodies are constantly drawn towards the slaughter”; consider “They are the flesh we feed upon come from the depths / out beyond the Continental Shelf.” Gemes deals with Adamson’s more sombre and darkly gestating images with care and delicacy. She synthesizes them into a

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greater picture that can tolerate the darkness of thought. In her hands they always emerge solid and life-affirming. Though both she and Adamson deal with minutiae, the fine details of this existence, it is as part of a larger picture. Robert Adamson has spent much of his life at the mouth of the Hawkesbury. As the Bunyah of New South Wales is to Les Murray’s verse, so is the Hawkesbury to Adamson’s. Adamson, the great Australian lyrical poet, has developed an extensive oeuvre of songs and incantations that draw on the environment, mythology, and spirit of the Hawkesbury. His metempsychotic bird poems, his codices of love and death, and evocative lyrics of place, are well known. But Adamson is also an innovator, constantly introducing new vocabularies and ‘voices’ into his rich and varied language, and through this the infinite languages of the river. In recent poem like “Creon’s Dream” we find new arrivals: The river seeps through the window, the books are opened out on the desk. When the first breeze hits the curtains the cats scatter. It could be dawn for all I know, concentration wanders through Creon’s words to Antigone Go to the dead and love them – okay so they live as long as I do – what else can I make of it? The bright feathers from a crimson rosella lie in clumps on the floor with a pair of broken wings.

There are new poems here as well as those taken from Canticles on the Skin, The Rumour, Swamp Riddles, Cross the Border, Where I Come From, The Clean Dark, and Waving to Hart Crane. It is interesting to note that these poems, regardless of where they sit in the manuscript, speak to each other. There is a sense of permanence about them. They flow between each other like the river between points on the riverbanks. In other words, the history of the place is constantly redefining the future, and vice versa. Once again, it’s a juxtaposition of essences. Adamson has been distilling these essences for decades, and, in many senses, Gemes’s images form a kind of visualization of this process. That is how an earlier poem can interact with a later image. The poem allows entry because it is fluid, the image invites the poem because it is conscious of the total history of the place, and the poem is part of this. One is reminded of the Spanish picaresque novel with its narrative flow, collation of experience, with some destination bringing it all into focus. In a sense, the publication of this volume,

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with the interaction between image and text, brings the work of both artists into a new kind of focus. Each can exist artistically without the other, but together they enrich and add commentary to the other’s craft. In considering Gemes’s portraiture, I’d like to bring to notice two images from section I V of the book: “No 41 Lorraine Biddle (née Doyle)” shows Axel Poignant’s portrait of Lorraine’s grandmother (Margaret Alberta Doyle – Lower Mangrove Creek, 1951) and “No. 42 June (Morley) Bonser with model of Surprise I I daughters-in-law Gwen & Jan Morley, grandchildren Sandra Vassallo, Debbie Groat, great-grandchildren Kylie & Nathan Vassallo & Melinda Camera.” What is emphasized in both of these images is the continuity of family and identification with the river. It is a wonderful compression of time as well as emphasis on change. The grandmother is still with us – not because of the photo, but because of the spirit of the granddaughter. But what the image does, like a poem, is act as an annotation to the fact. A reminder to an outsider of what is knowledge to the insider. It is also of the spirit of Gemes as artist that she pays homage to her artistic predecessor in Axel Poignant, accepting his art as part of the river’s spirit. This is like the poet recognizing those poets who have rowed similar waters (with Adamson we have Shelley, Mallarmé, Olson, Duncan, Webb, Slessor, Bishop, Crane, and many others). A Gemes portrait works like an Adamson poem; it allows the inner light of the subject to glow. In the poems taken from Where I Come From we feel this acutely. With the river as background, and using the ‘child’ as focus, the poet paints a complex family portrait. Take “My Fishing Boat”: Mum and Dad are at it again in the room next to mine their terrible sobbing comes through the damp wall they fight about something I have done I get out of bed and go down the yard to the river push my boat out into the black and freezing bay under the mangroves that smell like human shit

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I move along my secret channel my hands blistering from rowing slip with blood around the cove I tie up on a mangrove it rains harder all I catch are catfish here and have them sliding about in the belly of the boat they are the most ugly looking things in the world

In image 42, the shifts and continuity between generations are palpable. Apart from genetic associations, the model of Surprise I I brings out of the faces what it is that is common to each. This is their history; it makes them inseparable. This is what we feel on reading Adamson’s poetry – that once it is in the blood, one could never leave this place. In none of Gemes’s portraits is there a sense of exclusion. Her evocations belong, as do Adamson’s sensitive and passionate songs of river life and spirit, to the realm of essences. In arranging the images and text into sections, the authors invite us to make assumptions about how they should be read. But these are narratives, and not essays. They are taken and written from the inside and projected out. As we find Henri Cartier–Bresson saying in an interview, I have never been interested in the documentary aspect of photography except as a poetic expression. Only the photograph that springs from life is of interest to me. The joy of looking, sensitivity, sensuality, imagination, all that one takes to heart, come together in the viewfinder of a camera. That joy will exist for me forever.75

And Cartier–Bresson’s point is as relevant to the poet as it is to the photographer. Gemes and Adamson, so defined in their own arts, are also expressing a vision that breaks free of the implied boundaries of form, that asserts itself anew and unhindered with every page – be it of text or image. In The Language of Oysters, both artists evoke the spirit of the river and its inhabitants, and also conjure the element of art itself, so often absent from documentary observation. It is the realm of potential meanings, deep below the layers of

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Henri Cartier–Bresson, in Paul Hill & Thomas Cooper, Dialogue with Photography (1979; Manchester: Cornehouse, rev. ed. 1992): 66–69.

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text and image that touch us. As Henri Peyre has said of Mallarmé’s “[Le Vierge, Le Vivace Et Le Bel Aujourd’Hui],” The interested reader, who may prefer a reading different from ours, would do well to remember Robert Frost’s insistence that a poet is entitled to all the meanings that can be found in his poem.76

On the Collaboration of Robert Adamson and Juno Gemes77

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A U S T R A L I A , I discovered the poetry of Robert Adamson in a Selected Poems published by Angus and Robertson in the mid-1970s. I had been studying Australian poets for my final exams and it was with excitement and wonder that I read these poems from a poet who not only spoke in a voice that was modern and familiar, but also one that defied categorization, being imagistically rich, informed, dangerous, streetwise, and literary. His poetry undoubtedly had a ‘mystical’ quality, but not in any saccharine sense of the word. Rather, it called on the reader to participate in the discovery of the poetic, in the uncertainty – the terror and the beauty – of metaphor, of language metamorphosing into something that works on its own terms. In other words, the poem gaining a life of its own. It didn’t surprise me to find that Adamson’s great obsessions were Shelley, Mallarmé, and the American poet Robert Duncan, who, each in his own way, explored the ur-text of the Word, the sublimity of the poem. So vital was the stuff of an Adamson poem, so energetic the ‘calling’ of his poetic, that I found myself on the Perth–Sydney Greyhound bus, crossing the Nullarbor Plain in search of this intense and unique voice. I say ‘voice’ specifically, as I had no idea what the person ‘Robert Adamson’ was like, and knew nothing of his personal life other than what I could draw from the poems – and, as any reader knows, you don’t fuse personae and authors. So maybe I was in search of a ‘source’ of a ‘poetry’, more than anything else.

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EVENTEEN YEARS AGO IN

Henri Peyre, “[Le Vierge, Le Vivace Et Le Bel Aujourd’Hui],” in The Poem Itself, ed. & tr. Stanley Burnshaw, with Dudley Fitts & Henri Peyre (1960; Fayetteville: U of Arkansas P , 1995): 54. 77 As a supplement to “A Juxtaposition of Essences,” here my book-launch speech for The Language of Oysters, given at Australia House, London, in 1997.

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I eventually found Robert, in Balmain, operating at what could only be called full throttle. The chemistry was explosive – we talked of Dransfield, Shelley, Duncan, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and dozens of other poets. We raved for days without sleep. And, on this level, nothing much has changed – pursuing an idea or image until it has been ‘rendered’ into poetry. From that first meeting Robert and I have maintained a friendship and have discussed poetry and poetics, with a similar intensity across varying distances. It was through Robert I met Juno Gemes. With Juno a similar chemistry developed. As soon as I saw the photographs from her “Under Another Sky” exhibition and heard of her support for Koori and other indigenous people’s land-rights campaigns, I knew this was someone whose work I would have to examine closely. Juno’s photos have inspired me to write not only criticism but also poems and chunks of ‘experimental’ prose. What didn’t surprise me was that Juno and Robert should work together. I had the good fortune to review their ‘juxtapositions’ in Robert’s award-winning and iconic volume of poetry The Clean Dark. In some senses, this book gave a clue to what was to come. The poetic spirit I found in each of them I found intensified when they worked together. The Language of Oysters is testament to both a unified vision and the uniqueness of two artists reacting to and through the medium of place. The works, while remaining independent of each other, ‘speak’ to one another. This is what makes this book unique. The authorial integrity of each artist is respected, yet there is almost a third artist present – a language of image and text that is conjured out of juxtaposition, out of a recognition of a way, or ways, of seeing. Above and beyond all else, this is a book of great warmth. Rather than merely exploring a sense of place, it reveres it. And this attitude is exemplified by the wonderful production values Craftsman House have pursued in what can only be called an artefact. Adamson and Gemes are of the Hawkesbury River, a place rich in lore of Koori and post-settlement cultures. Personally, it serves as the coda to the complex motives and needs that originally sent me in search of the poet Robert Adamson. That search was a search for place, for a voice in which I might share. This is a book that examines the boundaries and frames of belonging. It is a constant declaration of wonder – and there is symmetry in this.

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David Brooks: Urban Elegies78

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H E N D A V I D B R O O K S ’ S L A S T V O L U M E O F P O E T R Y , Walking to Clear Point, was published in 2005, it carried the particular weight and fascination of being his first volume of poetry in twenty-two years. It had been preceded in 1983 by The Cold Front, which for some of us was an influential book of ‘deep image’ poetry carved along faultlines and flaws, figuring honed poems of darkness and light. Now, after only a two-year gap, Brooks’s new collection of poems, Urban Elegies, has been published by the Island Press cooperative.79 It is a fascinating collection in terms of its specific poems, and of its chronological spectrum. The volume is divided into three distinct sections that nonetheless have much in common stylistically, texturally, and thematically – “Living in the World” is followed by “Urban Elegies,” and the book finishes with “Three Early Poems,” which we might interpret as a lacuna for the space of Brooks’s public absence poetically, at least in terms of book publication, during that long ‘silence’, or maybe even reaching further back to Brooks’s classic chapbook of his student days, Five Poems – classic, in that it spliced the fragmentations of Pound with the ellipses, spiritual swervings and aberrations of the Black Mountain school of poets, through to the image-resonant Robert Bly (and others). Brooks’s new volume is not simply a collection of individual poems; it is, rather, one that has been brought together because the time is right for these poems to work as a book. Brooks is like this with his short fiction, diary/ journal material, and critical work: pieces find their place in juxtaposition and in context of other pieces. He is supremely patient in the execution of a work, even if, at times, under all the poise and control of his work, there is a tension, a restlessness at the constraints of form. In my journal, I noted, of Brooks’s new book, on a cold wheatbelt morning: his poetry induces a pause – not hesitation and not meditation (much of The Cold Front still in him) but, rather, a sense of caution. Even in poems where there is a more intimate and familial Ken Boltonesque discussion and interaction with friends, where irony belongs to the conversation and occasion rather than the situation or conversation being ironized (necessarily), the

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“David Brooks, Urban Elegies,“ Australian Book Review 294 (September 2007):

47–48. 79

David Brooks, Urban Elegies (Woodford, N S W : Island, 2007).

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persona of these poems, the poet ‘David Brooks’, living his life the best he can, teeters on the edge of horror and collapse. The poem “Sadness” ironizes the emotion, the state of ‘sadness’, through friends, alcohol, the familial, the safe – driving out sadness only to have it raise larger ontological questions. What excuse do we have to be unhappy, to feel sadness? Is it a necessary default setting? He finishes that poem with the lines: my wife is happy my daughter is happy the fish in the fishpond are darting about under the little fountain as if sadness were another country, much too far away to bother with today

The casual tone, the almost flippant disregard, turns the poem sharply. It means the opposite of what it says, its implication that the best kind of personal “rewards” bring the largest emptiness, or “sadness,” leaves the reader hanging. Earlier, I referred to a sense of caution because moments of beauty suggest a cost or a loss – even when there seems to be nothing specifically located. It has more to do with the pacing of lines, stanzas, the use of precipice – single words or very short lines leading into horizon-length lines that take us further than an edge: Night fills us with unassailable longing;

Often a resigned yet self-ironizing conversation, cut to the necessary, guides us. Brooks’s engagements with ‘evil’ turn on and through the observing self – certainty is relative. Death is often close at hand, but its trauma is elevated to a form of fatalism. When he invokes the “thingyness of things,” it is in the spirit of Ponge, a spirit of the myriad in the finite. Nature deeply invests the poems. The central section of the book, the eponymous “Urban Elegies,” does not exclude the ‘natural’ from the constructed, and, indeed, these poems are often tense textual manoeuverings between the two. His irony works in conjunction with an earnestness; in the ridiculous, tendentious, or humorous, he finds the invested moment, the resonating possibility. In “The End of Poetry, Again,” we begin:

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It’s the 8th of April, 2001 and a poet has just declared the end of poetry, again

The temporal specificity lends a scientific precision to the declaration, heightening absurdity. But Brooks isn’t a lampooner or a mocker; the absurdity is reflected back on the ‘self’, and the poet’s own complicity and vulnerability. It is a wicked tool to open a door of conjecture on a quiddity that equivocates between the sincere and the ironic: I agree about civilisation but find I have to think about the rest; certainly I don’t want any other creatures to suffer big or small any more than they are suffering already but I am not quite sure that not writing is quite the way to go

Okay, it pours irony, right down to the enjambment of the second-last line, tipping us into the metatext, into the act of ‘writing’. But there’s also an empathy with animals that simmers and intensifies through the poem, just as it does in a “Dog at Fifty” and “Rat Theses,” from the same middle section. The opening section of the book, “Living in the World,” carries an almost perfectly balanced poem in which the irony is genuine sadness and horror at the behaviour of humans towards other living things. After “four-wheel drives some like to call / ‘Balmain Bulldozers’,” we read: The traffic is loud and hard to listen through. The delicate beaks and fragile skull-bones, the tiny, intricate feet under the dark rubber tyres make sounds that nobody can ever hear.

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The use of the line-break, the precipice words, is typical, but the strength of this indictment is enhanced by the use of commas. Brooks is always a technician, even a formalist, at heart. He is also a poet of dichotomies and resolvable paradoxes – place is specific, even totemic – the persona’s having been there, especially with loved ones, makes it even more so. There’s a de-dramatized, familial tension between the aesthetic and actual, where the subjectivity of the persona, the lyrical self, undoes its own unities of perception through self-questioning, and most often the simple act of questioning itself. ‘He’ just is – with follies, achievements, responsibilities, wonderings, pleasures, and losses. No loud declarations are made for this ‘position’, but the poems remain emphatic. There’s a window onto a hermetic world, a world often located in urban proximity and closeness – spatiality is always working to resolve the ‘free’ and the ‘constructed’ in a particular space – a space of self-questioning that comes out of reflecting on the world at large. The macro through the micro. The poet constantly challenges whatever attempts to confine this subjectivity. The poems in Urban Elegies encapsulate wonder and contained anger, irony, and a sincerity that most often becomes unspeakable – in fact, becomes ‘pure image’. Brooks has always been an imagist at his core. There is a strong and conscious residue here of his earlier engagement with ‘deep image’ poetry, of the hyper-invested spiritual-material of a poet like Galway Kinnell. But Brooks has allowed the space of his poems to grow – they have a relaxed quality now that makes the pain and sorrow resonate all the more. The anger that drives him, in deep hurt, to curse the poisoner of a garden resolves itself into incantation, the form ironizing his condemnation. Finishing thus: Let them never understand such fury, such sadness as this

“The Curse” is explosively angry, but its anaphoric deployment allows space for any fallen angel to be resurrected. Brooks has not learned to hate. He is a master of subverting the reader’s expectations, of letting himself in through our flaws – the most celebratory, the most ‘living’ poems often being the most residually disturbing. His steady rhetorical control lures us, encasing imagistic slices, bursts, and moments, the self-narratorial/interior monologic ‘overhearing’. Although the poems seem straightforward in what they are saying, they are subtly innovative in their deployment of voice, subjectivity, and observation of the natural and material world. There is also a conversation going on with all other poets, the key to which is his resistance to all

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forms of gate-keeping – try out the cuttingly ironic “Barnyard Revelation Poem.” Not everything the poems attempt comes off – they are strongest when being ‘strong’, and can occasionally become too easy, or too casual, missing that haunting resonance you don’t expect. Occasionally a poem moves between the two states unconvincingly. But the power of Brooks’s work can never be underestimated, and there is an important poetic project going on here amid the integrity of individual poems. The construction of the book is primary to Brooks, and each poem becomes part of the whole, speaking across and through the book. In this he bends to his Symbolist predecessors, especially early C.J. Brennan, but he is altogether outside of symbolism as well: his images are too specific, too located for this. It’s the hybrid sensibility in the oeuvre that make him a significant poet in these insights and elegies of transformation and epiphanies, ends and beginnings, curses and blessings.

David Brooks: The Balcony80

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for David Brooks in a variety of genres. His poetry, which I have been reading since I was a teenager, has consolidated his earliest taut imagistic investigations that touched on the deep imagery of Galway Kinnell and Robert Bly but took the poems into a particular subjectivity that allowed the reader to be interior to the poems’ confrontations with vulnerability, metaphysical intensity and the contradictory but vatic life /death drive. In this remarkable new volume of poetry,81 that life /death leitmotif is still the force behind the questionings, but it is tempered with a critique of the ideal of ‘love’ that transforms it into something visceral and impelling. This is not to say that the earlier poems were not charged with an emotion around the life /death motif; indeed, they were. But there is something that has been sprung from a trap in these poems. This is much more sophisticated and nuanced than a poetry of masculinity and vulnerability that uses the familiar binary of the young female lover and older mentoring male to show a form of rejuvenation and ‘teaching’ that validates and confirms a resistance to societal 80 81

HE LAST FEW YEARS HAVE BEEN VERY PRODUCTIVE

“David Brooks, The Balcony,” Blue Dog 8.15 (2009): 54–56. David Brooks, The Balcony (Brisbane: U of Queensland P , 2008).

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norms. Here, the mentoring and learning go on in all directions: assumptions are broken open. This book needed to be written. When Brooks affirms, in his Catullus-irony-tempered rage, One hundred love poems? Don’t be ridiculous. Your colleagues will give you shit, and all those others, for whom love is an expression of failure, lack of nerve. . .

he doesn’t require a defence to do what he is doing poetically; he is going to go ahead and do it. The difference between this work and Brooks’s earliest work, such as in The Cold Front, is that certainty has now been put not only through the intellectual mill but also through the physical, bodily mill. The body itself knows what works and what doesn’t, and, indeed, these poems have an integrity that is at times painful, because they know when something is good and when something needs to be challenged. One poem in this collection that reflect the intensity of Brooks’s willingness to be held accountable through making such challenges is “Pater Noster,” which says, without reservation, where the nations clash in their incomprehensible military psychosis, letting their own people starve while the guns and the makers of guns, the ravenous makers devour and devour, here where twenty-two humans killed in an ambush is international news but the slaughter of one hundred million animals each day to feed their slaughterers goes unmentioned like the guilty secret it is that the whole civilization rides upon (you a slaughterer, me a slaughterer, she, he, all of us, yet the very mention is blasphemy)

It is important to ground this collection in such moments, with their rhetorical and discursive force, because so much of the book takes the imagistic tautness of Brooks’s earlier work a step further by eschewing all discursiveness for the glimpse, the moment, the realization. But this is not as simple as it sounds, any more than a more rhetorical poem like “Pater Noster” is. To understand why this is the case, we need to consider not only what is being said, and what moment is being caught – especially the ineffable and unsayable moments of love, desire, and connection between two people – but the background against which it is being said. Now these moments manifest

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themselves in a variety of ways. In particular, there is the physical location, which in this book ranges from a Sydney home with its balcony, through a village in Slovenia, the home of the persona’s lover and wife, to Paris. Location is vital, in that the tensions between belonging yourself, and belonging through someone else, are constantly in play. This sense of strong or vicarious connection is accordingly affected by those who might be watching you, who might see you, and who you in turn are conscious of. The central symbol and motif of the book is the balcony itself, which is a place not only of viewing – to see the world outside – but on which you yourself might be viewed – as in the remarkable poem in which a long kiss is watched by outsiders until its absolute intactness outlives them, and they are gone. Or making love near the archbishop’s house – not a problem, because no one’s looking. The Balcony is not only a collection of individual poems but a narrative and timeline. Past lives are re-awakened through new experiences and ways of reliving old experiences. It would be easy enough to say a ‘freshness’ comes into the language as much as the joie de vivre of the relationship that impels the book. But, again, it’s not really that simple. The ‘freshness’ is always loaded with a sense of mortality – whether it’s the loss of a close friend, the constant realization that one’s own death is not only inevitable but possible at any time, and that while the intensity of love that is driving the poems is at its peak, what is going on around is likely brutal, indifferent, and cruel. David Brooks has always been a literarily rich writer. He has an astonishing gift for retaining clarity of expression while creating an intensity of feeling and ideas. His poems have strong literary resonances, whether it’s Czes¶aw Mi¶osz’s Bells in Winter, which David gave me when I was twenty years old in the hope that I would learn to hone and time a poem, or SÌecko Kosovel, the brilliant Slovenian poet who died aged twenty-two but left a vast oeuvre of unique, often minimalist, intense investigations of language and place charged with irony, doubt, and bereftness, which David Brooks has cotranslated with Bert Pribac, or William Blake, or Ezra Pound, or Jacques Prévert, whose voice is so strong in The Balcony. Prévert’s Paroles is a deceptively ‘clear’ book that nonetheless was a revolution in French post-surrealist poetry. Prévert showed a literary audience that poetry doesn’t have to sacrifice its subtexts to be widely read and to be felt by non-poets. It is a great work. Brooks has worked through the spirit of Paroles in creating what is, to my mind, an equally great work, and his translation of Prévert’s “Barbara” is a direct case in point. Prévert’s poem, with its

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persona painting an intimate portrait of a woman he doesn’t know but has only briefly observed in a moment of passion with a man, is so apt a poem for Brooks to translate in the context of The Balcony, with its public and private aspects. One is almost in a theatre watching a film with oneself in it watching the action. This is the key to understanding the significance of Brooks’s love poems. In the most intimate moments, the persona is at once so physically involved yet also almost voyeuristically detached. Intimacy is possibly the most valued quality of life therein, but it never escapes the consciousness of mortality and the social realities of the world that surround it. It is not coincidental that the persona’s lover in the book is a translator. This is a book about language as much as about place or love, and the possibly redemptive qualities of poetry. Translation is not a panacea, any more than love ultimately can be, but the two are intimately connected, and love is conveyed as a form of sharing in which the act of translation is often oxymoronic or paradoxical: She is writing a message with her tongue on my neck in a language I don’t understand, there are birds nesting in my hair, my skin is singing a wild, untranslatable jubilate.

In these lines, we ‘get’ what is being translated, even if we don’t have the original language, and this is at the core of this brilliant work.

David Brooks: The Sons of Clovis 82

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in one form or another. They may wish to remain anonymous (did Helen Darville want to be busted?), or they may leap out at some point to shame their targets. After all, the wrongs they highlight wouldn’t be noticed and rectified if the game wasn’t up. Whether it’s Gwen Harwood with her pseudonyms and acrostics, 82

OAXERS REQUIRE ATTENTION

David Brooks, The Sons of Clovis: Ern Malley, Adoré Floupette and a secret history of Australian poetry (St Lucia: U of Queensland P , 2011).

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or James McAuley and Harold Stewart with their ‘outing’ of the hollowness and ‘nonsense’ of the post-Symbolists, as manifested in the surrealist and Apocalyptic tendencies of 1930s and early 1940s innovative writing, in the end, it comes down to craving attention. This might pass, or they might claim they wish it did, but a lifelong investment in their hoax’s success becomes part of the fabric of their identity. David Brooks, in his brilliant work of literary detection, The Sons of Clovis, guides the reader through the circles of literary constructs and national literatures, weighing up evidence for what drives the hoaxer, and specifically what informed and led to the Ern Malley Hoax of 1944. In essence, though Brooks tracks both men and their overlapping roles, it is primarily James McAuley and his crisis of soul and body that we follow, and who is presented as Malley’s core identity. If I have any criticism of Brooks’s take, it’s that one might also read the Malley poems as an embodied conflict between McAuley and Stewart, a young men’s rivalry, in which lines compete with each other as much as fit into a construct that no amount of ‘randomness’ can undo. Brooks discusses how the uncertainty resulting from Australian migrant cultures’ anxiety, in the context of Indigenous dispossession, facilitates a hoaxing environment. His interweaving of cause and effect, and demonstration of the few degrees of separation between hoax events and their outcomes, work something like a Brother Cadfael mystery. Digression and tangents are often the most ‘direct’ route to a truth. That’s because truth is necessarily only as stable as context and circumstance – who accepts it, who will confirm it. Writing poetry has always been about agendas as much as ‘inspiration’, and poets are rarely islanded; they wish to speak to someone. Australian poetry harbours settler /invader anxieties or resistances, depending on where one sits in or outside the construction of literary nation, and ‘isolation’ is often there to overcome. It is pivotal to understanding the Ern Malley hoax, and the hoaxers’ intention, that their targets weren’t only Max Harris in Adelaide and his band of Angry Penguins, but ‘larger’ international figures of the Apocalyptic poetic, especially the ‘anarchist’ Herbert Read, who wasn’t hoodwinked, because he read the poems knowing they were a hoax, counterpointing with a famous telegram saying the hoaxers were “H O I S T E D B Y O W N P E T A R D . . . T O U C H E D O F F U N C O N S C I O U S S O U R C E S I N S P I R A T I O N . . . W O R K . . . H A S E L E M E N T S O F G E N U I N E P O E T R Y .”

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The Sons of Clovis I I is a large oil painting by the French artist Évariste– Vital Luminais held in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, painted in 1880 and purchased in 1886.83 As the gallery’s notes point out, It says much for the grotesquery of nineteenth-century Salon painting, of which it is so spectacular an example, that “The sons of Clovis II” is still a collection favourite.

We also read, of Luminais: “His great success with this painting in the Paris Salon of 1880 was not repeated, its cadaverous sensationalism proving a hard act to follow.” Though he did, in fact, paint a second version of the painting! The original ‘Clovis’ painting, along with Adoré Floupette’s ‘decadent’ poetry, published in book-form in Byzance by a ‘Lione Vanné’ under the title Les Déliquescences and introduced to readers in Paris in 1885, are the triggers for what proves to be a compelling, well-researched, risk-taking and often playful exploration of the sources of Ern Malley’s poetry. But if, in David Brooks’s book of literary investigation and hypothesis, it seems that the Clovis painting is a tangent, or that I am merely offering it up here without resolving why it is so pivotal to this book, consider it no accident. Its presence and absence are part of the ‘mystery’ that Brooks narratively resolves but still leaves for us to ponder, to draw our own conclusions on. Decadent 1880s Paris is a lens, as much as Sydney, Adelaide, and New Guinea, as well as the Second World War, form loci through which an alternative story of Australian poetry and poetics is focused. Floupette’s poems, a response or reaction to French avant-garde poetry and art, in particular the work of Verlaine, Corbière, Moréas, and Mallarmé, were in fact the creation of the poet Gabriel Vicaire and the journalist Henri Beauclair. Brooks points out that the men made no great effort to hide their authorship and, further, that the parodies were not mere attacks on ‘Symbolisme’. The first edition of 110 copies was sold and a reprint was issued (1,500 copies) which carried a fictitious biography of the poet. Brooks considers the relevance of those who recognized it as parody and those who took it seriously, bringing us to this vital point: “The distinction between parody and parodied is beginning to blur.” Brooks, early on in his Malley adventures, discovered an edition of Floupette in the A N U library which had once belonged to the Sydney poet Chris

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The painting can be viewed at http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/work /712/ (accessed 4 July 2012).

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Brennan. This drew him to the painting Sons of Clovis (the connection coming from the title of the first poem in Floupette’s book, “Les énervés de Jumièges,” which proves to be the painting’s ‘alternative’ title). We then, with digressions, travel with him via James McAuley’s M A thesis on French Symbolist poetry, and the likelihood of his familiarity with Brennan’s copy of the French hoax book, through an extended metaphor of the hamstrung sons of Clovis and their punishment for rising up against their father, and, through Brooks’ mythopoetics (extrapolating from Michael Ackland), become aware that Stewart and McAuley were “damaged men,” like the sons of Clovis. This grotesque painting (which one assumes both McAuley and Stewart had seen at the gallery), becomes a byword for their implosion of symbolism. Brooks says: Each had been passing, in the years before manufacturing the hoax poems, and would continue to pass for some time afterward, through a kind of dark night of the soul. [. . . ] To each of them it came to seem, was coming to seem, as the hoax poems were being composed, as if relinquishment of the self to a spiritual path was their only means out of severe psychic pain. (19)

Be it for Stewart’s conversion to Buddhism in Japan, or McAuley’s wartime New Guinea epiphany and conversion to Catholicism, Malley is presented as a turning point. And it clearly is for Brooks as well, who, in tracking the cause and effect, also tracks a crisis in Australian poetry, the all-too-frequent ‘canonical’ claim that the postwar period was empty of innovation. I don’t think Brooks believes this. Whether it’s engaging with what are ultimately the self-serving acrostics and pseudonymous ‘hoaxes’ of Gwen Harwood (and Vincent Buckley) or the environment of literary oppression that led to the trial for obscenity against Harris for publishing Malley’s Darkening Ecliptic, or the banning of Donald Allen’s pivotal anthology of American Poetry (published 1960), until 1965, with the so-called release of inhibitions that comes with the Generation of ’68, I don’t accept that the period was empty of innovation and never have. Innovation is always there if you look. Though the Malley episode instilled doubt in some editors’ minds, and though it became a reclamation and generator later, the Generation of ’68 isn’t an announcement that modernism is back; rather, that a new consciousness of announcing its presence is consolidating. The poets of the mid- to late 1960s got their message heard more effectively, but maybe not more effectively (ultimately) than McAuley and Stewart. The latter were about announ-

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cing their presence, even if a newspaper at the time jumped the gun somewhat and broke the hoax before they were ready. (Brooks, in a late post-conclusion chapter – this book has ‘false’ beginnings and endings – finds Malley lingering in McAuley’s translations of the even more tormented poet, Georg Trakl, who wrote with Malleyesque qualities through addiction, I’d say.) Central to Brooks’s detection work is picking up on the ‘signs’ in the Malley poems and tracing them to their sources. And we find borrowings and references from a library of cultural referents rather than the few supposed books the men had at hand on the afternoon of composition. Naturally, as one takes all one’s knowledge and experience to reading a text, so one takes it in different measures to writing them. The poems become the sum total of who their writers are. Brooks makes a necessary point about the problem for the parodist: too far from the target won’t fool anyone, and once the poems become nearly as good as or better than the ‘originals’, the mockery is defeated by the affirmation behind the intentions of their ‘target’. Brooks: If the hoax is too well and too thoroughly disguised, to the extent where most readers would not notice and would need to have the hoax pointed out and explained to them, the hoaxers cannot really claim to have exposed the folly and poor judgement of their target. (71)

And, speaking of the Floupette case: A part of the problem [. . . ] is doubtless the not uncommon one where parody is concerned, that a bad parody won’t do the job, and that a good one risks being virtually indistinguishable from the thing itself. (188)

McAuley and Stewart had known each other since high school in Sydney. But as Brooks weaves and warps his case for a more universal Malley, tracing textual sources from Mallarmé to Eliot, we come to realize that not only Malley’s sources but also ‘cause’ /incubation go further back than the lives of the protagonists. The issue of parody and ‘inspiration’ becomes increasingly tangled, and what we are left with is not a straightforward ‘nonsense’ parody of the Angry Penguins ‘school’ of modernism wherein symbolism has been consumed by the incontinent unconscious displays of surrealism and Apocalypticism. Rather, we have something altogether more poised, controlled, and cathartic. In many ways, we see McAuley and Stewart using the hoax as a means of shifting their own poetic and ontological practices in a crucible fired by the trauma of war. And if we accept Noel Malcolm’s premise that nonsense poetry is a comic genre, and the best (of what he collected) is supremely

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enjoyable,84 the grim and perverse poems of Ern are a long way from such nonsense. And there is no revelation in the fact that Ern Malley’s poetry has long had a life of its own despite protestation of ‘nonsense’. Nor that the poems, apparently, set modernism in Australia back a couple of decades. I have never believed this to be the case, and clearly Brooks doubts it, too. He touches on the vagaries and uniqueness of Australia’s takes on modernism; this was where I wished for more. Vitally, though, Brooks notes: Australian cultural circumstance might have rendered some of what was elsewhere deemed modernism redundant or irrelevant, or changed some of it beyond immediate recognition. Australian modernism, this is to say, might not have looked like European modernism. (69)

Touché! Brooks goes on to configure the most important point in this whole discussion: If you look deeply enough into works of Australian naturalism from the late nineteenth century onward you find them dealing with a number of issues that a eurocentric modernism could deal with only by departing from naturalism. From this alternate perspective it can be argued not only that Judith Wright, Patrick White, Francis Webb, Bruce Beaver and others carried modernism very strongly through the 1950s and ’60s, but that a number of other authors who, to unaccustomed eyes, might not look like modernists at all, display something very much like the mind of modernism deep in the fabric of their work. (69)

The fact that the first Ern Malley poem, “Dürer: Innsbruck,” was actually created out of a pre-existing version of a McAuley poem and that, across the small oeuvre we have as a backdrop, McAuley early embraced Eliot (in addition to, as Brooks claims, the likely influences of the eastern-orientated Ezra Pound upon the eastern-bound Harold Stewart) speaks volumes for the cathartic interpretation of the poem-writing. Further, the notion that these poems were cooked up in an afternoon is firmly put to rest, with hoaxing and derision levelled at the Angry Penguins writers clearly in the air for some time, and a growing antipathy towards a new poetry both men had, to varying degrees, and with different outcomes, ‘embraced’ earlier. Towards the end of 1943, A.D. Hope was told to hold back from having a go at Harris and the 84

Noel Malcolm, The Origins of English Nonsense (London: HarperCollins, 1997).

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Penguins because McAuley and Stewart were already working on something. And there was precedent in the Adrian Lawlor and Alister Kershaw construct, Mort Brandish, who had appeared with less metatextuality in a 1941 issue of A Comment (interestingly, Harris suspected Lawlor and Kershaw regarding Malley’s possibly being a hoax, but dismissed the idea). Brooks’s book invites digressions and prompts discussion. I have touched on a fraction of its concerns and what it has to offer. There are also considerations of hoax as literary trope, of hoaxes in the Australian context, of the official (‘authorized’) Ern Malley story, its respectful use of Michael Heyward’s seminal work on Malley allowing for interesting departures and expansions of this. Brooks points out, for example, that Heyward notes the evident influence of Stéphane Mallarmé on poems such as “Documentary Film” and “Egyptian Register,” but that examination of this hasn’t been taken further. Brooks takes every examination further, and, though risking the hypothetical, usually comes out with concrete links and evidence. His arguments for the influence of Mallarmé’s “L’après-midi d’un faune” is my favourite part of this complex book. Considering the poem in its own right, he then asks, “What does this have to do with Ern Malley?” (the conversational ‘salon’ of the book). He then tells us that it might be that “ ‘ L’après-midi d’un faune’ serves as a frame for The Darkening Ecliptic no less significant and not much less extensive than Shakespeare’s Pericles, and might, if pressed, reveal to us a great deal more” (150). And Brooks presses. We see the swans possibly mistaken for nymphs manifest in the core drive of the Malley poems: “The same double-nature – and Mallarmean signature – haunts the poem’s last lines, ‘I am still / The black swan of trespass on alien waters.” We follow the traces, the desire lines of poetry, its intertextuality. I named this in The Australian as one of my best books of 2011 because it adds greatly to a necessary non-linear reading of twentieth-century Australian poetry, following signs and traces, and offering forks in the road, but also because in this most secular of texts, there are so many stations where we might pause and admire if not worship. Whether it’s an interlude on Brennan, Pierre Abelard, or Georg Trakl, the Clovis painting or Floupette, all contribute to our understanding of the whole. If one element binds it together, it’s probably McAuley, whose biography resonates throughout, and for whom I have gained greater respect through seeing the struggle between the night-horrors of his innovative and varied poetic and his need for control, formality and certainty in a traumatized world. From anecdotes at urinals (Hope, of course!) to crossings and misses in the

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geography of New Guinea and Sydney, we see a poetry that is physically embodied. In throwing up possible connections between disparate elements, Brooks is the first to question his own motives and desires. He talks of Heyward ringing Stewart and asking about Floupette, to be told that Stewart had never heard of him, but follows up: “As I have asked before, how far should we believe the hoaxer?” And, by extension, the critic? Heyward? Brooks? The reviewer? I’d like to have given the last word to Stewart’s late ‘hoax’ manifestation, “Ho-o,” but, not having a text to quote, will go instead with these post-Malley lines of McAuley’s quoted by Brooks: For lucid Ern, ye penguins, weep no more: Henceforth he is the genius of the shore. If, unawares, you stumble into sense, His arm shall save, and your own impudence.

—2012

Michael Dransfield: A Retrospective85

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E N G L I S H , the work of Michael Dransfield is a possible junction between zones of expression and innovation. A confluence of very different ways of seeing, his poetry is often simultaneously streetwise and sophisticated, and intentionally ‘naive’. An engagement with issues of national identity and resistance to narrow, bigoted patriotism can go hand in hand with national pride. A poem might range across the field of perception, and then ‘close-up’ in a way that suggests form is directing content. Regardless, Dransfield is always innovative, often unique. It has never been fully appreciated that Australian poetry of linguistic innovation does not sit on a Western timeline of historical change. It doesn’t fit the dialectic. Extending back tens of thousands of years through Indigenous habitation, it is a poetry of song, surfaces, paint, sand, the body, trees and plants, and texture. It is of water and air and fire, of a dreaming that works beyond the linear. Even in the often racist ‘settler’ and ‘convict’ poetry, songs, and ballads of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, there is an awareness of this difference. And in those poems where the strangeness and

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N TERMS OF WORLD POETRY IN

“Introduction” to Michael Dransfield, A Retrospective, sel. & ed. John Kinsella (St Lucia: U of Queensland P , 2002).

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uniqueness of the Australian landscape and environment are being examined, there is a recognition that a different set of rules of perception is required. Barron Field’s “The Kangaroo,” with its epigram from Virgil, “Mixtumque genus, prolesque biformis,” is an interesting example of this: Kangaroo!, Kangaroo! Tho’ at first sight we should say, In thy nature that there may Contradiction be involv’d, Yet, like discord well resolv’d, It is quickly harmoniz’d.

In his introduction to the poems of Adam Lindsay Gordon (1876), Marcus Clarke uses the term “Weird Melancholy” to describe the strange and particular attributes of the Australian landscape; further on he says, “In Australia alone is to be found the Grotesque, the Weird, the strange scribblings of Nature learning how to write.…” This is the European take on the alienation of the individual within nature, that something larger is out there. Dransfield, aware of how ‘settler’ culture has worked to ‘ringbark the dreamtime’, yet not sharing the Jindyworobaks’ tendency to patronizing appropriation, merged the Clarke view with an awareness of the problematical nature of such a view. Dransfield is a nexus, a coming together of sensibilities. This is not always specifically articulated; but a deconstructive (or even ‘paranoid’) reading of a Dransfield poem will often reveal such a meeting of sensibilities at work. In the ‘colonial poet’ behind the Courland Penders poems, and in many others, there ‘lurks’ not just guilt, but self-criticism. Though often called a neo-Romantic, when it comes down to it Dransfield is hard-edged and confrontative. It’s easy to be picked up by his sonorous lines, to be lulled into a sublimity of self, without recognizing this. It’s the hardedged Dransfield, this innovative and radical late-modernist, verging on the postmodern, that is proffered in this selection. If we detect the ‘anxiety of influence’ in the contradiction between Dransfield’s desire to become a major poet – even a ‘famous’ poet, known around the world – and his wish to undermine and challenge the canon, we should also recognize his genuine discomfort with the ‘official poets’. As a poet, and in terms of his own poetry specifically, he lived in a liminal world between the avant-garde and the establishment. He was a paradox; his best poetry thrives on apparent contradictions. These ambiguities, these ‘error zones’, bring a tension and complexity to even his apparently simplest poems. Dransfield knew the difference between history and mythology, brought the two to-

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gether, and created a unique and multi-faced poetic persona that can increasingly dazzle and amaze the reader at the beginning of the twenty-first century. His aristocratic constructions and fascination with dominant and powerful individuals from history come in part from a belief that individual acts and art itself can matter, can make a difference. His ‘aristocracy’ works more as an antidote to the commercially crass, to the excesses of capitalism, than as a paean to elitism and privilege. Accusations that Dransfield was caught entirely in the ‘confessional’ self should be dismissed once and for all with the publication of this Selected Poems, which seeks to present Dransfield at his best in his various poetic guises. With dexterity and diversity, he explodes the myth of self and takes on the personae of poetic history. Whether it be the Villon of the Testaments, or Rimbaud experimenting with colours and vowels, all such possibilities come into play in Dransfield’s work. Only apparently unified, the self of a Dransfield poem is constantly under pressure, often risking decay. The critical analysis of twentieth-century English-language poetry will be re-aligned once a thorough textual investigation of Dransfield’s poems is made. They are both simple and complex. As he says in “Pas de deux for lovers,” Morning ought not to be complex. The sun is a seed cast at dawn into the long furrow of history

Michael Dransfield’s work links the innovations of late-twentieth-century Australian poetry with that revolutionary implosion of Ern Malley. There are similarities, also, to earlier Australian poets – in part Kenneth Slessor, more so Leon Gellert, Zora Cross, Harry Hooton, and Lesbia Harford – but, essentially, it was Dransfield who lifted Australian poetry into a heightened state of modernism bordering on the postmodern. The dual coding of postmodernity is there in his façadism of nineteenth-century influences – from Shelley through Rimbaud and Swinburne, with anterooms of Rilke, Quasimodo, and others, hung with art as diverse as the pre-Raphaelites and that of his one-time partner, Hilary Burns (caught, like Dransfield, in a fantasy world torn between obligation and evasion) – to the functional interior with its deft ‘modern’ language-use, its jargonistic turns and youthful zeal. The dual coding is deeper than this. While comforting those of his own time, appealing to their concerns, he also converses with the history of his

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craft – the traditions of form, the nature of the canon. He is both radical and conservative, experimental and traditional – he fuses different eras, belonging to none. He is a nodal point in the development of a hybridized poetry in Australia – a poetry that confronts the ‘colonial past’ and tries to upend it, to distort its effect. It’s a new poetry, and when John Tranter wrote The need to develop a new poetics appropriate to the age drew a different and highly individual response from each writer. Michael Dransfield, skilfully evoking a mythical ancestral estate wreathed in an opium twilight – a mood that is almost a type of Transcendental.86

he partly caught the spirit of Dransfield. The other side of Dransfield’s work is the metatextual theorist, constantly investigating the way the self and subject–object relationship shift in the poem. References to things of the past abound, but so does a language of the future. Time is destabilized. Dransfield is both transcendental and what we might now term, with consistency, deconstructive. He seeks to attain a kind of Symbolist purity in art, to rise spiritually above the material, but he is also analytic and empirical. In his last months, when Dransfield was writing the thin and biting lyrics, or strips of lyrical intent, that would eventually be gathered by his mentor Rodney Hall to form the collection The Second Month of Spring, Dransfield shredded the last vestiges of ‘persona/e’ he had constructed into poems of immediacy, mapping a ‘self’ that can be devastating, and devastated, even when the poems seem most trivial. At this time, with Dransfield caught up in sickness and hospital, suffering the results of a breakdown and physical injury, the High Romanticism and gothic overtones noted by Rodney Hall in his introduction to Voyage into Solitude dissolved. Courland Penders, the illusionary ancestral estate he’d tried to convince people was real and that he would one day inherit, had become dislodged, reduced to textual self-recrimination, disillusionment, and ironic dismissal. The most overwhelming aspect of reading through such a chronological selection of Dransfield’s work – chronological in terms of publication but not necessarily of writing, as this is87 – is to experience the journey of Rimbaud’s “Drunken Boat” as it eventually deconstructs, delimits, and dissolves itself. 86

The New Australian Poetry, ed. John Tranter (St Lucia, Queensland: Makar,

1979): xvii. 87

Michael Dransfield, Voyage into Solitude, coll., ed. & intro. Rodney Hall (St Lucia: U of Queensland P , 1978).

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At various intervals there is rage as the boat moves by a hostile riverbank – a factory spilling out pollution, a power elite gambling for a bigger slice of the pie, a decaying forest, the disillusionment of failed love – but the flow of the river (which is transcendental) blurs the need to cling to life. Life fades as the voices gets harder and more dangerous. Michael Dransfield is now recognized as one of the most influential of Australia’s poets. Writing from the mid-1960s until his death in 1973 from complications arising from drug abuse and general physical debilitation, Dransfield produced an extensive body of work of immense range. Now framed within the literary construct of the ‘Generation of ’68’, Dransfield is often discussed as being in the vanguard of the 1960s counter-cultural revolution – as one who challenged the literary status quo and overwhelmed it with his sheer talent. There is truth in this, but closer investigation reveals a far more complex picture. Dransfield was as much a literary constructor as the critics who have followed him. The shaping of a literary biography was as relevant as the work itself. However, this biography did not necessarily represent the person known as Michael Dransfield but, rather, the literary figure Michael Dransfield. It is impossible entirely to separate the two, but to some extent it’s desirable. There is no doubt that Dransfield lived and breathed poetry, that he sincerely saw himself as visionary in the mould of Arthur Rimbaud, but the conscious manipulation of identity is impossible to ignore. An internationalist, in terms of both content and appreciation of a wide range of poetry in other Englishes as well as in translation, Dransfield saw himself as a ‘global’ poet and as something of a prophet. Above all else, he is a political poet. The title of Patricia Dobrez’s biography88 is itself a play on the numerous versions of self that Dransfield created to suit different needs and environments, selves that arose from a complex literary slippage as much as from the drug-induced paranoia so readily been associated with his name. Here Dobrez notes the indecision and pragmatism of Dransfield’s ‘politics’. We get a picture of a young poet more caught up in the social politics of the ‘vibe’ and happenings, of the flower-power child stoned on freakouts and hippiedom. The counterculture in full swing – resistance to the Vietnam War; this graduate of the elite Sydney Grammar School is a confusion of middleclass conservative and nationalistic values and the Age of Aquarius.

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Patricia Dobrez, Michael Dransfield’s Lives: A Sixties Biography (Carlton South: Melbourne U P , 1999).

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But to read Dransfield only as so much the product of his times has its problems. Dransfield was something of an anachronism, the values of chivalry and romance blended with the ‘perversions’ of Swinburne and the liberation of contemporary American poetry. Only vaguely political in the directaction sense, he was nonetheless an activist in extreme ways in his poetry – environmentalist, critic of the power establishments of the day, libertarian with personal safeguards, and, I believe, an anarchist individualist. Where’s the evidence? Not in the biography, but in the poems. Dransfield’s reputation has suffered from gossip and hearsay, from the accounts of friends and the hunger for yet more controversial material about his life. His bisexuality, addictions, self-promotion, psychological game-playing, manipulative tendencies – the list gets longer and longer. A youthful encounter with the work of Michael Dransfield is an indelible one. Although Dransfield was writing in the mid- to late 1960s and early 1970s, his intensity and engagement with issues of immediacy – of living, of discovery, of community and solipsism, of finding a literary and historical context for this ‘new’ life away from the security and insecurities of home and family – are dynamic, even brilliant. We recognize – I certainly did in my final years of school – a language and perception that manage to distil often conflicting emotions and attitudes. The problem with much critical appreciation of Dransfield’s poetry is that it fails to see that he wrote out of this psychology, dying before he was a safe distance from school and the family environment. That he cared much about where he came from is evident in every poem and every letter he wrote. Not wanting Drug Poems to appear before his father’s death; pride in the military achievements of his family, notably his grandfather – seemingly in contradiction with Dransfield’s pacifist, anti-Vietnam-War stance. Of course, if one is still returning home in times of crisis, and trying to establish connections with girlfriends /boyfriends and peers to create new families, this is going to be the case. Michael Dransfield is not so much a Blakean poet of contradictions as a Shelleyan poet of boundary-testing and dramatics. One of his idols already mentioned, Swinburne, set the Victorian literary world alight – and sent it into shock – with his brilliant first volume, which tested boundaries of form and function and especially of sexuality. Dransfield is often presented as a poète maudit, a young suffering poet, a drug poet par excellence. And though drug usage – its elation and destruction – is explicit in his poetry, and the reader will trace its effect through this selection, the poetry isn’t fundamentally about drugs. There’s bravado, as in any primarily male

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culture of ownership (how many pulls, cones, hits, tabs etc. one has had), as if to validate a process of enlightenment that guilt overrides – but it’s often not much more than that. Drugs and drug culture are vehicles for Dransfield – frameworks for a language of investigation and exploration of the creative principle. They represent the urban sublime and a link to the rural idyllicism that Dransfield so wanted but which always remained a problem for him. Dransfield was born in suburban Sydney. As he grew up, he developed a fantasy world in which he was of noble lineage – a process of simultaneously retaining and denying his bourgeois aspirations, and connecting himself with spiritual and hereditary authority – hence his ‘belief’ in the divine right of kings. He conjured that mythic seat of power – Courland Penders – the family’s rural estate transfigured from Britain (and Europe) to the rural outspaces of New South Wales. In his letters, Dransfield referred to the place as if it were real, and later, after stints working in post offices and tax offices, he sought to actualize it by buying rural properties. It is the symbolic focus of his great Courland Penders poems, which represent his attachment to ideas of tradition in poetry against which he struggled. Dransfield was to own or occupy a number of country houses, which, like his family home, would become symbolic as well as practical refuges, resting points between wanderings. There is more than a little of On the Road about Dransfield’s identification with troubadour and minstrel. Courland Penders is the scene of neopastoral simulacrum, where dark masques are played out for the benefit of ghostly audiences. The living and the dead, art and the material world, coexist in a state of flux. Dransfield writes “the house itself an alien”; maybe a place where drugs become a failed transitional vehicle, their illumination hindered by the realities and transgressions of history, of the physical world. These are poems of melancholy introversion, but with the doors opened to the curious. The poet, like the reader, as voyeur. One is reminded of Eliot’s “human kind cannot bear very much reality.” But Courland Penders is also a place of arrivals and departures, of uneasy memories and associations. It is necessary and restless at once. Dransfield’s father, we learn from Patricia Dobrez’s biography, was in poor health as a result of action in the Second World War. His mother – encourager of arts and music (his sister was a talented musician) – was the one who sent him to the exclusive Sydney Grammar, even ensuring that it would be covered in the event of her husband’s death and the end of his financial support. This school had a profound effect on Dransfield. It undoubtedly made him aware of his less prosperous circumstances compared to many

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other students, and possibly heightened his need to fabricate a ‘noble’ lineage. He cultivated an arty image but was selective in terms of what he rebelled against. This developed into a selective attitude – his poetry would flaunt sexual alterity (being ‘bi’) but is not particular on gender issues (not overtly feminist, for example). These conservatisms did, however, provide a political language of difference, which expressed itself in numerous poems. One of Dransfield’s finest ‘political’ poems, or, perhaps more appropriately, a poem of rejection and rebellion, is “Endsight.” From the ironic title which closes the romantic vision before it begins and the mock-dedication, the poem shows Dransfield at his wittiest and most cutting. He plays against romantic sensibilities (Coleridge) and the age of therapy (“midnights of consciousness”), and his figurative language is whittled and burnt to material reality – “the air a factory black / like x-rays of the children’s lungs... .” This is the dissolving lyricism which marks Dransfield as a poet of and outside his time. The poem is full of confusion and disorientation – the technological trappings of the modern capitalistic world creating dysfunction in the natural world: “occasionally / an owl thuds into a building.” The promises of material gain are empty, as are metaphor or poetry without reference. But the references internalize, and work within the poem. It’s a hybridized polemic. And, as he says, also the works of the Official Poets, whose genteel iambics chide industrialists for making life extinct.

The challenge to this destruction has to be replicated in form – traditional form would validate the very factors that have enabled the industrial complex to let such exploitation and destruction occur. The enjambed lines, deft turns of expression, bring the colloquial and symbolic, the metaphoric and reportage, into exchange and interplay. In the parlance of contemporary poetics, Dransfield is something of a pragmatist. His use of enjambment, complex linearity, the sentence as well as the line and even the word as units of construction, means that he is able constantly to take a poem beyond its subject-matter to explore the meaning of composition itself. If there is an argument that a new lyricism – one that is conscious of problems concerning its own subjectivity, the position of the lyrical ‘I’, then one might venture that Dransfield was at the forefront of this. Though his poems often seem to be deeply confessional, the reader should be wary of building personal mythologies out of the poems themselves. For in-

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stance, in his Drug Poems, where the persona is the focal point for all possible experiences, there is often an ironic sidestepping going on – almost a fascination with the abject nature of the process. Dransfield the poet is always far more conscious of the problems of presenting Dransfield the subject than critics have generally appreciated. What makes Dransfield a thoroughly modern poet is his concern with the external world and the relationship of the creative self to this. Along with Judith Wright, he is Australia’s premier environmental poet of the late 1960s / early 1970s, and his influence is not only to be found in a variety of contemporary Australian poets’ work, but also in a generational consciousness of empowerment of the self and the group. Dransfield deeply believed his poems would have an effect, would bring change. Be it about pollution or saving the rapidly dwindling native forests, or a societal issue such as sexual liberty, Dransfield wrote to be heard. These poems have been selected from Rodney Hall’s Collected Poems of Michael Dransfield published by the University of Queensland Press, and checked against all of Dransfield’s original volumes, as well as those published posthumously: Memoirs of a Velvet Urinal, and the two volumes compiled by Rodney Hall, Voyage into Solitude and The Second Month of Spring. I am indebted to the commentaries by Hall that accompanied the volumes of Dransfield that he edited, as well as to the biography by Patricia Dobrez. I’d like to thank Tracy Ryan for her comments during the process, and Elspeth Dransfield for permission to publish this selection. I would also like to acknowledge the Indigenous peoples of Australia as the custodial keepers of the land-mass known as ‘Australia’, and to indicate my respect for their cultures and traditions, as I am sure Michael Dransfield would have wished. a

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Lionel Fogarty: The Hybridizing of a Poetry89 Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.90

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‘ A R T ’ I S F I N I T E A N D E N T I R E L Y C O N T I N G E N T . It has no glory, it is paranoid, self-satisfying. Hypermodernism is a millennial modernism – action without movement, the flow and exchange of ‘data’ – and is entirely static in any natural sense. It subverts the laws of profit only insofar as it is useless, ephemeral, and the wealth it generates is illusory. In Australian poetry, an awkward relationship with modernism has had a dual legacy: fierce rejection and, conversely, a desire to move ‘beyond’. Australian modernism might be described as a reflexive /reflective dichotomy: it is a field in which reflex is possible (reflex as a reaction that is impulsive and necessary). On the other hand, it is a general characteristic of the Western continuum that much experimentalism is reflective: the present being examined through the past, rather than acting against it. There is a poem of Lionel Fogarty’s that I’d like to note as a possible starting point for discussion. But, first, some words of introduction. Of the Murri people, and born on the Cherbourg Aboriginal Reserve in Queensland in 1958, Fogarty is a leading spokesman for Indigenous rights in Australia through a poetry of linguistic uniqueness and overwhelming passion. In resisting the colonizing force of English, he has reterritorialized the language of the invaders and made of it a language that speaks for his people. I maintain that Fogarty is the greatest living ‘Australian’ poet, forging a poetic that captures the orality of his people’s millennia of song-cycles and spirituality, and also engaging with codes and tools of international modernism. Fogarty is at once verbally affronting and celebratory of his identity. A deeply ‘political’ poet, he is also a singer whose poetry seeks healing and redemption for the many wrongs done to his people. There is a rage in the work, and the murder of his

89

OR ME,

Radical expansion (2011) of an article, “The Hybridising of a Poetry: Notes on Modernism & Hybridity – The Colonising Prospect of Modernism and Hybridity as a Means to Closure,” in boundary 2 43.2 (Spring 1999): 156–59. 90 “La modernité, c’est le transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent, la moitié de l’art, dont l’autre moitié est l’éternel et l’immuable”; Charles Baudelaire, “Le Peintre de la Modernité” (The Painter of Modernity), in Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1961): 1163.

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brother Daniel Yock by police in 1993 (in a police van), as well as of his people in general, compels his poetic spirit. In a significant interview that Philip Mead conducted with him in 1994, Fogarty said: Daniel was a Song Man and he used to make songs up from his own dreaming, and he knew a lot of different languages. He was a really special person to my children. A very culturally talented guy, very dedicated to his culture.91

And it’s this dedication to his culture that Lionel Fogarty carries into a poetry which is cyclical and declarative, deeply metaphoric and metonymic at once. The ‘timelessness’, the dreaming, the conversations between story and land, between the totemic and people, are beyond labelling. A unique poet, he has effectively managed to confront the persistent attacks by imperialist language, and (still) colonial culture/s, on his people’s voice, by preserving its identity, and also creating something entirely new (an extension of what existed before), to fight the invader. A liberator, an innovator, and a writer with a purpose as crucial as the existence of his people. As I’ve said before: Fogarty has de-hybridized his own language by hybridizing English with his people’s language. It’s a poetry to which all of us should listen. Fogarty’s “Remember Something Like This” concerns the nature of memory, the flexibility of time and space, and examines the specificity of incident. There is a communalizing of the lyrical ‘I’ taking place. The poem resists prosody, and enhances a recolonization by entry into the public place (as per the Western continuum) as entertainment and art: Where’s this and that, you know. So they find out where him came from by looking at the tracks. He’s headed for the caves just near milky way.92

Fogarty comes close to creating something that is both culturally and linguistically unique. While reacting to the colonizing of his Murri tongue by English, he in effect colonizes English, rendering it subservient to his inheritance, to his spatiality (time /space). He sees this as a natural and necessary action. It is impulsive and decisive, a reflex action. If this sounds confrontational, then I 91

“Australian poet Lionel Fogarty in conversation with Philip Mead,” Jacket 1 (October 1997): online. 92 “Remember Something Like This,” in Fogarty, Minyung Woolah Binnung (Sydney: Keeaira, 2004).

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should emphasize that it is. Fogarty makes language a tool or even weapon of resistance; or, still more, an offensive weapon. His is the most revolutionary of languages being used in Australian poetry. Freedom doesn’t come solely by marking territory and occupying a conceptual space, a space linguistic in nature. One must reterritorialize lost ground. This is particularly true of a culture where the rites of naming are all-important in establishing a map of social and cultural identity. Where song is cohesion. In an article entitled “Poetics in the Americas,” Charles Bernstein interestingly notes: The invention of an ideolectical English-language poetry as a poetry of the Americas involves the replacement of the national and geographically centered category of English (or Spanish) poetry not with the equally essential category of American poetry but with a field of potentialities, a virtual America that we approach but never possess. English languages set adrift from the sight/sound sensorium of the concrete experiences of the English people, are at their hearts uprooted and translated: nomadic in origin absolutely particular in practice. Invention in this context is not a matter of choice: it is necessary as the ground we walk on.93

While these observations are in many ways transferrable to the Australian condition, there are differences between the American and Australian situations. Once again, turning to Lionel Fogarty – while his language is conceptual, it is also exclusive. It does desire (and I use this in the fetishized sense) to communicate to people other than his own, but only insofar as it will allow his people the space they had occupied and should still occupy. In a sense, this, ironically, makes it an incredibly utilitarian poetry, albeit as an enemy of a marketplace that actively seeks to deny his people’s exclusive rights to territory. This is not to say that poetry can’t be a universal and universalizing mode of language – rather, that this is something to be wary of. Bernstein refers to the ‘nomadic’. By way of cultural generalization, Fogarty is of a ‘nomadic people’ (a cuttingly reductive collective noun when used from outside the discourse – and I am consciously divorcing it from Bernstein’s context to highlight the point), whether they ‘wander’ or not. They are classed accordingly, at least in certain Empire textbooks. His poetry does not work 93

Charles Bernstein, “Poetics in the Americas,” in My Way: Speeches and Poems (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999): 113–37, here 117. Also in Reading Race in American Poetry: An Area of Act, ed. Aldon Lynn Nielsen (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2000): 107– 32, here 111. Originally in Modernism / modernity 3.3 (September 1996): 1–23, here 5.

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against the concrete experience of the Murri people, and I mean this in an objective and not subjective sense. Any use of the English base /standard, regardless of intention, is recognizing, interacting with, reinforcing, and qualifying a particular English historicity. The fringe should call the shots vis-à-vis its relationship with the colonizer. a At Kenyon College, Ohio, in 2005, I situated an Australian poetry and poetics class around the work of Lionel Fogarty. Having been provided with a box of hand-written (and illustrated) manuscripts by Lionel, my students (under the coordinating hand of Alex Hiatt), copied and collated the work for publication. The volume stalled in the years following because a reliable and stable text could not be established. I spoke with Lionel about these issues in Brisbane 2006, and we agreed that the book (some 700 pages) could be published with ‘errors’ as part of the spirit of resistance and ‘deconstruction’ (my word here) to and of the English language. I mentioned that we’d need some kind of disclaimer, because it would be misunderstood by many readers and inconsistency would be seen as an editorial rather than authorial ‘failure’. We came up with some back-cover text to point out intent, but issues of arrangement and consistency defeated the publishing process in the end, and the manuscript still awaits a consultative edit. One Queensland poet spent time with Lionel working towards a stable text, but found the job too vast. The question of orthography is a vital one, because Fogarty’s work is so much about non-compliance. But it’s also about communication: with Lionel’s own community, with a wider Indigenous Australia, with the ruling ‘white’ status quo and other colonizing power structures, but also with other coordinates within the fabric of Australian society. At times, Fogarty’s poetry devastatingly ‘others’ all non-Indigenous communities, centering the Indigenous self as mediator and conduit to knowledge (spiritual and empirical), even potentially rendering other sufferings of community (ethnicity and identity) as diminished because of what is perceived as an inability to learn from such pain and apply it to both understanding and compensating for Indigenous suffering. But Fogarty does not create a subaltern binary or a hybridity in which his voice would seek to ‘adjust’ another cultural space in order to absorb and control it. In essence, his poetry searches for intactness and independence against the flow of cultural input that his poems measure. They are witnessings, measurings, recordings, and processings of hybridity, not end results.

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When Fogarty puns on the Rolling Stones with “you made a grown race cry” in the poem “A Vera Take a Ride” (with its deeply ironic play on angloamerican/ized rock and pop music lyrics),94 he effectively explodes the very nature of the cultural referents, and questions the political semiotics of a Western music form that was, in its time, at least intending rebellion (this is later Stones). The Stones’ adopted models for rhythm, attitude, and even lyrical intonation were and always will be African-American blues. Cultural repositioning and filtering, especially when turned to such commercial advantage, will inevitably become a vehicle for the loss of agency in the original, in terms of its impact outside the listening communities it was originally intended for. Fogarty is playing on this. “you make a grown man cry” as sub-love plea for carnal satisfaction (the Stones’ eternal plea), takes us from individual angst to that of a people, with a deftness that still lays claim to the personal within the communal. The lyrical traditions of Western poetry are blown into the communal epistemological and ontological record. There is a frightening absolutism in discussion around ‘tradition’ and ‘custom’, over what is worth preserving, in a broader inter-cultural sense, and what should be filtered out. Fogarty resists the academic’s call for a diluted cultural ‘inheritance’ – a post-Aboriginality – that works as a worthy model for a liberal whiteness or, at least, a liberal non-Indigeneity. This model desired by those complicit with ‘white’ power structures is a new nationalism, a Jindyworobakism that taps into a gender-appropriate Western democratized (what some might erroneously call ‘politically correct’) version of the indigenous. It’s the new noble savagery. The beauty and intensity of familial relationships, of skin and its bonds, of relationships between land and ‘dreaming’ (to use Fogarty’s term), are cherished, but certain cultural beliefs (from tribal punishment through to sexual customs) are ignored, denied or ‘corrected’ to make this new artfully reconstructed form of noble savagery wholesome. By contrast, in singing his own stories, his people’s stories, Fogarty is proactively resisting the absorption of his own poetry into the integrating ‘anthologies’ of Western culturizing:

94

“A Vera Take a Ride,” in Lionel G. Fogarty, New and Selected Poems: Munaldjali, Mutuerjaraera (Melbourne: Hyland House, 1999). All of the poems mentioned here are in this book, but are quoted from Aratjara: Aboriginal Culture and Literature in Australia, ed. Dieter Riemenschneider & Geoffrey V. Davis (Cross / Cultures 28; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 1997): 39.

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Ngujoo nye muyunube Little black buree You must respect golo You must praise to junun You must seek love with googee little black buree hear your song ‘nuyeeree munu juwoon’ The gendergender will bring the message.95

There is a strong element of the ‘parodic’, even rebarbative, in the ‘transliteration’ (also a Fogarty poem, in essence) and the ‘translation’ of this: “The gendergender” is polymorphous in its signing, sounding, and discourse. In the tension of diegesis and mimesis, the non-Indigenous listener might well be ‘hoodwinked’ (the imposition of a trickster action: a transference of cultural discourse for the convenience of explanation, a ‘bamboozling’) through his / her desire for the authentic and for authentication. At the same time, the poem operates on a ‘sincere’ and respectful level for those it represents. The tension arises because difference of perspective and heritage is not easily reconciled, though the writing and publishing of it become confrontation with expectation, refusal, and reconciliation. Fogarty presents this (the opening of “Joowindoo Goonduhmu”) as the partly transliterated transcription of a Murri song, which, in “Quick Sing (Translation),” he then brings across to the ‘other’ (Western) side: I can see a lot of people coming Little black baby You must respect the moon You must praise the sun You must seek love with the star Little black baby hear your song: ‘That’s our country’ The willy wagtail will bring the message.96

Further, it should be noted that if a Western model of comparison is to be used (and it shouldn’t be), then Kropotkin’s mutual aid would be slightly closer to the mark than any evolutionary cultural (even biological) model 95 96

“Joowindoo Goonduhmu” (Aratjara, 53). “Quick Sing (Translation)” (Aratjara, 54).

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(Lamarckian or Darwinian). Fogarty shows concern for how origins and intactness (of identity, of self, of community, of spiritual causation and purpose) are moved away from in the constructs of Western scientific /’rational’ discourse. He rejects the ideas that one can look back to them eternally in retrospect, and that one moves somewhere out of a necessary competitiveness, a process of adaptation that is fetishized and marketed as a learning tool. The Western state and its systems of evolution, ownership, taxation, and justice are anathema to the law of relationship between humans, animals, land, and spirit that not only existed for tens of thousands of years prior to European invasion but persist still with strength and determination. The first homo sapiens is we aborigines The different ideas ’bout origins only you running human like people present state This old naturally wise earth not their scientific knowledge Brothers million love remains outside nowadays But savage are there commonly believed Theory of evolution we developed things living as original form of lifes. [...] WE NOT APES

maps are in your sapiens unwise species.97

‘Dreamtime’ becomes both something of a people and something the statedriven appropriators would claim as definition, as a control-mechanism in discussing Indigenous spirituality. Fogarty tracks the difference between the spiritual use of the term and its fetishized non-Indigenous marketing to control Indigeneity. It’s not all up for grabs by outsiders; it’s as ancient as people can be, and much of it is private, not available for use (exploitation): “Well tell we deep / Private thoughts.”98 In the 1983 poem “Scenic Wonders – We Nulla Fellas,” Fogarty works the double, even triple address that is so often accomplished through slippage in

97 98

“Dreamtime” (Aratjara, 109). “Dreamtime” (Aratjara, 109).

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tense and the question of where the possessive sits: what belongs with what, syntactically, but also in terms of meaning. This poem is both an apostrophe to an ancient land, almost a call by the land itself to its peoples, and a voicing of resistance to the voyager–colonizers (possibly a challenge to the ‘nothingness’ they perceive it as their right to fill, a challenge to the denial of Murri people’s rights and a complementary irony that the ‘actual’ nothingness is rich and inevitably unperceived by settler sensibilities). Distress (and anger) that the land’s ‘sites’ will be turned into ‘scenic wonders’ for invader–tourists, from Cook (and earlier) to those of the present day works as a counterpoint and ghosting text, all the way through. This is Fogarty’s own wartime ‘propaganda’ (to thwart that of the invader) but also a highly spiritual and witnessing text that is ultimately about praise and respect for country. Furthermore, as a counter to Western science, Fogarty establishes an investigative language of observation that works as its own science with as much validity, intensity, and authority as that of the colonizers. The specificity of ‘Murri’ people refutes the nationalizing of the local, and enforces intactness (‘indigenous’ in Australia refers to many ‘first’ peoples). In the remote 2,300 meeting crust of organisms existed sophisticated to some of my peoples who naturally ancient as Mount Olga to some Ngunarra to flat surface Murris sacred identity discover Katatjuta for many heads, venomous invades take territory Harmless are the message and cloudburst wild flowers decorating mosque Murri types. Laying puff up grey cooling precipitous rocks you not a bluff to Murri down your Tasmania time. Ranges and countless channels uninhabited country decades, is not weird cones knives, volcanoes borning a surface external wave, rock over arid plains are not far from our base. The crashed mass perfectly dry aired, raised rim made outer vanished whirling, high speed actually happens litter strange continent we thick and contained presence

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that bare dark molten, fierce of dying expanse in centuries, Murri people dry bed and wet bed.99

It’s vital to note Fogarty’s use of ‘we’: not only as the communal voice that’s ‘owned’, but also to differentiate from capitalist sensibilities and issues of private property. Fogarty is neither disowning his responsibility nor claiming a shamanistic authority. He claims no uniqueness outside the uniqueness of the ‘we’. And in referring to the ‘settler’ in the singular, while clearly meaning the many, and having a (bitter) laugh at ‘his’ expense (referring to an ‘introduced’ animal literally as well as the figurative joke regarding the unlikely, the far-fetched), Fogarty disrupts Western notions of ‘precision’, especially regarding the old, the new, the traditional, the progressive, and authority: “The wild pigs fly and settler, this don’t mean oldest.”100 Fogarty will use the language of the pubs, brutal and threatening, morphed with language of navigation and exploration, with an ease that is terrifying and more than suggestive — it is monitory. He is not just articulating a concern; he is throwing his poetry up as beach defences, inverting the enemy’s propaganda of terra nullius and habitation: 1770 Cook saw us and glassed us for a while

til wind, rain, sun frost and wilderness inhabited Aboriginals.101

Interestingly, a monadic as well as dyadic construction of spirit is brought into play, in which Fogarty works outside a timeline of both spiritual and material manifestation. In characteristic ‘patois’ slippage, Fogarty will take such considerations to a defiant resistance of the idea of ‘commonweal’ and citizenship by denying the ‘double’ tax’ of a life given to the country, that is then taken and then only offered back as a ghost, a nothingness, which is literally taxed. This movement between the spiritual and the empirical is emphatic: Don’t we create spirits the first and everlasting two every Murri distribution of wealth we have done for this country so we mustn’t pay tax on our homing wealth that stays within.102

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“Scenic Wonders – We Nulla Fellas” (Aratjara, 146). “Scenic Wonders – We Nulla Fellas” (Aratjara, 147). 101 “Scenic Wonders – We Nulla Fellas” (Aratjara, 145). 100

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In compiling this selection of essays and articles, Gordon Collier asked, regarding Fogarty, if I could [point] out somewhere that his curiously effective way of translating that aboriginal text [Joowindoo Goonduhmu] forms the substrate of much of his own writing: i.e. apart from that translation, his poems so often ‘translate’ the texture of his culture.

I responded: i think there is a form of ‘translation’ there, but also something quite unique and generative to lionel (with his full-on personality). there’s the markers of culture, but also the markers of lionel, which make for an interesting take on the spokesperson and ‘singer’ for his people. oh, ‘dreamtime’ should have quotes around it – it’s rarely used now as descriptor, though is specific to lionel’s usage. which shows in some ways that his articulation of connection with tradition is necessarily mediated by its expression in a translation process – i.e. finding the correlative in english and ‘western’ modes of thinking. i think this causes what i would call a frustration of textuality – a desire to undo the english paradoxically mixed with a need to use it to both get at the imperialists but also to communicate with other indigenous peoples in australia.

a I talk of hypermodernism as qualifying a framelessness of the field of the page. I argue that hypermodernism does not, per se, issue from the Object as structure, that its forms – in a Platonic sense – are not plastic, but conceptual. In approximating this idea to the modernist project, one could look again to Bernstein: I would propose at least three modernist projects: subjective, objective, and constructive. By nonsymbological or constructive, I am referring to the fact that in many of her works Stein does not depend upon supplemental literary or narrative contexts to secure her meaning but enacts her subjects as continuously actualised presentations of meaning. Unlike Pound or Eliot, with their myriad literary and other references, or James Joyce with his etymological anaphora, with Stein you are left with the words on the page and imaginary structures they build.103

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“Dreamtime” (Aratjara, 109). Bernstein, “Poetics in the Americas,” in Bernstein, My Way: Speeches and Poems, 117, and in Reading Race in American Poetry, ed. Nielsen, 111. 103

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For me, the imaginary structure is the page, as it would be, I imagine, for Fogarty. The page is a representation of a field of myth-thought, of songdream continuity, a place that refuses closure. Its imagined frame is construct. Language rendered as text categorizes the breakdown and results in a loss of occupancy and produces closure. The word itself does not liberate in this written context. Hybridity here is an attempt to keep language moving, though with the inevitable (and politically desired) result being confinement through qualification, and consequently control. The words work as double agents. I’ve referred to the kinds of poetry Fogarty and I write, from entirely different perspectives, as examples of ‘hybridizing’. By this I don’t mean a mixing, or a production of a third-party alternative from a set of specific material. A hybrid is not a possible next stage in a developmental sense, or a ‘dilution’ of the component parts. Nor is it a fusing of traditions. It is, in fact, a conscious undoing of the codes that constitute all possible readings of a text. It is a debasement of the lyrical ‘I’. What am I, I am this... contradicts the certainty of the informed and/or plugged into the sensorium of the poet per the Western continuum. Master of nothing, rather than master of all surveyed. It is not a rejection of frameworks but of contents. It recognizes frames for what they are: empty shells. Bernstein recently termed this my Trojan Horse theory of poetry – get inside formalism/ Western poetic traditions and dismantle.104 It is not a homogeneous poetry that replaces certain demarcations, borders, divisions, and qualifications. In some sense, it highlights these separations. I use the sestina and villanelle and sonnet. Though I doubt Lionel does. The result is a denial that is cultural as well as linguistic; a refusal to accept that the component parts are relevant to the discourse. I use the word ‘hybrid’ in a specific sense, outside regular postcolonial discourse. I mentioned an undoing of codes that constitute all possible readings of a text. I should stress that this is insofar as the author understands them. It stresses the distance between author and reader. It is a theory of unfamiliarity. In a sense, it invites closure, but only insofar as an end means that another hybrid might and should develop; a parallel fertility. However, it is process, not an end result, although, through its methodology, one hopes for a political response. Once Lionel has achieved his aim, his hybrids (will) revert to the continuum of his Murri tongue. That is not to say that they’ll be re-integrated, as a hybrid is too much of a conscious break – rather, that the old tongue, now 104

In an introduction to a talk by me (not written) to a seminar group at S U N Y Buffalo in November 1996. [J.K.]

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liberated, will appropriate them. They will become part of the land, and its meaning. The work of the poem will have been done. There will be closure, and only then is it desirable.

Dorothy Hewett105

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O R O T H Y H E W E T T I S A F A S C I N A T I N G P O E T , not least insofar as her work seems to convey a direct interaction between poet and subjectmatter. It is as if poetry were an entirely intimate experience for her and an exploration of hidden ‘truths’. The mythology of self is considered by some to be her primary project, but it could be argued also that there is a far more conscious play with the notions of what actually constitutes a poetry; that is, there is something going on at the meta-level that may not at first be obvious to the reader overwhelmed by her intense lyrical ‘I’. A fundamental problem with trying to pin Hewett down to a particular modus operandi or voice is that she is in many ways also a public poet. During the 1950s she was probably best known, in the literary sense at least, for her great political ballad “Clancy and Dooley and Don McLeod,” which many working-class activists knew by heart at that time. It should be noted that while the boundaries between ‘classes’ are blurred and increasingly irrelevant in Australian society (other segregations have taken and are taking their place), during the 1950s ‘class’ was a physical reality. In both her plays and her poetry, Hewett explores relationships of the individual and the community with the land. Her ‘land’ is the south-west of Western Australia, particularly the wheatbelt area around Wickepin, where she spent her childhood. Hers is an exploration of spirit, modulated through the very idiosyncratic eye of self. What makes this more interesting is that much of her poetry and drama on this subject was written while she lived in Sydney. Hewett spent much of the 1950s and 1960s in Sydney, though it was not until her return from another period in Western Australia that the energies of ‘the new poetry’ of Sydney during the early 1970s gave great stimulus to her writing career. Hewett now lives in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney and, despite her many years away from her home, still unearths the secrets of

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“Dorothy Hewett,” in Tre Australiska poeter: Dorothy Hewett, Les Murray, John Kinsella, ed. Gunnar Harding & Bengt Jangfeldt (Stockholm: Swedish Academy / Artes 4, 1997).

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that first landscape. On the use of memory, Hewett recently said in an interview with myself: Because I’ve lived quite a long while now I’ve got a lot of stuff that I can refer to, backwards and forwards. I think that what happens as you get older – or old! – is that the past becomes remarkably clear. I didn’t realise this would happen, but it does. . . Like seeing something, not in a glass darkly at all, but illuminated in the most extraordinary fashion. If you can take that and move it to now, you’ve got that patterning, self-referential sort of method which to me is what binds my poetry together. I’ve got to have a binding agency, and that to me is the central binding agency of what I do. So it becomes a pattern of the world, of life. . . (J K ) So instead of a poetry of autobiography which is about recounting what has happened, it’s a poetry about the qualifying nature of time, about how a history actually comes into focus with its passing – the opposite to autobiography in a way, because it’s reinventing every moment. It is. It’s also playing ducks and drakes with time. Time, in the sense of static time, doesn’t really exist at all. It’s like a tremendous game.

Her use of mythology and fairytales both to stimulate archetypal links and intensify her reading of the self’s relationship, or lack of, with reality has become synonymous with her work of the 1970s and 1980s. Nim, Alice, Lilith become figures that play the real parts to the poet’s shadow puppets. Through such figures, Hewett challenges authority, preconceptions of behaviour, and questions of fate and belief. Of the role of myth and fairytale in her formative years Hewett has said: the imagination and books were our lives, as well as typical things like riding horses, naming everything in the creek. . . We made this whole life, and looking back I realize that it was a very strange life in a way, because for me there’d never been a split (as I think there is for lots of people, for Australians) between the mythology of other countries and my own. In other words, reading Grimm’s fairytales, and Hans Andersen’s, I quite unselfconsciously transferred those myths into the Australian bush with no sense of strain. . . So that the gum trees might become Grimm’s giant.

Hewett is also fascinating in her defining of a poetry that exists outside the normal patriarchal modes of delivery. Her voice is decidedly ‘feminine’ but not merely a woman’s voice laid over a template of patriarchal form. She doesn’t imitate, but writes it as she ‘experiences’ it. Hewett, familiar with controversy, doesn’t compromise. She is not, however, comfortable with the

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notion of being in any way a feminist ‘icon’, saying the idea makes her “nervous”: “I don’t really believe that one human being can have that much effect on a period or a whole lot of people. I think I had some, sure. . . ” For the uninitiated reader, one of the joys of discovering Hewett is to experience the unfolding of the ‘mysterious’ and its link with voice. Her themes of love and isolation, family and individuality have extended into her verse of recent years. Her studies of ageing, of the loss associated with this but also the gains that hindsight and wisdom bring, grow stronger. Her debt to poets such as Lowell, Berryman, and Crane is obvious, and also, as she often attests, the debt to the voice of the Australian poet Robert Adamson. In a recent poem, “Inheritance” (Collected Poems), she asks: I have travelled a long way from my origins is there anything left of the child with the wheaten hair who listened for owls loved poetry and winter fires remembered the strange moment in the dark fields when the pet lambs grown into ewes and wethers trotted along the fence lines bleating to be let in?

David McComb: In Between Words106

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M C C O M B W A S A P O E T O F C O E X I S T E N C E . His liminality was more than living on both sides of a border at once; it was seeing the good in the bad, and the bad in the good, not in polarized terms but of necessity. He could celebrate the grim while loathing it. He could detest yob culture while singing to it; could make the poetic out of cliché and yet critique the easy saying, and the easy way out. He could be an addict and a purist. It’s not just a matter of contradictions (though there are plenty of these), but of a literary thinker who also engaged with the ‘ordinary’, who thrived on the energy of paradox. Even when energy is sapped, biologically or emotionally, a glimpse into an altered state can generate hope. This is poetry about drawing life when life is being depleted; about exploring nostalgia because there’s no real hope for nostalgia. It’s a Dorothy Parker relishing the

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“Introduction: In Between Worlds,” in David McComb, Beautiful Waste: Poems, ed. Chris Coughran & Niall Lucy (North Fremantle W A : Fremantle Press, 2009): 11–26.

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grim portrait because the writing of it matters. It’s a loathing of pretence, which resists the allure of belles-lettres while maintaining a certain faith with literary tradition. It’s not faux ‘on the streets’, but streetwise; not hiding behind the facts of privilege, but showing their lack of worth, and the damage they inflict in all directions. It’s connecting with landscape because a truth can be found in sea, sand, air, trees, rocks, space … if you want to find it. As a lyricist, McComb wrote musical metaphors with a strong sense of the literary poetic. His eclectic reading is evident throughout his poetry, consciously mixing not only ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural registers, but also contemporary and anachronistic forms of expression. Unsurprisingly a musical poet, he is also a highly visual one. Visual art is never far away; a synaesthetic counterpoint of sight, sound, smell, and touch (and taste, sometimes) is as much a part of his writing as a formal method. At first glance, except for a few poems that are overtly ‘traditional’, it would seem that McComb primarily used free verse (at least sometimes) … and open form. In actuality, he has made the two-part short ‘parallel’ poem his own, and there are many examples of differing approaches to this formalism throughout the book. Anaphora is his main device; the repetition of opening words and expressions in ensuing lines builds not only within particular poems, but right across the book. Readers will notice McComb’s wit and irony, and his bleakness. But it’s not that simple. His irony is often inverted, and his bleakness is often part of a perverse (even overt) celebration or claiming of the positive out of a sea of negatives. This occurs both on the personal/lyrical level (of the ‘unified self’), and as social critique. McComb is a poet of place and body, and for him the two are inseparable. He writes out of a childhood and youth spent in the Australian west, then in the east, and also overseas. Places aren’t named, but aspects of them are recognized, at first generically, then specifically. The ‘sea’ is generic, but we feel that the sea mentioned is both universal and belonging to one very particular place and time. McComb’s poetry has a strange dynamic between social critique, selfirony, love and love-loss, the ornate and the fetidly personal, celebration and lament. You get the feeling he could hate and love to excess, but his poetry melds these extremes (are they?) into a poetry that doesn’t quite have a register in English. If anything, it’s French (Villon, Baudelaire, a little Rimbaud) and Russian (Mandelshtam and Tsvetayeva). All nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century. Yet there is more than this. We detect the troubadours, in addition to Coleridge, Tennyson, A.D. Hope, W.H. Auden, as well as many poets

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from Donald Hall’s anthology The New American Poetry. One might think of the Australian poet Michael Dransfield, but the tones and linguistic registers here are entirely different, even if the subject-matter often overlaps. I feel I know this poet, because we have inhabited roughly the same time and same place. I even feel I know the poetry books he saw on bookshop shelves in his youth, and I can recognize which editions he would have been reading. As they did earlier for Michael Dransfield, European poets in Penguin translation made their mark on both McComb and myself (born respectively in 1962 and 1963, in Perth, Western Australia). McComb grew up in Perth’s most exclusive suburbs in a notable house on limestone cliffs by the Swan River. His father was a well-known surgeon. McComb did tertiary lit. studies. He was a musician from his early teenage years. This combination makes his position as writer in Perth different, in my time at least, from that of many writers and musicians then. He left Perth, though it was always part of him. It haunts him in the way that the traumas of nostalgia (its non-viability) affect him. He regrets what was lost of a good childhood, yet is unable to replace his trauma with it. And his poems are constantly troubled by this. As a social satirist, he relies on those origins. He has to make criticisms but, in the end, reflects them back on himself. Mirrors, even ink – You’re my double, we dip into the same inkpot, you scare me to sleep

– become needs and addictions. The poet is addicted to his own horror, his own trauma, and his own beauty. And there is great beauty in these poems and in this poet, as there were in his songs, and in his band The Triffids as a whole. I have mentioned that McComb was a poet of the body. There is a tension throughout the work between gender and biology. The male body yearns for the female body, is itself almost female at times. Sometimes it’s as if the work invokes feminist (and other) ideas of the body as a site for inscription, a rejection of Descartes, a reflection (“The mirror scares me to sleep”) of the social organism and the self through a remapping of the body. In “Sides of a Pit (Woman Sleeping),” with its scrutiny of the body, the artist’s gaze, an invasiveness, predominates: While she struggled under ether Nightworkers crept to make these very trenches

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The wounding that is covered up is nonetheless a marker of the violation of the flesh. The marker, the ‘sign’, is declarative: “Traces of animal saliva and faeces / would be harder to identify.” This may resonate for readers who are aware of McComb’s heart transplant, but also for anyone who cares to consider the nature of bodies and psychosexual identities. It hints, perhaps, at a crisis of gender, and of relations between gender and place. But in McComb’s poems, the affirmation stops with the body’s failure, especially of the heart, both literally and figuratively. At times, the poems are like premonitions of his life’s events, only to be confirmed or contradicted by another poem written, seemingly, after a traumatizing personal experience, often of the flesh and the emotions. These are poems of addiction to love and substances. Prayer and love poem are interfused. “Our lovelorn doggerel won’t bring down the government” (“Prayer for One”). The world rolls on. Mired in the realities of consumerist living, the speaker cannot actually realize escape through love, through touch, through prayer. The discourse is trapped in the savage realities and the exploitations of a world that demands payment on its own terms. McComb’s poem is a troubadour song, praising a form of courtly love and chivalry it doesn’t believe in; it makes the body, the dynamics of human interaction, into a landscape, place, location: “hair flowing south,” “whole rooms of happiness,” “cold distance yawns.” It takes a cliché like this last one and stretches it to a point of metaphoric collapse. We live in our clichés, it says, and when we are separated, when we have finished with each other, we resort to them as mnemonic devices, as memory hints. But the passions that informed the clichés remain. A poet who works in reflections, in mirrorings, McComb has himself as subject/s, and vice versa. His addictions and love are made terrifyingly interchangeable. One cannot heal another without suffering one’s own self. “Prayer for One” finishes with these lines: “let me subtract chill from your fingers, / let me burn for you a while.” Love becomes the absorption of another’s pain. Another poem, “to M Y D A R L I N G P I G , impaled on love,” love is subjected to the butchery and brutality of sex. But also the animal addiction. It reminds me of a Soutine painting. A lot of McComb’s work is painterly while still grounded in the musicality of song-poems. It displays a visual lyricism that is not imagism – since it is so dependent on aphorism and the conversational, usually offset by formalized rhetoric or linguistic anachronism – but which plays with the Poundian conventions. Always conscious of the manifesto, McComb writes outside it.

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He is a de-romanticizer; in some senses, an anti-troubadour. We see this in “Nocturne vs. the Girl with the Faulty Pleasure Instinct,” which opens: “The skies have broken out in a rash.” This is the territory of Shakespeare’s “My Mistress’ Eyes” in its praise through undoing. The ‘mistress’ in this case feels sick from eating too many figs, grapes, cherries and pomegranates. And her menstruation cramps crumple her stomach.

In the poem, images of birth and thought are compounded – the belly can be “trepanned,” bringing a sense that rationalism and enlightment are falsely fertile. We also see the death of the teenage dream, out of which so much pop music is made; the subtext of Americana. The poem utilizes a Steinbeckian reportage documentary style. Artificially induced sleep is trauma (sleep is problematized throughout the work). We read “Seacraft dash and slam betwixt” and note the brand-name associated with middle-class seagoing pleasure, the deck big enough for one girl in a bikini – a pleasuring, on the Swan River and just off Fremantle, that is restrained in its range by social expectations of class and work. We might consider, too, the ironic explosions of private guilt and suffering against the public pop-culture backdrop – a questioning of the postindustrial machine-life identified through personification as male (police commissioner and mayor are implicitly male). The female subject of the lyric becomes damaged (as object and through loss of subjectivity) and abused through the process of role-play. When we come to “Behind the Garages of this Country,” we find a more conventional approach; no lyric song impulse here. Closure is narrative and contained in the portrait, rather than looping back to the cycle of a song. The female figure is characteristic – this is a kind of lament mixed with admiration for her continuing despite the loss of agency due to circumstances. The choking grass and oil grime caught in her skin are extensions of a natural and constructed world. Her “wide domain” takes in all those who pass through for food and goods who are no freer than she is. She, at least, has identity. Literary subtexts and references run right through McComb’s poetry. Take “Pavement on the First Day of Summer,” with its sequential displacement of pavement/“us” /“we” /sea. The object/s in the poem reflect our own living conditions – “our” a mediated term in the poem. In this case, it’s a privileged conversation between “second-hand” Europeans who, in A.D. Hope’s poem “Australia,” “pullulate / timidly on the edge of alien shores.” McComb is al-

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ways conscious of intrusion and alienation, even from the “settlement” of his own happy childhood. We see this again in the poems “Return to the Sea” and “The Mistake of Returning.” An implosion of nostalgia in many cases leaves the persona stranded. As opposed to Hope, it’s a double-edged sword; the negative in its ‘smallness’ is huge in its spiritual and physical compensations. A crisis of identity becomes resolved in the imagistic packaging of moments, a mixing of rhetoric with lyric. It’s not a closed book; the “sea reinvents.” The suburbs edge into the sea – the liminal is always where we are. “Pines” are introduced, as are “electric pylons,” and yet we accept the former as ‘natural’. It reminds me of the Triffids clip by the sea: an ironic over-good time that implodes The Beach Boys. With “Return to the Sea,” the importance of coast (and river) to McComb, as much as the wider inner spaces, is affirmed. Childhood beach memories fuse with the awkwardness of re-engaging, post-childhood. Those memories dominate; nostalgia is at work behind the codes of public behaviour (adult) and the desire to reconnect with those liberties of mood and the non-politics of an earlier time. The line “The wide smiles of tidal debris” is pivotal: even the debris “smiles.” Pathetic fallacy and nostalgia are compacted; you cannot deny the child with your theory. It’s there by way of translation and explication, not to suit a politics of presence. There is no crisis in the earlier enjoyment; that comes later. And lines such as “Stuck to your sandy fingers, / And where flies pestered / The sore on your knee” investigate the contradictions of nostalgia: the flies threaten to bring infection, but the memory remains “positive.” We can’t, however, extract anything from the skeletons of nostalgia: “Bleached away of all reason of flesh / On this gleaming shore.” The pain lies in the reality that it has been lost but not forgotten. The nostalgia was never to be had, though, because its future excoriation was always there. The poet loathes a tendency to nostalgia – it is a false go(o)d. “The Mistake of Returning,” to take another example, begins: “I went back to the neighbourhood / I knew when I was young.” With the lines “My body, reawakened, / embraced the shape of the land / and the scent of the trees,” we realize that this is an ur-poem in the oeuvre. In it we see the fear of what one has come out of, coupled with longing, the body as land and vice versa, the necessity of a knowledge of the flesh, of the shape and scent of the living land. A place’s “embedded” voices are supplemented by the new knowledges and experiences you bring to it. The poem is poised, creeps forward stealthily to embrace, confront; prepare to be overwhelmed. We reach a strange shift in

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verbal register with “But because I was no longer spry and youthful” – an artificially decorative language to heighten literary effect, because the body has been altered and childhood excoriated by experience. The grief is nostalgia which cannot be intact. It is memory, and memory is a recollection of loss. The persona can only visit at night, as the love song – the aubade – of morning and waking with new life, new possibilities, will crush his remaining health. He must protect himself. A light irony of the child he once was, and the animals and birds that once were not recognizing him, is magnified through the “schoolchildren, dogs and birds” there now in their privileged lack of awareness of who he is and what has become of him, his trajectory from similar origins: “They would not notice / what had seemed so real to me during the night.” It is almost bizarre that David McComb is not yet known as a significant Western Australian – even Australian – poet. One of the features that should place him in the company of many of his contemporaries, whether journal or book-published or performing, is his innovative use of form. He was experimenting from his earliest poems in highly individual ways. “Blessed Be” is an example of McComb’s two-part parallel poem (numbered parts 1 and 2), all short, pithy, impacting. These poems in two parts are once again the trauma of celebration: the ‘bad’ becomes the ‘good’ and vice versa. A broader celebration is made out of the irony of the Christian blessing. Just because it doesn’t add up doesn’t mean he will lose it entirely. The blessing is re-invented to include the ‘contaminated’. These ‘parallel poems’ feign a question and answer, a call and response, while working within the ‘listing’ medium. They make the liminal space concrete in their embodiment of the binary parts (1 and 2 as manichaean opposites). Heaven and Hell have been pulled together: that is protean. Another ‘parallel poem’, “Death Of An Elder Statesman,” is a two-part list-riposte poem. The first part sets up a dynamic, the second part explores more discursively. But it also accumulates. Aphorism and prosepoem riposte. Again, in “His Father’s Voice” (an echo of His Master’s Voice gramophones?), the first part gives us distance and the second, the personal. A stating of the condition and a personal ‘riposte’, a way of handling loss. Once more, it is a celebration out of abstraction made concrete, with the fable-like anaphoric structure of part 1, the personal lyric reminiscence of part 2. In “Lancelin,” there is further innovation of the parallel form with its reversal of approach. First, the personal lyric (heavily ironized), then the anaphoric Biblical intonation and heightening as ritual. Surely one of the most interesting uses of the parallel form, though, is “Bad Back, Bad Heart.” The

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poem’s first part has a tone of personal experience set as data and information, the second part an ironized riposte. This is akin to the troubadour song and its razo (a critical commentary), displaced. I will call these parallel poems; they distantly recall the parallelism of Hebrew poetry. Given McComb’s heart failure, the motif of courtly love is extended into the body (as, indeed, chivalry demanded that honour be avenged by death). These ironized moral tales are anchored in the matter-of-fact, a deflationary reality, while at the same time parrying with literary conventions, especially those of the Western tradition. I have seen this ‘parallel’ form before in books of Russian and European poetry, I am sure. I can’t pinpoint where from memory, but McComb has experimented with it and made it his own. Formal and thematic elements work generatively and effectively together in “Fall Ever Onward.” Here, there are echoes of Auden’s poem on painting and (Icarus) falling, “Musée des Beaux Arts.” It is also, in some ways, a poem about fear of the figurative, and the quotation from Rilke’s “To Hölderlin” affirms the creative over Hölderlin’s ‘madness’. What’s beyond the bars of the cage is what interests us regarding Rilke’s poem “The Panther,” as it is in this poem by McComb. Escape from the cage of the creative is through “falling”; failure becomes a perverse liberation. This is a poem about being free from the formal constraints of art. The painter imagines the concrete painting of the dream. Swimming-pool lines over-epitomize the concrete (constructed) juxtaposed with the abstract (and, ironically, natural) plains. The artist takes the plain and uses it for depth as well as flatness. And the resounding “But I’m no painter – I’m a faller” prompts thought of John Ashbery’s painting poems. McComb is a master of extending the cliché into the figurative – of reclaiming the commonplace turn as active creative language that can bring change, reconsideration. In “The Wrong Side of the Bed,” the ordinary becomes the abject becomes the “most perverse of ways.” Biblical anaphora is reshaped in this light. Walt Whitman’s celebrations in this “new land” (which it’s not) are ironized. The celebration lies in the observation of the perverse, not in the new world thrusting forward. The title as cliché reinforces the ordinariness of revelation: we are all capable of seeing this. After all, like lice, it will bite us awake or sleeping. In some of the shorter poems a dry deadly wit cuts in (especially in the poems ‘after Dorothy Parker’), while in “I Don’t Handle Poisons” we read: “I’ve had visions, too, / when I was ill and highly-strung,” and here the dramatic monologue is at work again. The everyday is a vision, and the ‘regu-

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lar’ is paranoid. The poison is psychological, and can’t be avoided by custom or nicety. In “Gifted Children,” with grimness as social commentator, a reeducating outside class constructs, the sarcasm of Parker returns. The damage done in making ‘better’ and elevating. The fetishization of the gift, the social exploitation as a form of capitalist profit. It comes from the exclusiveness of ‘Peppy’ (Peppermint) Grove, and the knowledge of it. Privilege always wants repayment. Failure to subscribe will leave you as dead leaves. “See how the leaves have not betrayed us.” With “Romantic Lunch in Karrakatta Cemetery,” that major locus of the living as well as the dead in Perth, I recall a friend who wrote and even slept there. There’s a double irony in this poem, of course. There is death as renewal, as fertilization for the next generation, a sexual freedom in the presence of the dead, transgression, absence of judgment (though what of the voyeuristic observer?), and the insensitivity of youth to the dead; but there’s also a celebration of the death-wish implicit in love. The subject of “Ocean Beach Hotel” is demographically crucial, and McComb’s observation is astute. This hotel – known to locals as ‘the O B H ’ – is (or was) a drug place, a place for bands and partying. The Neptunes, The Stems, all the psychedelic bands played there. It overlooks Cottesloe Beach. Perverts and celebrations. Working-class culture and surfer culture clashed and played pool there and fed on each other as well. Strange crossover, but it worked. You’d see the brickie’s labourer who did drugs and listened to the bands alongside his bosses and workmates who listened to country-andwestern, drank by the sea, and “perved on the chicks.” A blokey culture that McComb would have found repellent. He catches the side of it that was not his but about which he felt guilty. His criticism is tempered by his need for that ‘fraternity’ as well – the misfit who did fit in many places. The four-line stanzas here are control. Control was necessary or fights broke out. The fight is restrained in this poem for the reasons outlined above. This is love–hate stuff. The O B H would epitomize what the poet loathes, scene-wise and in its gratuity, but he is also attracted to it. His marginal status here allows these to remain unresolved in emotion but resolved in the formal constraints of the poem. It is a control medium. Irony is a temporary escape. There is pain in so much of his work, but it doesn’t ever stop the thought processes. “The darkness of this masonic den, / steeped in nicotine and testosterone, / conceals its fraternity from the advancing gash of sunlight.” In “Ode to January 1989,” where “Everything sins, suffers, grows,” as the poem concludes, there are echoes of John Forbes’s poetry. The flatness of

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actuality can’t delete love – the love poem as self-ironizing gesture while still wanting so badly. Out of loss, or out of isolation or loneliness, comes growth, because of memory and reflection. Once again, we see McComb’s displaced, distorted, reflected, and replaced nostalgia. The ode was a typically Forbesian medium; celebration is always ironized but still made (of another – a love) against a backdrop of inevitable personal and broader social decline and decay. Pop culture in the form of film is a subtext to “South by South-West” – a play on Hitchcock’s North by North-West. The pun appeals, but there’s also a whole dynamic of subjectivity and place under investigation. ‘Popular culture’ (entertainment) undercuts the literary ‘troping’ of the poem; ordinary detail is mixed with the formal and religious register, the performative, enunciatory, exclamatory mappings of landscape, body, ideas, emotions, society, “Pitching / In this long dark swell.” The amniotic fluid exists out of body and we have an earthed ontology. The intricacies of nature are a hell as much as a wonder. It’s not just a binary, though. It is Rimbaud’s “Seasons in Hell,” with its tormented wonders. A rich array of technical skill is on display here. It is not surprising to come across lines from John Donne accompanying “Lovers Against The City”: “’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone; / All just supply and all relation.” I expected this. Yet it is a colloquialization of the metaphysical. All elevations and wit in McComb need grounding – as they did for Donne, though I am not convinced that McComb saw the intellect as any kind of answer. It’s more the Donne of the Holy Sonnets than of “The Flea.” Maybe the truth is in what might be its companion, “I Love You Red Dust,” Australia’s spiritual cement … the body and the land, the sexual ambiguity displayed on a hetero boy/girl backdrop. The polymorphous perverse (which can create liminality through inconclusive notions of the pleasurable: that is, pleasure is variable and fluid and exponential). That’s what ‘attracts’ me. Even a poem like “In Praise of Hotels” has a Villonesque “Testament” feel about it.… Irony is said to be the refuge of fools, but McComb is no fool. His irony, self-exploratory and self-critical, is a rhetorical device enabling the full emotional range to be explored. The anaphoric (his signature approach, as noted) “Withdrawal” is a cry of rage against the self for damage done to others. The Bible eats him out of childhood. So bland in the middle-class suburban life, but so damaging in the formal structure (like poetry) that it brings forth guilt. All these poems plead release; there’s irony, but most often the ability to celebrate the seemingly joyless compels the voice to keep uttering. In “The Beest-

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ing Boy” the commonplace becomes mythic and cautionary, “ ‘ Damn him’ says his stepmother / ‘Damn him’ says his stepfather.” New fairytales of horror, nursery rhymes undone, metonymic deconstructions. In “Beautiful Era,” McComb is scathing: “Don’t we make a pretty picture, you and I embracing?” The Donne of “The Flea” becomes a phantasm of ironized social realism. It’s what grunge believed itself to be. In Part 2 (a long take on the parallel), we read: Sure, newspaper cynics, third-rate ironists and technically-minded semioticians will tell us our beautiful era is stillborn kitsch, our finest Rabelaisian choruses nought but sentimental doggerel.

This is what the persona most fears in himself and his devices of exposition and investigation. He also knows that death means it doesn’t matter; death is indifferent. Manners leave you with nothing after the ‘climax’. And then we have “Denouement,” a literary exercise in closure: Those instincts they are useless now they helped me turn into a clown And someone else can sing a song now until that song runs down

McComb uses the abcb rhyme scheme on occasion as partial restraint. This poem is anachronistic in register and tone, and its rhymes enforce the entirely darkened irony. Exploitation of song is a fear and realization, as song matters to the poet. Not only has the industry put him on display but he has done so himself. Songs end, though – but they also stay in memory through formal attributes linked with what they’re saying. This poem plays with such a legacy, mournfully; it is a self-critical lament, but not self-pitying. The major events of one’s life are over, the climax reached, but the song, and life, recycles itself as much as it unravels. The songs matter and mattered, regardless. And with All the sleepless drivers Still speaking to themselves Strangers to their mothers Driving into the world

we register the sense of disaster – the car as symbol of transport and destruction. The map of the land, the body, of fate, and the song. The loss of familial connection. Aloneness. Like a David Lynch film, except it’s real. A listing of the loss. An Andy Warhol disaster repetition – screamed out loud, though

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only you can hear. With “Good Evening Dear Miss Alach,” the book finishes in a very different register from the rest. It is self-referencing regarding the foulness (I use the antiquated term) of the music industry, snobbishness, false values. A goodbye with irony writ large. Its modest proposal eats us all. It is an epilogue. In this journey through his poetry, I hope to have shown that David McComb was a conscious craftsman and a scintillating thinker about his craft. It was no mere utilitarian device of expression and opinion for him, but something of his body, of the place he came from and where he went. Poetry was necessity. It was a survival kit that kept him searching for reason, for purpose, for a logic in a traumatized but also compelling world. Beauty never faded, even if it struggled for expression. Love was about separation and loss as well as about having and possession. Irony was the safety-net that always gave way when the poet went out on the tightrope. Furthermore, McComb was an ecologist of body and land, and wrote against invasiveness in all its forms. Sometimes he had to deal with that invasiveness and come up with whatever ‘escapes’ he could manage. He was a poet of total liminality.

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of Born Sandy Devotional (recorded 1985, released 1986) as one of the great Australian music albums, there has been a pleasing ‘growth’ in publications relating to definitively West Australian band The Triffids (named, of course, after the John Wyndham novel) and their singer–songwriter Dave McComb. This new addition to the library is a strange beast (like most biographies). Ostensibly recording the life of The Triffids, it is in essence an exploration of Dave McComb’s life through The Triffids. It was a band formed out of school friendships and family (McComb’s older brother Rob was brought in as guitarist early on in its evolution), a band that underwent line-up shifts and changes before settling into its core identity, and was often spoken of as a close-knit group of friends. But there’s a telling moment that Butcher documents, with the album Calenture (1987), the band’s first with a major label (Island), when

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Long version of amputated article in The Monthly 78 (May 2012): 64. Review of Bleddyn Butcher, Save What You Can: The Day of the Triffids (Marrickville, N S W : Treadwater Press, 2011).

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the first (failed) producer replaces band members with session musicians, with little opposition from McComb, who clearly for the time being puts personal vision and ambition ahead of the band’s collective interest. It is unlikely that the reader will judge McComb too harshly, as contexts are manifest through this almost hagiographical account of McComb as creative genius, allowing us insight into the often tormented productivity of the band’s leader. But even the biggest fans among us will baulk at his not telling his close friend Alsy (band member Allan Macdonald) of the substitution. McComb is certainly a figure worthy of biography. A superb songwriter, musician, and poet, he is particularly interesting in terms of how and why his work uses, differs from, and interacts with other songwriters and poets of his time (and places). The trauma induced by alcohol and drugs, and the circumstances of his early death (in 1999 in Perth, of heart failure a few days after a car accident in Melbourne, whither he had returned with his family to settle down peaceably) – these are part of this, but not the central interest. Only occasionally does Butcher’s attention to substance-abuse risk prurience, beyond the details necessary to McComb’s story. Inevitably, Butcher illustrates such abuse as it relates to McComb’s daily creative life, but as this book finishes with the breakup of the McComb version of The Triffids in 1989, we don’t follow the full horrific road to his death in 1999 – drugs are not the primary focus, for which I felt grateful. McComb’s brilliance had to do with his inherent creativity, and his ability to relate his own emotions (especially ‘love’) to his physical, intellectual, and even spiritual (outside religion) environments. He played with ‘brand Australia’, and, as we see, there were glib, almost exploitative moments in his use of this, but it’s always with irony and awareness, and ultimately a desire not to ride the exotica bandwagon. At his best, mystery came through the quotidian, and if that seemed strange to outsiders, so be it. This was a songwriter who told stories of his experience, of where he came from, and of what effect it was having on him and his friends, while deeply informed by international cultural registers (starting with The Velvet Underground and, with the breakup following The Triffids’ studio album The Black Swans [1988] and the live album Stockholm [recorded 1989, released 1990], working with The Black Eyed Susans before immersing himself in country rock with his solo album Love of Will, recorded 1993, released 1994). If he lacked anything, it was an insightful politics. He comes across as naive in so many ways, but that might also be Butcher’s care not to cast McComb in an awkward light in this con-

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text. One disturbing undercurrent throughout the book is its signalling of anyone ‘black’, always distinguished thus when it doesn’t seem relevant. Late in the biography, Butcher almost disapprovingly quotes Jonathan Romney, in his front-cover review of Calenture in the New Musical Express, as saying that McComb’s lyrics on the album were “sometimes overwrought.” This same accusation might be made of Butcher’s biography (which is otherwise consonant with Romney’s dominant view, in the same review, that McComb was “one of the least superficial pop authors of the decade”). Butcher frequently risks over-indulgence of subject and language. In the effort to capture a zeitgeist, a feeling of the talk, the chat, the life conditions of the band (mainly McComb) in the ecology of the musical world of Western Australia, Australia, and later Britain and Europe, we become part of a performance, an ‘in situ’ witnessing that doesn’t always convince. Sometimes this has an almost Villonesque ‘jargon’ effect, in the sense that the great French medieval criminal poet caught the language of his fellow miscreants that was private and encoded. So, too, does Butcher, clearly of the ‘scene’, capture the jargon of rock and popular musical culture of the 1980s, especially in Perth and Sydney. Much of the book feels like a retelling of McComb’s journals (it would be interesting to see these published in full), or of McComb’s letters to lovers and friends, so that there is almost no critical distance from the subject. A great biography requires both empathy for and an objective angle on a subject. Butcher’s work abounds in the former and has little of the latter. There is a paucity of outside verification, of the usual ‘evidence’ one requires to build an informative picture. While Butcher is an erudite and extremely knowledgeable writer, with great sensitivity to McComb’s lyrics and the musical aims of the band as a whole, he is happy for the story to tell itself, and to illustrate with subjective accounts of the music which too often read like offcuts of music journalism. The insistent, breathless use of the present tense, the projection through McComb’s thoughts and ways of seeing, the entry into the poet–songwriter’s shaping consciousness as he is creating... this is all at times presumptuous. It’s as if Butcher were McComb, and, however intimate he was with his subject, this ironically comes across as fiction rather than fact, or at least a kind of ‘faction’, in its eagerness. As a result, we end up with a strange sense of distance from the real McComb and the band. In some ways, Butcher comes across as the invisible member (or extra tentacle) of The Triffids. He is silently omnipresent – in the band’s bedrooms and digs, at every performance. His

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magnificent photographs do capture a curious intimacy, but also seem, or are, clinical, staged, distant. This paradox is at the core of the Butcher–Triffids interaction as revealed in Save What You Can. One might say the same of the portrait Butcher paints of Perth in the period concerned. It’s one I know intimately, and one to which I am perhaps too sensitively attuned. The isolation, the ‘treeless plain’ that divides west from east, the need to make it on the east coast before sales and recognition are there, all are bound together. The irony and mockery of the city as small town hand-inhand with a love of place – including the rural: the McComb family owned a property (where McComb is buried: Woodstock, at Jerdacuttup down near Hopetoun) to supplement their Peppermint Grove mansion that McComb often referred to as being in Cottesloe – are skilfully conveyed by Butcher, with maybe intermittent blindness to the same cringe qualities existing elsewhere. Certainly he’s right to show McComb’s alertness to this, to emphasize the local but to look to a wider world for inspiration as well. Butcher is also good on McComb’s literary influences (wide-ranging) and the effect that doing creative writing at the Western Australian Institute of Technology (now Curtin University) had on his songs and poetry (conjoined in “Beautiful Waste,” the title both of the A-side of his 1984 single and of his collection of poetry). Having said this, there’s always something missing: maybe an understanding of being of Perth while submitting it to scrutiny? There’s something tonally and imagistically missing from the portrait that McComb himself captures in his poetry and songs, if you know how to look. It’s as if all the information is in there, regarding the conditions under which a song or a poem was written, even down to the isolation of intertext and use of lines ‘sampled’ from elsewhere, yet missing the multiple readings that might result. McComb was a bowerbird (or ‘magpie’, as he might say) of other people’s work (his ‘accidental’, then conscious, intertextual use of Les Murray is fascinating), but it’s always bent to his own needs and, what’s more, the needs of the text itself. Maybe it’s the irony that one can mock and parody the tendency towards cover music in Perth, and yet also frequently cover other musicians, and form holiday bands that do covers. It’s more than just giving the people what they want; it’s being part of something collective. It’s a comment about connection as well as isolation. Butcher is likely one of the most discerning and informed writers on the Australian music scene of the 1980s. We get insights (via McComb, really), into many of the Perth musicians (such as the Snarski brothers) and the great

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Go-Betweens.108 We see McComb trying to step out out of the penumbra of Nick Cave (and the Birthday Party), and inevitably enjoy the eclectic and ever-widening lists of musical influences, from Bruce Springsteen to Prince, both of which I found surprising but, on clicking, got something I’d not got before. In many ways, this is the work that other biographers and musical historians of McComb, The Triffids, and even the many they touched in various ways, will turn to. It’s a foundational work, full of details of the ins and outs of record deals, handling record companies, producers, studios, and the processes of making records (and tapes!). It takes us from the McComb home The Cliffe through to a range of recording venues (including the family shearing shed down south), the making of videos, and the network of friendships and associations that always make a song and recording more than the sum of its parts. One man might be at the centre of this book, but all songs are the result of many. The book makes this point, even if at times we get lost in the Dave McComb swirl. Really, in the end, Butcher’s biography cries out for a good editor. Maybe it’s the book Butcher had to get out by way of loyalty (in some way?), and, now that it’s off his decks, he will look to writing the more rigorous if less ‘full’ biography of McComb that I feel sure he has in him.

Les Murray: Incalculable Influence109

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M U R R A Y , B O T H I N P U B L I C L I F E A N D I N H I S P O E T R Y , is an avowed believer in Australian cultural sovereignty. He is unyielding in his defence of a belief that has grown out of a desire to give voice to a very particular Australian identity, which, to Murray’s mind, emanates from the Bush. Raised on bush traditions, he sees bush ballads as being vital to the national literature. In some ways, herein lies the core of Murray’s muchvaunted opposition to modernism (“Modernism’s not modern: it’s police and ES

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The Brisbane indie rock group, formed in 1977 and ultimately disbanded in 2006; in a sort of replay of McComb, its co-leader, Grant McLennan, also died of heart failure. [J.K.] 109 “Les Murray,” in Tre Australiska poeter: Dorothy Hewett, Les Murray, John Kinsella, ed. Gunnar Harding & Bengt Jangfeldt (Stockholm: Swedish Academy / Artes 4, 1997).

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despair” – Subhuman Redneck Poems) – that it is a concept of the technological worlds of the northern hemisphere, ignoring and even obliterating the place-specific and demotic voice of a popular literature. Murray is naturally sceptical of the tools of modernity and, while having a fascination for technology, he also recognizes its destructiveness and indifference. But Murray consistently suggests that the best approaches to dealing with the dark side of human existence are through spiritual awareness. Central to Murray’s work is the concept of the Athenian and the Boeotian. Briefly, Athens symbolizes the new, the crass, the commercial. It is the abstracting part of the brain (the ‘forebrain’), the producer of rationality, while Boeotia is that part of the brain that is imagination, dream, and inspiration; it is the place of ritualism and ancestral inheritance (the ‘poem’). Murray examines history as a struggle between these two forces or states of mind. When the expatriate Australian poet Peter Porter, in his poem “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Hesiod,” drew an analogy between Hesiod and Les Murray, he said, “Yes, Australians are Boeotians.” Porter was referring to Murray’s 1972 poem “The Boeotian Count.” The arising debate became the core of one of the major discussions in contemporary Australian literature – the conflict between the city and the bush, centre and fringe, etc. Lawrence Bourke, in his critical book on Les Murray, quotes Murray’s description of Athens as “that perennial urbane country of the mind which for ever scorns, oppresses and renews itself from my native Boeotia.”110 Murray sees white Australian history as a continuing process of distancing between the urban and the rural, though he feels that ultimately a reconciliation between the two is possible, if anywhere, in the ‘New World’ of Australia. Les Murray left his country home at Bunyah in the north of New South Wales in 1957, returning almost thirty years later in 1986. This is the place of his ancestors, at least five generations of them, and Murray is as concerned with tracing this inheritance through Australia as he is with his original Gaelic roots. The notions of ‘clan’ and ‘identity’ and consequently a personal sense of authenticity are vital to his project. This tradition and inheritance are the means by which he fights the imperialism of urbanism, the product of an industrial revolution that has systematically alienated both the land and the people who seek to maintain their relationship with it.

110

Lawrence Bourke, A Vivid Steady State (Kensington: New South Wales U P ,

1992): 27.

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At the core of national identity is the Australian language, which he sees as unique in character. The independence of an idiomatic Australian dialect distances the fringe from its English centre. One of the landmarks of Australian literature was the publication in 1976 of Les Murray’s selected poems, The Vernacular Republic. It marked one of those occasions when a personal literature becomes a public statement. The process of publication was a political act, and also an historical one, in the sense that it made concrete the long-term conflicts in Australian literature regarding urban and rural tensions. Lawrence Bourke says: Murray writes of The Macquarie Dictionary (1981), in his review-essay “Centering the Language,” that it shows “how much larger and richer our dialect is than many had thought, in part by gently but firmly shifting our linguistic perception, so that our entire language is henceforth centred for us, not thousands of miles away, but here where we live.” . . . This comment can be usefully applied to his own poetry. It too reveals the breadth and richness of the Australian idiom, and it too shifts our perceptions to show life centred “here where we live”. Murray’s title for his “novel” – the “vernacular republic” – encapsulates the point: a community becomes culturally independent in its use of a local language dialect, or a “vernacular”.111

a Murray has spoken of his love of language as being “a family inheritance to some extent.” To have control over language is to be free, and Murray is all too aware of how the Athenian centre seeks to use language to oppress and control. His understanding of the derivation of words is astounding. Apart from the European languages he studied at university, Murray has a knowledge of Gaelic and an interest in the common ancestry of languages. Murray has said, of his poem “Walking to the Cattle Place,” “It’s really an etymological sequence as much as anything else. It was sparked off by realizing from linguistics studies that the oldest root we can trace in Indo-European languages is cow.”112 An inherent shamanism has Murray acting directly for and with the land and the people whose gestures he conveys. There is a symbiosis between them, and it is not only his right but his responsibility as a bard to speak. Be it the myths of masculine strength and heroism from earlier cultures, or the stuff 111 112

Bourke, A Vivid Steady State, 23. Quoted in Bourke, A Vivid Steady State, 140.

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of Australia’s own national pride (such as the military courage and pride attached to the A N Z A C myth), or the Gaelic resistance to the English colonization of their language (and territory), Murray frames his poetry around the conflict between the old values and the new – the dehumanizing and indifferent forces of technology and change, against the forces of ancestral purity. What attracts me as a poet to Murray’s work is its organicism – the way a poem grows towards an ‘awareness’. This can be said of his poetry as a whole. There is a sense of moving through time and space, towards some metaphysical consciousness. I’ve often said that to enjoy a Murray poem one needs to run through all phases of human life – from childhood to old age; the poems register the full scale of senses and responses from the life-cycle. Murray’s delight in the intricacy of nature, the endless variety of creation, is also of great appeal, especially in a book like Translations from The Natural World. The poem that, for me, captures not only the Murray voice but that of the Australian psyche is from his most recent book Subhuman Redneck Poems, “Water-Gardening in an Old Farm Dam.” The pragmatism and sensitivity, the duality of that psyche (or character), the internal conflict, the extremes touching, are wonderfully caught in the lines And the reeds I hate, mint sheaves, human-high palisades that would close in round the water, I could fire floating petrol among them again, and savage but not beat them, or I could declare them beautiful.

This new volume is a much more personal book, and in many ways a cathartic one. Murray’s influence on a generation of Australian poets has been incalculable. Few fail to recognize his linguistic brilliance, his intricate metaphysics, his ability to craft a poem and create a sense of place. Murray knows the value of naming – and he has named the points within his and his people’s territory. a

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Les Murray: Speaking to People113

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E S M U R R A Y H A S A L W A Y S B E E N A P O E T who knows what he’s doing. Anchored in his emphatic faith in God, he is nonetheless a material poet who aims to speak to the ‘people’ (‘hoi polloi’) and the oftenslighted, as he perceives it, underclass of ‘rednecks’. This world-view reached its apotheosis in Murray’s controversial populist volume Subhuman Redneck Poems (1996). His voice and persona are bardic; he sees himself as speaking both as an individual outside central power cliques and for those who find it more difficult to be heard, especially in elite literary and political milieux. This approach could lend itself to radicalism, but in Murray’s case it is a determined if highly individual form of conservatism. In his new volume of poems, Taller When Prone, we find Murray mainly using a pared-back technique (one exception is the etymological-play poem “Infinite Anthology”), with selective use of his trademark verbal twists, wordplay, and joy in Australian vernaculars. He builds these poems from fragments of history and events, from travel, and from what comes to hand in daily experience, anecdotes, and the wonders of language itself. The rhythms are those of his earlier poems, but often less expansive (less ‘sprawling’), and with a more occasional tone. By ‘occasional’ I don’t mean ‘slight’, but that there’s a sense of speaking to a large audience, with empathy for their day-today lot. This audience might well be white and middle-class, but it’s impossible to say, and critics should be wary of second-guessing who Murray is or isn’t speaking to. He never hesitates to say what he thinks, and what he thinks ‘the people’ might empathize with. The question we need to ask, and maybe he expects it, is: Who are the people? The Australian white, rural, non-wealthy? Possibly. But these categories are evasive as the ‘city’ and the ‘bush’ – Murray always being associated with the latter. But Murray is a supremely skilled composer who knows how to use his ‘voice’. And it is a voice, and not necessarily Murray, no matter how much we’d like to draw the definitive link. Personally, I might politically disagree with sentiments raised in poems, and even how they’re constructed (for example, “John Calvin, unforgiver / in your Taliban hat,” which I find a gratuitous image), but I can see the image as an image. One can always admire Murray’s verbal dexterity.

113

“Taller When Prone,” The West Australian (18 May 2010). Review of Les Murray, Taller When Prone: Poems (Collingwood, Victoria: Black Inc, 2010).

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Taller When Prone uses an ‘us’/‘them’ approach. There are the politically oppressed Murray envisages and feels he speaks for, and those who would exploit them. In “The 41st Year of 1968,” he establishes an opposition between what he identifies as the ‘hippie’ and ‘settler’ elements of forest/bush communities. The horrendous loss of 173 lives in the 2009 Victorian bushfires comes under scrutiny; the poem draws a clear association between the ‘hippie’-led defence of native vegetation and that loss. It’s the ‘hippies’ versus the ‘rednecks’, the latter associated with ‘settler clearing’ and the former with the so-called Summer of Love (forty-one years ago is probably a reference to the devastating 1968 New South Wales bushfires; the ‘Summer of Love’ in Haight Ashbury, San Francisco, was 1967, but its effect echoed around the world the next year). Whatever one’s views, it’s not that simple, and ‘hippies’ are not part of the contemporary Australian picture. We see other references to this imagined division in “Refusing Saul’s Armour”: so I read unset books slept in buildings and long grass years before the Haight I mean the Haight Ashbury

The pun on this first ‘Haight’/‘hate’ locates hippiedom in the same realm as earlier references and subtexts to those who are indifferent to farmer suicides. Murray clearly, here at least, states his allegiances, and his voice follows. But poems allow any reader a way out, and the voice is the way. It distances us from opinions. What makes Murray’s technique and voice so universally effective that someone with an often opposing ‘politics’ can keep reading with such enthusiasm? It has to do with compression, his ability to merge events and locations, to compact time and space in pinpoint descriptors: not at all the stamp of tight-buttoned guards executing arm-geometry in the shouting yards

This book is full of the movement you find in an earlier poem such as “The Tin Wash Dish” with its easy-flowing rhythm – another key to Murray’s readability and appeal. It has always amazed me that Murray calls himself musically tone-deaf, as he has such an acute ear for the sounds of words and their

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combination. His poems have a verbal glow. These lines from “The Monroe Survey” live as a verbal moment in time outside the ‘meaning’ of the poem: Gut-coloured vast tube life-forms sup their overflow as it streams down.

This is visceral stuff; what poetry is all about. Murray uses the full panoply (there are many military metaphors in his work) to evoke the material world of human sensibilities. He speaks to people, not just ‘the people’.

Ouyang Yu: The Space of the Tale114

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and his contact with France and Italy in particular helped shape what we term ‘English literature’. Ouyang Yu’s Kingsbury Tales are the poems – in the ostensibly narrative form of a “novel” – of a traveller, an exile, a displaced poet, and a poet of two homes. The tension between these factors drives the poetry of this book. The qualification, ownership, and identification of ethnicity, language, and origin are obsessive motifs. They are also obsessively deconstructed, and with a matter-of-factness akin to a day’s ‘bowel-movements’. Racial identification is at once sacred and scatological: it is a paradox. The Kingsbury Tales begins with a ‘beginning’: HAUCER WAS A TRAVELLER,

Verse novel? No, that’s a tautology or an oxy Moron The Kingsbury Tales are no match For The Canterbury Tales Hear-hear to that Because they are not poetry Sounds like poultry? Not my fault A novel, tentatively To write in a jagged form A crap old Format That treats others’ histories as If they were my own

114

“Preface” to Ouyang Yu, The Kingsbury Tales: a novel (Blackheath, N S W : Brandl & Schlesinger, 2008): 7–13.

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Or my own As others’. . .

which sets the reader up for an anti- and contrary reading in so many ways. It connects with traditions that may or may not be its own; it challenges format and epistemology, and questions the nature of history, or histories, and whose histories they are. ‘Set’ primarily in Australia, spiralling out of the Melbourne suburb of Kingsbury, Ouyang Yu’s main place of abode (and home), and China (of early life experience, of a return to Wuhan, as conceptual space for all those who connect with its five-thousand-year history. . . the algorithm is complex and changing) – with asides to all other places whose cultures Ouyang is connected with – the work is exponential. The slippage of identity, and how societies invest or alter identity, is constantly under examination. Reading early “tales” from this work, I asked Ouyang about the influence on them of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and he replied that it was very little, if at all. There’s a comment here about the weight of expectancy an Englishlanguage reader (especially of relatively narrow cross-cultural experience) might bring to the work. Ouyang Yu’s ‘beginning’ clearly registers this. The familiarity of tale-telling, of sharing a story, echoes ironically and at times tenderly through Ouyang’s masterwork. There is certainly a tone of sharing horror and joy, and the many voices of this work, the many kinds of tales, seem mediated through a figure we might name ‘Ouyang Yu’. But this figure is a multiple personality, a paranoid zone wrestling with its own exclusion and belonging. It gives away its privacy and exposes itself to hurt and pain as a kind of deliverance. Excoriating racism, excoriating compartmentalizing (the Chinese and Western Orientalists), it becomes a book of listening and telling, of witness and bemusement, of the re-origining of language. Bigotry comes through segregated ways of seeing, but also from segregations of language. Ouyang has much to say on accent, on the manners of speech. His rhetoric, strewn with devastating images, is a new-created tongue. He is a resister, a fighter against proper forms, while obsessively determined to master and re-invent those forms. In doing this, he has created a new poetry. A new Australian poetry, a new Chinese poetry. Along with Lionel Fogarty and Javant Biarujia, he might be one of the few poets in Australia, maybe the world, who have been driven to create a new language because of the limitations and complicities of an English that is exclusionary, protective, and deleting. The ironies of teaching language (and being excluded from places of teaching) compel a number of these poems. During the recent election campaign, a ‘liberal voter’ on the John Laws Radio Program (as reported in the

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West Australian on 15 November 2007 and elsewhere) imagined Kevin Rudd “off in China jabbering in Mandarin.” It would seem that the racisms of Australian society are deeply entrenched in linguistic fears and assumptions – it is these, among other things, that Ouyang is constantly critiquing. John Forbes, in “Love Poem,” on the Iraq war and love (and the absence of presence), wrote the memorable line “doing what the west does best.” Ouyang know what China does best as well, and is equally ruthless in his judgments. Primarily, these poems deconstruct this through the ways of viewing that a ‘westernized’ Chinese might take to China, how it reconfigures experience. An outsider who was an outsider who was inside. The poems struggle with contraries and comparisons, with ‘over there and over here’ dichotomies. Entwined through this is the body as race, as exclusion. There’s an intense wrestling between desire and love, the poignant search for spiritual and carnal love going hand-in-hand with desire that is impolite, politically ‘offensive’, even perverse. These perversities are linked with power and mistreatment, but are strangely hungered after as well. The mediating voice /persona of the work, the teller of the others’ tales, is not a ‘nice’ person, but one open to experience, to being of what is being criticized. It can be racist as the racist is, misogynistic and ‘liberating’, it can be exclusionary, it can be hurt and damaged. This is a book of tales told by one poet with an ear to stories, experiences, offences given and taken. Some might say the dually hidden–revealed persona was ‘touchy’, easy to take offence: precisely, we are held accountable, as is the persona. But there’s an intactness in the stories of those experiencing loss, or bigotry, or bucking the odds. Similar experiences bring disparate voices together. In this I am reminded of Chaucer’s “Prologue to the Miller’s Tale” (tr. Theodore Morrison): When the Knight finished, no one, young or old, In the whole company, but said he had told A noble story, one that ought to be Preserved and kept alive in memory, Especially the gentlefolk, each one. Our good Host laughed, and swore, “The game’s begun, The ball is rolling! This is going well. Let’s see who has another tale to tell. . . ”

It struck me, when reading this cycle of poems (extracted from a much larger body of work, but brought together with novelistic narrative intent), that there was something of Angela Carter in their trauma. It’s an irony, and I don’t

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know if Ouyang has ever read Carter, whom he would rightfully challenge as being Orientalist and unconscious of her racism (she lived and wrote in Japan for a time, and her work is fraught with imagined Others), but similar effects in deployment of the tale are often instigated. I find Ouyang’s tales, taken collectively, are ‘horror tales’ with redemptive cores: the difference being that they are not fantasies but largely drawn from experience. Metaphor and the figurative are kept within the rhetorical framework of recounting. In an afterword to Fireworks, Angela Carter wrote of the tale: I started to write short pieces when I was living in a room too small to write a novel in. So the size of my room modified what I did inside it and it was the same with the pieces themselves.115

One might reflect on the expansiveness of both Australia and China, and the movement between (leaving China, then later going back to teach there) these expanses Ouyang makes in the small spaces of the poems (that continue to grow and ‘spread’). The correlations between the small space of the lyric (consider his superb and disturbing work on translating ‘traditional’ Chinese poetry – and the expectations Western readers have of this being Chinese poetry) and the small space of the tale, are challenged through the interconnectedness of the poems and the tales. Chaucer strikes again. As might The Tales of the Arabian Nights. Angela Carter continues: The limited trajectory of the short narrative concentrates its meaning. Sign and sense can fuse to an extent impossible to achieve among the multiplying ambiguities of an extended narrative. I found that, though the play of surfaces never ceased to fascinate me, I was not so much exploring them as making abstractions from them, I was writing, therefore, tales.116

Ouyang Yu is aware of this process in the tale and does the same and opposite. Enmeshed in history, detail, fact – heard and read and experienced – his tales are naturally extended and extending narratives, and yet he encapsulates and mediates their surfaces. This makes him complicit in their reduction, and active in their enunciation. It’s a new modus he has created. It can’t simply be called cross-cultural, and intra-historical, or comparative; it’s creating a new space for the telling of rejected and minimized experience on public 115

Angela Carter, “Afterword” to Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (London: Quartet, 1974): 121. 116 “Afterword” to Fireworks, 121.

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records, in constructions of nation and race. In re-telling a tale already told (and accepted as ‘real’ – amusing, dismissive, quaint, repellent, or any other offensive appellations) a reclamation takes place. Consider:

Two Bulletin tales On 14/4/1888 a story, titled, ‘Mr and Mrs Sin Fat’ Was published in Australia’s The Bulletin Which, in Chinese, translates directly into gongbao, a male newspaper I wonder if there was anyone Chinese Who wrote a response but if anyone did There was no trace left as the male newspaper wouldn’t have given it a chance For the birth of something that would have made a Chinese Or Australian difference I wonder if academics have wondered about these, too, themselves But hang on and listen to my other male newspaper story that happens today In which this female editor emails to say, in her response to the submission Of something I wrote: ‘I’m afraid we can’t place this piece’ I wonder if the then male editor of the male newspaper had said something similar Or in a more honest Aussie manner: I’m sorry, ‘Mr Sin or Mr Fat But I’m afraid we can’t place this piss as we are full (of shit) till the end of 1888’ The damage is done, however, for all my students, male or female Have read Edward Dyson’s fan(t)a(s)tically Australian ‘Mr and Mrs Sin Fat’ And know what Australia is like, or at least was like, in the good old white days

That was then and this is now? Of course not; little has changed. Consider the comment on the John Laws programme. During the 1980s I spent a lot of time with fellow anarchists stripping posters from lamp-posts around Perth posted by the A N M that featured “Asians: Out” and other disgusting slogans. All the many peoples of Asia were lumped together generically, and a white European nation was being ‘protected’. The people who posted these were violent (we experienced their violence) and pathological. Ouyang’s work actually understands such psychologies better than any other I have ever read. He gets inside racism and fear, inflects it into ‘himself’, into his own certainties. It is simply not adequate to call him ‘the angry Chinese-Australian poet’. He is angry, but he is also brilliant (he ironically refers to his own “genius” in

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one of the poems). He has put himself out there and takes the flak. Read ‘him’, listen to ‘him’, learn. He has travelled through hell, and is still there. Not only is Ouyang one of the greatest poets of our time, he is one of the most purposeful. He writes because he has to: even though he seems to wish he could stop and let it all go. He can’t. I – we – can’t let him. a Ouyang Yu is approachable and willing to discuss issues in his work. We email each other a lot. I asked a him a few questions about the work – “problems” I had. This is one example of the dialogic imperative behind his work – tits willingness to discuss and be alive to ‘real’ reactions. It is not reflective but active: J K : “In an ancient country one gets ancient quick” – you are referring to

China but Australia is also ‘ancient’. usually such lines in your work turn on an irony, and though there is self-irony in the line I can’t detect it re China and Australia. my ‘problem’ is re ‘culture’ and what constitutes the fetishization of ‘ancient’. could you comment? want to make sure I am getting the line. O Y : yes, I was referring to China and it’s a feeling I got on my return journey

there after I got my university teaching position. physically, my hair turned grey, for the first time, and, mentally, there was a realization that the ancientness of the country was complicit in that, too. you could, I suppose, read the ancientness of Oz into that as well.

Although I think this work is a masterpiece – one of the greatest books of ‘Oz poetry’ – this preface is not intended as hagiography. I do have some challenges: for example, implied ‘conclusions’. Ouyang is much less closed in his statements than a reader might think – a challenge is not necessarily a conclusion, and his work, like The Canterbury Tales, offers the chance of another tale to be told from another viewpoint, another ethnicity and identity in the context of those who don’t ‘look’ as if they are of a particular place, or don’t name themselves (or aren’t named) in that context. Ouyang actually tackles this himself in a poem dealing with taxi-drivers (mediators and go-betweens in a number of Ouyang’s poems) and identity – it cuts both ways in the poem, a kind of dialogue of misunderstanding and displacement. On the other hand, in the poem “An Aboriginal tale,” there is a comment about an Indigenous woman on a tram being the only Indigenous person the persona has seen through many years in Melbourne. This observation relies on physical perceptions. However, who is to say that one may visually identify a person’s ethnicity or belonging?

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It is difficult to draw comparisons between Ouyang’s work and that of other poets; he is so much his own poet. There are moments where images suggest Bei Dao or Yang Lian, but, equally so, “rubbish poetry” (which Ouyang drew to my attention) or the nineteenth-century French poets ‘he’ lambasts in various poems. Ouyang is a major translator from Chinese into English, and English into Chinese,117 and elements of this process, and of works he has translated, have evidently influenced his own lexis and prosody, particularly in the construction of lines and shapes of poems. There’s a strong influence from works of prose fiction, including, I’d argue, the book ‘he’ rejected, Xavier Herbert’s problematical Poor Fellow My Country, and also Under Capricornia. Ouyang’s re-invention of poems that do the work of the lyric and narrative prose and also cultural history may best be read as reactions to poems of revolutionary praise in China during the 1950s, such as T’ien Chien’s “Song of My Fatherland” or the 1968 poem by Sun Jui-ching published in English for propaganda purposes by the Communist government: “I Ride My Eagle Ten Thousand Li.” Many Australian poems are absorbed (and rejected) in the same way: from Dorothy Mackellar’s “My Country” through to poems of contemporary Australian poets. Ouyang is simply not afraid to deconstruct, even attack, all propagandas. He consciously creates alternative ‘sayings’ that unpick themselves. It is often vulnerable and deeply moving, and denies propaganda. In a piece on his school days published elsewhere, Ouyang Yu began: “The world hates poets”; but he remembers his father teaching him “ancient Chinese poets,” and there is the debt to an old tradition in a very early poem ending: “this wind has brought the message of spring to the earth, blowing 117

For example, Bitter Peaches and Plums, tr. Ouyang Yu & Bruce Jacobs (Monash: Monash Asia Institute, Monash University, 1996), In Your Face: Contemporary Chinese Poetry in English Translation, intro. & tr. Ouyang Yu (Melbourne: Otherland Literary Journal, 2002), and Loving: The Best of Both Words, intro. & tr. Ouyang Yu (Kingsbury, Victoria: Yuanxiang (Otherland) Literary Journal, 2005). He is also an accomplished essayist and critic – for example: Representations of Australia and Australians in China and Hong Kong, 1985–1995 (Nathan, Queensland: Centre for the Study of Australia–Asia Relations, 1998); On the Smell of an Oily Rag: Speaking English, Thinking Chinese and Living Australian (Kent Town, S A : Wakefield, 2007); Bias: Offensively Chinese / Australian: A Collection of Essays on China and Australia (Melbourne: Otherland, 2007); Chinese in Australian Fiction, 1888–1988 (Youngstown N Y : Cambria, 2008); Beyond the Yellow Pale: Essays and Criticism (Melbourne: Otherland, 2010). [J.K.]

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into everyone’s heart.” That optimism, reflected in times when “to be learned is a crime,” times of dictatorship and oppression, captures what drives Ouyang as poet. Angry, yes, but holding fast to a vision of beauty and hope. That’s his ultimate message. It is possible, though the reality is grim and foreboding. It’s up to us – all of us.

Letter to Ouyang Yu118

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N A SENSE, WHAT FOLLOWS IS THE DRIFT OF AN INTRODUCTION I might write on your work – I think you might disagree with a lot of it. I am not sure. Much of it appears in ‘scare quotes’ – that reflects my sense of inadequacy in dealing with the complexity of your work, and, I guess, your ‘self’. By way of subjectivity, I am going to remove your self from your self. This is the way Australia makes life ‘hell’ for those it can’t get around ‘making belong’. You become the other ‘Ouyang Yu’. The public ‘Ouyang Yu’ who puts it out and expects to get it back. Thing is, I’m on your side. Or is that a little too easy? Subjectivity in an Ouyang Yu poem, or an Ouyang Yu work of critical prose, even fiction, resides partly in the slippage between languages, partly in a reader’s expectation that there will be such slippage. Language is both tactile and a state of mind. When we first communicated, you politely corrected me on my misunderstanding of Chinese naming. Which was your first name – ‘Ouyang’ or ‘Yu’? You were correcting not cultural transcriptive problems but an unspoken (possible) idea that the necessity of understanding wasn’t also part of my cultural register. If it wasn’t, it should have been. I intend to learn Chinese – not because of a need to accumulate ‘other’ languages (though it does specifically interest me), but because I cannot understand the cultural space I think I occupy without doing so. As a writer coming out of an Australian landscape, I have many obligations – a recognition that I am on stolen land, and that culpability is ‘shared’, not exclusive. Australia, if not indigenous, is a migrant nation. We share responsibility in every way. Recognizing a shared responsibility, however long one has been in Australia (or elsewhere), is crucial to acknowledging our own limitations. Ouyang

118

“Letter,” in Ouyang Yu, Bias: Offensively Chinese / Australian: A Collection of Essays on China and Australia, foreword by J.V. D’Cruz (Melbourne: Otherland, 2007): 9–14.

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Yu’s life has been a journey in which different forms of exile are played out. His is a search for ‘belonging’, but not on anyone else’s terms. His poetic is formed out of an expectation that an individual (and, by possible extension, a community) will have equal access to privilege. Not that privilege is necessary, but that, should it exist, it should do so en masse. A particularly illuminating passage in this book of essays runs as follows: Again and again, there is something that keeps coming back to me like a refrain, twelve years into living in Australia, until I realized what it was when I dug up a line that I wrote a few years ago in my sequence, Soul Diary, which goes, “to be asian in australia is to live on the reverse side of paradise.” That is to put it gently when I compared it with what I said in a recent interview with a newspaper based in Hong Kong. I said, “living in Australia is like living in hell.” A personal conclusion from my own experience, I nevertheless find an echo to it from Chinese intellectuals I know in Australia and elsewhere. In his own words, Zhang told me that he sometimes felt that “it was like living in hell” in Australia when I mentioned that it was so difficult for Chinese intellectuals to live intellectually in Australia. What has now become obvious is that those Chinese intellectuals who came to Australia in or around the June 4th Incident in 1989 with great hopes for freedom and democracy have found them but, ironically, have had little use for them. Like sunshine and clean air, two great qualities of Australian life most admired by Chinese nationals, freedom and democracy, much as they are found lacking in contemporary China, will not get them a job or food here in the land of plenty.

I would argue there is no paradise in Australia, at least for the majority, but there is certainly a worse ‘no paradise’ for some more than others, and certainly for some ‘ethnicities’ more than others. Ouyang Yu goes to the heart of why this is so. His personal disillusionment has us reflect not only on the flaws of the ‘promised land’ but also on the systems of ‘freedom' and ‘democracy’ themselves. It becomes a case of degrees of oppression (and suppression, as noted in the foreword). There is a particularly terrifying bumpersticker doing the rounds in Australia at the moment, something like: ‘If you don’t love Australia, then leave’. This is, of course, primarily aimed at refugees and recent migrants, and migrants of non-European heritage even if their families have been in Australia for a hundred-and-eighty years! It is, in essence, the phantom limb of the old ‘White Australia’ policy.

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Though he is not an anarchist, Ouyang Yu’s poetic is certainly closer to mutual aid than to survival of the fittest. If I as an anarchist write myself into this, it is because Ouyang Yu’s work is very personally addressed. I am culpable; I am one of those he charges with failing to live up to what I believe I am. I make claims. The act of enquiry in Ouyang Yu’s work is vital, because one recognizes that the personal vis-à-vis the collective isn’t categorization or phylum, but education, growth, and respect. This act of enquiry exists somewhere between contradiction and paradox. It’s a fine line. I did refer earlier to the complexity of the work. But maybe by calling you /him ‘complex’, I am being too defensive, or too much a victim of my own cultural coordinates. We are, after all, all complex. Complexity has nothing to do with what we write out of, but how we are (mis)understood by others. Anywhere. Anytime. Still, few writers make their lives so vulnerable and open as you have with yours. You become, if not a conduit for a struggle, then a focal point for the embitterment of others who fear what you have to say, what you tell them about themselves, and yourself. I have long enjoyed our dialogues, and feel that discussion is a way of challenging my own preconceptions as commentator, observer (from a distance, at times), and even participant. I have to say, with due respect to Professor D’Cruz, who has caught you so well in his foreword, that I disagree with some of his statements there. To me, who have published and supported your work for many years, it seems wrong to suggest that an engaged and recognizing reception of it was only very recent in Australia. Your struggle, for me, has always been the reader’s struggle – some of us have gone with you, looked, and been held to account. From you, I have learnt to look at the ‘unanthology’ of Australian poetries, and have found many languages and many poetries. Yours is a universalizing voice. I see it as affirmative – sure, rebarbative and confronting – but ultimately healing. Yours is a poetry of metonym and cumulative images ‘spoken’ without deception or affectation. They are culturally levered images (that is, for example, metaphors of ‘culture’ as truth and production – paradoxes that warp and weave through each other: you are always becoming what you critique), municipal images, urban images, transcultural images, mythologies, archetypes, conversations, ‘ordinariness’, ‘colloquialism’, and above all else, the ability of language to work as barometer of who he or she is, who you are, who we all are. It’s an internationalizing voice of immediacy. You write locally and with a locality that echoes across borders. You write across borders, into borders, against borders, and even, at times, ‘defending’ borders.

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I totally agree with you regarding the bias and bigotries and fears, in Australian publishing, towards the ‘Asian Other’ (in all its generic unglory) that you outline in your own critical writing. However, I await commentary on the changes you yourself have brought about in that publishing psychology. On one level, this has taken place only on the surface – when the publishing world is outed enough, it reacts (if slightly), and it certainly reacts to public perceptions and apparent desires. Of course, Australia has not conceptually (and officially) gone forward in any sort of multicultural way in the last decade or so, and in fact has quarantined itself against non-American and nonEuropean (and selective there) influences. Some claim the extreme racism against ‘Asian’ communities has transferred to ‘Middle-Eastern’ communities, when in fact it has simply encompassed both. Rather, it’s an issue of media topicality, and of the ‘free’ media being least concerned with the freedom of people or peoples. It’s a matter of availability and topicality. I was trying to explain to students the other day that when the AngloCeltic-heritage majority does a mea culpa in terms of European colonization in Australia, it does so to emphasize its own power – by damning itself, it gains control of the argument, it claims the discourse, and makes its apologies with many caveats and disclaimers. A government agenda might, at best, say ‘Sorry’ or create a treaty with those indigenous people it has dispossessed, but this will only ever happen under conditions to its advantage, as one would expect of any entrenched power-structure. The non-recognition of Chinese heritage or Indian heritage or Japanese heritage (it’s a long list of ‘Asian’ and non-European othering and pan-rejectionism), works in a similar if also different way. ‘You’ represent what ‘they’ most fear. And Ouyang Yu is truculent, ‘intrusive’, deconstructive, and knows his ‘rights’. He ‘outs’ cultural abuse and cultural dishonesty. He becomes a threat. The brilliance of your work is that it does all of this – it investigates as well as accuses. It also moves towards wholeness and redemption. Things can change. Time and time again, you say that. Why is that so often missed? And above all, you are a poet, and your words bind things together – you reassemble what you deconstruct. You criticize all ‘cultural’ machines. It is the machine of cultural production and the governmental power structures they mask that are so closely examined in your ‘attacks’. Funny thing is, I’ve always thought of you as a poet of ‘language’ (sure, contingent on ‘politics’), and that your poems even when they seem rhetorical are in fact unrhetorical. They are about re-examining how we think we’re being told to read. Your

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poems don’t tell, they analyse how we are told, and what we think we are hearing. They are about sound in so many ways. Language as closer to who we are than anything else? Yes, at times. And why changes (however small and on whatever level) should have taken place at all. These changes might be measured by the willingness of journals to publish criticism that in essence damns their own modus operandi, a slight move towards editorial inclusiveness – not only in the tokenistic ‘how many authors of which ethnicity are we including?’ but also on the level of discourse and metatextuality regarding what constitutes ‘English’ and poetry of place /nation /anti-nation / community in Australia. Pushing this equation further, your work contributes to a hope that the majority of English-only speakers will recognize that languages other than English are also the languages of Australia. Your range of approaches in demystifying language-use is extraordinary – resisting centralizing control of language through broadening publication opportunities (the Otherland press and its Otherland Literary Journal is a ground-breaker in this way); examining how issues of translation affect the translator as much as the translated, textually and personally; investigating hybridization and hybridity from a flexible and mobile viewpoint; highlighting issues of migrant inclusion and rejection in media conversation (and cross-cultural conversation); and ‘internally’ – exploring subtleties of belonging and not belonging within marginalized migrant communities, communities often resisting the homogenizing and hegemonizing of and by ‘Australianity’ (especially under the Howard government). The foreword picks up on this, but we need to go further with it. I think you have a ‘paranoid’ struggle not so much with ‘identity’ as with access and rejection over where you come from – a need that is frustrated by an anger at what power-structures do to people. Even the conservatives (for whatever reasons) have started to recognize your significance as an Australian poet. The foreword seems to claim that because you finally won a prize (it is highly appropriate that you get the recognition – don’t get me wrong), some small notice is being taken of your work. As we both know, as much as we like the rewards, prize culture means nothing – it’s just a process and reflects only what is acceptable at any given time – it is a comment on that process and not on the work. I think the true measure of the effectiveness of your work is in the influence it has had on other Australian poets’ work. Palpable, I reckon. Your work is also more prevalent in journals now. In other words, I think the foreword could contextualize, and be more up-to-date. Just an opinion. Of course, it’s not always for the best of reasons that things change.

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Regardless, I hope more and more people do become receptive to your highly significant oeuvre. Best, JK

Simply Charmaine119

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C H A R M A I N E P A P E R T A L K – G R E E N ’ S strong and forceful poetry in The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets (ed. Susan Hampton and Kate Llewellyn), and then in various other anthologies, including Kevin Gilbert’s essential Inside Black Australia. Interviewing Charmaine a couple of years ago when I was preparing her book for publication, I asked her about her early writing – which began at high school – and also about other Indigenous poets she had read. She replied: FIRST CAME ACROSS

Kath Walker, Kevin Gilbert, Alf Taylor, Lionel Fogarty, and one of my late old nannas, Ethel Clinch. The late Kevin Gilbert gave me a lot of support as a teenager to keep writing and he included some of my poems in his book Inside Black Australia.

What’s as important to Charmaine as the list of other talented indigenous poets is the mention of the influence of a poem by her nanna, Ethel Clinch. Though Charmaine has travelled widely around Australia, and worked in cities a long way from her home place, she remains in her life and poetry closely connected with where she comes from. She writes her land and her community. The first question I asked her in that interview was about her people. She said: I belong to the Wajarri–Amangu and Bardimia people of the Murchison area. Wajarri–Amangu on my mother’s side and Bardimia on my father’s side. I was mainly brought up in Mullewa with my mother’s people but later in life have gotten to know more of my father’s side. The old people used to have very strict laws but most old people have gone now, leaving behind a very different type of culture and environment, which most people need to accept and nurture.

119

“Introduction” to Charmaine Papertalk–Green, Just Like That (Fremantle, W A : Fremantle Press, 2007).

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Charmaine is a singer of her place and culture not only in herself, but as an extension of her family and Yamaji country. She also said: I mean the proper singing for this country – the Yamaji country. The land must be so sad that it does not hear its people so often now.

This observation refers to traditional singing Charmaine says she heard coming from the Mullewa reserve, when she was a child. She has never laid claim to be a ‘proper singer’ in the traditional sense. But on reading her poetry in full – not just pieces in anthologies – I got the impression that this was a poet talking about many aspects of life and place, and, when the work is taken together, as presented in Just Like That, a singer emerges with the strength of her people and their land. In a different sense, then, she is indeed a ‘proper singer’. Charmaine is always willing to take risks – she’ll criticize herself and her own (if she feels it will help), as well as the colonizers, but in the end, she is trying to sing the community together with a respect for all the other songs out there that are others’ to sing. Charmaine is a social commentator – and she is willing to stand up for what she believes. She is a risk-taker and an activist in language and in what she does, and in her work with young people she tries to rectify the problems she explores in her poetry. Part of her biography reads: in Mullewa I developed a concept called ‘Y A K K A ’ (Young Aboriginal Kids Kicking Attitudes). A program was developed and on weekends I coordinate activities for mainly young repeat offenders and potential offenders, taking them on camps into the bush or other activities such as horse riding etc.

Charmaine is a poet writing because she has to. She is speaking for the living and the lost. She is trying to save the knowledge, and laments the forgetting, the matter-of-factness of death in a materialist world. She laments what has been taken, and also what is being lost through circumstance. In the remarkable title poem of the book, she writes: A link had been broken I could not mend Knowledge – your knowledge had gone Lost to me forever You had gone – just like that gone Like so many before you.

Knowledge and land and life are inseparable, and together they make the song of family, community, and place; they also make and come out of the song of the poem. The poem is a way of saving the knowledge as well as lamenting

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its loss. Though we read and know that the loss is forever, the poem also gives hope that a different kind of knowledge can and will remain. It is an affirmation as well as a lament. The modernist techniques of her poetry – information and how we see the world controlled by media – intertwine with the spiritual cycle of the poem. The cold hard facts of the modern material and colonized world wrestle with the spiritual knowledge of place and signs of place. Where is that sign? she asks, almost pleads: I did not believe it The events like a newsreel in front of me Playing your funeral – your wake I wanted a sign – what are you doing? Where are you? Just like that you were gone.

This is poetry to ‘hold family’ and people together. This is what I feel the poet hopes to achieve by writing. It’s also a celebration of her people. In conclusion, I’d like to emphasize that Charmaine also reaches out to the other communities that now make up ‘Australia’. She wishes more could be learnt from those whose land was taken by non-Indigenous Australians. She finished that interview with me by saying: To me, ‘white Australians’ like to look at things from a distance and not get to close and pretend they are really close to the land – when the majority live in cities. Television series like McLeod’s Daughters glamorize their connections to the bush and the land. This country could learn a lot more from Aboriginal people – all over the country – once they push through their stereotypes and understand that Aboriginal people in Australia are very diverse, from Tasmania in the south to Darwin in the north. This has been said over and over, but still people are amazed when you tell them of the diversity. We all actually have a lot in common as human beings – very basic things which are being overlooked. If we continue to ignore each other, then everyone is missing out on the creation of a culturally rich environment.

And this is one of the many reasons why I think Just Like That is one of the most significant volumes of poetry published in Australia for many years.

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Charmaine Papertalk–Green120

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P A P E R T A L K – G R E E N H A S B E E N W R I T I N G and publishing poetry since she was a teenager. Her poems have appeared in anthologies of Indigenous Australian poetry, and elsewhere, but have never been collected before. Early in her writing life, she was mentored by the late Kevin Gilbert, who included some of her poetry in Inside Black Australia, one of the most significant anthologies of poetry to come out of Australia. She was born near Mullewa in Western Australia; her mother was of the Wajarri Tribe and her father of the Bardimia Tribe. Although she spent much of her adult life away from her Yamaji homelands, she returned some years ago. What strikes the reader on first encountering Charmaine Papertalk–Green’s poetry is its intensity and directness. She says what she means and is willing to take on issues that affect her community, both from the outside and the inside. While always celebrating traditional culture and learning, she critiques any exclusiveness in what makes culture. Culture isn’t just the past, it’s all around – it’s the here and now. Papertalk–Green writes about Indigenous loss – highlighting the ethnocentric homogenizing of Australia’s Indigenous people into one, when in fact they are many peoples of diverse cultures and languages – but also about tensions and conflicts among her own people. Long dedicated to resisting addiction, she is never hesitant to criticize what she sees as the destruction of First Peoples’ legacy and heritage by drugs and alcohol, ‘black tall poppyism’, and violence – especially domestic violence. Papertalk–Green’s poetry is courageous and written with absolute purpose. Though so much of her poetry might be called ‘political’, she has created a unique singing of the ‘issues’ that is also visual and metaphoric (she is a visual artist, too), and singing. In an (unpublished) interview I did with her in late 2005, she said that her poems are “part of a life-cycle” – and her poetry suggests a sense of learning as much as observing and telling. The poems’ stories are part of a continuous narrative, and it struck me that when viewed together they clearly work cyclically themselves. Song and dance are the template her poems are built upon, which is what gives the ‘telling’ poems such deep figurative power. They are part of a larger song and larger commentary on a dynamic struggle between cultures, between tradition and the 120

HARMAINE

Book-launch speech, Geraldton, 2008.

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modern, between loss /oppression and the greed of colonialist consumer culture. They are often poems about women, speaking to women. Papertalk–Green feels impelled to speak her land, and to speak to her land. It saddens her that ways of conversing with land are being forgotten or ignored. Poetry is a mapping of that conversation. In that same interview, she said: I did not think of it as poetry though it was just another way of ‘thinking out loud’ for me. The songs of my people – especially the sounds – have remained within me from my childhood. Our house in Mullewa was close enough to the reserve and when there was a ‘sing song’ (as my late uncle called them) at the Mullewa reserve I could hear the singing late into the night from my bedroom window. I didn’t know what they were singing about but the sounds stayed with me and the clapping of the boomerangs. A couple of times, Mum danced with the women at the reserve and that, too, remains very special – especially the women’s movements – the handkerchief movements and the feet. It is so sad that the men aren’t teaching the younger people to sing, and most of the time the only public singing is at paid events – concerts and welcomes to countries. I mean the proper singing for this country – the Yamaji country. The land must be so sad that it does not hear its people so often now. It would be so awesome to witness a ‘sing song’ on the old Mullewa reserve grounds or to see a group of women dance. It is said that the Wajarri men were the most awesome dancers.

Charmaine Papertalk–Green’s poems are a language of connection. The loss of language as a result of colonization is horrific in itself, but she also feels that those who still have language have an obligation to share it: Language is important because it is being lost so fast. In our area there are only small numbers of fluent language speakers left – most people speak Aboriginal English or English. I love listening to people speak Wajarri; it sounds beautiful, but unfortunately some of the main speakers like to keep it to themselves – the schools are helping to keep it alive through classes, and some of the Elders. I love to use the Wajarri words I know and interweave them within my work. I think people should be proud of any knowledge that comes from their old people and use it to keep their spirit alive. I don’t like arrogant people who think they are better than other people just because they had the opportunity to learn language, and don’t have to share it with their people. I know very little about the Bardimia language, which is a shame, and all my old people on this side have gone.

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As with the work of the Murri poet Lionel Fogarty, the loss of language and the writing of poetry in English create a paradox. Both poets turn English to what they feel are the needs of their people – the poetry never serves a purely solipsistic purpose, but the self is always part of painting a picture of a people. Private thoughts and personal experiences are read against the concerns of culture and heritage (and, by extension, as part of the dreaming). As a reader, I have rarely come across poetry of such power and conviction as this – or maybe, empowerment and conviction. Charmaine Papertalk– Green takes on hypocrisy and duplicity wherever she sees it – at home and far away. Her images are often stunning (or terrifying – the idea of John Howard giving birth), and always part of a greater singing. No matter how harsh she is on the drinkers and ganja smokers who waste their time and heritage, she is compassionate and empathetic. She wants what’s best for her people, and for people in general. These poems are conversations, and a story is being woven. It’s the inside story, and not a romanticized or mediated version of Indigeneity made for soft consumerism.

Peter Porter: Crossing Between Worlds121

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N C L U D E D A T T H E E N D O F T H E S E C O N D V O L U M E of Peter Porter’s magnum opus, Oxford University Press’s two-volume Collected Poems, is an excellent new collection, Both Ends Against the Middle, in which Porter’s long-term concerns are revitalized and in some senses surveyed. Both Ends Against the Middle is characteristically marked by Porter’s sharp and ironic social observations and formal control, but also by a deftness and delicacy of tone, and a humanity that once led Blake Morrison to say “he loves the things he kills.” And always his critical bite is held in check by his humour – this is from the poem “Recreational Drugs”:

My scary drug was Reason; I got by On several priggish antidotes to doom. Today I watch the gilded young get high On skunkweed in a downstairs billiard-room.

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First read on B B C Radio 3 in 1999; the occasion was the publication of Porter’s Collected Poems, vol. 1: 1961–1981; vol. 2; 1984–1999 (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1999).

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Volume One contains the nine books written between 1961 and 1981 – beginning with Once Bitten, Twice Bitten and finishing with English Subtitles. It also includes poems published in Penguin Modern Poets, No.2 (1962) and in A Group Anthology (1963). The second volume contains seven books beginning with Fast Forward and ending with the new collection I just mentioned. Peter Porter needs little introduction in England, his adopted country, as, I am glad to say, is also the case in Australia, his place of birth. But the recognition of Porter as a significant ‘Australian’ writer has come much later than the British recognition that he is one of the major poets writing in English in the second part of the twentieth century. Through his involvement with The Group from 1955 until about 1966, Porter engaged with a significant gathering of British thinkers and poets, whose discursive brilliance and variety of styles would have a lasting influence on British poetry. Along with Philip Hobsbaum, Peter Redgrove, Martin Bell, and others, Porter participated in their critical assessments and discussions of each other’s work in a deeply intellectual but non-institutional way. As someone who has always made a living from a variety of non-academic jobs – bookseller, critic, radio commentator, and poet – Porter is able to cross between the worlds of academic argument, historical debate, and the ‘living artistic culture’. And it is Porter’s ability to reconcile the erudite with the ‘real’ that has made him such a popular and respected poet. His concerns range from social critique through to questions of self and mortality, aesthetics and culture, history and memory, the exploration of the tensions between religion and atheism, the primacy of ideas, and the truth, therapeutic nature, and terrors of dreams. Porter’s understanding of European art and music are legendary; he has delved deep into the fabric of Western civilization and identity. With a wry humanism that is never hoodwinked by the glittering surface, the production of glamour, Porter finds correlations between the confessional self and art that are constantly refreshing and intellectually invigorating. With his many voices, his range of dramatic monologues, his moves from the selfquestioning, even self-mocking “me” through to something like the brilliant and sensitive reconstruction of a dead wife addressing her still-living husband in the poem “The Delegate,” he takes the reader or listener on a journey in and out of the Self, love, and mortality. I am doing it in death as I did in life – but it’s so hard. I cannot forget unless you remember,

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pin down each day and weighted eye with exact remorse. After fifteeen years’ convergence, now we may draw apart and face our different exits.

For Porter, poetry has never been a Romantic endgame – it has a relationship with the real world. Though it can make reality and meaning out of lies and wrestle with the ambivalence of ‘truths’, it always comes back to the human concern. But ‘real’ doesn’t have to mean the commercial and exploitative, the fetishized mass cultural production. It can mean a place in which people try to better their existences, to consider their deaths, in the light of the intellect and those great translators of the ‘spiritual’ – art, music, and literature. Above all else, Porter is a spiritual atheist, and this is the key to his greatness. A secular poet whose investigations of the psyche and spirit elevate him to the rank of the great religious poets, but ground him in a Popean and Drydenesque world of social irony and societal investigation. Manners are always driving away in the background, as in “A Short Ballad of Unbelief”: Unbelief has just enough cunning To be grateful when nailing the lie Of transcendence that still every steeple Points nowhere but into the sky.

Language is something alive and important in itself for Porter, but not an end in itself. Poetry is significant, but there are other things more significant. Yet it is one of the most rewarding and necessary ways of examining truth, and the deceptions that surround truth. Porter never loses sight of this. Primarily seen as an urban poet, Porter has also written significantly of European and Australian landscapes. Always in the context of cultural concerns, and epitomized by his consistent use of the garden (before and after the Fall), as a place of artistic and natural interaction – an enclosed Arcadia, the natural world is more present than many critics have allowed. The range of influences on Porter’s verse is wide. In an unpublished interview I conducted with Porter last year as a precursor to the appearance of the double-volume Collected, he said: I don’t know whether the poets you admire are the people whose work you will see in your own poetry. I’m a tremendous admirer of Browning, a great admirer of Auden, a great admirer of Rochester, and who does not admire Shakespeare. I like poems of ingenuity, poems of skill, poems of cleverness, poems which use words in ways other than the Wordsworthian ‘voice of true

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feeling’. In other words, I like poems to have a kind of plot of their own over and above the kind of worthwhile feelings of the poets.

Born in Brisbane in 1929, Porter worked as a cadet journalist on the Courier Mail from 1947–48, but left for England in 1951, and apart from returning briefly to Australia in 1954, stayed there until 1974, when he returned for a visit to Australia at the invitation of the Adelaide Festival. In the last two decades Porter has been a regular visitor to Australia. 1974 was a pivotal year in Porter’s life, with the death of his first wife Jannice, and other personal matters that would find their expression in what many consider to be his masterpiece, The Cost of Seriousness, eventually published in 1978. It is a book which has significance not only in terms of British poetry and Porter’s oeuvre in general, but in his increasing influence on Australian literature. It is a book of tensions and reconciliations, with the past and self, love and death. Apart from its elegiac content, there is also an attempt to re-approach Australia, to discover worth in its landscape and evolving arts. Two poems, “An Exequy” and “The Delegate,” are among the finest achievements of English-language poetry of the 1970s. Porter’s struggle with an Australian identity that in many ways resulted in his spiritual exile has always informed his verse, and this is being increasingly recognized. For someone whose loves were European art and music, Australia of the early 1950s could have been a place of great isolation. Porter considered it a physical culture, whose national icons were sports-related. Phar Lap, a racehorse that won everything in sight, including the Melbourne Cup, and eventually died in mysterious circumstances in America on its mission to prove that ‘we’re better than them’, was stuffed and on display in the Melbourne Museum like a piece of art. Porter’s “Phar Lap in the Melbourne Museum” was the first poem of his I read at school in Australia. As a note to this poem, which I first came across in Alexander Craig’s excellent anthology Twelve Poets, Porter wrote, “My Phar Lap poem is based on memory and may well be incorrect.” And it is with the nature of memory as much as socio-cultural critique of Australia that this poem is concerned. Interestingly, like a number of so-called Australian movie stars and musicians, Phar Lap was actually born in New Zealand. But national myth-making always has a convenient knack of ignoring such geographical obstacles. Porter’s criticism of the nature of cultural iconicity remains – for Australians, Phar Lap was as Australian as Ned Kelly or the kangaroo. A new willingness among Australians to accept self-scrutiny, even by an expatriate, has gone a long way toward confirming Porter’s ironic and intensely investigative voice

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in Australian letters. Instead of having been ‘one of us’, he’s now ‘one of us who lives over there’. a Porter, whose relationship with Italy has been extremely important over the decades, had in some sense lived Australia through Tuscany – though seeing a reconciliation between Nature and people, which allows for Art, in a way not possible within the problematical relationship between the settler and the Australian environment. But the light is similar, the climate familiar.. .. It’s a complex issue, but one that parallels Porter’s early rejection of the physicality of Australian landscape and culture. It brings very much into question this notion of exile. Porter has seen a potential harmony between the landscape of Tuscany and human occupation that hasn’t been, for him, evident in settler culture in Australia. Bruce Bennett, in his excellent study of Porter, A Spirit In Exile, questions the relationship between the landscape and culture of Tuscany and Porter’s earlier ambivalence to Australia, and writes: Porter’s ‘rootlessness’ on his visits to northern Italy give piquancy to his attachments to a region which he inhabits with knowledgeable love. The Italy with which Porter has been concerned in his verse has little to do with politics or economics, and everything to do with the creative arts. As an Australian, Porter feels that northern Italy holds special lessons: “Here man himself is the measure of beauty, and here, despite despotism and, of recent years, reaching for easy commercial success, people and landscape remain in agreement. In Australia, we have hope. Protestant mercantile optimism, and the despair which comes from fighting Nature and losing. In Tuscany a peculiar truce still remains.122

Whether this condition exists in Australia or not is another argument, but in terms of Porter’s coming to terms with his exile and alienation, there’s an essential interaction taking place between the physical and conceptual. Porter is a rational poet, a thinker for whom ideas create a quality of existence that lifts us out of oppression. A socialist who doesn’t toe party lines or buy into the hard sell of doctrine, Porter isn’t interested in the condescensions of the intellectual snob. For him, all people have the right to think and participate in the beauty of art. In some ways, it’s ironic that he has been perceived as a difficult, even obscure, poet, with his vast array of musical and artistic references

122

Bruce Bennett, Spirit In Exile, 168–69.

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and his complex use of voice, since he believes that thinking is not an elite act, but one desirable for all. Art is available. And sometimes humour and irony are what make it accessible and real. When I asked Porter about how the title of his book Living in a Calm Country came about, he answered: Well, that, I made that up, that was just my own sort of invention, I thought it was rather a good – because I’d been to see these pictures in Tuscany. Once a thing’s painted it’s calm, and I thought, even if it shows a massacre of the innocents, the blade is still lifted, the blood isn’t on the floor. I’d been particularly struck by this ridiculous little saint in San Gemignano who lay down on a plank aged fifteen and never got off it again, the saint of the town. And I thought, one’s own body, one hopes, will be as calm as possible, and that’s the calm country we actually live in rather than the other country.

For myself, as an Australian now resident in Cambridge, I ‘suffer’ some of the ambivalence and restlessness of the ‘homeless’ expatriate who is comfortable neither with his place of origin nor with being assimilated into his adopted culture. It is much easier for me nowadays, in a world of rapid travel and instant communication, to be an international citizen. Australia will never be comfortable with its artists or citizens in general leaving home to practice their art elsewhere, but living elsewhere is no longer necessarily perceived as leaving. But Peter Porter made a cultural as much as a physical move at a time when leaving was excommunication – and on the other side, a perceived cultural aridity forced artists into ‘exile’ – and it is the reconciliation with the cultural possibilities of Porter’s homeland that informs even his most tangential observations. In this sense, he is writing as much about what Australia is or isn’t as he might be about a German composer, or an English artist. Talking of his recognition in Australia, Porter said to me: I started off in England and very few people knew I was Australian. I mean, the clues were in the poems, but they didn’t read them very carefully, and so for years and years I was considered completely part of the English poetry scene. As the English have become more and more aware of my Australianism, they’ve become less and less interested in me, which is the opposite of someone like Les Murray, because someone like Les, and not only him but a lot of Australian poets can enjoy what I call the exotic attraction . . .

I disagree with Porter here. I think the resistance to what he sees as exoticism has made him a unique and self-investigative voice. An international voice,

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even if its main concern has been the British–Australian nexus. Porter said to me in our interview: For instance in the case of “The Last of England,” of course the title is already thoroughly well established by Ford Maddox–Brown in his painting. I liked the title, and I suddenly thought, that would make a good title for a book, especially for an Australian who at that time hadn’t ever been back to Australia, from the time he left, at least not from the major time he came over in 1954. And I thought it would be a useful title for a book which was a kind of discontented summing-up of my first years in England, and I wanted also to say that the idea of England is so much better than the reality of England. I wanted to take a stand against what I think was not so well established then but is thoroughly well established now, which is the substitution for a real sense of a country of a hideous distortion which you can sell to the people called ‘heritage’. So “The Last of England” was the perfect title for me, especially as in the picture you see a couple of not particularly admirable chaps shaking their fists in anger at the Old Country, as the emigrant boat pulls away and heads off for New South Wales.

Peter Porter’s Collected Poems is a massive achievement. I’ve been able to give only a taste of his range and interests. Another delight is his flawless metrical control that comes in poem after poem. His use of rhyme is innovative and rarely laboured, and he is the most dedicated experimenter with verse forms in English along with Auden. As a young poet, I saw Porter as my model for versification; as an older poet, I also take him as my model for exploring the unknowable and unreachable. Being in the same country as him creates an alternative home. He is a place where many cultures and nations of place meet, discuss, argue, disagree, and delight in debate and analysis. In Peter Porter’s poetry we see both sides of the picture.

Peter Porter: Outdoing Himself123

W 123

PETRUS BOREL LED VICTOR HUGO’S PRIVATE ‘CLAQUE’ into the theatre of the Comédie-Française in 1830 for the opening performance of Hugo’s play Hernani, he and the others of HEN

“They Threaten and They Bless,” Australian Book Review 311 (May 2009): 29– 33. Review of Peter Porter, Better Than God (London: Picador, 2009).

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the Romantic ‘push’ fully intended their actions to precipitate the death of classicism in French theatre. They succeeded. Had Peter Porter been in the audience, one wonders where he would have positioned himself between the Romantic agents provocateurs /shock-troops (in part driven by the compulsions of the Petit Cénacle), and the classicist critics who panned the play and all it stood for in the press the next day. The performance and the attendant conflicts became known as ‘la Bataille D’Hernani’. Porter’s sympathies and empathy would doubtless have been a bit each way, though he would certainly have been on the side of the republicans rather than the royalists, another sub-textual ‘battle’ of the occasion; though, as a classicist in verse and aesthetics, he might have been disappointed by the failure of classical values to hold the day. But Porter’s classicism is not of the orthodoxy of that time, nor any other. His inflections of classical tradition through a European inheritance are as much about the journey as they are about a status quo of aesthetics. He is more likely to satirize all involved, and step off into a critical space that draws influence from both sides of the equation. Porter can admire Thomas Hardy as much as Horace – the gap is not as large as some might like to think. Porter operates out of an independent position that comes from the divided loyalties of The Group (and The Movement) in London during the 1950s, and his restless dialogue – physical and psychological – between states of habitation in Australia and his home of almost sixty years in London. He talks between spaces, between the European and the Antipodean. His explorations of belonging are tied up in issues of subjectivity, in a struggle between the conscious and the unconscious, and in what can be drawn to the surface. The binary between the Athenian of Porter and the Boeotian of Murray was a false dichotomy in so many ways – one that had legs (impelled by both Murray and Porter themselves) and left them both in an opposition that is superficial and challengeable. Porter’s own poetic inheritance, as we trace its path from Homer through Horace to Dryden and Pope and beyond, is more about prosody than sensibility. This might seem heresy to those who know Porter’s remarkable oeuvre well, but I am sure all would agree it shows great diversity in thematics and, ultimately, position of voice. Porter’s voice, although considered to express a social criticism in which the foibles and false values of society’s ‘veneer’ are scrutinized against the question of what constitutes the self – what is left for the individual in the societal ‘melting pot’ – is actually far more mobile and paradoxical than has been widely credited. The position of a unified self is

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constantly under scrutiny in Better Than God – in “The Violin’s Obstinacy,” the displacement of self through the object (violin) is a resonant irony (I am reminded of Megadeth’s astonishing “Hello Me, it’s Me again. . . ”). In his landmark study of Peter Porter’s poetry, Bruce Bennett effectively locates the core themes and concerns of Porter’s working life through to the beginning of the 1990s. In drawing an allegorical relationship between life and the political, social, aesthetic, and theological concerns of the poetry, Bennett homes in on the element of loss that drives the voice (I would argue ‘voices’). From Bennett’s introduction I will cite two points that I think are of immense relevance to Peter Porter’s new volume, published in time for his eightieth birthday. Bennett writes: Since allegory has been observed to arise chiefly in periods of loss, when a “powerful theological, political or familial authority is threatened with effacement”, the story of Peter Porter might be linked with two major losses of the post-second world war years in western industrialised countries: the loss of a sense of the past, and the loss of religious faith.124

I think Bennett’s observation remains true in respect of Better Than God, and one could make other points (as Bennett does elsewhere) regarding personal loss and loss of aesthetics through society’s materialism, but I feel that the new work might well bring about an entire reframing of these allegorical ‘losses’. In the new work, Porter has established a definitive form of poetic ‘negative theology’ in which an apophatic poetic is counterpointed through the formal prosody, the defined verse forms that offer a mathematical certainty of order. Defining ‘God’ through what is not said, or what can’t be said about the state of perfection, somewhat begs the question in poems so full of discussion about ‘God’. But are the poems actually speaking of God, or are they speaking of a Western history of creating God/s? I would argue the latter and will return to this issue shortly. The second point from Bennett’s introduction I wish to take as a point of departure is the notion of Porter as a sceptical humanist, who bears the traces of a near-religious nostalgia for a barely apprehended but haunting notion of perfection, presented most often as gardens which are reclamations of an Eden.125 124

Bruce Bennett, Spirit in Exile: Peter Porter and His Poetry (Melbourne: Oxford

U P , 1991): xiv. 125

Bennett, Spirit in Exile, xv.

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This is certainly a sound observation, and remains true as we progress through Porter’s work published since Bennett’s observations. However, on reaching this new volume, we might question the idea. Porter has never been a binary thinker, though his use of heroic couplets, the aphorism, and his underlying generator of wit and irony in general, might lead the casual reader to assume he was. One should be wary, though, as Porter’s juxtapositions are never simple comparisons limited to the sound-bites of form, but often shift through a whole poem and, indeed, a whole book. A Porter poem is often a complex amalgam of associations, comparisons, and seeming contradictions. The key lies in paradox. The garden and the room, finite spaces that are organized (or let run riot), are locatable fixed values through which Porter measures the presence and absence of God; what can and can’t be talked about. The room can be the place where you are along with your thoughts – a Hell or even, possibly, an earthly paradise, often both rolled into one – and the garden a place where humanity and nature can approach something verging on harmony. Porter’s gardens have always been about the prospect of Fall and being thrown out, though, and in this new book that prospect has become reality. This is a post-lapsarian world, as all Porter’s created worlds are, but the voices shift closer to non-participation than ever before. Porter has always been the critical observer, but his poems wrestle with age and death; there’s something else at work. To ground what I am moving towards, I want to consider what I regard as a key poem in the book, “Voltaire’s Allotment.” As Candide left an Eden and ended with the notion of cultivating his garden, Porter steps into the satire to make his own satire of the urges of self and community. In damning the vileness of the physical world and throwing in his lot with the garden of ideas, the poet in essence critiques his own lifelong use of garden as Edenic symbol (love and sex thrive in Porter’s gardens, but there is often the shadow of the Fall and death as well). Voltaire is at the core of pre-revolutionary French classicism, and in many ways symbolizes what the Romantics on the verge of the July Revolution of 1830 were resisting. I would argue that Porter is resisting his own bent toward classicism in this poem and many others in the book. Why is this? Because aesthetics and politics are unresolvable and even poetry, which Porter still celebrates as a form of triumphal deliverance against the odds, must deal with a list of horrors (a list of ships from the Iliad in many ways) that doesn’t lessen with knowledge and experience but simply grows longer. Allegory parodies itself.

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In “Voltaire’s Allotment,” a poem in the ‘voice’ of Voltaire as both historical figure and banner-waver of classicism, the poet dissects the role of the poetaster and critic, the utilitarianism of making a living from the arts, and from philosophy. He calls cities vile, yet most of Porter’s oeuvre comes out of cities and towns; he positions the small, personal, productive vegetable garden, the allotment, as the garden – not a place of pleasure but of work; he makes complicit the role of the Western poet perpetuating the list of horrors. It’s double irony all the way – Voltaire’s, Porter’s, the issue of the self. Candide, in which we are told ‘Il faut cultiver notre jardin’, is allegory. Porter’s poem is allegory. This ironizing of Voltaire’s ‘allotted’ legacy is further evidence of Porter’s unwillingness to be locked into a classicist camp – on its own, classicism can lead to façadism; it needs to be ‘used’ in conjunction with at least a version of Romantic subjectivity and a public conscience and responsibility. In many ways, Porter’s reconfiguring of the garden is as much about the counterpane of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Child’s Garden of Verses as it is about Voltaire, or even Genesis. The infiltration of the gardens of the ‘ancient’ world by the machinery of new empire is captured in “Birds in the Garden of the Cairo Marriott,” where Porter’s often metempsychotic creatures, birds (especially sparrows, sometimes elsewhere pursued by cats), act as gobetweens of the capitalist hotel chain’s garden and the ontological space of the spiritual garden: and your big rivals, we’d call them crows but they are dignity itself in brown tuxedos, peering from high perches of a Disney Ramasseum, speaking faultless American forever, they must be Prefects of the Underworld!

Porter’s use of mythologies is often allegorical and always immediate. Mythology is a template, a mnemonic, and inevitably a truth as relevant (and dangerous) as the Hadron Collider. It is not quaint use of the past, but a challenge to the empirical (and always challengeable) data of history. Renowned as a poet and critic of vast reading and knowledge, and, as Bennett notes, one who enjoys making good use of this in conversation, Porter is nonetheless unsure of the value of knowledge. To sidetrack slightly, in a magnificent elegy, “Vita Somnium Breve,” for the Cambridge poet Veronica Forrest–Thompson, Porter reflects on the isolation of knowledge, on the failure of both traditional and innovative poetics to create a bridge of empathy that would draw a poet of

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language out of that dark place. Language liberates and isolates at once. That’s the paradox at the root of Porter’s work – it is at the core of his masterwork, The Cost of Seriousness, which reflects on his wife’s death as well as the rejuvenating nature of new love (also discovered in a garden). This seemingly irreconcilable equation is at the core of Porter’s poetics. Ironically, for a poet with such apparently clear-cut satires, the equation is never straightforward. In a superb, understated poem, “Young Mothers in the Square,” Porter creates a form of ars poetica in thematics, a reflection on his decades of writing the garden in the city. The city is much like the enclosure that John Clare so bitterly resisted – the private spaces consumed by the corporate, and the corporation of the city itself profiting from the public. Porter changes what the city can mean, making it an urban and a country space in one – through its gardens, but also in the way different components of the larger entity relate and communicate among themselves. In this poem, the persona reflects on taking children to such gardens himself. This has emphatic impact if we take into account the fact that Porter raised his two daughters alone after the death of his wife, and the isolation of the parent who is defined by love of his children. The question becomes a personal one, but also part of the broader ontology of how God loves in a world that will take what is most beautiful, even pure. Does God damage because God is pure and can’t be rivalled? This is a twist to a poetic negative theology. The poem begins with a question: How long is it since I, as them, An old rose on a branching stem, Kept watch through cloudy grass and sun That no harm come to anyone In this Our Pale, yet might deplore The garden as a metaphor Where married love dies intestate En route to some half-hopeful date.

The personal biography is clear, but so is the questioning of a broader poetic of allegory. Porter has visibly absorbed critical responses to this work, including Bennett’s. He has a sharp and generous critical mind. The book offers a poem of dialogue between Stravinsky and Money; many other poems in this book work as dialogues, too, with Porter’s earlier poetry and the critical questions and positions they have evoked. Loss is irreconcilable for Porter; he doesn’t get over it, and why should he? That doesn’t mean he closes off – rather, he opens new threads of survival and love. His children, and the sym-

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bol of innocence, have remained steadily liberating for him. I’d argue that they are a theology rather than a religion. I’d argue that they are “Better Than God” because they don’t need to define God to believe (or not). They are more than metaphor – metaphor is what affirms God without evidence. Poets are just halfway-there scientists. The poem “Young Mothers in the Square” then shifts into the irony of parenthood and the acquisitive aspirations of the adult world, of ‘society’. But such darkenings of the pure palette are challenged by the poet himself: A shadow falls across the lawn; Is it the poet’s unearned scorn?

This is ‘answered’ by yet another question: ‘How can they play, as Gray observed, Unconscious of their fate?’

Fate is the linchpin for Porter. “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods / they kill us for their sport” comes from Shakespeare via Thomas Hardy for Porter. It is unsurprising that Porter once edited an edition of Thomas Hardy’s poems, but, probably most interestingly, they were an edition of landscape poems. In Porter’s gardens he paints Hardy-like landscapes; Wessexes in London, almost. (His Australian gardens, which we will consider shortly, are something else again.) “Young Mothers in the Square” finishes uneasily. It laments fate and a brutal or at best indifferent ‘God’, but also the inevitability that children ultimately become part of a desensitized materialistic world. Better Than God has a Moebius-strip view of the colonial. Poems that take us back to the poet’s childhood in Brisbane present us with interior and exterior views resolving in a cultural/physical dichotomy. We see what compelled the poet to leave Australia for London in the early 1950s to become an ‘expatriate’. Though Porter didn’t return to Australia for over twenty years, there has been an industry rehabilitating him to the national canon because he has returned on a frequent basis since the early 1970s. True, these returns meant an increase in Australian references in Porter’s work, and he has often been left as positioned neither in Britain nor in Australia (this is seen as poetically vital in terms of Porter’s unique way of seeing place and origins, which is no doubt accurate), but ultimately the question of exclusion and inclusion has been more about an issue of nationalistic gate-keeping than anything else. Porter doesn’t need to prove his connection to Australia to be significant to

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poets and readers here. The issues he deals with, inflected through his life’s experience and of testing language within formal frameworks (I would contend that he is one of the most technically innovative poets out there because of this), are translations, allegories, and interpretations of the texts of the world around him. In a poem deeply resonant on a literal level in a country that has burnt so much and will burn so much more, his poem “The Burning Fiery Furnace” puts a lot of canonical literary hunger into perspective. The ironic beginning is also a reflection on an interiority that is vulnerable in so many ways: Born to a seamless ordinance of heat, Small wonder I best remember Indoors, The too-small carpets slipping round the floors And ‘Under the House’, a region to retreat. . .

Australia as an outdoor place, as opposed to the rooms the poet writes in the city of London (or hotels elsewhere), is confirmed in the capitalizing of “Indoors.” A child who spends too much time indoors in Australia, as Porter seems to recall and I certainly can vouch for, is considered almost un-Australian. The outdoors is painted as natural and safe, indoors as unhealthy physically, socially, and mentally. The question of the onanistic self versus the healthy communal self. The ‘Je’ of the garden is one of individual retreat rather than community-minded looking to home. Sadly, as we know, neither inside nor outside is safe in a land that’s burning. This is a portrait of a personal ‘enfer’. The colonizing desire for control, desire to prosper, is scrutinized, and it casts the expatriate move back to ‘origins’ as a form of decolonizing: I write this down I’m sure because I’m old; The country of my birth’s become hot news And selfishness should always take short views – My ancestors came out and found no gold.

Written before the latest tragic fires in Victoria, this still reflects on a land governed by fire. And in terms of the poet’s ancestors, we read in “How the Eureka Stockade Led to Boggo Road Gaol” of a complicity in the colonization stakes that is remorseless in the telling and condemnation. Porter’s greatgrandfather, “Robert Porter, England’s son,” an architect, according to the poem, built the famous Boggo Road gaol. If the Eureka Stockade, long before, was a point of colonial crisis, Porter’s ancestor is shown profiting from and enforcing the status quo, entrenching the punitive as a kind of extension

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of the convict period (the jail was built after transportation had finished). In his uncompromising assault on the hypocrisy of the debate of nation, Porter finishes this narrative poem in its neat five-line two-rhymed stanzas: It’s all gone now – gaol, stockade, The Porters cut to stem. A moral, is there one? Invade! Australians know their land was made By history for them. My Great-Grandfather, pioneer, May help me to refuse To praise my country: he made clear Between New Start and Old Career There’s nothing much to choose.

Bruce Bennett once argued that Peter Porter was a socialist who accepted market capitalism. I profoundly disagree – now and then. I think Porter, at least in his poems, is a trenchant left-wing commentator whose politics are unforgiving. He doesn’t accept anything at all outside the functionality of poetry as a medium of communication. He doesn’t accept ageing, and he doesn’t accept death. Talking about it doesn’t mean you are hiding from it or wanting it. The issue of ageing in this work is not one of chronology or even the self so much as of how discourse forces the discussion. We celebrate Porter at eighty, but in a sense age and history are irrelevant. In poems that go back to childhood, that reflect on forebears killed during the First World War, including an uncle Porter never knew but who died away from ‘home’, we confront the reality that home is not as fixed as we imagine it. Who we die among is paradoxically arbitrary and yet defining. In “Christmas Day, 1917” the cemetery is the Garden in which the living and the dead converse according to the rules, the prosody: How extraordinarily neat, well-spaced, The Prowse Point Military Cemetery is – How mistaken my memory of my family’s memory Of these our far-off dead. Two weren’t even born where I thought they were, My Mother must have been living still at home When the news came, but she didn’t die alone. My civilian Father did.

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In this remarkable book of relatively short poems, Porter journeys past his poetry’s motifs: the garden, death, theology, aesthetics, consumerism, the philistine, love, loss, the nature of Hell. His poems are segmentary in the sense that you can extract parts that work intact as aphorism, but as a whole they add up to so much more than the sum of their parts. The poems progress in a linear fashion, yet ripple with cross-talk and contradictions. They are logical and irreverent at once. Science is wrestled with as a system of logic, but its participation in Western profit-making and consumerism is offset against its benefits for humanity, and language itself is scrutinized, its ability to ‘parse’ the reality we live, and the claims and hopes of art-for-art’s sake, left wanting. Porter is also a poet of great lyric beauty when he wants to be, and is impressively able to embed this in social (or religious) satire. The satirist is always part of what s/he satirizes, and Porter relishes participation, but there’s something transcendent as well that prevents the critic from terming his work ‘just’ satire or a play between society and self. Take these remarkable concluding lines of “By Whose Permission Do These Angels Serve?”: Easy to imagine angels as flamingos wading in a lake, and quite like God, being neighbourly and pink each day at dawn.’

Though Porter’s religious and theological beliefs are secondary to an understanding of the poetry, I felt that a book so concerned with a public God and a private God begged the question. When I asked Peter Porter a few questions about his beliefs he replied as follows: God is so far the hinge word of our every attempt at formulating a response to the unanswerable mystery of life that asking whether you believe in Him / Her / Them is almost an exercise in schoolday debating. In short, God is an existential set of coordinates. Theology is more interesting than Philosophy, but is also highly technical and, while I respect its complexities, I’m not closely concerned with it. I am not concerned greatly either with the Dawkins debate, though since we all should honestly declare our loyalties – then I would describe myself as an agnostic. In my braver moments I would say I was angry at God’s being used as a force of censorship and entrapment. Look at the three-line title poem of my book. It points out that if God set everything up it’s been left to us to work his universe and like score-readers we are good at it – i.e. ‘better’ than him. With the added inference that nobody can know ‘Him’ without us.

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I notice that my atheist composer friends like to set to music only sacred texts. The reason? authority. God and his religious history give us a good half of our subject-matter. Perhaps we are exploiting Him. Poetry concerns itself with love and fear of living and dying and is both emotional and factual. I tend to feel that modern poetry collapses into egoism and anecdotalism – its ecstatic moments seem hollow without a reference system to things beyond themselves. Maybe God has just gone away for a while – Deus absconditus. But it’s hard to believe in Heaven, Hell and eternal life. The one good thing about dying might well be that it does away with death.

Porter’s poetry is definitively based in a reference system, as I hope to have shown, but I feel that Porter’s wariness of egotism extends back further than modernism into the very classical roots he draws on. Religion supplies a template for Porter’s critiques, as much as a target. His concern is with false routes to God. In a modern, ‘Godless’ and brutal world, a world in which, as we read in the final poem of the book, “River Quatrains,” “Our City Fathers’ planning is polite. / The abattoir is on the edge of town,” there is aesthetic as well as spiritual salvation: I’m on a river bank. I think I see The farther side: a choice of nothingness Or Paradise. My poems wait for me, They look away, they threaten and they bless.

Of course, the salvation might not be where we’ve been told it should be. The poet needs to create the possibility even within the most damning poems of social scrutiny. For me, and for many poets of my generation, Peter Porter has led to an investigation of what this nothingness might constitute spiritually and aesthetically. The Paradises on offer have been overwhelmingly inadequate. For many of us, he’s been a classicist fully aware and understanding of the Romantic urge, and necessarily making something new out of the collision between the different modes. For Porter’s readers, all of his trademarks and more are in this wonderful new volume – a late flowering, some might say, but I’d say something all the more gritty and resolute. Porter has never stopped increasing. His verbal play, his punning, his incisive use of epigram and paraphrase, chiasmus (Porter’s poetry is a lesson in classical rhetoric fused with an ongoing crisis of ‘modernism’ and modernity that makes his poetic essentially radical), and an ekphrasis that extends into music and poetry as well as art, are second to none. Porter’s references to

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poets, artists, thinkers, scientists, musicians, and other cultural and historical figures are both comparative and emphatic, but also participatory: he speaks with the dead as much as with the living; they share with him and give comfort and distress in equal measure. The tyrannies of political state and organized religion also give certainties that might seem addictive and desirable, but Porter knows all good order comes at a price – “They call it valency when we discuss / How murderous this numbered regimen” (“Strontium to Mendeleyev”). Whether it’s the periodic table, or scientists at the Collider, a mysticism is never far from the facts, and Porter homes in on that with exacting precision. But in the end, and ends are certain, even the conversation of family, of friends, of strangers, every Paradise, must fall, and one is confronted with the fact that these gardens are very often trapped by the will and purpose that made them. A particularly sad and matter-of-factly elegiac poem, “Ranunculus Which My Father Called a Poppy,” tracks a guilt and disappointment which underpin in their different forms all our attempts to create Edens. In this way, Porter’s poetic lineage owes as much to the failed Edens of Christopher Brennan as it does to the gardens of Alexander Pope’s poetry, or the terraces and gardens that helped feed and pleasure ancient Rome. They serve neither those who attend nor those who stand and wait. . . Not for him the red of Flanders Fields sprung from his Brother’s body steeped in duckboard marl nor the necrology of the Somme. Defeat lived in those several petal folds, that furry stalk and leaf, those half-drenched pinks and shabby-borrowed golds.

Not everything has Latin names, but if it does, Porter knows them whether he says so or not. It connects him to the material world, even if the connection is likely ironic or one of loss.

Peter Porter: In Memoriam126

P 126

E T E R P O R T E R , O N E O F T H E G R E A T P O E T S I N E N G L I S H of the last hundred years, has died in London aged eighty-one. Born in Brisbane in 1929, after finishing school there, Porter travelled to London look-

“A tribute to Peter Porter,” The West Australian (24 April 2010).

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ing for work. After a few years there and a return to Australia, he saved enough to go back to England and stayed for the rest of his life, not visiting here again until 1974. Sometimes associated with the British formalist group of poets, The Movement, during the 1950s, Peter had little to do with Australia again until later in his life. Contributing a few years ago to the book School Days, Peter wrote of his “fierce dislike of that arid subject Education” and went on: School is what happens to us while we are growing up – partly to equip us to be proper consumers, to fill factories, offices, gaols and TV couches, and partly to do something with the years of boredom and pointlessness we must go through before we become the interesting people we have been put on earth to be.127

Perhaps this feeling led to his sense of a false start that possibly helped propel him to London, where he found his vocation and poetic voice. He wrote: I’d won the literary prizes at school and thus was accepted as a cadet reporter on the Brisbane Courier Mail at the start of 1947. This was the biggest false start I ever made. I lasted only until April 1948 and then hung around in jobs in warehouses until I sailed to England in January 1951.128

Yet, though in many ways a ‘British’ poet, he was also Australian, and his books often reflected the expatriate coming to terms with an Australian past. He was much more comfortable with this when, in some cases belatedly, Australian poets accepted him as one of their own, and no longer begrudged his ‘other’ identity, his great success as poet, broadcaster and critic in Britain. In the 1990s, Peter edited the Oxford Anthology of Australian Poetry, taking a fresh outside look at the poetry of his home country. He was also awarded an emeritus fellowship from the Australia Council in recognition of his achievement. Over many decades, Peter furthered the cause of Australian writing and art in Britain, and was friend to many Australian writers, especially poets, visiting London. It was 1993 when I first visited his flat there and interviewed him about his collaborations with Australian artist Arthur Boyd. In the years that followed, I would interview him at least twice again, keeping in regular contact.

127

Peter Porter, “The Place We Ne’er Forget,” in School Days, ed. John Kinsella (Fremantle, W A : Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2006): 66. 128 Porter, “The Place We Ne’er Forget,” in School Days, ed. Kinsella, 70.

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While I lived and worked in Cambridge, he visited me there, and I visited him at home in London or at places like the National Gallery. Sometimes I simply happened across him in the city streets, often around Saint Martin in the Fields. Peter enjoyed visiting Cambridge despite his healthy suspicion of academia. Though he possessed various honorary doctorates, and appeared at numerous universities, he was in every way from outside the academy. A brilliant, learned man, with vast knowledge of European art and music, and Western literature, he was largely self-taught and self-driven. Over time, Peter became my friend and mentor, and I owe him much. Many others could say the same. He was generous and encouraged younger poets, sharing his own work and reading others’ work. Personally, he anthologized my work, wrote an introduction for one of my books, and launched another in London. I could compile a long list of his supportive acts. In the last couple of years I had the good fortune to exchange with him poems we’d each written on various pieces of art – he called this our “poem rivalry.” Witty, and devastatingly able to see through pseudo-artiness, Peter kept everyone on their toes. But his conversation, so erudite, was extremely warm as well. He could entertain, disdain, and befriend at the same time. Peter’s poetry, too, is full of his wit, as well as his warmth and enjoyment of art and music. Peter was able to be political in his poetry without dogmatism, and could ask big spiritual questions without having to be ‘contemplative’. Satire, irony, razor-sharp social observation, and a world of references, would combine in finely-turned works that owed much to the eighteenth-century Augustan poets. Cats, which Peter loved, appeared in his poems and conversation. These are some of my favourite ironic lines of his from “Mort aux Chats,” evoking the ills of social tyranny: When I dream of God I see a Massacre of Cats. Why should they insist on their own language and religion, who needs to purr to make his point? Death to all cats! The Rule of Dogs shall last a thousand years!

Peter’s poems never let society off easily. He believed we should all be paid the same amount, no matter what our work, and once joked to me that he would always prefer to write for left-wing newspapers but occasionally, when

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he needed money, the right-wing papers would get his review because they paid better. I was present in London at Australia House for the 1999 launch of Peter’s two-volume Collected Poems. It was one of the friendliest literary events I’ve ever attended, bridging generational, national and stylistic gaps. Peter’s work unified people dramatically. As I was browsing through those volumes the morning after Peter’s death, I found myself re-reading his 1978 work, The Cost of Seriousness, which first brought me to a life of reading his poetry. This book is quite different in tone from many of Porter’s others, written in the shadow of his first wife’s death. The taut, restrained but emotionally intense poems (still carrying his learning and sensitivity to cultural arts) enthralled me. By way of farewell to Peter, I’d like to quote a stanza from his last book, the masterful Better Than God which won the Age Poetry Book of the Year in 2009: This has been an endlessly extended Eden, As though the same bee fell from the bud That saw an angel pass its tree.

Peter Porter: The Rest on the Flight129

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P O R T E R I S A P O E T I H A V E C A R R I E D W I T H M E since I was fifteen, and a schoolfriend gave me a copy of The Cost of Seriousness that his own father had sent him from Britain in 1978. I’d never read any poetry like it before, and haven’t really since. What struck me as remarkable was the way Porter expressed the elegiac and the satirical in one breath, without diminishing the impact of either. That a poet can manage to have a critical analysis of society work hand-in-hand with complex and subtle investigation of the self is truly remarkable. As many critics have noted, this book, written in the shadow of his first wife Jannice’s death, brings to mind Thomas Hardy’s poems written after the death of Hardy’s wife Emma. In many ways, The Cost of Seriousness is a harrowing book, but it also gives glimpses into the efficacy of art, music, and poetry as redemptive

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ETER

Australian Literary Review (November 2010). Review of Peter Porter, The Rest on the Flight: Selected Poems, sel. Sean O’Brien & Don Paterson (London: Picador, 2010).

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forces. However, the voice behind the poems is never blithe enough to see these as cure-alls; rather, they are vehicles for an affirmation of life, and even language itself. Many would still say that it is Porter’s masterpiece, though other great books would follow, including The Automatic Oracle, that work so deeply critical of the oracular, and the recent book of theological crisis and catharsis, Better than God. Peter Porter’s death has led not only to an extensive revisiting of his massive oeuvre, written over sixty years, and his prospective place in Englishlanguage letters, but also to questions about exactly what kind of poet he was. I find this bemusing, because, for all his social conversationalism, in his personal capital London, his sense of pan-Europeanism, and even his later reconnection with his homeland Australia, he was always the most individual of poets. Rather than equating him with the early days and aesthetic of The Movement in England, or in, say, Sean O’Brien’s affirmation, in his introduction, of Porter as comparable with the very different poets Ted Hughes and Geoffrey Hill, I see him as comparable more with poets of earlier centuries, such as Dryden, Pope, and Hardy. But, even more to the point, perhaps he is really akin to practitioners in other artistic genres, be they composers or visual artists. Looking through this superb selection, you get an overwhelming sense of how Porter’s coordinates, not only cultural but even theological, were formed by the observers, interpreters, and translators of sound and sight from the many cultural spaces of Europe – the heritage of artists and musicians, as well as writers. Porter’s knowledge of European art and music was legendary, but it’s not so much that the poems are packed with these references as that he manages to make them such an integral part of his very modern thinking. In this sense, he gives life to the best spirit of postmodernism, by making the façade a functional part of his thinking and exploration of the ‘human condition’. Porter’s lifelong concerns in poetry range from confronting social inequality, considering his own position as self-imposed exile from Brisbane and the country of his birth (he left for London in the early 1950s), and the questions of identity and belonging that ‘expatriatism’ engendered, through the oppressions and vacuity of materialism and consumerism. He explores the power of art to transform and transfigure, the theological angst of the agnostic or atheist, the compulsion to articulate mortality, desire, sex, the generative as well as the destructive nature of language, and even, perhaps significantly – cats. I don’t say ‘cats’ ironically: Porter was a great cat-lover. Cats occur in many poems not only as symbol but as acknowledgement of the non-human other.

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As a recognition that not all living knowledges belong to humans, Christopher Smart’s “Jubilate Agno” is never far away from Porter’s consideration and also his style. Technically, Porter was one of the most astute and accomplished prosodists of the twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. Style and content were never separated, and if Porter wrote in large chunks of metrical or syllabic verse, it was because what he was saying would bounce against those constrictions and generate tensions in meaning and affect. But his verse style was actually extraordinarily diverse, as he tested stanza shape and metre, and he let phrases and clauses build dramatic tension in a poem while simultaneously ‘telling’ us something – imparting a moral point or presenting an ethical conundrum. In his concise but intense introduction, Sean O’Brien notes: Breadth of subject is matched by diversity of form. Porter traverses ode, elegy, satire, lyric, monologue, epistle and numerous stanzas and metres, recalling one of his two great modern masters, Auden (the other is Wallace Stevens).130

One might add to this list parody, pastiche, and bricolage of ideas. It is surprising how often Porter’s poetry is cited as an exemplar of a more conservative and traditional approach to prosody, when, say, in comparison with American L A N G U A G E poetry, or even the poetry of the Cambridge avant-gardist J.H. Prynne. But, possibly, Porter in fact shares a linguistic awareness and sensitivity, and even politically (Porter was essentially a socialist), much more in common with the poetics of these writers than he does with the twentieth-century contemporary British poets of ‘stanza and clarity’ (my expression) with whom he is often associated. There are radical exceptions to this comparison, for a poet like W.H. Auden, whom Porter (as O’Brien signals) greatly admired all his life, was certainly both a technical and a political role model. Auden was never afraid to ‘tell’ something in a poem, and neither was Porter. The difference is that Auden might ‘tell’ and be allusive at his best, whereas Porter is almost universally allusive, no matter how much he is ‘telling’ us. Textually, Porter was the most declaratively rational of poets, his aphoristic wit driving the poem’s logic. On the other hand, there’s a subtextual parataxis of ideas – a juxtaposition of phrases and clauses of different ideas brought together without subordinating or coordinating conjunctions. It is this quality of allusiveness or suggestion more than anything else that prompts me to 130

Sean O’Brien, “Introduction” to Porter, The Rest on the Flight, xvii.

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compare him to the ostensibly more innovative poets of his lifetime. I would make the same claim for the selectors of his verse, Paterson and O’Brien – both of whom would probably profoundly object to this. During an interview Porter and I were involved in for a television programme, we found we had many poetic points in common, but came to an impasse on the question of what constitutes the make-up of a poem. I argued that it was the word itself, that a poem is composed of words and it is the single word that matters most. Porter strongly refuted this, saying the line was the measure of the poem. In a poet for whom individual words mattered so much, carried so much gravitas, who was so aware of their etymology, I found this intriguing, but if you look at Porter’s poems, they truly are composed line by line, stanza by stanza, with these working as frames in which individual words might be highlighted but are inevitably syntactically connected. That is the fundamental difference between him and the more overtly innovative poet-practitioners for whom conventional syntax is seen as a form of compliance with conservative and traditional ways of thinking. But, to my mind, Porter genuinely breaks this mould. In this selection, O’Brien and Paterson have included one of Porter’s “Three Transportations.” “Gertrude Stein at Snails Bay” is very much concerned with issues of language and the word itself. In his wry play with Stein’s nomenclature of nonsense, Porter transforms Steinian wordplay itself into a commentary on lexical logic. While seeming absurdist on the surface, the poem is about the distance as much as the clarity that language imposed on place can bring. Writing in “Miss Stein’s” voice – “I am Miss Stein (pronounced Steen) / and this sea is green” – he says: Above all, there is nothing to do in words I have written a dozen books to prove nothing can be done in words

While Porter is likely indicating that he believes the opposite is true, when taken in the context of his refuting the word as measure of the poem, we find more sympathy between the apparent opposites of the Steinian and the Porteresque. Porter is a poet for whom names are used to hang critical discourse on, so the slippage between name and meaning in this poem is especially interesting. In the poem, Stein, the American in Europe, is imagined transported to New South Wales. Understanding naming is dependent on context, so “Miss Stein’s” inability to hear the local becomes a reflection of Porter’s own long exile from Australia – “They tell me this is Arbor Day // No, I do not drop my

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aitches”; and then presents the paradox that both immersion and dissociation of a place can equally bring failure of comprehension: “I am in Snails Bay to find snails // Although there are no snails in Snails Bay. . . ” The position of the observer is never stable. While this poem succeeds, the poems from “Three Transportations” that O’Brien and Paterson have left out of this selection are far less successful, especially “Piero di Cosimo on the Shoalhaven.” In the poem “An Angel in Blytheburgh Church,” also from The Cost of Seriousness, there are these lines “A theology of self looking for precedents? / A chance to speak old words?” This poem, to my mind one of Porter’s greatest, takes us into a contemplation of death from the perspective of the nonbeliever looking at a sculpted angel resting against a church wall. In asking the questions quoted above, Porter examines why even an atheist will look for comfort to organized religion or its artefacts, stimulated by the spectacle of cultural history. He considers several possibilities before rejecting them, resorting to death as the redemption in itself. This crisis of ontology and the word is at the core of Porter’s poetic. He is constantly trying to reconcile language and spirituality, and, if not caught in a paradox, he usually steps aside and lets fate run its course. There is something immensely Hardyesque in this poem and in this world-view. In a book which is a treasure of our household, Landscape Poets: Thomas Hardy, Porter’s introduction tells us, “Hardy’s atheism is sometimes perplexing, since it includes a great deal of God-bothering.”131 The same might be said of Porter himself, though I’d say he had far more ‘hope’ than the Hardy he notes as seeing “little hope of redemption.” In Porter’s work there is redemption, though possibly this is accomplished more through social rectitude than through the trajectory of ego. In the same introduction to Hardy, Porter could also be speaking of himself when he says, “Hardy is especially the poet of indoor scenes. Perhaps one should say indoor scenes with a strong sense of the presence of out-ofdoors.”132 Porter often deals with city settings and interiors of buildings – as in “Both Ends Against the Middle,” which begins “Deep Inside the Imperial War Museum,” or “Basta Sangue,” opening “In the National Gallery of Victoria.” He is not really recognized as a ‘landscape poet’, though when he de131

Peter Porter, “Introduction” to Landscape Poets: Thomas Hardy, sel. & intro. Peter Porter, with photographs by John Hedgecoe (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1981): 12. 132 Peter Porter, “Introduction” to Landscape Poets: Thomas Hardy, 13.

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scribes an ‘outdoor’ scene, it is inevitably evocative of the place itself and the cultural allusions that inform the poet’s viewing of it. Gardens, for instance, are a familiar Porter motif, and “An Australian Garden,” included here from Living in a Calm Country, is a fine example. In this poem, which combines new love with a return to Australia, the garden becomes both paradise lost and paradise regained, colonial discomfort melding with a new sense of belonging that works to consolidate a cultural religiosity with secular materialism. The garden is that most traditional of colonial landscapes, and we might mentally overlay Glover’s “A View of the Artist’s House and Garden, Mills’ Plains” and the “Old World.” Of course, this is strongly ironized, in Porter’s typically distancing manner: “Spoiled Refugees nestle near Great Natives.” Nonetheless, it is also an attempt to render landscape as visual motif. Porter blends his characteristic artistic theological statement with the rarer ‘pure imagery’ when he writes of currawongs, “Their lookout cries have guarded Paradise” – even so, here the currawongs are doubling as the sword-bearing angel at Eden’s gate. A selection from the later book Dragons in their Pleasant Palaces, included here, is the poem “Hardy, 1913.” In this sonnet we once again confront the crisis of belief and expression. Though this is almost a channelled elegy, it is also a poem about the nature of writing love poetry. In the overwhelming drive of Porter’s characteristic urbane, aphoristic wit, familiar to readers across a lifetime’s writing, it is sometimes easy to forget that Porter was a great love-poet. In “Hardy, 1913,” we have an expression of the poet’s selfpossession and guilt at writing his love in isolation from the reality: “Remorse kept house with her safe in his heart / Her pets all killed off or dead from his neglect.” Porter constantly revisited themes and understandably revisited traumatic moments in his own life such as the death of his first wife, but this poem broadens the moment in time to reflection upon how he relates to those whom he has loved and been close to over his entire life. Its expression of aesthetic failure in the face of the needs and impetus of loving, ironically perfectly poised in this framed picture of a poem. The sonnet’s distinct turn after the octave challenges the poem’s conclusions with the deftness of its own structure: “He came back to his desk and framed in words / Those elegies in which his world lay wrecked.” Metaphors of violence and death are prevalent across Porter’s work, including this selection. He never indulges in these themes merely for their own sake. If, in the Hardy poem just considered, Porter contemplates another’s death, in “A Hoplite’s Helmet,” from A Porter Folio, he considers his own in

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the context of viewing the helmet, presumably in a museum, of a long-gone soldier. There is the usual Porter irony, here reducing the potential grandiosity of the historic weight placed on an object, by stating tongue-in-cheek, “You can // Frighten the cat / Poking your fingers through the eye pieces.” It is not unusual to hear Porter’s work spoken of in terms of elitism in the sophistication of its cultural references, but this poem clearly shows he saw knowledge not as a privilege but as something that should be available to anyone who sought it. More to the point, Porter refuted elites whenever he had the chance, be they governmental, academic, military, business or even psychological. This poem, which is written in alternating shorter and longer lines, set out as couplets, gives us the fragility of the archaeological artefact against the state-of-the-art techno-military prowess of its period, with a sense of overlapping that mimics the hoplite phalanx. Despite the sense of irony here, “A Hoplite’s Helmet” has an almost brutally direct point to make about both individual mortality and warfare. Roughly in the middle of the poem, the speaking voice, till now describing the helmet and its imagined wearer, suddenly says, “When death’s eyes / Make a play for me let him approach // In this helmet.” Could we read this as both a refusal to ‘go gently’ and an acceptance of death’s inevitability? The poem concludes by evoking the mass death brought about by warfare across millennia: “As many // Million dead / Must come again before this metal dies.” More recent military technology receives the same caustic analysis in “Both Ends Against the Middle,” where “Destruction’s most impartial theorem / The Rolls-Royce Merlin Aircraft Engine, gleams.” The poem “Your Attention Please,”133 was a definitive Cold-War anti-nuclear poem that many of us examined at school in Australia during the late 1970s /early 1980s. Written in a B B C -Radio news voice, this declaration of imminent mass destruction by nuclear weapons doesn’t miss a beat. It bombards the reader and the absurdity of the condition outweighs the irony of the poem; the voice handles this contradiction with a sense of total control belying the outcome. As the poem concludes, it is particularly scathing of religious rationalization of such a state: This announcement is ending. Our President Has already given orders for 133

“Your Attention Please” (1961), in Penguin Modern Poets 2: Peter Porter, Alan Jackson, William Wantling, ed. Al Alvarez (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962). Repr. in Porter, The Rest on the Flight: Selected Poems (London: Picador, 2010): 27.

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Massive retaliation – it will be Decisive. Some of us may die. Remember, statistically It is not likely to be you. All flags are flying fully dressed On Government buildings – the sun is shining Death is the least we have to fear. We are all in the hands of God, Whatever happens happens by His Will. Now go quickly to your shelters.

If Donatello was the conceit through which Porter examined warfare in “Both Ends Against the Middle,” art elsewhere also operates readily as conceit and reference point. The short poem “A Chagall Postcard,” from Possible Worlds, shows us a wry lyrical glimpse that Porter often came up with between more concerted and longer contemplations. However, we should not be deceived, because this poem gives us an insight not only into the process of art itself (if ironized by its presentation on a postcard) but also into the way the poet uses poetry ekphrastically. In this little poem we see a Chagall painting interpreted and re-created, the senses enlivened by musical reference. Porter’s deep interest in classical music is in both unison and tension with Chagall’s evocation of folk music through representations of instruments. Crucial to understanding Chagall’s work is accepting that he belonged to no single art movement but crossed freely between a number of them, and so generated whole new ways of seeing. His paintings are characterized by their oneiric quality, and one of Porter’s great concerns was the nature of dreams, as well as the process of dreaming. No Porter poem ever encapsulates a single theme – they are all points of departure for multiple considerations. We move from an apparent evocation of the painting’s contents to an ending that opens onto other observations: From earth to sky the cry ascends, What breaks will threaten where it mends, Proud lovers end as pallid friends, These feed on those.

The nature of the poem’s title is doubly interesting because the postcard both lacks the depth of the original painting and is also mass-produced, which in itself is a comment on the consumability of art. It is hard to say anything that is not positive about this selection. Certainly, I have personal favourites that aren’t in there, but all the poems that are in-

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cluded are admirable, and selecteds are by definition someone’s choice. Many of the great poems, as attested by innumerable critics over the years, are there, and some surprises. You will find “Annotations of Auschwitz,” “Phar Lap in the Melbourne Museum,” “The Porter Songbook,” “The Last of England,” “On This Day I Complete My Fortieth Year,” “Sex and the Over-Forties,” “On First Looking into Chapman’s Hesiod,” “The Easiest Room in Hell,” “An Exequy,” “Doll’s House,” the eponymous “The Rest on the Flight,” “River Run,” “Wittgenstein’s Dream,” “Basta Sangue,” “Max is Missing,” “Afterburner,” and an excellent selection from Porter’s final book, Better Than God, including “Voltaire’s Allotment.” For those interested in Porter’s conflicted readings of his homeland, there is no better place to start than “Sydney Cove, 1788.” Or for those who want a taste of Porter’s enjoyment of Latin wit, try his versions in “After Martial.” But perhaps the best place to end is with the last poem in this book, “After Schiller,” a very late poem listed by itself in the category “2010.” Schiller was a Sturm und Drang playwright, poet, and author of the “Ode to Joy” set to music by Beethoven. Porter’s immense achievement as a poet and critic has a sense of the grand about it, though he was the most humble and selfdeflating of men. “After Schiller” seems addressed to the speaker’s nearest who travels with him on the “stations” toward death: Weightless in everlasting space, but true To the blindly heavy rules of time, I have become a harbinger for you Of every weighted station of your climb.

However personal the address, that “you” inevitably draws in the reader. Porter never wrote only to himself or his intimates, but to all who would listen.

Note on the Australian edition The original British edition of these selected poems was introduced very ably by Sean O’Brien, while the Australian edition134 carries a short introduction by David Malouf, as well as a tribute piece at the book’s end, by Clive James. While the James piece is anecdotally interesting, and certainly evokes the Peter Porter I knew and deeply respected, with the usual Jamesian lightness, it is the Malouf introduction that really gives this edition its orientation in terms 134

Peter Porter, The Rest on the Flight: Selected Poems, intro. David Malouf, afterword by Clive James (Crow’s Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2010).

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of Australia. It is actually a testament to the selection itself, made by two British poets, Sean O’Brien and Don Paterson, that the book should work so well for both British and Australian audiences. But perhaps this is not so surprising, for, as Malouf himself notes, The achievements of such poets as Seamus Heaney, Les Murray, Derek Walcott and Derek Mahon, all English-language poets from non-English places, had created a new and wider category, ‘poets in English’, and it is here that Porter has his place. . . 135

As Malouf accurately asserts, referring to the early books, for the self-exiled Porter Australia was a “province of hell, a penal colony from which the poet has only narrowly escaped.” Malouf locates Porter’s home in language more than in either England or Australia. And after Porter's later return to Australia, the garden motif comes into play. I actually read Malouf’s introduction after writing this piece, and found it affirming to read his take on Porter’s modernism: Dismissive, in all the arts, of all the official forms of Modernism, he [Porter] sets about fashioning a modernism of his own that will contain the past without repeating it. . . 136

Malouf refers to the much-attested Athenian /Boeotian divide of Porter’s dialogue with Les Murray, as well as remarking on the rich diversity of Porter’s subject-matter. Finally, he astutely identifies a poet I should have added to my short list of Porter’s kin from over the centuries: Browning.

Master Missed137

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MISSING IS ONE OF THE LATE MASTER-POET’S FINEST In this first collection to appear after his landmark twovolume Collected Poems (1999), Porter demonstrated that there is life after a such a gathering. 135

AX IS

BOOKS.

David Malouf, “Introduction” to Porter, The Rest on the Flight: Selected Poems (Crow’s Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2010): xviii. 136 Malouf, “Introduction” to Porter, The Rest on the Flight: Selected Poems, xvi. 137 Much-expanded version of paragraph in round-up section “The Forward poetry prize at 20,” The Guardian (6 October 2011). Review of Peter Porter, Max is Missing (London: Picador, 2001).

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Max was a vibrant and philosophically flexible re-invention of poetic persona that took Porter’s renowned wit, and knowledge of European history and cultural arts, further into his varied equivocations over the meaning of Nature (with a capital ‘N’). There’s the characteristic tussle with the rational and scientific, and how they sit with artistic practice and emotional tension, often with an emphasis on where Nature fits in the anthropocentric picture. Porter is a philosophical poet who yet challenges philosophy with unerring clarity of thought. In this work he somewhat shifts his angles of analysis. Porter’s comparisons will inevitably come down to moments or examples of human achievement and failure. He is constantly willing to bring his ‘urban mind’ into confrontation with any ‘Wordsworthian’ tendencies that might raise their head, if with irony. And Max offers room for animals, not only as poetic device, but also as creatures in themselves, even if the sheer forces of existence weigh them down. Yet Max, the cat, will always have agency and knowledge over humans. There’s an array of animal and plant life, all woven into the fabric of human destiny, especially through language (“Words, first and last, have come to stay,” says the pointedly placed opening poem, “Last Words”). In the pungent irony of “Sir Oran Haut-Ton on Forest Conservation,” referring to Thomas Love Peacock’s gentleman orangutan from the novel Melincourt (1817), Porter writes, with a double-edged pen, “Nature votes Green. The world might still be saved.” He critiques human abuse of the natural world but he also mocks romantic fetishization of Nature. Porter’s tendency to confront Nature’s complexity and power comes out of a Hardyesque fatalism more than an epiphany. His world is both heavily Godfilled and godless; when God does appear, it is often with a bleakly indifferent supremacy. Mostly, nature is not as we see it, even how we mimetically attempt to make it as art. Symbols don’t really work. Writing of a butterfly, Porter says: Softest of God’s creatures ganging up on a loner, toiling stoic terrace of olive trees138

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It is worth considering in Max is Missing that, while animals are used as poetic devices (usually symbolic), there is also a sense of the ‘real’ animal about them (e.g., with Max the ‘missing’ cat himself, but also the spiders and the butterflies, etc.). So, even though the spiders and butterflies work as symbols and analogies, you get the sense of their being truly living things (i.e. more than symbols). The remarkable “The Kipling Donkeys” is a double elegy for the loss of a first wife and also the dead of war (Kipling’s son was killed at Loos in the First World War, and Kipling attended a dedication ceremony for that battle’s dead was held at Arras in 1930). The conflicts that come out of human failure to understand and accommodate the other have devastating consequences. In this poem, the donkeys act as medium between the living humans and the dead (remembering donkeys were also killed in vast numbers during the same war, and were often used to carry the injured): “Donkeys can tell our charnel natures / By our smell.” And the link between the “donkeys’ pasture” and the war dead, the ghosts that fill a photo (before and after it’s taken), create a fated interconnectedness of people, history, place, and animals. There is a sense that the knowledge the donkeys hold of human eschatology is deeply compassionate, empathetic, and respectful, despite the horrific nature of the circumstances. And as a haunting echo, we should keep in mind that Kipling had suggested the words from Ecclesiastes 44:14, “Their Name Liveth For Evermore” to go on Stones of Remembrance. The donkeys partially ‘earth’ the overwhelming grief and loss of husband and wife, mother and father. In Porter’s work there were always animals, especially cats, but in Max is Missing they exist as a sub-set of his aesthetic, in which they are sometimes (not always) somewhat more ‘intact’, rather than functioning as pure analogy and/or conceit in an artistic construction. The dreadful absolutism of spiders over their victims, or “stampeding butterflies” (“softest of God’s creatures ganging up”) in the light of a terrible god, suggests all fate, animal and human, is as flies to wanton boys.... It’s a Porter paradigm that takes one beyond the Porteresque notion that “we live in a confusion / Of the arts and serenity of symbols” (“Clichés as Clouds Above Calstock”).

creatures that can do no harm yet as a swarm seemed a little menacing” (Christine Porter, email to J K , 11 October 2011). [J.K.]

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I think it was a later-age coming to terms with mortality that took Porter’s symbols into the realm of gritty reality which, after all, is what so much of his poetry actually comes back to. Ideas carry their attendant pleasures and pains. Porter’s wife, Christine, mentioned to me in an email that the first dead body Peter had seen was a pet cat’s, late in life, and it profoundly affected him (especially given that death /loss /absence had been a terrible thing at times in his life, as it is in most people’s lives (and with the death of his first wife obviously resonant). I think that is central. ‘Animals’ feature strongly in five poems in Max is Missing, and are mentioned elsewhere as well. Although always there as poetic devices (symbols, analogies), they also have a strange agency that is unusual for Porter. Even “Orlando’s Parrot,” which actually refers to a deflating parrot-shaped balloon (from London Zoo, according to Christine), is weirdly alive in its vulnerability to fate and the whim of the gods. The plea of the ‘voice’ for a resurrection seems both in jest and also a plea from Nature (and to Nature) to defeat the gods’ malevolence. The parrot-balloon poem seems to carry a subtextual plea for all (animal) life to levitate above its condition of existence, to escape the gods and their terrible inflicting of fate. So the plastic parrot symbol almost becomes the real parrot, the symbol for the condition of all life, but almost life itself. In among the tones of Auden and Dryden and the impeccably formal constraint, there are new rhythms at work, and while the classical wrestles with the modern (so often found wanting), there’s a lightness that retains his satirical depth while inviting familiarity, gossip among the hard-edged reasoning, and always the ability to poke fun at himself and his subject: We who would probably want to remake or at least tidy up Tracey Emin’s bed

Porter has been known as an expatriate Australian for almost sixty years. True, he spent most of his life in London, and he was very much part of contemporary British poetry. But his poems always wrote back to Australia, and, from the mid-1970s on, reconnected with the place he’d earlier felt had no place for him. In this book there are a handful of poems on Australian subjects; one in particular stands out, “Duetting with Dorothea,” in which, referring to the author of probably Australia’s best-known (though least ‘great’) poems, he laments: Instead I saw a landscape Lit up by inner doubt.

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And in a colonized space, this is surely a legitimate stance for a non-Indigenous Australian. One should always have doubt.

The Rivers Project139

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R E A T I O N M Y T H S , T H E ‘ W O R L D R I V E R ’, sources of life and death, diverse ecologies, connectors and ‘edges’ of habitats, places of commerce and spiritual significance – rivers bind life together across the continents. The ‘great’ rivers of the world carry their histories and geographical significances, mythology and popular culture fusing with the pragmatics of survival and habitation. Rivers have been roads for conquest and warfare, for transitions from the material to the spiritual world. Humans have used and altered rivers to fit their own ‘civilizing’ ends. Rivers cleanse and pollute. Rivers reach out and destroy, bring annihilation on a floodplain just as they bring alluvial richness. They are a paradox from the human perspective. In turn, humans destroy and pollute them – erase and replace histories. Rivers epitomize the indifference of nature to the human condition. And this applies to the smallest as well as the greatest of rivers. I had long wanted to work on a project with the poet Sean O’Brien. We discussed it, and found the thing we had in common outside poetry was that we both lived on a river. Sean lives by the Tyne in Newcastle, England, and I live… well, I live by a number of rivers: the Cam in England, the Kokosing in Ohio, and the Avon in Australia. My permanent home, or where my family is, is York, Western Australia. The family place there is a few miles from the Avon, which eventually feeds into the Swan and the Canning, rivers of my childhood. The interconnectability of rivers, the rivers of the world, caught our interest. And this brought to mind the Australian expat poet Peter Porter, whom we both very much admire. We asked Peter if he’d become involved and, with him being a London-dweller, it seemed that the Thames would become another focus. By nature, though, rivers take us elsewhere. My Avon is an Avon of desolation and salinity, as well as a sacred place of immense beauty and significance. The rivers project is about the interaction of humans with

139

“Foreword” to John Kinsella, Sean O’Brien & Peter Porter, Rivers (Fremantle,

W A : Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2002): 9–14.

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waterways – their use and abuse, the conscious and unconscious role they play in our lives, in our mental and spiritual substance. Irony, sincerity, pragmatics, alienation, colonization, rejection – all of these issues come into play. Three voices interacting and fragmenting into the voices of place. A tangled picaresque, in which there are clear lines of flow, but mingled ones as well. Sources and mouths play against each other. So, in the end, what is the river culturally, geographically…? As Finnegans Wake begins: “riverrun, past Eve and Adam´s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs...” Rivers is a book of movement, a book of cultural change: replacement, loss, growth, destruction, and discovery. Beginnings and ends. A way of speaking across cultures, across gaps in a culture. Language and the river. The relationship of the poem’s form to a river. Three distinctly different takes – geographies – finding connections. It is also the linking of three distinctly different voices in the picaresque of poetry. a Peter Porter’s rivers run through and across the old and new worlds. The Brisbane River of his Australian birth and childhood connects with the Thames, the Jordan, river-port cities of the world. Journeys of commercial and spiritual exploration turn inward, into the inner self, into the fragile psyche of ‘civilizings’. The river is a useful tool of export in both religious and territorial conquest. Porter’s adaptations of Hölderlin are pertinent reminders of the multiple codings of the river: it brings tranquillity and certainty to soothe the troubled spirit, and yet it offers changeability, the unpredictable, and elusiveness: O well-loved banks of Childhood’s constant river, Do you still soothe the sufferings of love? And you those woods I haunted, when once more I come to you, will peace and love be waiting?

Hölderlin’s room in the tower of a friend’s house on the Neckar river, the main tributary of the Rhine, in the German university town of Tübingen, brought him comfort in his most traumatic moments. He died there in 1843. For Porter, the river becomes a contradiction or paradox: a rite of passage, a supplier of ‘progress’ and cultural rewards, but also the purveyor of indifference at best, and more often corruption/pollution:

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The river runs through its despoiled champaign

Porter treats attempts to manipulate the river, as a civilizing force, with characteristic irony and tautness. Made almost entirely of water, the human body is trapped by the necessity or imperative of the river to ‘make’ history. We’re impelled by it, caught by our need for it. It is indifferent to our attempts to make of it the sublime, the sympathetic: Blake drew The River of Life, with souls shimmying above. What will survive of us is energy, not love.

a To say that the rivers of Sean O’Brien’s poetry are dark and foreboding is to miss the persistent and durable life-force that works as undercurrent. O’Brien has crafted tough and adaptable ‘urban-pastoral’ lyric-elegies out of an indifferent nature and an often unforgiving history. There’s a synergy between classical form and speech sub-text in his work. Lyric? Yes, but something more than this: the ‘exogenous lyric’. Inside and outside the song. It’s a poetry that incorporates investigations of self in the context of social, environmental, geographical, historical, and cultural factors. In an O’Brien river poem the reader is at once overhanging the dark waters – or with a foot on the bank, a foot in the water, or moving with the living dead. The poet and the reader feel every molecule of the Tyne working as both Styx and life-giving (acqua vitae…) waters. Ironic, bitterly so at times, but deeply connected to human loss and suffering: It could not be quenched by affection Or drink: even now, at the death and beyond, oh yes It must carry on dragging its grievances into the dark, For the want of a nail, of a home, of a matchbox, A drum of pink paraffin, anything fiery enough To let the man rest by the waters of Tyne.

O’Brien is the contemporary master of dramatic verse in Britain, able to achieve that rare feat of making the song work as poetry — both figuratively and formally. Always under the surface of his control is social tension, and the anxiety of the individual in his or her relationships to community. The river symbolizes this tension. His is not a rarefied culture of ideas but a deeply intelligent engagement with the folklore and poetic literacy of the ‘pit’ as

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opposed to the ‘balcony’. There is a poignant beauty recognizable by all who feel loss in his words: Follow me darling, follow me down: My love is the river In which you must drown. My love is the river In which you must drown.

For O’Brien, a political poet, the river implies an exchange and traversal of geographies. Culture remains characteristic of place, and identity comes with the language of locality, but the river and the flow it symbolizes, especially as it carries and opens into the sea – into the trade routes of commerce and ideas – brings awareness and ‘liberation’ as well as destruction.: Say: here is a dream of extinction. Say: it carried coals from Selby, bashing through the swell like a Merrimack boat, part perhaps of Zachariah Pearson’s dream of blockade-running empire, of the manutenency of slavery undertaken, from the city whose MP was the abolitionist Wilberforce, whose house of exhibited shackles is a mere five hundred yards away.

a My Avon River poems are a journey from different ‘locations’ – signposted and marked points of expedition, highlighting and declaring the attempted displacement of other Indigenous signs. The Avon may be destroyed by farming and ‘control’, but it remains a place of dreaming and spiritual connection / conversation with the land. It is also a place of attempted rehabilitation (often misguided) and pride for locals. Left to itself, it might be a place of reconciliation. These poems finish in the Swan, outside the new Federal Court building, where land-rights cases are focused. It is essential that the message of the river be heard, that its rights, and the rights of those people connected with it for tens of thousands of years, are respected. The law and the river must reconcile themselves.

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Randolph Stow (1935–2010) —An Introduction to His Poetry140

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S T O W ’ S S L I M B O D Y O F P O E T R Y weighs more than most oeuvres many times its size. So often identified as a definitive poetry of mid-west Australia, it actually encompasses a much broader global geography in its subject-matter and sensibilities. Undoubtedly, though, its nerve centre is the land from Geraldton to Kalgoorlie, and north to the Kimberley. But we should think of Stow’s voice as part of something beyond the poems ᩺– ᩺or, rather, ‘voices’, because his poetry often dramatized the voices of those who could not speak in such contexts, or had been silenced by time and circumstance, the ‘I’ of a poem often a shifting persona, or a ‘character’ in a narrative in which the poet is hidden or obscured, haunting the lines. Be it those he writes of, be it the land itself, or the many other voices that make ‘place’, his poems are about connections and threads, even when they speak of isolation. Of writing of the mid-west region, I also think of the Yamaji poet Charmaine Papertalk–Green, and her articulation᩺–᩺bringing different meaning to the dereliction and hauntings of the outback᩺–᩺of the continuing colonialism of mining companies. I also think over the necessity of Stow’s version of Geraldton to the town’s desire for continuity and uniformity of identity. There is a school literary award named after Stow, and although he didn’t return to Geraldton for over thirty years, the town resonated with him and he with it. A town of ships in the harbour and massive combine harvesters on the sand plains. Of sheep and gun culture. Of a braggable number of days of sunshine and skin cancer. Beach-life and racism. Of wheat (and canola) and minerals, of seafaring and land-use. Groundbreaking, historic, and essential, Stow’s poetry is haunting, lyrical, mythic, spiritual, and anchored in place. However, it is also a prime case for what Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra have called “paranoid” reading,141 and a reader will do well to see not only the acknowledged ghosts in the poems but 140

ANDOLPH

First published as the introduction to The Land’s Meaning: new selected poems of Randolph Stow (Fremantle, W A : Fremantle Press, 2012). Reprinted here (in revised form) with kind permission of the publisher. [Footnotes and Works Cited added by Ed.] 141 Bob Hodge & Vijay Mishra, Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the Postcolonial Mind (North Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991): 218.

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also the unacknowledged and even, on occasion, displaced ghosts. Under the surface of so many of the earlier poems and, I would argue, the later, wherever they are situated, is knowledge of the fundamentally unaddressed wrongs inflicted on Indigenous peoples in Australia, and in the then (when Stow was working there) Australian colonial possession of Papua and New Guinea (from 1920 to 1975 it was an Australian territory under the League of Nations mandate, though Australia had taken control of Papua from the British in 1906, and of New Guinea from the Germans in the First World War, while West New Guinea was controlled by the Dutch and later the Indonesians). There’s a frustrated awareness that reaches across his novels and poetry, and even in the epiphanic To the Islands,142 which Stow said he wrote as propaganda to support missionaries, whom he saw as maligned. All poetry that comes out of colonial-station backgrounds, out of farming ‘country’ in Australia, either embraces, denies, or fights hard to escape the issues of theft and occupation of indigenous lands, and the cultural abuse that goes with this. Stow’s poetry is more aware than most ‘white’ Australian poetry, though it treads a tormented line. It carries the trauma of the search for personal spiritual, emotional, and clan-belonging identity, fracturing out over the planet, seeking to draw connections and intertexts wherever possible, to join the world of the living and unliving if not to attempt, then to envisage, a reconciliation with the ennui of Western cultural heritages in the face of often greater local forces. It also runs the risk of what Peter Minter has termed “anthropologising” Indigenous culture, by giving it a silence in the poetry, or projecting a colonial-white existential angst through the lens placed on interactions with Indigenous cultures (especially with the New Guinea /Trobriand poems of Outrider).143 Since Stow was an anthropologist for a time, this is not surprising, and he does constantly scarify his Western subjectivity through witnessing the ironies of ‘contact’ and the social engineering never far away from this (which inevitably fails in the face of the spiritual power of the ‘Other’). 142

To the Islands (London: Macdonald, 1958; Boston M A : Little, Brown, 1959; rev. ed. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1981; London: Secker & Warburg, 1982; New York: Taplinger, 1982; Woollahra, N S W : Pan / Secker & Warburg, 1983. 143 Peter Minter, “Australian Poetry circa 1988,” in A Poet’s Perspective: Australian Poetry Symposium (Newcastle, 1 October 2011), http://www.ustream.tv/recorded /17612651 (accessed 6 June 2012); Stow, Outrider: Poems 1956–1962 (London: Macdonald, 1962).

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It is not surprising that one of Stow’s favourite novelists was Conrad. The sea abounds, and An Outcast of the Islands and Heart of Darkness resonate. Stow’s colonial forebears are cast more tragically than criminally in terms of their role in the occupation of Australia. They were landowners, lawyers, judges, ministers, in South Australia and Western Australia, and as the preeminent Stow scholar Anthony J. Hassall says in his chronology of Stow’s life to 1990, “The Stow family is connected to the Randolphs of Virginia, to Thomas Jefferson and (allegedly) to Pocahontas.”144 Of course, the connection even anecdotally can only be as a form of colonization (with all its bodily implications), so this already shows one of the many corners of the paradox of Stow’s work. The ongoing colonial search for opportunity and profit, as well as a rebooting of lineage (branching of family), is most often dressed up in the conventions of discourse as the search for the Edenic and idyllic, and few writers with modernist sensibilities such as Stow, especially brought up surrounded by the trappings of colonial pastoralism, would do anything but show its failure. The problem comes with the balance of empathy for their failing to gain a paradise they were so deluded about. Shouldn’t they be condemned out and out? This is the crisis. Stow is cautious here, naturally having sympathy and empathy beyond his reasoning. The ‘harsh’ Australian land immediately offers the prick to the bubble, and a resolution of the failure of the ideal. From a Heaven /Hell binary, a transformative possibility is offered through the act of writing, and Stow, despite his glib takes in interviews on his purpose for writing, was driven to transform, to transcend the condition of this colonial meltdown into material reality (from crop failure to the death of stock, from dying of thirst to going mad in the sun, from cliché to dissolution of Western myths of right/s). But one should always be wary of imposing a model of crisis on any writer, though Stow reaches into his family’s colonial background readily enough. His grandfather was also a Buddhist, and this brought Stow into contact with spiritual literature that opened a different way. Cross-pollination is a characteristic of Stow’s poetry, drawing threads from Judaeo-Christian and Eastern traditions, and it is often guilt-laden and semi-anthropologized (though always, in the end, putting human above ‘data’), proffering alternative ways of seeing and articulating a crisis he found too disturbing to leave unsaid, but still did not want to articulate specifically. His poetry is richly metaphoric, 144

Anthony J. Hassall, Strange Country: A Study of Randolph Stow (1986; St Lucia:

U of Queensland P , 1990): 3.

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and uses partial conceits that interweave to paint what often appears to be a narrative but is in fact a series of glimpses woven together with the music of language. Stow loved language as a thing in itself. He loved to listen to speech. a Julian Randolph Stow, known as “Mick” to his mates, was born in Geraldton in 1935. The maternal side of his family, the Sewells, were established on Sandsprings Station (the Sandalwood of his writing) in 1866 (having acquired it in the 1850s). He attended Geraldton Primary School, then Geraldton High School, and in 1950–52 the elite Guildford Grammar School in Perth. He wrote his two early novels, A Haunted Land and The Bystander, during the long summer holidays while at university.145 His first book of poetry, Act One, appeared in 1957 in London.146 After university, where he did an arts degree, he worked on an Anglican mission at Forrest River (the Umbalgari), tutored for six months at the University of Adelaide, then studied anthropology and linguistics at the University of Sydney in 1958. His prize-winning novel To the Islands was published in 1958, and in 1959 he went to New Guinea as assistant to the (Australian) government anthropologist and then became a cadet patrol officer in the Trobriand Islands, where he contracted malaria. The following years saw him visiting England, working on a master of arts (on Conrad) at the University of Western Australia, lecturing at Leeds University, and publishing his poetic masterwork, Outrider, in London in 1963. Subsequently novels and other works were published, and he undertook extensive world travel. In 1969 he moved to Suffolk, then to Old Harwich in 1981. A Counterfeit Silence: Selected Poems appeared in 1969 in Australia.147 To this day, it remains the definitive Stow poetry collation, as he was not to publish another separate volume of poetry. Despite the paradoxes and seeming contradictions, the gaps and fractures, the divisions between old and new, material and spiritual, Stow wrote poems of connection. It is tempting to think of him as a ‘liminal’ poet, mapping those spaces either side of a metaphorical border, giving word to the inarticulacy of

145

A Haunted Land (London: Macdonald, 1956; New York: Macmillan, 1957), and The Bystander (London: Macdonald, 1957). 146 Act One: Poems (London: Macdonald, 1967). 147 A Counterfeit Silence: Selected Poems (Sydney & London: Angus & Robertson, 1969).

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blurred edges and zones where different worlds meet. These factors are certainly evident in his poems, but there is something more cathartic and more resolved than a first, second, and maybe a lifetime of readings reveal. I say ‘connection’ because I think the poems were written as gestures towards a completion or resolution the poet knew could never be achieved. But that doesn’t stop one trying. a Stow was born into a Geraldton that was still small (it’s a small city now of just over thirty thousand, but it thinks of itself as a ‘capital’ of the mid-west in many ways), and a long way from the rest of the world in terms of population, goods, and the exchange of global ideas. A town of the seaworld and the landworld. Not just a coastal town, but a place of congress and conflict between different modes of living and making a living. His writing of that area speaks the language of the sea and the land. Where they meet, clash, dissolve, reform. Where they connect. Where the sand mixes in the waves and it is neither shore nor sea, then is definitively one or the other. All of these, and a dissolution of cultural coordinates fuelled by angst, often in a single poem, can work entirely figuratively, with images of states of being clashing and dissolving, as in the unsettling poem of ‘temptation’ and the fall from Paradise, “Strange Fruit”:148 Suicide of the night᩺–᩺ah, flotsam: (the great poised thunderous breaker of darkness rearing above you, and your bones awash, in the shallows, glimmering, stony, like gods of forgotten tribes, in forgotten deserts) take care. Take care.

Stow’s use of parenthesis in his poems often accommodates the warning voice, the seeing, even sometimes prophetically observational, and the directional᩺ – ᩺dramatically working like spoken stage directions, as if they are rooms or portholes within the poem itself. The voice hides, lurks in them. Though not highly innovative in linearity or syntax or even verse form, outside his flexible use of the couplet, he is radical in his voice-play. Often there are voices behind voices, from the glib to the ecstatic.

148

“Strange Fruit,” in Poems from ‘The Outrider’ and Other Poems (Adelaide: Australian Letters, 1963): 12.

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In an early poem, “Seashells and Sandalwood”149 (the latter being the fictional name of a family property as well as a wood highly valued in China and exported there from Australia to the point of species extinction), we see the connection and exchange between the two states of being: My childhood was seashells and sandalwood, windmills and yachts in the southerly, ploughshares and keels

Stow would remain interested in the sea all his life, and was particularly interested in the ‘Shipwreck Coast’ (as some in Geraldton ‘promote’ it). He said in an interview with John B. Beston: I’ve been interested in the Batavia ever since I was a child, then I went on to become interested in the East India Company and in the history of the whole Indian Ocean. Maybe I’ll do a big nonfiction work on the Indian Ocean ᩺–᩺by the year 2000 or so?150

The Houtman Abrolhos Islands and the mid-west coastline of Australia were notorious for shipwrecks. The stories of the Batavia – with the 1629 mutiny by Jacobsz and Cornelisz and other crew members, the shipwreck, the bloodshed /massacre that followed, and the subsequent trial – are bleak hauntings of Geraldton and the region. The sea is marked with blood, literal and mythological, and the cost of exploration, of commercial and nationalistic empire-building is evident, though this pales in the context of the brutality and theft inflicted on Indigenous peoples in this process. In fact, it is said that some of the shipwrecked survivors became part of Yamaji and other tribes in the Champion Bay area, and the connections and blurrings are increased at once. In an article on the Batavia disaster, Stow wrote tellingly: One pair of opposed myths which one notices throughout this history / mythology of Australia is, on the one hand, the myth of Australia as prison, and on the other of Australia as Eden . . . the feeling that the island-continent is a natural gaol, and that Australian society is the gaoler . . . Opposing this is another tradition which paints Australia as potential paradise. This is the Arcadia of some eighteenth century mariners and artists, the “millennial Eden”

149

“Seashells and Sandalwood” (1957), in A Counterfeit Silence, 4. John B. Beston, “Mostly Private Letters,” from interview with Randolph Stow (Perth, 1974), in Randolph Stow (1990), ed. Hassall, 351. 150

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of Bernard O’Dowd’s not altogether starry-eyed sonnet, the “promised land” of Judith Wright’s mad Bullocky.151

Though he goes on to examine another possible pairing of myths, it is salient that this binary is his departure point. It was a struggle for so much Australian literature of the 1950s (through to the 1980s and beyond): an expressing of their inherent flaws and failure (and it’s this as much as the myths Stow divulges in the context of the Batavia horrors that results from a century which produces ‘Adolf Hitler’ and later ‘Manson’). It’s a ‘grey’ area, as they say, with all the problems using such a term might entail. Strangely, or maybe not so, ‘grey’ is a dominant colour/symbol throughout Stow’s poetry. A liminal space, but also something decisive. We all know what grey is. It’s not indecisive, and it is potent in its many ways, though we might wish to see it as anomalous. In the poem “A Wind From the Sea,”152 written in rhyming couplets that give it a sense of building a strangely delicate and ominous finality, ‘grey’ becomes the cement and the ambiguity between states. The wind brings “green and grey,” the house “patchpeels in grey and green,” a house and a window and something behind, including “grey / tatters of lacework” worked by the weather. The room behind the curtain is imbued with grey (“bloom”). The person in the room is treating ‘grey’ as Lady Macbeth treats blood, “Out, damned spot! out, I say.” The figure is an ‘it’, not a ‘he’ or a ‘she’. This gender-lack is a Stow sidestep. There’s also an avoidance of naming location. It could be many places in the world. Old world or new world. But it carries the elements of ‘civilization’ in the lace, and the house, and the mannerisms of presentation. Yet is it ‘civilized’? There’s a crisis of ‘civilizing’ in Stow’s work. The figure is looking out through the lace into the weather: “Wind, salt wind, across its face.” The essence of the sea has come through the window, merging land and water, solid and liquid and air . .. states. Grey is the failure of sexuality and desire. It is entangled with weather and the lyric, an imploded subjectivity, a failed or lost Eden. What can be said about this, and what can’t. In something so apparently ‘light’, the forbidden is foremost. A poet Stow came to admire greatly, Saint-John Perse, wrote in Amers:

151

“The Southland of Antichrist: The Batavia Disaster of 1629” (1971), in Randolph Stow (1990), ed. Hassall, 411–12. 152 “A Wind From the Sea” (1964), in A Counterfeit Silence, 53.

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Poésie pour accompagner la marche d’une récitation en l’honneur de la Mer. Poésie pour assister le chant d’une marche au pourtour de la Mer. Comme l’entreprise du tour d’autel et la gravitation du choeur au circuit de la strophe.153

There are many meeting places in this quotation. Where poetry and the sea, poetry and ritual, the sea and ritual, the sea and cycles of life connect. Poetry, for Stow, was a necessary part of an ecology. As natural as the sea, and potentially as forceful. And language is both the expression of these forces and an embodiment. It also makes ‘Nature’. Stow was drawn to language; he was compelled. When he left Geraldton High School and went to Guildford Grammar in Perth as a boarder, he studied French. He would continue this at the University of Western Australia, boarding at St George’s College there, and switching from a law degree to an arts degree, majoring in French. It was to French poets he looked, especially the Symbolists, especially Baudelaire and Rimbaud, for his own rapidly maturing poetic voice. Rimbaud remained with him all his life. a The first poems of the “Uncollected Poems” section in this selection of Randolph Stow’s poetry are taken from the literary journal Westerly, published out of the English Department of the University of Western Australia, where Stow would later tutor. Unsurprisingly, they are translations from the French, and old French at that, “Three Poems by Clément Marot (1496–1544).”154 They are not overly strict translations, done with a modern ease and a comfort of diction, by a young poet who knew his own voice but respected originals. This selection is also part of a personal journey for me, and no doubt the poems herein are part of many others’ journeys, aside from the life narrative of Randolph Stow himself. I first read Stow’s poetry as a third-year highschool student at Geraldton Senior High School, in Alexander Craig’s landmark collection Twelve Poets.155 Poems such as “Dust” and “The Land’s 153

Saint-John Perse, “Et Vous, Mers,” in Saint-John Perse, Amers / Seamarks: bilingual edition, tr. Wallace Fowlie (Amers, 1957; Bollingen series 67; tr. New York: Pantheon, 1958): 4. 154 “Three Poems by Clément Marot,” Westerly 1 (1956). 155 Twelve Poets, 1950–1970, ed. & intro. Alexander Craig (Milton, Queensland: Jacaranda, 1971).

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Meaning” spoke directly to me of the place I lived in physically, but also the place I dwelt in (isolation) within. The poems connected the external and internal worlds, but also the conscious and the unconscious. They seemed to be about mutability, especially in an ancient land that in many ways appeared to remain constant, always to be there. But dust is something that works its way into everything, and yet it is vague, elusive, and ineffable. It made me think about my certainties. About the damage and change being wrought on what we were constantly told was a ‘timeless’ land, and especially about impacts of colonization and the new colonial ‘belonging’. Did I belong? Whose land was this? And then there was Stow’s brief comment to accompany the poems, which riveted me to my chair in the English classroom of the new building down the hill at Geraldton Senior High School. I remember first reading it on a hot March day in 1978, staring out through the window, down through the eucalypts towards the hospital, and further on, the dunes and Back Beach with its crushing dumpers. The Indian Ocean. That year had already become a torment and I sought escape in the bush, on the sand, along the erosions of the Chapman River valley. Other than one friend and my family, I felt very alone, and wrote poems to myself. I read: I really have nothing to say about poetry in general (except that mine tries to counterfeit the communication of those who communicate by silence). And these poems are mostly private letters. R.S.156

I had no idea that Stow had taken on Tao as a system for processing an alienating world. I had no idea he lived in East Anglia. I only knew that silence was terrifying and relieving at once, and whether I understood him or not, I felt a kinship. Stow was a writer and thinker who knew the various arguments for reading or unreading his work. An intellectual as well as a ‘sensual’ person, he was responsive and receptive to ideas and ‘liberal’ in outlook. But his writing itself did its own things, and forever remains the zone of those who read it. It isn’t his alone, and probably never was. a The Stows and the Sewells were old colonial families who traced their roots (respectively) back to Suffolk and Essex. Stow was obsessed with roots and belonging, or at least reflecting on the obsession for roots and belonging,

156

Stow, “Afterword,” in Twelve Poets, ed. Craig.

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which he identified as part of the mythos of ‘Australian’ identifying /identification ᩺– ᩺the urge for nation. And though so much of his poetry maps his Australian belonging, as does his fiction, it becomes evident that he ultimately didn’t feel he belonged, and his expatriatism ᩺–᩺he lived in East Anglia, U K , for most of his adult life ᩺–᩺was the ultimate expression of this. So who did belong? Indigenous Australians. Stow clearly demarcates ‘white’ and ‘black’ Australia. I am not sure how he described multicultural Australia. His first novels struggle with this recognition, and are problematic in many ways because of it. But by the time we reach To the Islands, an awareness has set in that no journey on Australian land is possible without this acknowledgement and a restitution in psyche and spirit. The outcome of this awareness is violent and, despite commitment, ultimately isolated. How does one reach the after-death without the encodings of place? Can ‘we’ (the eternal Other) force ourselves into them? Randolph Stow the Writer was familiar to every kid at Geraldton Senior High School. His semi-autobiographical novel The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea157 was a set text in lower school, and the town prided itself on having ‘produced’ not only a famous writer but one who seemed to understand the town and region so well, and both noted and helped make its ‘history’. History is always a concern when tens of thousands of years are brushed away and a new legitimacy installed in its place in the minds of the colonizers. It ceases to reach out to where one has come from overseas, and focuses on where one comes from in the new, surveyed, and gazetted place. Merry-GoRound is a great novel, but it’s really a map of a boy’s (Rob’s) growing up and not a map of Geraldton, whose racism and conflicts between different cultural and social spaces place it beyond nostalgia. But the novel is immensely poetic, and charts the awakening of a poetic sensibility that is open to the moods of the land, and vulnerable to the machinations of the world at large. The protagonist is compelled into self-awareness and painful awakening by the Japanese army’s imprisonment of his cousin Rick. And a sense of distance from the battlefields of the Second World War, of Australia feeding people and a mentality to the conflict, while being physically separate in the main (though not entirely, and there’s an awareness of that), drives Stow’s postwar awareness and poetic concern with

157

The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea (London: Macdonald, 1965; New York: William Morrow, 1966; Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1968).

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deprivation of liberty, with war and its tolls, in the poem sequence “Thailand Railway.”158 Stow is known as one of Australia’s great novelists, often spoken of in the same breath as Patrick White, whom he seemed to follow in so many ways. But the themes of To the Islands (1958) and those of Patrick White in Voss (1957) are maybe in the ‘white Australian’ artistic dynamics ‘of the time’, as Stow’s book was written before White’s was published (though not published till after White’s). Themes of white alienation and the spiritual awakenings that come at the cost of body (and soul), the question of country being greater than the single rational Enlightenment Western subject, are of the zeitgeist as much as authorial discovery. But Stow, who after leaving university worked on a mission in the state’s north-west, did draw on personal experience in writing his novel, as he obviously draws on personal experience in writing Merry-Go-Round and the superbly poetic Tourmaline.159 And Visitants, perhaps his greatest novel, comes out of his being an anthropologist and field officer on the Trobriand Islands off New Guinea, in the same way that The Girl Green as Elderflower comes out of visiting and eventually moving to Essex /Suffolk and his breakdown as a result of his time in the Trobriands.160 There’s a narrative logic to the journey of these books looked at in their chronology, of their connections as much as dislocations, as he moves further away from his birthplace to his ancestral home, his reconciliation with the ghosts of his past, and the ghosts of local peoples and individuals he has disturbed in his growing up. His poems are epitaphs in so many subtle ways as well. None of our journeys is linear; all offer many forks in the road and tangents. In his play with the paradox of the mutable and immutable, of “strange country,” Stow treads carefully in showing what he has seen and experienced. Despite his claims of intense realism in his early fiction, there was always something distended taking place, something supra-real, right from A Haunted Land, and certainly from his earliest published poems.

158

“Thailand Railway (for Russ Braddon)” (1963), in A Counterfeit Silence, 64–70. Tourmaline (London: Macdonald, 1963; Harmondsworth & Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1963; New York: Taplinger, 1983). 160 Visitants (London: Secker & Warburg, 1979; London: Pan / Picador, 1981; New York: Taplinger, 1981); The Girl Green as Elderflower (New York: Viking, 1980; London: Minerva, 1991; St Lucia: U of Queensland P , 2003). 159

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As a poet, he was quite meticulous. He never wrote a lot, though he enjoyed early success, placing his first (and what would become a prize-winning) volume Act One: Poems with a British publisher who had brought out his first two novels. In fact, his editor Jock Curle is a dedicatee of more than one Stow work. Having a British publisher was still seen as pivotal for the 1950s Australian novel, if less so for poetry, and the writing out of the new country to the old was part of a dynamic that went back to the earliest colonial publications. Stow does something different, in that he writes out not so much to tell others what’s here, but as a form of exorcism of colonial ghosts (who are caught in a conceptual limbo, and who will keep being made), not allowing a route out of an enclosed (if vast) world he knows he can only and should only partly read. He is constantly bothered over what his rights of speech are. a The present book has a long genesis, and is part of a longer journey in itself. After Stow’s death in 2010, such a book was always going to appear. And Stow had carefully outlined with his agent what could and couldn’t be included. He’d had opportunities over the years to update and republish his body of poetry, but had chosen not to. I was told another Australian publisher had certainly sought a new collection or a new selected. I know, because as early as 1995 I wrote to Stow asking to do a collection, and in 2000 visited him with his old friend Peter Holland in Harwich, where we discussed such a collection. It came close, with Fremantle Press envisaged as Australian publisher together with the possibility of a British publisher, which was important to him. But it didn’t happen, though I did manage to convince him to give me two new unpublished poems᩺–᩺“Clichés” and “On a Favourite Cat” ᩺– ᩺for a journal I was guest-editing in the U S A .161 He showed me his work journals and these poems in their handwritten form. We discussed his work, and he talked of (co)writing an “autobiographical work” with a young man who’d approached him with the idea of a Stow biography (I believe ᩺– ᩺I never met the young man). In his Harwich house by the sea, with the great ships coming in from all over the world, the setting (as the fictional “Old Tornwich”) for his final, masterly Simenon-like anti-novel of the crime genre, The Suburbs of Hell,162

161

“Clichés” and “On a Favourite Cat,” The Literary Review 45.1 (Fall 2001): 199–

201, 202 respectively. 162

The Suburbs of Hell (London: Secker & Warburg; New York: Taplinger, 1984; South Fremantle, W A : Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1993).

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Mick Stow wanted to read as he felt inclined, drink at the local, and not be pressured about what he was writing. But he was generous, and discussed working with a Swedish translator on a volume of his poems, talked of Sidney Nolan, and showed us a (publicly unseen!) Nolan painting. It was the most memorable of literary visits but, more than that, it was a connection between rural worlds. We talked of the way he remembered Geraldton and the wheatbelt, and how I more recently knew it. We talked of absence and presence. Stow wasn’t pleased with much of his early poetry and when he selected poems for 1969’s A Counterfeit Silence: Selected Poems he rejected many of the poems from Act One. This refusal to publish has remained constant, and will likely do so until copyright is up. I was not able to include those poems in this selection, but looking over them, apart from some notable exceptions, I think he was correct to refuse further publication. Some of the poems are clearly immature and are working towards his greater poems that came later; some are simplistic in their dealing with complex issues of identity and culture. Stow was aware that he came out of a racist environment᩺–᩺patronizing when quiet, and overtly hostile to indigenous peoples at its more vocal and physical. I know this to be the case because I spent time growing up in the same area forty years later and it was the same. One cannot overstate this. In terms of what work I had available to me to select from (and I’ve used everything I could, plus some pieces I have unearthed that weren’t on the excluded list), this included the entire contents of A Counterfeit Silence, the poems I saw when I met Stow in 2000, a couple of new poems published in Westerly after his death (“Merry-go-round” and “Still Life with Amaryllis Belladonna”163), the poem “Anarchy”164 (brought to my attention by Bill Grono), early uncollected poems from journals (Westerly and Meanjin) including “Montebellos,”165 which appeared in the late 1950s and is really way ahead of its time in what it has to say. Stow has, with deadly irony, fused colonization, religion, a failure of history, the threat of atomic annihilation, and the indifference of death into a short, sharp poem that creates maximum impact. It is tight and deadly, prophetic and deeply seeing, clearly anti-nuclear 163

“Merry-go-round,” Westerly 55.2 (November 2010): 109; “Still Life with Amaryllis Belladonna,” M S . 164 “Anarchy,” in In Excited Reverie: A centenary tribute to William Butler Yeats, 1865–1939, ed. A. Norman Jeffares & K.G.W. Cross (London: Macmillan, 1965): 279. 165 Stow, “Montebellos,” Meanjin 15.4 (Summer 1956): 332.

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at a time when it was not a common thing, and at a time when activism was truly needed. Stow has mentioned Tourmaline’s being set in a “post-atomic world,” which, though dismissed by Stow as “not important, but it can be there,” so obviously is, and that’s what’s important! There’s also the new “Masks” poems and “Uncollected Poems” from Anthony J. Hassall’s Randolph Stow reader. Working with Stow’s sister and his agent, I was granted permission to include Stow’s (originally poetic) libretti that came about through his collaboration with the British composer Peter Maxwell Davies. (Stow wrote the texts.) Hassall has written of this collaboration: Stow has written two groups of poems as libretti for works of Music Theatre on which he has collaborated with the composer Peter Maxwell Davies. Music Theatre derives from Schönberg’s Pierrot Lunaire (1912), and has developed greatly in the last two decades, with Peter Maxwell Davies as its most distinguished exponent. Davies has a strong interest in the medieval period, and likes to overlay the work of earlier periods on the contemporary, as Stow does in The Girl Green as Elderflower. They are both interested in people ‘in extremis’, and the works for which Stow wrote the lyrics, Eight Songs for a Mad King (1969) and Miss Donnithorne’s Maggot (1974), are concerned, like Pierrot Lunaire, with madness.166

Stow himself, in a 1973 interview, remarked of Miss Donnithorne’s Maggot that it is “about the Sydney lady who was Dickens’s main model for Miss Havisham in Great Expectations. She is very like Miss Havisham, but more mad, more pathetic, more comic and more sexually frustrated.”167 In this over-the-top display of parodic wit at the expense of Freudianism, we are confronted by a disturbing and grotesque, sexual ‘dance of death’. I think these factors are worth bearing in mind when the ‘serious’ and sincere surfaces of Stow’s poems are read. And maybe one should also bear in mind an effective satire like “The Utopia of Lord Mayor Howard”168 and, 166

Hassall, Strange Country, 89–90. Anna Rutherford & Andreas Boelsmand, “Alienation and Involvement,” from interview with Stow (Aarhus, 1973), in Randolph Stow (1990), ed. Hassall, 348. Originally in Commonwealth Newsletter (1974): 17–20. See Stow, Miss Donnithorne’s Maggot (libretto for Peter Maxwell Davies’ music, prod. Adelaide, 1974; London: Boosey & Hawkes, 1977). 168 Stow, “The Utopia of Lord Mayor Howard” (1961), in Randolph Stow Reads From His Own Work (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1974): 3. 167

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more specifically, a poem not collected here (by Stow’s wishes, and I support this; it is a lesser poem because it is frivolously contemptuous), “The Tender Trap,”169 in which Stow writes: In the dim back stalls where he loved to linger, assaulting the virtuous with his finger, William Brown, aged 72

This satire struggles with prurience and sexism, and though we might not excuse it as a ‘product of its time’, Stow, being a wise and shrewd editor and selector of his own work, knew it to be a flawed and unworthy piece. All writers produce failures, even Randolph Stow! However, don’t be disturbed by Stow’s apparent lightness of tone. In the poem “Ruins of the City of Hay,”170 there’s an often tormented recounting of a failed Edenic vision. The Western myth examined through displacement via the geography, religion, and arts of ‘classical antiquity’ is left denuded in the face of the desires of a ‘new’ agriculture imposed on an ancient land. I was also granted permission to include some extracts of my choice from the novels that I considered warranted inclusion as poems in their own (separated) right. These actually include some paragraphs from Merry-Go-Round which are superb examples of his cumulative poetic descriptive style, plus a poem-song (almost chant) from Tourmaline, which is possibly the most poetic of all Australian novels, but in a sparse and taut way, like Stow’s best poems. In his 1974 interview with John B. Beston, when talking about how the name “Tourmaline” came about (for the town, the novel), Stow said: I dreamed a ballad, about a town called Tourmaline, and it stuck in my mind. That’s the ballad, more or less, that’s sung by Byrnie in the novel. What stimulated me most was the ghost townships of the Eastern Goldfields of Western Australia.171

The poem is a song, but song and poetry were never far apart in the reality of Stow’s writing. And in the same way that the poetry of vision of the path, the 169

In Wide Domain: Western Australian Themes and Images, ed. Bruce Bennett & William Grono (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1979): 180–81. Originally in Australian Book Review 3.2 (December 1963): 58. 170 Stow, “Ruins of the City of Hay” (1961), in Randolph Stow Reads From His Own Work, 5–6. 171 Beston, “Mostly Private Letters,” 349.

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way, in Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching enlightens the subtexts of Stow’s secular mysticism of Tourmaline, so it enlightens the poetry, especially the “Testament of Tourmaline” poems in the main body of the book.172 a It is worth noting that Stow said of his early writing years, in the interview with Anna Rutherford and Andreas Boelsmand: I also believed, in an uncomplicated way, in the doctrines of Taoism (that the fool is the wise man, the weak is the strong) and belonged to the notoriously apathetic generation of the fifties, which stayed out of politics.173

This is worth considering in two ways. First, it implies that the use of Tao in his writings was literal if ‘uncomplicated’, and second, he deployed it without politics. Stow had a ‘self-effacing’ way when talking of his own writing (though he could at times get enthusiastic and become revelatory), so the statement can’t be taken as definitive. His refusal to allow republication of certain works is part of this, and I am sure he could have been convinced in person to change his mind if he could see worth in how it was going to be presented. These two considerations are flawed. First, one’s lack of knowledge or ‘depth’ regarding a doctrine is often a literary advantage, leading to at first a hybrid and then something entirely new that departs from its sources, and second, everything Stow wrote was political because of his crisis of presence, belonging, and identity. In “From The Testament of Tourmaline: Variations on Themes of the Tao Teh Ching,” the word “variations” takes a lot of weight. And the variations are significant, not because of applying a Chinese philosophy to the Australian land, but because Stow’s very mode of conveying his observations of that land (and transcriptions) are through European semantics. (I say ‘land’ rather than ‘landscape’, because the latter is about human interaction and attempts at alteration of that land, though often Stow is writing about that.) Stow’s is obviously a post-Enlightenment way of seeing, despite his looking back to Renaissance verse and literary sensibilities, and a biblical template isn’t too far below the surface. These factors are intrusions and applications anyway, and in the face of annihilation of space, he needed to find a personal means of

172

Stow, “From The Testament of Tourmaline: Variations on Themes of the Tao Teh Ching” (1966), in A Counterfeit Silence, 71–75. 173 Rutherford & Boelsmand, “Alienation and Involvement,” 343.

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translation that also spoke outside his own colonial coordinates, though this in essence substitutes another kind of absolutism. For me, the least platitudinous (in terms of the poems’ ‘variation’, not what they ‘come out of’) and most revealing about how stuck in the colonial nexus Stow was, despite full awareness and ability to articulate the characteristics of that nexus (that he needed to ‘escape’), is X V I , with the lines that echo through his work. It’s all there: silence, empire, flowering (Kerry Leves wrote an important essay on “toxic” flowers in Stow’s novels174), water (or lack of) and the connection between life and blood (the most concerning of Stowtropes is the legitimacy of connecting identity with blood in land and people): Silence is empire Tao is eternal, flowering, returning, with water, with silence. Deep. Go deep as the blossoming myall. Silence is lifeblood; returning, flowering.

The issue of rejuvenation, of a cycle of life, of the patterns of seed to flower to death and seed, is never far away. The (western) myall is a wattle found out on the goldfields that survives in dry and ‘harsh’ places᩺–᩺its flowering is not toxic; in fact, the seeds could be ground for flour. There is a search for stability in the face of a world that changes and yet stays the same. Or the poet changes and can’t match the world with that. The myall is both a concrete reference to place, and a spiritual conduit, a means of converging spiritual discourses. In Arthur Waley’s translation of Tao Tê Ching, we read: See, all things howsoever they flourish Return to the root from which they grew. This return to the root is called Quietness; Quietness is called submission to Fate; What has submitted to Fate has become part of the always-so.175

174

Kerry Leves, “Toxic flowers: Randolph Stow’s unfused horizons,” Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 10 (2010): online (14 pp.). 175 Arthur Waley, Lao Tz×, Tao Tê Ching: The Way and Its Power and Its Place in Chinese Thought, XVI, tr. & commentary by Arthur Waley, intro. Frances Wood (tr. 1934, rev. 1958; London: Folio Society, 2010): 130.

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It is worth considering how much Stow reflects the brevity and expansiveness of both the mere five thousand characters of Lao Tz×’s original (that expresses so much) and the likely heavy influence of the versification of the Waley on Stow’s own line-making in general. Stow also ‘wrote’ another poem related to the novel Tourmaline that remains unpublished (though it has been broadcast). According to the handwritten note from a friend of Stow’s which appears at the bottom of the transcription I was sent by Beate Josephi, it is an unpublished transcription “from a recording made by R.S. to send to his publisher Jock Curle at MacDonalds, London.” Permission to include it here has not been granted, and it’s not a poem of the quality Stow would have wished to preserve, though it is nonetheless interesting for the reader of Stow, and the last lines, which I quote below, are telling in terms of the book, but also the oeuvre: My tower imprisons only me Who years ago mislaid the key. I lie and dream within my cell That Satan dreamed that he was king᩺–᩺ Of Hell.

Dreams are important to Stow’s poetry. Both (clearly) in their production and as a place where disparate things connect. Where calentures proffer death and life, where solid and liquid swap states, where myth becomes embodied, where love sheds its torments, where the private space of room or cell is laid open and the frustration, anxiety and fear are exposed (not necessarily lessened). And Stow seems to have dreamt poems more than once, often in a balladic or lyrical storytelling mode, carrying narrative in and out of dream, calling up early childhood listening and reading. Included in this selection is his ‘free translation’ “Annis and the Merman.”176 It demonstrates Stow’s skill at merging myth across a timescale that knows only its own needs and demands, that can be modern and ancient at once᩺– ᩺language was like this for Stow as well, evolving and yet located in a specific moment at once, a medium for the entry of spirits of early expression and speech. Never fixed, always transferring and in transition between states of the living and the dead. He wasn’t sure how to hear in Australia, though he 176

“Annis and the Merman,” in The Girl Green as Elderflower (London: Secker & Warburg, 1980): 88–90; free translation of the Danish ballad “Agnete og Havmanden,” in Danske Folkeviser, sel. Ernst Frandsen (Copenhagen: Thaning & Appel, 1966).

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could always sense the ancestral presences of the local peoples, and returned to make contact with those he felt he could hear and would hear him without condemnation. There is much to be written on the poetic interfaces of myth and reality in The Girl Green as Elderflower, and the metamorphic poetic of desire in the context of a highly fluid, mobile, and yet ritualized sexuality (with touches of Freud’s “polymorphous perverse”), failed initiations into adulthood, and suppressed or arrested desire (outside the literal narrative). It is worth noting, when considering the intimate connectivity between poems and novels, Stow’s citation of his own poem “Outrider”177 at the beginning of The Girl Green as Elderflower published twenty years later (though written in chunks ᩺– ᩺or maybe mythos components ᩺– ᩺over a long period of time). Belonging and connection are eternally fraught, and the entries into and exits from family are in tension with their own individual needs and drives. We carry our doppelgängers with us, but they are evoked and manifested by ‘place’, or in the text (or memory). And always the land is associated with music (and colour and words or silence᩺–᩺absence of words). Stow cites: Even such midnight years must ebb; bequeathing this: a dim low English room, one window on the fields. Cloddish ancestral ghosts plod in a drowning mist. Black coral elms play host to hosts of shrill black fish. My mare turns back her ears and hears the land she leaves as grievous music.

There are other unpublished pieces (or only journal-published or even pieces spoken on record) out there, but I was unable to get permission to use them, and others I thought unsuited to the context, such as the ‘playful’ song /verse of the children’s bushranger tale, Midnite.178

177

“Outrider” (1960), in Poems from ‘The Outrider’ and Other Poems, 8–9. Midnite: The Story of a Wild Colonial Boy (London: Thomas Nelson, 1967; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967; Englewood Cliffs N J : Prentice–Hall, 1968; London: The 178

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a If one is looking for comparisons, connections, and influences in Australian poetry it would be easy to refer to the Australian Poetry 1964 Stow edited for Angus & Robertson. It would also be easy to make a list of influences ranging from Adam Lindsay Gordon to Kenneth Slessor, with bush balladeers and Judith Wright for good measure. And there’s certainly a kinship with fellow Western Australian poets Dorothy Hewett (who wrote of a more southern wheatbelt) and Kenneth Seaforth Mackenzie. Judith Wright, discussing poets of the 1950s, makes astute and prophetic observations about Stow’s poetic impulses. She also speaks of the Australian poet John Blight: there is perhaps something in common between the elder Blight and the younger Randolph Stow, who both turn away from current developments and beckon the reader into different paths. Blight, however, believes in the power of the intuitive mind to find its true correspondences in natural forces; Stow’s thought is less downright, more self-conscious and conscious of others, yet more ethereal.179

I don’t think Stow’s strongest poetic influences were home, and textually he had left Australia even before he departed to live overseas and eventually to settle permanently in Britain. Thinking over his ‘return’ to Suffolk, to ancestral roots (of blood!), his need to reconcile who he was with where he was, or to reconstitute the bits of an imagined self while it still existed before succumbing to the geo-specifics of land’s meaning in Australia, I am reminded (as was Hewett) of Michael Dransfield’s later constructions of his imaginary ancestral home of Courland Penders with its connections to ‘deep’ England and Europe.180 Stow’s ancestral focus (fantasy) had more reality and grit, and more real pain of occupation without as many degrees of separation, but the echoes are there. Facsimiles generate their own depths.

Bodley Head, rev. ed. 1984; Harmondsworth & Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin / Puffin, 2004). 179 Judith Wright, Preoccupations in Australian Poetry (Melbourne: Oxford U P , 1966): 200. 180 Dorothy Hewett has noted the ‘mythological’ aspects of both Stow’s use of the family’s Geraldton ‘homesteads’ and Dransfield’s Courland Penders: Hewett, “Silence, Exile and Cunning: The Poetry of Randolph Stow,” Westerly 33.2 (June 1988): 59. [J.K.]

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In making the connections on the circuit board of poetic impulse and vision, I’ve been on a number of excursions into Stow’s physical world (that overlaps with my own). I have been a regular returnee to the Geraldton region, where my brother still lives as a shearer (and surfer), and whose home is only a few kilometres, as the crow flies, from the old Sewell homestead of Sandsprings. The breakaways, the red rivergums, the roos and the scrub, the abandoned stone homesteads, the wind-bent paperbarks on the Greenough Flats, the crows and the red-tailed black cockatoos, the headed and headless windmills sucking their lime water from under the sand, I know well. Last time I visited, I took photos of Stow’s old rural stamping-ground. I also travelled out to the Mount Magnet area, where the young “Stow” was almost evacuated (as young “Rob” was almost evacuated) during the Second World War, and where the family had a station. Mick’s sister Helen notes that her brother “wouldn’t have gone up to Boodoonoo (near Mount Magnet) at that age, but would have ridden horses and mustered sheep around the two farms near Geraldton, that is, at Sandsprings and Koogerina.” If you visit Yalgoo then, further inland, Mount Magnet, and the old mines (and the active ones) and the eroded rock formations, you quickly see the kind of territory that informs not only the novel Tourmaline, but so much of Stow’s middleperiod poetry, especially the Australian poems found in the pivotal volume Outrider (which possibly owes its title more to the Trobriand connection than to the metaphor implicit in being part of, but separated from, the land of his birth and core inspiration). We were there in midsummer, the heat at fortyfour degrees. Emus cantered alongside the car as we hit cattle-grids with astonishing regularity. Tin shacks and mine tailings were the residue of empires of the mind, and those they fed elsewhere. Each sacred place of the local peoples had been mined, or would be mined. Meeting-places were given ancient Western cultural names, like ‘the amphitheatre’᩺–᩺full of smashed beer bottles, condoms, and shell casings. Most recently, we made the trip to Essex and Suffolk, to look at the old Stow-related family places, and Harwich. Shortly after getting back, I wrote this note to Mick Stow’s sister, Helen McArthur: Remarkable thing happened today. We were heading to Harwich and to East Bergholt, to check some Stow locations re finishing this mammoth undertaking, and we called by [a woods cemetery] where a ‘return’ to the soil and a reclaiming of woodland is the guiding principle, so that Tracy could visit the grave of a very dear friend and teacher of hers who died last year (the great literary scholar David Musselwhite), because it’s his birthday on Saturday and

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she wished to mark the occasion. She came back to the car and said in a surprised and astonished voice that Randolph Stow was buried in the same place, not far from her friend. I immediately visited the grave and was deeply moved. I mentioned to him quietly the task I had undertaken and how I wanted to do the very best by him and his work that could be done. Robins and magpies were about and our eight-year-old son said it was a wonderful place (he didn’t actually go into the cemetery). Anyway, it was a very special moment.

David Musselwhite wrote a distinctive book entitled Partings Welded Together.181 This contradictory title seems fitting for Stow’s work as well ᩺– ᩺those connections that seem to fight each other, that come together despite the interference. Musselwhite applied the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari, especially reterritorialization, the body without organs, and nomadism, to novels by writers such as Hardy. It strikes me that Stow’s work would equally benefit from such an application. Helen McArthur has been very generous in providing some answers to queries I made about individual poems after visiting her and her husband on a bush block in the Perth hills. I include a couple of her responses here: J K : How long did Mick stay with the Duttons at Anlaby [another old pastoral

homestead᩺–᩺in the South Australia of the Stow ancestors]? Or did he create it from conversations with Geoffrey Dutton in Adelaide? H M : Mick was very friendly with the Duttons when he and Geoff were both lecturing (maybe Mick was tutoring) at Adelaide Uni. He went with them to their holiday shack on Kangaroo Island, visited Anlaby, I don’t know how many times, but know he slept on the table in the billiard room in vain hopes of seeing the ghost, and on another occasion was taken to a sheep station further out, which they owned, and was fascinated by the bush songs sung by the manager (to a guitar, I think). Some of this is in the letters now in the possession of the National Library . . .

And: J K : When you were kids, did you ever write or read poems together? H M : No, we didn’t do that, but my mother and Mick used to quote reams of

poems to each other, mostly over the washing-up. When she took her final exams in English at Perth College (1926) the exam consisted of quoting those reams verbatim, and she didn’t seem to forget them. I still have her poetry book with ink smudges and her name in 5 places, The Bond of Poetry᩺–᩺A Book 181

David E. Musselwhite, Partings Welded Together: Politics and Desire in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel (London & New York: Routledge, 1987).

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of Verse for Australasian Schools ... “Out Back,” “Where the Dead Men Lie,” “Where the Pelican Builds.” You can see where those were remembered, in Midnite.

a I feel Stow’s poetry is too often read through a narrow lens of colonial mystique (for its tenacity as well as its apparent ‘failures’). It is true that the ongoing evocation of the outsider, who in essence is the white colonizer (however many generations he’s been in a place), takes us to an ontological, primarily existential brink, but in the end readers are too often happy to let this fall into a mystical confrontation with the eternal. If there is an eternal, it is really the eternal Other, the white (man) who confronts his spiritual and cultural ennui because he knows he can’t gain access to the old narratives of land, and must avoid, overlay or destroy those myths in order to perpetuate his own. The land necessarily wins out, but the victory comes at great cost if not to the land, then to the individual who loses life and the hope of belonging after death. There is no transference into an afterlife as the land can’t read his codes of existence. As readers, we are always aware of how difficult it is to keep bathos and absurdism made in the ‘here and now’ out of our minds; that these new tropes of ‘nation’ can so easily become self-parodying. But Stow has a wryness that keeps these thoughts at bay, and furthermore, he persistently embraces them as qualities in what he is investigating. Furthermore, in the light of massacre and murder which underpin coloniality, there is little room for anything but horror. It is wrong to use Stow’s interest in Tao as a way around the crisis of unbelonging, of ultimate rejection of the ‘white’ subject by the land. There’s a sense of the ineffable, a sense of the land’s existing beyond the individual, yet all individuals being of it. And the paradox of something that has to remain unsaid because it cannot be said, nonetheless being written and engaged with. I would argue it is this as much as the ‘utterances’ of wisdom that works on Stow’s Tao-influenced prose and poetry. It is tempting to orientate oneself in a vast landscape through the negative, through casting the arid lands as a vast ‘Un-Being’, but I would argue this buys into the colonizing psychology of the desert as emptiness, which is a denial of so many presences. I don’t believe Stow’s poetry does this, but I believe many read it this way. Though Jindyworobakism belongs to a very particular period in Australian literary history (1930s through to 1950s), there are suggestions of it in Stow’s poetry, and certainly in the way it’s read. There’s a reconfigured Jindyworobakism at work in the present day where, dissembling the white colonial national binary

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(Indigenous cultures /white cultures), a more flexible model is at work, which allows for the fact that Australia is a pluralistic migrant ‘nation’. That is a good awareness in itself, but when non-Indigenous try to ‘become Indigenous’, the cultures of ‘original’ peoples are absorbed and bent to the will of the privileged bourgeois (often well-educated and well-meaning). A poem such as “The Land’s Meaning,”182 with its report back from the edge and beyond, becomes a tool for this. This poem has long affected me. I wrote a poem when I was eighteen that explored the images of “The third day, cockatoos dropped dead in the air” and the emblems and symbolism found in Sidney Nolan’s painting/s. The biblical messaging that doesn’t fit᩺– ᩺the third day brings an act not of creation but of dissolution. There is a sense of loss of subjectivity to forces greater than the self, resulting in “I was bushed for forty years,” as if all time is collapsible into the moment of (un)realization. But there is a quest (always a thwarted quest) for awareness, for the empowerment of the individual through epiphany, at work. The narrator in “The Land’s Meaning” tries to experience vicariously without taking the risk, the “leap of fate” into the nothingness (that is replete). He says: I have not, it is true, made the trek to the difficult country where it is said to grow; but signs come back, reports come back, of continuing exploration in that terrain ...

“Exploration” is crucial here. It’s a deadly word. We will discover (another loaded word) that this exploration doubles for colonizing activity in a literal sense, but also in an opening oneself to the void, being filled with the silence. And that’s described as an empire as well: “sending word that the mastery of silence / alone is empire.” The point being, a fulfilment through conquest is desirable, lusted after. The falsity of material empires is swapped for the fullness of emptiness. We find that we perceive a limit, beyond ‘thinking’, where a Lasseter (for example) might have perished lusting for gold, there is an afterlife, an endurance: “the recently departed / march to the mind’s horizons, and endure.” So, is this a transference, an afterlife, or is this a Oneness, or both? Or is it wish-fulfilment or maybe envy of Aboriginal spirituality? Stow, being a bloke of the mid-west, knew about such scepticism, about such a glib view of aspiration. He writes: “hide away the tracks with an acid word.” We

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“The Land’s Meaning” (1962), in Poems from ‘The Outrider’ and Other Poems, 4.

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don’t want to know, because it is too difficult. Prop up the bar and keep drinking. And there are those who return. But are they enlightened? Have they profited? Are they the vanguard of the new spiritual colonization? No. But there’s an awareness that one could only sense and not own what’s there (as the outsider, and, in fact the true other᩺–᩺the ‘Other’ in Australia is he who is not of the land, or has separated from it within this model). One is aware of the topography but cannot map what is essential beyond mapping: “But one who has returned, his eyes blurred maps / of landscapes still unmapped.” And ’Mat, “eternal dealer in camels,” gives us an “account” (like a mining ledger or, vitally, an explorer ᩺– ᩺so much of Stow plays off explorer journals / narratives). The key here is the vision of bush mateship as something beyond speech, beyond exchange in a material sense, but a mutual knowing of the extremity and potency of the elemental: “And I came to a bloke all alone like a kurrajong tree. And I said to him: ‘Mate᩺–I don’t need to know your name – Let me camp in your shade, let me sleep, till the sun goes down.”

The texture of “shade” takes the weight of the poem, the weight behind the laconic flippancy that impels the whole. The pitiless heat pushes all ontologies aside during the day, and a cosmology awakens with the cool of night. Understand that, or perish. Dedicated to Sidney Nolan, who provided paintings for the volume Outrider in which this appears, the poem captures a mutual concern about alienation and belonging, leaving and being drawn to catharsis, to resolving what could not be resolved when living in the land. The eternal search for meaning out of experience. This poem should be considered as both phantasm and also fantastical: it is an act of imagination even more than an act of experience or observation. There’s an urban sensibility projecting here as much as a rural or ‘outback’ one. And that’s part of its perpetual crisis of ‘civilization’. In his groundbreaking study of Stow, Anthony J. Hassall starts his discussion of Stow’s poetry with “The Land’s Meaning.” Though I have a somewhat different take on the poem, Hassall’s is an informed one. He notes: The poem is “For Sidney Nolan,” who did a series of paintings for Outrider, Stow’s second book of poems, as well as the dust jacket for Tourmaline. The collaboration grew out of a series of “Australian Artists and Poets” which appeared in Australian Letters between 1960 and 1968. The painting which

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accompanies “The Land’s Meaning” shows red desert, spinifex, and sky᩺–᩺all empty. The land predominates, “the bloodred, bitter ground.”183

To my mind, there is an irreconcilable gap between the specificity (yes, it is psycho-geographically specific᩺–᩺I’ve been there) of the Stow poem and the archetypal generalization of the Nolan painting (which does not sit alongside the poem in Outrider; nor is it the poem I refer to in the context of the “third day”). Both are about myths, but not aiming for the same end results. Stow’s ‘experience’ and the end result is pain (maybe not fully realized at this stage); Nolan’s is suppressed wonder bordering on exuberance. a Stow’s childhood looms large in his writing, with the complexities (and pleasures) of family, the slipping between planks of personal identity as regards ways of seeing and experiencing, sexual identity, vocation, and being of the town and the country᩺–᩺his family home was in the town of Geraldton where his father practised law, and his relatives were in the surrounding rural districts, including at Sandsprings. Childhood should give us our least occluded route into a meaning we don’t have passed down to us through law and knowledge, but one only understands what one can access. There’s slippage there, and metaphor steps in to make sense of it all – shooting, ploughing, fencing, the contradictions of crows. In “The Land’s Meaning” we also find the ubiquitous joiner and divider, the clogging and barely seen “dust.” You drown in it, you coexist with it. It’s there and not there. Arthur Waley, in his translation of Lao Tz×’s Tao Tê Ching, notes: “Dust is the Taoist symbol for the noise and fuss of everyday life.”184 Definitively, the poem “Dust,”185 probably Stow’s best-known and most anthologized, opens Outrider with “Enough,” she said. But the dust still rained about her; over her living-room (hideous, autumnal) dropping its small defiance.

Dust is so massively small. It’s the paradox of a divided way of seeing. Behind the satire, behind the grim irony, is an awareness: the hebephrenic world 183

Hassall, Strange Country, 76. Arthur Waley, in Lao Tz×, Tao Tê Ching: The Way and Its Power and Its Place in Chinese Thought, IV, tr. & commentary by Arthur Waley, intro. Frances Wood (tr. 1934, rev. 1958; London: Folio Society, 2010): 113 (n1). 185 “Dust,” in Poems from ‘The Outrider’ and Other Poems, 3. 184

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can’t see it᩺ – ᩺it goes on, and nature abounds (“We worship nature / in my country”). But the infection and contamination of the soul, the erosion of certainty, are the price paid for those who are in contact, who will be blighted within a paranoid reality. And even their awareness can only be questioned, doubted, played with. But the gentle irony of “feather dusters” is also sympathetic to the pain of those who know: But the neighbours slept behind sealed doors, with feather dusters beside their beds.

There is an early double poem about children that serves as a template of Stow’s reading of the local, and what rights attend this. “Child Portraits, with Background”186 proffers what will become the paradox later in Stow’s writing in terms of absence and presence, of the expatriate and the exile᩺–᩺can we ever leave the place of our childhood? Even if we envisage an ancestral land (Suffolk in Stow’s case) – where some hybridization of identity, some reconciliation with who one perceives oneself to be and what spirits (ghosts) will offer a link, a transference into the soil and atmosphere of place – we are still anchored in childhood awakenings of reading of sensual experiences. Smell, taste, what we hear. .. when it goes, we lose it, but are eternally aware of it. It is a form of a later “grievous music.” The poem posits a child of the southern forests (Stow rarely travelled into the south-west and did not know its verdures well) and a child of the north. The green south and the harsh dry dusty north. The crow (though equally a southern creature) appears in the north, as harbinger, and metempsychotic link to the living death and eternity of nothingness: “the crows cried continually of death”; they become the embodiment of the cruelty of not all fate, but fate specific to that place for that (white) child. The last stanza of “On Northern Downs” reads: And he told himself in the dry and the dancing days that life is a white bird, screaming through the hills, harsh as brass, fleeting, not to be held. And spring led him where summer sent the sheep to die, and showed him orchids, eyes of a staring skull.

“On Northern Downs” is the Stow experience as opposed to the green of imagination (there was green in his north as well, if not in the poem). The white bird as clarion, a binary with crow, but a bitter binary. Not to be held. 186

“Child Portraits, with Background” (1957), in A Counterfeit Silence, 10. The two parts are subtitled “In Southern Forest” and “On Northern Downs.”

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When I trapped parrots with my brother as a child on a huge (thirty-thousandacre) farm outside Mullewa not too far from the Sewell family stations, my fingers were bitten by the birds through to the bone … “not to be held.” Not to be decoded. I felt, later, that it was just punishment, if inadequate punishment, for my crimes. And there is a ledger behind all this. An accounting. In this simple early poem, the land’s meaning is already writ, as it had to be to begin the process of translation and transcription into something equating to a belief system. There’s an anxiety of wish-fulfilment and its inevitable failure. Tao isn’t the end result of Stow’s search; it’s an attainment of means, at least at a certain period (coming after “Child Portraits”). It also brings to mind the concern reviewers had about Nolan’s paintings distracting (“overwhelming”) the poems in Outrider; but I see the poems as a gift to Nolan from one who could see things that Nolan could never see. a In the same way that sea and land connect (whether in an induced ‘calenture’ or in reality), the blurring and thus connecting or intertwining of sexual identity behind a continuous presentation of ‘masks’ is a strong element in Stow’s poetry (this proliferation of masking has been observed by various critics). Stow wrote love poetry. He wrote about a love of land, of the sea, of family, of knowledge, of poetry, and of unidentified individuals. Stow’s homosexuality has been little discussed, if at all, in literary criticism, and though he seems to have had one or two early girlfriends, it appears that the main drive behind his love poetry is for a man or men. Stow’s sequence “Masks,” collated for Hassall’s Randolph Stow reader, confronts us with the difficulties of imposing biography on poetry. It’s worth quoting at length a response to a question from Hassall in an interview entitled “Breaking the Silence”: A H : You once described your poems as “mostly private letters.” How are they private? R S : The poems I was referring to there are the ones which use the ‘objective correlative’. These are the poems which have mythological titles: “Ishmael,” “Enkidu,” “Endymion,” “Persephone,” “Penelope,” “Efire,” which is the Portuguese form of Ephyre, these poems are using the ‘objective correlative’ in the strict sense of the term. They are private letters written to people with whom I have a relationship, about which, for one reason or another, I want to say something to them, directly; but I say it through the circumstances of the myth-figure, who gives each poem its title. Using that device makes them a little less private than otherwise they would be; but all the same they remain very private. And I have wondered about the value of publishing them. On the

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other hand, some of them do seem to work for other people: “Ishmael,” I think is one which most people get something from, without knowing anything of the circumstances, or the recipient ...187

Few would argue with Stow on this. To some degree or another, most poems (written by whomsoever) contain elements of the private, even when they are public verse ᩺– ᩺say, an occasional poem, or a protest poem. The very personal factors that compel one to write for a specific occasion are necessarily part of personal experience, choices made (or unable to be made), as well as broader social circumstances. Most of Stow’s work has that feeling of the gnomic and hermetic about it, of a private utterance in a public space. But it’s true, the “Masks” sequence does use myth to hide behind as well as to convey: myth is a vehicle and a destination. “Ishmael”188 is one of the finest of the poems (not part of a sequence originally, but it became part of one by default, or by conscious arrangement of love poem–‘letters’ over a long period of time) because it evokes the biblical Ishmael who was born as a proxy and granted no heritage from Abraham his father, and who with his mother was driven away (with only bread). Ishmael wanders the wilderness. The poem doubles for a personal statement of refusal to blame, to haunt, for an emotional disenfranchising (loss of love?), but also the (chosen and unchosen: exile as paradox) leaving of one’s landed heritage (construct that it is). Stow is adept at mixing registers of the colloquial and the mythic, of the observed and the stated, of the day-to-day and the elevated: The hawks wheel in the dawnlight, the dawn breeze blows from the heart of drought, from the hungry waiting country – and what have I to leave, but this encumbering tenderness, like gear for ever unclaimed.

All of this is contained, restrained, and delivered with epistolary precision. Stow long favoured the couplet, sometimes rhyming, often not, as a mode of delivery for the aphoristic, the honed idea, the utterance, the compacting of ‘intense feelings’. In attempting to divide Stow’s work into different modes of poetics, critics often miss the fact that his poems at a given time reflect not only his experiences and his prose but also what he has been reading as a 187

Anthony J. Hassall, “Breaking the Silence,” from interview with Stow, in Randolph Stow: Visitants, episodes from other novels, poems, stories, interviews, and essays, ed. Hassall (St Lucia: U of Queensland P , 1990): 400. 188 “Ishmael” (1964), in Randolph Stow Reads From His Own Work, 11.

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poet. The early influences of bush ballads and Romantic English poetry are loud in his so-called ‘juvenilia’, which is a category I refuse to accept. Let’s say ‘early poems’. Stow wrote poems from an early age. There are many strata to his ‘juvenilia’, many sub-periods. His university years, when he was majoring in French, unsurprisingly call on French verse forms, and one can see a play with a kind of sprung-rhythmic ‘alexandrine’ in poem after poem, but there’s also a touch of Greek elegiac metre. Then there are his so-called “voyager’ influences from the sea poems of Baudelaire, possibly (to a lesser extent) Leconte de Lisle, certainly Rimbaud and the ever-present “Le Bateau Ivre,” but also Portuguese and Spanish exploration poetry/‘ voyaging’ poetry. In fact, Outrider carries a quotation from an anonymous poem on the sea: yo no digo esta canción sino a quien conmigo va.

– “R O M A N C E

DEL CONDE ARNALDOS”

Those are the last two lines of the following poem (translated by James Elroy Flecker): LORD ARNALDOS The strangest of adventures That happen by the sea, Befell to Lord Arnaldos On the Evening of Saint John; For he was out a-hunting – A huntsman bold was he! – When he beheld a little ship And close to land was she. Her cords were all of silver, Her sails of cramasy; And he who sailed the little ship Was singing at the helm; The waves stood still to hear him, The wind was soft and low; The fish who dwell in darkness Ascended through the sea, And all the birds in heaven Flew down to his mast-tree. Then spake the Lord Arnaldos. – (Well shall you hear his words!) – “Tell me, for God’s sake, sailor, What song may that song be?”

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The sailor spake in answer, And answer thus made he: “I only tell the song to those Who sail away with me.”189

In other words, the reader makes a choice to join the voyages, wanderings, expeditions of Stow’s personae. A voyage posits an end, an aim, but Stow’s voyages were as vulnerable as the boat crossings we read of in stormy weather with a mortally sick (in body and soul) Cawdor in Visitants. In the cargo cult of capitalism itself (exchange and gifting of goods with the aim of selfempowerment) in which the privileged Western mind accumulates data on socalled ‘primitive peoples’ when they are the very enunciation of those possessive and acquisitive values (from yams to planes, village songs to radios), the connections are greater than the gaps. Superstition and possession as control are tools deployed by Western colonizers and their manifestoes of capitalism as much as they pertain to a given native community and its relationships between the living and the dead. And connections are not always generative, and often very damaging, especially, obviously, for those being exploited, damaged, and controlled. The ideas that greater forces (alien, visitant) at work are some kind of release, some kind of hope (though it induces breakdown and death), that the voyage retains a spiritual dimension that can’t be measured by how much booty (knowledge as well as goods) one extracts and brings back, are a narrative and poetic divergence. These private musings are a shared-private, a joint subjectivity, in which we can join if we wish, our suspension of disbelief all that’s required. There’s generosity in this gesture. a Carl Whitehouse, in the essay “Randolph Stow’s Outrider and the French Voyager Poem,” notes: It is in the fusion of place ᩺–᩺embarkation, voyage, and destination᩺–᩺with time᩺–᩺childhood, adulthood, and death᩺– ᩺that Outrider imitates the wider frame of the voyager poems of Baudelaire and Rimbaud. In both these poets, the voyage away from an oppressive locus of civilisation towards an idyllically free world ᩺– ᩺whether visualised as Holland, the Orient, the tropics, or the open sea ᩺–᩺also constitutes a metaphorical voyage out of the divided

189

Anon., “Lord Arnaldos,” tr. James Elroy Flecker, in Hispanic Anthology: Poems Translated from the Spanish by English and North American Poets, collected and arranged by Thomas Walsh (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1920): 130–31.

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realm of adulthood towards the lost Eden, whose existence has been affirmed in the vision of the child. The embarkation itself is instigated by an overwhelming experience within an oppressive adult world, whether this be the sensual delight that infuses the opening of Baudelaire’s “La Chevelure” (“O toison, moutonnant jusque sur l’encolure! / O boucles! O parfum chargé de nonchaloir! / Extase! ...”) [...] or the torpor from which the boat flees in Rimbaud’s “Le Bateau Ivre’ (“Comme je descendais des fleuves impassibles, / Je ne me sentis plus guidé par les haleurs: / Des Peaux-Rouges criards les avaient pris pour cibles, / Les ayant cloués nus aux poteaux de couleurs”).190

We could mildly contest Whitehouse’s comparison with Rimbaud’s “Le Bateau Ivre” on the grounds that Rimbaud at that stage had not sailed anywhere other than the imagination and through books, and that Stow’s sea poems of Outrider are informed by experience at sea and, as a child, of living by the ocean. I have no doubt Stow drew on Baudelaire and Rimbaud for more than literary inspiration, that he identified with them, but this is on many levels, including the sexual and even the malign, the dark, and, as Whitehouse rightfully later identifies, the “transgressive.” The birthing and, pivotally, rebirthing nature of the sea as amniotic fluid as well as its vast ‘nothingness’ and capacity to annihilate, the association with suicide and spirit-death with voyage, captures something of the hybrid crisis of the later “Persephone” mask poem.191 So much of the crisis is sexual. Whitehouse correctly observes: These procedures reflect Stow’s understanding of the self-referentiality of French voyager poetry, where a subsequent work in the tradition both celebrates and criticises its most notable predecessors, through transformations upon a defined range of formal strategies.192

We might add that all Stow’s poetry does this with its ‘templates’. Included on the back cover of this volume is a postcard painted by Sidney Nolan, of Stow as Rimbaud as Stow (in a train!), and this is worth considering as another public–private mask. A dressing-up in the character of a poet who probably shocked and awed Stow textually, emotionally, mentally, and sexually. Whitehouse’s location of the French voyager poets’ failure to ‘rediscover’ or reclaim a ‘lost paradise’ rests in a “misdirection afflicting Western civiliza190

Carl Whitehouse, “Randolph Stow’s Outrider and the French Voyager Poem,” Australian Literary Studies 18.2 (October 1997): 119. 191 “Persephone” (1966), in A Counterfeit Silence, 56. 192 Whitehouse, “Randolph Stow’s Outrider and the French Voyager Poem,” 124.

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tion, in that they reinforce the very divisions within the subject that they attempt to heal.”193 But is a Taoist solution offered? Or, indeed, is one read through the spiritual crisis embodied in the novel Visitants and its ‘clash’ of notions of civilization? I think not. I sense that the fracturing of the whole that is written into the torments and celebrations of the Outrider poems is about personal coherence and purpose in terms of what has been denied at home. Stow is often described as a nostalgic writer, especially with a book like The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea, but I think it was nostalgia angst, even an act of despair. The sense of division between childhood and adulthood is not about return, but about the need for constant departures. Childhood in Stow is about departure and insecurity in spite of the apparent security of family land, social conventions, and the red herring of ‘nation’. Stow’s evacuation from the town of Geraldton during the Second World War, and the experiences he heard of and processed after the war (“Your memories, not mine; a debt to acknowledge a debt”) that led to his “Thailand Railway” poems underpin this. Childhood is there to be lost and recalled desperately with the question asked: For, in the end, what charge is there to lay but this: Be children still, in peace, for ever?

Though it’s a small oeuvre, Stow’s was influenced by a vast amount of poetry. The reading of many poems informs the creation of one of his own. From Shakespearean theatre to his contemporaries, Greek tragedy to Dutch documents of exploration, French Symbolists, the novels of Robbe–Grillet: all feed, at different times across his writing life, into the making of a poem. The poem that precedes “Ishmael’ in A Counterfeit Silence, “Western Wind When Will Thou Blow,”194 is a case in point. Its template is wellknown, but its simplicity belies a textual complexity that relates to the original as well. The title comes from a short anonymous poem of that name, appearing in a partbook accompanying music around 1530, though likely to have Middle-English origins: “Westron wynde, when wilt thou blow, The small raine down can raine. Cryst, if my love were in my armes And I in my bedde again!”

193 194

Whitehouse, “Randolph Stow’s Outrider and the French Voyager Poem,” 124. “Western Wind When Will Thou Blow” (1969), in A Counterfeit Silence, 54.

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Tradition is never to be denied, but it is to be interconnected with the ‘here and now’ of the world of the Stow poem’s re-envisaging: Five nights in love, five nights we lay: the sea of the Hebrides rocked the bay.

It’s a poem worth considering in the light of the private /public in so many ways. It carries with it the joinings of land and sea, each influenced by the other. The land ‘rocks’ with the sea. We have a sense of folk verse, of a ballad buried in its couplets but distorted and rendered into song, into lyric. It refers to the Hebrides, which we assume to be the Scottish islands, but which maybe also have subtexts of the New Hebrides in the Pacific (more as shadow than reality). We should never forget that Stow’s poems travel the world, taking the sand plains and the rock plains of the mid-west with them. It’s not as easy as saying that this (or any other) poem belongs to a Stow metaphysical period, or symbolist period, or modernist period, because it is all of these and more. Though his poems were a mirror to his reading, Stow was never a poet to ‘belong to a school’, and never a mere imitator. Even his earliest poems are out of kilter with his influences. Coinages are always a shortcut for what should be explication, but in the mood of a general introduction, I will say that what Stow performs is a synthesising poetics. As his range of poetic experience increased, he added more to the toolbox. Be it Saint-John Perse’s Anabasis, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence” or Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” he took from all, and added to the desperation to make a form that matched his needs. To say otherwise is to fall into the trap of making him a Patrick White clone. To make false and fruitless comparisons between the novels and pastoral dynasties of White and Stow, to make Australia a monistic entity of white literary affirmation (while condemning Stow). Randolph Stow’s work is much more than that. He is far more tormented and disturbed than we might gather from a light reading of the poems. His celebrations are ‘away’, in Suffolk, drinking wine, thinking of the malic formation of wine from the grape, finding calm which he couldn’t find as a writer in Australia, and perhaps never found. And maybe it helps to have lived where he lived to understand what pastoral actually means there. I am thinking of Ellendale Pool, a remarkable sandstone chasm near Sandsprings farm. My brother lives just near it, too. It is said to be bottomless, and swallows inhabit the sandstone niches which are eaten away under the ledge. You’ll find it in Stow’s fiction; it is suggested in his poetry, as idea more than

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place. In A Haunted Land, it’s the space where sex takes place between a decaying white family’s daughter and a Yamaji youth. She will turn on him and deny, and he will be punished. The homestead Malin, with its imploding dynasty none can escape, broods in the background as much as the land it has attempted to usurp. It is a dark and twisted book. The forces are great in the land, but the ways of the new /old families are compelled by their history of voyaging, conquest, and empowerment. They will fight to the bitter end for their ‘rights’, even though they destroy one another in doing so. Their ‘blood’ has gone bad. I think of this at Ellendale Pool. I think of the farms around it. In there is the pastoral. And ‘stations’, referring to these large spreads of grazing and farmed land (grazed mainly by sheep in the Stow heritage), also evoke, of course, Stations of the Cross. Stow’s silhouette of Christianity, when it is there at all, comes out of that mystical sense of connection with other great spiritual reckonings, rather than as dogma. But stations as places are dogmatic intrusions, as were the Stations of the Cross as Church construct, to control an experience of Christ’s suffering, crucifixion, and passion. It was at an Anglican private school that Stow boarded when down from the country. One needs to consider “The Ghost at Anlaby”195 in the shadows of the pastoral colonial. Geoffrey Dutton, Australian poet and man of letters, was the scion of a pastoral family. The station /homestead on Anlaby will necessarily also be a place of ghosts. The oft-unspoken haunting of the dead and tormented peoples whose land was stolen, and the inherent decay in colonial families ‘cut off’ from their roots and origins (identity), are reminders of the life which merged genteel with harsh and rough’n’ready in a cliché of the ‘harsh’ (though it is) land, fracture the verse, divide the stanzas with their semipatterned rhymes and metrical variations. And with whom does one connect? Where is company? Such families and their communities necessarily isolate and exclude themselves. It’s like stock images from paintings, repetitions of ideas of the pastoral a long way from the decadence of occupation which informs it at heart, “What phantom remembers / that wicked, warm, Edwardian midday hour?” In the poem sequence “Stations,”196 a “suite for three voices and three generations,” the issues of family and belonging “mix’ ancestral “bloodlines’ 195

“The Ghost at Anlaby” (1958), in A Counterfeit Silence, 25. “Stations: Suite for Three Voices and Three Generations” (1965–69), in A Counterfeit Silence, 57–63. The ‘stations’ are: “Forever to Remain. The Man” 196

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and the “blood of the land”; they almost mimic and shadow kinship and totemic relationships of skin, of Yamaji and other Indigenous peoples’ ancestral belongings, their stories, their law. That core Western mimetic device, myth, that devolution from pantheism into materialism (the packaging of spiritual belief), vacillates around Indigenous stories of origin and Creation, ‘dreamtime’ and ‘dreaming’, ‘songlines’, totemics, and, ultimately, taboos. It’s what is not said, as much as what’s said. The “troubling dream,” the “Western destiny,” and: Here then, in this most bare, most spare, least haunted, least furnished of all lands, we are to foster greenly the dream, the philadelphic idyll, and in good faith and in good heart dream on. Land of whose bone and sap I am: are you that desert where the perjured West aspires? “Or Delos of a coming Sun-God’s race?” –᩺Or camp of torpid factions, by grey fires? (“Here Also Let the Troubling Dream”)

It’s all here. Jungian dream archetype, wresting of the unconscious in a surreal transference (almost automatically), and shadows of the Dreaming that has been interrupted and disturbed and overlaid (if, despite horrific damage, ultimately unsuccessfully). There’s also the myth clash, and the myth transliteration, the tools of dynamic equivalence that leave the interloper floundering for explanation. Ultimately, “T H E Y O U T H ” does not comprehend and lacks knowledge. Further, note the “grey fires.” It’s a failure of Western fetishizing of its own myths᩺–᩺Western culture’s packaging of its own means of understanding what it comes from. In actuality, the land is never unnamed; it is named down to its particles of dust by the ‘blacks’. But the (white) woman, eternal outsider, eternal Other in patriarchy (this is to do with colonization and gender in the colonial sense), is eternally sacrificed to her own destiny (heritage): THE WOMAN:

Across the uncleared hills of the nameless country I write in blood my blood’s abiding name. (1965), 59–60; “My Wish for My Land. The Woman” (1969), 60–61; “Here Also Let the Troubling Dream. The Youth” (1965), 61; “The Earth and World Besiege Us. The Man” (1968), 61–62; “The Garden Runs Wild. The Woman” (1965), 62; “The Grief of Younger Brothers. The Youth” (1965), 63.

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When I wrote to Randolph Stow in 1995 about my own relationship to the Western Australian wheatbelt, I received in return a letter in which he said he recognized much of what I wrote (as ‘place’) but there were other explorations he didn’t recognize. The term “uncleared” in the lines above (italics are so often about call and response, about echoes, in Stow) is a magnifying-glass on the issues he lived with that I later would: poisoning, killing, clearing, destruction. Maybe his non-recognition of certain features was due to the way I cast them᩺–᩺abrupt, in your face. Stow is more subtle, and the issues of bloodties and obligation ring much louder in his work. Stow wrote “Stations” in Maine, U S A ; often distance clarifies with issues of connection and obligation. With elegiac tone, with irony (“T H E W O M A N : My wish for my land is that ladies be beautiful . . . ”), there’s a welter of blood pooling in the collective short-term memory of the colonizers, and the brutality they feel they need to confront to conjoin with the harshness. This is real, but also a construct, illusory, a comparative, stuck in notions inherited and seen in images and reports from the Old Country of the normative: green, wet, ripe, monotheistic but with pantheism cohabiting through memory and land. Take “T H E Y O U T H : and under alien skin the surge, the stirring, / a wisdom and a violence, the land’s dark blood.” One doesn’t need to deploy “paranoid reading” here to unravel the tensions, especially given that it was written in another ‘New World’ country with ‘similar’ issues. Displacement in so many ways is at the core of Stow’s poetic. The masks run deeper than the unmaskings, and go hand in hand. But the most disturbing articulation of usurpation goes through to the womb, through to channelling the blood off into a new whiteness. Beneath the almost wistful, gentle elegiac tone, there’s something more disturbed, suggesting a parallel to D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, undercurrents that Stow exposes and disowns in the Australian mid-west version of the 1915 American silent film of the South and the Ku Klux Klan (used as a recruiting film by the Klan through to the 1960s!). Stow had to leave his birthplace; what choice did he have knowing what he knew, seeing what he’d seen? It wasn’t just a case of having written all he could write about Australia. THE WOMAN:

A woman is soft. A woman is a river. I will flow in my tall blond sons, in my tender daughter, implacable, enduring. The dark women come up barren from the dark water. The spirits die.

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The kinship of gender, of woman needing to support woman, is lost here in the compulsion of ‘race’-making, of constructing a powerbase, to secure the takings. The costs are overwhelming, and the white woman recognizes what she inflicts on her fellow (‘dark’) woman, but does it all the same, compliant with the patriarchy’s militarism. But the loss of spirit is everyone’s loss of spirit. The killing of one is the annihilation, also, of another. In this section of “Stations,” Anthony J. Hassall has rightly observed the woman’s concern with “rape of the land, her hopes for her family, and the grief of war,” and that she is at “first troubled by the white usurpation.”197 Hassall concludes that she eventually “is unrepentant’ in the ember-glow of the lines “I will not think the justice of our tenure / questioned by that old guilt.” But the fact of it having to be ‘said’ is the torment of guilt that cannot be wiped clean. She might be trying to drive the guilt away, but it still gnaws at her. It is resolvable. We hear “War blacks out the land”᩺ – ᩺a “paranoid reading” would inform us that war has been blacking out the land since first contact, that the war is ongoing, and that the war of the world’s nation-states is an extension of the same colonizing urge that has led to perpetual ‘war’ / conflict in Australia. Her volte-face, if it is one, is because of a fear of showing vulnerability. Black Australia is still perceived as an enemy to “her tenure.” The trope of extinctionism that one also finds in application of the absolute finality of ‘genocide’ is strong here: we can talk of the past, create retrospect, to cover up the continuing nature of the crime. This becomes the paradox of writing poetry that is both condemnation and affirmation of colonial presence. The paradox is a defence-mechanism to avoid the need for immediate action to rectify the ongoing problem, to end the ‘war’. Reading “lost tremor of nomad fires,” one is reminded of Judith Wright’s “Bora Ring” and: The hunter is gone; the spear is splintered underground; the painted bodies a dream the world breathed sleeping and forgot. The nomad feet are still.198

That is not satisfactory. They need to be heard again, as Wright would certainly have agreed. a 197

Hassall, Strange Country, 95. Judith Wright, “Bora Ring” (1946), in Wright, A Human Pattern: Selected Poems, foreword by John Kinsella (London: Carcanet, 2010): 2. 198

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Randolph Stow’s poetry embraces undercurrents and evasions, while at times also being brutally frank and direct. Sexuality, so often evoked in the blood of land as well as the body, is frequently ambivalent, evasive, or polyphonic. Stow is neither a homosexual writer nor a heterosexual writer. In some ways, he’s oddly sexually detached at times, but he is an omnivorous, if very personally specific, poet of love. Love, for Stow, is a powerful universal that moves across gender and sexuality, ethnicity and place. It is a binding force, and though there is often despair, there’s always hope as well. It’s where Stow’s version of Blake’s ‘contraries’ dwells. Love is simple and complex, of an excruciating othering but also de-Othering. It is private, so very private, but also looking to announce itself and remain safe, secure, damaged as little as possible. “Persephone” is a fine love poem in the “Masks” sequence /resequencing. Interviewed by Hassall in 1982, Stow spoke of the poem’s genesis: Perhaps I should explain᩺–᩺it can do no harm᩺–᩺how one of them came about: that’s “Persephone.” This is getting back to when I was still in my mid-twenties ᩺–᩺I formed a passionate attachment to somebody who came to visit me when I was living far away, in rather idyllic circumstances. And later I thought that I would try to renew the relationship in the big city, in London, and I wandered about trying to pluck up the courage to go and knock on a certain door. Eventually I decided not to, and even became frightened of an accidental meeting, such as might happen even in London, in the underground, so I went away. The parallels with the Persephone myth are worked out along those lines. The speaker, one is to imagine, is a mortal lover of Persephone, who’s fallen in love with her when she’s in the upper world in Spring, and then tries to go and rejoin her in her Winter world. In this case Hell is a city much like London, it has a pewter-coloured river, it has train-shrill tunnels, and so on. This is quite literal description of a personal experience. And at the end, when he says: “I would have you think of me on another island,” the island in question is Manhattan.199

Though I have quoted this to show the workings of the poet’s mind, at least in retrospect (and in summary, as it must be), I hesitate to call it a definitive reading of the poem. The use of myth to mask a deeply personal interaction is also the means of seeking to universalize it, to make the personal part of a larger structure in which our selves are given context. We are not alone in

199

Hassall, “Breaking the Silence,” 400.

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this, it happens over and over, we must see ourselves in such lights to make sense of the pain, the anguish, and the joy. Poems are about connecting with other poems, other stories, other people. They are annunciations and announcements. In the interview it is evident that Stow is avoiding the use of pronouns᩺–᩺note “and knock on a certain door,” rather than ‘his’ or ‘her’ door. As Noa Logan Klein points out, “Such circumlocutions allow gay and lesbian individuals to remain closeted without being dishonest through the use of inaccurate gender pronouns.”200 There is also gender ambiguity in the poem itself, as the intimated roles of Demeter (the spring world) and Hades (the winter world /death) who contest for the presence (and loyalty) of Persephone are ambiguous. The masking of the beloved’s identity is an act of privacy, but also a factor in not being ‘out’ in a public literary context. The slippage between myth and reality, male and female, conventions of the heterosexual and their undoing (for which we should be grateful), are there if we want to look. But are we invited to look? I think we are, for, as private as these documents might seem, they have still been published and have undergone the process that entails (request, maybe, consultation, response, proofs, printing, appearance, conversations that follow). The “I came with the wound of spring to the winter city” can be female to female (Demeter to Persephone), and yet we equivocate in the paradox of “(you had done me such springlike harm).” But Persephone, the ‘condemned’-beloved, is of both worlds (sexual, conceptual, pragmatic᩺–᩺a private, clandestine love affair that needs to be kept quiet in order not to alienate or anger the other partner᩺– ᩺Demeter /Hades?); she is a “tenderrooted / hybrid,” of the surface and the underworld, and any outside force could damage the delicate balance /arrangement. In a poem in which gender is less stable than it at first seems, this is about claims of ownership not only of love and a beloved, and its consequences, but also of anonymous sexuality. It should be said, though, that Stow was insistent about the “private letters” nature of his poetry, and in the Beston interview he insists: But I’m not terribly concerned with publishing. Some of my poems have been in my hands for several years. I do publish, usually by invitation when I’m asked for a poem, but that’s not my intention when I write.201 200

Noa Logan Klein, “Doing gender categorization: Non-recognitional person reference and the omnirelevance of gender,” in Conversation and Gender, ed. Susan A. Speer & Elizabeth Stokoe (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge U P , 2011): 77. 201 Beston, “Mostly Private Letters,” 352.

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I wouldn’t call this disingenuous, and I don’t doubt this was largely the case, but it’s also part of a writer’s myth. As a child, Stow wrote poems that were later published; he published novels when he was barely in his twenties, and wrote with zeal and a purpose in publishing᩺ –᩺ at least in his early years. I don’t accept that his poems, certainly those collected later, weren’t half-written for an elusive public. What’s more, I’d claim that the “Masks” poems are a subtle if not cautious ‘coming-out’. a I have not relied on a lot of biographical data in writing this introduction but, rather, on the poems, which frequently have their own meanings outside that intended by the poet. The more private a communiqué, the more distant from its original intent it will become with being made public. Stow had a definitive understanding of what ‘public’ meant, and his silence of many years (his last novel was published twenty-six years before his death, and his last offering of a selection of new poems was in the 1990 Hassall reader) is often interpreted as stepping out of the public literary light, as a desire for seclusion, and even as meaning he’d said what he had to say. This is possibly only partly true. Issues with alcohol, depression, settling one’s ghosts, and plain old writer’s block must be thrown into the mix, as well as a crisis of the private–public dichotomy. Stow was a very private person; his poems speak this loudly, and maybe his unseen and unpublished poetry as loud as all. Furthermore, Stow always took a long time to write books, outside his earliest novels and poems, and things brewed long and hard with him. I think we must be wary of what a poet tells us a poem is about, and I’m sure he’d generally have felt the same. Finally, some words on breaking the two-part intactness of Outrider ᩺– ᩺carefully conceived as a single volume (see Whitehouse)᩺–᩺in order to accommodate Stow’s later deletions and re-orderings as new poems evolved that fitted with earlier material and grew into sequences and new contexts. What’s more, Stow himself refused inclusion of “The Wild Duck’s Nest”202 in both the Hassall 1990 reader selection and any new volume after his death. “The Ship Becalmed” and “The Recluse” were also left out of the “Outrider” section of the Hassall reader, though I am pleased to say that they are restored herein. They were originally included in A Counterfeit Silence in the “Juve-

202

“The Wild Duck’s Nest” (1958), in Outrider: Poems 1956–1962, 16.

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nilia” section.203 I find it regrettable that “The Wild Duck’s Nest” is on the restricted list, because I find it one of his most morally imperative poems, full of power in lines such as paused there, in the still noon of our country which affrights the heart with silence, able with one crow to tear the whole taut world of earth and air apart.

Aside from the strained “affrights,” these are typical but slightly divergent lines in Stow’s poetic. Sometimes it’s the slight movements that are most interesting. By breaking the old to accommodate the new, one takes away but also respects the narrative growth of the poet. Poems are often beginnings, not ends, and Outrider is also a book of beginnings. The outriders to come, to sail or ride or trek alongside the earliest manifestations. Despite the to-be-later-made “Masks” sequence (presented in the Hassall reader), we find “Endymion” in Outrider.204 Then, in the “Stations” section of A Counterfeit Silence, we find more myth-love poems that will be “Masks” ᩺– ᩺“Ishmael” and “Persephone.” Other openings. a In arranging this book I have tried to maintain some of the essence and sense of original arrangements (impossible where permissions have been denied), and reflect what they would lead to, and where they would fit in later configurations. There’s a dialogue across these presentations. See the appendices for original orderings of books post-Act One, which will both restore early settings and invigorate later manifestations. Stow’s late poems are full of lilting energy that characterises his earliest verse. His moving across time and place, his use of personal history and broader social and artistic history, the gap and connections between the writing of a world and the world as it is (or might be), are alive and well in “Clichés”; Stow notes that a cliché is “a printer’s plate or block; a photographic negative.” Each of these snapshots merges the self with others᩺– ᩺‘his’ past becomes others’ past, and vice versa. Compare these imagistic glimpses and their temporality and spatiality: 203

“The Recluse” (1956) and “The Ship Becalmed” (1962), in The Counterfeit Silence, 8 and 9 respectively. 204 “Endymion” (1962), in Poems from ‘The Outrider’ and Other Poems, 6.

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Do you remember, Elizabeth, the scent of bruised Geraldton wax leaves by the ruined tennis court in the year when the Japs were coming? * A small New Mexico town lost in the winter dusk and the spiced smoke of pinyon rising.

with: A canyon of empty warehouses: Shad Thames. It can only be from old miser’s hoard we have these ghostly riches: cinnamon and cloves. * Ted loves his wife; in every little check of his square-dancing shirt, she has embroidered a rose: her tribute on the cenotaph of his maleness.

We go from early to later life, from Geraldton to New Mexico, to the Thames. Who are Ted and his wife? We have pithy, wry comment as well as the glimpse. Then photos. The notes taken in a journal (indeed, where I first saw them). An accumulation, maybe the condensation of years of silence, or years of watching and writing down. A slow and a fast occupation. In Stow’s handwritten journal, they seem to have been written in a stream. Fragments made whole by the moment. Years of reading and Li Po, Tu Fu, Wang Wei, Japanese haiku, William Blake, William Carlos Williams, and innumerable other poets are distilled into these moments. The ‘hackneyed’ or ‘commonplace’ or ‘overused’ that we associate with cliché is played upon (Stow was never about fireworks) but given new life and zest. The word’s origin is French and only dates back to 1892, and has to do with ‘stereotyping’. Even the ordinary has its own qualities, and neither Stow nor his poetry could ever be stereotyped. Like all fine users of literary precedent, he absorbs and reprocesses his sources, making the new, the indelible. Clichés, used energetically, are inevitably generative and built in a truth. They are never just copies. And a word on a later uncollected poem included in the book, “Merry-goround,” written ‘for’ Geraldton at the request of the head librarian of Geraldton Library for the opening of the reproduction of the merry-go-round on 30 June 1988, and published in the opening programme. It is a relatively light,

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occasional piece, but it’s almost a gentle and understated ars poetica as well. The merry-go-round referred to is at once the original on the Geraldton Marine Terrace foreshore Stow knew as a child ᩺– ᩺strongly associated with the pleasures of childhood (as well as the threat of bombing by the Japanese and his evacuation to Sandsprings Station);᩺the imaginary merry-go-round in the sea; and a replacement facsimile of the foreshore machine. The merry-go-round turns on its fixed point while the world turns on its ‘fixed’ point, and even in a place where the seasons don’t subscribe to those in the (English) literature of seasonal certainty, or indeed the bleak literature of Australia’s explorers of death, Barcroft Boake and Adam Lindsay Gordon, it can be relied on to keep turning, if only in the imagination. The novel The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea is an anxiety text about growth, separation (Rob and Rick ᩺– ᩺Hassall is excellent on this issue, as he is on the doubling of characters in Stow’s work), and uncertainty when things seem to suggest they should be more stable and certain. The irony of the connecting nature of the merry-go-round, as it circles the world of itself, acts as a metaphysical conceit in a way that Stow might have drawn from John Donne. The original merry-go-round of Stow’s (and Rob’s) childhood was removed because it became dilapidated and dangerous. In memory of Stow’s novel as much as anything else, and the active role it plays in identifying Geraldton and the town’s /city’s quest for literary heritage, a replacement was created. It, too, eventually became dangerous and was fixed in place, so now we only turn about its centre in our imaginations. It doesn’t turn at all. I visit it most times my family and I are in Geraldton, to ponder this irony of ‘development’ and nostalgia, and how all connection is inevitably a reification of distance and loss. Stow’s evocation of the adventurousness of childhood, and the destiny we reap from this (his circumnavigations, living far away from his birthplace), is still there, in a Wordsworthian visionary dreariness, a spot in time. A tempered romanticism runs through Stow’s work to the end, informed by a knowledge he barely wishes to or is barely able to articulate. His connection is with Australia through memory; with Suffolk because he is buried in the place of his ancestors, and there is a belonging to many places inside and outside temporality and spatiality in his poems (in their concretions and abstractions). He is tethered to centres in the self, and the very myths he explored and struggled with. And in geographies that are so different, but still of the circle, whether it turns on its own, or together with the rest of the planet. One must always keep in mind that the merry-go-round is the world that was

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coming as much as the childhood world that it was (geographically expansive, but closed off from the ‘rest of the world’ in so many ways). It is wrong to impose this childhood and young adult world of Western Australia as a nec plus ultra on reading Randolph Stow, because his later poems draw on Suffolk as ‘his’ land as much as the earlier poems on Western Australia (consider “The Clock in the Empty House”205 as a place-substitution poem, the house a symbolic universal and the land specific). Stow said to Beston: “This happened to be the place I grew up in. I’m interested in nature, in botany, geology, and so on. I could just as easily have drawn on England and the English landscape, and do in some poems.” But is this entirely true? Is it a full picture? Stow is making his own connections and disconnections here. There is a denial of his own writing, for whenever he writes another place (Malta, surrounding the Cape, New Guinea and so on), it’s with the sense of a very specific land’s meaning and a crisis over recolonizing this with an inner peace he sought, haunting his present and future. “Merry-go-round” finishes with one of his signature couplets᩺–᩺a signing-off (with “stoop” being used as metaphor for ‘bird of prey’): The gulls stoop down, the big toy jerks and flies; And time is tethered where its centre lies.

It is useful to consider this poem in the light of the extract from Chapter 15 of The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea (see Appendices), especially in the context of John Donne’s metaphysics – the couplet cited at the end being the last two lines of Donne’s poem “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.” Randolph Stow was a poet in search of silence, troubled by the noise of both the residue of colonization and its ongoing condition. He was tormented by many ghosts, but also had the ability to create moments of tranquillity in his work. His poetic identities were elusive, but able “to embrace with the whole soul / the One.” Place was empirical and mythological at once. All was paradoxical, and in paradox the poet took refuge. The epigraph to A Counterfeit Silence was taken from Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and maybe in there are the clues to reading Stow’s poetry: “Even speech was for them a debased form of silence; how much more futile is poetry, which is a debased form of speech.” But then, poetry seems to bypass speech in so

205

“The Clock in the Empty House,” in Celebrations: Bicentennial Anthology of Fifty Years of Western Australian Poetry and Prose, ed. Brian Dibble, Glen Phillips & Don Grant (Nedlands, W A : U W A Publishing, 1988): 130.

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many ways, even when presented in ‘voices’. Those voices often tap into the precognitive, and we are also left asking ourselves whether writing is closer to thought than speech.

REFERENCES Anon. “Romance,” tr. James Elroy Flecker, in Hispanic Anthology: Poems Translated from the Spanish by English and North American Poets, collected and arranged by Thomas Walsh (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1920). Bennett, Bruce, & William Grono, ed. Wide Domain: Western Australian Themes and Images (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1979). Beston, John B. “Mostly Private Letters,” from interview with Randolph Stow (Perth, 1974), in Randolph Stow (1990), ed. Hassall, 349–55. Originally in World Literature Written in English 14 (1975): 221–30. Hassall, Anthony J. “Breaking the Silence,” from interview with Stow, in Randolph Stow (1990), ed. Hassall, 392–401. ——. Strange Country: A Study of Randolph Stow (1986; St Lucia: U of Queensland P , 1990). ——, ed. Randolph Stow: Visitants, episodes from other novels, poems, stories, interviews, and essays (St Lucia: U of Queensland P , 1990). Hewett, Dorothy. “Silence, Exile and Cunning: The Poetry of Randolph Stow,” Westerly 33.2 (June 1988): 59–66. Hodge, Bob, & Vijay Mishra. Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the Postcolonial Mind (North Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991). Klein, Noa Logan. “Doing gender categorization: Non-recognitional person reference and the omnirelevance of gender,” in Conversation and Gender, ed. Susan A. Speer & Elizabeth Stokoe (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge U P , 2011): 64–82 (esp. 77). Lao Tz×. Tao Tê Ching: The Way and Its Power and Its Place in Chinese Thought, tr. & commentary by Arthur Waley, intro. Frances Wood (tr. 1934, rev. 1958; London: Folio Society, 2010). Leves, Kerry. “Toxic flowers: Randolph Stow’s unfused horizons,” Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 10 (2010): online (14 pp.). Musselwhite, David E. Partings Welded Together: Politics and Desire in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel (London & New York: Routledge, 1987). Rutherford, Anna, & Andreas Boelsmand. “Alienation and Involvement,” from interview with Stow (Aarhus, 1973), in Randolph Stow (1990), ed. Hassall, 343–48. Originally in Commonwealth Newsletter (1974): 17–20. Saint-John Perse. Seamarks: bilingual edition, tr. Wallace Fowlie (Amers, 1957; Bollingen series 67; tr. New York: Pantheon, 1958). Stow, Randolph. Act One: Poems (London: Macdonald, 1967).

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——. Australian Poetry 1964, sel. Randolph Stow (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1964). ——. The Bystander (London: Macdonald, 1957). ——. A Counterfeit Silence: Selected Poems (Sydney & London: Angus & Robertson, 1969). ——. Eight Songs for a Mad King (prod. London, 1969; London: Boosey & Hawkes, 1971). ——. The Girl Green as Elderflower (New York: Viking, 1980; London: Minerva, 1991; St Lucia: U of Queensland P , 2003). ——. A Haunted Land (London: Macdonald, 1956; New York: Macmillan, 1957). ——. The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea (London: Macdonald, 1965; New York: William Morrow, 1966; Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1968). ——. Midnite: The Story of a Wild Colonial Boy (London: Thomas Nelson, 1967; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967; Englewood Cliffs N J : Prentice–Hall, 1968; London: The Bodley Head, rev. ed. 1984; Harmondsworth & Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin / Puffin, 2004). ——. Miss Donnithorne’s Maggot (libretto for Peter Maxwell Davies’ music, prod. Adelaide, 1974; London: Boosey & Hawkes, 1977). ——. Outrider: Poems 1956–1962 (London: Macdonald, 1962). ——. “The Southland of Antichrist: The Batavia Disaster of 1629,” in Randolph Stow (1990), ed. Hassall, 410–19. Originally in Common Wealth, ed. Anna Rutherford (Aarhus: Akademisk Boghandel, 1971): 160–67. ——. The Suburbs of Hell (London: Secker & Warburg; New York: Taplinger, 1984; South Fremantle, W A : Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1993). ——. To the Islands (London: Macdonald, 1958; Boston M A : Little, Brown, 1959; rev. ed., Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1981; London, Secker & Warburg; New York: Taplinger, 1982). ——. Tourmaline (London: Macdonald, 1963; Harmondsworth & Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1963; New York: Taplinger, 1983). ——. Visitants (London: Secker & Warburg, 1979; London: Pan / Picador, 1981; New York: Taplinger, 1981). Waley, Arthur. The Way and Its Power: Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching and Its Place in Chinese Thought (New York: Grove, 1994). Whitehouse, Carl. “Randolph Stow’s Outrider and the French Voyager Poem,” Australian Literary Studies 18.2 (October 1997): 116–27. Wright, Judith. “Bora Ring” (1946), in Wright, A Human Pattern: Selected Poems, foreword by John Kinsella (London: Carcanet, 2010): 2. ——. Preoccupations in Australian Poetry (Melbourne: Oxford U P , 1966).

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Andrew Taylor: On Commissioning the Collected Poems for Salt Publishing206

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a collected poems is a survey of a life’s work in poetry, but also, no matter how depersonalized a poetry might be, a life itself. Furthermore, it’s not surprising to find a huge range in any poet’s oeuvre if it’s been formulated over forty to fifty years. What makes an interesting starting-point for the discussion of Andrew Taylor’s work is how these obvious declarations prove to be unusual and unique in their physical manifestation. Taylor writes a poetry that can be intensely personal, but also highly detached emotionally. It can be up close and distant at once, and even poems that some might call confessional are distracted by the default position of the ‘idea in language’ (the idea as thing-in-itself), which is at the core of all Taylor’s poetry. So, there’s a constant, a thread that unifies the work – so much so that you can read the work like a narrative of the evolution of ideas, or maybe, more precisely, a consideration of ideas from different angles, vantage points, and contexts. The narrative itself is driven by change – in personal circumstance, experience, physical location (especially travel), ageing, conversation, contemplation, and the process of writing. Writing has never been static for Taylor – a true innovator, he has combined formal control (astonishingly in place right from his very first book, The Cool Change, published in 1971), with the desire for formal dexterity generated by the need to move, to reassess all ideas that cross his broad scope. Interviewing Andrew Taylor a few years ago, my first two questions involved the notion of changing place, and the tension within his poems between the materials used in the poem – animals, objects, location and so on – and the direction of ideas away from these. The two matters are closely related. When Taylor writes of a specific city, be it Adelaide, London, or Ithaca, he captures the ‘thingyness’ of the place, just as much as he captures the ‘thingyness’ of socks and shirts, or of a watch; but he also places it in a landscape of ideas and a ‘self’-critical light. I have changed – or maybe modified – my views regarding the ‘tension’ in a Taylor poem. I used to think it was primarily a case of paradox, contradiction, or tautology, but have come to 206

S IS OBVIOUS AND CONSTANTLY RESTATED,

“About Andrew Taylor: On Commissioning the Collected Poems for Salt Publishing,” Ars Interpres: An International Journal of Poetry, Translation & Art 6–7 (September 2006): 316–20.

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consider it in more theological terms – a secular theology, almost. There’s a clash between the material world, and an absence of the spiritual. A cold hardness of vision that seeks to reconcile itself with a more optimistic outcome. The apparent contradictions are often not contradictions at all but, rather, explorations of how difference fuses and transforms, even if it leaves a bitter aftertaste (or the venom of scorpion or spider). In his often disturbing Cat’s Chin and Ears: A Bestiary, the poems cross a light-hearted, almost whimsical humour with something far more aggressive. Violence is an ever-present undercurrent in many Taylor poems. Animals in this bestiary aren’t considered in the light of their benevolence or pleasuregiving, but in their clash with and distance from the human. With the manners of a satirist of the ilk of Rochester or Dryden, with a side-glance at Aesop and La Fontaine, Taylor produces disturbing encomia to modernity. The natural world is never really nature (despite what some critics claim about nature in Taylor’s work), but an almost cybernetic ally connected by fate to the human. Taylor doesn’t praise human dominance; he laments it, and is bemused by it. A more telling example of Taylor’s restlessness – so formally contained – between subject matter and ‘message’ can be found in the magnificent poem “Adelaide Winter.” Benignness of place crosses over with terror of potential and fact. Consider Winter – real winter – never comes to Adelaide. Its long shadow brushes us from south and east when birds leave, and the trees stir a little, uneasily, as a dog does at night sensing another creature in the dark.

Initially, the suggestion of the benign comes from the lack of a real winter – nothing can be as harsh as winter might be imagined. However, the seeds of the apparent contradiction build with the “uneasily,” and the threat of “sensing another creature in the dark.” This pattern, or maybe template, expands and branches through the poem, like a network of veins. Even in his more satirically dry poems (and this is not a dry poem), Taylor lets the poem breathe and develop at its own will. His poems are organic. Eventually, we reach a point in “Adelaide Winter” where even the affirmation of children (sick, healed) pulls away from the certainty of the poem’s

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‘voice’: “This is a city where children / disappear.. . ” to the loss that is universal, the loss of ‘innocence’ that is focused through the materiality of the ‘city’, even through ‘nature’, until the loss is universal as well as personal: “Magpies / savaged me this morning, defending / the young they’ll never see after this year.” The absence of loved ones echoes through Taylor’s work. In poems of great sensitivity, but with characteristic structural and philosophical rigour, a distant lover is brought close, only for the grasp to be lost again. The physicality of relationships is as much in memory as reality, and always awaited, expected. There’s a cycle of presence and absence that works like tidal change through the work. Briefly returning to the “Adelaide Winter” poem, before offering a substitute for my original notion of tension driving a Taylor poem, I’d like to consider section I V , in which the nursing of a sick child and her resurrection through familiarity and security (though “my lazy, almost forgetful / pulse carried her home” epitomizes the constant irony of the self that walks the boards here, in the most serious of moments) is counterpointed with the killing of a thrush in the garden with a shovel (counterpointed, asTaylor’s verse is consciously a musical notation): . . . Our cat had broken both wings and eaten part of the breast and neck. Although I was trained to kill – not only animals but people too – my bones weighed heavily and sick until I bore the illness of that child.

The life–death /nurture–kill contrasts are clear, but I’d argue that these aren’t presented as alternative choices, as possible avenues that resolve in an accepted tension (that is, “just as nature is. . . ”) but, rather, as a material reality that works alongside a conceptual unacceptability. In the real landscape they coexist in tension, but in the “landscape of the imagination” things are changeable, and challengeable. That’s what thinking is – the formalism of the argument (the shape of the poem), and also the freedom to innovate, change, escape the logic. You see this literally demonstrated in poem after poem in Taylor’s Collected: in the two innovative major works of the mid-70s Parabolas:

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Prose Poems and The Crystal Absences, the “Trout,” in Sandstone, in the sublime Swamp Poems of recent years. Maybe it’s been a confrontation with mortality, straddled by the enigmatic and visually stunning Swamp Poems, that confirms this argument. These are clearly spiritual poems that retain their critical edge, their empirical analyses of materiality. Imagistic and contemplative, the eye of the observer is both witness and participant – is removed from the scene as observer, but directly implicated as part of a greater whole. These are poems of terror and beauty, but subtly woven into a space where ‘nature’ and the ‘constructed’ fuse and morph. They are small journey poems that open onto large vistas: I navigate it now inspecting such decay and loss as could rip the shell of my craft with new and circumspect respect

As is shown in his much praised “Sandstone” sequence, Taylor is a poet of edges, but edges that define a space and also erode and change. Nothing is fixed but the need to create the poem, to love, to observe, to witness. So, finally, my theory. I feel that we need to look where Gerard Manley Hopkins looked in developing his ideas of inscape and instress: the medieval theologians. The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy says of ‘haecceity’: First proposed by John Duns Scotus (1266–1308), a haecceity is a nonqualitative property responsible for individuation. As understood by Scotus, a haecceity is not a bare particular in the sense of something underlying qualities. It is, rather, a non-qualitative property of a substance or thing: it is a ‘thisness’ (a haecceitas, from the Latin haec, meaning ‘this’) as opposed to a ‘whatness’ (a quidditas, from the Latin quid, meaning ‘what’).

Taylor’s poetry abounds in haecceity, but it never lives on its own. In apparent contradiction, but in actuality existing in parallel, there’s also a selfhood that combines with a vision of nature, what might be termed ‘ipseity’. In essence, there’s a spirituality of ideas to this tough and often ironic take on the world. The more real the world he creates, the more it is invented – or reinvented – in this world of ideas. Even an animal and its fate become the common object, even the death of a father and the inability to do more than shake the hand rather than meet the mother’s wish of bestowing a kiss – the failure to do so, leaving not a vacuum or negated view of the world, but one

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in which the wish to do so can be expressed in the act of writing the poem, if the material failure to do so is the remembered reality. In a poet as experienced and professional as Andrew Taylor, you could make an endless list of those he has read and admired. There are clear influences on Taylor’s work, but many of them come from visual art, music, and especially the experiences of cultural difference. It’s a complex portrait. But for me, the ability to place the idea and image together, to think and see at the same time, brings most to mind the Wallace Stevens of “Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction”: Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea Of this invention, this invented world, The inconceivable idea of the sun.

Consider Taylor’s cathedral poems, especially “The Windows”: Windows are the invention of fire in glass our story burns at the sky light lives in the eye the eye itself held in a wall knocks endlessly

Nature (fire, sky, spirituality) in tension (the window) with the constructed world (the cathedral, religion) – neither being independent of the other. Andrew Taylor’s Collected Poems presents a life as a jigsaw puzzle. The pieces are constantly being added, and though the images are clear as the pieces go into place, we are never sure what the picture will end up looking like. An innovator and a maverick, as he continues to add to his life’s work, he will keep us guessing, though offering firm clues as to how to follow him on his journeys.

Judith Wright: The Complexity of Design207

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L L H U M A N L I F E W O R K S O U T O F P A T T E R N S , makes patterns, and leaves its mark, its imprint, to some degree or other. Judith Wright (1915–2000) wondered at and investigated the complexity of design with a secular vision but a spiritual intensity. More than five decades of writing and thinking led her to feel that though all people had patterns in com-

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“Introduction” to Judith Wright, A Human Pattern: Selected Poems (1990; Manchester: Carcanet, 1992): xvii–xxvii.

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mon, not all people considered or used these patterns (consciously and unconsciously) in just ways. The poem is a pattern, the land is a pattern, ‘flora’ and ‘fauna’ are patterns, society and communal groups are patterns. We are monadic and dyadic at once. And choices are made. The poem is a pattern and an exercise in free will. But when the distance between how we live in an environment and how we respect that environment grows too great, those patterns are disrupted, and become self-defeating and damaging to the networks of patterns that coexist to make the world that is. Although her poetry and world-view were so centred not only in Australian landscapes, flora and fauna, but also in the idea of Australia with its mass of contradictions, affirmations, and negations, Judith Wright was truly a world poet. From her pastoral origins on the family station in the New England tablelands, through days near coast and rainforest in Queensland, and finally to her much-loved inland acreage in the bush outside Canberra (at Braidwood, New South Wales), Wright looked inwards into Australia, and in doing so made the local poetically universal. Her dedication to place and, as her life went on, increasingly to environmental concerns and Indigenous rights was part of a life-dialogue with her origins and their implications in her writing. One cannot separate Wright’s poetry from a political agenda, even in her earliest poetry, which is less compensatory, less prone to self-critical considerations of her world as made by her family, and families like hers; of the destructive effect of ‘pioneering’ on the peoples whose land was stolen, and of the damage done to the ecology of those places. But Wright is a poet in whom all aspects of the human condition are present in even the most scathing analysis of human greed and foibles. A poet of apparent formal conservatism in equal strength to her political radicalism, Wright needs to be formally re-read if one is fully to understand how much she was actually pushing the limits of formal diction and prosody in order to say what she felt needed to be said. It is true that later in her life she expressed doubt about innovative poetics, but this probably came out of a sense of exclusion and maybe out of a suspicion of being misread in her dynamism. Wright was an innovator in the way she wrote about flora and fauna. Although she separates human and animal causality, her poems so often consider not only the rights of animals themselves but even the complexities of writing animals within the constraints of the poem itself. Here, she often uses form in a self-ironizing way, subjecting the persona to the agency of the animal being discussed. In “Platypus” (an animal exploited in life and in lite-

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rature for being considered physically bizarre), the poem sets the animal against the persona’s childhood memories of its rippling, bright brilliance, and against a history of consumption, environmental degradation, and pollution, to arrive at the following: But at this late midnight suddenly my mind runs clear and you rise through. I sit and write a poem for your sake that follows a word – platypus, paradox – like the ripples of your wake.

Wright was a school standard for decades; it was through my mother, who taught Wright in her English classes, that I came across her poetry in my early childhood. One of the earliest poems I wrote was a less than successful imitation of “The Old Prison.” I mention this because so many Australian poets of my generation cut their teeth on such poems. First, because they were what was taught, but second, and most importantly, because they combined formal attributes that one had to learn even if one wanted to overturn formal conventions; and, third, because they seemed to speak for at least part of the experience of being a child in the Australian school environment. For those of us with rural connections, possibly even more so. Here are the last two stanzas of “The Old Prison”: Who built and laboured here? The wind and the sea say – Their cold nest is broken and they are blown away. They did not breed nor love. Each in his cell alone cried as the wind now cries through this flute of stone.

This presents a particularly relevant sense of the isolation and torment of convict prisoners (who likely made their own jails), and also of the imprisoning nature of ‘pioneering’: the sparseness and abandonment to the elements of markers of colonialism (and penal servitude) as an implied juxtaposition to the omnipresent markers of ‘civilization’ in the places or country/countries of

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the prisoners’ origins or heritage. A seemingly simple painting of abandonment becomes resonant with political implication. This poem appeared in Wright’s second book, From Woman to Man. If we leap ahead, thirty years later we find this stanza in the poem “For a Pastoral Family,” in section 2, “To My Generation”: If now there are landslides, if our field of reference is much eroded, our hands show little blood. We enter a plea: Not Guilty. For the good of the Old Country the land was taken; the empire had loyal service. Would any convict us? Our plea has been endorsed by every appropriate jury.

There are some vital and subtle shifts between the voices in these two poems, while essentially they remain the same. Wright is often considered to have become more radical as time went on, but I’d argue the signs were clearly there from the beginning. Both these poems deal with the effect of time and (false) justice. Both are about erosion and loss because of damaged presences in the first place. Both are about ‘nature’ taking back in the face of an Ozymandias-like effort to dominate and control. But, much more than that, both deny that ‘nature’ is reason enough to ignore the implications of wrongdoing. In “The Old Prison” we get no sense of the prisoners’ wrong, only the bleakness of the jail’s being there: it has become in its failure (as it always would fail) an embodiment of loss and futility; it is of the bones of the land. In the more direct criticism of the “To My Generation” piece, there is an accusation of injustice in justice itself – that the law imposed on the land in colonizing was an anathema to that land, and ultimately ‘its people’. Comparisons like this between different points in Judith Wright’s writing life generate much understanding of her greater vision. Take the very early “Bora Ring” from her first book The Moving Image (1946), then “At Cooloolah” from her third book, The Two Fires (1955), and finally “Two Dreamtimes” from the much later Alive (1972). All three poems are concerned with the relationship between Indigenous and colonial Australia (in its various manifestations). “Bora Ring” might be said to take a more patronizing look at the ‘issue’, in the sense that absence is noted and responsibility (for the damage done to a brother person) focused through a Biblical lens: The hunter is gone; the spear is splintered underground, the painted bodies

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a dream the world breathed sleeping and forgot. The nomad feet are still. Only the rider’s heart halts at a sightless shadow, an unsaid word that fastens in the blood the ancient curse, the fear as old as Cain.

At first glance this seems a typical colonial-guilt poem: the colonial rider / inheritor feels discomfort because of a violation of the basic Judaeo-Christian principle of justice and loyalty to a brother. Out of this, we might surmise noble sentiments in a noble-savage construct. In this context, the use of the figurative to equate Indigenous spiritual presence with the literary (derived from the Biblical) ghost is further evidence of appropriation. . . another classic example of poetic sentiment separating from implications in the real world. But there is more to this than we might think. One must remember that this is a projection through the eyes and collective inherited sensibilities of the rider. It’s his way of understanding in an inchoate way – the poet translates his disturbance and sense of guilt into the discourse he comes out of. There is, in the least, an acknowledgement of broader cultural culpability for wrong done here. Again, an issue of justice. “At Cooloolah” is one of Wright’s masterpieces. It taps into the ‘issues’ of “Bora Ring” but goes much further in its metatexts and broader implications. In the following two magnificent stanzas, the idea of conquest and occupation is overturned without any sense of a romantic resonance to appease guilt: but I’m a stranger, come of a conquering people. I cannot share his calm, who watch his lake, being unloved by all my eyes delight in and made uneasy, for an old murder’s sake. Those dark-skinned people who once named Cooloolah knew that no land is lost or won by wars, for earth is spirit; the invader’s feet will tangle in nets there and his blood be thinned by fears.

From a contemporary viewpoint, there is a more recognizably ‘postcolonial’ deconstruction of the positions of the colonizer and colonized. There is a sense that colonization has failed in anything more than murder, that the invaders will always be the real losers. Extending this, we might see that no hybridity is possible in the face of such crimes, and in the face of such spiri-

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tual and cultural strength existing in direct conjunction with, and coming out of, a land that the invaders can only abuse and misunderstand. What makes this a technically as well as politically radical poem is that the image-making, so characteristically rich (Wright is one of the great image-makers in Australian literature), is beholden to the implications of the message – what is being said struggles against the physical confines of stanza and line, and the very ability to express and discuss the horrific implications of the invaders’ actions. The calm of the stanza pattern is belied by the trauma of what’s being said. It is characteristic of Wright to undo and ironize form through strong political purpose. “Two Dreamtimes” is dedicated to “Kath Walker, now Oodgeroo Noonuccal,” Indigenous poet and activist, and Judith Wright’s close friend. It is significant to note that Walker changed her name as an act of resistance and reclamation at the time of the (very white) Bicentennial Celebrations of the First Fleet’s arrival in Australia in 1788 (and thus the title was emended to note this name-change for the Selected Poems originally published in 1990). This poem is fraught with contradictions in Wright’s effort to find kinship, and break out of the binary she herself cites, of the conqueror and the persecuted. Common ground is found in gender. Wright spent her entire life writing poems of empathy and insight into what it means physically and ontologically to be a woman in a patriarchal world, but, even more, writing poems as an affirmation of human complexity, agency, and identity. Wright projects her own sense of anger and humiliation at where she comes from – indeed, who she is – into her effort to find spiritual connection with Oodgeroo, her ‘shadow-sister’. One feels that the necessity of the poem is on her side, and there’s a tacit acknowledgement of Oodgeroo’s likely graciousness in accepting such an address. The tension in the poem manifests itself in the apportioning and accepting of blame on the poet’s part – no longer the distance of voice in the previous two poems I have mentioned in this context, but the poet herself: Over the rum your voice sang the tales of an old people, their dreaming buried, the place forgotten. . . We too have lost our dreaming. We the robbers, robbed in turn, selling this land on hire-purchase; what’s stolen once is stolen again even before we know it.

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If we are sisters, it’s in this – our grief for a lost country, the place we dreamed in long ago, poisoned now and crumbling.

Wright claims kinship with the land, and admits loss. One confronts degrees of belonging – childhood spent in a particular place, older pioneer family – in the face of tens of thousands of years of family presence. This is not benign; there is a passionate urge to be part of the land because it is deeply felt, and though there is necessary contrition (justice again), hopes of redemption and ultimate connection come through friendship with an Indigenous Australian. The parrying and dialogics of the poem show an awareness of this irresolvable irony – it is the same faced by the rider in “Bora Ring,” just a more direct way of trying to overcome the guilt. One might consider this a form of appropriation, but in the context of Wright’s activism for land rights and Aboriginal rights in general, we are forced to re-assess. Poetry is based in the act of comparison: of creating allusions whose sources the poet knows, having seen something outside the readily described but wanting to allow another to enter into it. Creating the pictures in our heads that, in the end, don’t need the words. This is what Wright is doing. It’s a life’s writing process. It’s a technical, philosophical, and political agenda. If Judith Wright has a greatest poem, it might very well be “Naked Girl and Mirror.” A girl conversing with herself as woman in a mirror (or the true self conversing with the socially constructed self, ruled by vanity and expectation, entrapment, and disappointment). Reflection becomes illumination and obscurity. Its longer lines, its address to the self – the internal ‘Other’ – its dialogue between soul and body resolved as a soul–body conjoining that remains as a secret self, throughout life, that a partner can never know – the inner girl that the grown woman might forget but who defines her deepest freedoms and identity – the poem is unmatched, to my mind, by any other with its subject-matter I have read. The self-accusation, the call for agency that won’t come in the living world, and the tension of self-address, often using a staccato line with multiple caesuras in conjunction with distended iambs, are disturbing. The poem’s power rests in the addressing voice’s denial that the grown woman can ever know her real inner self, when they are in essence one and the same. The forces and conventions of a society in which women are forced to role-play from birth to death, but especially from puberty on, don’t beat the soul even if they do the body. The poem is selfaccusatory and self-liberating, a poem of compliance and resistance. In the

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end, not even male (we assume) lovers can get ownership of the inner self which the woman is taught to deny even to herself, but which is so desirable to the controlling lover: Yet I pity your eyes in the mirror, misted with tears; I lean to your kiss. I must serve you; I will obey. Some day we may love. I miss your going, some day, though I shall always resent your dumb and fruitful years. Your lovers shall learn better, and bitterly too, if their arrogance dares to think I am part of you.

Irony and empathy work together. Wright always wrote out of self-knowledge. The list of Wright’s influential poems is long. And when I say influential, I mean to the extent that generations of Australian schoolchildren knew them, if not by heart, then something close to it. Wright’s work was used for teaching readings of Australian landscape (in the European way of seeing), as affirmations of pastorality (which she later rejected, though this selection by Wright contains two of the poems she viewed as most problematically affirming in this context, and probably the two best-known Australian poems outside the work of Banjo Paterson, “Bullocky” and “South of My Days”), social issues (see “Metho Drinker”.. . one of my classes spent an entire lesson discussing the obvious meaning, but one difficult for schoolchildren, of “His white and burning girl, his woman of fire, / creeps to his heart and sets a candle there” – the sexual, even romantic, substitution of alcohol in a perverse and horrific irony eluding us until prompted), Indigenous rights, and environmental issues. Wright was identified as definitively Australian, and was sold to us with a nationalistic affirmation she would have found disturbing but maybe also pleasing at the same time. There is that parochialism in her work, but it’s not an uncommon attribute in poets of world standing. Other nations affirm their own through affirmations made by others of their own. Spanning a large part of Wright’s working life was her relationship with the philosopher Jack McKinney (who died in 1966; though he and Wright married in 1962, they spent many years living as a couple prior to that). McKinney had played an intensely intellectual role in feeding her poetry. Wright suffered deafness and eventually impaired vision toward the end of a vital and busy life. That busy life also included her helping to found the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland, raising a daughter, advocating for many other poets, fighting for Indigenous rights (including helping Nugget

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Coombs found the Aboriginal Treaty Committee in 1979), and standing up to governments in Australia over numerous social and environmental issues. I wrote to her a couple of times near the end of her life, and received back one fax in large letters and a card. They were the two most important short communiqués of my life even though they were negative replies to my requests for poems – she pointed out that she didn’t write poetry anymore. She had said what she had to say, though she never stopped fighting for just causes. I am an anti-nationalist, but she would have understood that, as her version of nationalism was about country and the local, not about power and might. In her last book of poetry, Phantom Dwelling, she wrote these lines: Rhyme, my old cymbal. I don’t clash you as often, or trust your old promises of music and unison. I used to love Keats, Blake; now I try haiku for its honed brevities its inclusive silences.

Is there a new poetic in this? Her last book contains long-lined poems as well, but maybe reconciles the above declaration with her older prosody in the wonderful “The Shadow of Fire: Ghazals,” which, loosely using the internal structures of the ghazal, bring the ‘shorter’ and ‘longer’ together, and free this strictest of forms from rhyme and repetition, reforging it in a landscape of her mind, stretching over her life. In these poems, the personal address to the world around Wright reaches its apogee – a Sufi-like affirmation of all existence grounded in her familiar sense of the real, her down-to-earth practicality. The land is no game, but poets do play games. And whatever one’s views or aspirations, we are neither all one thing nor all another. With the power to write of ‘issues’ as she did, it is easy to forget that Wright was a great poet of love and affirmation, and a great celebrator of beauty, especially in nature. Often this is anchored in the brutal irony of the abuse of nature (see the powerful “Extinct Birds”) or with foreboding and warning, but in the end it was an expression of the sublime. A Human Pattern finishes with these lines from the ghazal “Patterns”; patterns were something that fascinated Wright and her philosopher husband – they had majesty but were never without social implications. Her poetry thrived on what seems, often, paradox:

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That prayer to Agni, fire-god, cannot be prayed. We are all of us born of fire, possessed by darkness.

Wright is an elemental poet. So much fire, water, earth, and air is in her work. And, of course, that necessary fifth element, quintessence. The senses, birds and animals, women and children, and landscapes, all inhabit her work. She is often called a poet of nature, but I think she is far more a poet of human contact with the land in which humans and nature are differentiated. This is not to say they aren’t part of the whole but, rather, that poetry is an exploration of the distance humans create between themselves and nature. Between ideas of ‘Eden’, and the world they ‘scape’. In the end, Wright was entirely sceptical of the Western aesthetic triumphing over the land, or even representing it, and I have often wondered if this was the real reason for her poetic silence late in life. a

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Vanishing Points208

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T COULD BE ARGUED THAT THE LYRIC IN POETRY IS A FAIT ACCOMPLI ,

that it is generic across languages and cultures. If musicality and the register of song inform the line of poetry, or are worked against, then the lyric becomes a truism. But the lyric is more than that. It’s a political registration as well, a declaration of relationship between self and text, self and the empirical ‘outside’. It declares an intentionality in appearance, in its desire for continuation. Typically, a poem gives the reader or listener something to take away from the text – an emotional gravitas, whimsical joy, intellectual or spiritual connection or awakening. These expectations have been challenged and undermined overtly through the stages of modernism, but such challenges are the prototypical concern of the poet regardless of age or context: that is, the relationship between the originating words and word-strings, and their intended audience. The ceremonial chant, the private utterance scribbled on a prison wall, the paternalisms of a society’s laureate: it’s a question of where the packages of word, or words, disseminate, take on lives of their own through the context of each individual or group encounter with the moment of utterance. In a sense, the lyric is lost in the moment of realization: it is that engagement with ‘self’ and articulation, the many possible engagements of the lyrical ‘I’ with signifier and signified. Modernism in poetry maps this frustration of self-expression. The ownership of certainty of observation – that what the poet sees and conveys to those other than him- or herself is a constant – has been placed under pressure and found wanting. Social and cultural upheaval on an unprecedented scale, the destruction of natural ‘resources’ (the word itself is a large part of the problem), and death by mechanization have led to obvious shifts in notions of what constitutes the ‘I’, or, rather, what the ‘I’ can validly express outside its own constructed empiricisms. This is, of course, a ‘culturo-centric’ observation.

208

“Preface” to Vanishing Points, ed. John Kinsella & Rod Mengham (Cambridge: Salt, 2004): xvii–xv.

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Context does matter. Someone writing a poem in a luxury apartment in a great city at the centre of a military empire does create a different intentionality from that of the singer composing with community members, expressing the group’s marginalization, loss, and defiance. The expression ‘avant-garde’ is military in origin, be it from Napoleon’s shock troops or dredged out of Malory. The modernist avant-garde, and the avant-gardes that have emerged out of modernities, have worked to challenge a status quo, or to assert their differences in perception. A more just way of expressing, or expression, comes into play. It’s to do with ‘seeing’, and conveying the politics of that seeing. The relationship between the poet and the tools of expression, and the tensions between experience and expression, are highlighted. Language is of the user, but the user is also a product of language. This paradox informs the desire to make of poetry a weapon to challenge a ‘false’ or ‘deceptive’ status quo. Be it the Dadaists after the First World War, or the play-ploys of Gertrude Stein, or the post-Vietnam War and Watergate eruption of LANGUAGE poetry, or the smouldering rejectionism of the ‘Cambridge School’, or the guerrilla de-hybridizations of the Murri poet Lionel Fogarty. There is iconoclastic intent in each expression, and language is the weapon. It could be argued, however, that the lyric has always been the vehicle for such expression, and the ‘form’ itself – in its paradoxical combination of the universal and the centering of self – evolved as the most effective linguisticmusical vehicle for such expression of opposition. This anthology is an example of how diverse not only conceptualizations of the lyric are, but how malleable its coordinates can become. Each poet here is conscious of the implications of a text that might imprint itself on memory, the effects of the mnemonic, and the lyric’s power of subliminal expression. Rather than see aggressive intentionality, one might equally see a responsibility and concern about the effect the lyric has once it leaves the space of composition. That words ‘change’, that meaning alters according to context, are variable factors that, ironically, liberate rather than restrain the poem. In the 1980s it was not unusual in European-language poetry communities to talk of the death of the lyric – especially in linguistically innovative circles of English-language poets. Maybe what was observed, or intended, was a rejection of the exclusiveness of the self, that the poem could exist in a bubble, ‘ignorant’ of political responsibility. Of course, poetry was never so easy, whatever form it took, but the need to express such concerns – and to test them within the structure of the poem itself – was strongly felt. In recent years, there’s been talk of new lyricism, post-lyricism, and the gamut of

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groupings that comes with a need to reconcile past with present poeticizing. There has been a sense of the metatextual, but this is not necessarily a new thing. Thomas Stanley, a Caroline poet, was a great translator. Most of his own compositions still show traces of those poets he translated. He brought Italian, French, and Greek conventions into play within his strictly formal English verse. He replayed popular conceits in new frameworks. He was an intellect; he was a metatextual poet. The contemporary English-language innovative lyric captures some of this – text and sound to be received on a mnemonic level – but also needs to be processed and thought about. Reading and listening should be work as well as reception. Poets challenge us to think about how the lyric works, and whether it is a literary concept relevant to whatever environment/spatiality we experience it in. The power of the word itself, of the line, of the packaging and distribution of those lines, is in play. The lyric has never been the prisoner of convention that some would have us think it is – metrical consistency in English, or the corset of French syllabics (for example, with the alexandrine, placement of caesura, alternating rhymes, and so on), has always been displaced or eroded without the loss of lyrical effect. The metrically variable lyrics of Sidney through to the resonant para-tac-tics of Prynne have in no way impaired the singing of the language. Rather, they have developed sophisticated layerings of political possibility. Most gatherings of poets are not ‘schools’ but groupings of unique voices. Some speak more directly to us than others, but the sheer power of the lyrical template must call our certainties into question.

Preface to Salt209

T

H I S I S M Y F I R S T S A L T P R E F A C E , despite there having been twelve years of Salt issues before this. I’ve never completely trusted introductions to issues of literary journals. They suggest a formulaic approach, one that goes against everything I’ve hoped Salt represents. It’s about diversity and eclecticism, not playing the game in the way it’s expected. I read with incredulity Robert Ross’s statement in the online Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism that “Australia has produced no single critic or theorist of international stature, nor has it developed a distinct

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Salt: An International Journal of Poetry and Poetics 15 (October 2002).

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school of criticism or theory” – a tendentiousness that needs to be rejected or addressed. This is not the place to outline the extensive historical evidence that might be called on to refute the statement, but it is the place to claim that writers and editors have been involved in such a dialogue within Australia, and with other regions, for some time! Ross is well-informed about things Australian and literary, and is not blind to developments and variations on pre-existing conversations from elsewhere in the world, but I feel he has missed something vital going on in Australia. Salt is an engagement, if not a ‘school’, of literary displacement and slippage. It refutes prescription and creates community. It comes originally out of Australia, and yet is not Australian, nor of any other nation-state. That’s a statement. A theory is working here – consciously. It’s a manifesto. Its eclecticism is theory. It lives it, doesn’t simply report it. The recent co-issue with John Tranter’s like-minded (in some ways at least!) Jacket magazine is evidence that this is not just one editor ‘pissing in the breeze’. The most interesting criticism and theory coming out of Australia, or anywhere else for that matter, is concerned with issues of production, of boundarytesting. Even J.H. Prynne’s sublime and astonishingly referenced piece of scholarship, They That Haue Powre To Hurt,210 is also the work of a poet of diverse language-use and writerly utterance. Scholarship is significant, but so is the poet commenting on the poet. Reading the contexts, exploring the specific and possible uses and meanings of word as deployed in the poetic line in the context of its time of writing. Mediated through the poet-scholarcritic of a contemporary language-usage. Originally, I sent out messages to dozens of poets and scholars asking them to react to the comment by Ross. Some simply sent poems or articles back without explanation, seemingly removed from my original invitation. Others were more direct. Some material was just ‘general-purpose’. It became clear that it didn’t matter, and what was necessary was the curating of a space that would allow this digressiveness to speak for itself. The current issue, consequently, is not a ‘theme’ issue. Fast-forward to the inclusion of some astute and interesting pieces that test such an assertion, but without letting it overwhelm the context. Praxis works best: a practical demonstration across registers of creativity. Many of those contributing may know little about Austra-

210

J.H. Prynne, They That Haue Powre To Hurt: A Specimen of a Commentary on Shake-speares Sonnets, 94 (Cambridge: the author, 2001).

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lian literature, criticism, or literary theory, but then, by contributing, maybe they do! This is a diverse issue of Salt (I like to think they always are). Not only in juxtaposing the ‘experimental’ and ‘traditional’ – tired terms that don’t hold up to any kind of scrutiny – but in the alternative ways of viewing ‘language’ and the possibilities of language that are suggested. In the end, through the archiving and ‘selling’ of the literary journal, the packaging, the arrangement and presentation of texts becomes a language in itself, outside, possibly, of editorial intent. So this issue calls the bluff. It’s an A B C of names, and maybe of themes. It’s a primer. The stagnation of a culture comes through being only inward-looking, through resistance to dialogue with cultures outside itself. Of course, a culture must make its own choices about the nature of its contacts with other cultures. The separation of a writing culture from a scholarly culture is a material case in point – the protection of academic language, the gate-keeping academia, versus the preciousness of the ‘out there’, attempting-to-make-a-living ‘writer’ needs to be challenged from within – on both sides, and in that liminal zone that is a space such as Salt. Not many Salt authors, whether they are part of university culture or otherwise, would identify with something as prescriptive as the academy! And many of these authors would disagree on fundamental points of contact. Personally, as a vegan, I might have a problem with the Dalai Lama’s dietary reasoning, but this doesn’t blind me to the relevance of his views as a mirror for greater cultural and spiritual issues. The difference creates the dialogue. Salt is entering its most determined period of publication. Three issues out in a short time, a compulsive poetry-publishing programme. Salt is based in three countries – Australia, England, and the U S A . It’s about pluralism. It’s about internationalism, and respecting regional integrity. And it’s about nations of diverse language-use, and not nations of State. It’s not a centre; nor does it recognize a particular centre, or even centres. It’s a journal without borders – belonging to no place or culture specifically. Of course, it’s prisoner of its intentions, but these intentions are to adapt and keep moving. It’s about respect in the end. Respect for those who aren’t yourself, and what they have to say. Some writers in the issue have never published before; there are others who are established literary names. They’re talking to each other, and readers are invited to join the conversation or start one of their own. A journal should listen on the level of text, as well as suggest and chatter.

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International Regionalism and Poetryetc211

P

W E S T E R N A U S T R A L I A , was, and probably still is, the most isolated capital city in the world. When I lived in Geraldton, completing the last three years of high school, the town’s population edged over the rubicon that would make it a city (25,000) – bringing a consciousness of being some kind of centre within the international language of place: district, suburb, town, city, state, country. Whether I was in the country, or in the coastal town /city of Geraldton, or in Perth, I felt isolated. I read science fiction to break down that isolation. I read ‘great’ literature from all over the world. I leapt into computers when they first arrived on the scene – in fact, being, so I’m told, the first school-child to ever use a computer in a school in Western Australia, possibly Australia. I helped set it up – a Wang P D P 9. It required punch cards, of course, and that was a language that escaped the limitations of text and yet created new limitations. Communication fascinated me. It meant freedom, escape, knowledge. At one stage I was communicating by letter with up to two hundred poets and writers from around the world – simply so I could feel part of the world. As soon as I was old enough to travel, I did so. In some ways, being away from ‘home’ has clarified things for me. Distance does this. From an early age poetry had meant this to me – metaphor was an alternative reality, a virtual space before the language of technology had provided the terminologies. In the simulacrum I travelled. Writing poetry was one way of accessing a ‘universal’ space, a global language. The way poetry was presented to readers also fascinated me. I tried to start my first serious literary journal when I was about twenty – it was to be called Canti. I collected some excellent material for it, with strong support from that Australian internationalist David Brooks, but a lack of finances defeated me in the end. At the end of the 1980s, when I founded Salt – first issue early 1990 – it was with the same ‘internationalist’ take on things. My influences were as diverse as New Poetry (edited by Robert Adamson) and the Paris Review. Early issues of Salt were fairly well landlocked, but as Salt developed so did its international content. It is now a truly international journal. Salt is, however, a symptom and not a cause, as indeed is the internationalist angle I bring to publishing material in Stand with Michael Hulse (a long211

ERTH, THE CAPITAL OF

“Geography is History: John Kinsella on International Poetry Space,” Poetry Review (London) 60.2 (Summer 2000): 4–6.

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time internationalist – also in his capacity as my predecessor at Arc), as well as my role as International Editor at Kenyon Review and International Editor for Arc publications. At the core of it is a desire to cross boundaries, to open up lines of communication. This is not done randomly, but within a code of respect for the integrity of regional concerns and demarcations. For an internationalist, there are some links that can’t be made, and that should not, indeed, be attempted. On a local level, someone recently offered me a recording supposedly made of Syd Barrett strumming a guitar behind his fence – a microphone had been strategically placed to catch the erratic chords. This is material that should not be available to me, but a neighbour listening nearby who hears it randomly might justifiably stand and listen. On the other hand, rare studio recordings of Syd Barrett that circulate don’t seem to fit the category of personal intrusion. It’s a strange analogy, but a workable one – there are poetries that should not be made available to all leaders and listeners, as there are words, rituals, artworks, and pieces of music that belong to particular contexts and places. The process of publication and editing is a political one. This is why I am strongly against the publication of Aboriginal songcycles that have been collected by white anthropologists. It’s simply not the non-Indigenous publisher’s right to access such materials at will. So what are we trying to achieve through ‘internationalizing’ poetry? On one level, we’re talking about enriching respect and intra-cultural understanding, on another, about a global linguistic tourism. The latter is obviously an undesirable side-product of the former. The internet is recognized as the stimulus for the rapid rise of an international consciousness, and for a consciousness that exists in a non-geo-space. A parallel world. A place of community where the boundaries are more flexible and language more fluid. But is this the case in reality? Boundaries and territories exist on the net as much as anywhere else. Prejudices of the real world persist and multiply in cyberspace. You can have small-minded inward-looking poets on the net as much as you can in the outside world. People use it to promote their own work as much as to bring attention to others. The desktop becomes the coffee shop. And so on. You have your poets who publish only on the net, and those who see it as a second-rate place to publish. There are ‘topline’ internet journals, and second-rate internet journals. In a field where self-publishing is the norm, there are strong moves towards creating hierarchies. An awareness of place beyond one’s own may have been prompted by the net, but in the end it is subject to the conditions of social relations that operate in the outside world.

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One of the great uses of the net is in creating these alternative communities (along with their own boundaries and languages, etc.). The invigoration of poetry at the level of language is seen daily on discussion lists and in collaborative web projects. I have co-written two books via email, and numerous pamphlets. It is easy to cut-and-paste and interact with another writer’s words. An active – cybernetic – text emerges. The possibilities are endless. With the poetryetc email discussion list, which I have run over the last few years, a number of projects have emerged and have been developed. Poetryetc also runs a Featured Poet series – in fact, we are well into the third series now. Poets as diverse in technique and voice and location as John Tranter (Australia), Michelle Leggott (New Zealand), Alice Notley (U S A via Paris), Nils– dke Hasselmark (island of drholma), Jo Shapcott (U K ), and dozens of others have been run. Each feature carries a statement by the author, a selection of poems, and a biographical note. One of the most successful projects to be run was the Interactive Geographies Project, which will be published by Salt in book form later this year. It basically functions as a long prose poem. People were invited to write about the space they were ‘in’, in the following way: I’d like to invite Poetryetc participants to assist in the creation of a geo-text. The aim is to break down territories, boundaries, demarcation lines etc. by creating an interactive regionalism. If people would send to the list responses to their immediate surroundings – responses to location, demographics, spiritual signifiers, gender, and so on – I’ll work the collective effort into a single text and publish it as a Salt book. Your responses should be without punctuation and in continuous text – no line breaks. You will be appropriated, altered and mixed. So, maybe Douglas could begin with “Paris,” or maybe it’s the Alberta Douglas, or maybe Alison in Melbourne, or someone who lives purely in cyberspace. Deserts, oceans, and the maps of circuit boards all welcome. Interact away!

Pieces came in in their dozens – even hundreds. I cut and spliced and mixed the prose poems into one continuous text. Here’s a small extract: two ferries 30 k town fishers loggers tiger lilies rhododendrons begonias hemlock painters sculptors an island of palm washed up at Santa Ana and down to the spilt warehouses all in the head the paint factories the furniture showrooms sprawled carpenters gardeners farmers deejays carvers electricians plumbers if you crane your neck you can just about see Kings College chapel through the third floor window though normally I keep the blinds closed to cut down reflections off my X-terminal monitor a colleague described mock-

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enviously as being the size of Rutland actually the view from the other side is better because you’ve got the Cam even though the gasometer spoils styles canada geese sea lions seals sand unpublished serious echoes remixing Heraclitus like he must be a mountain in Otago while gray kingfishers hunt California and marshhawks stylize hawkeyes by precise lack of coloration in birds earthbound where else but in newzealand the only raptors are a falcon and a swampharrier a name which reminds me that the worlds tallest flowering plant the eucalyptus regnans is called Mountain Ash by mainlanders but swamp gum in Tasmania most everything is swamp here it seems and the distinction in naming between here and there reminds me of the marketeers and their wiles as they try to superimpose blocked culverts rotting bridges daft dogs fast cars houses and converted barns where the ploughmen set soil aside to English nature’s doubtful taxonomy I walk despite the numbers also walking where there’s a train saying good afternoon it’s a lovely day in Kew Gardens.

This is international regionalism at work. It speaks for itself. Internationalism becomes more than the mixing together of names from diverse parts of the planet, more than hybridizing poets with different attitudes to form and language, with different ethical and political views; it becomes a voice in itself. If the author is not dead, the author is variegated and multiplied. Those desiring machines have created a cybernetic voice and a place that is unfindable on any map as we know it. This is the stuff of exploration and holds the attendant risks – it is not always desirable for individual voices to be lost to the community. Colonizations can take place without an awareness of a territory’s even being crossed. These genre-busting exercises, these internationalist footsteps, can’t escape the lessons of history. As they say, for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction. One project’s freedom is another’s compromise. Not all words and all textual environments are up for grabs. These are not merely verbal games. The globalization of text must also carry respect for the specific. Individual authors will no doubt recognize their words in the piece quoted above, but the words have become part of the whole, part of the metaphor of the poem itself. All participants agreed that individual contributions would not be identified – indeed, due to the ‘mixing’ process, this is impossible; but the names of all ‘players’ will be included in the front of the publication. A couple of recent postings I sent to the list are as much about a view of ‘internationalism’ as they are about poetryetc:

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The reason this list was set up in the first place was to illustrate that different poetics/pov/geographies/cultures etc (the etc. being the most important part to my mind) can find common ground for dialogue.

and Just a note re stats: membership of this list has been fluid from the early listbot days. The number of women on the list at any one time has varied from just under fifty percent to just under thirty-three percent. One of the prime directives of the list is to recognise the truth behind what Mairead and Alison and many others have observed (the archives of poetryetc and poetryetc2 carry some pretty pointed comments by Tracy Ryan, re this). . . List membership is open and I actively encourage women to join. You’ll note that there’s a fair balance re the Featured Poets. I take these points extremely seriously. Thanks for your comments! And poetryetc is a “neutral” (and) safe space – at least that’s what it’s working towards.

The ground-rules for poetryetc were: no racism, misogyny, or bigotry of any kind. The list has members who are leading poets and critics, people who would normally be seen as being in opposing ‘camps’ (the concept of ‘camps’ has been hotly debated lately) communicate and interact on a regular basis, and people who are just starting to write poetry or are only interested in reading and discussing it all find a home on poetryetc. There are linguistic innovators and formalist poets, there are cross-genre enthusiasts and traditionalists: you name a binary and it’s there, and it’s surely been broken. And it is international in its membership. In promoting an internationalism, I feel that one should be wary of ignoring responsibilities in one’s own backyard. This is the regionalism issue again. In my case, the degradation of land, the ecological disaster that is modern farming in the Avon Valley, a murderous history of displacement of the Nyungar people, and the obligation to actively support the pursuit of land rights – these are just some of the issues that inform whatever I do or say, in whatever context. This is where my so-called ‘anti-pastoral’ comes from. It is easy to make generalizations as an internationalist, to forget the importance of context. There are universal truths, but environment shouldn’t be forgotten, despite the claims of certain geneticists! I once wrote a poem about my Uncle Jack “trusting no more than his own.” My family live in York, about seventy miles out of Perth in the Avon Valley. It’s wheat and sheep territory. My brother is a shearer, my Uncle

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Gerry a farmer. Uncle Jack has never understood why people need to go ‘elsewhere’. He reckons there’s enough for a lifetime to do and learn where you’re born. He has that rare ability, like my brother, to divine water. I always felt, as a child, that this gave him a head start – the ability to be in two places at once, to speak another language and know another space.

A Poet Laureate for Australia? God Forbid!212 It’s the edge of subversion that comes with the poet existing outside the status quo that makes poetry necessary. Though one should be somewhat sceptical of Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary, its savage irony underlines how portentous the tradition of Poet Laureate is. This from an American playing with the word ‘laureate’:

‘O

FFICIAL POETRY’ IS RARELY ANY GOOD, TO MY MIND.

Laureate, adj. Crowned with leaves of the laurel. In England the Poet Laureate is an officer of the sovereign’s court, acting as dancing skeleton at every royal feast and singing-mute at every royal funeral. Of all incumbents of that high office, Robert Southey had the most notable knack at drugging the Samson of public joy and cutting his hair to the quick; and he had an artistic color-sense which enabled him so to blacken a public grief as to give it the aspect of a national crime.213

There’s been much talk recently of Australia ‘appointing’ its own poet laureate. Given the ongoing constitutional connection with the Queen of Great Britain, one might even ask if the British are going to time-share their recent appointment, Andrew Motion. This hasn’t been seriously suggested – the idea is for Australia to have one of its own, appointed ‘officially’, selected by those who apparently know best. The Americans have their own version of a laureateship, but the position is temporary (the British version is for life), and the prospect of variety one of its advertising points. Rita Dove is a very different poet, with different public projects, from the incumbent Robert Pinsky, for example. This national character-building, this cultural advertising, is reinfor212

“Laureates for Australia,” The Australian’s Review of Books (July 2000): back

page. 213

Ambrose Bierce, The Enlarged Devil’s Dictionary, ed. Ernest Jerome Hopkins, preface by John Myers Myers (The Devil’s Dictionary, 1911, rev. 1967; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971): 204.

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ced by the institutional support of the august Library of Congress. So the role is about an individual, but that individual is just a temporary face of something greater than its component parts – the United States of America. So where does the idea for an Australian poet laureateship stem from? A desire to consolidate Australian cultural consciousness – a type of nationalistic reassurance? Or maybe Australia is looking to the international cultural market-place – another stunt, another manoeuvre in the international Australian advertising campaign that has at its head OlympicsAustralia.com? Or is it a reward, something far more personal? There’s little doubt that Les Murray would be the first appointment, and, political differences aside, few would argue against his deserving such a position, should it be established. My argument isn’t with Les, but with the need for the position in the first place. It’s worth noting that when the search for a British poet laureate was on, there were whispers – no, shouts – that the next instalment should be either a woman, a minority representative, or a poet of the Commonwealth. Oh, there was Ireland as well. How about Seamus Heaney? No, Seamus told them clearly – though politely – that he wasn’t available. Ireland doesn’t pay homage to the Queen of Great Britain! No chance of another Act of Union there. Of course, any choice made by a governmentappointed panel of advisors would have to get the Queen’s approval (after all, it’s her show), so that left only the Commonwealth as a possible extra-terrestrial recruiting ground. Les Murray, or Derek Walcott? After some delay, both poets announced they were unavailable. Whether they really had a chance is open to conjecture, but the idea was seriously suggested. The People of the U K might well have feared a reverse colonization. So, back to the internal concerns of ethnicity, gender (there has never been a woman laureate), and politics. Tony Harrison recoiled from the idea of his being appointed and wrote a bitter, if not very good, attack on the whole idea. His recent book Laureate’s Block and other poems carries this attack, which falls between the planks as disingenuous in its effort to imply that he’s the real people’s laureate anyway, and that his good republican credentials would never have him sink so low. The potential role of government in any Australian appointment is of particular concern. Whether the position is mediated via a government agency or through some other body that functions with government funding, the question arises of appropriateness, influence, and purpose. So, pay-off time, or is some more altruistic motive at work? Even if those supporting this notion see

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it as a way of encouraging poetry in the community, shouldn’t they question the inevitable creation of hierarchies that follows such a privileging action? One can’t help seeing a link between Australia’s failure to take a step towards a more positive history by shedding constitutional ties with the Crown and the backroom moves to establish a post of Australian Poet Laureate. The need to identify ‘authority’, to gain the cultural assurance of the State’s imprimatur, is a sad sign of a period in Australian politics where an ignorance of what constitutes a national literature, and what its implications are, lurks behind official posturing. To create such a position, especially in a climate such as this, says more about identity-crisis and the need to create nationalist placebos than it does about any respect for poetry and its significance. To create poetry of commemoration, of the public occasion, is to reinforce the notion of State – even on those rare and bold occasions when such poetry bites the hand that feeds it. It most often creates an environment of reaction, leads to the preservation of the status quo, and marginalizes other poetries and cultures that don’t toe the party line. Having said this, I’m not suggesting that a poet shouldn’t be wreathed in laurels, or should avoid dedications, commemorations, or celebrations. Sometimes they have a positive political effect, not least in declaring the presence of an oppressed group or of working within the zeitgeist of a community. There’s a plethora of unofficial and self-proclaimed poet laureateships out there – from M T V laureates to the rapidly appearing laureates of cyberpsace, and to any other subcultural group you can think of. To define a subcultural laureate, is of course, to work against authority. To undermine the official model. But also to share vicariously in its authority – particularly in a commercial set-up such as M T V (a contrived ‘subculture’). Campaigns to focus international attention on a specific country’s needs, or to celebrate the triumph of poetry over racial and cultural disparity, might be positive. New Zealand has a quasi-official laureateship – the Te Mata Estate New Zealand Poet Laureate. Te Mata Estate is a wine company. The Nelson Evening Mail reported, after the appointment of the Mori poet Hone Tuwhare: .

the award is made every two years to someone who has made a significant contribution to New Zealand poetry and carries with it a grant of funds and allocation of wine from the century-old winery, in keeping with the traditional award of wine to a British poet laureate.

While valuing the appointment of Hone Tuwhare, I have my doubts about the usefulness of imitating British practice. It sends strange signals of validation.

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Private industry connecting with an ‘official’ historical culture. The political signals can be contradictory. More often than not, however, national laureateship appointments highlight a failure to address the needs of different communities. This isn’t about poetry of the self but about poetry of the public occasion. The international laureate – say, in the case of the Nobel Prize – despite the obvious politics of canvassing and utopianism, the questions relating to criteria and nomination and elites, can affirm a general humanity, lifting communities out of nationalistic dead ends. The choice is an external one, and that helps. Cultures can so easily replicate themselves without critically examining their problems. A look at the history of the British laureateship is a case in point. There have been fine poets; there have been second-rate ones. Regardless, the problems remain the same – the voice becomes attached to a power that has no real interest in the individual, despite the advertising. What, indeed, does the position mean? The British laureateship carries with it the expectation to compose poems for Royal occasions such as births, marriages, and funerals. Other occasions of national significance are also open to versifying. It was made official in 1668 when John Dryden was appointed, but Ben Jonson was actually the first laureate, in 1616. Some decidedly forgettable poets have held the post – including Eusden, Pye, and Warton. Ted Hughes’s seeming ‘disdain’ for writing official celebratory verse probably did it more good than harm. He brought to it the authenticity of a real poet after some fairly lightweight appointments last century. As for the one hundred pounds a year and being made a member of the royal household, I’m sure such privileges had little influence on his poetry. It should be recognized, however, that for all its regal trappings and antiquated attachments, the British laureateship is not, in some senses, as plugged into officialdom as the U S version (where many states, in fact, have their own laureates – there’s a pecking order, one surmises, relevant to the size and influence of the state in question). The Library of Congress administers the office of laureate, and a web-check soon reveals that it’s really plugged-in. The idea of the web as democracy, as the people’s medium, is big. Robert Pinsky reels out the poems celebrating fathers and baseball players, and runs a massive project of people recording their favourite poems. To bring about a focus on poetry on this scale is admirable, so there’s an highly positive side to it. But the rhetoric behind the appointment shows the problem: were Pinsky recommending dysfunctional families and anarchism, I doubt that he’d have

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retained his position for as long as he has. That’s not to say that people have been appointed for writing sanitized verse. Rita Dove, the author of some strong ‘political’ poetry, held the position for a year. But it’s what’s said during the incumbency, and there are some things one can now say, and others one can’t. So, which way to go? The end result seems depressingly the same – one or many faces, it’s still a nationalist (or royal) agenda that’s being pushed. Any official appointment, be it by a government organization or some semi-autonomous body speaking for ‘the Australian people’, is going to be tainted. Maybe we should have a referendum? one might cynically suggest. Then it becomes a question of what questions you ask, how you present them, and the fact that most people would avoid the issue if they could legally do so. To understand Australian poetry, you need to read work by its own poets – whatever their background – and look outside the country as well. The laureateship concept comes out of a desire to create a definitive line of inheritance in Australian writing – to create a canon. I would hope that Australia is confident enough in its literature(s) to avoid such tags of legitimacy. Although, should a laureateship be established, I’m sure poets will be lining up to fill the position.

The Work of Robert Sullivan

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S U L L I V A N I S O N E O F T H E M O S T S I G N I F I C A N T P O E T S of his generation writing in English. This might seem an easy blurb-like statement, but it’s also one that contradicts itself. Sullivan writes inside and outside English. He engages with what he would recognize as ‘Mori English’, though this in a sense is not ‘correct’. He writes an anglophone poetry that incorporates Indigenous language – from naming, to everyday expression, to storylines, to fragments of song-cycles, to mythological clauses. Hybridizing language as resistance to colonization is both a political and a celebratory act. What makes Sullivan essential is that he occupies a liminal space in terms of his epistemology and prosody. This is vital in practice, as his dedication to ‘Mori’ and ‘Polynesian’ cultural heritage/s is, at times, essential in its intactness. This is both necessary and admirable. He is affirming a collective view of action when he cites Albert Wendt as follows: OBERT

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Our quest should not be for a revival of our past cultures but for the creation of new cultures which are free of the taint of colonialism and based firmly on our own pasts. The quest should be for a new Oceania.214

Sullivan is a participant, and his poetry is participatory. Western notions of the ego-self are dissected, but in the same way as he notes that there are cultural and intellectual property-rights categories for the self and the community now in Aotearoa New Zealand, so he acknowledges the outsider, or, rather, the individuation of the self outside community (which one still, inevitably, comes out of). To my mind, in both Sullivan’s critical writing and especially his poetry – a major body of work in itself – what is exciting is this subtlety in exploring specific issues of community and heritage, and the obligations of respect (especially ancestral) held therein, while exploding the myth of the Western self by reinstating the latter within the fabric of community. Sullivan shows how it is possible to reconcile Indigeneity and individuation – lyrically and metaphysically. This expression of universality in specific, coordinate-orientated discourse is dynamic. Robert Sullivan’s exploration of place and time through the motifs of the spiral (from carving to tattoos to text), in both his prose and his poetry, is quite brilliant. In citing examples of the spiral’s influence on the poetry of other writers in defining a ‘Mori’ literature, he creates connections for his own practice: so astonishingly realized in his master-work Star Waka. This volume of “deep sea navigation” and cultural connectivity vis-à-vis the detritus of imperialism and modernity, is prosodically based in European poetics yet effortlessly introduces the motifs of the spiral into the shaping of forms / stanzas. Each page becomes a deep ocean, each poem a vessel (waka is Mori for ‘canoe’). Polynesian explorations are subtextually and overtly juxtaposed with European explorations. One would expect a dichotomous template to evolve, but it is never that simple.

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Robert Sullivan, “The English Moko: Exploring a Spiral,” in Figuring the Pacific: Aotearoa and Pacific Cultural Studies, ed. Howard McNaughton & John Newton (Christchurch: Canterbury U P , 2005): 20, quoting from Albert Wendt, “Towards a New Oceania” (1976), repr. in Writers in East–West Encounter, ed. Guy Amirthanayagam (London: Macmillan, 1982): 206, and in Rob Wilson, “Blue Hawai‘i,” in Wilson, Reimagining the American Pacific: From “South Pacific” to Bamboo Ridge and Beyond (Durham NC: Duke U P , 2000): 139.

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In Star Waka Sullivan melds the contrasts: condemnation and sympathy, similarities (say, in navigation) and differences (especially in intention), irony and sincerity. In this astounding narrative sequence, issues of mythologizing are both central and peripheral (including whether myth is debased, say, per an ‘Uncle Sam’ or even an ‘Odysseus’ – key figure of Western narrative templating). Sullivan at once manages to ‘be Mori’ without compromise and to participate in the ‘beingness’ of the non-Indigenous ‘Other’. It is a reverse of the supposed subaltern position and, even more so, an imploding of alterity. As he himself notes in talking of translating a welcome for a guest at a marae: “In a welcome there are no subalterns, only alterity.” Sullivan’s heritage is vital to him as poet and thinker. His Mori heritage comes through his mother’s side, and he has spoken in an interview of starting to write poetry at eighteen through encountering place (“deliberately” – near his “ancestral fortress”) and sensing the pen being moved (by his ancestors… place… etc). The spirit is a powerful reality behind Sullivan’s work. His obligations to the preservation of his people’s (and peoples’) culture is paramount. Sullivan also has Irish heritage on his paternal grandfather’s side. He is proud of that and cites influences from Joyce to Beckett to Heaney. Traces of all those poets are evident in his work, but so transfigured that they become new and, at times, even more stunning than their models. I am conscious of what I am saying in making such a call. Sullivan allows for a reconciliation between such apparent cultural disparities because of the universalizing link of myth; a respect for origins and stories and their spiritual validity. In Sullivan is the writer many of us have been waiting for – a sharpminded empathizer who writes out of necessity rather than utility. In exploring the spiral motif (history from a Polynesian point of view is generally received as non-linear, maybe curved – as Sullivan notes, the past being in the future – but this does not mean that linearity and the spiral can’t go hand in hand), he draws cultural disparities closer rather than pushing them further apart. In an interview, Sullivan says: When I visited the west coast about four years ago, I went to Yeats’ tower, Thoor Ballylee, and climbed the winding stair to where he observed the stars. I love the spiralling gyres and the energy that shape gives to a poem.215

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“Conversations: Robert Sullivan, poet and judge for the 2005 Kiriyama Prize for fiction,” WaterBridge Review (January 2005): online.

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At the risk of over-excitement, I will end by quoting one of his waka poems which I believe clarifies what I have been trying to indicate above. In creating his fragmentary narrative sequences, Sullivan makes full use of various traditions, but the spiral is at their core. Sullivan writes: I find Maori epistemology very attractive. It can incorporate temporal realities that are both linear and non-linear. Authors are able to fold time in the manner of a spiral, and to stretch it linearly when appropriate.

This statement could be his ars poetica. The spiral is not necessarily in the shape of the poem (though it can be); it is in the weighting of the poem. Sullivan has always been intrigued by sound, and his poems are often musical sculptures. And even when more discursive, the turnings of the words (an aural kerning) give them a music – a spiralling music. Waka 88 Do not mind the settler. I observe the rules of this mythology (see how he did not place a star or ocean or a waka in his pageantry). I am Odysseus, summoned to these pages by extraordinary claims of the narrator. I run through all narratives. Dr Jung put me there early in the century. Look closely at the narration. Who is holding the sails taut, commanding the paddles, seeing that the carvings follow the patterns of waka that follow the patterns of the sea? I. Odysseus. I have put myself here because this is a text. A very western text. the navigators sail with me now. I sail as a member of the crew, and can speak for them.

Sullivan’s poems critique themselves, as Sullivan critiques himself. His linguistic verve, acute intelligence, and brilliance as a poet make him one of the most exciting figures in world literature. —2006

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The Steady Vision of a Modernist Makar

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C .K . S T E A D ’ S L I F E T I M E C O L L E C TION in the middle of the Nullarbor, arriving at the railway siding of Forrest on board the Indian Pacific train. The Nullarbor is a vast flat gibber plain desert that, as its Latin name suggests, is basically treeless. Just blue bush and saltbush, and the odd tree around the railway siding/s planted by rail workers over the decades. Few of these trees survive for long. This is one of the driest places on earth. Reading Stead’s poems in this environment makes for a stark comparison in many ways. Stead enjoys something approaching iconic status in New Zealand letters, and his poetry and fiction are well known in Britain. His Collected Poems was originally published by Auckland University Press in 2008, then brought out in the U K by Carcanet. Stead’s subject-matter draws strongly on his New Zealand background (his family ties there go back to the 1830s), on the richness of his New Zealand landscapes, and on the country’s social and cultural concerns, and he can even step across the Antipodean pond to refer to Australian ‘place’ in various poems. But so much of his creative sensibility is shaped not only by European cultures but also by European poetics. In many ways, anchored in the London of the émigré T.S. Eliot, Stead’s work reaches out like a Grand Tour, collecting artefacts, observations, and sensuous experiences that span classical and modernist themes and experiences and bringing them back to a New Zealand defined by these variables, via London, and yet so very different. Stead melds ‘old-world’ intellectual and aesthetic concerns with ‘new-world’ ways of seeing. His tone is often ‘academic’, witty, and extremely dry, though this is less so in the early image-rich poems. The earliest work included in this Collected dates to his twenty-first year (he was born in 1931), and, apart from uncollected material, the book draws on thirteen collections of poems. Stead’s register often favours mixing the laconic with the factual (or fragments of fact), the empirical with the metaphoric. Anecdotes, snippets of reading or literary reference, artistic allusion, historical data, and scenarios painted as vignettes, gossip, and ripostes, aphorism, miniature portraiture, storytelling, and a bedrock of irony – these underpin much of the work in varying degrees. Stead distantly tells us the story of a poetic life, how poems are made, and the experiences of travel and movement. 216

WRITE THESE REFLECTIONS ON 216

C.K. Stead, Collected Poems 1951–2006 (Manchester: Carcanet, 2009).

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In this vast book we go from rhyming four-line stanzas, through sonnets in couplets, open verse forms, Poundian fragments, notebook-style accumulations, free verse, concrete poetry, forms of Stead’s own invention, and so on. And it is vast in both subject-matter and technique. It is rare for the reader to be able to see beyond the idea of the poem, to have the still moment or emotional insight that inevitably informs Stead’s poetic spirit, but that’s not a problem for me. It might be for others. Stead relishes mixing ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, relishes modernism, and dabbles in the postmodern. If, indeed, there is anything of the latter, it is as an arch modernist ironizing through pastiche and bricolage – in the end, Stead’s classicism, especially his penchant for Latin brevity and satire, means that façades are never enough. His poems are obsessed with meaning, and the arbitrary is an uncertainty he doesn’t entertain for long, even ironically. Writing of sickness, vulnerability, and the breakdown of external control in a late poem like “S-T-R-O-K-E,” with its partial dissolutions of language and meaning, Stead is still insisting on linguistic control and intellectual certainty, even when they appear to be impaired or lost. The perfect words in the perfect order can still be an aspiration even when the sense of the world is breaking down: doctors go walking down cool green corridors soft-soled nurses are numbers / numbness ward is a word and patient is pain is pen

The loss of control of the word leads to other words and a restored ‘sense’. Metonymy is created (and an order) where there barely seems to be any – meaning substitutes for meaning. Stead’s New Zealand is unambiguously a colonized site, but one in which the European values that act as coordinates to his poetic sensibility don’t really translate onto a land that resists and offers an alternative array of poetics. At times in dialogue with this other New Zealand (Aotearoa), and at

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times recognizing himself as ‘Other’, the relationship is not easy, even less easy than the manic and paradoxical brilliance of James K. Baxter’s renunciations, enunciations, and visionary engagements. But it’s this unease, framed within a confidence and ‘ease’ of language-use, that gives Stead’s poetry a raison d’être far outreaching many of his contemporaries. One feels that Stead is not ‘stuck’ in a register or way of viewing his own condition, his own privileged position of articulation in place and community, in his home country, but, rather, needs to identify and investigate the points of connection in divergent histories. Stead doesn’t simply import Europe and Britain into New Zealand; he also exports New Zealand in an effort to qualify its difference and uniqueness. It would be too simple to say he was an internationalist, because, for all his travel and global subject-matter, it’s his being a New Zealander that alters his way of seeing across vast distances, and even his reconsidering of just ‘how’ a poet might write history. Stead is highly attuned to the specifics of place: the plants, the geology, and spiritual signs of location. But fundamental to his poetry is how these aspects can be cast into a language that, as adaptable and ‘growing’ as it is, is strangely resistant to absorbing alternative histories. English, but European languages in general, are celebrated for their failure to signify what they are used to describe. Even in Stead’s most ironic, clipped, and pithy lines, we doubt the very empiricism they are built on for an abstracting spirituality. Stead is often considered a ‘dry’ poet, yet even his ‘driest’ poetry is lively with this contradiction. And that’s why, bereft of the materials of European art and culture, bereft of the glitz of America that he uses as a template for rerenderings of Old-World culture, and an empathy for landscape and cultural dialogue in his native New Zealand, the deceptive emptiness of the Nullarbor is the perfect place to read his poetry. His poems are not re-creations of history and culture, but marginalia that create alternative ways of seeing what we think we know for certain. Stead’s masterpiece, in many ways, is his planned but never fully realized five-part long-poem sequence that began with “Walking Westward,” and includes the brilliant “Scoria” and later the dense long-lined sequence “Paris,” also envisaged as part of this grand work. As Stead himself notes, these poems are concerned with time and place, and range from landscapes in New Zealand to an address to Paris itself as organic entity, in each case reflecting the ‘growth’ of poetic sensibility. The point of the Paris sequence is less the addressing of what is familiar, the elevation of Paris as disturbed muse or icon

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of artistic propagation, as lure to the romantic, than the matter-of-factness against which these sensibilities find their grip. This is where the President of the Republic spends his afternoons. Here’s the street where his motorcade passes. From this dais he pins on ribbons and medals and kisses wrinkled cheeks.

Consider these lines in the context of a later poem, “Deconstructing the Rainbow Warrior,” and the implications of the French body politic and its extension into the sovereign body of New Zealand (which sovereign body? whose?), the bodies of the French agents themselves (with their attendant fake Swiss passports, country of the neutrality of convenience, of the ‘unavailable’ body). Consider these lines in the context of language and adaptation to place and circumstance, its ability to colonize the colonizers. Consider ‘deconstruction’ born of Derrida in Paris, for whom such an act would have been a moral outrage. Consider these lines in such lights and you will go some way to seeing why Stead is not just another Antipodean poet constantly abroad in his sensibilities: Half of Auckland, Dominique argues, has taken their number. She’s exaggerating of course. He refuses to panic. A beautiful night. You can see the lighthouse light on off Rangitoto, and an undercover moon casual among the clouds over North Head. Here come the rubber boys back in their puttering Zodiac. Remember, reader, poems don’t deal in fact – this is all a bad dream in the Élysée Palace.

Stead’s ironic tone, so drawn out of the Roman satirists, out of the epigrammatic, is always layered with a sensitivity to place, so that even his bluntest puns connect us with what is lost to the expediencies of sovereign states, the drives of the apparently enlightened world. He doesn’t trust it. And this, in the end, is what brings him closer than many other non-Mori New Zealand poets to a sense of what is problematical in his writing a New Zealand that will always at least partly be at one remove from him, no matter how close to it he feels. In many history poems over his writing life, Stead maps the distance and points of contact between the colonizers and the colonized. It is the essence of this history he wrestles with: how poetry might retell the official tales.

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Technically, Stead is one of the most assured poets writing in English. His measure of the line is precise, and he has the rare ability to give readers a sense that the poet is there, chatting to them personally, in easy lines that nonetheless are full of poise and balance – qualities I consider most vital in the contemporary line because a sense of ‘natural’ speech can be preserved while restraining a line’s rhythm and content’ to prevent it becoming too prosaic. Stead is not a demonstrative musician, but often his apparent ‘flatness’ of rhythm is understatement, and the reader is jolted into reconsideration on those occasions when the verbal pitch suddenly rises or falls (often when connected with the visual). In other words, with seemingly minimal effort, Stead gets the maximum in terms of meaning and sonority from any given line. This is a fine quality that has taken decades to perfect. Stead is also a master of the staggered line, breaking a line of thought at exactly the right point, ensuring that it is picked up on the following line at precisely the right point. This progressive variation on enjambment, so familiar to the contemporary reader in many languages, finds its subtlest and yet most often deadly ironic brinkmanship in Stead’s practice. One imagines that getting the lineation correct when laying out this magnificent volume would have been a nightmare. The positioning (and timing) of every indented line is paramount. If Stead is a re-inventor and re-invigorator of the Eliot–Pound strand of modernism, it is with a sensibility that has weathered Abstract Expressionism and Andy Warhol reproduction. His poems process lines, and the lines are part of the visuality of the piece. This from “Yes T.S.: a narrative”: The grapes are in the last leaves are orange and yellow and black on the vines down the beautiful hill-slopes in late sun / chill shadow run the lines.

This Collected Poems is a triumph. If Stead begins his poetry life as a maker of poems as artefacts wrought in image and the texture of words – Street lights are marbling designs on the rain-glazed eye, Shadows sprawling beyond wet hedges Where charcoal trees sketch rough-and-ready edges On the smudged grey backdrop of a winter-waking sky.

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– he has honed his craft through his struggles with the nature of history and through telling of a crisis of belonging and of what matters in the crisis of modernism and modernity for him as poet. His poetry has become increasingly sparse and pared-back on the page, with a frequent emphasis on the short line, clauses, and the cumulative build-up of fragments of speech, observation, maxims, even what amount to minims of images; and Stead is often epigrammatic. That earlier verbal density has given way to acute intellectual clarity, to the sharp ‘turn of phrase’. What’s more, with ‘ease’ he catches trauma and discomfort in a way that challenges any finality of art. Art is important to Stead, but, in the end, he knows its place. With all Stead poems, it’s a matter of timing, of using it at the exact moment. In a piece of personal history that, in some senses, is still another’s history (as all history surely is), we read in “My Sister and M.S.”: Small boys avoid big sisters but mine in age against all the odds in that battle with her body proved that grace could win. ‘Daddy’s Girl’, I drafted these lines for you on the warm stones of a Mediterranean beach, on our father’s birthday.

—2009

On Patrick Lane, and Patrick Lane on Himself217

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H E I N T E N S I T Y O F P A T R I C K L A N E ’ S P O E T R Y arises out of a tension and dislocation between the need to tell a story, and the need to step away from it, being of a specific place and looking back into that place, the desire for love and the trauma that it often brings. Biography – the events of a life, the events that affect a life, and the way a life affects the world around it – is the nexus of Lane‘s poetic. That he was born in British Columbia, Canada, in 1939 is both pivotal and arbitrary to encountering his verse. For this factual poet, every experience produces its fictions: and these are delved into and explored for the truth. When he started to write at the age of twenty-two, Patrick Lane began a process of unpicking the real from the imagined, the truths behind his often extreme experiences. What first attracted me to this truly great poet was his remorseless drive to ‘cut through the 217

“Introduction” to Patrick Lane, Syllable of Stone (Eastbourne: Arc, 2005): 9–20.

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bullshit’. Lane will deliver, warts and all, and you’ll be shocked and delighted at once. You’ll find yourself thinking about issues you’d rather push to the back of your mind. Rather than merely reconcile this life through recollection, observation, recording, and catharsis, Lane’s poetry also becomes part of what is being examined. This avoidance of mere judgment on wrongs committed as a child, or on the complexities of his parents and the difficulties of upbringing and childhood, radiates into a broader humanity. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that the poems are straightforward reflections of Patrick Lane’s character – I doubt that they are. They are varied in tone and approach, with an alchemical and often volatile shift between the figurative and the ‘real’. ‘Nature’, for Lane, is no conceptual ideal; it’s what he and his poems have always been part of. Sometimes the relationship is awkward, sometimes even dangerous and abusive, but it is always honest. Yet despite the brutal honesty in Lane’s work, there is no lack of subtlety; this is a poet of concentrated and often delicate observation. When the poet writes, “Because I never learned how / to be gentle. . . ,” he is referring to the conditions of his upbringing, not to an incapacity in his poetry, as it often shows compassion and ‘gentleness’. But in a world of death, gentleness untempered blinkers insight. Lane is a poet of Dante’s Divine Comedy, though moving through hell, purgatory, and heaven with deceptive ease, and often at once in the same poem. Rarely does one state exist without the other. One should always be bothered by a Lane poem – sometimes, the absolutely unacceptable is where we find a place to exist, a place to belong. There is no good and bad here – all is blurred. The watching, the opening, the being inside, the intertwining of people, animals, flowers, and rocks, present a world of entanglement, a constant cycling of cause and effect. Between the poles of his mother and father, the persona of many of these poems equivocates, prevaricates, asks: Who will I be, I who am now as old as his death, I who have never been a father to my own lost children...

That the stamp of birth and environment will always be part of experience and knowledge qualifies Lane’s vision with a stark fatalism. It’s this ‘darkness’ that makes the luminosity of his vision all the more dynamic – as bright as snow. In his brilliant “Winter” sequence, a landmark of originality, stillness, and depth, in a land that has produced many songs and poems of winter (of

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the snow!), we see this entwined and blurred dualism exemplified, the bleak and the enlightened – a fatalism that brings prophetic insight: Winter 33 The brightness which is the light seen from a tomb and which is what the dead see when they gaze with their marble eyes from the dark rooms they are laid in. This is a whole city this snow.

In garnering poems for this relatively short selection of Patrick Lane’s poetry oeuvre, I originally asked Patrick to make a long selection himself from which I could then work. That longer selection makes a cohesive whole in its own right – the poet mapping his own journey through the disjunctions and meldings of self and text. However, for the purposes of introducing the work of this remarkable poet, to what I imagine will be largely a new readership, I’ve tried to pick up some of his major threads, and demonstrate the thematic and technical range within his lifelong concerns. Place, family, experience, observation, and identity echo through these poems, and though Lane is so often considered a poet of place – and so definitely a Canadian poet – I hope that, as specific as that place might be, I have shown here that Lane is, and has always been, one who dwells in the mind. I’d argue that Lane is a metaphysical poet, whose tools and descriptors have come out of a biography, but range far and wide through the ether. We sense place through his senses. History, rather than being purely retrospective, lives in Lane’s poems. We grow with him. But in the end, it is our own growth, and the growth of the spirit that we find wrestling with the material, with the science of the real. I had in mind to ask Patrick Lane a few questions, so I could quote him in this piece. His answers were so illuminating, and so spontaneous, that rather than extracting a few quotations, I have decided to let him speak for himself: a Tell us a little about your life: especially in your early writing days and your parents’ view of your poetry and writing. You can get a general overview of my bio from my web page (www .patricklane.ca) and, though that will not answer your question, it is some kind of beginning. I married in high school, eighteen years old, when my girlfriend became pregnant, and I then went on to work in the bush and sawmills of the Interior (the general term for the hinterland between the high Rockies

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and the West Coast). As well, I worked on highway jobs as a cat-skinner (driving large earthmoving equipment with dozer blades – caterpillar tractors). That said, I had always wanted to be an artist of some kind from the time I was a young boy. I began writing poetry in 1960. I actually wanted to be a painter, but I couldn’t afford oil paint or acrylics or brushes – we were quite poor, a wife, three children. I wrote in isolation in the lost mountain valleys with no peers and only the poets I’d studied in high school as models. I thought all the poets were dead. I began intuitively and instinctively to write of the world I was a part of, the poverty, the working-class men and women of the small transient industrial towns and villages, a bear at the burning barrel, a cougar at the door, a man with his hand cut off, etc. I sent them away to a magazine I’d vaguely heard of and they published three poems. I never looked back. I worked all day at the mill, looked after my family in the evening, and when all were asleep I rose and wrote poetry from 11 pm to 3 or 4 am, when I would go to bed and rise at 7 am for work. My parents? My father had left home (the farm in Alberta) when he was thirteen. It was, I think, 1918, the end of the First War. He was a rodeo cowboy, worked the combines of the west, the early oilfields of the west. He moved into the mountains to work on the Kootenay River dams during the late 1920s and early 1930s, meeting my sixteen-year-old mother at a softball game, my father a good player, a catcher. They married when she was nineteen. Three children, boys, fast, me the third, and then the war and my father gone till 1945. He came home, worked his way up to a good white-collar job in an equipment company, was murdered in 1968. A man with authority, trusted by others, a leader, really, kind and generous. I really didn’t know him at all, though I tried hard to do so. He was largely illiterate. Surprised me a year before he died when he casually mentioned he wanted to be a potter when he retired. Who knew he nursed such creative desires? He was an early desaparecido, a missing father. My mother came from middle-class stock, a kind of small-town gentry, a very solitary woman, with a certain class attitude. She was a reader, many books around the house. She behaved, even in our early wartime poverty, as better than others, superior in class, with a distinct attitude toward her own parents’ earlier roots in the U S A . She was sexually abused by her father, and I only discovered that after she died. She was a split personality, very flirtatious and erotic when drunk, very cold and distant when she was sober.

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A certain ‘kind’ of non-urban/rural Canada is at the basis of your work – there are many ‘rural Canadas’; can you specifically position yours? My background wasn’t so much ‘rural’. That implies a kind of agrarian, farm class of people. Mine was of the bush and the mountains, early, industrial, western Canada. The back country, the wilderness was my home. I revelled in the fact that where I walked no white man had walked, the creeks and canyons unknown except for the Indians. My country was the ‘Interior’, south-central British Columbia, a mix of mountain ranges to the east and west and in the middle the high plateaux of the interior. The valley I grew up in was the Okanagan, a desert valley (it was the far northern tip of the Great American Desert that extends from Mexico through America, Arizona, Utah, etc., to B.C.). I cut my teeth on stones and cactus, rattlesnakes, and black widow spiders. Your relationship with your father is pivotal to so many poems – tenderness and brutality that work as the twin poles of your poetry... My father was actually a kind and gentle man, compassionate in his heart for the human world, but he was a man of his time and practised a pragmatic simplicity when it came to killing animals, pets or not. I had been raised by my mother till I was six. I saw a kind of brutality in his practice, his seemingly casual killing of creatures, and was early on shocked by it. He was male, a man of the old days, who had been raised on farms, was a hunter and a fisherman, and he saw the wild country that surrounded us back then as a place that needed to be conquered and civilized. In that he was like other men, with the difference being the contradiction between his tenderness and compassion and the brutality and casualness toward other forms of life. He was uncultured, meaning his personal culture was alien to me. He was not a man of the book, but a man with hands – they did what he asked of them. He was active; my mother was passive. Both were strong, decisive people. He was never cruel. He punished me and my brothers, but never without what he saw as cause. We accepted it. He was a silent man, a man without a story. My mother was silent as well, but very much a storyteller. Her world was fictive, his practical. In your work the male /female binary /dichotomy is foregrounded. There’s a respect, but a distance that the male persona is constantly seeking to bridge – almost to heal. I think my mother was the model for an austere detachment, an inhuman presence. She was a profound sexual being, yet she presented herself to me and

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my brothers as a rather terrifying contradiction. Her behaviour could not be forecast; we did not know who we might meet. She was sexually abused by her father, whom she loved with a great passion. Like many abused children, she created an alter ego, a girl who slept with her father, a provocative and eroticized child. The other girl was demure and rather innocent. Both were profoundly detached. I watched her very carefully when I was a child and a young boy (aren’t all poets watchers?), trying to understand her and so understand what a woman was. Needless to say, I grew up with an extremely distorted model. The old cliché of women seen as either ‘virgin’ or ‘whore’ is most apt. That she contained both in herself was very confusing to me. My father’s behaviour was equally confusing. It was not uncommon for him and his friends to go to prostitutes when they travelled to towns nearby. My mother’s response to this was strange, to say the least. To quote her: “Daddy always had new tricks to teach me when he came home.” My first precocious sorties into the psycho-sexual world at fourteen were very confusing. I idolized women and did not see them as fully realized people. They were, I’m afraid, quite alien to me. I desired them, entered into an active sexual life at a very early age in the 1950s, that highly repressed, conservative decade. The world I inhabited as a young man in the back country was both brutal and simple. Women were treated as objects back then. I was quite unaware that men were treated the same by the women of the time. In my poetry I have tried to both illustrate and explore their suffering and the suffering of the men who practised a machismo excess and a guilt-ridden, self-pitying pathos. I think I see the world through a distorted woman’s eyes, raised as I was in a world that largely did not contain men. Men were away at war when I was a boy. “If,” the poem about the woman and the burro, was first published back in the 1970s and created a terrible furore among both women and men (it was the decade of early feminism), neither of whom saw to the heart of the poem, the suffering of both men and women when confronted with the obscene. Shame and guilt are powerful motivators for change. The male persona in the poem refuses life, torn apart as he is by both revulsion and desire. It is, I believe, an apt definition for my particular generation and, perhaps, for others. Could you discuss the ‘biography’ of the poem “The War”? “The War” came out of a retreat I had at a monastery. The story the potter told me was back in 1973 or 4 and it stayed with me until 2003. I think we are, as poets, not able to tell certain stories until we are old enough to under-

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stand them fully. I learned long ago not to tamper with a story, not to try to express it inadequately. The story of the boy in Germany in late 1944 came as I told it in the poem – a tale carefully told, quietly, and not a confession, but simply a man explaining who he was. Ordinary men untrained in the complex arts of rhetoric and abstract systems of thought explain who they are in a simple story. But the stories have immense implications. I wrote “The War” the same day I wrote “Weeds.” Both came out in an inchoate rush, the poems stitched together by conjunctions and commas, long repetitions, and long lines. Form and content, inextricable, each a complement of the other. My old valley back in the middle of the last century was still a paradise, a wilderness, an ‘other’ place. To go back now is to suffer a terrible pain, the flora and fauna destroyed, the valley overrun by the human. Each man went there to find paradise and found instead his own hell. The creatures, the grasses and cacti, the lost and wonderful rattlesnakes are gone now. For me it is just another holocaust. Though it is a rich and complex poem, I nonetheless find “Part 2” of “Weeds” disturbing – even more disturbing than usual! The derogatory language is in the context of experientiality – the ‘capturing’ of the prejudices of places offset through the awareness of the adult poet – so it’s not simply that. There’s something that gets under the skin and gnaws. You said to me, I imagine off the record: “others more politically correct might shudder a bit” regarding specific expression. What does this say about the ‘child poet’, the child’s experience, the child’s way of seeing as mediated through the adult poet? Even as a child I spoke of the world. The past was the present wrapped in the future. The world of experience I had as a child was one of suffering and loss. By this, I mean my perception of it. My parents, the previous generations, refused to speak. George Steiner’s thesis of ‘silence’ was predicated on the experience of the mid-century war being so terrible it silenced the writer. I found that my mother and father and their friends simply refused the past. They did not want to return to it in any way, least of all in speech. The Dirty Thirties, that decade of suffering, was from 1930 to 1950, twenty years, with a war in the middle. No one wanted to remember it. No one wanted to remember anything. It was as if they were ashamed of the past. As for my behaviour as a wild child, the sheer destructiveness of my actions, the forests I burned down, the animals and birds I wantonly killed, etc., etc., what can I say now but to simply report back in poems what I told as stories back then?

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My models were fictions, the men I saw around me, their behaviour, their terrible actions. I was a born storyteller as a child. I told endless tales of my experiences, most of which were not believed, seen as they were as being outlandish and exaggerated lies. What are your views of Canadian ‘national’ poetry and splits and tensions within this, and where you might position yourself (or not)? I lived through a long period of Canadian nationalism from approximately 1967 through to 1978. Ten years where Canadian writers struggled against the American behemoth who had invaded our psyches with their stories in print, film, and music. I think we looked at our own country and realized our own story had not been told by anyone. We are a bifurcated country with both French and English, but beyond that we are a huge country and are constantly being defeated by our own geography. It is very difficult to explain to someone in Europe how big we are and how far apart we live from one another. It is as far from London to Moscow as it is from Vancouver to Toronto and even then there is still a third of a country to go. We call it ‘out west’, ‘back east’, ‘up north’, ‘down east’, ‘up-country’, ‘down-country’, ‘down south’, etc. We hardly know each other. As to our national poetry? There is no common thread, there are no common themes, beyond the merely human. The American models still dominate, and our young poets turn to them still for affirmation. We do not translate, even among ourselves. The French–English is still referred to as the ‘two solitudes’. The nexus of Toronto /Montreal/New York is still seen as the measure. I have been called a ‘regional poet’ for fifty years because the model of my content, the concrete referents, are not from the centre. I developed as a poet on my own. I am an autodidact, untrained by the academies. I am still seen as someone outside the pale. I do have forebears – Al Purdy, Milton Acorn, Alden Nowlan, and a few others – but they, too, are autodidacts. The “Winter” sequence is elemental and metaphysical. It is Rilkean in its language (thinking of the “Sonnets to Orpheus,” even the Duino Elegies at times), sometimes meditative and imagistic, at other times rhetorical, and at others almost conversational (and intimate, with winter), with the form always being crisp and concise. Thematically, it engages and threatens and wonders /considers at once – tightly drawn contradictions that open new ways of seeing into what is often taken for granted. Could you say a few words about this?

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Regarding winter or “Winter,” the sequence of poems written over three intense days in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, in January, the temperature minus 40 Celsius, the wind blowing, the wind-chill factored in and telling anyone who was mad enough to go outside that bare skin would freeze solid after five minutes of exposure. The Great Plains of the north. How I love their extremes! I lived out there for thirteen years and still miss both the people and the place. There are more miles of road in the southern half of Saskatchewan than anywhere else in the world. It is completely populated by people, one huge farm broken up into grid lines, the lines ‘corrected’ every so many miles to accord with the North Pole. ‘Correction lines’ is what they are called. How human of us, eh? The people of the plains are among the most accommodating, friendly, and kind people you’ll find anywhere, and so are unlike any people anywhere. The Native peoples live on marginalized reserves (à la South African townships – Sask was the model the Boers used) and in the cities in huge slums. But “Winter”? I was musing on the fact that my country is one of only a few that experience deep winter. Us and the Russians, the Nordic peoples, and that’s about all. We are unique in that. And I thought of it as a ubiquitous metaphor for us as a people, and chose one late night to write a sequence with winter as a presiding metaphor. They are postmodern meditations. They refuse closure, deny narrative, strive for an anti-lyrical, anti-anecdotal content. Their preoccupation is with form. The art of the northern peoples, the Inuit, their sculptures, particularly the early ones carved in the first half of the past century, the best of them finished by the late 1950s. After that they became a commodity, an item to be traded south, rather than something a man might carve during a long winter when time was on his hands and not much more. In “Winter 20” I end the poem with three lines taken from another text, the story being told by the white man who first collected the sculptures back in the 1920s and 1930s and who asked an old carver what it was he had made. “What is it?” he asked. He wanted the story, you see. He wanted to know what the carving represented. The carving was one of a man with seals growing out of his body, his back, his shoulders, his face. He asked what the sculpture meant and the old Inuit (Eskimo) just laughed uproariously at such a strange question. He said it was just something that was in his head in the winter. The Colville I refer to is a high-realist Canuck painter, quite famous. His canvases go for around $100,000 or more. The old Inuit gave his to the white man as a gift. The white man didn’t realize what kind of debt he was in and gave the old Inuit money. I tried in the “Winter” poems to express and

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explore the contradiction in “Winter 13,” the one about the ptarmigan – our dilemma as we strive to unite both spirit and flesh, both life and death, and our rapt confusions over it all. My favourite of the poems is “Winter 15,” a poem that captures at its heart what I have struggled with much of my life, the solitude I have sought, the quiet I have never quite achieved. I don’t finally believe in the inhumanity of Robinson Jeffers, but that purity has been much desired in my life. I too have spent my time with stone. You write primarily about a specific landscape, but do ‘travel’ elsewhere, often in ways that highlight the horrors and contradictions of life elsewhere. I lived for a while in South America, in the early 1970s. When I returned I wrote about it. I am not what you might call a ‘travel’ poet. We do have a number of those, Earle Birney and Al Purdy are two great Canadian poets who spent their lives writing poems centred on exotic locations. I think I found the horrors and contradictions of life in the Third World as exemplars of life in my own country. I didn’t know I was suffering when I was a boy and a young man. In the poem “Just Living,” I quote an old logger who, when I asked him about the violence of our lives in the bush and back country, the small towns, the mills, said, “Well, Pat, we were just living, weren’t we?” The irony of that has not been lost on me. I had been attacked in 1979 by an eminent critic; his article in our national newspaper was entitled “Poet as Rapist.” He excoriated the content of my poems, accused me of using extreme experiences to titillate my readers. I was shocked and angered by his accusations. But then, I’ve had those words thrown at me many times. I’ve lived a long and hard life and seen terrible acts of inhumanity. One way to describe me is to call me a poet of witness, but that is, I think, inadequate. One of our great poets, Gwendolyn MacEwen, who died tragically of alcoholism, has a line in a poem of hers, “Dark Pines Under Water.” It says, “there is something down there, and it wants to be told.” Here’s a somewhat broader and more general ‘poetics’ question! How and why you write poetry in the way that you do? I’m not sure I can easily describe my poetics. In 1968 I realized I had worked three or four hours a day for ten years trying to write a good poem. I sat myself down in a cabin up on the Skeena River in the north and I asked myself how much I wanted to be a writer, a poet. It was an important moment in my life. I had been embedded in the poetry scene of the 1960s, the coffee houses, the bars, the politics of poetry and literature. I sat in that small cabin and asked the question. My answer was that I wanted to be able to write not just a

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poem, but a great poem. I turned away from my peers, the scenes in New York and San Francisco, Toronto and Vancouver, and began to study the master-poets of the past century, Yeats and Auden, Stevens and Williams, Layton and Lowell, and all the others, Rexroth, Jeffers, Sexton, translations of Neruda, Rilke, Trakl, Vallejo, etc. I didn’t return to the world for six years. When I did I was ready. I had returned from South America and I was ready to begin my life’s work. I had laboured hard but I had learned. The craft of poetry was second nature to me. My writing arises from the ashes of the great poets. Whether or not it, too, has greatness is not for me to say. I have written some few fine pieces. Auden said once that if you can write six good poems in your lifetime you are a minor poet. If you write twelve you are a major one. I’m still writing.

Plagiarism: A Beginner’s Guide218

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and distortion. Context and intent are the key, and the ethics behind an ‘action’ pivotal. For example, in a poem like “Area 51” in my volume Visitants,219 there’s a conscious play with cult disinformation as proliferated through the net – with the texts of back-engineering and conspiracy that both lurk and glow. By replaying lifted text back against itself, creating harmonics and resonances that ironize the terms of production, one is making an ethical statement. The referencing, the citing of source, becomes irrelevant in the poem’s undoing of the fanaticism behind the original posting. As with my novel Genre220 and its conscious play re availability – the anarchist’s rejection of copyright and the ownership of words and ideas – ‘borrowed texts’ become something else as they are re-presented in a specific highlighted environment. The signals of appropriation are there. The reader (should) know what is going on. The same applies to the hermetic poetries of the linguistically innovative etc. avant-gardes – poststructuralist, L A N G U A G E , post-L A N G U A G E . Refer-

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“Preface” to Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities 14.1 (Special Issue “plagiarism! (from work to détournement),” 2009): 1–2. Earlier version in broadsheet Plastic (Semtext) (Prague, 1998). 219 Visitants (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1999). 220 Genre (Fremantle, W A : Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1997).

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ences abound but are mostly unqualified. They exist as references in themselves. Investigation and reading are expected. Decontextualization of the original changes meaning; intention highlights disjunction in presentation. Poetry has always worked on the level of the subliminal, the suggested, the referential, but whole poetics are constructed out of language and idea ‘feeding’ over the last century. But, then again, look at Villon – one can’t appreciate the Testament in all its sordid glory without historical research, without its political, social, and personal particulars. So, we’re talking about something else here and not plagiarism. At best, we’re talking about destabilization of authority, of distortion of authenticity; at worst, about an anxiety of textual influence – of a canonical, nationalistic, identity-ridden angst of poetic creation. The author looking for a web to operate in. It’s not coincidental that poetry scores one of the highest ‘hit’ rates after sex on the net. It’s an intertextual cross-referencing growth environment that suits its uncertainties, its labile shifts. Poetry has always lacked confidence. The self invests so much in expression, in signposting sensitivity, no matter how removed from the ‘I’ the poetics and politics are. The language of expression is mediated through personal experience. The alternatives – with which the net helps beautifully – are cut-and-paste and hyper-movement, integration, borrowings, machine-talk, visual montage – a breakdown of poetic authority and identity. The collaborative voice becomes manifest, the self is provided with a refuge in a place of vast prospect. This refuge allows for indulgence in a pathology of anonymity and participation, but also for a ‘social’ construct, a sense of community and the group to move in. Take poetry email discussion lists. We know most of the participants, even if it’s by their constructed identities (hidden behind hotmail.com and Yahootype addresses: brand-name as multiple-personality poetry factotum), yet they remain removed and vague in reality. Their biographies are read and ‘surfed’ – they are almost incidental to ‘feeling’. In such a context, in such a scarequoted environment, plagiarism is an irrelevancy – it’s constructed out of notions of appropriation. Theft is the legitimate movement, the flow – because that’s the game. Of course, newcomers get extremely upset because in the real world this isn’t on – naturally. The problem with, say, students jumping on the net to plagiarize an existing essay, to hand it in to their institution under their own names, is that they’ve crossed territories without any of the ethics necessary to make the journey; rather than destabilizing their institution, to make a poli-

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tical statement, they are trying to get ahead, to get the benefits of institutional certainty – to share in its power-base. That is real plagiarism. It is a purely dishonest act without any hypermodernist overtones. Craig Loney, on the other hand, handing a copy of Machiavelli’s The Prince (Penguin edition) – with the cover torn off and replaced by his own carrying his name as author, into his first-year lit.-theory unit at Murdoch in 1982 was a stroke of genius. It was ethical, not working by subterfuge. If he’d written an essay and cut-andpasted The Prince with his own (androgynous) meanderings, it would also rate as ‘art’, as politics, as cultural and social commentary – not as plagiarism – whether or not he cited the source. Why? The play with the text shows irony, that someone reading a lit.-theory essay at university would be unfamiliar with The Prince is humorous. The same rules apply to copyright. A recent discussion on poetryetc had people firmly defending copyright on the grounds that it feeds starving artists. Copyright operates on many levels, the least being, certainly with poets, the protection of one’s means of making a living. I find the idea that poetry should be the preserve of legalities repulsive; it goes against the spirit of everything I believe. I have, on a number of occasions, found whole lines, even stanzas, of mine re-written in people’s poems. The vain side of me takes it as a compliment, the intellectual side of me takes it as a literary criticism. Either way, they’re words and they’re up for grabs. Once written, the language changes – distorts – with reception anyway and is no longer purely the author’s. It becomes part of something else. Imagine if the Psalms were copyright!!

From Assimilation to Multiculturalism221

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T I S O F T E N S A I D T H A T A L L N O N - I N D I G E N O U S A U S T R A L I A N P O E T R Y is ‘migrant’ poetry – that the process of leaving your place of origin, your ‘home’, and travelling to an adoptive home, defines you as a migrant, regardless of when the migration took place. This line of argument possibly arises out of a desire by the dominant culture – the Anglo-Celtic in the case of Australia – to create a new language of assimilation, despite a multi-cultural, or maybe post-multi-cultural, environment. Of course, in the case of Australia many of its earliest non-Indigenes were transported rather than migrating by choice, and the sense of foreignness was extended to their own cultural space.

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But later migrations, too, whether voluntary or induced by desperate circumstances at home – such as the migrations from Europe after the Second World War or the movement of refugees from Indochina after the Vietnam War and the rise of Pol Pot in Cambodia – carried a sense of foreignness within the national identity of origin. What was fought against, in terms of preserving identity and developing a sense of connection with the new home, was the perceived monolithic nature of Anglo-Celtic culture. I am sceptical of this label, as pronounced migrant differences existed within this ‘dominant’ culture, especially between the Irish and the English, but it serves as a centre against which to ‘define’ migrant presence. Federation in Australia in 1901 brought with it what has become known as the ‘White Australia policy’, the desire to keep Australia racially homogeneous: British in politics and culture, with a distinct sense of Empire and, even more, standard English-language usage, but allowing for the identity of Australian Strine. This racist policy sat side-by-side with the desire to increase population, particularly after the Second World War, and underpinned the policy of assimilation: that all new Australians would speak one language and be one people. Whether Greek, Italian, or Polish, or any other nationality, all would strive to be English-speaking Aussies in spirit. Of course, Aboriginal people had no part in this picture and their claims to the land had been dismissed thank to the notion of terra nullius. In the eyes of the Commonwealth of Australia and the majority of the population, they simply didn’t count. This remained the case until the 1960s, and, many would argue, is still the reality. It was only with the Mabo decision in the early 1990s that the Commonwealth of Australia legally recognized the Indigenous presence before the arrival of Europeans, but only if they could prove ‘continuous occupation’ of the land. The brilliant Murri Aboriginal poet Lionel Fogarty, considering the land as opposed to the invaders, has written:

A Lie Way out in the valleys and mountain ranges of light You came quiet in roaring tide in the sunset lagoon How softly whispers the river and streams in endless waters THOSE

can’t tell a lie.

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Not surprisingly, some migrant writers have identified with the repression of Aboriginal people and other Indigenes, though this is problematical because all migrants, regardless of where they come from, live on land that was originally occupied by Indigenous people. To the Indigene, the question of dominant and minority cultures may not be as relevant as the denial of ancestral lands. When I talked of the postwar assimilation of new Australians, I specifically mentioned Europe. The White Australia policy, which arose out of the 1901 Restrictive Immigration Act,222 was aimed at non-European, specifically Asian, immigration. Chinese had been in Australia at least since 1848, but fear of what was called ‘the yellow peril’, the racist clichés of the small white population of Australia being over-run by the imagined vast hordes pouring down from Asia, prevented notable levels of Asian migration until recent decades. The war with the Japanese reinforced the fear, even given that many Chinese suffered at the hands of the Japanese army. The domino theory of communist domination of South-East Asia bolstered support for the Vietnam War. Racial stereotyping was rife, and support for racist politicians such as Pauline Hanson from Queensland indicate that these prejudices still infect some living in Australia. Fortunately, the migration of Vietnamese, Chinese, Cambodians, Indonesians, and other peoples from Asia during the 1970s and 1980s has significantly enriched Australia’s culture. Poets such as Ee Tiang Hong – a political exile of Chinese heritage born in Malaysia – and, later, Ouyang Yu, editor of the Australian Chinese-language literary journal Otherland, have been active in fragmenting the eurocentrism of Australian culture. The process of assimilation came to an end in the early 1970s, being replaced with what is known as ‘Multiculturalism’: implicitly a recognition of the diversity of what it is to be an Australian, carrying with it a respect for cultural difference and self-identity. On the positive front, multiculturalism has allowed ethnic communities to gain a political voice within the bureaucracies of Australian social and cultural organizations but, as has been pointed out by many commentators, has also led to ‘difference’ being accommodated under the umbrella of what remains the distinctive white Australia AngloCeltic identity. S O, born in Greece in 1951, having migrated to Australia at 222

In the same year, the Pacific Island Labourers Act passed into law, leading to the deportation from Australia of thousands of Pacific Islanders (many of whom had been ‘blackbirded’ or press-ganged as ‘Kanaks’ into near-slave servitude; ironically, shortly after the passage of the 1901 Act, ‘blackbirding’ was legalized, leading to the return to the Queensland canefields of many Islanders).

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the age of three, paints a deeply ironic portrait of the residue of this nationalistic ‘Aussie’ majority, at least insofar as the national mythmakers – politicians, the media, breweries, and sporting organizations – would have it:

from Ockers by SO Australia (in the 70’s) had the “Libido” of a gang-bang the brains of a “Bunyip” & “the finesse of a rugby-team booze-Up” it lived on tomato sauce the “Sporting Globe,” terrace houses, galvanized-iron bushfires & a cyclone. December was still the month for getting pissed & the “sinking-of-the-sausage” still applied. the sheep became neurotic & the stockman rode around on a motorbike, dark sun-glasses, a T-shirt, & a pack full of stubbies. . . .

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For a migrant, of whatever origin, the primary issue on arrival in a new country is battling the sense of ‘foreignness’. One becomes ‘the Other’, an alien in a strange place that in a variety of ways, whether overtly or subliminally, seems to reject the very things that constitute your identity. The language might be different, and, if not, an unusual accent will mark you as an outsider. There might also be conflict between the sense of being an exile and the desire to settle, the need to connect one’s past with the reality of an often very different present. And, of course, there is the difference in landscape. When the earliest settlers arrived in Australia they often rebuilt their home in places that bore little resemblance to their place of origin. Any similarity they could find allowed them to build a connection with the old life. Place names are a key to this – New England, New South Wales, and so on. In the postwar migrations from Europe, specific places became associated with particular ethnic groups. Melbourne is one of the most culturally diverse communities in Australia. Jewish migrants from all over Europe have been attracted to it, as well as Greeks, Italians, and numerous other peoples. When considering Australian multicultural poetry, it shouldn’t be assumed that every poem is about the specific experience of migration. There are second- and third-generation Australian poets who might work within a multicultural environment. However, cultural and linguistic dislocation will often inform texts. The poetry of Antigone Kefala – born in Romania of Greek parents and then living in both New Zealand and Australia – utilizes nonrealist scenarios interweaving dream and mythology with notions of place, culture, and self, in many ways breaks away from such stereotyping. Interestingly, Kefala has four languages, though she writes in English:

The Wanderer The river moved further away in the heat of the road shimmers of water towards the horizon. The salt which they gave him at home he would place on his tongue to taste his own roots and draw comfort.

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The world made of a matter that never forgets, a symmetry so exact, fatality at the heart of each thing.

Other ‘multicultural poets’223 who have attracted much attention in Australia include Dimitri Tsaloumas, Peter Skrzynecki, Alex Skovron, Thalia, Ania Walwicz, Anna Couani, and Jeri Kroll. Kroll, an American, is not usually identified as a ‘migrant’ poet, but I note her to make a point. I find it difficult, especially as someone from the so-called dominant culture, to represent multicultural poetries. Questions of authenticity and authority come into play. I say this as an Australia who now lives in Britain. For me, home is where my family is – and they’re here in Cambridge, but home is also a specific place in Western Australia. It is the landscape that fills my poetry, it is the stuff of my childhood memories. It is interesting that much multicultural poetry, as Sneja Gunew and others have pointed out, centres on the parent–child relationship, specifically an inversion of roles: the relationship to the country of the new ‘parent’ culture. What of poets who see the label ‘migrant poet’ as ghettoizing or find ‘multicultural poet’ limiting? In the end, it’s the poem that speaks for itself. The last poem I have selected examines Dutch colonization of Indonesia, emigration to Australia, and the problems inherent in exploring identity and notions of home. Here are the first and last stanzas of the poem “Colonialism” by Jeltje Fanoy: mama and papa were nursed by babus: young Indonesian women who spent their youth coddling the colonialists’ sickly children. [...] i think my mother & father came to Australia 223

The term ‘multicultural poet’ is being used here to designate a polylinguistic / crosscultural subtext to an English-language poem. [J.K.]

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with a dream of finding something they’d left behind in Indonesia. how their faces lit up! when the migrant-ship crossed the Equator! (my father greeted the Southern Cross like a long-lost friend!)

A Poet of Understanding224

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P A K I S T A N I P O E T Alamgir Hashmi has, in a personal statement, written about the cultural diversity of his education, and about how every word he has written has entailed some kind of ‘private struggle’. His recollections begin with the following revealing observations: HE GREAT

I was born in 1951 in Lahore, a city with distinctive flavours and ambience, where many diversions would have been possible. Somehow I began to take reading and writing for myself rather seriously from an early age. It was long before I could admit to anyone that I wrote in ways and forms which were not regarded by many around me as quite useful enough. Growing up in a home where several languages were spoken, often interchangeably, offered a multiple choice from which a definite answer was expected. Thus English has remained my first language, the only one in which I live while counting my blessings with the others.225

The issues of choice and the need to write poetry are intrinsically part of Hashmi’s poetic, as much as the question of where a voice locates itself as it traverses cultures. He is a hybridizer of cultures on one level, but, more than that, he is both participant and observer. His poetic persona is complex and 224

“Introduction” to Alamgir Hashmi, The Ramazan Libation: Selected Poems (Todmorden: Arc, 2003): 9–12. 225 Email communication, 2003.

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multi-faceted, it can be at once ironic and deeply sincere, it can be Pakistani and American, it can be spiritual and materialist. Love in a Hashmi poem is never a series of emotional responses removed from their cultural implications. Hashmi is a genuinely trans-cultural poet, with wide interests and diverse tastes. An internationalist, he travels widely. I first met him at the International P E N 62nd World Congress held in Fremantle, Western Australia, in 1995. Along with the poet Dennis Haskell, I edited a small selection of delegates’ poetry entitled Sightings.226 The poem of Hashmi’s that we included was “Islamabad 1988,” in which the coordinates of language and place are palimpsested, where different locations become infused in each other, in the fluidity of language, and where a place is also what it is because it’s not another: I am practicing the saffron smile these days; field days if you look at my lovely sisters, Vienna, Helsinki, Canberra. I am really not so unnatural; can see the point in having a pair of fussy big brothers. Even as I know that I am not Phoenix – out of Arizona, I have risen from the ashes, and must fall in love again.

The personification of the city is not mere device here; it is at the core of the way Hashmi’s voice both locates itself in its subject-matter and also retains distance. The poet is deeply implicated in the poem, yet also detached. One is left with the feeling that there is some kind of crisis of certainty, that belonging is an elusive factor in Hashmi’s life and work. A traveller, but more than that – a world citizen – living in places as diverse as Switzerland, the U S A , and Pakistan, Hashmi writes poems full of shifts between places – slippages, the negotiation of geographical and cultural spatialities that I find so attractive as a multi-nationed reader. Critics call him a modernist, and taste and poetics often support this, but he’s also a tradition-

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Sightings: Poems for International P E N 62nd World Congress, Freemantle, ed. Dennis Haskell & John Kinsella (Applecross, W A : Folio, 1995).

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alist. There’s more than a postmodern touch to his use of traditional façades, with ironic twists and colloquial observations and disruptions that complicate any categorizing. Book titles indicate the shifts: America Is a Punjabi Word (1979), My Second in Kentucky (1981), This Time in Lahore: New Poems (1983), and Neither This Time /Nor That Place (1984), among others. A wonderful counterpointing of cultural coordinates, an irony that is never malicious but always savvy, a celebration and gentle chiding, can be found in the linguistically versatile “America is a Punjabi Word.” This sequence is Hashmi at his most enthusiastic – a picaresque that becomes universalizing: 21 We came down via Detroit; I fastened the seatbelts fast. I kept the eye-shutters closed and told my camel not to stop even for a Coke, until we were safely down below the Ohio – in the navel of these states.

The play with orientalism and American pop culture is deft, and fair-humoured. Modernity as a Western construct is undercut by “24”: “We say, let’s go back / to the Old World / where people know what the / people and camels / are all about” – a questioning of and a challenge to the intellectual modernities he has absorbed as a traveller and scholar. “Captain Kirk in Karachi” is a paradigm model of ‘hybridized’ postmodernity – a brilliant de-colonial anti-epic, an explorer’s accountability sheet: the New World colonizing the Old over again, but an old world where people and camels are understood. The poem “The Refugee Girl Makes Good” is scathing about the imperial cultures of refuge. This is Hashmi out of good humour, and in something approaching anger. The bitter irony of the refugee child who comes from terror gaining super-proficiency in English and acceptance by the Oxford establishment speaks for “Those many who are not here.” Hashmi wrote the poem after reading a report in Asiaweek, and this reportage is vital to the construction of something that Hashmi challenges:

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Your teacher is proud and fond of metonymy. He calls you “a shining example to us all.” And your own English is perfect enough to say: “I love chips”

That metonymy links us by degrees of separation all back to the refugee being rescued in the South China Sea. We are all culpable – in her status as refugee, and her status as cultural convert. The so-called ‘First World’ seems fragile and false, and yet the ‘Third-World’ poet does not make himself immune from his own criticism. He is aware of linguistic and geographical self-ironies. Hashmi tells tales in which he is implicated; in his poems the lyrical self avoids us. The ‘I’ of “Snow”, a deeply personal pronoun (analogically, symbolically) – is offset by the voice of “ghastly white” snow, its confusion and mystery, the people who “talk like a Greek Chorus.” It’s the range of his voice and material, the willingness to travel wherever knowledge and experience might take him, that marks Hashmi as vital. He is also a political poet of courage, a poet of understanding, respect, and ‘justice’. In a poem like “Bahawalpurlog: In Seven Parts,” he speaks from his own ‘zone’, familiarity something gained by immersion, but never an immediate right. Hashmi never claims ownership or absolute authority – he respects difference too much for this. Hashmi is also a translator, about which he says: Besides English, poetry is being written in several languages in Pakistan – in Urdu, Punjabi, Sindhi, Pashto, Baluchi, Siraiki, Kashmiri, etc. I have translated some of it (originally written in those languages) into English, in the intervals between my own poems and critical writing, or upon request. Englishlanguage poetry in Pakistan is vibrant, and some of it has been described by critics as part of the best anywhere. It can be said to have a firm tradition and as more and more young people write, as I notice nearly every week, the stream will likely have a steady course. However it is seen in the world at large, English-language poetry represents some of the best modern poetry in the region.227

There is a generosity in this that is obvious, and it characterizes Hashmi’s interest in the community of poetry.

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Email communication, 2003.

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Although Hashmi has already been well published in Britain through his now out-of-print Oxford University Press Selected Poems, The Ramazan Libation is a new and vigorous selection that I hope shows the poet in all his diversity. His is a voice that belongs wherever it is read.

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Wound Responses (with Rod Mengham)228

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C A M B R I D G E U N I V E R S I T Y and librarian at Gonville and Caius College, J.H. Prynne is possibly the most significant English poet of the late-twentieth century. Lyrically experimental, his work has mesmerized and attracted readers from around the world for three decades. It has brought some to Cambridge in pursuit of new and unread texts, it has inspired students to develop their own ways of investigating the processes of poetry, to question the prescribed ways of reading, and it has led translators such as the late and brilliant Bernard Dubourg to dedicate themselves to exploring the nuances and variations in language and potentials of ‘meaning’ that lie in its structures. Prynne’s is a unique poetry. While of a tradition that reaches back through Wordsworth, it is linguistically innovative and strongly influenced by poetic languages outside the traditional English poem – be they those of Ed Dorn or Charles Olson, contemporary Chinese poetry, or the theories of Martin Heidegger. Prynne’s work is often referred to in semi-mystical terms, as a result of its being difficult to get hold of. As Prynne has avoided mainstream publishing, it has been assumed that he rejects the ‘general’ readership, that his is a language of an informed and ‘alternative’ clique. But it is the indifference of the mainstream publisher to ‘the work’ itself that has been a problem for Prynne, and not the idea of availability. Actually, quite to the contrary, the affordable volume that can be read by anyone with an interest in what is going on in the poem would appeal to Prynne. What Prynne would reject is the easy path to comprehension. A poem requires work, and it is the reading process that preserves the its integrity. N.H. Reeve and Richard Kerridge write of Prynne as follows: ONG RESPECTED AS A TEACHER AT

The apparent impossibility of achieving a complete reading of a Prynne poem, a reading which exhausts the poem’s otherness, suggests that the poetry is postmodern in its indeterminacy, its avoidance of totality and closure. . . 229 228

“An Introduction to the Poetry of J.H. Prynne,” Jacket 7 (April 1999): online. Excerpt from Bloodaxe Books catalogue advertising the Collected Poems of J.H. Prynne (1999). 229 N.H. Reeve & Richard Kerridge, Nearly Too Much: The Poetry of J.H. Prynne (Liverpool: Liverpool U P , 1995): 2.

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We might cite this as reason for the poet’s rejection of his earlier, more ‘traditional’ /linear material (not included in Poems). J.H. Prynne is an intensely private person. The immediate assumption is that he is also an extremely private poet. This often comes of a poet whose explorations of the minute are so focused. But these minute observations explode into something large and substantial and prone to exponential growth. This collection of poems has been a long time coming. At its core is the Poems volume published in 1982 by Agneau 2, long since out of print. But there have been over half-a-dozen other works since then published by small presses in small print runs. This new volume is entirely up-to-date, taking in the pun-rich and highly codified For the Monogram, published in 1997 by Equipage. Rightly particular about the presentation of poetry – the integrity of text, the frame and field of the page, the context in which presentation and consequently reception take place – Prynne has been patient in collating another ‘collected’ volume.

Shifted Prynne’s work has shifted key several times in the last three and a half decades, but one of the advantages of the new Poems is the opportunity it allows for gauging continuities of theme and method. Prynne’s is a poetry that has always been concerned with much more than the way the individual self understands its relation to the social and natural environments; right at the centre of the reading experience it offers is an encounter with the languages and findings of various disciplines that coincide in demonstrating how the self is formed by processes that often lie beyond the grasp of individual perception and cognition. These might locate humankind in relation to geological timescales or to the infinitesimal events of neurochemistry, to the migration patterns of other species or to the systems logic of information technology. Such an array of different kinds of knowledge and discourse could never be reduced to the scope of the familiar, speaking voice without submitting to an illusion of control and conscious orientation. Prynne’s poetry, rather, prompts a critical awareness of how the impulse to translate the strange into familiar terms can be seen as a form of denial, as a refusal to face up to the moral and political impasse of contemporary selfhood. In the social reality of our own time, translations like this can often be ethically disastrous, when they co-opt the terms of one special language and set of relations into another; one clear example, which is highly prominent in Prynne’s writing, involves the contamination of social politics by the criteria

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of economic transactions. Syntactically and semantically, the language of the poems reaches beyond the grasp of conventional modes and measures, in order to register the lateral pressures and sometimes buckling impact of incongruous vocabularies, competing idioms, and conflicting programmes. There is no point of view being transcribed here – rather, the constant inscribing of conditions which both generate and limit the individual point of view.

Deflections The curve of Prynne’s career has seen a steady intensifying of this kind of challenge to the reader. After the rationalistic meditations of a first volume that he has decided not to reprint, the œuvre has been marked by strongly motivated deflections of established reading methods. In The White Stones and Kitchen Poems, the fluency and balance of the philosophical monologist are belied by crowding intimations of a whole series of relativizing contexts for the occasion of utterance. The English landscape is seen in relation to the withdrawal of the glaciers, its patterns of settlement judged in relation to the customs of nomadic tribes. In Brass, the reader is jolted, more rudely and exhilaratingly, from one unruly format to another, and is forced to cope with constant adjustments of tempo and tone, stretching from invective to elegy, not simply within the volume as a whole, but often within each text. Linearity and narrative, if not dispensed with altogether, become increasingly redundant, and in the adoption of the poetic sequence as the most frequent vehicle for Prynne’s concerns, the emphasis on recurrent figures and sound patterns begins to tip the balance in favour of ‘vertical’ rather than ‘horizontal’ priorities in interpretation. This tendency is established in the ‘diurnal’ sequences of the 1970s (Fire Lizard, A Night Square, Into the Day) and developed and complicated throughout the following two decades. In the 1980s, much of Prynne’s work seemed to be chiefly organized around the monitoring of thresholds, of the lines that mark the limit of personal agency, beyond which a more extensive condition of being might be intimated or subliminally glimpsed (for example, in The Oval Window). Often these thresholds are located around the body, at the various points of entry and exit where the processes of absorbing information from the world or of sending it out into the world must start and finish. The crucial question, of where and when personal agency can truly be said to come to life, is posed most revealingly in situations where the body is in trouble, in circumstances of estrangement or pain, and consequently much of the research encoded in the poems focuses on the extremities of what one text refers to as ‘wound

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response’. This strand in Prynne’s writing is most evident in volumes such as Down Where Changed and Word Order.

Signifying In the three most recent texts, published during the 1990s (Not-You, Her Weasels Wild Returning, For the Monogram), Prynne’s experimentalism has reached the point where even the most seemingly innocuous parts of speech (e.g., prepositions) are prevented from carrying out their usual functions. In this, he is a writer who has carefully denied himself the comfort of an avantgarde house-style, despite the readiness of critics to identify him with the techniques of the so-called ‘Cambridge School’. The ghettoizing of Prynne’s reputation has resulted from his decision to publish only with small presses and to engage in public debate almost entirely through the pages of little magazines. Prynne’s rather singular involvement with small avant-garde groupings is also an historical choice of artistic traditions, an antithetical gesture of defiance in a culture whose endorsements of the anti-modernist establishment have alienated many of the most serious practitioners of innovative writing. Unsurprisingly, some of Prynne’s most significant affiliations are with American and continental writers and thinkers; Charles Olson, Frank O’Hara, Martin Heidegger, and Paul Celan must be included in the list of those who make their presence felt at different stages of his work. And, most recently, a commitment to exploring the signifying systems of Chinese poetry has introduced the most profound implications for contemporary reading practices.

“Rich in Vitamin C”230

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H I S P O E M I S F R O M T H E “ 1 0 U N C O L L E C T E D P O E M S ” S E C T I O N of J.H. Prynne’s forthcoming Poems, which collects thirty years’ work and will be published early next year, and was originally collected in the earlier Poems volume published in 1982. It is a strong example of the Prynne lyric in which tensions between external social, political, and economic forces and interior, personal, emotive, and reflective experience come into play. The tone is almost of a love poem, yet there is a darkish irony at work as well. There is a sense of collusion and lightness in “snowy-wing case,” “your pause like an apple pip,” “sweet shimmer of reason,” but all is

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Commentary on J.H. Prynne, “Rich in Vitamin C,” Jacket 6 (January 1999).

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tainted by the “cross-fire of injustice.” There’s a military metaphor at work – “from starry fingers / noting the herbal jolt of cordite / and its echo” which is in itself destabilized by the lyrical gesture of “starry” and the reference to the natural in “herbal.” There seems to be an unholy alliance between the stealth of military incursion and the processes of the natural world. “The baltic loved one who sleeps” might in fact be a submarine skulking and “echoing” in territorial waters, with “the motto we call peace talks,” some kind of Cold War suggestion. Is it a precursor or even an ironic hymn to something like the Strategic Arms Limitations Treaties – the love /lust cycle of interaction between enemies? Whatever, we are lulled by the mellifluous language and the haunting beauty of the piece. But the sense of threat is never far away. The title is interesting in this context, as “Rich in Vitamin C” is both a scientific fact that has particular ramifications with regard to healthy growth – “it’s supposed to ward off Colds!” (maybe I should thus capitalize the C) – and an advertising slogan. Prynne seems to be taking to task the commercializing of the personal – love, as well as the political-military dialogue. The references to a “screen,” “sight-lines,” and “pulse” also suggest an interaction or collusiveness, even conflation of acts of the body – seeing, visualizing, pumping blood – and the processes of the economic, military, and social machine. All of this is superbly united in four tight metrical nine-line stanzas. For Prynne, the field of the page, or maybe the space of the margins, the position of the text, and measurements of indentation and so on are emphatic to meaning. They affect how something is said, and how it is read. For Prynne, the production of a poem, the production of a book, is as much part of the cycles of commercial fetishization as the creation of the poem itself. So, it is the responsibility of the poet (and reader) to work at diminishing a degree of moral irresponsibility that overshadows the creation and production of art. Which explains why most Prynne works have been available in small print-run pamphlet forms published by presses for whom profit is not a motive. The forthcoming Poems are being published by a combination of Bloodaxe and the Australian publishers Folio and Fremantle Arts Centre Press, keeping costs down and avoiding, as much as possible, the usual dictates of the market. The work of Prynne is often seen by many as being difficult – both in its language and in its apparently hermetic references. Meaning seems to be flexible, speech is destabilized, and readers are confronted with questions concerning their own status – even complicity – in the relationship between the mediated word, the crafted text, and the external world, without which it can-

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not exist. It’s the idea of the self as centre, the so-called lyrical I that’s being questioned here. “Rich in Vitamin C” shows how every human interaction, personal reflection, and meditation on time and place involves others, and effects, and is influenced by, macro- and micro-changes in the social, economic, and political climate. Above and beyond all else, Prynne’s concerns are moral and ethical – he believes that, even in the intimacy of the lyric moment, we have an obligation to recognize what is happening in the greater world. A personal anecdote. Six or seven years ago I was hitch-hiking in the south-west of Australia, living in hotels and camping out, in search of a silence in which to write, to discover a new voice in myself. I carried only one book in my pack – which was a new experience for someone who usually has at least half-a-dozen books on the go at once. It was the early J.H. Prynne Poems. It was like a technical guide manual, a map book to new poetic territories, in addition to being a collection of poems of sublime and challenging lyricism. As I read these poems in my aloneness, I realized that my need to ‘escape’, to find some new voice, was self-deluded, that voice is interactive – the traumas and concerns of the greater world were still there – I was simply avoiding them. It was then I realized how political Prynne’s voice is, and how, indeed, my own has always been. I started writing again – confronting, rather than avoiding, it. A new angle, the same voice.

Primary Evidence231

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N A N A L O G Y T H A T M I G H T W O R K as a comment on this superb collection as a whole is: “memory has become a peninsula”; the peninsula is both solid, and as Nick Kneale notes, surrounded by water on three sides.232 Memory is our connection with who we were, and forms who we are. But the writing of memory is not only to do with memoir and autobiography; it also enters the realm of fiction. As Eva Salzman notes in her introduction, talking about the ‘genre’ of ‘faction’: “memoir is a story too.”233 In the same way that memory is inevi-

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“Afterword” to True to Life: Memoirs from ‘the Working Class College’ Ruskin College, Oxford, ed. Eva Salzman with Nick Kneale, afterword by John Kinsella (Coventry: Heaventree, 2007): 193–96. 232 Nick Kneale, “Peninsula,” in True to Life, 190–91. 233 Eva Salzman, “Introduction” to True to Life, 7–8.

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tably unstable and can be built and rebuilt in so many different ways – so many different angles depending on the conditions under which we remember – writers make choices about what they will or won’t tell from their own experiences and observations. Fiction and non-fiction come out of a set of such choices. Not everything can be in there. Joanna Pavelin’s wonderful “That Girl Was Me” maps the moving journey of one individual from loss of control over the direction of her life to making choices that increased and focused her ‘self’, and her control over that self. In writing the memoir of this journey, she has made a choice in what she wants to say – not everything is in there, but the selection of what is narrativized is made on the basis of her wish to show that such journeys towards self-empowerment can be made. One feels that the writing process is an essential part of this – both on the level of a healing and on the level of political statement. Remembering becomes a form of resistance to those things that would thwart this journey. The fiction writer faces the same choices: a story is told, but it is always one of many possible stories. In virtual fiction, one can make a choice about the direction a narrative will take, or even apply a narrative à la The Sims, to a pre-existing set of characters and scenarios. But the choice of activating the process of storytelling is a conscious one. We choose our methods of telling. I have always thought of memoir and autobiography as modes of biography, as even when we are absorbed in telling the story of our lives, or part of our lives, or our lives in relationship to the lives of others (or certain events, places, and specific circumstances), a critical distance from who we were and what we are inevitably arises. We see ourselves as another person almost, having to be researched and portrayed. Admittedly, this happens to varying degrees. Interestingly, the closest we get to our inner selves is very often through fiction: through the dramatic monologue or the stream of consciousness of a character who might well be very different from ourselves but who becomes a conduit to a ‘spontaneous’ way of thinking. Or, in that strangest of art forms – existing always between fact and fiction – poetry. The poem might well excoriate who we are while we’re writing it, but then when it goes public, as with the pieces held in these pages, it inevitably moves away from us and has a life of its own. It is doing things while we sleep, when we’ve forgotten about it (even if briefly). For one reader, it might be deeply factual, for another, a piece of fiction. Or it might exist in that liminal space between. What is remarkable about this collection is that it both conforms to the precepts of literary genres and entirely breaks them down. Great skill has

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been displayed in the editing and arranging of this collection by Eva Salzman and Nick Kneale, but it was also graced with some highly skilled and versatile writing, writing across a great range of styles and approaches. If there’s a universalizing connection between the different pieces, within their different editorial categories, it is an ‘ease’ with the necessity of speaking. This is a confident political collectivity – a community forms in these pages that speaks out against the monoculture of mainstream literary publishing. Inevitably, some (maybe many) of these writers will participate or have already participated in that realm of fetishization of the word and identity. But if so, it will be with an awareness that what matters is the willingness to be part of something greater than ourselves: a collective memory that counters every fact with a fiction, and every fiction with a fact – of our lives, experiences, observations, and memories. When Katie Abbot begins her piece, with brutal ‘self’-irony (enhancing a serious purpose), “I was determined to be the Joan Baez of England,” we know that she is speaking to ‘us’, that all who enter the constructed reality of her piece are willing participants. Agree, disagree, believe or not believe, sympathize or not, we journey with the ‘persona’ in company. Like the principles that led to the founding of Ruskin College, this book is a sharing – and there’s a massive generosity in this. On completing my reading of the book, I was taken with a strong need to write a reply – a short ‘memoir’ (or his /herstory) of my own by way of response. It was the Agewell section that stimulated this need. And, seriously, it is a need. This is what a great book should do. The reader has an urge to reply, to participate. However, it’s not my story I want to tell, as is often the case with me. Rather, I would relate a brief glimpse into the lives of my maternal family – my auntie and my mother and their parents during the Second World War in Perth, Western Australia. What brings this to mind is the concurrence of two events: reading this volume, and my mother telling me that my auntie still had the cotton bag (no doubt made by my grandmother, a seamstress) that she would take into the trenches at school. I immediately asked Mum if she could borrow that bag from my auntie. It came back with a note pinned next to “LH,” my auntie’s initials embroidered on the flap of the bag; the note read: “Bag used by Lorraine Heywood during World War I I when Japanese invasion seemed inevitable. Bag was taken into trenches each day at school and contained small first aid items.” Mum also brought home photocopies of two other precious items from my auntie’s stockpile of memorabilia (or, more accurately, her connec-

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tion with her childhood and the collectivism of the people in a certain place at a certain time living under shared conditions): her War Savings Stamps card with sixpenny warplane stamps affixed, the mottos reading: “Sixpence A Day Keeps Invaders Away” and “Don’t be an Onlooker – Be in the Fight,” and a connection to her own mother’s mother’s experiences of the country at war twenty-five years earlier (when Australia was not directly threatened but vast numbers of friends and family were killed or injured on the western Front), my great-grandmother’s Red Cross certificate for “three years’ devoted service,” as well as her certificate for service to the Red Cross in the Second World War, when she was in her seventies. These are facts, details. They are primary evidence. But from them an endless story is told – from personal memoir to collective world history. Each small story is part of a greater whole, but none loses its infinite possibilities and intrinsic wonder because of the larger picture. I am a pacifist opposed to all war, and believe in an internationalism in which difference, diversity, and ‘regionalism’ are respected; in part, this political position comes out of the stories of my family. Their stories are my story, their stories are our stories, and the stories in this book are no different. They are a key to understanding the narrative of self and human interactions: whether we are of them or can even personally relate to them – in being told they become part of us. All stories are vital.

A Panegyric234

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S H A P C O T T I S O N E O F T H E D E F I N I T I V E B R I T I S H P O E T S of her generation, remarkable for the way in which she interweaves a flexible but rigorously applied prosody with elusive registers of meaning and ‘idea’. In an age where overt innovation in textuality is not uncommon, hers is of a unique and complex order – it innovates for a purpose. Her poems ‘read’ as linear constructions on the ‘surface’, but are nodal, and branch subtextually. Meaning is generated through confluences and juxtapositions of words, clauses, lines, and stanzas. Her search for pattern and rhythms in the imaginary and the mystified separates her from most other innovative poets writing in English today.

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“On the Work of Jo Shapcott: A Panegyric,” Manhattan Review 13.1 (Fall– Winter 2007–2008): 150–55.

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Shapcott is not afraid of clarity of expression as a means of suggesting other angles and other possible approaches to what is being said. This variety of approaches comes via the diversity of poetic materials being used – through departures from poems by poets such as Rilke, already departures in themselves, to engagements with the oeuvres of poets and writers, newspapers and television, to reconfigurations of myth, fairytales, cartoons, Biblical stories – the list grows exponentially. Her mind is searching and sophisticated in its examination of ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures, and their ultimately seguing into the lyrical gesture. To enhance this dynamic, her prosody is exceptional and her use of the line-break – as generator and challenge to meaning – inspirational. In a Shapcott poem, the lyrical I, the causative self and unified self, play against the narrativization of subjectivity – a telling of stories that effectively separates the poem from the poet, yet, through ironies of distancing, in fact draws the reader closer to the ‘poet’. We see this in beautifully terrifying poems such as the Mad Cow sequences – the exploding of anthropomorphism through gender play and the gender politics of madness /hysteria /the patriarchy of the public and civil (codes). She’s added new shades of irony. Another remarkable and consistent feature of Shapcott’s verse is the mixing of registers of language (from science to fairytale – indeed, we question whether or not there is in fact a desirable gap between the two): from the colloquial to ironic deployments of the archly lyrical. Through these registers, there arises a sense of who we are amid the flux of often contradictory information that makes any world we live in, and makes poems what they are. Take, for example, the relatively early “Pavlova’s Physics,” where the comparatives of hard science versus creationism, dance versus shape (of atom, molecule, universe), street wisdom versus high art, pragmatism versus the extraneous, history versus immediacy (satisfaction, need), are given full play. We ask straight away: do prima ballerinas and physics have much to do with each other? Grace and science? Then we realize the absurdity of posing the question in the first place. Of course they do. What is choreography? And, by implication, the role of the poem in what is being said and the science of how it is said. Are we positioning the ballerina as female against an assumed maleness of science? And that’s just the first of our slippages, our wilful nonreadings (as opposed to more constructive misreadings). The poem seems to say exactly what it means, but in something like a slippage of contrasts or, more accurately, a semblance of them that functions quite differently – Shapcott’s poetry functions in the liminal.

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The chameleon on the cover of Her Book 235 is significant, though she explores the un-Keatsian (in contrast to his ‘chameleon poet’) anti-romantic; her personae change as readily and rapidly as the chameleon’s colouring, though always remaining the chameleon-itself at core. After all, the chameleon alters colour to protect itself and/or not to draw attention to its presence, a form of subterfuge – she tells a story of self, of the body, of the politics of objectification, and the significantly insignificant in the face of infinitude. There’s also constant play between the exotic and the ‘familiar’ (indeed, the chameleon itself, to the British book-buyer, becomes a visualization of this ‘exotic’). This says as much about the poet’s interaction with her various personae and her wrestling with the nature of subjectivity as it does about broader cultural and social preconceptions in a given time and place, and the dissection of potential (and likely) bigotries that attend such othering (from gender to nation). These are also poems about how they are looked at, how they are read: they return the gaze, refusing to keep custody of the gaze themselves. They look everywhere they can! “Pavlova’s Physics’ also shows how Shapcott’s flexible prosody can generate and defy ‘meaning’; the stanza-breaks in particular disrupt the narrativized subjectivity, and insinuate doubt into the certainty of tone: I’m really a wise kid, the kind that gets on and doesn’t need to go to college to do it, secretly learning to peel back the potent leaves of mathematics while boning up on Greek at night. For all that, the consciousness is an outdated barn of a thing, a slow phenomenon compared to the speed of the senses. Today even I’m entranced by the marine symmetry of my body

From “boning up’ to “marine symmetry,” from the “wise kid” to “slow phenomenon,” the apparently clashing juxtapositions shift like a puzzle cube, realigning and counteracting. Often such play with tone and vocabulary produces a staccato piece of poetry (which is fine in itself), but there is true skill

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in the fluidity and comfort Shapcott exhibits in weaving the disparate pieces into a whole, into a body – organic, flowing verse. L’écriture féminine becomes ‘embodied’, literally, in the flesh of the poem. It challenges the reader in its intactness no matter how much this intactness might grow bleak or deteriorate in meaning. Shapcott’s poems, so intellectually clinical, on the one hand, resonate sensuality, on the other. This makes her a hard poet for followers to imitate – one can get the ‘style’, but not the resonance of sensuality and tactility of language. These poems of intellectual acuity are tactile beings. The poet of ideas is also an imagist. Jo Shapcott’s innovations come out of a firm investigation of the traditional, and she is eloquent and thorough in her knowledge of the histories (and herstories) of poetry and literature/s. She is a patient and meticulous poet, and a patient and meticulous thinker about poetry. But she is also inventive: a maverick, who will make the old new. Her poems shimmer with life, but never in a saturated, easy way. Nostalgia is decried, and easy pleasures of sound and sight challenged. But, for all this, her poems make living the idea, and make ideas out of the living: My life as an iguana is for tasting everything My tongue is very fast because the flavour of the air is so subtle. It’s long enough to surprise the smallest piece of you from extremely far away. Iguana death is a closed mouth.

Explosively but subtly (yes, that apparent contradiction is the key to her poetic), the poem moves faultlessly between observation and intimation. Its compactness and smooth intensity make it sublime (sublimity is something Shapcott is constantly challenging). We cannot, as readers, escape our own implications in its turnings and condensations. Each line is a step towards our own small death, our own closures. Shapcott has never been afraid of winding a poem up – in fact, she is the best ‘finisher’ around. Her challenges to closure come through tough endings that force us to look out for new beginnings, to

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move on (often with a shudder). Maybe this is why she does series of linked poems so well: we are compelled to read the poem that follows, and then the next and the next. Jo Shapcott plays a vital role in challenging what it is to be ‘herself’. By extension, she also challenges what it is to be ‘English’ and writing in English (as one might, say, to be ‘French’ and writing in French) – as she so skilfully deconstructs, compounding ‘English’ and ‘woman’ in an irony so withering it takes class, cultural precepts, and language itself into the realm of culpability: ‘Let me pass please. I am an Englishwoman.’ Englishness is not a given, is always open to challenge. It has implications in a ‘postcolonial’ world as much as at any other time. Shapcott questions ‘ownership’ and ‘origins’ of language. She is not an ‘owner’ of language, but a part of language. Her poems are political without ever being polemical. They are loaded with implication and responsibility. She takes her role seriously, though she can ironize the self, and herself; her ‘position’ in the world of writing, and the world at large. It is her hyper-consciousness regarding every word she writes that leads us to resort to scare-quotes when discussing her words – all words have implications for her, in and out of context/s. Shapcott makes the little big, and vice versa. She reclaims the right to possession of her self and, by extension, the rights of texts. In this way she is the postmodern and minimalist inheritor of the legacies of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Emily Dickinson.

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— P OETS IN N ORTH A MERICA

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Correspondents by the Metre236

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P O E T R Y , F O U N D E D I N C H I C A G O in 1912 by Harriet Monroe, can almost lay claim to having published most “name” poets of the twentieth century – certainly in terms of the West and in terms of small-magazine cultures. Be it Ezra Pound with his poem “In a Station of the Metro,” ‘the’ imagist poem and maybe the most effective imagist manifesto in itself, through to Eliot and his “Prufrock,” to Tagore, Frost, Millay, Stevens, Yeats, Moore, Brooks, Rukeyser, Roethke, Ashbery (originally under another name – a fellow student playing a joke!), Plath, Heaney. . . the list goes on. In its special ‘foreign’ issues, it has continued to survey poetries from outside America, while retaining a particular air of Chicago and, especially in Harriet Monroe’s time, the Midwest of America. T.S. Eliot called Poetry an “institution,” and in many ways it’s the pro and contra of identifying with such a label that propels the ‘narrative’ of Dear Editor. Poetry wants to be different, if not subversive – yet also reliable, predictable (has never missed an issue, no matter what financial crisis beckoned), and known. Can this work both ways? Can a literary journal be iconic and iconoclastic? There’s no straight answer to this. Dear Editor runs the gamut from thank-you letters to letters of acceptance and rejection, generous commentaries on individuals and poetics of the day, private losses and laments, quirky observations, back-biting, humour, epistolary harassment, questionable sanity, and pure nastiness. These letters are set against the history of the first half of twentieth-century America, and to some extent Europe. There’s an effort to contextualize attitudes and the developments in poetry with the socio-political shifts of the changing times. The history of the book is primarily localized in the poets and the journal, with big movements such as war or depression, or the Cuban Missile Crisis ‘upstaging’ the fiftieth anniversary celebrations, forming vast backdrops. Cutting a swathe through what he saw as the inanities of contemporary verse, especially the sentimentality of the Georgian poets, Ezra Pound exhorted

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Sydney Morning Herald (23 November 2002). Review of Dear Editor – A History of Poetry in Letters: The First Fifty Years, 1912–1962, ed. & compiled by Joseph Parisi & Stephen Young (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002).

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from London to “make it new.” He wrote to Harriet Monroe on 27 January 1913 from London: How are we to be two decades ahead of the country and cater to news stands at the same time?? We’ve simply G O T to lead. Otherwise we sink to the level of a dozen other dilettantes. We can’t compete on business terms with Home Journal. We can’t afford to give the public what it wants. . .

Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, a title that strangely perplexed people with its tautological double entendre, was not initially established as the stimulus for modernism in English-language poetry that it would become. It arose more out of Harriet Monroe’s frustration of not being able to get into print herself. Joseph Parisi, in his introduction, makes it clear that the earliest years of Poetry, with its championing of the New Poetry, was only one phase in its history. And where Monroe’s legacy has actually triumphed over the Poundian modernist purity is in the eclecticism of the journal, in its desire to reach out to a poetry public she suspected was there, and felt should be, as well as to reward poets for their work with a good quality journal and payment. Parisi tells us that on deciding to establish the journal, Monroe spent weeks in the Chicago City Library catching up on the latest books of poetry and developing a hit-list of poets to approach for material. Ezra Pound enthusiastically replied, and, not long after, he was appointed Poetry’s Foreign Correspondent. The story of Pound’s relationship with Monroe and Alice Corbin Henderson, her original associate editor, forms the subtext for much of the book. It resonates through changes of editor and staff, and the last letter collected in this book is Pound’s. He looms so large here that his sins and achievements create a narrative state of tension not even approached by the often comparatively subdued editors themselves across the decades. Not that Poetry hasn’t had some interesting editors, with their own styles and takes. Monroe clearly saw her role as one of national importance, and the alignment of the journal with the making of nation, and with the trials and tribulations of nation, is the most disturbing subtext of the book – even if upset by the fascist recalcitrance of Pound. She’s there for the poets in the 1914–18 war with special issues and general support. A touching letter from D.H. Lawrence, 15 September 1915 (London), laments:”How is poetry going in America? There is none in England: the muse has gone, like the swallows in winter.” There’s the redemptive hope of the New World implicit in this, as well as the expectation that would shape the ‘poetry Renaissance’ of the decade.

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Poetry would do the same in the Second World War. The magazine was particularly supportive of poets during the Depression, and saw itself as part of the national community. One of Monroe’s famous declarations, pinpointed by Parisi, concerns her vision of poetry as an evolution of the artistic consciousness of nation: “If we are provincial, we shall always be so until we cease to take our art and art opinions ready-made from abroad, and begin to respect ourselves.” This is the de rigueur rebuttal of the ‘cultural cringe’, the throwing off of cultural shackles that bespeaks a nationalism more than the growth of individual poetries. Poetry, from the beginning, had an agenda. Monroe’s declared ‘Open Door’ policy represents a certain kind of door, open in a certain way. Parisi, in his long historical expositions that surround the letters taken from poets and readers over fifty years, is wrestling not only with the written record as constructed from the archives of Poetry but also with the record established by Monroe herself in her autobiography, A Poet’s Life. She was not averse to fostering talent – though one wonders if they were, rather, disciples. She’s not presented this way here, but from the outside it looks a little like it. Relationships with other literary journals constantly crop up, and these are further tensions that drive the narrative. Another story traced through letters in this volume that reflects on the business of poetry involves Amy Lowell. It seems Lowell used her money and influence in attempts to browbeat Miss Monroe and rule the pages of Poetry for many years. It is made clear that her influence wanes when her publicity machine dies with her. Lowell is an exaggerated version of what seems to have been the case with so many poets. Wallace Stevens comes across as a rare exception. Monroe’s favourite and personal discovery, he takes it all on the chin. We see here how history might be selectively constructed. By its nature, this book sets out to record a vision of poetry mediated through a specific journal’s records. It’s not only a history of Poetry; it attempts to be much more by suggesting that the magazine actually helped to construct modernism in English-language poetry, though this ‘agenda’ was retrospectively imposed by critics. Monroe and her successors are seen as multi-culturalist (“before their time”), though we need to ask how representation is working. Monroe published special issues devoted to Southern Poets and so on, and I’ve already mentioned the magazine’s tradition of publishing special issues of ‘foreign’ poetry. Today it might be termed ‘internationalism’, of that non-communist kind. Politics form an interesting subtext as well: vaguely left, with accommo-

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dation (if with reservations) of distinctly left poetries – Muriel Rukeyser’s, for example – but also playing it fairly safe. No poetry journal is really apolitical. As Parisi makes clear at the beginning of the letters, the unspoken is always money. Poets are ‘meant’ to write for nothing. Indeed, William Carlos Williams, who doesn’t come across here as particularly caring about his rivals (i.e. all other poets), frequently demands that Monroe stop paying people: that payment is bringing mediocrity, that poetry comes out of a commitment and not a desire to be fed. Easy to say if you’re eating well, of course. The championing of poets who decline in later years – Vachel Lindsay and Edgar Lee Masters are two examples cited over and over – is seen as respecting the needs of living over talent or ability. Some of the most moving letters come from Kenneth Patchen regarding his inability to secure funding during great hardship and illness. They are genuinely sensitive and heart-rending, but also sublime examples of asking when you’re not asking. Monroe and her fellow editors were never well-off, and we read constantly of meetings with supporters and of scratching for grants. This is the real slog of the journal. Constantly on the verge of bankruptcy, saved at the last minute, anniversary issues being purportedly the last issues – operations have been a monthly drama. As announced in the press recently, Poetry has just inherited $U S 100 million from the late Ruth Lilly, of the pharmaceuticals fortune, so the magazine no longer has such worries. Will this turn out to dilute its impact? Will security take some of the edge off? One of the keys to Poetry’s success has been the balancing of the ‘front’ of the journal with the prose /reviews at the ‘back’. The creation of a persistent and varied critical culture might well prove Poetry’s greatest long-term gift: true range is to be found among its critical writings. At its best, this book of letters rises beyond the iconic journal, and fractures into the lives of the poets. It’s not whether the selection shows them to be arsehole or saint that matters, but that we forget about the frustrations of payment, publication, and aesthetic hungerings, and touch their ordinary lives. This happens frequently in the collection, and that’s its charm. Yet it is not a mere collection of letters, but letters framed by a specific history – of the journal, more than the poets (except perhaps Ezra Pound), though all journals see themselves as having, in some way, fostered – and even more than this, helped create – the poetic sensibility. There are many treasures in this collection. Especially appealing is Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s facsimile-reproduced letter (large, bold print):

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Dear Editors Thank you for the review of Allen Ginsberg’s Kaddish And Other Poems, even tho’ your reviewer did not recognize Allen Ginsberg to be the greatest living American poet. (who is greater, daddy?).

Although the journal published various Beats, the tone that’s fostered in this book isn’t quite the daddy-o of the City Lights bookshop owner in San Francisco. Some letters are included, it seems, because they represent the publication of someone not of the white bourgeoisie; because they broaden the scope of the open door (Monroe in 1912: “The Open Door will be the policy of the magazine – may the great poet we are looking for never find it shut, or halfshut, against his ample genius. .. ”). Langston Hughes’s letter of thanks, reproduced in facsimile, on the letterhead of “Fire!! Devoted to Younger Negro Artists” is a case in point: . . . Thank you very much for my check from P O E T R Y . Such things come in very handy when winter time’s approaching and overcoats are to be purchased. And I am very proud of having been published in P O E T R Y . It’s something every poet wants to achieve.

The inclusion of this letter is interesting in two ways: it illuminates no movement, though its letterhead does. This is a positive move on the editors’ part; it also shows an awareness of the marginalization of black writing in contemporaneous American letters. There are numerous quiet efforts to approach this issue. More interesting is the universalizing ‘poet’ in Hughes’ letter against the declaration of the stationery’s letterhead. It asserts specificity and cause, and universalism. Open door should mean open door. Poetry certainly wished this to be the case, even if it was not always the reality: that deserves recognition. On Monroe’s death in 1936, Wallace Stevens wrote: Her job brought Miss Monroe into contact with the most ferocious egoists. I mean poets in general. You could see her shrewd understanding adapt itself to her visitors. When they had left her office she remained just as amiable. There must be many of her contributors to whom she gave the feeling not only that she liked their poems, but that she liked them personally, as she usually did.

Friendship is central to this book. Even with the jealousies and fighting between poets, Monroe and those who followed her as editor attempted to create a space for meeting and interaction. Whether having lost offices through financial hardship and even a patron’s change of heart, or making do in a cold

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attic at the top of the university library, poets were welcomed and often wined and dined. That’s the key. The identification of the magazine with the city of Chicago was pivotal. Poetry wasn’t a renegade, a breakaway – it was a part of the city, bringing news from afar, making itself a centre, a nodal point – a force to reckon with.

The L A N G U A G E Poets237 Seriously, these sorts of far away presentations enfold their columnar pretense.238 In its first dumb form language was gesture technique of travelling over sea ice silent before great landscapes and glittering processions vastness of a great white looney north of our forebeing.239

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Ron Silliman, has said of this type of poetry that it’s a “community of concern for language as the centre of whatever activity poems might be.”240 Silliman would also confirm that this notion may be expounded in any style or method providing the product is not merely a ‘voice poem’: i.e. the writer conveying to reader a ‘natural’ message in narrative sequence.

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NE OF THE ARCHITECTS OF THE L A N G U A G E MOVEMENT,

“C-o-m-m-u-n-i-c-a-t-i-n-g an ad-hoc introduction to american L A N G U A G E poetry, de-fiAntly not ‘idle babbling’: any queries(?) please. Outside the manifesto,” Fremantle Arts Review (August–September 1995). 238 Charles Bernstein, “Gradation,” in Bernstein, Islets / Irritations (New York: Jordan Davies, 1983): 24. 239 Susan Howe, Secret History of the Dividing Line (New York: Telephone Books, 1978): 7. 240 Ron Silliman, as quoted in George Hartley, Textual Politics and the Language Poets (Carbondale: Southern Illinois U P , 1984): xii.

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Charles Bernstein once said, “there is no natural writing style.”241 If there is a ‘natural’ writing style, then it is fact based on assumed knowledge and methods or patterns of delivery, leading to, in the words of George Hartley, author of the influential volume Textual Politics and the Language Poets, “a socially contrived basis of [... ] writing.”242 L A N G U A G E poetry is about going beyond the boundaries ‘traditional/conventional’ language-use places on notions of meaning. This re-working of material through aesthetic discourse is done in a political light, or at least with a political awareness, though in a way which refutes the idea that language should only refer to that which occurs outside itself. The L A N G U A G E poets do not exist as an anathema. They are grounded in and influenced by many earlier poets and movements, such as Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, Gertrude Stein (of “a rose is a rose is a rose” fame), Charles Olson (and the Black Mountain /Projectionist school in general), John Ashbery, Louis Zukofsky, William Carlos Williams, the Dadaists (especially Tristan Tzara), the Russian Futurists, and Surrealism. In the case of the Russian Futurists, they identified with a movement that was born out of revolution in the same way as they themselves were in resistance to the Vietnam War and Watergate. Similarly, the Dadaists, with their hatred of the corrupt and war-decadent European State system, sought a ‘truth’. As Tristan Tzara said in his “Introduction to Dada,” It seemed to us that the world was losing itself in idle babbling, that literature and art had become institutions located on the margin of life, that instead of serving man they had become the instruments of an outmoded society.243

As will be obvious to the reader by now, L A N G U A G E poets do not separate the political from language. And in a sense all language is political. L A N G U A G E poets are an extremely diverse though networked group of practitioners. There is a plethora of small magazines and presses devoted exclusively to their work, and also a communal spirit (if somewhat defensive at

241

Charles Bernstein, “Stray Straws and Straw Men,” in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, ed. Bruce Andrews & Charles Bernstein (Carbondale: Southern Illinois U P , 1984): 43. 242 George Hartley, Textual Politics and the Language Poets, xiii. 243 Tristan Tzara, “An Introduction to Dada,” in The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, ed. Robert Motherwell (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P /Belknap Press, 1951): 403, quoted in Hartley, Textual Politics and the Language Poets, 11.

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times – a kind of ‘us’ and ‘them’ attitude towards more traditional and conservative schools of verse) that allows extremely diverse poets to feel they share a common ground. Some of the American journals that have been significant over the years, since the first issue of This in 1971, a year seen as the startingpoint of the movement, are L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, S U L F U R , T E M B L O R , Q U , M I A M , R O O F , T O T T E L ’ S , S I N K , and T R A M E N . Major anthologies include: The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book (selections from the journal of the same name), ed. Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein (1984); The American Tree, ed. Ron Silliman (1986); Language Poetries, ed. Douglas Messerli (1987); and From The Other Side of the Century, ed. Douglas Messerli (1994). There are numerous poets and critics , and in many cases poets are also critics. Some of the most influential poets are: Bruce Andrews, Steve Benson, Charles Bernstein, Clark Coolidge, Ray DiPalma, Carla Harryman, Steve McCaffery, Susan Howe, Ron Silliman, Diane Ward, and Lyn Hejinian. The L A N G U A G E poet, regardless of differences of aesthetics and theory, looks to the value of the individual word. As the Russian Futurists Velimir Khlebnikov and Alexei Kruchonykh wrote, in their poetry “the word developed as itself alone.”244 Through the combination of individual words, phrases, sentences, etc., each word is attached to another by a series of associations. The pre-Babelic notion of one universal language comes into play here. In much the same way as Marx’s ‘commodity fetishism‘ may be seen as an answer to the corruption of speech by capitalism, itself a necessary step to liberation, the confusion of Babel may be seen as a learning curve. The loss of mono-articulation does not deny its universal roots /associations. As in the State of Nature, people used language to work together as a tool for survival, as opposed to the capitalist use of language for profit and subjugation, so the L A N G U A G E poet tries to recapture this original ‘purity’ of words. In a sense, the avant-garde, in general, might be perceived as being a series of rearrangements of anachronistic sensibilities. These practitioners would, of course, reject the notion of the ‘romantic’ poet who defines self through comparisons with the ‘natural’ world, looks for a specific (predictable) series of references to subvert the reader, and as a consequence making the poet’s ego central to perceptions of the outer world,

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Velimir Khlebnikov & Alexei Kruchonykh, “The Word as Such” (1913), in Velimir Khlebnikov, Collected Works, vol. 1: Letters and Theoretical Writings, ed. Charlotte Douglas (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1987): 255.

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regardless of persona (which is often something of a façade in any case). Steve McCaffery says: Reference in language is a strategy of promise and postponement; it’s the thing that language never is, never can be, but to which language is always moving.245

Words, like labour and production, can so often become victims of “commodity fetishism,” assuming “a fantastic form different from their reality”246 (Capital 1, Marx) – as we are ‘told’ what we ‘know’ we become increasingly complacent and victimized by language. Julia Kristeva, in Revolution in Poetic Language, examines the liberating nature of the semiotic (“includes drives, their dispositions, and their divisions of the body by the ecological and social system surrounding the body, such as objects and pre-Oedipal relations with parents”247) and the contrasting oppressive ‘symbolic’ (“logical and orderly framing of language”248). She says, in “The Signifying Process”: The regulation of the semiotic in the symbolic through the thetic break, which is inherent in the operation of language, is also found on the various levels of society’s signifying edifice. In all known archaic societies, this founding break of the symbolic order is represented by murder – the killing of a man, a slave, a prisoner, an animal. Freud reveals this founding break and generalizes from it when he emphasizes that society is founded on a complicity in a common crime.249

In the same way, the ‘romantic’ poet exploits our complicity in reference to his /her self and diverting our attention from the commonweal. In the course of this we become complacent and dulled to the mode of production that removes surplus labour from its producers, in Marxist parlance. It is worth noting that, despite their general obsession with theory and critical practice, the L A N G U A G E poets tend to be anti-academic (i.e. the 245

Steve McCaffery, “Intraview” (1978), in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, ed. Bruce Andrews & Charles Bernstein (Carbondale: Southern Illinois U P , 1984): 189. 246 Karl Marx, “Chapter 1: Commodities,” in Marx, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 9: Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capital Production (London, 1887; Berlin: Dietz, 1990): 67. 247 Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, tr. Margaret Waller, foreword by Leon S. Roudiez (La Révolution du langage poétique, 1974; New York: Columbia U P , 1984): 86, quoted in George Hartley, Textual Politics and the Language Poets, 68. 248 Hartley, Textual Politics and the Language Poets, 69. 249 Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 70.

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Academy), and in fact grew out of an antipathy towards the academic verse of the 1950s and 1960s, as well as the incorporation of poets such as Creeley, Duncan, and Olson into the literary canon of the period. L A N G U A G E poetry, above all else, should challenge the reader. Stimulation comes of disorientation. The Russian Formalists were fond of the word ‘ostranenie’, which may be roughly translated as ‘genuine strangeness’ (though usually rendered as ‘defamiliarization’/‘Verfremdung’). There are boundaries, but only insofar as they are constructs of a post-Babel capitalist world (the dismantling of the ‘common’ language providing a complex market and consequently the ideological starting point for capitalism). They are there to be passed through, or over, or under, or negotiated in some way. L A N G U A G E poetry in Australia, at least in terms of publishing, is in its infancy, despite certain poets (such as Kris Hemensley and a circle of poets ‘centred’ on Melbourne’s Collected Works Bookshop and other innovators such as Pete Spence) having worked in a similar vein to their American models for many years. In 1991, Meanjin ran a special L A N G U A G E poetry issue which included both American and Australian practitioners of the art. This issue prompted much dialogue among writers and theorists around the country. One of the major questions addressed was whether or not there could in fact be a school of poetry in Australia recognized as L A N G U A G E poetry. It could be argued that ‘L A N G U A G E poetry’ is a purely American phenomenon (be it one heavily influenced by modern European – particularly French – theory and language experimentation) and that Australians have, like other nations and cultures, hybridized its theories to suit their own social, political, and linguistic peculiarities. According to Sigi Curnow, The term “Language” in this enterprise ends up exhibiting the kinds of textual dislocations with which writing itself is preoccupied; unstable, localized, “Language” becomes a sort of shifting signifier, embracing a diverse range of practices and concerns.250

In Hartley: The answer to reification is not a further obliteration of meaning – as McCaffery and Melnick have at times suggested – but a laying bare of the social process of meaning production. As Andrews puts it [The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, ed. Andrews & Bernstein, 136]: “To politicize-not a closure but an

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Sigi Curnow, “Language Poetry and the Academy,” Meanjin 50.1 (Autumn

1991): 171.

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opening.” Or as Marx puts it in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: “The social revolution [. . . ] cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future.”251

Memento Mori252

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that echo out of a land many have tried to make Biblical, in the process opening the circles of Inferno. Rarely missing a beat – rhythmic and measured with long lines that develop like jazz variations and then return to their signature moments – it is poetry of density and lustre; poetry laboured over in fury and anger, and hope. The land and its people – all its people – resist the telling of a simple narrative of discovery and ‘settlement’. It is a land constructed out of dispossession, greed, and slavery, as much as out of hope, freedom, and deliverance. In the mix are ambition and the irresistible momentum towards a capitalist healing that can never happen. In “The Heavenly Doctor,” we read of treatment that can be done HIS BOOK IS FULL OF SULPHUROUS ANAPHORIC LINES

By a stream of hot air at white heat, for about $3 cost – nothing left But a little heap of snow-white ashes: As when the meteor passed In the early morning, and fading, threw A sudden glaring into my room like a flash from a hunter’s firepan.

This is a ruthless and at times horrifying confrontation with the failure of the egotistical sublime, of idealism, and ultimately even of civil disobedience. In many ways, the book is even more relevant to the world as it is now than it was in 1996, when first published. Poetry becomes one of the last lines of protest – and this book is protest, but never propaganda. It is a vision without the claptrap, without the claims of the best way out. As Garrett Hongo noted back in 1996, it is a translation – Hummer acts as medium: Hummer presents us with a hectoring witness compelled to translate the banal urban atrocities of our current civilization into complex testimonies and transcendent prophecies.253 251

Hartley, Textual Politics and the Language Poets, 99. “Memento Mori: On T.R. Hummer’s Walt Whitman in Hell,” Denver Quarterly 44.1 (2009): 57–65. Review of T.R. Hummer, Walt Whitman in Hell: Poems (Southern Messenger Poets; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State U P , 1996). 253 Garett Hongo, back-cover blurb for T.R. Hummer, Walt Whitman in Hell. 252

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True, but I also think that Hummer is taking the transcendent, particularly American transcendentalism, to task for its failure to translate out of its time and place. It is needed, but isn’t there. He searches for a replacement. “Testimony” is appropriate: these are Villon-like testimonies from the shadow of the gallows, from the shade of a rotting empire: not just an urban empire, but an empire of the fields, of plate glass and “the abstracted sky,” and of a world contracted thus.… This collapsing and collating of historical time, the droll and Hippocratic reality and utility of three bucks, and the lyrical-cum-narrative self in the isolation of a room – individual in the face of apocalypse, the collective conscience of the nation no longer there when the crunch comes – works as ars poetica for this book as a whole. Walt Whitman in Hell is a journey through America and the idea of America, but also through the psyche of the creative self. The vision is apocalyptic and euphoric at once – discovery of music (jazz, bebop) or a moment of beauty in nature, or the redemptive nature of language itself when all else is destroyed by the irony of life – counterpointed and contrasted by constant reminders that we will die, of our own mortality: “memento mori of the skull.” The title poem of the book is its engine room. Walt Whitman is in hell because the vistas of freedom and democracy he envisaged and ‘saw’ cannot be realized. Is this because of the way modern America has gone? Vietnam echoes through this book, as does the first Gulf War. Foreign policy becomes an inferno that consumes all that has made America from elsewhere in the world. Of course, Whitman was never an abolitionist, and argued in defence of Manifest Destiny among his friends, so his democracy is an exclusive democracy, and his songs of freedom ultimately rest on placating the desires of the self. This is Hummer’s point of departure; his narrator is tormented by the tensions between self and nation, between soul and body. New York, archetypal before time allows it to be mythic, becomes the core, the nexus of this struggle. Rather than entering Inferno immune with Virgil at his side, this modern Walt carries an awareness of his own hypocrisy, and struggles to celebrate in the burning light of personal and collective guilt, of greed and inequality, suffering and “memento mori.” But every torment also becomes an eruption of energy, and energy in this book is hope. Hummer has created a language generator, a work in which you feel every word has been put through the fire, the kiln, and re-made. This is the work of a poet’s poet: scintillating, even

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terrifying, always disturbing. It becomes a work of witness, but also of selfwitness: On a secret path along the rim of the starless city, perhaps, Between the wall and the torments, or perhaps in a tunnel Dug far below the other shafts, where I have been Let down through a column that seems of brass, Descended safely among the unhappy that I might witness The vastation of souls. A multitude of pitiful Men and women are gargoyled by homelessness here, Hung in various ways from the different parts of themselves Corresponding to the sociology of their births.

It’s not surprising to see an epigram from Allen Ginsberg, that other shaman soothsayer of the American collective consciousness mediated through the Self, at the beginning of “Walt Whitman in Hell.” But using the epigram as Hummer does – “on the black waters of Lethe?” – suggests (as with Ginsberg) that hell is never straightforward, that it harbours the paradox of being creative, and generative. It’s not surprising that Dante’s Inferno is read more frequently than Purgatorio or Paradiso (though both these parts of the Divine Comedy have, to my mind, so much more to offer, and in so many ways). When looking for sources for Hummer’s compaction of the Divine Comedy (for this is not Inferno alone but, rather, the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso collapsed like a dying star into one), we can travel from Aristotle and Plato through the neo-Platonists (especially Thomas Aquinas) through to Hart Crane’s The Bridge and Whitman himself. However, the work I think Hummer’s subconsciously owes most to is “The Morning Song of Lord Zero” by Conrad Aiken, a poet with whom Hummer wrestled many years ago (though he only vaguely remembers reading “Zero”). Hummer’s work is so much an address to the Self, to the Body and Soul, and to the Collective Consciousness that it is a dialogue between writer and reader. Here are a few lines from Aiken’s masterpiece: Who are you? Who? Fatigue this might be, or repetition as the shutter drips sunshine in a known pattern, bright drops falling in a water-chain of light. The dream hangs from the morning ceiling like a canopy,

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illusory mosquito-net whose folds our old terror again insinuates itself to hide…

Of course, Aiken employs modulated lines in which the breath and ‘meaning’ are the measure of line-length, while Hummer pushes his lines well beyond both these components and lets each line become a poem in itself. But what is similar is the dialogism and the fusing of redemptive vision and death and loss. Hummer’s vision is bleaker, though. In the sense that Freud in his essay on the uncanny discusses the urge to get inside the mother, to be in-utero, so Hummer’s world is a contradiction of womb and uterus as productive and nurturing, and also enclosing and suffocating. Here are some of the tautologies at work: All along, there was thirst shaping up in the uterine rot of fence posts Everywhere the sunlight touched

and Somewhere else, the strained heart, the muscles of the inner thigh, The inscribed surface of the forehead, the ruptured uterus Signify. Is that the old life we dream we are losing, comrades…

and Against phthisis. Against hysteria, scoliosis, quinsy. Acute to the rhythm of the womb’s trepidations, morphology of rupture, Circumcision, leeching, the inhaling of chloroform during labor.

The female becomes Blakean. There’s a condemnation of social damnation and inequality, and the patriarchy is nation. In one of the most powerful passages of the title poem, and the work as a whole, Hummer highlights the Romantic selectivity of redemption, the subtext that sublimity is offered to men and denied to women, that the patriarchy is capitalistic apocalypse. One should be wary of a simple binary of good and bad here based on gender – the book refutes that constantly, men and women are condemned and celebrated together – but it is a critique of the discourse of gender: …In insensible confusion, I stumble On the misery of women moaning in parlors, in memory Of the names of rivers their husbands died for – The Nile, the Rhone, the Rhine, the Somme, the Marne, The Aisne, the Yser, the Meuse, the Chickamauga,

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The Yangtze, the Mekong, the Tigris and the Euphrates, Where stealth bombers and F-111s vomit sulfur and acid On the Mesopotamian plain until the image of my old father Gilgamesh lurches out of the dust to lay hands on The byzantine levers of a T-72 Soviet tank. One Of these demons of unforgetting, a magnetized girl of twenty Who lived sixty years beyond the day of her lover’s desertion By fuel-air bomb in the wreckage of Panama City, Comes forward to comfort me with bandages and morphine, Cool hands on the brow. The story of her girlhood Materializes within me, an immaculate marriage Of nightmare and menses. Now the voices of my stillborn Sons and daughters rise from the blistered tarmac, The strangled books of the vanished poets of America…

Whitman’s own times in war hospitals led, ironically, to great redemptive moments as a poet. The Whitman anamnesis or spirit is not just all men and women in declaration, but in the harshest of realities, and in body and soul. Fredric Jameson opens the first chapter of his master-work Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, with this paragraph: The last few years have been marked by an inverted millenarianism in which premonitions of the future, catastrophic or redemptive, have been replaced by senses of the end of this or that (the end of ideology, art, or social class; the “crisis” of Leninism, social democracy, or the welfare state, etc., etc.); taken together, all of these perhaps constitute what is increasingly called postmodernism. The case for its existence depends on the hypothesis of some radical break or coupure, generally traced back to the end of the 1950s or the early 1960s.254

Jameson’s opening is an opening of parts recognizing the selective, fetishized, and fragmentary nature of modern experience. Rather than a totality, there are parts. The irony of Terry Hummer’s poem “Made-for-T V Movie, in which a Couple Throws a Copy of Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism; or, The Logic of Late Capitalism off a Bridge and into a River,” is manifold and manifest. The sequence becomes a series of premonitions and introspections that parody the postmodern ‘end of this and that’. Things happen outside the real254

Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991): 1.

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time of the poem, and yet they are a parallel truth. It’s ‘the one about’ or ‘somewhere else’ that fixes the action as much as what you see, what you get events. The poem is a crisis of aesthetics, of art. In the narrative of the poem, the narrative of the book as a whole, events are always real and unreal at once. The juxtapositions of a sensual moment with a sulfuric counterpoint are made to seem inevitable. And even in real-time, the desire is to create an artefact of the real – to avoid it, to reinvent it as art or distraction: “If she only had her Nikon, / The light meter, the polarizing filter, she could fix // Her love with this pre-Raphaelite aura of April sunlight in her hair – .” These lines are characteristic of Hummer’s approach to the line and subject throughout Walt Whitman in Hell: the mixing of the modern with the classical or neoclassical, in a revivification of a renaissance sensibility that has been proved unreal, and ultimately stranded. The long lines draw the reader to the brink, the caesura, if it comes at all, often doing so well into the second half of the line. Hummer has created a narrative line loaded with possibility – figurative and overt. When a short line in a poem chimes in (or tolls in), or a short-line poem breaks up the usually longer-lined poems, it is in a deeply compressed form, spring-loaded to spark the narrative of the book along. Another feature of the lines quoted above is the section-break after “fix.” “Her lover…” actually begins section X, and the carry-over of the poem’s flow is another paradoxical linking /separating device of Hummer’s. Make no bones about it – and we’re certainly talking the bones of civilization, the bones of nation, the bones of songs of ourselves – this is a burning text that is a late-modernist confrontation with postmodernity and its tricks and dead ends; it is Andrew Marvell’s “A Dialogue Between the Soul and Body” revivified and refocused through Dante’s Inferno, the Inferno of an America that would be paradise, and very occasionally is. The Soul initially says in “A Dialogue”: “Oh, who shall from this dungeon raise / A soul enslaved so many ways? / With bolts of bones that fettered stands / In feet, and manacled in hands…,” to be counterpointed in the binary by a body that replies, “Oh, who shall me deliver whole / From bonds of this tyrannic soul?” This also is the crisis – and ultimately resolution – of Hummer’s master-work. In the end, it is millenarian, and the old narratives of catastrophe and redemption become inseparable from the condition of modernity. The significance of the redemptive nature of music, especially AfricanAmerican music in many manifestations – from Lightnin’ Hopkins to Miles Davis – cannot be underestimated. There is also a concurrent and largely undeclared dialogue with the poets Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen. If

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redemption is possible, then it is also through the creative and social revolution of a Harlem Renaissance, of vitalized poetic language being used to empower where people have been suppressed, or where they are searching for connection, for collective identity. The double entendre of these lines as we approach the end of our infernal journey echos back through the book: And to Countee Cullen’s crucifixion: “Maybe God thinks such things are right.” “Maybe God never thinks at all. . . .”

Black poetry, black music (especially jazz but also the blues) – these are another counterpoint to the decay of (white-made, though by no means exclusively so) capitalistic power-structures (the corporate, the military complex, the manufacturing of nation-making mythologies and digestible versions of ‘history’). There’s also a subtext of civil war poetry – from Stephen Crane to Herman Melville, apart from Whitman himself. The book is an anti-war poem from beginning to end. If configured through the spirit of Walt Whitman, the personae of the poems of Walt Whitman in Hell shift and change in nature. They are not all Walt Whitman, but are always aware of the spirit of Whitman. An over-arching contra-presence, which forces comparisons between an ideal of America, an ideal of constitution, bill of rights, and the ideal as quoted on the dust-jacket of the original Louisiana State University Press edition of 1996 ( “The United States themselves,” says Walt Whitman in his incendiary introduction to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, “are essentially the greatest poem”); a contra-presence to a contemporary America in which the failure of vision for many is all too evident. The dust-jacket blurb continues: “Over one hundred years later, T.R. Hummer recasts the poet’s ecstatic vision as a fierce, heartbreaking, and slyly oblique jeremiad.” I agree with this, but there is much more. Hummer’s struggle is with America and Whitman, particularly the ideal of Whitman’s America that has been used to propagandize. Whitman’s canonicity has done sterling service in supportung views of the Self as a conjunction with National Self. Hummer is not just fierce; he entirely destroys this constructed mythology. In “The Antichrist in Arkansas” we read: In the alley off Jefferson Street, they are giving secret signs. Who are they? Call them the Brotherhood of Darkness. Give them emblems: khaki workshirts, Prince Albert in a can. They worship at the Synagogues of the Flesh of the Holy Pig.

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Belief is so entirely corrupted and abused? Or has it been hijacked and used as a smokescreen for greed and power? The questions never go away. Violence is close at hand, and, in the Christian sense, to dust we return: all personae expressing themselves in the figurative, whatever their crimes (or not), are damned by an obsessive search and need for meaning in redemption. They/we want to forget, but cannot, no matter how acidic the context, how poisoned the vision: Memento mori? I want to forget this country where the law is still Pristine, where politics dies and comes back from the grave as fate. I construct The urinous light of a jail cell in Burlington the moment before the deputy Slapped me blind. They thought I was drunk when the whole time I was nothing But crazy from eighty hours awake at the wheel and all the white crosses I’d popped….

The short-line poem becomes the long line cut down to size, impossible to contain despite the strictures. Ironically, perhaps we can finish by returning to Jameson: If there is any realism here, it is a “realism” that is meant to derive from the shock of grasping that confinement and of slowly becoming aware of a new and original historical situation in which we are condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra of that history, which itself remains forever out of reach.255

So much of the South is in this work: and so much of its idea of its own history. New York as seen from the South, America as a whole envisaged from the South. This is a book of confession where confession fails but language elevates and liberates: it says that poetry is the only medium for redemption, speaking what cannot be spoken. We will pass through the layers of Self and Self as Nation, rid ourselves of false prophecy and notions of deliverance, and tackle the problems we have created head-on.

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Show Me the Way to Go, Homer256

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the tension between poetic form and narrative is the driving force behind these volumes. An intertextual quasimythical ‘epic poem’, Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red is created out of the few remaining fragments of Geryoneis, by the Greek lyric poet Stesichoros (born around 650 B C ), told from the point of view of the monster Geryon rather than the hero Herakles who slew him – “[Stesichoros] came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult period for a poet,” Carson tells us. It’s there, too, in the self-referential personal narratives of Paul Durcan’s new volume, confronting national and literary identity; through the sassy, Ally McBeal-style dealings with city, work, and the ironies of a gendered world in Deborah Garrison’s A Working Girl Can’t Win, and the compacted, almost explosive, fragmented narratives of Adam Thorpe’s From the Neanderthal. Thorpe seems not to have lost his poetic voice after his increasingly largescale narrative prose works of recent years. He is a powerful lyric poet, able to evoke place in the manner of Geoffrey Hill. Making connections between a variety of pasts – from the primal through to a recent past that is already, in some sense, ‘mythical’ – he demystifies the processes of time. The past and the present are actively interwoven for Thorpe, and even when he writes of his son asking “Why aren’t our footprints there in front?,” eliciting the reply “Because we’re not there yet. Footprints come from us,” there is a sense of cyclical inevitability about movement – that the footprints will come. Thorpe has great control, and at times when the poems risk preciousness, he has the skill to pull them back. There are many about family relationships, and the voice of the focal father always runs the risk of paternalism. But Thorpe always gently withdraws at the crucial moment. It’s tempting to call him a nature poet, so strong is his connection with place, but his sense of history maintains a philisophical distance that prevents us from simply labelling him. We see this in “Pickings,” a modus operandi poem for the book that concisely examines layers of the past – 256

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“Show me the way to go, Homer,” The Observer (1 August 1999). Review of Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red (London: Jonathan Cape, 1999); Paul Durcan, Greetings to Our Friends in Brazil (London: Harvill, 1999); Deborah Garrison, A Working Girl Can’t Win (London: Faber & Faber, 1999); Adam Thorpe, From the Neanderthal (London: Jonathan Cape, 1999).

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Tins, the tines of forks, light francs from the war, each worth what we find to say about it. . .

– as children pick fragments of things from over the grave of an “old dame.” The real skill in this poem is the blending of the materialism of the poem with the dark humour of “ ‘She’s much too deep,’ I say,” regarding the prospect of unearthing her. We see it, too, in the title sequence, which actually concludes the book, “From the Neanderthal” – a strong, meditative poem on place and inheritance, where the subject ‘fades’ with the inevitability of the landscape, history, being: In the upside-down bit of the lake the plovers are just as good at swimming as their aerial partners: they imitate so exactly I have the heretical thought that they might be the same, that a being can occupy two places without splitting and roar to scare the weakness away.

A subtext of the Thorpe volume is the movement between the earth of England and the earth of France. Paul Durcan, in Greetings to Our Friends in Brazil, also travels, but his journeys are of Paul Durcan. Whether he’s in Brazil, Chicago, or Ireland, he is primarily concerned with giving us (his ‘readers’) a view of the real Durcan, the ‘fictional’ – media? – Durcan, the negotiated-through-others Durcan, the political Durcan, and so on. Reading the volume of epistles to the self, I was reminded of an episode of Seinfeld where Jimmy talks of himself in the third person. From “Karamazov in Ringsend”: “Not the least the poet Durcan. Watch him / As he drives up... .” Most of Durcan’s poems are in the first person, but a few stand back and examine the phenomenon that is the man himnself. While Durcan has a clear gift for the colloquial and narrative – these are stories of his engagement with place and ‘characters’ primarily – the poems are weighed down with a sincerity that could do with a good dose of self-irony. Durcan is capable of irony, but it’s always backed by a sense of self that undoes it for me. The poems set in Brazil are often patronizing, and words like “mulatto” are used apparently without question. His praise of presidents and poets, his damnation of others, are emotional and off-the-cuff. We get the sense that he feels everything, but

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thinks little. Durcan has written some brilliant narrative poems in the past, but they are in short supply in this overlong and tedious volume. Deborah Garrison’s A Working Girl Can’t Win is intentionally light in tone. It’s un-p.c., it’s argumentative, does manage to self-ironize, and is very much the quick read that the fast New York culture that engendered it would produce. There’s a sense of the Warholian factory about it, with dashes of Ultra Violet, but more the ‘I’ll have a good time regardless of what you all think about it’. Garrison has a sense of line-length and knows about closure. It’s not a volume that’s going to change the world, but maybe that’s the point. Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red may be one of the finest volumes of English-language poetry, or maybe ‘p(r)oetry’, of the last decade. Its intertextual weaving of popular culture, myth, sexual comment, theory, and narrative is greatly accomplished. It’s a verse novel, in effect, though some might call it prose. It operates on tensions in the process of ‘translation’ and mythology, narrative and the moment in time. The interplay between the redwinged Geryon and his nemesis Herakles is dynamic and alluring – it’s hard to put down. The reader is constantly asked, and asks, what the truth is behind what we’re informed about the self, the writer. Autobiography is a selective process. This is a metatext in which Geryon analyses his own life, his own ‘being written’. The poet, the translator, mediates for us – tells the story, builds the narrative, but only insofar as Geryon allows it. Photography plays a big part in the text – the truth of the moment, the possible manipulation of the ‘seen’. Carson tells us that Stesichoros put the bite back into the adjective – in the late-twentieth century, Carson has brought relevance to the prose line as line of poetry. To be red and re-red (sic)!

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RAY’S IS A VOICE WITH POISE AND SPIRITUAL SUBTLETY, while remaining direct and engaging. There is a strong metaphysical element to his verse that is rendered approachable and, at its most challenging moments, even vulnerable. Ray’s poetry is about the human condition and, above all else, shows humility and respect for difference in people. He manages to highlight relationships between people and place that

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David Ray, HeartStones: New and Selected Poems, photos by Judy Ray, ill. Endre Rátkay & Richard Farley (Lakewood C O : Micawber Fine Editions, 1998).

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many poets don’t even glimpse in a lifetime’s writing. He uses his own experience, his own sense of growth and familiarity with the landscape he was brought up in, his relationship to his father and, through his father, with the land and the ethos of dust-bowl America. There is real pathos fused with respect in his work. It is this tension that heightens metaphor, making high poetry out of the colloquial. He is readable, yet never compromises himself technically. His poems are beautifully crafted – working narrative voice and lyric into vignettes, tales, and ‘paintings’ that work through and against each other. A Ray poem can be read individually; it can also be read against all other Ray poems and against the traditions and cultures that inform it and them. These include not only the folklore and speech of the Plains, but the legacy of Thoreau, of European art and thought, of Indian mysticism, of settlement cultures, and an overwhelming sensitivity to the dispossessed and colonized. What is especially rewarding about this interactive oeuvre – so beautifully captured in the selection here – is the movement between different locales. Be it Greece, Australia, India, New Zealand, or Iowa, Ray is ‘at home’. His camera is not out to steal the soul of place, to colonize and translate it for the ‘folks back home’, but, rather, to engage with it as a discerning and concerned eye that recognizes boundaries and marvels at what forms these; how much they invite – or reject – crossing. This translates into the ‘spiritual subtlety’ I mentioned. There is a sense of spirit in all Ray poems, no matter how much sadness or loss. And his voice moves from profound elegy to elation and joy – almost rapture. ‘Loss’ is constantly being negotiated; the poet feels obliged to find joy when darkness threatens. Ray is also a master of irony. Not the in-your-face kind, but the wry sideswipe, the gentle dig, and stoical acceptance. Critical it can be, but always recognizing that to err is human. Those tensions again. A beautiful poem, on the nature of memory and loss, that illustrates these tensions is “The Buffalo Waiting Room.” Another hallmark is Ray’s sensitivity to childhood. From terror to delight, he remains open to the translational value of memory as one grows older, and is able to re-invent his voice by examining his relationship with the past as it changes through recollection. A biting poem in this vein is the title poem; another masterful piece is “Chiggers.” I first came across David Ray’s work during his visit to Australia in 1991. Resident for a few months at the University of Western Australia, he quickly became an active part of a poetry community very concerned with the issues

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of isolation and what constitutes an independent poetic voice – the language of place and identity, especially vis-à-vis an international community. The issues that concern Ray in his poetry were immediately available and of interest to poets in Perth – among the most isolated capital cities in the world, if not itself the most. Also a community polarized as ‘they’, or the ‘Other’, in a vast nation whose real ‘centre’ is the eastern seaboard, specifically the major cities of Sydney and Melbourne. These in themselves are cities of the fringe in relation to the power centres of London and New York. Here was an ‘international’ poet translating his concerns into many different geographies. The peacocks of HeartStones are birds I know well from the University of Western Australia – interesting in themselves, but also symbols of exoticism – “imported ‘objects’ ” – and the relationship between the creative spirit and place, between the self and the external world – “One more day we are close, you and I / while I fretfully prepare for my departure.” Here we have codes and translations from the fringe. And elegy is never far away. Neither is his father’s barbershop. One is given the overwhelming impression through his poetry that Ray is not a materialist. It’s true that there’s an aesthetic at work here, but it’s in the production of beauty through the natural and spiritual worlds. Without seeing it as an end in itself, Ray can recognize the beauty of the ‘thing’. It’s all interconnected. Take this magnificent book – it contains a fine selection of Ray’s material from 1965 through to the mid-1990s, and is also an objet d’art. This is not gratuitous. The pleasure that we obtain from touching the paper, of engaging with the physicality of the text – the font working with rather than against the eye, the comfortable leading and use of the curatorial space of the page – draws us closer to the very human and spiritual concerns of the poems. We ask ourselves whether this is complicity, or something finer – possibly an aesthetic dynamism? The artwork found throughout the book engages not only with the text – the poems – but also with the materials and layout of the book. The paper creates a particular texture, as a canvas, as the surface of object/s being photographed. Once again, there’s the interaction between the artists, the subject, and the curatorial space – the place of presentation and viewing. This is the key to Ray’s poetic, and is found over and over in his poems. We see it in a poem such as “Reply From New Zealand” with its epistolary style, its tone of confession and meditative rumination, of ethical and spiritual consideration, and, above all, interaction with place – with the map, with the zodiac, with the exact and the expansive. Van Gogh is mentioned, as is the

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map of New Zealand, and “As for miracles, last weekend across the glittering bay / we saw an albatross nest.” The photograph that accompanies the poem is sublime in its starkness – black and white, sombre, signposts to a No Exit, to Murdering Beach, to Purakanui 6km, to Long Beach–5km; it leaves us with a mass of contradictions. The light is overwhelming – bright but tinted with grayness. It’s simple but full of ambiguities, almost contradictions. And this is the stuff of great poetry. The picture is also a poem. A stilled metaphor. The variety of artistic work in the volume is appropriate, given the range and interactive nature of Ray’s poetry. And irony is one of the features of Richard Farley’s work that balances its surface nostalgia. Read the same in the Ray poems. Take “Custer’s Last Stand” as an example. Endre Rátkay is a very different artist whose work appropriately illustrates Part I I , “That Fantastic Space.” The work is iconic, prophetic, and haunting in an ‘orthodox’ way. A synthesis of Christian and pagan mysticism creates a tension so often explored in the poetry. Take the illustration on page 80 and the poem that accompanies it, “On A Fifteenth-Century Flemish Angel”: That you are dealing here With a down-to-earth angel, An angel whose wings belong, organic As a bird’s: not like those Greco Angels, sour-faced and grim with doubt.

The colours are stunning. This is an illuminated manuscript and the precursor is William Blake! HeartStones is a prophetic book. It’s spiritual and physical, it’s a book of the everyday, and of the ‘cloister’ – the meditative space. It is of geographies seen and unseen. And it is a book of friendship and communication, of love and loss. The line from a fellow poet that drives the fine “Variations On A Line By William Stafford” is germane: “the darkness around us is deep.” David Ray is someone whose voice does not live in isolation, but brings warmth and light to the darkness that we all feel at varying distances from our lives. His poems see, whatever the quality of light. —1999 a

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Healing the Damage Done258

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I’ve only just re-read the first eighty-seven pages of George Ellenbogen’s selected poems and I have to dive into the writing of what might pass as an introduction. What needs introducing? That he is a poet? That he writes a neat and balanced line and what he says matters dearly to him? That he is a Canadian long resident in the U S A , and better known internationally than ‘at home’? That a Jewish émigré history haunts and compels him? That the spectre of the Holocaust is necessarily present, and should be? That he can write about horror with such sensitivity that terror can come even of stillness. Very few poets can make me want to weep. To my memory, I have cried three times in my life. I came close again reading this book, and yet there’s not an excessively emotional moment in it – when emotion heightens, understated irony constrains it. If you’ve met George, you’ll hear his living voice – literally – in the lines. He has a measured way of speaking, a deep and gradual loquaciousness that will end in a questioning, a self-questioning.. .? “I don’t know, John, I don’t know.. . Well. .. . ” He smiles even in despair, though he does despair. And yet George has an eye second-to-none for beauty. He can capture it and be delicately ironic (his inflection of this is unique) all at once. I’ve been reading George Ellenbogen’s poetry for many years, and published his wonderfully surreal and existentially playful sequence (yes, yes, it does exist. . . the sequence and the playfulness and the existential torment: at once, tautologically, paradoxically, and ambiguously. . . with humour), “Worlds of Helene Leneveu,” in Salt magazine. Sequence? Well, no, it’s more a conversation. Or different conversations at different times. About people? Ideas of people? Characteristics of people? Characters? The ‘borders’ between people and the parallel worlds their characters inhabit? Poet to artist, artist to poet, speaking at Magrittean cross-purposes, though always on the same plane. The apple, the umbrella, are as the giraffe collector or the mad pianist. It’s like an Oulipian experiment, whose constraint is the limits of language itself, and the limits of people. I’ve been reading George Ellenbogen for years because he torments and pleases me at once. I am not comfortable with my responses, but they are there: teased and bothered. He’s a linguist – a mathematician of words. And 258

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“Introduction” to George Ellenbogen, Morning Gothic: New and Selected Poems, ill. Helene Leneveu & Irving Ellenbogen (Montreal: Signal / Véhicule, 2007): 9–18.

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he thoroughly enjoys manipulating and ‘playing’ with words. It’s not surprising to see maths and the material science of language appear in contexts as horrific as the destruction of the ghetto in Warsaw by the Nazis (“Some Recollections of the Last O R T Classes in the Warsaw Ghetto”), or in the surreal portraiture of “The Mad Pianist.” In many ways it seems horrific to make the link, but it’s a link that affirms hope (a control of language as a control of fate and identity) in the face of horror on the broadest scale, the destruction and loss resulting from war, the pall of the Holocaust that should never be lost or erased from memory, and on the minute scale of day-to-day existence, or of the incidental comparison that carries the weight of history and association with it. The loss of an ‘r’ takes us from “friend” to “fiend” in the verisimilitude of English (as the language of the poem): As for your pianist friend I typed him when I dropped an “r,” made him fiend. Floor tiles flood before him like a Danzig corridor, yielding.

To find Ellenbogen’s major sequences “The Rhino Gate” and “Worlds of Helene Leneveu” among his highly drafted and resolved ‘self-contained’ individual poems, written over three or four decades, comes as an aesthetic shock. His poems contain and maintain a sense of self (be it in first, second, or third person) that retains its distance even at the most intimate moments with a perfect grammatical measure. The matter-of-factness of causality, the ironies of a four-poster bed unable to be twisted into leaving a bedroom after the end of a relationship, the potential ‘humanity’ of all humans no matter the situation, these leave you sure of the world in its successes and failures. These poems resist the powerful and power by asserting the small space, the space of the moment and of memory. Of the self, those one has known, and the collective consciousness. One particularly grounding image from the haunting “At the Jewish Cemetery in Gora Kalvaria” combines the pain of the reality of the human condition, of the cruelty and crimes committed by and through ideology, bigotry, and brutality of people and against people, and the trauma of visual comparativeness: how a perfectly apt image is terrifying in its undoing of the aesthetic. Our minds neatly order the appropriate visualization: we think ‘art’ at cross-

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purposes to ‘reality’. In this is the supreme triumph of imagination, and it is belief in the redemptive nature of the lyric that compels Ellenbogen to write. It’s the best example of why there must be poetry after Auschwitz. The silences and fragmentations of Celan have been rebuilt and offered as tablets of help. We hear often how writing is an aid to memory, but Ellenbogen’s writing is an aid to recovery and affirmation: My mother remembered part of it, an earlier part: how she clung to the synagogue floor like a crab when armies passed through and bullets splintered the walls: her friend in blood loosened her grip.

Ellenbogen’s lines enjamb and meld with each other, though they always retain a sense of intactness, of completeness in themselves. This is one of the contradictions that compel the poetry. A form of aural slippage takes place as meaning folds into meaning. The line “in blood loosened her grip” is literal in the blood of wounding, and symbolic in the horror of racism come out of “blood,” but also affirming in the positiveness of a bonding between those suffering. Ellenbogen never tells us what to think: the poems allow us to converse with them. Ellenbogen is a conversationalist: not a rapid speaker, or a loud speaker, but a listener and a commentator. We can imagine him looking closely at a flower, or pausing on his walk to the local shop to watch someone cross the street, or the ways the cracks in a pavement angle and mean something. The interconnectedness is historical and emotional, literal and figurative. And so, from this certainty, leaps the ambivalence of the sequences. “The Rhino Gate” is a masterpiece of cultural reconfiguration and misconfiguration. Ellenbogen writes of the narrator: “she sometimes combines and reshapes, reconstructing a past that provides less and less comfort.” The whiteness of the East Africa ‘settler’/narrator (and the narrative itself!) configures the choice of words and exclusions. Images in magazines, and descriptions and comments from sources ranging from “the sale of real estate to a report on the Mau Mau movement,” work in dialogue with her narrative interiority. But this is actually deceptive, because the entire ‘conversation’ is linguistic, and the Africa presented is in many ways an Africa of the mind. It becomes a metatextual undoing of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The Rhino a symbol by which the imagined Africa /‘Congo’ of colonialism becomes itself.

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Through this device of simultaneous distancing and connecting (with place), Ellenbogen explores the nexus of language and imagination, and exposes what allows colonization or ‘settling’ to take place with such ease (though it might literally fail in so many ways), and such self-justification. Despite “reconstructing a past that provides less and less comfort,” Ellenbogen, the poet, loses his omniscience by being proxy for this narrator’s voice, as she loses hers when drawn into subliminal conversations with Mau Mau Song: God created Gikuya and Mumbi And place them in Gikuyuland. They were deceived by the Europeans And their land was stolen.

through to Karen Blixen’s disturbing “I have a feeling that this country belongs to us.” The rhino itself becomes both the mythical beast akin to the Western unicorn, through to the anchoring reality of strength and resistance against colonization. It becomes that mental binary in which opposites coexist and make the imaginative possible. The poem, we are told, came from “an enigmatic phrase, a mystery I was to struggle with for years before I found its poem.” This language, or an idea expressed in language, leads the way. And thus also the poem ends, an idea in language that will not be restrained any more than the overlaid markers of place – a poem still searching for a phrase (or marker of place) to attach itself to. It doesn’t have access to the ‘true’ markers of place (the pre-settler markers). What remains is “darkness.” What’s left is the rhino resisting the magic ascribed to the idea of it. Its real magic is in its resistance: We have not heard anything else not seen anyone along the mud road, the ruts hardening. This is the way it comes, daylight deserting for darkness. Before we light the lamps we look again, knowing they are there, escaped from dreams in skins of leather, lowering their horns against history that bridles but cannot restrain.

Moving on (and back from) page 87! There are many poets who come to mind as we read Ellenbogen – from Wallace Stevens through to William Staf-

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ford through to Paul Celan. But he’s entirely different, and is so individuated that, really, comparisons should be made with him. Coming out of a bilingual culture, Ellenbogen has a natural sensitivity to language, and since I’ve known him he’s always seen his poetry as being open to translation into other languages, especially French and German. In a sense, it’s translated (in George Steiner’s sense) before it even begins appearing on the page. Language is active, never stagnant. It’s the key to healing the damage done. Where Celan eroded and chose not to look for what had been lost, ending with fragmentation, Ellenbogen reclaims and rebuilds. Out on the ice, among the snow, avoiding the stump that will thaw, he’s enlivening the matter-offactness, and the existential torments, with the play of language in the context of those things language (at the very least) helps to create: Speech, for example. Capital “F’s,” small “y’s” we press into dance like vaudeville stars submerge in memory teased to life through the breath of fax machines on other continents; (“Volatile Prose”)

In an absurdist way, the mundane is always mysterious – and other continents, as idea or reality, can only be so. Ellenbogen is also a poet of specifics and details. Whether it’s in the ‘poet’s voice’, in persona, or a borrowed voice, names and specifics matter. They anchor the reader, and the poet, and that’s the broader dialogue taking place across all the poems: a spoken and a silent conversation with the reader. Whether it’s “Harry Flatt pumping notes” leading to “I knew the sky had opened for redemption” or the sheer appallingness of “Approaching a Photographic Exhibition of Bodies Suspended from Trees” with the parody of aesthetics, of the clinical indifference of even sympathetic art (photography or poetry or painting... ), the horror of the subject-matter played against the horror of representing it, a specific fact leads to a self-accusatory moment: for both writer and reader. It is never loud, never dramatic. It is measured and telling and activist and responsible because of this: and these photos become an anthem where long sad shapes frozen on a page

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swing into the mind in black and white.

Ellenbogen’s poems are carved and whittled back. Even a conversational “prosaic line” is made sculptural by his highly tuned ear, and sense of the visual balance of a line. Often crafted in free-verse stanza blocks, or in flowing longer stanza forms that vary in pitch and length, these poems show form as control and self-preservation. It’s the control-mechanism for the lake, relationships, the circus horse, tulips, spirituality, materialism, history, silence, and loss to be focused through. All are treated with the same incisive care, and despair. In an early poem such as “Sunset – Trafalgar Square,” we get an immediate and succinct sense of Ellenbogen’s awareness of craft: the line is his measure, and within the line meaning will often turn on a pun, or a single word which operates as a cantilever, and occasionally a caesura. If we take “a maypole folk dance around” from The Nelson Column still survives, a maypole folk dance around.

we read /hear “folk” in the sense of those – the people – gathered around Nelson’s Column (tourists, locals, whomsoever. . .) and also in the sense of the dance around the maypole being a ‘folk dance’, a traditional dance. It’s not a dramatic shift or slippage, but it’s one all the same. It makes you pause just slightly, the line otherwise rolling smoothly on. This subtle changing of gear, and then back again, is highly characteristic of Ellenbogen’s understated dexterity. I have been trying to write this introduction for many months now. A while back I interviewed George about the book. I worked hard at the questions after my first reading of the selection of poems, then sent them off. I did not read his replies closely, as I wanted them to sit at the back of my mind, let it all rest, then re-read the manuscript before committing my reactions to paper. These are my belated reactions – intentionally belated. This is a book that breathes into you over time and re-reading. The present introduction and George’s comments – a fascinating document of autobiographical recounting, poetics, and beliefs – seem to belong to two separate countries in many ways. But that’s the way it should be, I think. George Ellenbogen is a poet of such complexity melded with clarity, of philosophical logic and poise, and also joyful surrealism in which language flows from the unconscious where even the worst nightmares can also produce the

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brightest moments, and the most whimsical, that he needs to be looked at over time. I hope readers appreciate how significant he is. He is, for me, one of the most human and humane poets I have ever read.

Brooding Consequence259

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IN RAMKE’S WORK IS UNIQUE IN WORLD POETRY IN ENGLISH. The blurbs on the back of his books don’t, to my mind, capture the versatility and flexibility of his explorations either thematically or technically. The ability to mix different registers of language – from the colloquial and immediate, the found and culturally apt (T V talk through to crime novels and ‘high’ canonical literature’), through to the scientific and philosophical – is perhaps not surprising in a modern American poet, but the deftness and fluidity of his approach are astonishing. I mean, seriously gifted. Formal approaches to metaphysical and theological problems (and I differentiate strongly here) are wide-ranging and never employed gratuitously – Ramke can give dynamism even to the tried and true four-line stanza. He can make the natural world work hand-in-hand with the ‘artificial’, and make a relationship between these seem necessary, if paradoxical. The ‘connectivity’ of Ramke’s poetic language is scintillating. Also the ‘science’ of his lines. Take the following stanza:

Through the mountains his souvenirs, Stones to make garden paths. He rolled rocks into His car, along the highway stones were Insolent with lichen, arrogant with ontology.

Two things make this unusual. First, the enjambing of the lines in such a way that a sub-metonymy (as each stands for something else in the building of the poem) is suggested (the relationship between the functions of the stones themselves but also the rolling of the stones and car, and even what the rock being rolled across a tomb, by implication, might culturally signify). This sub-metonymy also creates an atmosphere of metaphor and image – a difficult yoking. The last line of the stanza is both discursive and rhetorical – ‘its’ own theol-

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Bin Ramke, Airs, Waters, Places (Kuhl House Poets; Iowa City: U of Iowa P ,

2001).

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ogy is challenged in the bluntness of statement/conclusion (the attributing of specific traits). Ramke utilizes a wide range of forms, and is skilled in their use. Many poets attempt such a wide range but few handle the differences with such confidence and ease. From dialogue pieces through to free-flowing verse forms, stanzaic variations, prose poems, annotations, columnar pieces – the scope is massive. In his remarkable Airs, Waters, Places, the book becomes the nervous system itself, the page becomes flesh. The poems are cumulative and mesmeric. They are also ethically volatile, and an aphoristic moment can literally send a shiver down the spine. Even the most disconnected moment is connected overall. Poems challenge the ‘self’ through the connectivity of communities of body, ideas, ethics, and the betrayal of these. The poems investigate, dissect, deconstruct, and make their own lives, their own ‘burning’. History and myth become inseparable, as do ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ – experience and how and what ‘we’ imagine. There is an acute intelligence at work behind his poems: never straining to be learned, they simply are. Each becomes a thesis on what has come before it. None exists alone; rather, they create their own space in the lexicon – are a kind of concordance. Even in ‘crisis’, Ramke’s work generates hope. Its engagement with the romantic soul is transcendent even when worst-case scenarios and specific horrors are being explored. This is never done in a fatuous way – not a case of ‘here’s the darkness and I will provide the light’. Rather, information on a ‘horror’ (or a beauty) is conveyed and the intricacies and inexactitudes of language create anomalies that take readers into their own decision-making and interpretative processes. This is what great poetry should do. He takes us into the terror and allows us a way out. Often, these are poems of brooding consequence that remain familiar – we are there, complicit, being talked to. .. or with. In his choice of words and expressions there is nowhere Ramke can’t or won’t go. From ‘hard-core’ scientific nomenclature through to eighteenthcentury moral science, from Aristotle through to John Donne to Freud, all is deployed. The irony can be tough and hard, but in the end a reverence for spiritual investigation and knowledge wins out. Here’s a poet who tells us stories made of ‘matter’. The material and the spiritual meld, struggle, and, occasionally, release vast quantities of light. Bin Ramke has constructed and designed books of poetry that are even greater than the sum of their considerable parts. He writes significant indivi-

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dual poems, but, even more, has a large, almost Blakean prophetic vision of ‘the book’. For me, they are ‘illustrated books’. I can see his pictures – maybe, more accurately, his ‘tales’. He has been termed a ‘secular’ poet, but his poems defy categorization to my mind. Out of the empirical world with which he wrestles comes a political ‘theology’. Never dogmatic, always nuanced. Sometimes even deadly. —2008

Pastoral Metaphysics260

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H E R E ’ S N O T H I N G I N A U S T R A L I A N P O E T R Y quite like these volumes of poetry by the American poets Susan Stewart and Peter Gizzi. Both poets have weathered the rearrangements of textual responsibility and ostranenie (genuine strangeness) of L A N G U A G E poetry; both have confronted the poetic environment’s awareness regarding the lyrical self – the ‘need’ to be self-critical about the conviction of this lyrical self – and have emerged stronger and more versatile for this. Gizzi’s Some Values of Landscape and Weather is overtly aware of the American poetic debate surrounding the resurrection and invigoration of the lyric; Stewart’s Columbarium is no less aware, if not so rhetorically engaged. Stewart’s lyrics are chthonic, elemental; indeed, her collection is book-ended by poems of the elements. In Australia lately there may have been volumes with some of the flavour of Gizzi – Peter Minter’s Empty Texas, and Michael Brennan’s recent work – but it’s more to do with influences, and the conversations that go on around these influences, than it is to do with individual poems. The last poem in Gizzi’s book, “Beginning With a Phrase from Simone Weil,” plays with Weil’s most eminent work of philosophy, and the notion of gravity and grace is written through these texts. Weil is increasingly read as a poetics of philosophy, ethics, and spirituality within the Western framework, both confirming and challenging. And this is what Gizzi does: he is compliant with the lyric, yet always challenging his necessary personal involvement.

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“A Spot of Wordplay in Clement Times,” Sydney Morning Herald (9 April 2005): 12. Review of Susan Stewart, Columbarium (Phoenix Poets; Chicago: U of Chicago P , 2003), and Peter Gizzi, Some Values of Landscape and Weather (Middletown C T : Wesleyan U P , 2003).

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The poem, as abstraction, refuses to tell the story straight. So the confessional self deceives us with its claims to authority. In Gizzi’s “Imitation of Life: A Memoir,” facts are only as reliable as metaphor, or maybe less so. The difficulty of being here is what do we transmit of ourselves that we can ever really know? The single benefit of food is that we recognise it is food. Can you spot the decoy.

American critics have claimed that Gizzi has re-invented the lyric. What he has done is tested its flexibility, and found it as durable in the post-millennium as ever. Innovative post-L A N G U A G E lyric poets have largely hidden behind irony. Gizzi can be extremely ironic, street-savvy, but he’s also sincere. For Gizzi, beauty is fetishized, yet there’s still Gizzi, still beauty, despite the poisons. And this is his claim as poet. . . “the way / the smallest dot is something’s home.” Exploration of the lyric is the mainstay of the modern innovator, not only in English but in many poetries (especially French); in Australia, Alison Croggon is one of the explorers, another is Robert Adamson. But in American poetry Stewart’s Columbarium is, to my mind, the finest book of the last five years, in its technical brilliance, philosophical questioning, and lyrical beauty. The core of the book is made up of ‘shadow georgics’, and these range from directly ‘instructional’ poems to allegorical tellings that instruct by implication and empathetic suggestion. History and myth submerge the actual – the object is never without implications, though those implications are treated with cautionary probing. A pastoral metaphysical poet, Stewart’s influences are strongly seventeenth-century. Donne, Herbert, Traherne suggest themselves in shape, form, and content. They dialogue with the poet. But these poems are not just wrapped up in the realm of ideas. They are deeply personal, and touch markedly on the mother–child relationship. Music is there, a notational system that measures place as well as interactions. At certain points we might think of David Campbell or Gwen Harwood, but Stewart’s language is more discursive, her lines longer – often physically – but also by implication. Both Gizzi and Stewart are concerned with how we locate ourselves in the material world. What do objects stand for when we tell of them, or allegorically tell of ourselves? Both poets play with the conventions of pastoral, and of telling things by telling their opposite.

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Both poets are interested in how the telling shapes a truth as much as, or more than, the incident or event itself. In Stewart’s wonderful “Braid,” about the experience of having hair braided as a child – the pain creating another language beyond the decorative braid (“wisps backed and tucked / yank into yank), we feel the tensions of duty and conformity, the control symbolized by the braid, the way we do not see ourselves as others see us, and “a kind of face / sent from woman to / woman like a duty.” Two of the most exquisite of Stewart’s poems are “Apple” and the disturbingly elusive “Pear,” in which the “flying and falling” of a girl on a trampoline between buildings is remembered by returning to the same spot on a bridge where the incident was distantly witnessed, with the chalk of the teaching room creating a tension between what is written – the precariousness of the word – and the fact of the moment. There is Wordsworth’s spot of time made ‘real’. Most of Stewart’s poems are rich in classical and philosophical allusion. She doesn’t give us the moral system to live through demonstrating good husbandry in the way Virgil’s Georgics do – how to tend the vine and furrow earth. But the ploughs and bees are there, and there is a connection with the desire for a system. It’s just that moral systems produce their questions, and it’s these questions and shadows she pursues. Pivotal to both books is “the weather.” In “Local Forecast,” Gizzi writes: We depend on early sun, clement weather, afterward comes thunder. In a notebook the relative timidity of observation can be brutal.

We write in the hopes of grace, to be shocked by the reality of the inclement. The landscape is fetishized, given a value that has little to do with the purity of lyrical engagement. Brought to us, it’s not the same as experienced. The truth of poetry is questioned. Weather lore is the core of folk mythology and rusticism. In Stewart, Virgil’s Georgics are rendered into a questioning of the central georgic certainty of hierarchy and order: We live below in the cave of will and stick out a finger from time to time to test the wind’s direction. Up there it all depends. You could shake it slowly

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through a sieve and still know less than you knew when you started. There’s no one in that place with a passing though for us.

The pastoral, the bucolic, lyric has been pressured and transformed by both poets. The ego-self of the poems has been questioned, though it persists, vestigially or entirely: questioned, questioning, yet here. The lyric is alive and well and kicking. Australian poets and readers of poetry – embrace these poems, and celebrate!

Codex of Myth261

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S T E W A R T I S A N I N V E S T I G A T O R O F L I N G U I S T I C N U A N C E and a new metaphysics, par excellence. Each of her books of poetry has been a carefully taken step in a vision that transcends the materiality of subject, and even of subjectivity. She plays games with language, but all her games have serious implications. Maybe it’s truer to say that she observes the games that are played with language and reflects on them, then engages. The play and irony of her poetic arrangements are ladders to a kind of Trahernian affirmation and even transcendence. Spiritual yet pragmatic, her verbal and conceptual unravellings and reworkings tease and illuminate. I believe she is one of the finest poets of the last fifty years. Red Rover, Susan Stewart’s new volume of poetry, is like a medieval codex of mostly unknown poems that have been recently discovered, scintillatingly transcribed and recast to reflect on a modern world (or worlds) that remains quite ancient in its modus operandi. I say mostly, because we have versions and takes on poems by Chaucer, “Variations on the ‘The Dream of the Rood’,” and other sublimities and embeddings of Christian and neo-Platonic thinking. The super-genre of medieval dream poetry resonates through a book in which the representational nature of language is investigated against a longing for spiritual affirmation. This beautifully wrought book is actually a work of resistance and trauma in which the ‘poet’ reflects on the evasions and tactics of language when it’s

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Salt Magazine 3 (2009): online. Review of Susan Stewart, Red Rover (Phoenix Poets; Chicago: U of Chicago P , 2008).

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put to use to socialize and historicize. With a writer so intensely informed by a broad range of literary histories, who as a critic has forged a linguistic philosophy to investigate literature, it is almost surprising to see history re-invoked as a form of spatial infinite, a timelessness in which past, present, and future coexist. Myth, always important to an understanding of Stewart’s work, becomes anchored in the child’s game, in the domestic, in the incidental, in the proforma of animals and plants, the here and now. Myths collate and cross-talk, and the dream of the wood of the cross is the dream of the perfect world and the world in which no death is natural. ‘Nonsense’ is only nonsense because we hear it as such. The mummer doesn’t need speech. This is a mummer’s book. Sights are seen and sounds are heard, but what do they mean and what do we do with them? This is a book of a new kind of metonymy. The parts stand for the whole, but always in the context of metaphor – a parsed metonymic metaphor, if such a thing can be imagined. Take this stanza from “Variations on ‘The Dream of the Rood’”: It says, ‘I was a cross in the form of a man: I was made from a tree, and like a tree. And I had arms like a man and was like a man, and from the man a god took form,’ Then from his side the soul flew, sudden. Like a cloud, the soul flew, flown.

I’d argue this as variation, translation, and transformation. Pivotal is the simile – so often called the lowest of poetic devices, but here restored to its innate potency. In comparing, it becomes part of; in becoming part of, it transcends. This is how the true splinter of the cross could carry such power, in its forest-scale existence. Stewart understands the primary gestures of poetry and that poetry doesn’t exist purely for middle-class comfort as a means of contemplating the ineffable, but is a very practical way of making the ineffable tangible. The gritty realities of the Middle Ages aren’t far away here. And when Stewart writes of the horrors of a crime such as the school shootings of Amish children in Pennsylvania, it’s not in its reality of blood but in its greater reality of permanent spiritual damage. She does this through creating

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connection, making good and evil part of a whole. The irony of the method is that the horror is not diminished but placed in an eternalizing spiritual perspective. In many ways, Stewart has learnt to write the unwritable without being appropriative, insensitive, consumerist or exploitative. She writes it because she means it and because pain needs transformation. In the end, this becomes an issue of the mechanics of expression. Origins of language come out of the necessity of language. In a book where sequences of poems anchor shorter lyrical responses, the ‘Songs of Adam’ sequence (in the cumulative sense) forms an ur-textual core. Basing it on the ‘Deo Gracias’, a fifteenth-century English hymn-poem, Stewart here takes lines from the earlier text and extemporizes. Playing with the text’s metre, the poem stutters (in the case of Adam), lists, anaphorizes, and engages with the core of the original text, the notion of felix culpa. It is essential to understand this in order to understand Stewart’s book as a whole. Felix culpa – happy fault – conveys the idea that it was just as well that Adam and Eve sinned or we would never have known the joy of redemption (or the incarnation of the redeemer). This is not to say that Stewart concurs, but she notes it as a driving theology and ontology of not only the medieval Christian world but also ‘her country’ with its windows cut out looking east and west, its panopticon view of itself. This is forcefully brought ‘home’ in the long and ‘string-like’ poem late in the book, “The Field of Mars as a Meadow,” where we see the collision between the ‘created’ (the natural world) and the imagined (a form of liberation in Stewart’s work), between past and present (across geographies, time, and space: say, ancient Rome to contemporary America), the enslaver and the emancipator, war and a subverted love. The Campus Martius in ancient Rome was a public space where wheat was once grown, livestock foraged, and the military trained. The confluence of activities is the irony from which departs a history that takes the reader through to modern imperialist America. Stewart gives the impression of looping a narrative together from a variety of sources, a form of subtextual cento. The notes at the back of the book are minimal – which is the right way to go about it here – but you just know that thousands of lines inform each one. However, with a lyrical deftness and absolute control over her words, Stewart doesn’t need the notes. And the reader doesn’t need to know to get the tone or impression – indeed, the thinking. Children’s games are a rich source of poetry but Susan Stewart has recast them as focal points of the poetic. Poetry is not always positive but it is necessary: it’s a default position in terms not only of learning but also of control.

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Zero-sum game philosophy is a key focus in poems such as “Red Rover” and “King of the Hill,” as much as it is in the games themselves. The metonymicmetaphoric parsing is pivotal in poems such as “tag” and “shadowplay.” The sequence “Games for Children” becomes a poetics primer. Across the book, a rebuttal of this seems as crucial as Blakean contraries. Comptines – nursery rhymes (especially with numbers), jeux de doigts (finger-play) are a playground and also a private science (and an end of childhood freedom – already inbuilt in the regulation of the game, especially “King of the Hill” with its hierarchy and one-ruler system, but also in “Red Rover” with its breaking the chain of the opposition or failure and being absorbed – both might-is-right scenarios not only to condition for social control but also to prevent language breaking down. .. poetry as control mechanism and liberator... ). The handgame in the private space of conscience leads to the blacking-out of the perceivable world “‘shadowplay”) – this is a telling ontology. I am reminded of the opening poem on the owl and the Berkeleyan sense of something being as we perceive it (subjective idealism): And still I thought a piece of cloth had flown outside my window, or human hands had freed a wing, or churning gods revealed themselves, or, greater news, a northern owl a snowy owl descended.

So, “to be is to be perceived,” but in Stewart these perceptions allow being on multiply coexistent as well as contingent levels. Her poetic works in the same way, and this is also a poem about writing poetry, about where poetry comes from. Stewart looks for an ‘answer’ in dreams, and would have light where darkness is, but also knows death is as much part of light as darkness. She resists the manichaeism she invokes. I called this poem ‘the owl,’ the name that, like a key, locked out the dark and later let me close my book and sleep a winter dream [. . . ]

Stewart can deliver a searingly forceful and even didactic line amidst the lyrical gesture. She sets up, say, a form of direct address, or a discursive ‘point’, then diverges into a ‘different’ mode that enhances the point through juxtaposition. This shift in tonal and often formal register is not uncommon in her

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poetry. An example is this from “When I’m speaking, I’m not crying” (which on the opposite page is preceded by the companion poem “When I’m crying, I’m not speaking”): The personal is artificially political just as the political artificially personal. War profiteering has many means, including the sale of poems against the war. Those who destroy the garden and poison the well think that streets will be named for them in the future.

The mapping of a postlapsarian world is a constant motif. Above we have the shift from the didactic inversions of the first couplet, to the out-and-out statement of the second couplet, through to the Edenic allusions of the third. But the major shift comes in what follows: When Aeneas, son of the goddess of love, strides out alone on the empty field, so recklessly

This ‘diversion’ reinforces what has come before, but also allows for a reinterpretation of what we assume is rhetorical but is likely built out of a series of textual references (that subtexual cento at work again) that build a mosaic of context and interpretation, displacing original meaning. What is language? Susan Stewart wrote a dissertation on nonsense, and has a reputation as an acute thinker on the question of what language is. We are left asking whether lines that function paratactically or non-logically are no more ‘nonsense’ than lines that seem to make obvious rhetorical sense. Take these lines from the poem “my mother’s garden” from the linguistically and structurally (and I mean in terms of structuralism) brilliant sequence “Games from Children”: I found my wooden boat staring at a cloud I lost my memory when I learned to whistle

The aphoristic certainty of these statements makes sense of the nonsensical. We are often told that this is how poetry works anyway, but such overt and confident statements as ‘fact’ might lead us to term these ‘absurd’ or, maybe, ‘surreal’. The unconscious logic behind the claims enforces a visualization.

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By allowing this, the lines become no less acceptable than the didactic lines regarding war-profiteering, with which I, for one, agree. But I also agree with the ‘absurd’ lines as well. Why? This is the question Stewart asks and fuses with theological and ontological questionings. We can read this book as crisis or affirmation, or both. Stewart’s quest for both a spirituality and a language in which to express the spiritual is often at its most potent when it is seemingly most ‘simple’ (it never really is, any more than Blake or Dickinson). For her, a wren has to be, and will be. It is both entirely outside human experience and necessarily connected to it through language, through ecology, and through the affirmation of being. This from “Wrens”: if there’s another place another world another life there must be wrens.

The weight of the ontology is balanced between the overwhelming repetition of “another” and what we (imagine? perceive?) as the lightness and delicacy of a “wren.” Stewart’s theology may not be organized in a religious sense, but it is systematized. Her use of play-rhymes in the form of children’s games and her Blakean innocence-and-experience ellipses and mnemonics often functions as prayer, and also as a substitute for discursive exploration, at times as a kind of ploy, a commentary on how ‘belief’ can be compulsive. Her sublime and double-entendrish version of Chaucer’s “The Former Age” plays this in a sweetly and deftly ironic way. It’s true and fabricated at once, what she explores. I admire how Stewart can be so cuttingly satirical (and even damning) and yet retain a non-judgmental voice. All she needs to do is to allow Chaucer to be as modern as he is, and will always be, to speak loudly in this new age of violence and greed: Alas, alas, now may men weep and cry for in our day there’s only coveting, double-dealing, and treason and envy. Everywhere poison, manslaughter, and murder.

Thinking about Stewart’s use of voice in Red Rover, we might often ask who is speaking and who is being spoken to. It’s actually not a persona or personae – voice doesn’t work that way here (not even in dialogue forms) – the

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‘voices’ are elopements from language and from the system of expression that marries us to certain outcomes of meaning. This is the irony of Stewart’s song-forms, her nursery rhymes, her songs of innocence and experience. . . they are enclosures like Russian dolls, or Rubik’s cubes – puzzle forms that open out and out and out. They are not containments. That’s the irony of Stewart’s ‘voice/s’. It’s why she is never sickly or twee with earnestness but capable of the most ‘sincere’ gesture. Because of this, she could write “Elegy Against the Massacre at the Amish School in West Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, Autumn 2006” – the refrain and the namings of individual children are imprisonments that open into deliverance and spiritual transcendence. Stewart can’t make claims of deliverance or liberation in the poem – what right would she have? – but she can let form and the word itself emanate out and transfigure from horror. Stewart was moved to write this poem out of necessity – the massacre took place near where she had lived, and place compels a response as shared space, as an echoing trauma come out of the felix culpa which backgrounds ‘acceptance’. The Amish community’s forgiveness of the perpetrator, and their rejection of pragmatic material logic with a spiritual logic that knows only its own names, goes beyond the language any poem can search for, in the final stanza: Anna Mae, Mary Liz and Marian Lena, Naomi Rose when time has stopped where time has slowed the horses wear the rain

The poem is where the children are. The poem works through games from children but transcends the social in a way adults usually can’t see, especially in times of horror and responsibility. This is one of the most significant poems written out of America. A variation or maybe even a striking exception to my anti-personae theory of Red Rover is the “In the Western World” sequence, with its embracing of the unified self, with a kind of history of Western subjectivity. I see this as a declaration of roots (as well as a lyrical-I mode that reflects on its own urges, needs, production – a kind of wonderment that it is speaking the things it ‘sees’, ‘senses’, and ‘feels’ – this ‘wonder’ understates and creates distance – maybe that “stranger” “unmoved and unmoving” is also a reflection of Western subjectivity, of the non-sustainability of a unified self. . .?) and, as such, actually fitting with the anti-personae theory. We might ask which will be free

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of the other – the body or the soul? The body gets the soul’s ontological crisis and the soul gets the pleasures. Red Rover is a ‘complaint’ (as it should be) but not a didactic one. It has more resonance for its belief in metaphor. To go back to an earlier point, in thinking over Stewart’s metonymic incursions into metaphor, I am reminded of non-linear Indigenous-Australian senses of ‘time’ in her use of ‘myth’, fact, observation, and reflection, and kinship between land and soul. These create a different space for metonymy and not one I am sure has ever been explored in a ‘Western’ poetic. This has a range of implications in terms of Red Rover’s chains of control, chain of life, chains of being, and strings of language, which deserve ongoing investigation and discussion. Red Rover should open discussion on many levels.

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by Michael Donaghy are the final poems of Safest – part of his planned next collection, which his death (in 2004) prevented him from seeing in print.263 These poems, not just confronting death but giving us, his readers, a way of coping with our own mortality, surely the greatest gift a poet can give, are all masterpieces, all innovative, and characteristically technically astute. I will come to them in due course. I need to state from the beginning that maybe I don’t view Donaghy’s poetry in the light it is usually seen in. Which is not to say that I contest Sean O’Brien’s scrupulous, sensitive, and intelligent introduction – in fact, I most often agree with him or find myself wanting to write things he has already said, or, at least to reaffirm his observations – but that I perceive Donaghy as more than a revitalizer of a formalist tradition. As Sean O’Brien puts it, HE FINEST POEMS IN THIS LANDMARK BOOK

For those who cared to notice, Donaghy was among other things renovating some features of the scholarly, formalist American poetry of the 1950s and

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Poetry Review 99.4 (Winter 2009). Review of Michael Donaghy, Collected Poems (London: Picador, 2009). 263 Michael Donaghy, Safest (London: Faber & Faber, 2005).

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60s, whose leading exponents were Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht and James Merrill.264

Indeed, Donaghy’s work shares many points of contact with these fine poets – but in the end, despite his American (Irish) origins, Donaghy’s poetic sensibilities seem to owe more to his adopted country than to where he comes from. Yes, John Donne is there, and one might argue that almost vivacious, smart first volume, Shibboleth (1988), is metaphysical in design, but so are William Empson, W.H. Auden (in his pre-American phase), and even the Australian ‘expat’ in Britain, Peter Porter. In interview, Donaghy discussed conditions of reception and his consciousness of the way both British and American reciprocal investments of style and voice can so dominate critical response. For example, he “held back” the “O’Ryan’s Belt” sequence of poems until after the publication of his first book (it forms part two of his second book, Errata, 1993), because “I knew that once I broached the matter of Irishness or Irish folk music I’d be typecast as ‘the Irish American musician poet’.”265 Donaghy was equally concerned with interpretations of his ‘proletarian’ Bronx background and other imagined qualifiers of a poetic. This poet knew how he didn’t want to be interpreted as much as how he did. Speaking of his background, Donaghy mentions in interview the prevalence of knives in his childhood (neighbourhood gangs), which adds a different way of looking at the various references to knives and sharpness throughout the work (a line that is often drawn along life and love, death and fate – “Occam’s Razor”). Donaghy mentions Hopkins and Dylan Thomas as poetic influences (both easy to see in a residual sense), and also Pound. I wonder about this – maybe the Pound of “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” or Cathay, but not much the Pound of the Cantos, as I am sure Donaghy himself would have agreed. Having said this, the late unresolved fragment “Irish Folk Music” might stylistically owe something to the Pisan Cantos. Despite this discussion, in the end I’d have to argue that, however fascinating such contextual reading might be, it’s not fruitful to try and approach 264

Sean O‘Brien, “Introduction” to Donaghy, Collected Poems, vii–viii. Originally as “On Michael Donaghy: Black Ice, Rain and the City of God,” the T.S. Eliot Lecture delivered at the Poetry International Festival, South Bank Centre, London, Sunday 26 October 2008. 265 Interview (November 2002) in Donaghy, The Shape of the Dance: Essays, Interviews and Digressions, ed. Adam O’Riordan & Maddy Paxman (New York & London: Picador, 2009): 170–71.

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Donaghy’s work – of all poets’ work – through his influences. All poets have them and some wear them more obviously than others, but Donaghy is his own measured and hyper-controlled ‘self’. There is nothing arbitrary about a Donaghy poem, even if his thematics can embrace arbitrariness or chance itself. The poem is an icon on one level, but no icon is to be trusted. Donaghy’s almost larrikin wit, his ability to create paradoxical self-degeneration while making something seriously about the self, his skill in making the commonplace, the incidental, or even the literary, resonate well beyond their moment, are characteristic of so much of this book in particular. Donaghy plays with formalist conventions but doesn’t elevate them as things in themselves. This might seem peculiar, given the deep craft involved in every clause, every line, every stanza. These are possibly, along with work by O’Brien himself, the most honed poems being published in English. But they are not chipped out of stone; they are engagements (and often play) with language. Donaghy views ideas and literary ideology as fair targets, and does not hesitate to ironize his own art. Literary history is about coteries and tastes, national and personal politics, as much as any intrinsic value. But to ironize modes of reading is not to denigrate sources or a literature. For example, in his ‘hoax’ poem sequence, “Seven Poems from the Welsh,” the irony plays against the ‘othering’ of a literature for the sake of fetish consumer value, while at the same time deeply respecting the craft and sensibilities of the ‘originals’ pastiched. Donaghy is a metatextual poet, for whom form is not the shaper of poem, of meaning, but a trigger for challenging content. Irony, wordplay, the deployment of ‘pop-culture’ icons working in literary and philosophical contexts (‘high art’), all these allows Donaghy to create an environment where greater seriousness is possible because no claim to a privileged position as ‘all-seeing’ poet is established. What is established is this absolute certainty of control, so we trust the links, the juxtapositions, while the play is going on. This pairing of trust and irony creates a unique tone: I know nothing quite like Donaghy’s ductus. He invites us to go with him and we inevitably accept. One of the failings of much contemporary reviewing, aside from the like / dislike binary, or the ‘good /bad’ binary, is that a reviewer will look to the obviously best poems to serve as an illustration of a poet’s skill. I think one learns most about a poet’s abilities from a ‘lesser’ or seemingly ‘minor’ poem. Take, for example, “A Disaster,” from Shibboleth. Here’s the poem in full:

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We were ships in the night. We thought her rockets were fireworks. Our radio was out, and we didn’t know The band was only playing to calm the passengers. Christ, she was lovely all lit up, Like a little diamond necklace! Try to understand. Out here in the dark We thought we were missing the time of our lives. We could almost smell her perfume. And she went down in sight of us.

One need not labour the obvious irony of a ship sinking while the observers think it is celebrating some mysterious occasion. Nor need we labour the conceit of the ship as woman, the objectification and fetishization of the female body and the suggestions of surface (sexual) enjoyment and internal distress and suffering. The irony carries these aspects almost nonchalantly and in a way that leaves the reader accused of insensitivity and lack of astuteness, as much as the observers. That’s a characteristic rhetorical device with Donaghy, implicating and sharing complicity in a failing with the reader. We identify with the flaws of the persona /personae, as they are our own, and certainly those of broader social responses. In his longer poems (never too long – a page or just over is a longer poem for Donaghy), this technique is used with great rhetorical complexity, and with many diversions and crisscrossing of irony and tone, that are inevitably brought together at the end of the poem, not by way of ‘closure’ but sometimes with tragic overtones. It’s why his approaching-death poems are so powerful and necessary beyond their obvious personal and familial import. But back to this short piece. What lifts it out of the ‘matter-of-fact’ is the fourth non-rhymed couplet: Try to understand. Out here in the dark We thought we were missing the time of our lives.

The pithy, aphoristic accumulation of the previous lines, with their relatively light deployment of the figurative, is undone here. The caesura between “understand” and “Out” necessarily couples and bridges the darkness of the personae and the inevitable experiential darkness of the reader (doubly ironic because of the clarity of the poem). “Out here” is also ‘in there’ and ‘in you’ and ‘in

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us’. One of the most rewarding aspects of Donaghy’s work is how nonexcluding it is. To use a cliché, he wears his learning lightly; but it’s more than that, it’s a political choice not to allow language to hoodwink the reader. Don’t get me wrong: his poems are often imagistically complex, image frequently working simultaneously with a series of rhetorical devices, but their aim is not to delude or show themselves as superior. Learning serves a function, and that function is to share knowledge of the fragility, and its attendant ironies, of the ‘human condition’. To return to that couplet: the second line is as much a sad reflection as an ironic augmentation of the poem’s main drive. It works both ways. In the same way as in the final couplet, the objectification of the sinking boat as she is also entangled in the genuine issue of attraction. It’s a poem built out of paradox, and this operates like a key to unpick the Donaghy of so many poems, including, in the first volume, the disturbing “Auto da Fe” and “Ramon Fernandez.” Donaghy’s second collection, Errata, is a different book altogether, while maintaining the tones and techniques developed in the first collection. It serves us well to pause for a moment and reflect on Donaghy’s constant assertion, in interviews and elsewhere, that the measure of a poem for him was always aural, and that the mnemonic links between traditional musical ‘forms’ and the form of a poem (he was known to compare the ‘reel’ with the ‘sonnet’ in this context) were fundamental to him as a poet, not merely a formal truism, but also part of content itself. It has long bemused me that, while a negator of the ‘postmodern’, Donaghy was in many ways one of its richest exemplars. True, he opposed the façadism of post-modernism (which he rightly located in its architectural origins), and deeply rejected the faddism of a self-perpetuating ‘avant-gardism’, but in his appropriations, play, and linguistic inventiveness he has as much in common with, say, Ashbery, whom he very early on imitated and later rejected, as with Dylan Thomas, who caught his ear as a child (through anthologies published in America). Donaghy was right to reject the promotional aspects of any movement or cluster that defined itself to the exclusion of other practices, but in some ways I think he found himself having to stand up for a position he didn’t textually endorse. He himself said that a poet like Olson, whose worth he entirely rejected, influenced him as much as a poet he admired, because it helped him understand what it was he didn’t want to do in poetry. Negative influence is as valid as ‘positive’ influence. The picture is complex. In the same way, rejecting the syllable count as an artificial mode of constructing a poem, and favouring the ‘beat’ as more natural, and more to do with the building-blocks

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of poetry, Donaghy actually undercuts his own dexterity when it comes to making poems. He utilizes ‘beat’ and ‘syllabics’ in most of his poems; a contrapuntal effect between these overlapping modes of constructing the line is evident in many poems, particularly those where pastiche of music and text form the dynamic. Donaghy was incredibly astute at articulating what his position wasn’t, but I am not convinced he actually fully realized how much of a ‘link’ his work forms between formalist and ‘postmodern’ poetics. If Donaghy was slightly bemused at why Shibboleth received so much acclaim, and the better follow-up Errata less so, then it might well reside in the hybrid nature of this latter masterwork. The poems that make up the second section of Errata, “O’Ryan’s Belt,” are as good as any he ever wrote, and as a larger work, if we might interpret this group of poems as such, his most vital, to my mind. As it shifts between ‘places’ (Manhattan, the Bronx, Chicago. .. ), the notion of heritage (Ireland, but not exclusively) invests the ‘folk’ with an immediacy, a necessity: music and, consequently, poetry become a marker of identity and purpose. Donaghy makes shifts between narration and idiom with ease, and, ironically, with the deftness of a prose master such as Joyce. Maybe this is not so ironic, as Donaghy himself once noted that his influences came as much from the rhythms of prose writers (such as Defoe) as from poets. What Donaghy manages, as well as anyone writing in English has ever managed, are the shifts in mode and voice within a single short poem. It is the skill of a realist novelist merged with the mythic and folkloric resonance of a Yeats: When Anne Quinn got hold of it back in Kilrush, she took her fiddle to her shoulder and cranked the new Horn of Plenty Victrola over and over and over, and scratched along until she had it right or until her father shouted ‘We’ll have no more Of that tune In this house tonight.’ She slipped out back and strapped the contraption to the parcel rack and rode her bike to a far field, by moonlight. It skips. The penny I used for ballast slips. O’Ryan’s fiddle pops, and hiccoughs

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back to this, back to this, back to this:

The long quotation is essential to show these effortless shifts in tone and temporality. It’s more than a tense change; it’s more than going from scenesetting to explication (from ‘show’ to ‘tell’), and it’s more than from a more expansive line to a more compressed line: it’s a movement in and out of aurality. It is interesting to compare the musical phrasing of the line “Victrola over and over and over,” with its slight variation on the word “Victrola” and then its relaxation into the ‘easy’ memorability of trochees that comes with narration, to the line “back to this, back to this, back to this:.” The latter is easily memorized with its repetition of phrase and anapaest, but the switch in mnemonics comes with the shift in narration (point of view, tense, and so on). It is always worth bearing in mind that Donaghy recited his poems from memory at readings, and that his poems were seemingly built out of the compilation of recitable elements. This might well account for the fluidity in shifts and slippages of ‘modes’ in one poem, even very short ones. Not everything we do is anchored in the ‘aural’, and though the measure of the poem for Donaghy was aural, he recognized that there were other modes. Referring to his famous essay “The Shape of the Dance,” of the marks left on a Chicago dance floor by the dancers’ shoes after the evening’s entertainment were over, Donaghy observes: “This pattern, I recognized, was an enormous encoded page of poetry, a kind of manuscript, or, more properly, a pediscript.”266 And although he said he didn’t write concrete poetry, Donaghy certainly registered the representational. A metonymy of sign and sound infuses the writing. It is easy to forget that he also wrote a lot of poems about the ‘visual’ (ways of seeing), and that sound and sight are ultimately inseparable in his work. Interestingly, the poem that precedes the “O’Ryan’s Belt” ‘sequence’ is entitled “A Discourse in Optics,” in which, in part i, an ironic metaphysics of self-reflection, heritage and absence /loss (“heirloom”), plays against pathetic fallacy: That full-length antique bevelled mirror Wants to be clear water in a trough

to become a discourse on the lyrical self and paradox of the failure of that self and reassertion (grounded by the the mirror heirloom’s destiny, to become rubbish in the skip):

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Michael Donaghy, “Wallflowers,” in Donaghy, The Shape of the Dance, 4.

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I’ll prop it up outside against the skip So clouds can ghost across the rust. Though I can’t see myself in it, Still, it’s the only mirror that I trust.

In part ii, “The Pond,” the posture of ‘nature’ is inverted (in terms of part i), with a pond providing the reflection, but the same questions explored regarding the self and the characteristics of subjectivity. Here, nature becomes the manufactured object – the reverse fetish: Except those times light strikes the basin level And almost makes a window of the surface To show our shadow amid coins and gravel Outgazing the sad overcoat and face

The ‘emotive’ aspects of these ‘epiphanies’ are rendered ‘neutral’ by the scientific precision of the language and form. The social dynamics of the “O’Ryan’s Belt” poems, the implications of musical and poetic form in terms of law and order (“Patrolman Jack O’Ryan, violin” and Police Chief Francis O’Neill), and the folkloric as vehicle for gritty realism as well as repository and preservative for community identity and narratives, are aspects of this small group of poems that need exploring at length. For a poet who refuted nationalist agendas, who rejected political and social posturings, and who was deeply embarrassed by being labelled a ‘New Generation Poet’, there is a struggle in Donaghy’s poems about the myth of self when set against national and cultural backdrops. I am constantly brought back to the disjunction between the architectural perfection of the poems as artefacts, and their deeply troubled sense of ‘self’. The ‘I’ was Donaghy’s anathema, as it is for any thinking poet. The L A N G U A G E poets, whom he so reviled, confronted that struggle and were, Donaghy felt, caught in the ironies of their own literary production and self-declarations as authors, but it was also his struggle. Rather than make general comments about Donaghy’s third (highly accomplished) collection Conjure (2000), and about the selection of uncollected poems that conclude the book, I’d like to use the remaining space to look at a few of the closing poems in the section devoted to Safest. Wordsworth’s “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge” embodies the city of London as living flesh, and bestows an agency on the entire corpus while noting the autonomy of parts, its limbs. In Donaghy’s sonnet “The River Glideth Of His Own Sweet Will,” a younger self filled with the prospect of

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the living city confronts the dying /vulnerable self wired to the (heart) machine of the city (machines are a particularly disturbing presence as symbol and actuality for the poet). This poem gleams with clarity and a gentle irony that become both self-obituary and a declaration of love for place that echoes against futility – in fact, normalizes and almost sanctifies the futility of the regular, the expected, the mundane: What unaided eyes could possibly connect thirty years across Westminster bridge through traffic fumes, crowds, children, career, marriage, mortgage?

The poem’s beauty and depth is in its simplicity. In “Exile’s End,” the voice speaks across the phases of dying. The poem is the poet’s epitaph, and the ‘voice’ removes itself from the context of body. Throughout Donaghy’s body of work, in fact, runs this notion of dialogue of soul and self. The poem becomes the flesh, the embodiment, but it is not the poet. The poem does not have to exist on the page, and maybe it never did. The poem begins with a semi-naval metaphor, a world of fluid and violence undercut by the rush of vulnerability: Wait then for a noise in the chest, between depth charge and gong, like the seadoors slamming on the car deck.

One is a filmic imagined image, the other a familiar one. The naval and the ordinary civilian collude and clash. As the poem progresses, the ordinary and matter-of-fact (“a nurse’s bald patch”) merge or ‘blur’ with the past. The body is alienated from the ‘self’ through death, but the voice of the poem continues in its metaphysics: turn away. We commend you to the light, Where all reliable accounts conclude.

The end is affirmation. Darkness is not the end; light is. The final poem in Safest, “Two Spells for Sleeping,” is an incantation, an invocation, and a farewell. The spells for sleeping are for the dying and for those left behind, a loved one in particular. A hermetic love poem, it also resonates like a folkloric song, an affirmation to be passed on through generations. Personal and communal, local and universal, like all great songs, all necessary spells. From this tough, intellectual, and gritty poet, a gentle but robust leave-taking:

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Fair Enough?267

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T ’ S H A R D T O G E T B E Y O N D T H E C O N T R A D I C T I O N of a book like Inga Clendinnen’s Dancing with Strangers, which claims that history “is a secular discipline, and in its idiosyncratic way a scientific one, based on the honest analysis of the vast, uneven, consultable record of human experience,” yet takes an overtly novelistic and popular-fiction approach to that most serious of issues: the arrival of the First Fleet at Sydney Cove in January, 1788. Maybe the contradiction is resolved in the line that follows: “To understand history we have to get inside episodes.” This is fair enough, but the excitement of those episodes, and the desire to create an alternative drama of contact between Indigenous peoples (bemusingly and collectively – regardless of tribal difference – called ‘Australians’) and the British colonizers, make this fiction more akin to Peter Carey’s partly ironized yet deadly serious national myth-making in his True History of the Kelly Gang. Clendinnen has positive intentions – her highlighting and honouring of Indigenous societies is laudable – but her wish to play the historian betrays a nation-making agenda that has imposed an entirely Western view of narrative on all involved in those early colonial interactions. The quotations above are from the book’s epilogue, where we also read of the colony’s first governor, Arthur Phillip, and official colonial history’s bestknown ‘Aborigine’, Bennelong (or, among other transliterations, Baneelon): “Our two main protagonists” – as if these people she seeks to humanize out of the limitations of historical record and interpretation are performers for the modern psychologizing ficto-historian – “were given no reflection, revision or even explanation of their positions. Each failed, to their own and their people’s injury and to ours. They cannot be blamed for that failure.” With all her imaginings, surely Clendinnen – or any other non-Indigenous Australian – would have no idea of what Baneelon or any other indigenous Australian was thinking. Her defence of Governor Phillip is a reprehensible piece of narrativemaking, which is partisan and disrespectful to all those Indigenous people

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“Two cultures come face to face,” The Scotsman (11 September 2005). Review of Inga Clendinnen, Dancing with Strangers: The True History of the Meeting of the British First Fleet and the Aboriginal Australians, 1788 (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2005).

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who lost their lives, as she readily and consistently points out, to British bullets and disease. Despite all she observes, she concludes that “I think we are all Australians now.” This ‘history’ has won prizes in Australia because it seeks to heal what in reality cannot be healed without large-scale return of land and rights. We don’t have the right to live together ‘as one’ – non-Indigenous people only have the right to ask forgiveness of Indigenous people, to accept what they offer us, not the other way around. Dancing with Strangers seeks to make a ‘living’ history, yet Clendinnen actually practises much of what she rightly condemns in the attitudes of the colonizers – she often fails to see past her own middle-class preconceptions and tastes. To my mind, she has written very ‘soft’ and dubious /unsubstantiated history, containing absurd and platitudinous statements like “Racist terror would come soon enough. But not in Phillip’s time” (181), when clearly every action of the colonizers was racist. The failing comes out of the reconciliation on Western terms that lies (unconsciously?) beneath the text. Too often we reach passages that say “It is possible to construct some hypotheses” or the like – pure guesswork. Even where she makes what might seem like a reasonable suggestion, the paucity of evidence outside her own narrative compromises the analysis: Having inquired into this and other events, I am coming to think that Australian politics were not tradition-bound, as sentimentalists choose to think, but flexible and opportunistic, as is often the case in societies where warrior prowess stands high. (124)

Why can’t a society be “tradition-bound,” whatever that actually means, and pragmatic? Many readers will love the book, but it doesn’t do the justice to Indigenous ‘Australians’ that Clendinnen obviously wishes it to, and the portraits of major players of the First Fleet are highly subjective and manipulated. It’s good that a non-Indigenous writer has accepted the stupidity and the wrongs of colonization; that she has tried to bring dignity, humanity, understanding, and a certain amount of reason to portraits of Indigenous Australians involved in early or ‘first’ contact. But still, the failings need to be highlighted: ‘soft’ writing is what gives fuel to the right-wing historians who rant about ‘fact’ and ‘the historical record’, often ignoring the one-sidedness and obvious limitations of that record, and who go on about defective and subjective left-wing, liberal-minded histories.

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Basically, it seems that Clendinnen’s ‘research’ amounts to reading journals and letters of the early British players, and consulting a few anthropologists. She too often plays the amateur psychologist and anthropologist – and, even there, applies formulae from other periods and other Indigenous Australian peoples inappropriately and without clarification. Her analysis of misunderstandings when looking at the difference between tribal law – with its collective punishment, its focus on revenge and compensation – and the equally “brutal” rigour (and “performance” aspects) of the King’s law, is one of the book’s strengths but, once again, lacking depth. In considering Bennelong’s apparently cultural-bridging character, she recognizes the inevitability of failure, but plays him out like a character in that narrative drama. Governor Arthur Phillip works, contrarily, as antagonist and protagonist in this drama of translation failure. I don’t think this gives dignity; I think it removes it. Among the many offensive lines that seek to give stature and dignity (almost in the Walter Scott or Alexandre Dumas mode), is this conclusion re Bennelong’s life: “Over the last years of his life Baneelon abandoned the British in his heart, as they had long abandoned him in the world. At fifty he fumed his way to an outcast’s grave. He should have died earlier, in the days of hope.” What hope? Barangaroo, Bennelong’s partner, suffers the same fate at Clendinnen’s hands. Built up as a proto-feminist hybrid of Indigenous and Western resistance to patriarchy, this unquestionably strong and political woman is reduced to another platitude: “What I admire is her intransigence. Despite the massive pressures brought to bear upon her by her warrior society, Barangaroo always remained her own woman.” I am glad that she did in this story, but are we reading about the author or the real person? It’s a blurred picture. Clendinnen’s eagerness to psychologize the ‘Australians’ (whom she calls “nomads,” a problematical term in itself) is because she wants to paint a more compassionate history – but, instead, it removes agency. Her interaction with her favourite observer, Watkin Tench, “Captain-Lieutenant of Marines,” is embarrassing to “watch.” We watch her watching him watch. She forgives those she feels for, and condemns those she doesn’t. The opening gambit in the “settling” of Australia in 1788 has long needed reconsidering and reconfiguring, but the idea that at one stage a “conciliation” was possible is ludicrous – “dancing” with “Australians” never meant anything other than ‘of the moment’, and the Governor’s attempts to understand and communicate were merely part of the endeavour to conquer. Clendinnen knows this, and thus constantly plays the severity of Phillip’s punishments of

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his own people against his desire to feed (at the “expense” of the colonial rations – meagre at best) the “savages” – she sees but doesn’t ever let it run its full course. Throughout Dancing with Strangers, with all her sympathy, I wondered if these were ever real people to her – or, rather, so ‘real’ they became fictive. It’s a middle-class history for middle-class white folk feeling guilty about ‘what they’ve done’. As I heard one poet say at a “Black Poets’ night” in Sydney recently – “I don’t want to hear from some white person about how their relatives massacred us. Living with that guilt is their problem – we’ve got to live with the consequences.” Words aren’t enough, and many Indigenous people might well not want to share a common Australia. Fair enough.

Witness to Restoration268

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D A M A I T K E N ’ S M O S T R E C E N T V O L U M E , Eighth Habitation, is his finest. If critics have any sense of what matters in poetry of the AsiaPacific region, they will look to this book as a reworking of the range and depth of inter-cultural dialogues. Aitken’s lines flow with such a beguiling ease of expression that their underlying intellectual and cultural sophistication is readily absorbed. There is a superb sense of rhythm across a whole poem. The lines expand and contract with breath, and a penetrative irony, built through understated, matter-of-fact observations, dissolves into sparingly deployed images that enhance the poems’ politics:

and writing is an exercise with invisible ink, like a patchwork of moonlight in the foliage

Divided into three sections, each with its own geographical emphasis, but reaching a confronting intensity in the final section of “Cambodian Poems” with its forceful resistance to remappings of place, and to the destruction of culture and people themselves, Eighth Habitation is a tour de force. The tour is of a purgatorial world in which the natures of the colonizer, the tourist, and the expatriate are thrown into brutal relief against the cultural spaces they seek to exploit. History is reconfigured through the senses as the 268

“Inspired insights into purgatorial world,” Sydney Morning Herald (9 May 2009), Books: 32. Review of Adam Aitken, Eighth Habitation: New Poems (London & Sydney: Giramondo, 2009).

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poet engages with the cumulative realities of the here and now and what has passed. The temple of Angkor Wat, potent symbol of contemporary Cambodian Buddhism – originally dedicated to Vishnu and decorated with sculpted scenes from the Mahabharata at a time when the Khmer Empire was Hindu – lies like a semi-silent affirmation behind this work. In the poem “A Map of Cambodia,” we read: Under one map there’s another rising on the tide as the pain recedes.

Here we have an immediate sense of Aitken’s concern for how external forces bend place to their wants, often against the people’s will or needs. This poem carries the subtitle “after Yao Feng’s ‘Map of China’ ” – so much of this book is dialogue and response to other poets’ and writers’ work. The dialogues and responses range from the use of archival material from 1950s diaries in the first section – which is more ‘grounded’ in notions of an Australian home, considering the relationship between ‘home’ and ‘away’ – through to an ironic address to the French explorer Henri Mouhot as constructed in Mouhot’s journal, Travels in Siam, Cambodia, Laos, and Annam. Other poets’ poems have basically been ‘rewritten’ in the light of the poet Adam Aitken’s’ experiences and circumstances while recalling these other works. Aitken’s ‘responses’ to other writers seem strongly to come out of spiritual and ontological isolation. This isolation even extends to ‘love’ poems in which the personae are further away from love the more they desire it, or try to define it. In a remarkable series of “aubades” running through the final section, the poetic voice/s vacillate between irony and want, between confrontation and longing. They may address doubt (of the self inflected through a lover), or the defining moments of colonization (“It was like this / for the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954”). A number of the colonial demarcations in this book focus through a ‘father’ figure in constructs of seeing place: i.e. how an ‘Asian’ environment is perceived from a Western colonial point of view. Even inside the ‘places’ conveyed, the persona is always inflecting such a view: how it might be misviewed. With regard to the ‘mother’ figure in the book, outside the literal (and deadly ironic but still affectionate) rendering of cultural displacements in “Cairns,” she becomes almost a metaphorical extension of animism. In the middle section of the book, “Crossing Lake Toba,” an animistic metaphor is configured across cultures and belief-systems as a point of dream

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reference. It becomes an archetypal issue in Aitken’s ‘myths’ of origin. Aitken has astonishing insight into language and its cultural echoes. Profoundly ‘secular’, the poet is nonetheless never far away from struggling with religious sensibilities, and caution, respect, and challenge work hand in hand when dealing with religious subjects. There are tensions between religion as oppressor and as liberator, as inspiration and torment. And this goes right to the core of who the poet is. So many of these poems clearly evoke the poet physically present in the place described. Even if they are ‘borrowed’, you know the poet has been there – later, seeing the ‘same’ things but in a different way. This brings us to the book’s major political question: how are subjects represented through the figurative language of poetry which can’t tell precise truths, and doesn’t desire to? To return to the work’s Cambodia section: Aitken acts as witness to a restoration of the figurative in a broader public sense, while accepting that such horrendous loss as under Pol Pot can never be compensated for – the dead cannot be restored to life – but they can be acknowledged and respected, their spiritual presences and material manifestations cherished. The poem “S21,” which describes Tuol Sleng prison, Phnom Penh, now a “genocide museum,” is horrifying but at no point exploitative of the ‘experience’ of visiting, despite using irony sharpened by a ‘lightness’ of tone. The mutual responsibility we all share for such crimes is clearly defined. Not every poem in this collection attains the same heights; some don’t quite cohere, while others seem too incidental. But, all in all, this is a book that deserves to have books written about it.

Poetaction of Desire Out of ‘Thraldom’269

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U T SIMPLY , THIS IS ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT POETIC NARRATIVES

to have appeared in English anywhere, at any time. It has challenged my self-conceptions of sexual and gender intactness, of my willingness to let identity bleed across categories. It has outed one’s willingness to recognize fetishes to control those fetishes. It makes pornography out of love, and love out of pornography. It is a new Song of Songs, it is a revelation of the false notions of the libertine. The only work I can compare it to is François Villon’s 269

Preface to Gabrielle Everall, Dona Juanita – and the Love of Boys: a new novel, ill. Tara E. Kelly (privately published with the assistance of Arts W A , 2007).

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great Testament. And it goes further. The body as it rejects the implant. The body as object cyborgs into receptor and giver. It invades and receives. It grows holes. It fertilizes itself. It lusts and hides in chastity. Desire is a linguistics of behaviour, and a life’s work, a life’s reading and living, has been given up to the body of this text. It saves and scarifies. It is sacrificial, like desire. This amorous adventure of Dona Juanita and her selfincarnations is a poetaction of desire out of ‘thraldom’. A novel of texts, a narrative of compaction, expansion, and the intimate moment stretched by a stalking, a prison of psychiatrics imposed by the machine of the corporate state, imposed by the approvals of body image and insext. How can a frightening tale of ‘lust’ be so enduringly tragic? Lot who won’t recognize his Lot’s wife, won’t absorb the obsession. The text uses and is used. What’s left for the suffering, for the Werthergirl? Make no mistake, when the notes say “ideas from,” the self-compassioning of the splitting, regenerating, recombining character ascends well beyond. This is a narrative of giving, loss, imprisonment, and release. The page is the mirror, but only to what one knows already: the (the)rapist only knows what to say because you’ve said it already. This is a cathartic masterpiece, a work of female desire that traumatizes gender, makes liberties out of its incorrectitudes. This is one of the great poems of sexuality. It is an apocryphal book of the Bible written late in the piece. It is the suppressed voice making itself discovered. It refuses not to be listened to. It is compelling. It is a chatroom, a stripshow, a confessional, a library, the director’s cut. I won’t stop talking about it. It is more stimulating than French literary theory. It is not a French letter. It is not Goethe. It is not Kathleen Mary Fallon, though it is as significant as Working Hot.270 It is a tale, a fairytale in which the heroine is called to help, and does, falls in love, is used and rejected, watches as her love is eaten by another, still remains, still intertexts, descends (further) into an abyss, rejects the state’s control, the control of a chemical order, and rises up. Irony threads it together, and its catharsis is the orgasm that can’t be repeated. But it is had, like resurrection. It is Paradise Lost and Paradise Refound. Bodies moved into, moved out of. The same skin. Your skin. All skin. The young man of noble lineage is seduced by Dona Juanita? Or a Byronic victim of the seducer.

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Kathleen Mary Fallon, Working Hot (Melbourne: Sybylla Co-operative Press,

1989).

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The ironies are cutting, the predation of ‘maleness’ unhinged. This poemnovel revels in verbal tricks and puns, undoings and re-threadings, but always with determined and deadly purpose. As I’ve said, and I’ll say it again – and I am a bloke who has carried a copy of Valerie Solanas’s S C U M Manifesto around the world with me, infiltrating it into text whenever I can – this is a work of brilliance. Solanas hit truths in her madness, hits truths when she collapsed into violence: Everall has taken those truths and made something far more deadly and effective than Solanas’s tragedy. She has turned text against the predators: against gender, against the categories. A story that needs telling and retelling again.

“This Enquiry Into You”271

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HASKELL HAS ALWAYS WRITTEN IN A VOICE UNIQUELY HIS, belonging to no movement, being part of no ‘scene’. But it would be a mistake to assume that he’s not aware of what’s going on in the poetry community around him, or that he is entirely disconnected from this. In some ways Haskell writes as he does despite the intentions of current trends. Haskell’s poetry, so often set in familiar environments and concerned with the day to day ‘realities’ of life, is in fact concerned with questions of the relationship, and tensions therein, between subjectivity and objectivity, the observer and the observed. His is a meta-process of post-Romantic investigation, a consideration of what the poetic voice means in the ‘real world’. His consideration of the ‘observer as link’ in the interactive voice of family, friends, literature, community, and spiritual questioning, is a major project, and one that brings the influence of a poet like Kenneth Slessor very much into focus as the modernist project fragments or at least moves into its later stages. This is poetry deeply (and unselfconsciously) questions the movement of the ‘I’. Haskell’s latest volume, The Ghost Names Sing, presents us with subtle poems that are skilfully ‘available’. These are poems that may seem almost too available on a first reading, but on further investigation the reader realizes that the ‘I’ is much more fluid than at first thought, that it is positioning itself against our prescribed reading and experiential practices; that there is a constant ironizing at work, a self-mocking humour. This is not a case of the poet

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“The ‘Ghost Names Sing’,” Southerly 58.3 (1999): 250–55. Review of Dennis Haskell, The Ghost Names Sing (Fremantle, W A : Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1997).

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simply telling us about his or her world, but an investigation of how we as readers build up a ‘sense’ of that world, how we construct perceptions out of the ‘I’. Even the mostly direct and apparently personal poems are about manipulation of subjectivity. Which is not to say that they are misrepresenting experience, or are ‘dishonest’, but that they are querying the very process of receptivity, of giving voice to experience, and ultimately the lyrical process. One gets the feeling that Slessor’s “Metempsychosis” is often at the back of Haskell’s mind: “Suddenly to become John Benbow. .. .” Issues of gender and the domestic, and movement through (or against) perceived masculine and feminine spaces are beautifully and sensitively observed and managed – an uncommon thing in male Australian verse. Haskell writes in “Reality’s Crow”: Each time we met I knew you better than I knew. I love your soft warm flesh, your gorgeous breasts, I love the being, the sense, the smell of you – things Australia at least would have men too embarrassed to speak. Surely such happiness, and so enduring, Australia can allow neither of us to take.

One gets the feeling that this is something Dransfield missed in his declarations to Australia! The woman-as-object of romantic adulation, or lyrical focus, is undone here – this is a ‘real’ and not simply idealized object – but without losing the sensual. Haskell is able to be so blunt, so conscious of addressing ‘his lady’ by setting it off against national perceptions of appropriate masculine behaviour. By being direct, familiar, and available to the critical eye, he is undoing the binary. He dares ‘us’ to mock him. Real men don’t do this! Here is a statement of emotional vulnerability and non-shame in the attempt to recognize female subjectivity, something too rarely undertaken. Make no mistake, this is a political poem, as most of the poems in this volume are. Each poem in this collection is accomplished in some way, and some are small masterpieces. Haskell has a great sense of pace within the line, and from the first poem, “The Empty Room,” with its “Only small rotations of dust,” through to the last “GA873: The meaning of Meaning,” with “billow into pure white waves” timing and control are entire. Questions of ‘meaning’ in the immediate are characteristic of many of these poems, but a poem like “Chilliholicism” undoes the ontology in a classically self-effacing manner.

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Even in his light-hearted moments – and he often gives the impression of being light-hearted while being deadly serious – Haskell is questioning the role of participant, of observation and response, ironically concluding, “You’d have to be / born to it, a chilliholic; something so unnatural I knew / could never be learnt.” Throughout the collection there is a play with and against those poets who have influenced Haskell most. Yeats is constantly there, especially in parody like “The Second Going” with its neat satire on W A Inc: “The worst escape conviction, while the best / Are full of voyeuristic intensity.” But so are Eliot, and Keats, and even cummings. Many poems in this collection examine the re-invention of childhood experience, of a personal family history; someone coming to grips with how they are in a sense defined by collective experience, but how that experience is refocused and re-invented by the individual. Something is necessarily lost in the process. The individual extracts from the collective experience: “I stood there knowing / that the past was our only connection / and had rushed, unreasonably, / out of our lives” (“The Mighty Wests”). Still there is always an attempt to engage with what it was to be someone other than the observer. One of the signature poems in this collection is “Romanticism in the 1990s.” It’s worth quoting in full. The use of consciously poetic tropes plays against the reader’s expectation. Closure is resolute and yet defiantly unsatisfying. A “fine horizon” is undercut by “thin, listless cloud”: Yachts like gulls with upturned wings alone in their element silently flit across a fine horizon of thin, listless cloud. On the shore we stare out to sea amongst the translucent blobs of jellyfish foam, sand sinking into our toes. And the yachts look like elegance, delicacy of action. Wind spits along the groyne as they startle west away from us across the brackish chop,

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chimeras billowing colour before a salt-laden blast. But here they are suddenly wrenched towards us direct, heaving slowly, relentlessly onward. Spinnakers grow flaccid and are roped in. Bony hulls lift less and less often from the water. The wind comes in clots The closer and closer they get to us the more they become big, lumbering boats.

The poem ironizes its own existence, the role of the poet as ‘bard’, the requirements of the listener, all in one. But despite “The wind comes in clots,” there is also a beauty that lies in the ‘isness’ of the scene, rather than the poet’s perception: “And the yachts look like elegance, delicacy of action.” The irony consumes itself. The question of time and place, the position of observer and the observed, is an undercurrent, or maybe undertow – again one is reminded of Slessor – “The gulls go down, the body dies and rots, / And Time flows past them like a hundred yachts.” There is also an undercurrent of sexuality. But maybe it’s also grounded like everything else in this anti-romantic (small r) poem: “The closer and closer / they get to us/the more they become / big, lumbering boats.” Here is a poem that deals with questions of quiddity, of referentiality, of the ‘lyrical I’, of the ‘word itself’, without making the slightest allusion to theory or becoming embroiled in the language of exegesis. The wonderful collusion between persona and the ‘other’ in the context of the poem, and the ‘other’ in the sense of the listener /reader, reinforces the undercutting of expected processes of reception: “The closer and closer / they get to us. .. .” But it is still a poem about words and the way words work as thingsin-themselves.272

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We need to read against expectation, against what we think we’re reading: consider that sand sinks into toes, not toes into sand. [J.K.]

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The poem “As You Are, As We Are” is a brilliant case in point, in the decentering of the romantic observer. The ‘dynamic equivalent’ of the Keatsian voice is captured to perfection. This is a poem in which the ‘availability’ of the Keats mythology, Keatsian poetic voice, and the Romantic tradition are explored. It is a poem written in strong, almost terse language. The sublime is earthed and subdued. And the asides to Shelley – earthed through the death of the child – are a masterly touch – “past the grave of Shelley’s son, / his life so short it made Keats’s seem long.” This is a rich and varied collection. It is a collection about poetry, about ethics, about aesthetics, the participation in the questioning of “God” – Yet I can’t scorn your beliefs, dare not laugh, suffer nor sneer. After all, it’s me who’s writing this as if you’d hear. (“Recognition”) “... Forgive me C., I cannot say ‘you’ and believe it – ” (“Flowers”)

and about the position of the poetic voice within the construct of the poem. It is a book in which the ‘I’ of the poem colludes with us, shares with us – shares with ‘you’, and then slips away. It is a volume that has the reader confronting his or her participation in the personal histories of the poems’ evolutions.

Launch Speech as Object: On Niall Lucy’s Pomo Oz273

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responsible for the public presentation of a new work – an endgame in the mysterious but often exacting process of publication – and as point of reference as person and a creator of texts generally known as ‘poetry’ discussed in some detail in the work I am launching, and with pleasing empathy in the second part of this book, I feel privileged (and I use the word in a Derridean sense of privilege of speech and not metaphor) to be standing here, to be part of a spectacle whose evolution

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Niall Lucy, Pomo Oz: Fear and Loathing Downunder (Fremantle, W A : Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2010). Blog entry, Mutually Said: Poets Vegan Anarchist Pacifist (March 2010).

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reaches back through the Enlightenment, finds some of its finest moments in a Chaser ‘fake motorcade at the A P E C Summit’ in 2007, the prompt for this work in so many ways, and encompasses resistance to an increasingly deepset status quo that is anti-ideas, anti-text, and generally fearful of truths whose existence it believes postmodernists deny. In response to factors such as the bashing and brutality of the Howard years’ assault on critical thought, exemplified by that foolish exposition of emptiness, Kevin Donnelly’s Dumbing Down274 (launched by Howard), Niall Lucy claims that he is not necessarily a ‘postmodernist’ (though he might be), that a name is but a name, but that he is going to stand up to the plate (the American baseball allusion will be brought into focus, despite the firm anchoring of this book in Oz!), and take on those balls being hurled at critical thinking in schools and elsewhere. Cultural wars are religious wars, are crusades. Niall Lucy is writing against a New Crusade, and he is writing against cultural quarantine. He is writing for understanding and equality, for fairness. I have no scare quotes around any of this, which is really weird for me. The strangest subtextual thought I took from this book was that Howard’s Australia, and maybe ‘Rudd’s’ also, has no idea what ‘Australia’ is, even less so than Baz Luhrmann, who maybe knows a lot more than he’s letting on. About time! I will say, as subject, personally, that I am unabashedly a ‘postmodernist’, and believe that to claim to be so is a claim to ‘truth’ and necessity. When I teach postmodernism, I usually start with a consideration of French Dandyism and 1830s–1850s France in particular; my journey takes me to Chicago and the architectural theories of Charles Jencks, with side tours via Thomas Pynchon and L A N G U A G E poetry, ending with the attack on the ‘Twin Towers’. Behind all that is the ‘punch line’ of Niall’s contention that Derridean thought becomes not only blame but something akin to the “death of pleasure” (please, critics of the postmodern, look to Baudrillard in the least here), “There is nothing outside the text.” As Niall, with characteristic logic and efficiency, scythes his way through the inept thinking that allowed a generation of popular critics and educationalists to argue the ‘truth’ of the canonical and the denial of the need for truth in the ‘critical’, we become increasingly aware that communication of any event, however serious, can only be ‘textual’. Speaking of a letter by Artaud to Benjamin Crémieux, Derrida says: “Released from the text and the author-god, mise en scène would be re274

Kevin Donnelly, Dumbing Down: Outcomes-Based and Politically Correct: The Impact of the Culture Wars on Our Schools (Melbourne: Hardie Grant, 2007).

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turned to its creative and founding freedom.”275 Considering an issue of surface, spectacle, and spectators, Derrida locates an entirety within and without text. For a student at high school – one fairly funded, say, rather than, as Niall notes, overprivileging private schools with public money, and creating disjunction – the sheer ability to value ideas expressed within the text as saying one thing and inevitably meaning another, is exciting. When Niall notes the university complaint that theory destroys ‘the pleasure of reading’, then he laments that narrowness of a teaching that allows nothing in or out of the text, that truly there is nothing but the text in the literal sense. That the values of a piece of writing are intact and self-informing, that context is purely historical and localized. That how we read won’t alter those perceptions. But I am twisting Niall's words – he says this with so much more clarity. As subject I can illustrate by a couple of examples. First: After 9/11 I told my American students that the destruction of the Twin Towers was the end of postmodernity as a functional critical application in America. The skyscraper undone, the skyscraper centering capitalism undone by ‘Holy War’ – a term that would suit the ‘attacked’ as much as the ‘attackers’. An Australian telling Americans. They weren’t sure where to position themselves. An ‘ally’, but a foreigner. This mattered to some in terms of what kind of ‘truths’ I could be uttering. Suddenly, this left-wing teacher was to be seen inverting a left-wingism. Postmodernism might be usefully right-wingism for some? If we start with architecture servicing the needs of capitalism (say, from 1972 per Jencks), if we start with the theories of postmodern architecture, are we always going to be looking to the right? I would clearly argue not (and did with my students) – rather, that postmodernism has become the resistance to that original perception of service to capitalism. Some of my smartest students – the highest-achieving student graduated at the top of his year, leaving to become a sanitary worker and showing me he’d learnt something – said, no, it wasn’t true that it would be the end of postmodernity in America. To explain: it is the consolidation of the postmodern. They will rebuild and the façades will be greater than ever. A Freedom Tower!? Indeed, and Ground Zero becomes a New Enlightenment, thoroughly Western in a way that would appal Derrida, and Chomsky. The point is that an anarchist such as myself can be ‘postmodern’ in world-view and practice (I see no choice), but so, too, can deeply conservative re-inventors of the status 275

Derrida, Writing and Difference, tr. Alan Bass (L’écriture et la différence, 1967; London: Routledge, 1978): 237.

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quo who want to make the edifice greater than ever. They apply a kind of critical thinking that is the opposite of what I understand or take from the ‘event’, but in the end it is reduced to spectacle. It’s how we interpret that reduction that matters.276 Second: I studied at high school in Geraldton under a great postmodern teacher of literature – Bill Green. He let me run riot. Whether it was Blake or Tolkien, he encouraged the introduction of not only history but even chemistry theory into my final paper (which was, outlandishly, done on Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings). I had, incidentally, bought the entire collection of Penguin ancient and English classics the year before, and read them from A to Z. I wasn’t lacking in the ‘classical’. Now, back then I was no pacifist, and Bill didn’t try to make me one, but critiquing war motifs in Lord of the Rings in the context of gender (go re-read Lord of the Rings) and racism (go re-read Lord of the Rings) took me from playing War Games to the streets. It needn’t have – he didn’t encourage that, in fact he was ‘neutral’ – I might just as easily have gone the Freedom Tower way. Point was, a critical faculty was engendered in me and I didn’t do what the author of the text intended or wanted or maybe just wondered I might do. For me, the author was dead. And I wanted to be one of those dead authors for whom text was the world and the world was text, because that’s the only way truth can be conveyed.

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I wish to prevent a possible confusion between motifs. The Twin Towers were essentially modernist architecture – the new Freedom Tower will likely incorporate pomo architectural elements but not ultimately be double-coded in structure. But it will double-code in national and international meaning, as did the twin towers in their symbolism as target. I am not saying that the end of pomo was because the towers were pomo buildings, which was not the case (really), but, rather, that the notion of the skyscraper that oversees the market (skyscrapers are panopticons that often obscure their own vantage points by being in each other’s eyelines, and by vying for space), looks out over the world in its modernist-capitalist certainty but dissembles in its electronic (networked, of course) sleight-of-hand, becomes double-coded and a symbol of corporate postmodernity. The irony being that postmodernity gave the critical tools to undo this reading and this function. Thus, postmodernity runs its own course, has its own ‘mind’, becomes a set of organic critical tools (sure, gratefully co-opted by the left). These perceptions come out of my being a poet for whom poetry is a textual practice (poems as buildings, especially houses). I should say that this discussion is not intended to be disrespectful to the memory of those who lost their lives in this tragedy. [J.K.]

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What I have said is at the basis of my friendship and admiration for Niall Lucy. His book is rigorous and yet highly readable. It’s also bloody funny at times and Miranda Devine and other such figures are played out in this new Dunciad Major. Don’t let the lines of exquisite prose fool you; this is a new type of writing, a poem-book that prize judges won’t know where to fit. But they should give it something to show that the old is confirmed in the new, whether they like it or not. In my favourite chapter, “Everybody Loves Raymond Williams” (which I do because I am a pastoral guy who thinks big country houses hold most of the State’s evils), Niall considers the fear of deconstruction in terms of a fear of a loss of authority on the part of the ‘Teacher’ (don’t worry, he’s firmly on their side) in terms of the State, and the university. He writes, with reference to Derrida: Like the essence of a poem, the essence of the new international is that it doesn’t have one. Its limits, then, are indeterminate, approximating something like a positive form only in the conservative denunciation of whatever questions the authority of ‘proper’ ways of thinking and the ‘proper’ order of things.277

Touché. Harold Bloom says I can write canonical poems; I read canonical, often realist, literature; I believe in essences; I think metaphysics make for poor science but I love metaphysical poetry. I am a postmodernist. I am going to take Niall’s model and try to write an anti-pomo potboiler – it’s a good guide, he has read his dunces carefully and closely, and is too generous in his pisstake (to quote Marion May Campbell from the cover). Niall Lucy is the smartest bloke out there, and I hope he likes the book I am going to write as a result of thinking about the book he has written.

Seams of Confirmation and Doubt278

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interconnections between the individual stories that make up Tim Winton’s new collection of short stories, The Turning, lay seams of confirmation and doubt that spread out below the surface of whole communities in south-west 277

HE SUBTEXTS CREATED BY THE FAMILIAL AND GEOGRAPHICAL;

Niall Lucy, Pomo Oz, 48. “Quest for light in world of human darkness,” Scotland on Sunday (24 April 2005). Review of Tim Winton, The Turning (Sydney: Picador, 2004). 278

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coastal Western Australia. Winton’s mythologies are highly localized and regional, anchored by memory and the specificities of place. Characters are defined by their pasts, and it is the past they remain fixated on: “Do you realize that every vivid experience in your life comes from your adolescence? You should hear yourself talk. You’re trapped in it” (“Defender,” 302). We might wonder if this, like many other such statements, is a dialogue between the writer and himself. Behind the different personae – male and female, of various ages – there’s a clearly unified voice at work, a kind of holistic unity. It is also, underneath, an extremely ‘heterosexual’ work – despite references and allusions to ‘lesbians’ or asides on the ‘poof’ syndrome. The book is very ‘direct’ in its language-use, and, for all its confrontation with sex, drugs, and sin, a strongly positivist one in its affirmation of the human. However, death is never far away – from bodies burnt in house fires to the drowning of an almost non-verbal bully, or the death by heart-attack of another non-verbal outsider in an asylum. These subterranean seams entwine together, forming layers of genealogy and circumstance that resonate with a shared bleakness, a dark destiny – “Looks dry this country, it does, but underground there’s water. Caves of it. Drilling, that’s what this country needs.” (“Aquifer,” 42) It is a book of irony, of a belief that is being sorely tested. One gets the sense that no crime – regardless of its being naive or the result of mere human weakness – will go unpunished. Existence expects payment in kind. Winton creates an internecine world that works painfully towards resolutions, and no matter how much darkness or grotesquerie interrupts the quest for light and awareness, it ultimately surfaces in this set of yarns that overall is more an experimental novel than ‘simply’ a book of tales. In many ways, this is one of Winton’s most innovative works. Bizarrely, it’s Angela Carter who comes to mind more than the hyper-realists one might normally equate with Winton’s approach to detail and colloquial detail and speech. Under close investigation, it becomes obvious that for all its up-close and ‘beingthere’ feel, Winton’s world is more mythic and ‘unreal’ than we might think. Having grown up in Western Australia, I get the overwhelming sense of being in situ, but also that it’s a world removed by degrees of separation. It’s as if we’re more in a world of spiritual crisis, of faith seeking to be liberated from the confines of religious difference. The crisis points and small triumphs of our matter-of-fact existence are examined, revisited, recast, and re-remembered. The answers to any given character’s story are found in the stories of others – family members, friends, a brief moment of contact. The faith is a col-

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lective one – difference, ultimately, becomes secondary in our shared plight – a search for location, belonging, and the past that makes us what we are. The presence of the author still crowds behind the narratives (be they third-, second-, or first-person), but more as a director trying to coordinate the disparate threads. Ultimately, Winton’s is a deeply compassionate voice, but one that allows the irony and even cruelty of a particular situation to direct the unravelling of narrative. These are stories about the inevitability of fate, but also about the beauty of the moment – be it a first kiss, or the mutual realization that a dying mother’s / wife’s request to her son to seek out her longestranged husband, his father, is a way of reuniting the alienated father and son, or, in classic Robbie Burns manner, seeing ourselves as others might see us, as in the opening story “Big World”: But something else, the thing that eats at me, is the way he’s enjoying being brighter than her, being a step ahead, feeling somehow senior and secure in himself. It’s me all over. It’s how I am with him and it’s not pretty” (13

Geographically large, it is, of course, ironically, a very small world. This is a beautifully interwoven work, with enough loose threads to escape the prison of cause and effect, but one still encased in the unified vision of reward, salvation, and the potential for damnation. It’s a very Anglo-Celtic vision of the south-west and, even more, a very Protestant interaction with it. Winton’s insights into the ‘born-again’ tactics of ‘friendship’ and conversion mesh with tragic isolation and loneliness, and an apotheosis of spiritual selfknowledge comes out of horrific domestic violence. Winton’s characters are homogeneous and unworldly in the broader sense of the word – they might not have seen snow, but the luckiest ones escape to a wider world, to come back as no better people. And that’s the point – truth lies close at hand, close to home. If those outside the main characters’ ‘scope” ‘are self-consciously ‘othered’, culturally or personally, it’s because these characters are intensely involved in their own experience. A French word – beaucoup... “Bo-what?” (“Boner McPharlin’s Mole,” 280) – enters as a satellite to the central concern. Speech is active, written language a cause for suspicion. What is read is about escape – a freedom that has your Kombi Van breaking down not far from home. You return or perish. A number of Winton’s personae in the stories of The Turning are female – as if it’s something he feels he must confront. Most often it works, but sometimes we get the sense of a teenage boy, for example, imagining how a girl might have thought. Distance from those not like oneself is constant – Ital-

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ians, “Catholics” and their “Catholic” business that is both alienating and enticing; boys and girls, men and women – but in a way that casts illumination on one’s own shortcomings and paranoias. In the end, it’s about a desire for understanding and expression. Interestingly, landscape, which forms such an important part of this book – the moving to and from towns, through a variety of terrain – is not really what this book is about; no matter how described, it’s static compared to the evolution of the character’s lives. It’s something they pass through; with exceptions, such as in the story “Aquifer,” and to some extent “Fog.” The stories are quite filmic, and one wonders at the over-emphasis on verisimilitude with regard to props and scene-setting – the reference to brand names, mannerisms of a period – ugg boots, Fabulon, formica, types of vehicles and so on. These are the tools of nostalgia, yet this is not a nostalgic book. Even the recollections of childhood so consciously – and vividly – limned are tainted by a sense of intrusion and loss. The carving of new suburbs out of bush, the weirdness of the B B C voice on the phone giving the time, and the (occasional) paranoiac reference to, or presence of, “Aborigines”. We get the feeling the author is conscious that they are not present enough, and that rectifying this is textually – and factually – evasive. The final story of the volume, “Defender,” comes closest to articulating the disconnection, the fear that the cultural distance between Aboriginal people and the white settler community might be reduced to racism, and the ultimate guilt and inability to bridge this gap. Issues of religion, policing, and the law are background to dishonesty, spirituality as fad, and avoidance of confrontation, throughout the volume. Vic, so pivotal in our journey through this time machine of family and place, is caught in his own “complications” of confronting what he fears others might see as racism, that he might even see himself as racist and prejudiced if he examines his conscience too closely. We see that he is more concerned about his wife thinking he’s a racist than about the fact that she’s “cuckolded him.” But then, we are told, he concedes: Anyhow he probably was a racist in other ways. He had an involuntary reaction against white South Africans. He didn’t care for the shape of Slav’s heads – they tended to be flat at the back. (310)

It’s an incredibly guilty work. The sex is guilty, the relationships between family members are guilty, the things not done and those that can’t be undone are guilty. The closed-off nature of this isolated yet physically vast world – focused through the tri-poles of Angelus (read: Albany, coastal ex-whaling

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town of the south-west), the city of Perth, and the cray-fishing community of White Point – is emphasized in macro and micro. In a dwelling of “scraptin and ragwall” out in the goldfields the first-person narrator notices a postcard tacked to a pole: “It featured a map of the state with the word S E C E D E ! superimposed on it in faded yellow” (“Commission,” 227). The details are skilfully drawn, but the image created is one of separation, distance, and isolation. As noted elsewhere, all that’s outside the west is the east – “That Christmas we drove the Falcon across the Nullarbor Plain to visit the Eastern States which is what we still call the remainder of Australia” (“Aquifer,” 46). Winton’s world is consciously and physically closed, and, in terms of his oeuvre, often seems to be trying to find ways out into other cultures in the same place, to reach into other communities. Winton is a fabulous storyteller – it comes easily to him. His natural details give the sense of great accuracy, but are more generalized than readers might think. What’s at the core is the way nature can be both liberating and deeply grotesque /alienating. In wrestling with forces of belief, love, destiny, domesticity, and nature, Winton creates a world that is paradoxically both fantastical and carefully mapped. The empathy seems always to be with the people who inhabit the place, rather than with the place – or the natural environment – itself.

Missing the Boat279

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ARELY HAVE I BEEN SO ANGRY OVER THE PUBLICATION OF A BOOK as I am over Frank Welsh’s Great Southern Land. In the past, if I’ve had to negatively review a book I’ve felt a pang of regret – it’s at least worth admiring an author’s effort to tangle with language, to express his or her views or creativity. This is the exception. Welsh’s so-called history is a disgrace, and not because it’s a history of Australia written by a non-Australian. In fact, there should be more histories of Australia written by non-Australians. Let me place a caveat on that: Aboriginal ‘histories’ are often private histories, and they are for Indigenous Australians to tell. Welsh has no respect for these private histories. He should try reading Dot Collard’s uplifting story, or Aboriginal Australia edited by Bourke, Bourke, and Edwards, or maybe a closer reading of Bruce Elder’s sobering Blood on the Wattle: Massacres and

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“Disgrace dressed up as history,” The Scotsman (1 August 2004). Review of Frank Welsh, Great Southern Land: A New History of Australia (London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 2004).

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Maltreatments of Aboriginal Australians since 1788, listed in the Welsh bibliography. And, yes, artefacts and body parts should be returned to their people. And, no, anthropologists and historians have no claims over these things. The place of non-Indigenous history is to scrutinize the interactions between Indigenous Australians and non-Indigenous Australians, and to respect cultural privacy. Welsh would decry this. He seems to think all is available to him and, though he gives the impression at times of being anti-racist and deeply humanist, he is a classic apologist for the invasion and occupation of the Australian land-mass. Welsh’s understanding of anything Indigenous is laughable and insulting. He mocks the fact that census figures have shown that the number of people claiming Aboriginal heritage has increased. Of course it has: it is now recognized that Aboriginality is not a matter of how much Aboriginal ‘identity’ you have, but that you have Aboriginal ‘identity’. It might be surmised that another reason the census showed more people claiming Indigenous identity was the increased confidence to live a life without the general societal and governmental persecution of the past. Even with the removal of ‘light-skinned’ Aboriginal children (the ‘Stolen Generations’) from their parents, a process he eventually declares racist, Welsh waters down the crimes through a superficial effort to tell all sides, to be the impartial historian: The road to hell is invariably paved with good intentions, and the intentions of Sir Paul Hasluck, in charge of Aboriginal Affairs and the Territories from 1949 for twelve years, were demonstrably excellent.

Here’s a place where condemnation of white Australia should be in full force. It’s not. Heritage is far more complex than Welsh understands or wants to understand. In the brief space I have allotted, I should discuss Welsh’s racy style, his witticisms and put-downs (“A short person with oversized vanity, Kerr had been known as the ‘Liberace of the Law’. .. ”), his dubious citing of observers such as Bill Bryson (believe it or not!), and his bizarre choices in what to leave out or investigate with more than a gesture. The problem with these choices is evident when he tells the story of a government or a period (the Whitlam government’s 1974 double dissolution is at least worthy of more serious analysis, surely). Facts and primary sources are supposed to inform a history – in this effort, they flutter around like illustrations in a picture book. And the footnoting is inadequate.

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Some news for Mr Welsh: Royal Commissions don’t always get it right and are as open to manipulation as any other construct of the State. One of the hundreds of Welsh’s misrepresentations comes in his brief gloss on the negative effects on the Keating government of the Hindmarsh Island affair. As has been broadly discussed, this incident has been seen as a marker in Australia’s cultural wars (does Welsh know what these are? he seems to know nothing of Australian cultures outside sport and, er, sport). It has become gradually clear that the Royal Commission’s investigations and conclusion – that a claim by the Ngarrindjeri women regarding Secret Women’s Business was a hoax contrived to prevent the bridge being built – was deeply flawed. In other words, whatever the truth, the issues are more complex than Welsh’s: a Royal Commission, chaired by judge Iris Stevens, nevertheless found that the Aboriginal ladies had ‘fabricated’ convenient secret religious beliefs; it was the stuff of which satire is made, and did nothing to advance Aboriginal causes, Tickner’s credibility or Labor’s appeal to cynical voters.

You don’t have to deconstruct this language-use much to pick the condescension. “Aboriginal ladies.” And the book is full of this. Welsh pretends to be sympathetic but is constantly mocking. Although capable of recognizing the vileness of the Howard government’s treatment of refugees and particularly the appalling Tampa incident, Welsh investigates nothing adequately, and there’s always a tone of superiority. It’s like the Empire and the colonies all over again – and he doesn’t know he’s doing it. And yes, Mr Welsh, we should be obsessed with Aboriginal issues – their land is still largely occupied, and the social issues go beyond the problem of drink. Some might believe Welsh’s style flamboyant, but it’s not the great Manning Clark. Welsh has none of the late professor’s knowledge or maverick sense of culture, or driving (if misplaced) national visions. Reading this book, it’s as if the place I come from were a cultural vacuum. A place where the Irish Ned Kelly is simply a racket, and not worthy of mythologizing. Why not think a little bit more about why such myths are created? A thug and murderer he might have been, but his ‘spirited’ manifesto “The Jerilderie Letter” is a unique moment in Australian history and merits investigation. The issue of Kelly’s Irishness is not to be dismissed in a few condescending smart-arse lines. Peter Carey’s The True History of the Kelly Gang may be fiction, but it has more truth than Welsh’s vision. No wonder he says that Carey’s is a badly informed justification – he just doesn’t understand anything tangential. Carey

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didn’t defend the Kelly gang’s violence; he examined why and how myths are created. The book is even worse for the fact that Welsh appears to think himself fair-minded and generous. It purports to support multiculturalism (he likes the food), but what of the histories of the Chinese, Greek, and Italian Australians, and many other peoples outside the Anglo-Celtic world, as histories in themselves, and not just appendages to the British colonial inheritance?

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– O F P E R I P H E R I E S – wrestling with gravity, unseen (underground) menace, poisonings, and movements across time and place. There’s a coherence in it, a dialogue between poems as diverse as the “quiet clearing of the throat / from a child’s room, close to midnight” auguring the yearly presence of the cold or flu in the house, a Ferris wheel, a blowhole, and the elegiac rumination over the death of a neighbour. That coherence comes out of the desire to assert a positive view of a world so tainted by avoidable tragedies. There are always options to the poison, to the double helix of D D T . The book’s vision is not Luddite – ships and planes can be cherished and ironized simultaneously. The white of Antarctica both beckons and symbolizes an unattainable absolute. I might hesitate to call this book darkly spiritual, but I would certainly call it spiritual. There’s a caring in it – a sophisticated deployment of language anchored in the ‘real’, the actual, that drives the narrative of this tightly honed, compact book. Many poems have been written about visiting Antarctica, or imagining visiting Antarctica, but Day’s is of a darker hue: “A tawdry brass band extracts too much emotional mileage,” as “Antarctic Ships” begins. She gives us the tension between what the mind perceives and the emotions experienced, the desire to be present and absent, and the fetishization of the seemingly exotic, the ship as something akin to that of Poe’s novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym; a perverse ferryman of the Southern seas: HIS IS A BOOK OF EDGES

The tilted vision has some allure – the thirty-degree list, the bloodstopping notion of deep green fathoms above which these tubs valiantly ferry the little emblems of life itself. 280

“Crossing the boundaries,” Eureka Street (December 2004): online. Review of Sarah Day, The Ship (Blackheath, N S W & Sydney: Brandl & Schlesinger, 2004).

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Who knows mortality like a sailor?

There’s sympathy, even admiration here, but a recognition of an ironic sublime. The lines are effortless and yet strangely cutting. The outsider, the new arrival, comes via those temporary villages, towns, and cities, ships. Migration, transference, exploration, visitation, pleasure – the ship is a kind of conjurer’s trick, a delusion of connectivity and community. Day’s ship poems give movement and stasis in the one line: a sense of approaching something but still being part of, even caught in, what’s left behind. In others, the personae of the poems see themselves – the bus driver, even the amputee – as the ship touches yet another port on its way to the symbolic vastness and emptiness. These experiences are overwhelmingly full, of course: and it’s the intricacy, the myriad of variations and disguises of nature and people, that compels us through surreal landscapes where the imagined merges with ‘fact’, and language generates purpose in itself. The truth of the poison is countered by the necessity of telling, of witness. There is much conflagration and inferno in these poems. Images of fire and water abound, as an elemental struggle takes place. On one level, it’s of earth, wind, fire, and water; on another, it is the quintessential struggle between moral responsibility in observing and telling, and accepting what is. Going with the pleasure cruise. Irony is never far away, but it’s not bitter. When we read of planes passing overhead, observed from an aficionado’s point of view, as being like rosaries, there’s a double thrust: a technical admiration countered by the technological usurping of spiritual values. Do prayers travel higher than a Boeing 747? The Ship is a book about time and chaos (theory). The echo of Yeats’s “The Second Coming” in the statement “Things fall apart,” from the villanelle “Sky Writing,” is a specific literary reference – and this book abounds in subtle as well as more overtly declared literary connections – but the movement from one era to another symbolized by the slow progress of the symbolic ship, on one hand, which is told only as the passing of a few lines, is juxtaposed with the rapidity of flight, on the other, right down to hours and minutes. . . . One end of the world one moment, the other end the next. Movement binds the collapse, the chaos, together. It’s the glue. Culture becomes transposable, and movement both transferring cultural knowledge, and also depleting it. There’s not judgment here, but a vicarious observation and participation. Old connections are triggered by new experiences: memory is physical and walks with you down corrugated gravel roads.

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In her examination and ethno-linguistic critique of representations and alterations to the natural, to the restructuring of nature through genetic modification and cloning, Day insists that ‘living’ is not simply a matter of having a similar or the same physical structure. The learned experience, the patterns and progress of inheritance, are disrupted. You can’t teach the re-created to be what it naturally would have been. And the genetically altered Salmon with its Trojan gene will come unstuck from the inside out. What has been lost outweighs what has been artificially ‘regained’. These are Miltonic issues of the Fall, with no Paradise available to regain. The satirical “Inaugural Speech at the Announcement of the Successful Cloning of the Thylacinus Cynocephalus” posits: Now, teach this individual shy reticence, teach it elusiveness in dry sclerophyll and casuarina, teach it native invisibility in the shadows of shearing sheds and out-houses. Teach it fear.

There is a commentary on occupation of land here. There is a commentary on the impossibility of playing the hand of God. The codes of existence itself are being tampered with and upset, and what we have is J.–K. Huysmans’ 1884 À Rebours where nature is constructed, where real nature is merely the inspiration and stimulus for an artificial world. Day is ruthless in her critique, but the deftness of her language, its verbal twists and turns, its metaphoric base, lead to questioning rather than mere accusation. Yet there is real anger, and a real questioning of what religious belief is in such contexts. In “Oncomouse (R) DuPont,” the fetishization of the living, the capitalist profit at all costs in the world of science–religion oppositions, psycho-babble and validation through this, the ultimate indifference to what it means to live, even be ‘created’, are all ‘dissected’: Try telling the oncomouse that a lab-bred predisposition to cancer is in some way akin to predestination;.

And in the devastating poem “Lex Talinas” the abuse and use of animals is templated against ideas of justice (natural) and law: “Did they savour the sop / of the vocabulary of punishment?” and: Better a wicked pig than an aimless God

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in a random universe.

There is a despairing humour, if that’s the word for this. Day makes full use of repetition and semi-refrain, and in the thylacine poem, the Biblical and Whitmanesque anaphoric repetitions parody sacredness. Tradition is tampered with, genetically modified. A love poem becomes a Dadaist inversion of the aubade, and a ‘romantic’ image is grounded by empirical data. This is a book of struggle. It has moments of immense beauty, with Day attuned to natural phenomena, the ‘human’ moment. There’s despair in the hubris of altering what is, in tampering with creation. But it’s a scientific book as well – judgment doesn’t fall blindly. The language of this tampering is entered and explored poetically. It creates its own directions. Sometimes possible readings might go against the purpose of the author, but Day creates digression through a sharp, intense linguistic register – she knows that words have so much internal pull, such energy, that as hard as she works to contain them, they will escape. This gives The Ship a life of its own. This book of diverse poems is like the engine room of an ocean-going liner, the Rolls Royce engines of a Jumbo, the Robert Stevenson M5 train belching smoke, and the most acutely realized moment in nature actualized. There’s no simple answer. This book does not seek to answer, however, but to explore. Read it again and again; it’s eerie to realize how many “subterranean missives” there are. She reads the science, she knows the edges: she looks over them as we look with her. She asks the necessary questions.

Fringe Benefits281

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in the Australian landscape. Introduced, it has, along with domestic cats, been responsible for the decimation and extinction of many native Australian bird and animal species. So the use by Frieda Hughes of the fox in this context has a meaning outside that of its native landscape. And context is the key to appreciating her first collection of poetry, Wooroloo. Since Hughes is a visual artist, it is not surprising to find that hers is a book drenched in ‘paint’ and drawing. She has a keen eye for people, relationships, animals, and life-force. She paints landscapes and portraits, and visualizations

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The Observer (25 April 1999). Review of Frieda Hughes, Wooroloo (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1999).

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of psyche. Death is here, but only because of the living. And this is an important point. Hughes has been criticized for focusing her poetry through the voices of her parents, with claims that her work is heavily shaped both in form and content by their work and lives. But a close reading of Wooroloo shows this to be a superficial view. Hughes’s poems are largely formed by her interaction with the ‘fringe’, and the tensions between the Edenic potential and potentially hellish reality of exile and isolation. And her book is about the terrors of isolation, of aloneness. It is a book about cathartic confrontation and rebirth. The strongest work shows tension between these states at its most ambiguous, most tenuous. For Hughes, the world is alive. Even death is alive. She recognizes its finality in fleshly terms, but examines the way it is animated through the interweaving of life and ‘nature’. A ‘negative’ reading of Hughes’s voice would place her at the centre of a world constructed out of artistic and personal dislocation, where even fire is a living entity that must be weighed in against. Where sheep are not just burnt, but cooked. Still, I didn’t hear. It was louder now. The neighbour’s sheep Were cooked in a field corner, and chickens blackened Beyond possessing even a beak or claw to make them birds.

And it is fear and threat that contribute to what we are. But they are only part of the picture. We can have many lives, all interconnected. The human soul and human disquietude and hellishness inhabit all. But Hughes’s is a more complex book than this allows – it explores how the poet restructures an often alien world to gain kinship with it, to open lines of communication in moments of the greatest despair. A poem such as “Laszlo” demonstrates how interaction with other people can be healing. The presence of birds epitomizes this: they symbolize the interconnectedness of things. The small space can be the most infinitely complex, all nature is read and reads through them. And the body bears feathers In its quiet. Its little soul sleeps, So small in its twigs. If it yawns, or belches, There is a city in there,

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With its lights on.

They are metempsychotic. But they are just flesh as well, and in this as insignificant as human remains. A rich and dazzling poem is “Kookaburra” – dead – beyond his “bitten body,” beyond “ribs like open rafters,” we have: “Stripped of what made him / He is only a fraction of his noise.” But despite the reduction, he is there after death. Another key to understanding the Hughes ‘darkness’. The human world invests its symbolisms to maintain order and connection – and twelve not at the table are twelve nonetheless. The fox that is both inspiring and obviously symbolic of heritage, the creative urge, and the terror of presence and memory, is also an intruder. A strangely beautiful intruder, of either gender. Communication between male and female, between child and parent, is very much at the core of this book. It is the fox that will come to the smell of human food – to the very creatures who most threaten its existence. And there’s the question of ‘belonging’ and exile again, of paternity and art. Of what remains the same, and what changes, becomes new and different. In “The Different Voice” we read: The fox chewed his thoughtful paw, gnawed At his own toes and knew his differences. When he opened his sharp mouth, long tongued And lined with hard white spires, his voice rose Like the howl of a ripped tree gasping for roots. This was not a fox noise. The others listened.

As a Western Australian, from the same physical setting as many of these poems, I feel a kinship with the tainted expositions of this rich and varied place. It’s a flawed paradise. And there is loss – the burning down of a studio, a place for creating – there is the operation that removes the fertility of the body, and there is the healing – the laying-on of the hand over the scar, the suture. And the ‘return’ to London, the uncertain step towards some kind of acceptance. A simple literal reading of this movement, all too easy, leaves the reader the poorer. At her best, Hughes is a deft technician who can shape a series of images and neatly come back on them. Some of the best poems finish with sharp couplets. Hughes has that knack. She does see outside the self. The position of the confessional voice in this poetry is quite deceptive – the ‘I’ can be both public and personal. Consider “The Reader” and note how she needs to out-

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flank the obvious. This is poetry come out of siege. At its best, it has wit and a rich and complex vision. Hughes is a good judge of the line and works the voices of ‘others’ well through her ‘own’. This is a ‘confessional’ poetry that doesn’t fall into the trap of poetry as mere therapy, but toys with the possibility. Wooroloo will lead to significant work. Hughes is finding her feet, not so much technically (most of these poems are assured) as in terms of what she can and can’t say, of what she’s allowed to claim as her own. It’s not a case of coming out of the shadow, but allowing that, once introduced, even the fox with its destructive potential has its place. It’s valuing and respecting what’s already there and also allowing for the new, the benefits of catharsis.

On the Poetry of Kate Lilley

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A T E L I L L E Y ( B O R N 1960) has managed to ‘hybridize’ her scholarly literary work with the creation of poetic texts in a unique manner. As a deeply informed ‘postmodern’ and ‘post-lyrical’ poet, she has naturally applied Renaissance texts and intertext to contemporary discourse around visual and ‘sound’ cultures, especially film, television, and popular music. Making use of a ‘zeitgeist’ language of the ‘here and now’, especially in terms of its synthesizing and presentation in conditions of artifice (e.g., film), and crossreferencing it with Renaissance texts, seventeenth-century poets and poetics (e.g., Milton), and nineteenth-century presentations of decorum, manners, and ‘femininity’, Lilley has been able to create a poetry and poetic that are original, dynamic, innovative, and decidedly feminist. Further, these poem-texts she is creating act both as essays on ideas and discourse, and as lyrical interludes that are poems-in-themselves. With a strong sense of linguistics, Lilley elevates the word in the poem into a Shklovskylike ‘strangeness’, which is generative as well as referential. In other words, her word-play creates questions about the nature of meaning and presents the reader with insights into the relationship between the word itself and the meanings we ascribe to it. In her essays and book chapters, Lilley has been exploring feminist poetics through the lens of a textual politics of reception: how a contemporary readership in a given cultural space receives notions of authority, truth, validity, and necessity. In a remarkable recent keynote address (the Dorothy Green Lecture, A S A L , 2010), “Rue des Archives,” Lilley asks the question, “What is the function of an ‘intimate archive’ in relation to a public, confessional

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oeuvre?”282 In the context of her own writing on the work of her eminent mother, the writer (poet, fictionalist, playwright) Dorothy Hewett,283 she considers the degrees of separation between the archival materials of a writer’s life and its reception by posterity/an audience (or visitor to a writer’s housemuseum), and also those who act as mediators between the deceased writer’s estate (and documents), and the reader /visitor. Lilley investigates her own role in the act of preservation, presentation, and indeed discovery, with scholarly rigour and creative flexibility, developing a body of work out of a lifeprocess, a systematic investigation, and a deep commitment to the exploratory yet generative act of creating poems Over the past five years, Kate Lilley has been working on a collection of poetry,284 a work of linguistic exploration and fine nuance, of an almost Elizabethan sensibility regarding love and erotics (as in Shakespeare’s sonnets and John Donne’s metaphysics), a sophisticated consideration of the slippage between desire and sexuality, investigating the complexities of mother–daughter relationship in contexts private and public, of the politics of gender, identity, and identification, and of an unusual personal biography unravelling (and ravelling!) into textuality. It is a collection of stunning wit and irony, wordplay, and syntactical reconfigurings, scholarly research and application, as well as complex emotional registers. Lilley’s first prize-winning full-length collection, Versary, is equally remarkable.285 What impresses me so much about Lilley’s poetic /poetry work is its deft ability to present a voice that seems to be in one register while operating on another. She can be writing about ‘popular culture’ and simultaneously be registering a deeply autobiographical moment. She can be writing about the functioning of language and also be writing about an object or event; she can be wickedly ironic and almost embracing. These factors are interwoven in a linguistically innovative way, with a richness of diction that might find its footing in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poets she has 282

Published online as “In the Hewett Archive,” J A S A L Special Issue: Archive Madness (August 2011): 10; http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/jasal/article /viewFile/2169/2637. 283 She is also the editor of Selected Poems of Dorothy Hewett (Crawley, W A : University of Western Australia Publishing, 2010). 284 Kate Lilley, Ladylike (Crawley, W A : University of Western Australia Publishing, 2012). 285 Kate Lilley, Versary (Cambridge: Salt, 2002).

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written on or admired, or equally from her familiarity with European modernist poets, or L A N G U A G E and post-L A N G U A G E innovations in the U S A . Kate Lilley has successfully fused rhetorical gesture with lyrical impulse. She segues between an investigation of ideas and the ‘matter-of-fact’, not making hierarchical distinctions, but allowing the poems’ language to explore the problem that such (aesthetic) hierarchies of distinction exist in the first place. Take these lines from the poem “It Follows”: Resentment starts to go backwards in search of a new hermeneutic the appointment slipped your mind that’s no excuse I’m the kind who’ll sit in the waiting room and watch the second hand for as long as it takes it’s something I’m proud of I won’t leave just because it’s dark outside and the street is slick with tears it’s impolite to tell you what you know already

The immediacy is counterpointed by a series of cascading emotional and conceptual issues, but it remains fixed to the apparent ordinariness, even banality, of the moment. The distinction in Kate Lilley’s work between the ‘real’ and the ‘decorative’ is blurred, and, in an almost surreal manner, different ways of exploring an idea or issue coexist comfortably. The point is that the verse always flows – its movement compelling the reader to make elisions s /he normally would not. Strongly informed by gender and a politics of embodiment, the poems become meeting-points for aphorism and physical memory. It is uncompromising, deeply textual work that deserves reading and frequent re-reading. —2011

Seeing the Light: Redemptive Language286

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Even the most formally and politically conservative ‘Australian’ poets are writing out of conditions which differentiate it from geographical, cultural or geo-political catch-alls. As much as the Andrew Bolts of the country would like to see Australia as part of ‘Western culture’, it isn’t, and never has been. On the one hand, it is a ‘settler’ and ‘migrant’ nation; on the other, the home of many In286

USTRALIAN POETRY IS BY NECESSITY INNOVATIVE.

“Abhorring the vacuum,” The Australian (14 July 2012). Review of Kate Fagan, First Light (London & Sydney: Giramondo, 2012), and Aidan Coleman, Asymmetry (Blackheath, N S W : Brandl & Schlesinger, 2012).

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digenous peoples with their own languages and ways of articulating their relationships to country. The pluralism of human habitation on the continent doesn’t come with colonization, but was long a condition of being there. Poetry as a mean of interpreting the self’s place in a greater world, of voicing those difficult links that hold thought to body, body to community, community to world, in whatever configuration, has to keep adapting and altering to cope with shifts in the nature of these relationships. Even the most ritualized song or poetry is affected by the conditions under which it is used. A world changing under the pressure of rapid climate change and rapacious land-(ab)use determines the language of poetry in so many ways. However, it’s not often the case with Australian poetry criticism, which, on the whole, I find quite conservative. There are quite a few stunning exceptions to this, but I am talking more generally. We seem to be (re-)entering a period in which many critically desire above all else the over-workshopped poem that exemplifies a seemingly sound relationship between form and function. The poem that escapes the gravity of poetic propriety measured by tradition, and a sense that poetry is above all else ‘art’, is seen as ill-formed and uninformed. The fact that whole different poetics function on different levels with different purposes is either ignored or not understood. The arbiters of good taste will control you, no matter what. In the newest or newish generation of Australian innovators who stand out for their willingness to be considered innovative (rather than as a natural default due to location and ecology of writing), we find a poet such as Kate Fagan, whose First Light is a bold and beautifully poised volume that manages to meet all the formal gravitational requirements while being so much more. Fagan’s volume is remarkable for preserving the space of the poet’s subjectivity – in other words, a place where the poet can be herself – while engaging with a broader community of language and landscape. Birds, light, darkness, music, objects standing for each other, tensions and exchanges between nature and art – all work through their contradictions and dis /connections: “Let me scale the bromine hills, / iPhone in hand.” This might happen in Australian locales, and there are many up-close connecting moments in the book that do this; or it might be a broader space of idea and conversation, where the self of the poems becomes one with the many other voices who speak through any poem. When we think of Aristotle’s ‘Nature abhors a vacuum’, we might also think that poetry recoils from void.

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Fagan is generous and communal in her intensely poignant and scaffolded poems. She connects with other structures concretely and figuratively. She is a deeply political poet with a concern for the intactness of things, for the rights of existing, and yet she is also architecturally aware of the need for a building to have all its parts working to stay upright. Her poems are all embodiments and challenges to Platonic forms. In the superb “Concrete Poem,” she enfolds us in the irony of our own conditions of behaviour and ‘belief’. All has consequences, all is connected: The violence in repetition in repeating The repetition of ritual

First Light is a book of contact. In the section of the book titled “The Correspondence,” with its play on Baudelaire’s idea of correspondences, letter poems function as places where nature and metaphysics converse: Concepts spark and crack where vision pauses. What is the use of poets in a bereft time?

In her notes at the back of the volume, Fagan says: “The Correspondence was written in response to ten pieces of music by the Australian composer Luke Plumb.” And we see that the self-communes with the idea of creativity as much as with the specific qualities of the music that inspired the poems. The letters are to the music, the composer, language, all that is evoked in these considerations, and to the self: And so I commit myself to the first arrival of spring, bold as the icicles that break ahead of me.

In many ways, it’s the cento poems in First Light that epitomize Fagan’s poetic and her desire not to own and not to be owned. Even the love poem in Fagan’s hands is not about ownership. Centos are an ancient ‘sampling’ form that have been practised by many poets (including by Fagan’s partner, Peter Minter). The building of a new text from other poets’ work is both an act of homage and also, sometimes, a critique of the originals. Fagan’s centos are warm, brilliant, and dynamic. They give their sources life over again and show the essentially communal nature of poetry, and of language itself. The irony is that these poems are as fresh and vital as any ‘original’ could be.

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They are never anything but new and paradoxically intact poems in themselves. A review cannot do justice to the range of Fagan’s poetry in First Light, from the pithy, sharp, and parodically aphoristic lines in “The Octet Rule” to the controlled familiarity in poems dedicated to friends and family. Fagan’s work has the qualities of visual and plastic arts, and of a superbly balanced musical structure. As one of Australia’s finest composers in the folk-music tradition, Fagan knows how to make words ‘sound’. But for all their familiarity, Fagan’s words can be razor-sharp and deadly (“Authenticity / comes at a price it seems”). But in the end, it’s the redemptive power of language itself that gives Fagan’s book its wonder and affirmation. A prayer book for a secular world. Aidan Coleman’s Asymmetry is not, it would seem on the surface, an overtly ‘experimental’ work. But it is, at least in the first two-thirds, which deal with serious illness and recovery. The last section of the book is made up of gentle love lyrics dedicated to the person who clearly stood by him during this illness. They are poems of affirmation and heartfelt thanks, but are possibly too languid and faint for an airing outside the environment of their creation, and, I’d insist, necessity. But the first two-thirds of the book are innovative and essential outside the ‘self’ in so many ways. They share some things with Michael Dransfield’s much under-rated daily poems, thin down the page, in The Second Month of Spring, but are really their own, desperately creating space for re-emergence into language and being. In the depth of illness the poems are thin and sparse, but grow as language ‘returns’. The understandably cynical and desperate isolation of loss of speech and functionality in hospital, tended by the machine of the medical, is drawn with deadly impact. The ‘he’ has been “manhandled” and the frustration between desire and ability stated over and over: With my left hand I pick up the paper, bully it flat.

The body, so damaged, is under physical assault in its “healing.” But with language, we have the hope of redemption: “I wake to legs, / to a message getting through.” He craves the ordinariness of the healthy: as I sit and watch Leana sip coffee and this is nearly enough

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It is fascinating to note the use of words like “beaming,” “telepathy,” “superstition,” and “pray” being deployed in the search for language. By the time we reach the poem “To Play,” the figurative is taking over from the ‘facts’, and the poems are becoming linguistically more expansive. It’s like a mapping of the way poetic language forms, adapts, and makes itself necessary. Then outside, in the world, the language becomes sensual and visceral: “The scrunch / of gravel, distracts, places me – here.” Maybe the problem with criticism of innovation in poetry is that many critics deny what is innovative or reject what they see as major departures from the familiar. Poetry is these factors, and much more besides. I look forward to more possibilities, more challenges to what makes poetry.

Peaty Richness287

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I G R Y A N ’ S I S A U N I Q U E V O I C E in Australian poetry. It is one steeped in the perceived impressions of a street counter-culture, but one that in fact directly reflects a larger consciousness. Ryan’s influences are probably far more conservative than the casual reader would (like to) think. Homer, Virgil, and Keats come to mind, though this is not blatantly so (allowing for give-aways like “On first looking into Fairfax’s Herald,” “Penelope,” and “Achilleus”). The verse structure itself is a hybrid, a paring back of sound as direct inflection of tone. With her darkly rich ironic flair for observation, Ryan undercuts, outplays, is both restive and dramatic. She allows a line to run for its own sake, but will cut it dead without warning. It is Ryan’s variation, or modulation, of line-length that most intrigues me. When she ends a line it is usually with a wallop (a word that sound-wise would fit quite comfortably into the Ryan vocabulary), even when the narrative demands continuity. These are poems of the page which I imagine could be performed extremely effectively. The sharp, even vicious rhythms speak from the throat rather than the chest – the breath is not so much driven by the diaphragm as dragged across the vocal chords into a bitter atmosphere:

Sorrow’s old classic taste washes out of my mouth The rain spiders lurch in the window’s black strip I tame my neck with drugs 287

Westerly 49.2 (Winter 1992): 84–85. Review of Gig Ryan, Excavation (Sydney: Picador, 1990).

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Phoney extroversion brought him home but now coming down, like a saint his sharp Lucretian body jerks up the stairs Love’s pillage (“Love’s Pillage”)

Or, take the poem “Wind,” with its comparative breakdown of artificial constructs in rhythmic patterning. Throughout the collection there is a lifting of myth ex-voto – extremus: a vow to the necessity of the collective spirit, almost extemporaneously. In the lustful intensity of suburban angst these dedications are tossed off but with an acute dedication to structure: the irony of what is said, how it is said, and why it is said. These poems are blunt, to the point, but, on the surface, allusive in methodology. Take the brilliant “Penelope”: I’m law if this is waiting I watch the videos of dead the wraiths of love I limit like car-sickness Being eulogized, they slide into the horizon like a coin The world get out of it and goes to bed.

There is something of Ai’s portraiture in Ryan, even if it’s verbally tinged with the peaty richness of a Basil Bunting. We have “Napoleon,” the character in “Method,” in “R I P ,” “Achilleus,” and numerous others. The poem “His new voice” gives an impression that’s something like trying to visualize Hunter S. Thompson coming to grips with his chauvinism. As with the circles in Dante’s Vision of Hell and Purgatory (there is very little Heaven), we move at a constantly changing pace as we recognize figures, lose others to the mist. Ryan constantly deals with notions of role-play, the power-struggles of lust, love’s acquiescence to the territorial status quo (despite subcultural twists): She counts her ex-husbands who gorge themselves on sorrow I kiss his face’s fad goodnight You should’ve let me drive your Yank Tank’s myriad of dents and panels

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but instead you give me care and in my head his kit reforms to pack death in choppy bed and squall. (“Tripping Out”) Sunday’s bad. Why do you bother in love with his cool black cadillac but not his tiffs he chuffs out his smooth tinny whispery gossip His turn table low-key body (“Too Bad”)

Here, one is reminded of John Forbes’s maxim from a 1974 review of Geoffrey Lehmann in New Poetry: One of the reasons poetry gets written is the allusiveness of words like ‘love’ or ‘beauty’; words used incessantly but almost indefinable. For if you can’t live content with the newspaper meanings of such words, you have to redefine them in terms of specific relations or places.

Gig Ryan’s irony is often self-deflating. To mock is often the best form of avoiding the devastation of exposure. Desire is dangerous but impressive and irresistible: I mean, we both want boys I look in the gutter but I got stained My breasts get heavy with desire (“Excavation Excavation”)

and, more abruptly, Sure, he comes round and does his heavy-breathing stuff, his dumb desires articulate his lot swivels on his finger and behind his trivial accounts, her reproachful angel gags her wet cloths and puts up with it. (“Stint”)

This poetry, rarely subtle, consumes you. Lines like these from the poem “1965” remain with you a long time after closing the book. The blocked rivers trailing like glaciers The army’s fear like a slow-worm eating away at my parents, my sisters, my brothers.

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Driving and Binding288

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C L E C T I C I S M I S T H E H A L L M A R K of Fay Zwicky’s collection Ask Me, though there is no dilution of impact as the poet effectively fuses myth, song, wit, rhetoric, colloquial speech patterns, and sublime image-making. Ask Me could almost be described as a distillation of Zwicky’s two earlier collections Isaac Babel’s Fiddle and Kaddish, complemented by a new-found zest for synthesizing language and subject, best characterized by the elegies (which are quite different in tone from the landmark poem “Kaddish”), and poems such as “Home Care” and “Reading” in which, while retaining distance, she approaches an almost comfortable warmth that balances the austerity of her wit:

“D’you read at all?” I ask who never did much else. “I’ve never read a book, but I was fit.” “I’ll bet you were,” I say, thinking of pitiless Dampier sand and sun that saps the blood from a green country man, loading his breath with dust.

The idea of a continuum in voice, myth, and reality, is explored in the opening sequence, “China Poems 1988.” Take the comparisons between the idealized “Peking” and the actual “Beijing” in “Out of this World”: I’m in Beijing. When I was young it was Peking. Fans and silk and lacquered screens, sages playing chess in elegant pavilions on the Flowery Mountain... It’s minus 4. The heating system thumped all night, the cistern trickled. At school we called it Chinese Torture, gave each other Chinese Burns.

The difference is as profound as that of the languages of Li Po and Wang Wei to that of the tanks that rumbled into Tiananmen Square. In “Tiananmen Square June 4, 1989,” putting aside her position relative to the collective 288

Westerly 48.3 (September 1991): 124–25. Review of Fay Zwicky, Ask Me (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1990).

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nature of a myth and history that is alien to her, and focusing on the stark universal reality of death, the poet says ironically: I’m thinking of my middle-class German grandmother soft as a pigeon, who wept when Chamberlain declared a war, Why are you crying, grandma? It’s only the big bad wolf, my dear, It’s only a story.

The position of the woman poet in the patriarchy of language and, by extension, history and culture is a constant theme. – that, in spite of the ‘maleness’ of traditional poetic forms, Zwicky sees the poetic voice as ostensibly feminine…. Language becomes a liberator, in every sense.289 In the sequence “The Temple, Somnapurna,” the sexuality of the creation myth is examined. The cycle or “wheel of existence” of Ganesh is conveyed through overt sexual imagery involving “shafts,” “trunks,” Ganesh having his head “docked,” and so on. This is balanced by the decidedly feminine rhythms of the poem and the feminizing of Ganesh through lines such as “his lotus face smiles down.” The resulting sexual ambiguity enables the maintenance of the “wheel.” As stated, Even gods may be ambiguous, hate their wives, their children. His hands fold slyly in prayer, lips part like shells to whispering waves of stone – Women kneel in pious shadows tracing sinuous whorls of coloured flour, wisped by incense.

In the brilliant sequence “A Tale of the Great Smokies,” the concept of the creation cycle of “wheel,” the spinning of life and death ad infinitum, is also 289

John Kirby’s article “Finding a Voice in ‘this fiercely fathered and unmothered world’: The Poetry of Fay Zwicky,” in Poetry and Gender: Statements and Essays in Australian Women’s Poetry and Poetics, ed. David Brooks & Brenda Walker (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1989): 175–93, proves an interesting starting point for an examination of these issues in Zwicky’s work.

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explored. There is a sympathy with the subject which radiates throughout the image-making, that is reflected in the richness of the colloquial rhythms, that makes this a truly inspired work. Although not American, Zwicky has managed to capture regional traits and internationalize them much in the same way as a poet such as Turkey’s Necati Cumali does in his poem “At The Inquest.” Based on the myth of Odysseus and Penelope, the sequence follows the “thread” spun by Penelope on the wheel made by Otis. The lines “Somewhere beyond all this drift / the stars are reckoning us up” form the signature for the tapestry of Otis’s physical journey and that of Penelope’s inner being as she is left to manage her life in the Great Smokies during his absence. The richness of the sexual imagery, the cloistering, awakening, and self-constraint of Penelope, the interplay of environment and human emotion, forms a breathtaking vision to add to the backdrop of mountain scenery. Primarily, these are poems about liberation and restraint. The wheel drives and binds. It absorbs words, sequests language to breath: Tread air, tread light silent as dust riding darkness. Treadle and turn, black bobbin fat in my fingers. Soft as moth's breath, threads slip through tides of my handling, wordless to wait on his coming, fixed in my longing for speech. Compost black currant fodder horse urine hickory smoke Breath lives, wavers within. Far below, wide over valley burn farmlights through fog. Dusty signals from neighbouring hearths. (“Penelope Spins”)

There are numerous other poems that could be lifted from the three sections that make up this book to illustrate the skill and breadth of vision of this poet. Worthy of special attention are “Four Poems from America” for their

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wonderful use of sound, “Broadway Vision,” “The Pretty Young Wife,” and the elegies “In Memory, Vincent Buckley 1925–1988” and “For Jim 1947– 1986.” Zwicky’s powers lift poetry out of death with sensitivity and majesty: Darkness. The brief and infinitely graceful dance of body, fluid arc of upraised arms, the dance in air, in empty spaces, the rush to bite down, all, all in beauty. Remember, he said. Remember. Black child, I will. I do.

Back in Black290

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F E E L T H A T B A C K I N B L A C K has the best opening of any rock album. The tolling bell, the sense of mourning mixed with threat, the slow guitar picking out an ominous death march with the heartbeat drum behind it that builds to an address by what may be the Devil declaring that he’s coming to take you, the listener, to Hell. It’s “Hell’s Bells” we hear. It’s both a warning and an invitation. And those factors were always at the core of A C / D C . The first time I heard Back in Black was memorable. Picture coastal rural Western Australia, hundreds of miles from the major centre of population (Perth), and four or five panel vans with their backs open, so-called chicks in skin-tight jeans posing to their advantage and their ‘Rock’ boyfriends (‘Rocks’ were a ‘working-class’ gang of the time) in black tee-shirts, black jeans, and ripple-soled desert boots (or ‘D B s’), swigging from ‘long-neck’ beer and Jack Daniels bottles, rocking out to the new A C / D C album beside the Chapman River. They were passing bongs around, and probably hyped on speed as well. My brother and I, and a mate, stumble across the scene, attracted by the hard-driving music, finding ourselves suddenly the centre of atten-

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“Devilishly loud and a little bit dangerous,” The Australian (26 July 2010): 17. A tribute on the thirtieth anniversary of A C / D C ’s 1980 Back in Black album, this is an extended version of a piece that originally appeared on the B B C World Service programme The Strand.

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tion, until we too start head-banging to the title song, “Back in Black,” and consequently live to tell the tale. It was wild colonial convict music. Even though the new lead singer Brian Johnson hadn’t been transported, he seemed to have the necessary tough credentials. And those ‘Rock’ guys around us beside the river – many of them would likely end up in prison, and they knew it. But they’d always be back. Resurrected. Bon Scotts become Brian Johnsons. I was seventeen and had been listening to A C / D C since they first appeared on the Australian television rock and pop show Countdown. To understand what A C / D C meant to Australian kids of that era, especially if you were working-class or, as I did, went to a working-class school and lived just outside a State Housing Commission suburb, you had to appreciate the threat their music presented to adults, and to the middle class. Kids who were into A C / D C then were really considered a threat to society. Pumped up on their music, they might become violent at any time. So the myth of the suburbs went. Maybe you had to be there. The band’s appearances on Countdown, with then lead singer Bon Scott snarling his often aggressive and seductive poetry into the camera, did nothing to alleviate middleclass discomfort. My musical life went from the sublime to the ridiculous — without making any judgments about which pole is which. Mum taught classical piano and I listened to Beethoven and Bach at home. Down the road I listened, with the Williams twins, to “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap,” to a solid no-frills rock and roll that said it as it was on the streets, or at least as we imagined the streets. Back then, gangs were on the rise in the neighbourhood. ‘Rocks’ and ‘Surfs’ fought pitched battles in parks; then skinheads appeared on the scene, prompting rhymes such as: Oh what joy oh what fun We had the skinheads on the run But the fun didn’t last Because the bastards ran too fast.

That’s when I was living in the city. We moved to the country, and I was in Geraldton when the last Bon Scott– A C / D C album came out, the menacing and death-affirming Highway to Hell (1979). Not long after this, Scott choked on his own vomit, paralytic-drunk in a car in London. It seemed A C / D C were finished. But then they rose again. Although it’s not overtly stated, when we heard that an album entitled Back in

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Black was coming out, we assumed it was an elegy to Scott. I’d been writing poetry for years, and for me Wordsworth and Scott went hand-in-hand. We were most sceptical about someone replacing Bon Scott as both frontman and lyricist. Later, we’d hear how Scott had heard Brian Johnson singing for the Newcastle upon Tyne band Geordie and had given him the stamp of approval as a powerful lead singer. But that was never enough for fans. Yet Johnson didn’t alter A C / D C . He added to it, and Back in Black became all that Bon Scott had been and more. Angus and Malcolm Young had always been the force behind the band. Along with Cliff Williams’s measured bass, and Phil Rudd’s reliable and responsive drumming, they elevated the band above yet another rhythm and blues-cum-rock and roll rip-off. Angus Young makes remarkable use of an intentionally ‘limited range’ on his guitar, using that range to full and even groundbreaking extent. I’ve often thought of him as the Corelli of modern rock guitarists, but with the demonic urgency of a Paganini. This is nowhere more evident than on Back in Black, with its precise, economic, and yet scintillating lead breaks. It’s an album of power, asserting class values and the right of music to invigorate attitudes some might not find so palatable. It’s sexist and it’s selfish, but it’s also ironic and piss-taking. We see how music shifts meaning according to the values an audience brings to listening (and experiencing): many of the girls I knew at school felt threatened by boys who listened to Back in Black, and yet those same girls, years later, often with university degrees and good incomes, are singing “You Shook Me All Night Long” as an anthem to love and desire, a rollicking sex ride. The grand irony is that as feminism has given women more social rights and confidence, the ability to claim a song celebrating female sexual prowess and attraction has, hopefully, gone hand-in-hand with rights in the bedroom. The Brian Johnson take on women ranges from the cynical “What Do You Do For Money Honey” to the male-affirming “Let Me Put My Love Into You.” But time has taken this album as much into women’s hands as men’s. Women are not the victims some early male listeners may have wanted. Back in Black is about their power and strength; this has become clearer over the years. I’ve always admired those with strong convictions, even where I profoundly disagree with them. The last song on Back in Black, “Rock and Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution,” is one of the in-your-face declarations I so admire in rock music. A C / D C ’s suggestion that aesthetics are a relative thing, that

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beauty is in the eye of the beholder, reaches right back to the refusal to be held down (as in 1976’s “Jailbreak”). Clichés of female beauty in the world of macho values can be challenged, as in “Whole Lotta Rosie” from their 1977 album Let Their Be Rock, which was, indeed, one of the songs with which Brian Johnson auditioned for A C / D C . By way of affirmation of the title song, I haven’t worn anything but black since 1996.

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Theatre Reviews Equus ¸ by Peter Shaffer ¸ directed by Melissa Cantwell ¸ Perth Theatre Company ¸ His Majesty’s Theatre, Perth ¸ 12–26 September 2009291

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as one of the great plays of modern English-language theatre, Peter’s Shaffer’s Equus is more limited in scope than many critics have claimed. I do not say this on the basis of its thematic breadth. This ranges from a charged interrogation of religion’s failure to transform the mundane realities of consumer life into a field of hope for deliverance, through a crisis of viscerality in terms of deliverance from evil and the embodiment of human values in the Gods of ancient Greece and their all-too-human dramas; the overlaying of ‘paganism’ by Christianity and the forces this unleashes, to a departure on Freudian therapy, and ultimately a quest for a physical God that answers the sexual urge as much as the effete elevation of the spirit. Rather, I feel Shaffer’s play is, among other things, limited in its use of horse as symbol – though the shallow human exploitation of animals is critiqued, he seems to want to replace that with what are merely other human priorities, ultimately revealed as another set of human spiritual values. Although the play accords dignity to the mentally ill who ‘are themselves’, it is not extended in a full sense to the animals themselves. The centaur image and the becoming-one of human and horse which so centres the drama early in the play, is so brutally rejoindered in the stableboy’s, the seventeen-yearold Alan Strang’s, spiking out the horses’ eyes that the question of the animals’ dignity is more than a cursory consideration. The play is driven by duality of self, (Lacanian?) reflections of the self, pertinent to this production with its use of glass and the constant play of reflections in tune with the chorus of dancers working ‘behind stage’, and Freudian sexual tropes. If the play is about the trauma of sexual repression and a fear of the fact of parental sexuality, it nonetheless doesn’t really judge the parents for the mental illness of their son. The intensity of Vivienne Garrett’s delivery of Strang’s mother’s speech in her own defence testifies to this. A father as atheist and an ex-teacher mother with borderline religious zeal are overlaid with early trauma of loss inflicted on Strang as a small child when he is pulled off a horse ridden on a beach without parents’ permission. The

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“Animal passions and unstable lives,” The Australian (21 September 2009): 16.

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potency of sight compels the play not only in terms of vision and blindness, but also in gendering behaviours. In the conflicted struggle with father-hero figures, Alan Strang is entangled in a crisis of ‘custody of the eyes’, that most medieval notion, which ranges from westerns on television (forbidden at home) to the rites of the ancient Gods. The Perth Theatre Company’s current production is one of those cases where the directing – by Melissa Cantwell – and production of the play are better than the play itself, even if that sounds unorthodox to Shaffer’s many admirers. This seriously intelligent interpretation is one out of the box. Or one in the box – a glass box, to be precise. Reflective surfaces, deep focus, and depth of field come to mind – one even gets a bird’s-eye view of Strang in his hospital bed. The stage has not only a literal but almost a filmic depth as well. It’s what film tries to achieve but perhaps never really can. Scope for portrayal of the horses in Equus gives room to manoeuvre, and interpretations have been many and varied. Gavin Webber’s magnificent choreography and the dancers’ flexibility, muscularity, and sheer litheness bring into play not only an active realm of metaphor and symbol but also a real physicality. They are horses. Equus is essentially about the epiphanic journey of Dr Martin Dysart, a psychiatrist who is convinced by a magistrate, Hesther Salomon (played efficiently by Jodie Buzza), to treat Alan Strang after he has blinded horses in the stables he works in at weekends. As Dysart, one of the actor William McInnes’s major achievements, unravels the narrative lines and bridges the unconscious to conscious self; releasing repressions, he begins to confront his own sexual lack, his own need for passion inflected by a fascination with ancient Greek gods and artefacts. In a sense, he becomes the vehicle for a crisis of British imperialism, its reliance on borrowed myths. He starts to live through Strang’s therapy. McInnes is controlling, humorous, bitter, angry, and savage. He moves across the full stage in what could have been a static and largely verbal role, instead giving it great presence. McInnes’s powerful voice is a major factor here. Strang has the action, and Khan Chittenden has moments where he fills the stage in ‘sensurround’ playing him, but it is McInnes who fills the theatre. Nevertheless, in Chittenden’s approach to the role, there is a range from sarcasm to vulnerability, sensitivity to brutality, that lifts the work out of what could be the confines of male fixations. The entire cast works as a unit, and there is a sense of strong bonds between all. This really is a production where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, but its parts are damned good.

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The Sapphires ¸ by Tony Briggs ¸ Black Swan State Theatre Company and Company B Belvoir ¸ The Playhouse, Perth ¸ 28 January–10 February 2010292

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of the musical The Sapphires is the huge talent of the four lead women singers, Christine Anu, Casey Donovan, Hollie Andrew, and Kylie Farmer. Each has a remarkable voice in her own right, and they work extremely well as a group. In this otherwise bland and poorly scripted play, their presence makes the music more than just the songs. Following the experiences of four Koori sisters, from the Tiki Club talent show in Australia through to touring wartime Vietnam with their ‘slick’, error-prone manager, The Sapphires is intended to be “fun, theatrically entertaining and something that people of all ages and cultural persuasions could sing, laugh and shake their mooms to,” according to the playwright Tony Briggs. And there is no doubt that the audience response was greatly positive, with a standing ovation that had them moving in the aisles. However, this piece of musical theatre – really a series of vignettes linked by Motown and other musical numbers – lacks both dramatic tension and comic impetus. The direction, by Wesley Enoch, was often static, with little sense of genuine movement in action and dialogue, and no sense of place. Vietnam was like a cartoon cut-out; the view of the war and the sufferings of the Vietnamese, as represented by the teenage “Joe” (Aljin Abella), who follows the Sapphires around, was stereotypical at best, whatever the actor’s efforts to deal with the part. The actors seemed to struggle to elevate the script; constant shouting stood in for true character development and familial tension. Nonetheless, Casey Donovan in her role as Cynthia introduced some comic flair and sensuality, and her solos were of overwhelming power. The humour was generally ineffective because the script lacked depth, but one line delivered by Donovan, referring to another sister’s “shameless” conduct after her own character had been constantly making sexual innuendo, hit the mark and showed that this play could have had more verve than it did. In attempting to deal with issues of Indigenous rights in the context of the 1967 referendum,293 and the strength of the four Koori women themselves, 292

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“Singers save the show,” The Australian (1 February 2010): 17. See http://www.naa.gov.au/collection/fact-sheets/fs150.aspx (accessed 9 February 2013). It took place on 27 May 1967; a ‘Yes’ vote led to the removal of a racist point in section 57 and the deletion of (the racist) section 127 from the Australian Constitution. [J.K.] 293

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Briggs allows a dissipation of his message by minimizing war’s horror and the Vietnamese people’s plight. He might argue that, given everything Aboriginal people have had to endure from colonial culture, it is possible to “find the humour in any situation,” but in this displaced context, it unfortunately conveys an insensitivity to the suffering caused by that war. Briggs does attempt to address these complexities, but at times his resolutions come across as glib one-liners. This play claims not to be political, but is all the more political for it. I feel the audience, in their celebration of the genuine musical splendour of this show (under Peter Farnan’s musical direction), should think carefully about what is lost when affirmation is at others’ expense. The politics of this piece are, in the end, conservative. It concedes too much to celebrating nation as white culture constructs it, when it could resist so much more. The Danger Age ¸ by Kate Mulvany ¸ directed by Sally Richardson ¸ The Deckchair Theatre, Fremantle ¸ 8 May–29 May 2010294

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D A N G E R A G E I S A W A R T I M E C O M E D Y with a few too many twists. Not so much twists in plot as in what kind of theatre it seeks to be. Ostensibly an absurdist comedy that binds ‘fact’ and the almost fantastical, it is set in World War Two Australia, considering how divisiveness and threat complement each other in defining the ‘heroism’ and ugliness of nation. In this play, a sickly ten-year-old named John Curtin (Gibson Nolte), living in Kalbarri, receives a phone call from the U S President, who thinks he is talking to the Prime Minister of Australia, instructing the boy as Prime Minister to abandon Australia north of the ‘Brisbane line’, which also cuts through Kalbarri and provides the conceit for the play, and to defend only the south of the country. The use the boy makes of this information, and the absurdities of both war and prejudice, are configured against issues of growing up. The boy divides the town with a north–south line, and the town-cum-Australia’s bigotries are played out between the protected south and the abandoned north. The ‘Danger Age’ of the title refers to both the traumas of war and the dangers of being ten in any circumstances. The play shows genuine concern for injustice towards Indigenous Australians projected through the character

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“Twisted wartime comedy caught between genres and a sock-puppet,” The Australian (13 May 2010): 17.

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of ‘Albert’ (Irma Woods), a Bardi girl at risk of being taken by authorities from her mother, who is both John Curtin’s friend and his touchstone for a harsh reality. The work also examines the deep perversions and ironies of racial hatred, and the presumption of what constitutes the enemy, in the community’s treatment of the Japanese doctor Dr Matsudaira (Anthony Brandon Wong) for who he both is and isn’t, and also for his relationship with young John’s mother, the ‘loose’ single parent, Maisie Curtin (Samantha Murray). But the ultimate problem of the script is the separation of the comedy from the ‘messages’. Often resorting to cheap sexual innuendo and panto-exaggeration to enhance the laughs, the play frequently seemed confused and lacking in subtlety, and the ‘line’ between nostalgia and horror is not considered carefully enough. The Keystone town-cop routine also wore thin, despite the very real points regarding oppression and authority behind the slapstick. Wrestling with shifts in genre and tone may be fine, but here these often seemed gratuitous and clunky. The use of Trevor the sock-puppet became tedious and too much like a mere comic device. The cast worked hard with the material, but, though often hitting the mark, the script’s frequent weaknesses let them down. Adult actors playing children brought little of the irony you’d expect to the roles, though all engaged with gusto. Direction was satisfactory, but slapstick reigned when it should have played second or third fiddle. The Shape of Things ¸ by Neil LaBute ¸ directed by Adam Mitchell ¸ Black Swan Theatre Company’s The Hotbed Ensemble ¸ Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts ¸ 14–30 May 2010295

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as a liberal arts college professor in small-town midwest America, I was looking forward to this play set somewhere similar, looking at the tensions between students working out their relationships to each other, and how these fit with their studies. Evelyn (Melanie Munt) and Adam (Tim Solly) play out their primeval bonding ritual in the not-so-Edenic world of knowing everyone’s business. Evelyn lures the staid and reserved Adam to taste forbidden fruit. But she is an art student! Here the bells should ring.

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“Facile approach to a body of work,” The Australian (27 May 2010): 15.

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They certainly rang for me as I watched her ‘change’ him, claiming that Adam was changing himself. Ah, I thought, she is making him her project. Risking a spoiler, I will say that when it comes to art-project presentation time, she tells all. Although we quickly learn the irony of any claim for art as truth, the only truth that remains is in the bedroom whispers between Evelyn and Adam, kept from the audience, in a scene she videos – actually for posterity, though he doesn’t know that. Evelyn encourages Adam to have a nose-job. Adam believes this is a love affair when in fact Evelyn is using him for her own ends, coaxing him to improve himself – getting fit, wearing trendy clothes, a new hairstyle. If you know anything about Stelarc or Orlan, you know about bodies being altered for ‘art’. So did most of my former college students – and I taught English. In small liberal-arts colleges, students mix, as Evelyn and Adam do with their counterpoints in Jenny (Adriane Daff) and Philip (Austin Castiglione). These characters were little more than points of contact for a dramatic tension that didn’t really take off. Despite the director Adam Mitchell’s claim that Neil LaBute, writer of The Shape of Things, “always offers the audience plenty of intrigue and a tasty moral or ethical dilemma for us to chew over,” this play has little intrigue and only a dated soapbox moral or ethical dilemma. This play is all about talking. Too much of it. The playwright should engage with more Pinter or Beckett and understand what silence can mean in theatre. Nonetheless, the verbiage allowed the talented cast to show their ability to build conversation to bursting point. Wrestling with an often facile and puerile script, they managed to extract moments of pathos and humour. The play has nothing remotely shocking or “startling,” despite what the advertising claimed. The idea that subjectivity in art and in relationships can’t necessarily be equated is nothing new. LaBute is hardly the first to critique the Tracey Emin-like treatment of life as merely material for art. In championing ‘literature’ over postmodern art, highlighting the dehumanizing aspects of aesthetics, the play seems stuck in a Warhol Factory moment without appreciating the ironies of repetition. However, this was a slick and well-staged production. The lighting, ‘moving image’, and set design were excellent, and the director was clearly better than the script he had to work with.

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The Clean House ¸ by Sarah Ruhl ¸ directed by Kate Cherry ¸ Black Swan Theatre Company and Queensland Theatre Company ¸ Playhouse Theatre, Perth ¸ 29 May–19 June 2010296

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A T T E N D E D M Y F I R S T P L A Y when I was five. It was the Tintookies marionettes at the Fremantle Town Hall. The fascination continues. I enjoy seeing theatre in all its forms, even poor theatre – the moment actors hit the stage, something transformative takes place. Theatre is more than just an aesthetic, and much more than just an entertainment to while away my hours until death. Tonight I reached the other end of the equation: the first play I have sat through that had absolutely nothing to offer. It was a performance of Sarah Ruhl’s inane, inept, and feeble-minded The Clean House at the Playhouse Theatre in Perth. Usually a bad script can be rescued by enthusiastic acting, interesting lighting or stage design, but in this case there was nothing. The lighting was boring, the acting pedestrian, and the set twee. This comedy, wistfully romantic, degenerated into a sentimental scenario of ‘feeling-good’ in the face of mortality, clearly designed to please middle-class urban Americans and, sadly, by extension, Australians. The Brazilian Matilde (Brooke Satchwell) works as a housemaid for the American doctor Lane (Sarah McNeill) and her surgeon husband Charles (Hugh Parker), frustrating Lane’s professionalism through her “sadness” at cleaning, and her preference for joking. Matilde’s quest for “the perfect joke” because of her deceased parents’ passion for humour (and the joke of their deaths!) works as a foil for the exploitation motif at the basis of North American wealth buying South American labour. That’s a motif worth critiquing, but this play does it lamely. Virginia (Carol Burns), Lane’s obsessively clean sister, works out her own demons by performing Matilde’s cleaning duties for her and challenging Lane’s space. Meanwhile, Charles is having an affair with his mastectomy patient, Ana. The issue of her cancer is dealt with in a trivializing manner. But I won’t waste any more time on the plot. This play, which might seem to offer so much to women, nonetheless portrays the professional woman Lane as cold and uptight. The irony the play tries to create in the exoticism of the South American women, Matilde and Ana (Vivienne Garrett), doesn’t

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“Waiting for a revolution that did not come,” The Australian (4 June 2010): 16.

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work, because the playwright is too ready to get cheap laughs out of it all. The ‘working class’, too, are dismissed with a crass joke. Gratuitous, like many of the ‘jokes’, the touches of ‘magical realism’ were an insult to the great Latin American magical realists. I had hopes for the play’s use of Portuguese and Spanish to contest the dominance of English, but although it attempted to satirize the clichés, it came off as little more than a stereotypical joke motif. The problem with this play is its self-satisfaction. It makes you want to get up and shout ‘¡Viva la Revolución!’ Honey Spot ¸ by Jack Davis ¸ directed by Kyle J. Morrison ¸ Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company, Yirra Yaakin Theatre Space, Murray Street, Perth ¸ 17 June–17 July 2010297

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of reconciliation from 1985, written by Jack Davis for younger and older audiences, was energetically staged by the Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company (Perth) under Kyle J. Morrison’s direction. Davis was able to treat serious themes without didacticism. In Honey Spot, a twelve-year-old Wadjela (‘whitefella’) girl and a thirteen-year-old Noongar boy find friendship and creative affirmation in W.A.’s south-west forests. The play is adept at touching on all potential issues of appropriation and disrespect without ever compromising the integrity of Noongar culture. Peggy (Katya Shevtsov), and Tim (Ian Wilkes) develop common expression through dance, combining European ballet moves with Noongar corroboree dance. They brought a liveliness and energy to their interaction that rippled through the audience. Lynette Narkle as Mrs Winalli, Tim’s mother, was a guiding light, while Peggy’s father, the forest ranger, forced to confront his own racism, was ably depicted by George Shevtsov. But the finest moments came with Phillip Walley–Stack’s turn as the resistant, confrontational William, Tim’s cousin, underscoring seriousness with humour and verve. Tristen Parr’s music, using cello played by Emma McCoy and didgeridoo mainly from Walley–Stack, skilfully ranged from subtle to bold. Dance, music, and drama merged with ease.

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Mutually Said blog (20 July 2010): online.

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Fluid scene-changing through the actors moving in and out of the circular performance area was especially effective. Keeping it simple was key. Davis’s plea for Wadjelas to engage in genuine listening conversation and respect for Noongar language and naming persists long after the show is over. Twelfth Night ¸ by William Shakespeare ¸ directed by Roger Hodgman ¸ Black Swan Theatre Company ¸ Playhouse Theatre, Perth ¸ 24 July–8 August 2010298

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B L O O M H A S O B S E R V E D : “The largest fault of every staging of Twelfth Night I’ve attended is that the pace is not fast enough. It ought to be played at the frenetic tempo that befits this company of zanies and antics.” I’d agree with this – too often, productions of Twelfth Night indulge Shakespeare’s luminous and startling language, letting the words hang in the air and the action hang behind. When the Clown says he is a corrupter of words, he is talking of language and sexuality, and the pun drives the entertainment and exercise of the intellect. We don’t want to dwell on this, we want it to compel us forward. The Black Swan Theatre Company’s new production, energetically directed by Roger Hodgman, who brings music theatre experience to the play’s relevant song moments with zest, certainly allows action and language to work hand-in-hand to drive the play on occasion to its comic heights. I felt assured that Twelfth Night’s tight plotting was going to shine through, the moment I entered the theatre and saw Christina Smith’s uncluttered, even bare set. I was less sure with Viola’s ambiguous dress as ‘Cesario’, sensing that the homoerotic potential of the play might be ignored. It wasn’t, but it could have been pushed further. Given that Viola is such a linchpin in this comedy of mistaken identities, Amanda Woodhams gave a reasonable performance. Likewise, most of the cast did what was required of them. However, the stand-out performances came from Steve Turner as the Clown, Feste, Luke Hewitt as Sir Toby Belch, Samantha Murray as Maria, Ingle Knight as Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and Geoff Kelso as Malvolio. Kelso’s hand gestures amplified as if to fill the stage. Some of the farcical scenes (Bloom observes that it is actually a play of no genre) were bravura performances – for instance, when Maria and her accomplices are plotting to dupe Malvolio into believing that the seductive if melancholic Olivia desires him.

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“All hail the Bard’s sublime slapstick,” The Australian (30 July 2010): 17.

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These scenes were quick, resonant, with a range of humours on display. How to make slapstick transformational. Or, in the Bloomian sense, sublime. The production’s finest touch came in a Beckettian ‘Endgame’ moment with Malvolio in a wheelie bin confronting the darkness and torment of imprisonment while mocked by the Clown in the guise of a priest. This scene was scintillating theatre, bringing a savage modernism to this timeless play as effectively as the easy ‘French Riviera’ feel of Alicia Clements’s costuming. It takes the play outside genre. A slight let-down was that the denouement did not resolve the chaos with quite the same festive spark that had existed elsewhere in the play. The Graduate ¸ Adapted by Terry Johnson from the novel by Charles Webb ¸ directed by Peter Lawrence ¸ His Majesty’s Theatre, Perth 30 August–12 September 2010299

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F W E A R E T O A C C E P T the New York Times view of the 1967 movie version of Charles Webb’s novel The Graduate as “one of the best seriocomic satires we’ve had from Hollywood since Preston Sturges was making them,” then we thoroughly immerse ourselves in middle-class America’s 1960s urge to dismantle its own social pretensions while fully enjoying them. The movie The Graduate has a certain amount of frenetic nihilism that Terry Johnson’s stage adaptation never approaches. Although there is mention of the protagonist Benjamin Braddock’s supposedly intellectual and social nihilism, nowhere does the play give us any real sense of that. Satire inevitably comes from inside a culture. Benjamin desires to reject the acquisitive and conservative values of his parents and their friends. But his crassness is in disturbing counterpoint to this desire. Lured into an affair with the alcoholic ‘Mrs Robinson’, wife of his father’s close friend, Benjamin both undermines the status quo of the society he deplores and exploits its pleasures. This is the rub: socially, the play indulges what it satirizes and we are expected to laugh with this indulgence. We can laugh at ‘ourselves’ but identify with Benjamin’s quandary. For this stage production to work as anything more than farce, Benjamin must embody the conflicting values he articulates. Rider Strong’s Benjamin only gets this in part. It’s a perfectly competent exhibition, but one is not convinced there’s anything existentially divided or in crisis about the young man.

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“Star turn saves a play showing its age,” The Australian (30 August 2010): 16.

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Jerry Hall’s Mrs Robinson is wry, sarcastic, and suitably drained of all empathy and compassion for a world that has left her lonely and bitter. Almost. Despite her vengeful anger at Benjamin for falling in love with her daughter Elaine, Mrs Robinson tells a few home truths, overheard by her daughter, that facilitate the young couple’s rebellion. If there’s a reprieve in the play’s misogyny, it’s in this harsh ‘stimulant’ to youthful idealism. Jerry Hall captures this transition perfectly. In many ways this production is her vehicle. Kate Jenkinson as Elaine mirrored Hall as her mother in subtle ways – as her contrary, but also in habits, as in her unconscious bedroom behaviour, showing that the good and the bad aren’t so easy to separate. Luke Hewitt played a strong Mr Robinson, while the other cast members did serviceable jobs in roles that demanded little of them, despite Peter Lawrence’s capable direction. It is a slick production. The set’s louvred wall ‘rooms’ are adaptable and functional, if a little drab, but this is redeemed by generally smart use of the stage with creatively nuanced lighting. Great theatre never dates, but The Graduate is showing its age. Still, this was a show, more than a ‘comedy-drama’ to test our souls and minds, and as a show it succeeds. The Removalists ¸ by David Williamson ¸ directed by Melissa Cantwell ¸ Perth Theatre Company ¸ The Playhouse, Perth ¸ 27 August–11 September, 2010300

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O E S A P L A Y written as a black comedy always remain a black comedy? In the case of David Williamson’s landmark 1971 play, The Removalists, I would say not. It’s too easy to say it has ‘dated’. We can’t disregard the fact that violence is a product of the conditions under which we live. All the same, re-staging it presents the audience with issues of cultural awareness that possibly diminish the play’s defiant messages against corruption of authority and power. As a critique of patriarchy and its abuses, The Removalists’ ‘humour’ was always bound to audience guilt at complicity. Has anything changed in Australian society that makes this message less comprehensible, more distant?

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“Williamson’s classic gets trapped in a 70s time warp,” The Australian (6 September 2010): 17.

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Sadly, probably not. It would be a pity for the audience to see the play as more historical curio than deep insight into traumatic abuse of power. Thus, The Removalists’ message should still be relevant. Yet it doesn’t quite suggest solutions to its observations. In 1971 those observations might have worked to bring change. They now seem like a time-warp, if the next stage of tackling such abuse isn’t dealt with. The Perth Theatre Company’s production has successful moments, but doesn’t re-invent the play enough to move it forward. The director Melissa Cantwell says: “The Removalists for me has always sat outside the realms of naturalism, just.” Perhaps that ‘just’ is the problem. The play needs to be pushed into the world of artifice, maybe into a Brechtian estrangement, for us to appreciate the universality of its message. Cantwell notes that she hasn’t updated the work, retaining its ‘politically incorrect’ text, for its humour’s sake. Neither should she, but she could have allowed the language more symbolic play. This production was so literal. Even the set for the Carters’ home, with its rounded laminate edges, like a sealed cabinet, was just too realist for me. Sergeant Simmonds is the driving force, portrayed by Greg McNeill with a brooding irony that built as the play went on. With excellent ‘comic’ timing, he moved swiftly from ebullience to depressive anger. Yet, on the whole, there was insufficient dramatic tension, and little sexual tension. It was quite a coy production. The published script notes a “carnal conspiracy” between Simmonds and Fiona’s sister Kate (Kim Walsh) when the domestic violence is reported. But on stage, Kate’s culpability was ironed out at this point. And the choreographed violence wasn’t enough to create the estrangement the play needed. The cast were up to the task yet did not all seem enthusiastic. Fiona Pepper, playing Fiona Carter, had the character’s mood right but, stuck within the static direction, didn’t allow us to see much more than the ‘victim’ cipher. Jon English as the Removalist, that enigmatic symbolic centre that might carry the play’s absurdist weight, used gesture which brought a bizarre gravitas to his own indifference and ‘denial’ of the horror unfolding around him. But more could have been done with him. As that perverse embodiment of corruption, Sergeant Simmonds, says to Constable Ross (Sam Devenport) on his first day at the job, “What you saw today’s the real law, Ross. A compromise between human follies and human desires.” Kenny Carter, a role vigorously wrestled with by Philip Miolin, is

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cut from the same cloth, but, as evidence and confirmation of the police officers’ own inability to control their urges, must be dealt with. And we, as audience, are culpable. We still laugh, maybe more uncomfortably than in 1971, at the absurd horror of violence and corruption, but the comedy is more sterile, and less self-reflexive.

Krakouer! ¸ by Reg Cribb in collaboration with Sean Gorman ¸ directed by Marcelle Schmitz ¸ Deckchair Theatre ¸ Victoria Hall, Fremantle ¸ 5–11 October 2010301

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H I S R E T U R N S E A S O N of Reg Cribb’s theatrical adaptation of Sean Gorman’s book Brotherboys: The Story of Jim and Phillip Krakouer, bursts upon the audience from its opening moments and barely lets up. The cast members give bravura performances. Jimi Bani as Jim Krakouer and Sean Dow as Phil Krakouer complement each other in a wide range of theatrical registers, from slapstick and witty repartee through to meditative seriousness. In these intensely physical roles, the visceral interaction between the football-obsessed Nyungar brothers from Mount Barker creates a narrative in itself. Telling the story of the Krakouer brothers’ rise through junior country football to the heights of the V F L / A F L , under Marcelle Schmitz’s direction, this production makes constant use of movement in conjunction with rapidfire dialogue, working almost as a pas de deux between the brothers. Essential to the drama’s unfolding is the third cast member, Luke Hewitt, in several small and fleeting roles, passing through the Krakouers’ lives as both supportive and malign figures. His timing, like that of the other actors, is impeccable; he drew huge laughs with his parodic car salesman and various shysters of the football world. The script is full of football in-jokes, appropriate one-eyed observations, and social satire. The set, though minimalist, was highly functional, and historical footage of the real-life Krakouers playing emphasized the displacement between the dramatic portrayal and reality. This is a positive feature, though I’m not sure that gap was always successfully investigated. Constant play with footballs was effective: the actors had well-honed ball skills.

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“O brother, I get a kick out of this performance,” The Australian (7 October

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The play deals with crucial issues of Indigenous affirmation in the face of racism, of self-empowerment, and of the tragedy of what is left to an Indigenous football player when his career is finished. On the one hand, both of the Krakouer brothers experience the adulation that comes with their ‘magic’; on the other, they are on the raw edge of racial vilification from crowds and fellow footballers. These issues are confronted with strength and dignity, allowing the Krakouer brothers’ characters to speak their frustration and resistance at once. But despite their closeness, Jim and Phil as shown in the play are very different people. Jim believes in violent payback, while Phil is described by his brother as the more “Zen” of the two. Phil here plays the conscience and foil to his brother’s violence on the field, penchant for gambling, and eventual downfall through drug trafficking. This brings me to my reservation about the play. Painting the brothers as legendary figures, we are distanced from any sense of real people, despite an obvious desire to bring the brothers to life on the stage. True, one of the heroes, Jim, has undeniable faults, but somehow those faults are absorbed into the myth and made palatable. Although often understandable, Jim’s violence is surely never ultimately excusable. In addition, Jim’s conviction for a sex crime as a teenager is somewhat glossed over in the play. Whether or not he deserved his sentence, the girl in question is given no voice, not even indirectly. This is a significant problem. It is vital to get an internalized view of the difficulties confronted by the brothers in their rise to football immortality, and they certainly paid a great price in an extremely racist environment. But we should never forget that they, in particular the character of Jim, made choices as well that still need to be viewed outside hagiography. Ruby Moon ¸ by Matt Cameron ¸ directed by Jeremy Rice ¸ Always Working Artists and Deckchair Theatre ¸ Victoria Hall, Fremantle ¸ 19–30 October 2010302

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H I S P L A Y O F D I S T U R B E D A N D P A R A N O I D fairytale horror screams David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, especially Fire Walk With Me, with the odd touch of Blue Velvet. Throw in Angela Carter’s The Company of Wolves, and yet another reworking of Little Red Riding Hood, set among the mentally unstable of your local suburban street, and voilà, you have Ruby Moon. 302

“Surreal search for the big bad wolf,” The Australian (21 October 2010): 15.

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The scenario is that of a married couple daily going through the routine of self-analysis, self-criticism, and blaming others, as they seek answers regarding the disappearance of their six-year-old daughter. In considering the full range of responses from suspicion to accusation, especially in terms of the fear of difference, we advance through this whodunnit without any real prospect of solution. Trying way too hard, Matt Cameron’s script endeavours to confront audiences with their own fears and hysteria over the loss of children to a malevolent and predatory world, and the destruction of their own inner child. It leaves us looking in the mirror, but little more. This much-praised play in many ways stands or falls on the basis of its production, and this particular one probably sits somewhere in the middle. It has some fine moments when the actors – two of them covering eight roles between them – transcend the parodic and surrealist expressions of archetypes. In turns, they play the parents and each of the outlandish street residents whom they interrogate about their daughter’s fate. Benj D’Addario’s deployment of mimicry and clowning gestures, and Kate Rice’s polar-opposite roles as the religious fanatic and the exotic seductress, did more than just reveal the plot that’s never really a plot, and managed to touch something deeply realistic in our psyches, for all the absurdism the actors convey. From the stereotypical aspects of each character, the director Jeremy Rice teases out the symbolic and the fantastical to make some edgy statements about adult responsibility and its failures. There is a risk of clumsiness in the scene and multiple costume changes, but these were handled adequately here, maintaining the general hectic pace and obsessive drive. Lighting, though simple, was strangely hypnotic at times, and successfully isolated zones within the set to enhance a sense of dislocation and disorientation. On the other hand, the patchwork-like floor covering was oddly distracting without adding much to the mood, and sound was sometimes unconstructively abrasive. As this almost unusual play signed off, I was left in conflict between relief that someone had tackled a virtually unwriteable issue through nightmarish pastiche and a feeling that such a serious issue was being treated reductively. It has to be said that some of the caricatures were unsatisfyingly ridiculous.

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Mother’s Tongue ¸ by Kamarra Bell–Wykes ¸ directed by Kyle J. Morrison ¸ Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company ¸ Theatre Space, Murray Street, Perth ¸ 29 October–20 November 2010303

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should really be about: a sense of immediacy, a feeling that the audience is confronted by the action and that more is going on than the all-too-familiar existential crisis of lives under Western capitalism. Kamarra Bell–Wykes’s play, developed in conjunction with Yirra Yaakin, is an excellent example of how all the ingredients of a theatre company can be put to work to bring to life something fresh and essential. Mother’s Tongue is set in an imaginary Australian seaside town, Kunnawanna, source of many puns. A minimalist set is necessary in the Yirra Yaakin Theatre’s small space, but the use of corrugated iron to represent the sea is a masterstroke of depth and physicality. In Kunnawanna, an Indigenous brother and sister are coping with the loss of their nanna, having never really recovered from the much earlier loss of their mother. Into their grieving comes the white girl Jolene, subtly and connivingly played by Anita Erceg. Jolene insinuates herself into the siblings’ lives, seeming to address the spiritual needs of Ngala (Miranda Tapsell) and the sexual isolation of David (Isaac Drandic). What turns out to be at stake is no less than the linguistic heritage and the cultural knowledge this carries, bequeathed to Ngala and David by their mother, who had researched and recorded their Indigenous language and shared it with David, now at risk of completely forgetting it since his nanna is gone. The possession and, conversely, the loss of language seem to me the most pivotal concerns of cultural identity. For a people to lose their language or have it manipulated by others is to face the probable loss of control over their own heritage. Bell–Wykes incisively picks apart issues of language custodianship, with the siblings under pressure to sell their language inheritance to a university for a vast amount of money. She exemplifies that striking confidence in Indigenous writing which allows a conversation so vital to Indigenous communities to be held in front of a broader public without compromise and with humour.

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“War of words with injection of humour,” The Australian (1 November 2010): 17.

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This was by no means a perfect play. It took time for the energy to build, but the drama really asserted itself once the three characters were brought together in the one house. Isaac Drandic’s David was a strong blend of masculine presence and family caregiver, and Miranda Tapsell’s Ngala was a feisty and decisive dramatic force. Anita Erceg was both beguiling and repellent as Jolene, the empathizing but self-interested white interloper. Still finding her feet, this playwright may well turn out to be one of the greats. Kyle J. Morrison’s direction brought out the very best in a compelling work. Waltzing the Wilarra ¸ written and composed by David Milroy ¸ directed by Wesley Enoch ¸ Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company ¸ Subiaco Arts Theatre, Perth ¸ 3 February–6 March 2011304

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’ L L T E L L Y O U S O M E T H I N G for nothing,” as Mr Mack (Kelton Pell) says in David Milroy’s Waltzing the Wilarra: Yirra Yaakin is my favourite theatre company anywhere in the world. It is innovative, energetic and politically charged, and this new production is no exception. From the moment the spotlight finds Old Toss (Ernie Dingo), vaudeville wise-cracker and parody of a Shakespearean fool (and Hamlet or, rather, ‘Spamlet’!), with his sidekick Young Harry (Jessica Clarke), we are on a roller-coaster of irony, bitter social critique, affectionate humour, and drama. Drawing on a club like the Coolbaroo that arose in Australia after the Second World War, where ‘whites’ and ‘blacks’ sang and danced together, as a potential model for a less sanitized and formulaic and possibly genuine mode of reconciliation, the play deftly weaves music theatre in a Brechtian strain with contemporary identity affirmation drama. The cast are superb. None of them puts a foot wrong. Highlights are Ursula Yovich’s wide-ranging, soaring voice, Trevor Jamieson’s sensitive renderings of a complex, ambivalent character in Charlie, and Ernie Dingo’s panto-dame slap-down of serving King and Country, which is uproarious and perfectly pitched. The backing band including Milroy on guitar and Lucky Oceans on pedal steel guitar was near faultless. Milroy composed the songs that range across

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“Satire meets songs and whites meet ‘Terra Nullians’,” The Australian (10 February 2011): 15.

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country and western, through jitterbug-jive dance, to Nick Cave- and Tom Waits-like intensities delivered by Tim Solly’s Jack. The lyrics are generally apt and deft, but occasional slips into American idiom undo the anti-colonial tone a little for me at times. The plot is straightforward. Mr Mack, the club’s M C , attempts to placate his star performers, especially the married couple Jack and Elsa. Complicated ‘race relations’ are explored. Jack, a white ex-soldier, inflicts the violence of his war nightmares on Elsa, his Aboriginal wife. Charlie, Aboriginal but brought up as brother to Jack, also loves Elsa. Issues of what amounts to Elsa’s mother’s domestic slavery in Fay’s white family play out between Elsa and Fay. Milroy and the director Wesley Enoch are skilled at teasing out these overlaid issues. But the modes are mismatched between the two acts. Act Two shifts to the present day and the demolition of the old club. Issues that have and haven’t been resolved explode. Act Two’s political and ethical satire is vital, but the earlier physical energy is dissipated. The act’s opening is handled too slowly here. Having said this, I must say that old Mr Mack comes into his own. Kelton Pell is his usual brilliant self – humour, gravitas, and worldliness anchor the act. This play is almost a tour de force. It’s gutsy and entertaining. It’s humorous but uncompromising on behalf of its ‘Terra Nullians’. But it does necessarily question the motives and insensitivities of those non-Indigenous Australians who think they’re on-side when simply being racist in other ways, patronizing and excluding to appease their own consciences. Donka: A Letter to Chekhov ¸ by Daniele Finza Pasca ¸ Teatro Sunil and others ¸ His Majesty’s Theatre, Perth ¸ 12–19 February 2011305

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of Donka: A Letter to Chekhov, Daniele Finza Pasca, says in his note to the production: “basically for years I’ve been looking for lightheartedness on stage.” To refine a moment of gravitas with lightheartedness is an art worth pursuing, but I found little of that in this production. Rather, lighthearted equates with lightweight here, and one is left wondering why Finzi Pasca bothered engaging with the great Russian playwright and short-fiction writer at all.

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“Letter to Chekhov replete with filler,” The Australian (14 February 2011): 17.

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Apart from the fact that Chekhov enjoyed fishing, and that he was a doctor, and that somewhere in there a poetic sensibility might be considered, there is little real sense of Chekhov or his work beyond superficial allusion. We see snippets of his thinking and his work, but by the time they are blown out onto the dream-screen (quite literally – this work is full of visual gimmicks), they merely float into an ether of self-indulgence. The ongoing dissection metaphor becomes tiresome, though it does reflect the concern Finzi Pasca and his troupe have with the body. Maybe that’s the best point of entry into Donka. The cast are gifted performers who segue between acrobatics, aerialist and otherwise, juggling, clowning, music, singing, and comedy with ease. The level of circus skills, which make up what are essentially vignettes, is superb, if the ideas behind them often seem lacking. Finzi Pasca may be known for his Theatre of the Caress, but perhaps we should take a cue from one player’s reference to kitsch. Really, what’s on offer is a Theatre of Kitsch. If we can get past the tackiness and consider it as irony rather than suffocating warmth, then something might well be happening. Slapstick and visual gags, reliant as they are on intense physicality, need space and the right kind of environment to draw an audience in. The proscenium arch might not be best for this. The street, tents, and theatre-in-theround all take performers to the audience and vice versa. Maybe it was this that was lacking. Nonetheless, there were plenty of laughs, cheers, and applause from some in the audience on this occasion. But really, it’s the corny rose-petal flecks covering the stage, suggesting the blood of the consumptive Chekhov, the overdone parody of the duel with its endless squirting of fluids (seriously), and the tedious revolving hospital bed on wheels, that act as filler and dilute the whole. We hear from the harlequin-like figure that the clown’s soul resides in its shoes, and that bodily dissection won’t reveal the soul. Finzi Pasca knows art can help in this, but he’s not quite sure how. The Modern International Dead ¸ by Damien Millar ¸ directed by Chris Bendall ¸ Deckchair Theatre ¸ Victoria Hall, Fremantle ¸ 17 March–2 April 2011306

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by praising the actors, director, and entire production crew above all else. Especially when it comes to a play politically RARELY START A REVIEW

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“Powerless servants of the peacekeeping quest,” The Australian (21 March

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and ethically charged to the point of agitprop. But Deckchair’s production of Damien Millar’s much-lauded The Modern International Dead, under the energetic and empathetic direction of Chris Bendall, deserves foregrounding. The audience is confronted with a basic set of wooden packing boxes that might carry equipment to assist in international peacekeeping or maybe something more sinister, television screens that impact with a muted grinding image feed, and a mounting sense of claustrophobia on a stage used in its entirety, taking it close to the audience. All these make atmosphere without labouring the point. The three actors, Michelle Fornasier, Stuart Halusz, and Steve Turner, flexible and thoroughly dedicated, handled dozens of roles among them, while maintaining three overarching main characters in this analysis of peacekeeping, intelligence, and other subtexts to conflict in the contemporary world, with specific focus on Cambodia, the Iraq wars, Timor, Somalia, and the Rwandan genocides. Halusz’s tortured idealist Luke is traumatized by memories and doubts over his and his fellow soldiers’ ineffectiveness in the face of brutality and slaughter. Fornasier’s Bridgette, novice nun and later counsellor, whose journey is a loss of faith or a quest to find some other form of faith, and Steve Turner’s convinced and driven microbiologist weapons inspector, Rod, become genuine character studies and symbols of conflict, both personal and representative of wider social and cultural tensions. Whether it’s Luke’s physicality, Rod’s authority, or Bridgette’s ambivalence and confusion, each actor brings subtlety and power to the roles. Parts of the script are superb, and the way it draws on real interview material makes for dramatic insight, but not necessarily for fuller dramatic shape. Testimony is complex to convey, and maybe one or two stories would have sufficed rather than the cascading, interconnecting presentations. These are often handled with great skill where the narratives reinforce each other, but at times they wander or seem like padding. Much of the humour was sharp and timely satire, but the vision of Mary in Rwanda lost its focus and overdid the bathos. Also, on occasion there was a risk of milking horror for obvious effect rather than actual dramatization. Although each character questioned, doubted, and even suffered, the play seemed unconscious of an underlying nationalism in presenting (white?) Australian peacekeepers as normative. And the brief portrayal of the Indian officer in Somalia was offensive caricature.

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This is ultimately an accomplished piece of work, but perhaps preaches to the converted. As a pacifist, I wanted it to question even further the witnessing of war that it critiques. The Ugly One ¸ by Marius von Mayenburg ¸ directed by Melissa Cantwell ¸ Perth Theatre Company and STM ¸ State Theatre Centre, Perth ¸ 22 March–9 April307

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M A Y E N B U R G ’ S The Ugly One presents various paradoxes about the self, but is fundamentally trapped in its own paradox. Purporting to be about the shallowness of measuring existences by physicality alone, it wallows in that very shallowness. How we sell ourselves is how we draw attention to what we have to say. If our self-image is of being ordinary or even remarkable in some way, as the play would have it, why should the opinions of others so sway us? The tensions between being a social organism and a unique individual are put to the test. Lette, confidently played by Benj D’Addario, is an inventor, told that he can’t promote his own product at a convention because he is intensely ugly. Nobody has ever brought this to his attention. They all, including his wife Fanny, assumed he knew, or simply did not want to offend him. It takes his boss, Scheffler, played by the spruce and larger-than-stage Geoff Kelso, to tell him the blunt truth. In the end, business sense must win out. As a result, Lette has surgery to beautify himself, and becomes ‘the face’ of his times – loved, lusted after, and ultimately replaced, until his beauty has no fetishistic worth because it is too readily available. His wife has an affair with his assistant, made over with the same new Lette face, only because she loves the look. So, an indictment of human vanity, of capitalism, the beauty industry in particular, and a John Berger-like subtext on ways of seeing. Melissa Cantwell’s direction, making use of clean lines and a planar space, works well enough. Gemma Ward, cast as Lette’s wife, and a 73-year-old C E O who lusts after the new Lette make for yet another subtext. Supermodel, and one of the ‘faces’ of her time on the catwalk, becomes a mirror for proliferating narcissism.

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“Diving into the shallow end,” The Australian (28 March 2011): 16.

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Ward was acceptable, and certainly knows how to use the stage and hold her glances. But her voice was thin, and although the roles were deliberately flat, she could have made them more dynamic. The play relies so much on skin-deep humour that she was well-placed with her industry background to bring this out. But the humour falls flat for me in the context of the C E O ’s homosexual son (one of Brendan Ewing’s roles). He wants Lette as much as his mother does, via a ménage à trois which is presumably supposed to shock the audience, but doesn’t. The son is clearly an embodiment of narcissistic desire. Even if von Mayenburg intends this to be a parody of sexual stereotypes, it fails. It’s just another joke at someone’s expense. Essentially, it’s a light play that borders on farce, paying too much attention to Albee and Ionesco and, more accurately, their imitators. The absurdist premise is simply not absurd enough, and tedium rather than innuendo arises with lengthy pseudo-technical discussions of male and female parts in highvoltage power sockets. The Ugly One tries hard for little return. The Duchess of Malfi ¸ by John Webster ¸ directed by Steve Chinna ¸ Dolphin Theatre, University of Western Australia, Crawley ¸ 24–28 May 2011308

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the closing night performance of John Webster’s darkly tragic play The Duchess of Malfi (written 1612–13), directed by Steve Chinna with a cast drawn from U W A ’s English & Cultural Studies theatre students. From the moment we sat down the show looked promising – a simple set with plain flats – and the opening dance scene was eye-catching. Other than the odd piece of furniture – and at one point a starkly menacing coffin – most of the scene changes required nothing more than the deft shifting of these flats, ably handled by the cast. I love the kind of understated design and direction that is not so minimalist as to be pretentious, but knows how to enhance a complicated plot and set of characters by keeping it streamlined. I agree with what Tracy says about it. It’s a richly cross-genre play, ranging from wit through an almost surreal burlesque (at least to modern tastes), through horror, to a more ‘conventional’ (maybe read: ‘modern’) notion of AST NIGHT WE SAW

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tragedy. Teasing all these elements out so effectively shows what a brilliant director Steve Chinna is. Tracy and I have worked with Steve before, and he and I are colleagues at U W A . I have met few directors and thinkers on theatre with as much depth, creativity, and versatility as Steve. All his skills were on display in this production. It’s such an intense blast of grotesque psycho-trauma, fully charged not only to entertain but to challenge us as audience. It even asks questions of the theatre itself. This play includes some of the most memorable lines in English-language theatre. Beneath its in-your-face drama is an almost surprising subtlety, so hard to weave in a world in which the “ten thousand several doors” that death has, “for men to take their exits,” are almost default settings. This brings to mind two of this production’s great aspects: the entrances and exits that were deft and often stimulating in themselves, ominous and full of suggestion; and also the skilful handling of the substitutions within the blank verse, the movements into prose speech (e.g., Antonio), and the miniclosures of rhyming couplets. Steve Chinna is a supreme interpreter of verse in drama, much like Tim Cribb of Cambridge University. The actors handled these with varying degrees of success, but what stood out across the performance was their ease of expression: the language glowed with clarity, as if the events were taking place down the road – though it’d be a very weird place they were happening in... . The music was excellent, especially the live flute and percussion, never overdone. As for the actors, I was taken with most performances in different ways at different times. After the show, I chatted with Steve, and he noted that he had asked the performers to let their characters grow and evolve with the moment. To be “mercurial,” I think he said, rather than to operate within the expectation or ‘stencil’ of a character. Astute advice. It’s what allowed Aisling Murray as the Duchess, who began by playing the role a little too rigidly ‘haughty’, to settle into a far more complex and wide-ranging performance, coming into her own particularly in her last scenes. Similarly with David Roman’s Duke Ferdinand: his interpretation of the Duchess’s mad, conflicted brother actually blossomed with the revelations of his lycanthropy – Roman’s extreme take on this actually brought pathos as well as grotesque ‘humour’ to the part. There was tragedy in his revenge lust as well. The Duchess’s other brother, the lustful and plotting Cardinal, was played with staid poise and perverse aloofness by Patrick Whitelaw. One of the

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play’s star turns was by Harriet Roberts as the saucy and coquettish Julia, the Cardinal’s mistress. Her timing was excellent. Maybe the essence of this production’s tackling of the absurd contradictions in John Webster’s tragic revenge play was embodied in Mark Tilly’s Bosolo (‘a malcontent’) and his perversities. Tilly played Bosolo as both panto-villain and traumatized wrestler of split personality – a Jekyll and Hyde act that could have fallen flat on its face, but didn’t. In fact, insofar as he is the machine driving the plot and the ephemeral nature of ‘conscience’, I think he nailed Bosolo.

A Picture of Doctor Faustus309

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F A U S T , the scholar and physician who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge and insight into the workings of the universe, and later from a lust for earthly passions and goods, is a central Western cultural metaphor and symbol for moral equivocation, false gain and inevitable punishment. It also has equivalents in other cultural spaces around the world, and has been adapted to illuminate a universal human quandary in numerous reformulations through many geographies and languages. What is so appealing about this tale that in many way derives from a crisis of church and state and indeed Christianity, in the late-fifteenth and the sixteenth century, that reaches a peak with Luther and his followers, and the violent break away from the Catholic church in the sixteenth century, is that it applies to the grand and the obscure, to the famous and the anonymous person, in equal measure. If its origins are much earlier, and the story of the sixth-century cleric Theophilus of Adana in the Golden Legend is a strong exemplar, the Faustian soul-selling was always likely to prosper in an age of fear and oppression, when religion staked its ground against a mixture of science, mysticism, superstition, and continental politics so interconnected as to be often inseparable, and of which religion itself was a part. The old world of the absolute monarch was fighting to maintain its stranglehold on power and on people, in the face of challenges from a new and increasingly urban ‘middleclass’ garnering wealth and education.

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“The Many Faces of Faust,” The Australian (27 May 2011): 17.

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Whenever any of us goes against our conscience, against what we intrinsically know to be right, in order to profit from wrong, we are in essence ‘selling our souls’, or creating a Faustian pact with the devil. Religion, or even spiritual belief, doesn’t have to have anything to do with it; rather, it’s a question of moral integrity. The religious subtexts need not be more than symbolic, and may operate as a moral scaffolding for making secular as much as spiritual points. In many of the Faust stories there is a strong fear of and prurience about sexuality. Such tales of moral turpitude are about control. Creating literature out of them is about scrutinizing the nature of this control. The Faust story has many origins, but its most literal and most concrete is the Faustbuch, or Historia von D. Johañ Fausten, published by Johann Spies and released at the September 1587 Frankfurt Book Fair. Spies, a Lutheran, wrote in his preface to the work, “I should publish it as a fearful example of the Devil’s deception and of his murder of body and soul, so that it might be a warning to all Christians.” This was also an age of witch-burnings. So there is little doubt about Spies’s purpose and angle – though, given that the work became a bestseller, he also cashed in on the word-of-mouth fame of the real Dr Faustus, a notorious scholar and astrologer, who was born in the late-fifteenth century and died in 1541. As John Henry Jones notes in his introduction to William Empson’s investigative work Faustus and the Censor, since Dr Faustus left no writings himself we have to rely on word-of-mouth and second-hand accounts. Dr Faustus probably studied at Heidelberg, and was a physician and a boastful ‘showman’ constantly on the verge of arrest, moving from town to town, divining, conjuring, and performing feats of magic. He is supposed to have conjured the spirits of figures from the Iliad to illustrate a lecture on Homer. Jones also points out that the notion that Faust sold his soul to the devil was likely apocryphal, and he attributes it to a Protestant clergyman. Faust was accused of sex crimes and other ‘naughty’ forms of behaviour, and he probably died a violent death. Melanchthon, who succeeded Luther and, perversely, possibly associated with Faust, had a particular hatred of Faust, and referred to him, according to Lercheimer (1597), as a “shithouse full of devils.” It should be added that Faust had his defenders and was seen by many as learned, even brilliant, if wicked. The Faust story, and indeed the real Faust’s life, must be read against the violent changing times of which it is part. The superstitious world of magic and alchemy was being superseded by an arguably equally superstitious world

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in which war with the devil was being waged on all fronts, and the facts and discoveries of the new science were an increasing threat to religion. Evil was being rooted out as part of a war for souls, but also a very earthly conflict over the spoils of wealth and power. We journey from the medieval to the Renaissance, but also through the worst persecutions of those perceived as a threat to God and the church. The Faustian figure is such a part of European folk history that it is hard to separate the strands. Versions appear in medieval Poland, but also in the ancient world. Some say that Paracelsus, John Dee, and other sixteenth-century alchemists were to inspire Christopher Marlowe to write his version of the Faust story. Marlowe’s The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus was originally published in 1604, then again with extra material in 1616. Given that Marlowe died in 1593, there has been much debate as to the more authentic version. It is now generally accepted that the ‘A’ text of 1604 is representative, and that the later version includes additions attributed to Samuel Rowley. In this first great work of literature based overtly on what is known as the English Faust Book, a strange and error-ridden translation of Spies’s original production, we see a Dr Faustus who, as with the Faustbuch, signs a pact with the devil in which he will be served by the devilish spirit Mephistopheles for twenty-four years, and then will be damned to hell. Though he has doubts, Dr Faustus signs the pact in his own blood, and sets out on the road to damnation. In the original English Faust Book he declares: “I, Johannes Faustus, Doctor, do hereby make known... that, it being my intention to speculate on the elements ...” and then commits himself to the care of Mephistopheles: “In return... I vow... that when twenty-four years have passed... he shall have full power to direct and govern me as it pleases him according to his way, and all that I have: life, soul, flesh, blood and belongings, shall be his for evermore.” Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus travels a similar journey from moral equivocation to engagements with manifestations of heavenly power on earth (we go from the Seven Deadly Sins to Faustus assaulting the Pope, to his conjuring Alexander the Great for Charles V, and to the comic interlude of the servants Robin and Rafe playing with magic and perhaps being turned into animals by Mephistopheles). At the end of his twenty-four years, having conjured up the beautiful Helen of Troy, and despite scholars praying for his soul, Faustus is torn limb from limb and taken to hell. The toll has been exacted.

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Many argue that German literature’s greatest work is Goethe’s play Faust, especially Part One. The full version of Faust Part One was published in 1808 and first performed in 1827, while the final version of Part Two was completed by Goethe just before his death in 1832, and first performed in 1854. The entire work wasn’t performed until 1872. Goethe spent his entire, long adult life working on Faust. The influences on Goethe of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus were probably limited, and certainly came later in his life. Apart from the Faustbuch of 1587, two major influences on the work were the Book of Job in the Bible and Homer’s Iliad. As a Sturm and Drang writer, Goethe’s youthful resistances to and testing of classicism were pivotal to his mode of expression. Faust Part Two, written in his later years, in particular engages with a panoply of Greek characters, including Paris and, indeed, the ubiquitous Helen of Troy, über-symbol of classical beauty. Faust, in Part Two, eventually ends up with Helen in Arcadia, where they have a son, although on that son’s death she chooses to go to Hades to be with him, and Faust is left alone. But the key female figure in Goethe’s Faust is Margaret, or Gretchen, a girl he comes across (in Part One) after signing his pact with Mephistopheles and seducing her with jewellery and the youthful nobility bestowed upon him by a witch’s potion. That’s at the core of Part One: Faust’s seduction, impregnation, and abandonment of Gretchen, his attempt to rescue her with Mephistopheles’s help after she kills her baby and is imprisoned, her recognition of the devil, and her prayers for redemption. Although Faust’s redemption doesn’t come until a long life of travels and lusts has passed, he eventually foils the pact by doing something for people other than himself, trumps Mephistopheles, who fails to provide the ultimate ecstasy or pleasure, and meets in Heaven with Gretchen, appearing there after his spirit is led to the Virgin Mary. It’s a redemption story through and through. Goethe’s Faust might expect redemption in a way that Marlowe’s Faust couldn’t. Once again, Goethe was a writer of his time, but he also helped define that time, open a new time. And the Faust story was one vehicle for this. The issue of the value of knowledge (Goethe also wrote on scientific subjects) and the fact that a search for knowledge can only be positive, even if God reserved some knowledges for himself, has so often brought the Faust story alive again. Questions of superstition and scientific ‘fact’ are as relevant now as they ever were, if the consequences of disbelief in either direction seem, in the main, less extreme.

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When I was eighteen, I wrote my first poem on Faust. It was called “Faust at Krakow” – Melanchthon claims Faustus studied magic and alchemical craft in Poland. Some years ago I wrote a version of Milton’s Comus in which the Comus figure had both Faustian and Mephistophelian overtones: a genetic scientist in my take, Comus created animals for his revelry as part of a Bacchic pleasure. His science served that pleasure. And science that has at its heart a desire for pleasure, rather than healing or improvement, is the stuff of Faustian models. More recently, I have been working on a Faust libretto (for whose accompanying music I am in discussion with the composer Gordon Kerry) based on the original Faust book and a silent film, and that work includes engagement with contemporary issues as diverse as genetically modified organisms and the Hadron collider; even food-colourings! I have been particularly fascinated by the manifestations of Faust in art, music, and cinema. At this very moment I am listening to Liszt’s A Faust Symphony: Three Character Pictures, Faust, Gretchen and Mephistopheles, written between 1854 and 1880. Relying on precedent and archetypal roots, as all Faust stories do, including the stories that arose around the historical Faust while he was alive and after he died, Liszt also drew on Goethe, and added to earlier work he had done, including waltzes, based on Nikolaus Lenau’s Goethe-influenced 1836 poem “Faust.” The material lends itself to Liszt’s symphonic-poem approach; it is a ‘tonal’ and human work in which the characters, even Mephistopheles, break through in a passionate engagement with existence. Mephistopheles is often exuberant, and not altogether in a slavishly enticing way. Hector Berlioz’s opera for four solo voices, La Damnation de Faust, performed in Paris in 1846, is another landmark of the constantly new and reinvented Faust. The expression of mood in nineteenth-century versions of Faust is often vital, as indeed was Goethe’s handling of Faust’s suicidal and depressive feelings over his failure to see into the matter of things, to gain the knowledge he felt compelled to acquire. It is interesting how often Goethe’s non-clerical but still heavenly redemptive model is preferred as a base to other artistic interpretations such as Marlowe’s. Maybe Walter Kaufmann is right when he says of the end of his study of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus: “Here is a tragic ending at the price of a religious orthodoxy that Goethe found deeply repellent.” It is worth noting that one of the conditions Faust had to abide by in his pact with the devil, in the original Faust book, was to “renounce his Christian faith.” We might consider that as

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counterbalance he would be granted knowledge and ‘truth’ from Mephistopheles as part of the deal. For me, the greatest post-Goethe work on the Faust story is F.W. Murnau’s 1926 German silent film, Faust. Visually remarkable, with the Faustian (as his life might show) Emil Jannings as Mephisto, this adaptation of Goethe’s masterpiece is deeply human. Set during plague, in this film Faust sells his soul both to heal and to regain youth. It’s a deal many might make. I was also greatly taken by István Szabó’s 1981 film Mephisto, with its double-play of an actor wanting to perform as Mephisto, who sells his soul to the Nazis and in doing so becomes Faust himself. Other works that might accompany me on a life’s journey include Charles Gounod’s 1859 opera Faust; Thomas Mann’s 1947 novel Doctor Faustus, whose protagonist Luverkühn makes a pact in exchange for musical genius – and like so many twentieth century Faust stories is set against the backdrop of Nazism in Germany; Luis Riccardo Faléro’s lush dream of lust and damnation in the painting “The Vision of Faust”; and maybe Jan vankmajer’s 1994 film Faust, which I haven’t seen but am pursuing because of its use of puppets and clay animation. I am particularly interested in this because my partner, the poet Tracy Ryan, saw a puppet play of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus in the late 1980s in Perth and says that it was “stark and haunting puppetry that still stays with me over twenty years later.” And puppet plays and street theatre have long been vehicles for the Faust story, with Goethe said to have seen such a puppet play as a young man. There have also been interesting Faust manifestations in poetry outside theatre, such as D.J. Enright’s 1979 A Faust Book and, more recently, Chris Hamilton–Emery’s grimly satirical Dr. Mephisto (2001). The list is a long one, but what so distresses me is that none of the above is a female Faust story. Mary of Nijmegen was a medieval Dutch play with a Faustian theme; Helga Druxe has written theory on female Faust figures in various realist novels (by males such as Stendhal); in 1877, Louisa May Alcott anonymously published A Modern Mephistopheles, which is apparently about a poet’s pact with the devil. I also know many poems and stories by women that take up the story motif; nonetheless, there’s a challenge there, an important one. It’s a gendered story in so many ways, but also one that exists outside gender, ethnicity, social status, and geography.

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A Gesture Towards a Poetics of Theatre310

O

three were written to be performed, and the fourth was written in response to a performance happening around me. One of the plays is a collaboration, so that’s an occasion of mutual response. They are all, to varying degrees, ‘verse’ plays, though the amount of verse varies considerably. All are written from a poet’s perspective, and with an ear open to colloquialisms as drama. Dance and movement across the stage are pivotal, as is light. Even if the manner of lighting is not indicated, the mood of the piece is a fair indication. Most significantly, I think, each was intended as a template for those who make things happen on the stage. They are to be pulled apart, workshopped, rewritten, re-articulated. They might be performed exactly as is, or in variation. Each has an ethical intent, and I would hope this is respected, but that ethical intent itself is under scrutiny, so who am I to say. . .? In fact, the premier performance of Crop Circles in Cambridge engendered that kind of debate: the ‘surrealism’ and abstraction of the play, the use of myth and archetypes, against the realism and seemingly overt moral messaging. I would suggest that the boundaries are far more blurred than this. Take these plays where you will. Maybe a brief mention of places and circumstances of composition will help. Crop Circles came together from notes and poems and an idea of a story – thus, I suppose, it lends itself to being the most narrative of the plays. I sewed it together while on a residency at Varuna Writers’ Centre, making use of the office computer late at night and in the early hours of the morning, in a removed and slightly threatening mind-set. The play was revised later in Cambridge, and then workshopped at the Playbox with an excellent group of Australian actors under the direction of Aubrey Mellor. The dramaturgical assistance and directorial input from the Playbox regulars were eye-opening in terms of dramatic intention – of delaying a revelation to the last possible moment. Years of reading poetry aloud, and hearing others reading my poetry aloud, gave me a groundwork for projection of the colloquial and yet versified voice. I also had a map of relations and friends and people I had encountered in the Australian wheatbelt over the years to draw on for tone and modulation.

310

F THESE FOUR PLAYS,

“A Gesture Towards a Poetics of Theatre,” in John Kinsella, Divinations: Four Plays, ed, Stephen Chinna (Cambridge: Salt, 2003): ix–xiii.

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The second play collected here, Smith Street, came about from living with my partner and co-writer Tracy Ryan on the notorious street of inner-city Perth frequented by prostitutes, and vilified by the government, police, and good citizens of the neighbourhood. As with the other plays, it is concerned with issues of bigotry and oppression, of hypocrisy and liberation. Heaven, Earth, and Hell are clearly delineated and the players are constantly struggling to preserve or dissolve these boundaries. It’s a passion play. It’s mystery, miracle, and morality rolled in together. Always elements of cabaret, melodrama, and farce. In some senses, the closer to the ‘action’, the more fantastical the ‘voicing’ of the work. Steve Chinna, who directed the first production of this play at the University of Western Australia, also developed the script in a number of ways – primarily in the use of song. Smith Street was the realization of the director’s using the script as template, and enhancing and giving a particular vision to the work. The third play, The Wasps, was written specifically for the Cambridge Marlowe Society, though constructed in Ohio and Western Australia, as well as in Cambridge itself. I had enjoyed the Marlowe’s interpretation of Australian spatiality in their production of Crop Circles, and sought to use what I’d learnt from this experience when writing Australian characters in a London setting in The Wasps. The centre cannot hold? And which centre, or centres? So the discourse goes.. .. It is based on dance movement and light-play. Each of these plays works through a dramatic synaesthesia, with elements of sound and sight providing as much dramatic and ‘narrative’ action as the story-line itself. In writing The Wasps, with its obvious classical subtext (though ironized and displaced), I spent much time reading masques – Jonson (especially in the context of the dramatizations by Inigo Jones), Campion, Milton (textually). .. . The anti-masque as a form particularlyinterested me, and the literal writing of masques is what interests me in theatre at present. The influence on The Wasps isn’t direct, but it’s there – minimalized, distracted, and honed down. It’s an undoing of the form, as one might almost expect; in the same way that Smith Street plays with the conventions of Victorian melodrama. The last play here is described as “unperformable.” Its place of composition was the old Railway Hotel in the city of Perth, Western Australia (supposedly the most isolated capital city in the world). This hotel was knocked down about ten years ago, in the early hours of the morning, against a council preservation order. Its propped-up façade, all that remained, stood there for years with its boarded-off disembodied allotment of prime city development

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space behind. The irony was fitting. The Railway was one of the roughest pubs in Perth, and a central place for the scoring of narcotics. Users would score in the pub, climb the staircase, and hit up in one of the guest bathrooms upstairs, often nodding off on the floor or in an empty bathtub. What was remarkable about the Railway was that it was a meeting-place for blacks and whites. There was the usual racism, but somehow brothers and sisters could be discovered across the divide of the pool table. Problems were, in some ways at least, shared. This part of the play speaks for itself. It’s a play about respect and disintegration, and the entanglement of these in a city where the oppression of marginal groups – especially of those who might claim primacy over the land the State exploits – led to communication between those outside the machine, taking place in zones of the condemned. There is little narrative action in Paydirt; the drama is in the words being spoken at all, and suggestion of things that have already happened. There is a sense of the Odyssey about it, but this is inverted. People drink and die, the dance goes on. The dance of constraint and oppression, but also of vision and connection with a place overlaid by the city, by the invaders. It’s the common space, the meeting-place, where in loss something is gained. I like to think of Paydirt as a distracted miracle play. This is the only play not to have been performed, or to be in preparation for performance. Could it be performed? I suppose I’d like to think so; but maybe not. My influences as a young writer were, profoundly, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Beckett, Brecht (especially his play Baal: I wrote a play called Baal which has been lost), Shakespeare, and, indeed, Marlowe and Goethe (textually), forgotten playwrights like Heywood (also my grandfather’s surname), Indonesian shadow puppet theatre, anonymous Elizabethan plays in facsimile manuscript form (The Wasps actually gets its name from one of these), Dorothy Hewett, Jack Davis (a little later), and maybe Gertrude Stein. Paydirt is the inability to recognize the need to dramatize nothingness. The stage never stays still, and that’s climax enough. Strangely, Paydirt is filled with the most ‘real’ of people, and yet they primarily act as ciphers in the play – static, people coming and going around a pool table, collecting drinks from the bar. Other than the main character Samuel, they come and go and become interchangeable. Samuel plays the prophet, but is not really up to the role fate and his own free will cast him in. He is a blind seer – but one whose blindness enhances seeing through sensitivity and an alternative sight. He stumbles through memories and glimpses of insight. His flaws overwhelm him. Samuel would have us think he alone is

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there, but so would each of the other characters if only we could see them as they would have us see them. But we can’t, because we don’t know how to look. Theatre is supposed to do this for us? I don’t think so. Dramatic action is built into language itself, and the compression and non sequiturs that vitalize poetry, that give it metaphoric resonance and metonymic links that become harder and harder to trace, are the rise and fall of movement for me. The actor takes us into the words themselves, as well as into the meaning that comes from hearing the words spoken together. Maybe I am visualizing a theatre in which we look and hear in a different way: we see something different because we want to. We are not passive, even when the players are apparently passive. Paydirt was another lost play until a few years ago – it vanished for a decade and was found in my mother’s shed. It was transcribed (with minor translation loss), and a small amount of additional material was added more recently. Its structure has not changed at all. Neither have the intentions and visualizations behind the piece, no matter how tempting it might be to revise. I have decided not to collect my earliest plays – written almost twenty-two years ago – because, in some senses, they are a forerunner of these views of theatre. I think I became more amenable to the expectations of an audience to be entertained as I got older. I went to a great deal of theatre as a young man, and fed my plays with this very direct experience. They were conversations with and against convention, that remained determinedly introverted, dramatically, because most of what I had seen tried so hard to give people a good time. If people find this volume of interest, I expect those early plays will be transcribed from manuscripts (mostly handwritten and in archives), and presented for the reader, and maybe, maybe in the ‘right’ hands, performed. — 2002

My Comus, Milton’s Comus311

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C O M U S I S A N E N V I R O N M E N T A L I S T dialogic poem. I hope I have operated in the spirit of Milton’s original Comus. I have certainly used it as a literal template, intertexting and dialoguing with the original. If the tone lends itself to irony, it’s not at the expense of Milton’s work, which I see as an environmentalist work in the first place. 311

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“My Comus, Milton’s Comus: an afterword,” in John Kinsella, A Dialogic Mask

/ C O M U S / A Mask, John Milton, intro. Tim Cribb (Todmorden: Arc, 2008): 121–25.

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However, my Comus is also one tormented by its own celebration – the tension is in the need for constraint, a fear that the darkness of humanity will overwhelm the telling of the tale. Maybe Milton’s is that as well – one could certainly argue this. Comus, the character, the figure, is a darker character than many observe. Comus is the evil in all of us. My Comus is a genetic scientist – I perceive the altering of genes as a basic wrong against the state of nature – and I am one who believes in mutual aid and not natural selection! But I’ve met some extremely decent genetic scientists, whose deep conviction is that they are doing something for the betterment of humanity. And that’s the rub. So, is it about the vilification of those some of us consider to be acting against the best interests of the planet’s bio-health – those we can blame, while remaining intact, even virtuous ourselves. ..? I think not. Frankenstein’s monster exists not only because of Dr Frankenstein but because of the world that engenders him. Everyone, or pretty well everyone, would agree that global warming is a bad thing; fewer take personal responsibility. Most would agree that race hatred is a bad thing, but few own up to being participants in any way whatsoever. Yet we are all culpable, and that’s the theme of my Comus. And celebrations come at a cost. A mask is a play based on dance and music, really. Costumes, stage sets, the long luminous shadow of Inigo Jones, Jonson... Milton’s Comus was less about these factors than most. It was genre, but went elsewhere, I’d insist. Still, it has many of the ingredients of the mask genre, and it works within those conventions. There’s dance here even when the characters are not dancing. The words make the performance in so many ways. It’s a work about characters. On one level they are ciphers, but to me they are very real. I’ve known all these people. I’ve been some of them, a mixture of them. The unreal bits as much as the real. What’s at stake here? The right to choice, the right of all things to exist without wanton damage and exploitation? Yes, but it’s a warped picture the moment we try to qualify and measure it. It’s easy to translate Milton’s Comus into rave culture, into the moral vicissitudes of modern science, into a world of tension between religiosity and consumerism. What’s not so easy is to know where this leaves us, as the listeners, the watchers, the readers, the participants. This is a celebration, but what do we ultimately take away from such celebrations? Landscape is all-important to Comus. Mine crosses the wheatbelt of Western Australia and various spaces of Cambridgeshire. These are the places I am most familiar with, and that I write constantly. They shift between the generic

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and highly specific – between being there and reading the travel pages. There’s a critique of how modernity allows some of us to relate to place. A virtual landscape fused with the one/s we walk through, work in, grew up around. I hope I have created a topological ecology. It’s about the geometry of the natural world, our misshaping of it in attempting to profit, aesthetically and commercially to make of it more than is there. The conversion usually brings loss. This is also a work about gender and sexual politics. About intactness and the roles women get to play in movies – that debate. It’s about power and privilege and male inheritance. But nothing is as it seems. So, “Comus” equals revelry. So, the elevation of the Earl of Bridgewater to the President of the Council of Wales and Lord Lieutenant of Wales was the event to trigger Milton’s Comus. Bridgewater was relative (son-in-law and stepson) to the Countess Dowager of Derby, and the Countess was of the family of the most notorious sex scandal of the age – Lord Castlehaven, related by marriage (to the Countess’s daughter), had been executed for his extreme sexual perversities that involved – apart from his wife, his servants, and other parties – his twelve-year-old stepdaughter. When Milton heard about the possibility of writing a mask, no doubt through Henry Lawes, to be performed at Ludlow Castle, all this would have been strongly in his mind as he cast the Earl’s two sons and daughter in their roles. The Milton biographer A.N. Wilson leaves us in no doubt: What member of the family, watching Lady Alice have this encounter with her tempter, could fail to remember her cousin Elizabeth, who, so recently, really had been ensnared in the most brutish fashion by her stepfather and his band of monstrous revellers?

Wilson goes on to note that echoing passages that might well allude to such contrasts were edited from the players’ copies by Lawes. I need not elaborate other than to say that however strongly Milton intended such subtexts, there is a sense of sexual disturbance in the Comus that disturbs, even ‘perverts’ the revelries, that brings a triumph of virtue into an ironic and disturbed focus. Milton’s Comus is sexually perverse. This is only partially relevant to my rendering, remake, reconfiguring. ... I use this disturbance as a reflection on the hypocrisy with which we treat the natural world, the environment. Crimes of sexuality, especially against those who have little or no power of refusal, fill the newspapers and television. Wilson calls these public expiations, these show trials, ‘cleansing rituals’, ways of offsetting broader social malaise. The

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media uses and abuses those with little or no say over their own choices in a way to allure and lure, and reaches fever-point over the legal trials of transgressors while using exploitative material, especially of the young, to sell advertising. The basic sexual hypocrisy is also the hypocrisy of the abuse of the land. The nature documentary is aired while cars, and numerous other consumer products whose creation has been detrimental to the environment, are advertised. The sexualization of the land itself is archetypical and unsurprising, and certainly Milton plays with Greek and Roman traditions as much with those of a pagan English (not Welsh) countryside mediated through Protestantism. This sexualization of the land is ritualistic, and religious. I have interrogated that in the context of exploitation. Milton’s Comus alludes; I am more direct. Singing, dance, and ritual. A preserving of the status quo, as the presentation of any art ultimately is, no matter how iconoclastic. Communication is control. But I am writing against that. I think Milton was undermining as much as confirming the powers that be. That strange ambivalent relationship with patronage. There are other things going on herein, but I won’t overexplain. Suffice it to say that, for me, poetry and theatre are inseparable, and poetry is a positive ambiguity. And I have always been a fan of genre – maybe, just maybe, Comus fits with the horror tradition more than any other. And there are those who celebrate horror with barely a second thought, the medium elevating itself above serious scrutiny.

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Onomastic Index

“1965” (Gig Ryan) 497 24 Hours (S O) 125 “24” (Hashmi) 386 “41st Year of 1968, The” (Murray) 223 9/11 473, 474, 475 À Rebours (Huysmans) 485 “A Vera Take a Ride” (Fogarty) 194 Abbot, Katie 398 Abbott, Berenice 154 Abelard, Pierre 180 “Aboriginal Father, The” (Dunlop) 83 “Aboriginal Mother, The” (Dunlop) 83 Aboriginal Treaty Committee 337 Aboriginal writing 16–19, 44, 65, 74– 75, 95–96, 127, 130, 136, 225 —See: Jack Davis; Lionel Fogarty; Kevin Gilbert; Charmaine Papertalk– Green; Oodgeroo Nunuccal, Kim Scott; Bobbi Sykes; David Unaipon AC/DC 501–504; Back in Black 501– 503; “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap” 502; “Hell’s Bells” 501; Highway to Hell 502; “Jailbreak” 504; “Let Me Put My Love Into You” 503; Let Their Be Rock 504; “Rock and Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution” 503; “What Do You Do For Money Honey” 503; “Whole Lotta Rosie” 504; “You Shook Me All Night Long” 503 Accidental Grace (Beveridge) 51, 53 “Achilleus” (Gig Ryan) 495, 496 Ackland, Michael 87, 177 Acorn, Alvin 373

Act One: Poems (Stow) 281, 289, 290 Adamson, Robert 24, 25, 26, 30, 39, 40, 45, 46, 48, 49, 57, 61, 65, 69, 70, 76, 126, 137, 151–66, 203, 348, 440; The Language of Oysters 151, 152, 154, 159, 164, 165, 166; Canticles on the Skin 26, 162; Catch 161; The Clean Dark 159, 160, 162, 166; “Creon’s Dream” 162; Cross the Border 162; “Meshing Bends in The Light” 155; “My Fishing Boat” 163; “No River, No Death” 160; “Phasing Out The Mangroves” 161; The Rumour 70, 162; “The Serpents Breath” 151; Swamp Riddles 162; Waving to Hart Crane 162; “What’s Slaughtered’s Gone” 155; Where I Come From 162, 163 Addison, Joseph 128 “Adelaide Winter” (Taylor) 326, 327 Aeschylus 540 Aesop 326 “After Martial” (Porter) 269 “After Schiller” (Porter) 269 “Afterburner” (Porter) 269 Agneau 2 (publisher) 392 Ai 496 Aiken, Conrad, “The Morning Song of Lord Zero” 419 Airs, Waters, Places (Ramke) 437, 438 Aitken, Adam 50, 51, 53, 54, 61, 62, 464–66; “Cambodian Poems” 464; “Crossing Lake Toba” 465; Eighth

544 Habitation: New Poems 464–66; “Fable” 62; In One House 51, 53, 54, 61; “Indochine” 62; “The Inn of the Sixth Happiness” 62; “A Map of Cambodia” 465; “S21” 466; “Saigon the Movie” 62 Albany (WA) 479 Alcott, Louisa May 535 Alive (Wright) 332 Alizadeh, Ali 90 “All the Albums We Listened to Together” (Quinton) 147 Allen, Donald 28, 177 al-Samawy, Yahia 86, 90, 106 Always Working Artists 520 America Is a Punjabi Word (Hashmi) 386

“America is a Punjabi Word” (Hashmi) 386

Anachronism (Mateer) 51, 53 “Anarchy” (Stow) 290 Anderson, John 146 Andrews, Bruce 414, 416 “Angel in Blytheburgh Church, An” (Porter) 265 Angkor Wat 465 Anglo-Celtic presence in Australia 9, 97, 100, 127, 219, 234, 378, 379, 380, 478, 483 Angry Penguins (journal) 11, 25, 81, 98, 175, 178, 179 Anlaby (WA) 299, 312 “Annis and the Merman” (Stow) 295 “Annotations of Auschwitz” (Porter) 269

“Anorexia” (Maiden) 76 “Antarctic Ships” (Day) 483 “Antichrist in Arkansas, The” (Hummer) 423

“Apple” (Susan Stewart) 441

SPATIAL RELATIONS

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“Approaching a Photographic Exhibition of Bodies Suspended from Trees” (Ellenbogen) 435 “Aquifer” (Winton) 477, 479, 480 Aquinas, Thomas 419 Arc (publisher) 137, 349 “Area 51” (Kinsella) 376 Aristophanes 540 Aristotle 419, 438, 492 Armand, Louis 25, 137 “Arrival of the Bee Box, The” (Plath) 130

“Art for Life’s Sake” (Quinton) 147 Artaud, Antonin 473 “As You Are, As We Are” (Haskell) 471 Ashbery, John 26, 40, 89, 210, 407, 413, 453 Asia, and Australian culture 50, 93, 99, 105, 234, 380, 464, 465 —See also: China Asian migrants, in Australia 100, 136, 228, 232, 234, 380 —See also: China Asia–Pacific nexus and Australia 97, 103, 105 Ask Me (Zwicky) 498–501 Asymmetry (Coleman) 494 “At Cooloolah” (Wright) 85, 332, 333 “At Greenwood, a Meditation” (Haskell) 33, 34 “At the Jewish Cemetery in Gora Kalvaria” (Ellenbogen) 432 Attard, Karen 55, 56 Atwood, Margaret 47, 133 Auckland University Press 361 Auden, W.H. 204, 243, 247, 263, 273, 376, 450; “Musée des Beaux Arts” 210

“Auguries of Innocence” (Blake) 311 Austlit (literature site) 68 —See also: S E T I S

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545

Onomastic Index

Australia Council 89, 259 “Australia” (Hope) 130, 207 “Australian Garden, An” (Porter) 266 “Auto da Fe” (Donaghy) 453 Autobiography of Red (Carson) 425, 427

Automatic Oracle, The (Porter) 262 Avon Valley (SW Australia) 107, 108, 116, 118, 121, 274, 277, 352 Azim, Firdous 134 Baal (Brecht) 540 Back in Black (AC/DC) 501–503 “Bad Back, Bad Heart” (McComb) 209 “Bahawalpurlog: In Seven Parts” (Hashmi) 387 “Balcon, Le” (Baudelaire) 32 Balcony, The (Brooks) 32, 33, 171, 173, 174

Baneelon (Bennelong) 461, 463 Barangaroo 463 “Barbara” (Prévert, tr. Brooks) 173 “Barn Owl” (Harwood) 47 “Barnyard Revelation Poem” (Brooks) 171

Barrell, John, & John Bull 128 Barrett, Syd 349, 403 Barthes, Roland 42 “Basta Sangue” (Porter) 265, 269 Batavia disaster 283, 284 Bateson, Catherine 56 Baudelaire, Charles 80, 87, 89, 190, 204, 285, 307, 308, 309, 493; “Le Balcon” 32 Baudrillard, Jean 153, 473 Baxter, James K. 363 “Beach Burial” (Slessor) 86 Beat Generation 89 Beauclair, Henri 176 “Beautiful Era” (McComb) 213 Beautiful Waste (McComb) 203, 217

“Beautiful Waste” (McComb) 217 Beaver, Bruce 28, 35, 76, 179 “Because She Would Ask Me Why I Loved Her” (Brennan) 87 Beckett, Samuel 359, 512, 540 “Beginning With a Phrase from Simone Weil” (Gizzi) 439 “Behind the Garages of this Country” (McComb) 207 Bei Dao 230 “Bell Birds” (Kendall) 38 Bell Jar, The (Plath) 132, 133 Bell, Martin 242 Bellear, Lisa 56, 97 Bells in Winter (Mi¶osz) 173 Bell–Wykes, Kamarra, Mother’s Tongue 522–23 Bendall, Chris (theatre director) 525 Bennelong 97, 461, 463 Bennett, Bruce 88, 123, 140, 245, 249, 250, 251, 252, 255 Benson, Steve 414 Bergson, Henri 152 Berkeley, Bishop George 445 Berlioz, Hector 534 Bernstein, Charles 192, 199, 200, 412, 413, 414, 416 Berryman, John 203; Dream Songs 48 Beston, John 283, 292, 317, 322 Better Than God (Porter) 247, 249, 253, 261, 269 “Better Than God” (Porter) 253 Beveridge, Judith, Accidental Grace 51, 53; “Incense” 53; “The Tea Vendor” 54

Biarujia, Javant 225 Bierce, Ambrose 353 “Big World” (Winton) 478 “Birds in the Garden of the Cairo Marriott” (Porter) 251 Birney, Earle 375

546 Birth of a Nation (Griffith) 314 Birthday Party (Melbourne band) 218 Bishop, Elizabeth 163 Bishop, Judith 73 Black Eyed Susans, The 215 Black Mountain school 25, 26, 46, 167, 413

Black Pepper press 57 Black Swan State Theatre Company 509 Black Swan Theatre Company 511, 513, 515

Black Swans, The (The Triffids) 215 Blake, William 82, 173, 186, 320, 420, 439, 445, 447, 475; “Auguries of Innocence” 311 “Blessed Be” (McComb) 209 Blixen, Karen 434 Blood on the Wattle (Elder) 480 Bloodaxe Books 137, 138, 391, 395 Bloom, Harold 476, 515, 516 Bluebeard in Drag (Tracy Ryan) 133 Bly, Robert 167, 171 Boake, Barcroft 321 Boat (Walwicz) 14 Bobbin Up (Hewett) 30 Bobis, Merlinda 106 Boeotian / Athenian binary (Murray) 23, 42, 49, 68, 72, 88, 129, 219, 248, 270

“Boeotian Count, The” (Murray) 72 Bolleter, Ross, “Late sonata” 124 Bolt, Andrew 491 “Boner McPharlin’s Mole” (Winton) 478

“Bora Ring” (Wright) 315, 332, 333, 335

Borel, Petrus 247 Born Sandy Devotional (The Triffids) 214

Botany Bay 91

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Both Ends Against the Middle (Porter) 241, 265, 267, 268 Bourke, Lawrence 219, 220 Boyd, Arthur 259 Boyle, Peter, Coming Home from the World 50, 55 Brady, Veronica 59, 140 “Braid” (Susan Stewart) 441 Brass (Prynne) 393 Brecht, Bertolt 523; Baal 540 Breeze, Jean “Binta” 133 “Brennan” (Wright) 21 Brennan, C.J. 21, 27, 70, 89, 95, 98, 171, 177, 180, 258; “Because She Would Ask Me Why I Loved Her” 87

Brennan, Michael 25, 89, 439 Brewster, Anne 140 Bridge of San Luis Rey, The (Wilder) 322

Briggs, Tony, The Sapphires 509–10 “Broadway Vision” (Zwicky) 501 Brockman, Elizabeth Deborah 29, 85; “On Receiving from England a Bunch of Dried Wild Flowers” 84 Brooks, David 32, 33, 167–81, 348, 407; The Balcony 32, 33, 171, 173, 174; “Barnyard Revelation Poem” 171; The Cold Front 167, 172; “The Curse” 170; “Dog at Fifty” 169; “The End of Poetry, Again” 168; “Faces in the Street” 33; Five Poems 167; “Living in the World” 167, 169; “Pater Noster” 172; “Barbara” (Prévert, tr. Brooks) 173; “Rat Theses” 169; “Sadness” 168; The Sons of Clovis 174, 175, 176, 177; “Three Early Poems” 167; Walking to Clear Point 167 Brown, Pam 35

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547

Onomastic Index

Bryson, Bill 481 Buckley, Vincent 20, 37, 41, 177 Buckmaster, Charles 146 “Buffalo Waiting Room, The” (Ray) 428

Bukowski, Charles 146 “Bulahdelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle” (Murray) 42 Bulletin (journal) 37, 85, 129 “Bullocky” (Wright) 19, 38, 39, 284, 336

“Bum’s Rush” (Dransfield) 36 Bunting, Basil 496 Bunyah (NSW) 49, 162, 219 “Burning Fiery Furnace, The” (Porter) 254

Burns, Hilary 183 Butcher, Bleddyn 214, 215, 216, 217, 218

“By Whose Permission Do These Angels Serve?” (Porter) 256 Byron, George, Lord 81 Bystander, The (Stow) 281 Caddy, Caroline 47 Cage, John 49 Calenture (The Triffids) 214, 216 Callimachus, “Hymn to Apollo” 146 Cambodia 97, 379, 465, 466, 526 “Cambodian Poems” (Aitken) 464 Cambridge, and Kinsella 538 Cambridge, Ada 86 Cambridge Marlowe Society 539 Cambridge School 13, 344, 394 Cambridgeshire, and Kinsella 542–43 Cameron, Matt 520–21 Campbell, David 28, 35, 48, 69, 98, 130, 440 Campbell, Marion May 476 Campion, Thomas 539

Canada 372, 431 —See Alvin Acorn; Margaret Atwood; Earle Birney; George Ellenbogen; Patrick Lane; Irving Layton; Al Purdy Canberra Tent Embassy 20 Canberra-based poets 50 Candide (Voltaire) 251 Canterbury Tales, The (Chaucer) 224, 225, 229 Canticles on the Skin (Adamson) 26, 162

Cantos (Pound) 450 Cantwell, Melissa (theatre director) 507, 508, 517, 518, 527 “Captain Kirk in Karachi” (Hashmi) 386

Carcanet (publisher) 361 Carey, Peter, True History of the Kelly Gang 461, 482 Carson, Anne, Autobiography of Red 425, 427 Carter, Angela 130, 226, 227, 477, 520; “The Magic Toyshop” 131 Cartier–Bresson, Henri 157, 164 Cat’s Chin and Ears: A Bestiary (Taylor) 326

Catch (Adamson) 161 Cathay (Pound) 450 Catullan Rag, The (Rose) 50 Catullus 172 Cave, Nick 218, 524 Celan, Paul 394, 433, 435 Chagall, Marc 268 “Chagall Postcard, A” (Porter) 268 Chapman River valley 286 Chaucer, Geoffrey 226, 227, 442, 447; The Canterbury Tales 224, 225, 229 Cherbourg Aboriginal Reserve 18, 190 Cherry, Kate (theatre director) 513

548 “Child Portraits, with Background” (Stow) 304 Child’s Garden of Verses, A (Stevenson) 251

“Chilliholicism” (Haskell) 469 “China Poems 1988” (Zwicky) 498 China, Australian familiarization with 231; familiarity of Ouyang Yu with 226, 230; literature in 230 China, migrants from, in Australia 9, 82, 93, 101, 232, 234, 380, 483 China, presence of in Randolph Stow 295–97, 305 Chinese language, in Australian writing 10, 101, 105, 225, 227, 230, 380 Chinese-Australian writers 226 —See: Ouyang Yu; Miriam Wei Wei Lo Chinna, Steve (theatre director) 528, 539

Choate, Alec, & Barbara York Main 140 Chomsky, Noam 474 “Christmas Day, 1917” (Porter) 255 “Christopher Brennan” (Tranter) 27 City Lights bookshop 411 “Clancy and Dooley and Don McLeod” (Hewett) 201 Clare, John 252 Clark, Manning 482 Clarke, Marcus 14, 87, 182; For the Term of his Natural Life 83 Clay, Henry, “Two and Two” 108–14 Clean Dark, The (Adamson) 159, 160, 162, 166 Clean House, The (Ruhl) 513–14 Clendinnen, Inga , Dancing with Strangers 461–64 “Clichés” (Stow) 289, 319 “Clichés as Clouds Above Calstock” (Porter) 272

SPATIAL RELATIONS

a

“Clock in the Empty House, The” (Stow) 322

Cold Front, The (Brooks) 167, 172 Coleman, Aidan, Asymmetry 494; “To Play” (Coleman) 495 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 120, 188, 204 Collard, Dot 480 Collected Poems, 1943–1995 (Harwood) 37

Collected Works Bookshop (Melbourne) 416

“Colonialism” (Fanoy) 383 “Colossus, The” (Plath) 134 Columbarium (Susan Stewart) 439, 440 Comerford, Deb 10 Coming Home from the World (Boyle) 50, 55 “Commission” (Winton) 480 Company B Belvoir 509 “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge” (Wordsworth) 456 Compton, Jennifer 47 Comus (Kinsella) 541–44 Comus (Milton) 534, 541–44 “Concrete Poem” (Fagan) 493 Conjure (Donaghy) 456 Conrad, Joseph 281; Heart of Darkness 280, 433 Cook, James 91 Cool Change, The (Taylor) 325 Coolidge, Clark 414 Coombs, Nugget 20, 337 Corbière, Tristan 176 Cordite (journal) 52, 56, 68 “Correspondence, The” (Fagan) 493 Cost of Seriousness, The (Porter) 244, 252, 261, 265 Couani, Anna 383 Countdown (Australian TV pop show) 502

a

549

Onomastic Index

Counterfeit Silence, A (Stow) 281, 283, 284, 288, 290, 293, 304, 309, 310, 312, 318, 319, 322 Courland Penders poems (Dransfield) 36, 182, 184, 187, 297 Craig, Alexander 40, 244, 285 Crane, Hart 26, 46, 163, 203 Crane, Stephen 423 “Crane” (Neilson) 75 Crawley (WA) 528 “Creek of the Four Graves, The” (Harpur) 80 Creeley, Robert 416 Crémieux, Benjamin 473 “Creon’s Dream” (Adamson) 162 Cribb, Reg, adapt. Gorman, Krakouer! 519–20 Croggon, Alison 35, 56, 66, 137, 440 Cronin, Margie 25, 56, 66, 89, 98 Crop Circles (Kinsella ) 538, 539 Cross the Border (Adamson) 162 Cross, Zora 11, 87, 96, 183 “Crossing Lake Toba” (Aitken) 465 Cry for the Dead, The (Wright) 20 Crystal Absences, The (Taylor) 328 Cullen, Countee 422 Cumali, Necati 500 cummings, e.e. 470 Curle, Jock 289, 295 Curnow, Sigi 416 Curran, Melissa 56 “Curse, The” (Brooks) 170 Curtin University 217 Curzon, David 48 “Custer’s Last Stand” (Ray) 430 “Cut” (Plath) 131, 132 D’Cruz, J.V. 233 Dadaism 98, 344, 413 “Daddy” (Plath) 134, 371

Dancing with Strangers (Clendinnen) 461–64 Danger Age, The (Mulvany) 510–11 Dante Alighieri 367, 419, 422, 496 Darby, Pat 123 “Dark Pines Under Water” (MacEwen) 375

Dark Side of the Dream (Hodge & Mishra) 21, 84, 118, 278 Darkening Ecliptic, The (‘Ern Malley’) 177, 180 Davies, Peter Maxwell, Eight Songs for a Mad King (libretto by Stow) 291; Miss Donnithorne’s Maggot (libretto by Stow) 291 Davis, Jack 17, 44, 83, 97, 540; Honey Spot 514–15; “One Hundred and Fifty Years” 17 Davis, Miles 422 Dawe, Bruce, “Homecoming” 86 Day, Sarah 47, 57, 483–86; “Antarctic Ships” 483; “Inaugural Speech at the Announcement of the Successful Cloning of the Thylacinus Cynocephalus” 485; “Lex Talinas” 485; “Oncomouse (R) DuPont” 485; The Ship 483–86; “Sky Writing” 484 “Death Of An Elder Statesman” (McComb) 209 Deckchair Theatre 510, 519, 520, 525 “Deconstructing the Rainbow Warrior” (Stead) 364 “Defender” (Winton) 477, 479 Defoe, Daniel 454 “Delegate, The” (Porter) 242, 244 Deleuze, Gilles, & Félix Guattari 22, 108, 152, 299 Dennis, C.J. 86 “Denouement” (McComb) 213 Derrida, Jacques 42, 364, 472, 473, 474, 476

550 Descartes, René 205 Devine, Miranda (Australian columnist) 475

Dharker, Imtiaz 133 “Dialogue Between the Soul and Body, A” (Marvell) 422 Dibble, Brian 140 Dickens, Charles 291 Dickinson, Emily 80, 403, 413, 447 “Different Voice, The” (Frieda Hughes) 488

DiPalma, Ray 414 “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap” (AC/DC) 502 “Disaster, A” (Donaghy) 451, 453 “Discourse in Optics, A” (Donaghy) 455 Dobrez, Patricia 36, 185, 187, 189 Dobson, Rosemary 39, 98, 126 “Dog at Fifty” (Brooks) 169 “Doll’s House” (Porter) 269 Dona Juanita – and the Love of Boys (Everall) 466–68 Donaghy, Michael 449–57; “Auto da Fe” 453; Conjure 456; “A Disaster” 451, 453; “A Discourse in Optics” 455; Errata 450, 453, 454; “Exile’s End” 457; “Irish Folk Music” 450; “O’Ryan’s Belt” 450, 454, 455, 456; “Occam’s Razor” 450; “The Pond” 456; “Ramon Fernandez” 453; “The River Glideth Of His Own Sweet Will 456; Safest 449–57; “Seven Poems from the Welsh” 451; The Shape of the Dance 450, 455; Shibboleth 450, 451, 454; “Two Spells for Sleeping” 457; “Wallflowers” 455 Donatello 268 Donka: A Letter to Chekhov (Finzi Pasca) 524–25

SPATIAL RELATIONS

a

Donne, John 47, 146, 321, 438, 440, 450, 490; “The Flea” 212, 213; “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” 322

Donnelly, Kevin 473 Dorn, Ed 391 Dougan, Lesley 141 Dove, Rita 353, 357 Down Where Changed (Prynne) 394 Dragons in their Pleasant Palaces (Porter) 266 Dransfield, Elspeth 189 Dransfield, Michael 35, 36, 39, 40, 41, 46, 76, 166, 181–89, 205, 297, 469, 494; “Bum’s Rush” 36; Courland Penders poems 36, 182, 184, 187, 297; Drug Poems 36, 186, 189; “Endsight” 41, 46, 188; “Fix” 76; Memoirs of a Velvet Urinal 189; “Pas de deux for lovers” 183; The Second Month of Spring 184, 189, 494; Voyage into Solitude 184, 189 Dream Songs (Berryman) 48 “Dreamtime” (Fogarty) 196, 199 Drewe, Robert 141 Driving Too Fast (Dorothy Porter) 36 Drug Poems (Dransfield) 36, 186, 189 Druxe, Helga 535 Dryden, John 248, 262, 273, 326, 356 Dubourg, Bernard 391 Duchess of Malfi, The (Webster) 528 “Duetting with Dorothea” (Porter) 273 Duggan, Laurie 40, 42, 49 Duke, Jas H. 98 Dumas, Alexandre 463 Duncan, Robert 26, 46, 163, 165, 166, 416

Dunlop, Eliza Hamilton 93; “The Aboriginal Father” 83; “The Aboriginal Mother” 83

a

551

Onomastic Index

Durcan, Paul 425, 426, 427; Greetings to Our Friends in Brazil 425, 426 “Dust” (Stow) 303 Dutton, Geoffrey 299, 312 Dylan, Bob 11 “Early afternoon” (Rooksby) 144 East Anglia 286, 287 Eclipse (Sykes) 51, 53 Ee Tiang Hong 380 “Efire” (Stow) 305 Eight Songs for a Mad King (Davies, libretto by Stow) 291 Eighth Habitation: New Poems (Aitken) 464–66 El Dorado (Dorothy Porter) 36 Elder, Bruce, Blood on the Wattle 480 “Elegy Against the Massacre at the Amish School in West Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, Autumn 2006” (Susan Stewart) 448 Eliot, T.S. 10, 11, 89, 178, 179, 187, 199, 361, 365, 449, 470; “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” 407; The Waste Land 311 Ellenbogen, George 431–37; “Approaching a Photographic Exhibition of Bodies Suspended from Trees” 435; “At the Jewish Cemetery in Gora Kalvaria” 432; “The Mad Pianist” 432; Morning Gothic: New and Selected Poems 431–37; “The Rhino Gate” 432–34; “Some Recollections of the Last ORT Classes in the Warsaw Ghetto” 432; “Sunset – Trafalgar Square” 436; “Worlds of Helene Leneveu” 432 Ellendale Pool 311, 312 Empson, William 450, 531 “Empty Room, The” (Haskell) 469

Empty Texas (Minter) 439 “End of Poetry, Again, The” (Brooks) 168

“Endsight” (Dransfield) 41, 46, 188 “Endymion” (Stow) 305, 319 English Subtitles (Porter) 242 “Enkidu” (Stow) 305 Enoch, Wesley (theatre director) 523 Enright, D.J. 535 Eora people 91 Equipage (publisher) 392 Equus (Shaffer) 507–508 Ern Malley hoax 11, 12, 28, 40, 55, 75, 86, 98, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 183 Errata (Donaghy) 450, 453, 454 Eschatologies (Kinsella) 132 Ethnic Radio (Murray) 42 Eureka Stockade 93, 254 Euripides 540 Eusden, Laurence 356 Evans, Walker 152 Everall, Gabrielle (Gabbie) 98, 466, 468; Dona Juanita – and the Love of Boys 466–68 Excavation (Gig Ryan) 495–97 “Excavation Excavation” (Gig Ryan) 497

“Exequy, An” (Porter) 244, 269 “Exile’s End” (Donaghy) 457 “Extinct Birds” (Wright) 337 “Fable” (Aitken) 62 “Faces in the Street” (Brooks) 33 Fagan, Kate 25, 89, 492–94; “Concrete Poem” 493; “The Correspondence” 493; First Light 492–94; “The Octet Rule” 494 Fahey, Diane 47 Faléro, Luis Riccardo 535

552 “Fall Ever Onward” (McComb) 210 Fallon, Kathleen Mary, Working Hot 467

Famous Reporter, The (journal) 56 Fanoy, Jeltje, “Colonialism” 383 “Farewell Reverberated Vault of Detentions” (Fogarty) 74 Farrell, Michael 31 Fast Forward (Porter) 242 Faustus, Doctor 530–35 Fellowship of Australian Writers 138, 139

Fellowship of Writers, W.A. 123 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence 410 “Field of Mars as a Meadow, The” (Susan Stewart) 444 Field, Barron 25, 38, 91; “The Kangaroo” 77, 79, 182 Finnegans Wake (Joyce) 275 Finza Pasca, Daniele, Donka: A Letter to Chekhov 524–25 Fire Lizard (Prynne) 393 First Fleet 91, 334, 461, 462 First Light (Fagan) 492–94 Fitzgerald, Robert 73 “Five Bells” (Slessor) 75 Five Islands Press 55, 127 Five Poems (Brooks) 167 “Fix” (Dransfield) 76 “Flea, The” (Donne) 212, 213 Floupette, Adoré 176, 178, 180, 181 “Flowers” (Haskell) 472 “Fog” (Winton) 479 Fogarty, Lionel 7, 15, 17, 18, 35, 44, 56, 59, 66, 74, 85, 97, 106, 127, 130, 190–200, 225, 236, 241, 344, 379; “A Vera Take a Ride” 194; “Dreamtime” 196, 199; “Farewell Reverberated Vault of Detentions” 74; “Joowindoo Goonduhmu” 195; “A

SPATIAL RELATIONS

a

Lie” 379; “Quick Sing (Translation)” 195; “Remember Something Like This” 191; “Scenic Wonders – We Nulla Fellas” 196, 198 Folio (publisher) 395 Fonda, Peter 41 “For a Fatherless Son” (Plath) 134 “For a Pastoral Family” (Wright) 21, 332 “For Jim 1947–1986” (Zwicky) 501 For the Monogram (Prynne) 392, 394 For the Term of his Natural Life (Clarke) 83

Forbes, John 24, 27, 31, 40, 42, 43, 46, 49, 50, 57, 61, 66, 69, 76, 88, 89, 126, 129, 136, 137, 146, 211, 226, 497 Formalism 55, 416 “Former Age, The” (Susan Stewart) 447 Forrest–Thompson, Veronica 251 Foucault, Michel 116, 117 “Four Poems from America” (Zwicky) 500

Franklin, Miles 7 Fraser, Hilary 122 Fremantle Arts Centre Press 48, 55, 127, 138, 142, 289, 395 Fremantle, as base for poetry publishing 143; theatre activity in 510, 513, 519–21, 525 Freud, Sigmund 11, 291, 296, 415, 420, 438, 507 From the Neanderthal (Thorpe) 425 “From the Neanderthal” (Thorpe) 426 “From The Testament of Tourmaline: Variations on Themes of the Tao Teh Ching” (Stow) 293 From Woman to Man (Wright) 332 Frost, Robert 48, 165, 407 Futurism (Italian / Russian) 11, 125, 413, 414

a

Onomastic Index

“GA873: The meaning of Meaning” (Haskell) 469 Gallagher, Katherine 48 Gallipoli 86, 99 “Games for Children” (Susan Stewart) 445

Garrison, Deborah, A Working Girl Can’t Win 425, 427 Gellert, Leon 11, 86, 96, 183 Gemes, Juno (photographer) 151, 152, 153, 154, 156, 157, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166 Generation of ’68 24, 28, 39, 40, 46, 51, 54, 55, 67, 81, 88, 177, 185 Generations of Men, The (Wright) 20 Genre (Kinsella) 376 Geraldton (WA) 19, 239, 278, 281, 282, 283, 285, 286, 287, 290, 297, 298, 303, 310, 320, 321, 348, 475, 502 “Ghost at Anlaby, The” (Stow) 312 Ghost Names Sing, The (Haskell) 468– 72

“Gifted Children” (McComb) 211 Gilbert, Kevin 16, 20, 44, 97, 157, 236, 239

Gillam, Kevin 124 Gilmore, Mary 94 Ginsberg, Allen 11, 411, 419 Girl Green as Elderflower, The (Stow) 288, 291, 295, 296 Gizzi, Peter 439, 440, 441; “Beginning With a Phrase from Simone Weil” 439; “Imitation of Life: A Memoir” 440; “Local Forecast” 441; Some Values of Landscape and Weather 439

Glover, John 266; “A View of The Artist’s House and Garden, in Mills Plain, Van Diemen’s Land” 129 Go-Betweens (Brisbane band) 218

553 Goethe, Wolfgang Wolfgang von 533– 35, 540 Golden Legend 530 Goldsworthy, Peter 50 “Good Evening Dear Miss Alach” (McComb) 214 Gordon, Adam Lindsay 38, 81, 82, 83, 182, 297, 321 Gorman, Sean 519 Gounod, Charles 535 Graduate, The (Webb/Johnson) 516–17 Grant, Don 140 Grant, Jamie 46 “Grassfire Stanzas, The” (Murray) 22 Gray, Robert 34, 40, 46, 50, 53, 65, 67, 76, 126, 137, 253 Great Southern Land: A New History of Australia (Welsh) 480–83 “Great Thing About a Hypothetical Self, The” (Quinton) 124 Greenhouse (Hewett) 48 Greenough Flats 298 Greetings to Our Friends in Brazil (Durcan) 425, 426 Griffith, D.W., Birth of a Nation 314 Grono, William 122, 140, 290 Ground Zero 474 Group, The 242, 248 Groves, Denise 119 “Guardians” (Rooksby) 144 “Gulliver” (Plath) 134 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift) 134 Hagemann, Helen 124 Haight Ashbury 223 Hall, Donald 28, 88, 205 Hall, Rodney 35, 51, 151, 184, 189 Hampton, Susan, & Kate Llewellyn 236 Hanson, Pauline 136, 380 “Hardy, 1913” (Porter) 266

554 Hardy, Emma 261 Hardy, Thomas 248, 253, 261, 262, 265, 266, 299 Harford, Lesbia 11, 96, 183 Harlem Renaissance 423 Harpur, Charles 21, 23, 38, 68, 79, 81, 95; “The Creek of the Four Graves” 80

Harris, Max 11, 98, 175, 177, 179, 180 —See also: Angry Penguins; Ern Malley hoax Harrison, Tony, Laureate’s Block 354 Harry, J.S. 24, 35, 40, 57, 126 Harryman, Carla 414 Hart, Kevin 26, 46, 47, 51, 65, 126, 137, 419

Hartley, George 412, 413, 415, 416, 417 Harwood, Gwen 35, 37, 39, 40, 44, 47, 66, 98, 126, 137, 174, 177, 440; “Barn Owl” 47; Collected Poems, 1943–1995 37; “In The Park” 47 Hashmi, Alamgir 384–88; America Is a Punjabi Word 386; “America is a Punjabi Word” 386; “Bahawalpurlog: In Seven Parts” 387; “Captain Kirk in Karachi” 386; “Islamabad 1988” 385; My Second in Kentucky 386; Neither This Time / Nor That Place 386; The Ramazan Libation 384, 388; “The Refugee Girl Makes Good” 386; “Snow” 387; This Time in Lahore: New Poems 386; “24” 386 Haskell, Dennis 33, 34, 51, 122, 140, 385, 468–72; “As You Are, As We Are” 471; “At Greenwood, a Meditation” 33, 34; “Chilliholicism” 469; “The Empty Room” 469; “Flowers” 472; “GA873: The meaning of Meaning” 469; The Ghost Names Sing

SPATIAL RELATIONS

a

468–72; “The Mighty Wests” 470; “Reality’s Crow” 469; “Romanticism in the 1990s” 470, 471 Hassall, Anthony 280, 291, 302, 303, 305, 306, 315, 316, 318, 319, 321 Hasselmark, Nils–dke 350 Haunted Land, A (Stow) 281, 288, 312 Hawkesbury River area 26, 46, 49, 151, 152, 157, 158, 161, 162, 166 Heaney, Seamus 270, 354, 359, 407 Heart of Darkness (Conrad) 280, 433 HeartStones: New and Selected Poems (Ray) 427–30 Heat (journal) 52, 56, 68 “Heavenly Doctor, The” (Hummer) 417 Heidegger, Martin 391, 394 Heidelberg School (painters) 81, 129 Hejinian, Lyn 89, 137, 414 “heliography” (Mitchell, S-P) 146 “Hell’s Bells” (AC/DC) 501 Heloise and Abelard, in Harwood’s poetry 37 Hemensley, Kris 416 Henderson, Alice Corbin 408 Her Book (Jo Shapcott) 401 Her Weasels Wild Returning (Prynne) 394

Herbert, George 47, 440 Herbert, Xavier, Poor Fellow My Country; Under Capricornia 230 Hernani (Hugo) 247 Heseltine, Harry 78, 80 Hesiod 127, 219 Hetherington, Paul 142 Hewett, Dorothy 28, 29, 30, 48, 65, 69, 81, 82, 98, 126, 137, 140, 141, 201– 203, 297, 490, 540; Bobbin Up 30; “Clancy and Dooley and Don McLeod” 201; Greenhouse 48; “In Midland Where the Trains Go By”

a

555

Onomastic Index

30; “ Inheritance” 203; “On Moncur Street” 30; Rapunzel in Suburbia 30, 48 Heyward, Michael 5, 6, 180, 181

Heywood, Robert (maternal grandfather of John Kinsella) 540 Heywood, Thomas 540 Highway to Hell (AC/DC) 502 Hill, Fidelia (Fidelia Munkhouse) 91 Hill, Geoffrey 262, 425 Hindmarsh Island affair 481 “His Father’s Voice” (McComb) 209 Hitchcock, Alfred 212 Hobsbaum, Philip 242 Hodge, Bob, & Vijay Mishra, Dark Side of the Dream (Hodge & Mishra) 21, 84, 118, 278 Hodgins, Philip 66, 76, 129 Hodgman, Roger (theatre director) 515 Hölderlin, Friedrich 80, 210, 275 Holland, Peter 289 “Home Care” (Zwicky) 498 “Homecoming” (Dawe) 86 Homer 127, 248, 425, 495, 531, 533, 540

Honey Spot (Jack Davis) 514–15 Hongo, Garrett 417 Hooton, Harry 35, 70, 73, 183; “Words” 81

Hope, A.D. 35, 38, 41, 73, 97, 137, 179, 204; “Australia” 130, 207 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 47, 83, 328, 450

Hopkins, Lightnin’ 422 “Hoplite’s Helmet, A” (Porter) 266, 267 Horace 248 House of Vitriol, The (Rose) 50 “How the Eureka Stockade Led to Boggo Road Gaol” (Porter) 254 Howard, John 235, 473 Howarth, R.G. 81

Howe, George 79 Howe, Susan 412, 414 “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” (Pound) 450 Hughes, Frieda 486–89; “The Different Voice” 488; “Kookaburra” 487; “Laszlo” 487; “The Reader” 488; Wooroloo 486–89 Hughes, Langston 411, 422 Hughes, Ted 262, 356; “View of a Pig” 134

Hugo, Victor, Hernani 247 Hull, Coral 34, 35, 51, 54, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 137; “In Brewarrina Nothing Is Sacred” 58; “Liverpool” 60, 61; “Pornography” 58; “Praying Mantis” 58; “Separation Landscape” 60; “Sharpies” 60; “Toys” 60; William’s Mongrels in the Wild Life 51, 54, 60; “The Zoo Ark” 35 Hulse, Michael 348 Human Pattern, A (Wright) 337 Hummer, T.R. 417–24; “The Antichrist in Arkansas” 423; “The, Heavenly Doctor” 417; “Made-for-TV Movie” 421; Walt Whitman in Hell: Poems 417–424; “Walt Whitman in Hell” 418

Huysmans, J.–K., À Rebours 485 “Hymn to Apollo” (Callimachus) 146 “I Don’t Handle Poisons” (McComb) 210

“I Love You Red Dust” (McComb) 212 “If” (Lane) 371 Iliad (Homer) 250, 531, 533 Imago (journal) 56 “Imitation of Life: A Memoir” (Gizzi) 440

“In a Station of the Metro” (Pound) 407 “In Brewarrina Nothing Is Sacred” (Hull) 58

556 “In Memory, Vincent Buckley 1925– 1988” (Zwicky) 501 “In Midland Where the Trains Go By” (Hewett) 30 In One House (Aitken) 51, 53, 54, 61 “In Praise of Hotels” (McComb) 212 “In The Park” (Harwood) 47 “In the Western World” (Susan Stewart) 448

“Inaugural Speech at the Announcement of the Successful Cloning of the Thylacinus Cynocephalus” (Day) 485 “Incense” (Beveridge) 53 “Indochine” (Aitken) 62 Indyk, Ivor 52 “Infinite Anthology” (Murray) 222 “Inheritance” (Hewett) 203 “Inn of the Sixth Happiness, The” (Aitken) 62 Interactive Geographies Project 350 Into the Day (Prynne) 393 Irish Folk Music” (Donaghy) 450 Isaac Babel’s Fiddle (Zwicky) 498 “Ishmael” (Stow) 305, 306, 310, 319 “Islamabad 1988” (Hashmi) 385 Island (journal) 56, 68 Island Press 167 “It Follows” (Lilley) 491 Jacket (journal) 18, 68, 137, 346 “Jailbreak” (AC/DC) 504 James, Clive 269 Jameson, Fredric 421, 424 Jannings, Emil 535 Jeffers, Robinson 375, 376 Jefferson, Thomas 280 Jencks, Charles 473, 474 Jenkins, Wendy 44, 70 Jennings, Kate 43, 126 Jindyworobaks 15, 82, 86, 88, 98, 130, 182, 194, 300

SPATIAL RELATIONS

a

Johnson, Brian (AC/DC) 502, 503 Johnson, Terry, adapt. The Graduate (Charles Webb) 516 Jones, Inigo 539 Jones, Jill 47 Jones, John Henry 531 Jonson, Ben 539 “Joowindoo Goonduhmu” (Fogarty) 195 Josephi, Beate 295 Joyce, James 359; Finnegans Wake 275 Jung, Carl Gustav 313 “Just Living” (Lane) 375 Kaddish (Zwicky) 498 Kalgoorlie 278 “Kangaroo, The” (Field) 77, 79, 182 Kapetas, Jan Teagle 140 Kaufmann, Walter 534 Kayang & me (Scott) 16 Kearney, Desmonda; “The Weighing of the Heart” 124 Keating, Paul 481 Keats, John 11, 51, 76, 337, 401, 470, 471, 472, 495; “Ode to a Nightingale” 38 Kefala, Antigone; “The Wanderer” 382 Kelly, Ned 482 Kendall, Henry 14, 68, 81, 95, 128; “Bell Birds” 38 Kent, Jean 44 Kenyon Review (journal) 349 Kermode, Frank 137 Kerouac, Jack, On the Road (Kerouac) 187

Kerr, John (Governor-General) 481 Kerry, Gordon 534 Khlebnikov, Velimir, & Alexei Kruchonykh 414 Kimberley, the (WA) 81, 278 “King of the Hill” (Susan Stewart) 445 Kingsbury Tales (Ouyang Yu) 224–29

a

557

Onomastic Index

Kinnell, Galway 170, 171 Kinsella, John, “Area 51” 376; Crop Circles 538, 539; Comus 541–44; Eschatologies 132; Genre 376; “Lilith Considers Two Who Have Died Young” 132; Paydirt 539–41; Smith Street 539; Visitants 376, 538–41; The Wasps 539 Kipling, Rudyard 272 “Kipling Donkeys, The” (Porter) 272 Kirby, John 499 Kitchen Poems (Prynne) 393 Klein, Noa Logan 317 Kneale, Nick 396, 398 “Kookaburra” (Frieda Hughes) 487 Koori people 56, 157, 159, 166, 509 Kornberger, Horst, “Outback” 124 Kornberger, Jennifer 124 Kosovel, SÌecko 173 Krakouer! (Cribb/Gorman) 519–20 Kristeva, Julia 415 Kroll, Jeri 383 La Fontaine, Jean de 326 LaBute, Neil, The Shape of Things 511– 12

Lacan, Jacques 507 “Lady Lazarus” (Plath) 132 Ladylike (Lilley) 490 “Lalai (Dreamtime)” (tr. Murray) 77 “Lancelin” (McComb) 209 “Land’s Meaning, The” (Stow) 286, 301, 302, 303 Landbridge (anthology) 13, 65, 138 Lane, Patrick 366–76; “If” 371; “Just Living” 375; “The War” 371, 372; “Weeds” 372; “Winter 13” 375; “Winter 15” 375; “Winter 20” 374; “Winter 33” 368; “Winter” 367, 374

Lane, William 94

Language of Oysters, The (Adamson) 151, 152, 154, 159, 164, 165, 166 L A N G U A G E poets 13, 40, 46, 49, 55, 69, 70, 89, 125, 263, 344, 376, 412– 17, 439, 456, 473, 491; in Australia 416

Lao Tz× 293, 294, 295, 303 Larkin, Philip 137 “Last of England, The” (Porter) 247, 269

“Last Words” (Porter) 271 “Laszlo” (Frieda Hughes) 487 “Late sonata” (Bolleter) 124 Laureate’s Block (Harrison) 354 Lawlor, Adrian, & Alister Kershaw 180 Lawrence, Anthony 45, 57 Lawrence, D.H. 408 Lawrence, Peter (theatre director) 516 Lawson, Henry 7, 23, 33, 82, 85, 95, 129; “Faces in the Street” 32 Layton, Irving 376 Leggott, Michelle 350 Lehmann, Geoffrey 37, 40, 46, 53, 67, 76, 126, 497 Lenau, Nikolaus 534 “Let Me Put My Love Into You” (AC/DC) 503 Let Their Be Rock (AC/DC) 504 Lever, Susan 127 Leves, Kerry 294 “Lex Talinas” (Day) 485 Li Po 320, 498 Library of Congress 354, 356 “Lie, A” (Fogarty) 379 Life Studies (Lowell) 48 “Lilith Considers Two Who Have Died Young” (Kinsella) 132 Lilley, Kate 489–91; “It Follows” 491; Ladylike 490; Versary 490 Lilly, Ruth 410 Lindsay, Vachel 410

558 Lisle, Leconte de 307 Liszt, Franz 534 “Little Red Riding Hood” (Walwicz) 78 Little River (Quinton) 146 “Liverpool” (Hull) 60, 61 Living in a Calm Country (Porter) 246, 266

“Living in the World” (Brooks) 167, 169 Llewellyn, Kate, & Susan Hampton 127 Loanwords (Mateer) 16 “Local Forecast” (Gizzi) 441 Loney, Craig 378 “Lookout, The” (Quinton) 148 “Lord Arnaldos” (Anon.) 308 Lord of the Rings (Tolkien) 475 Love of Will (McComb) 215 “Love’s Pillage” (Gig Ryan) 496 “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The” (Eliot) 407 “Lovers Against The City” (McComb) 212

Lowell, Amy 409 Lowell, Robert 133, 145, 203, 376; Life Studies (Lowell) 48 Loy, Mina 11 Lucy, Niall, Pomo Oz: Fear and Loathing Downunder 472–76 Luhrmann, Baz 473 Luminais, Évariste–Vital 176 Lynch, David 213, 520 Mabo decision 109, 379 Macdonald, Allan (Alsy) 215 MacEwen, Gwendolyn, “Dark Pines Under Water” 375 Machiavelli, Niccolò, The Prince 378 Mackenzie, Kenneth Seaforth 297 “Mad Pianist, The” (Ellenbogen) 432 Maddox–Brown, Ford 247 “Made-for-TV Movie” (Hummer) 421 Magic Mirror Theatre 132

SPATIAL RELATIONS

a

“Magic Toyshop, The” (Carter) 131 Magritte, René 431 Mahabharata 465 Mahon, Derek 270 Maiden, Jennifer 24, 35, 40, 86, 126; “Anorexia” 76 Makar Press 54 Malcolm, Noel 178 Mallarmé, Stéphane 26, 87, 89, 163, 165, 166, 176, 178, 180 Malley, Ern —See: Ern Malley hoax Malory, Thomas 344 Malouf, David 269, 270 Mandelshtam, Osip 204 Mangrove Creek 1951 (Poignant) 152 Mann, Chris 49 Mann, Thomas 535 “Map of Cambodia, A” (Aitken) 465 Marlowe, Christopher 532, 533, 534, 540

Martial 269 Marvell, Andrew, “A Dialogue Between the Soul and Body” 422 Marx, Karl 414, 415, 417 “Masks” (Stow) 291, 305, 306, 316, 318, 319 Masters, Edgar Lee 410 Mateer, John 15, 16, 51, 53, 105; Anachronism 51, 53; Loanwords 16 Maurice, Furnley, “to a telegraph pole” 80

Max is Missing (Porter) 270, 271, 272, 273

“Max is Missing” (Porter) 269 “May” (Neilson) 75 Mayenburg, Marius von, The Ugly One 527

McArthur, Helen 299 McAuley, James 11, 38, 82, 98, 122, 175, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181

a

559

Onomastic Index

McCaffery, Steve 414, 415, 416 McCauley, Shane, Roland Leach & Donna Ward 140 McComb, David 203–18; “Bad Back, Bad Heart” 209; “Beautiful Era” 213; Beautiful Waste 203, 217; “Beautiful Waste” 217; “Behind the Garages of this Country” 207; “Blessed Be” 209; “Withdrawal” 212; “Death Of An Elder Statesman” 209; “Denouement” 213; “Fall Ever Onward” 210; “Gifted Children”; “Good Evening Dear Miss Alach” 214; “His Father’s Voice” 209; “I Don’t Handle Poisons” 210; “I Love You Red Dust” 212; “In Praise of Hotels” 212; “Lancelin” 209; Love of Will 215; “Lovers Against The City” 212; “The Mistake of Returning” 208; “Nocturne vs. the Girl with the Faulty Pleasure Instinct” 207; “Ocean Beach Hotel”; “Ode to January 1989” 211; “Pavement on the First Day of Summer” 207; “Prayer for One” 206; “Return to the Sea” 208; “Romantic Lunch in Karrakatta Cemetery” 211; “Sides of a Pit (Woman Sleeping)” 205; “South by South-West” 212; “to M Y D A R L I N G P I G , impaled on love” 206; “The Wrong Side of the Bed” 210

McComb, Rob 214 McCooey, David 89 McCredden, Lyn 136 McKinney, Jack 336, 337 McLennan, Grant (musician) 218 McMaster, Rhyll 69, 129 Mead, Philip 13, 18, 20, 55, 78, 88, 126, 191

Meanjin (journal) 40, 56, 68, 290, 416 Melanchthon, Philip 534 Melbourne Museum, and display of Phar Lap 244 Melbourne, and literary activity in nineteenth century 13; as subject in Ouyang Yu 229; base of David McComb 215; conservatism of 49; cultural diversity of 382; literary activity in 49; poetry activity in 31; writing base of Ouyang Yu 10, 225 —See also: Sydney–Melbourne axis Melbourne-based poets 49, 50, 87, 416 Melincourt (Peacock) 271 Mellor, Aubrey (theatre director) 538 Melville, Herman 423 Memoirs of a Velvet Urinal (Dransfield) 189

Mengham, Rod 391–94 Meredith, George, “Modern Love” 96 Merrill, Miles 98 Merry-go-round” (Stow) 290, 320, 322 Merry-Go-Round in the Sea, The (Stow) 287, 310, 321, 322 “Meshing Bends in The Light” (Adamson) 155 Messerli, Douglas 414 “Metempsychosis” (Slessor) 469 “Metho Drinker” (Wright) 38, 336 “Method” (Gig Ryan) 496 Mi¶osz, Czes¶aw, Bells in Winter 173 Midnite (Stow) 296, 300 “Mighty Wests, The” (Haskell) 470 Miles Franklin Award 7 Millar, Damien, The Modern International Dead 525 Millay, Edna St Vincent 407 Milroy, David, Waltzing the Wilarra 523–24

560 Milton, John 373, 485, 489, 539; Comus 534, 541–44; “When I Consider How My Light is Spent” 38

Minter, Peter 25, 52, 55, 66, 70, 89, 98, 137, 279, 493; Empty Texas 439 Miss Donnithorne’s Maggot (Davies, libretto by Stow) 291 “Mistake of Returning, The” (McComb) 208

Mitchell, Adam (theatre director) 511, 512

Mitchell, Scott–Patrick 142, 143, 144, 145; “heliography” 146; {where n equals} a determinacy of poetry 144 Modell, Lisette 154 Modern International Dead, The (Millar) 525

“Modern Love” (Meredith) 96 Modotti, Tina 154 Mok (journal) 41 Monkey’s Mask, The (Dorothy Porter) 36, 50 “Monroe Survey, The” (Murray) 224 Monroe, Harriet 224, 407, 408, 409, 410, 411 —See also: Poetry (Chicago) “Montebellos” (Stow) 290 Moore, Marianne 407 Moréas, Jean 176 Morning Gothic: New and Selected Poems (Ellenbogen) 431–37 “Morning Song of Lord Zero, The” (Aiken) 419 Morrison, Blake 241 Morrison, Kyle J. (theatre director) 514, 522–23 “Mort aux Chats” (Porter) 260 Mother’s Tongue (Bell–Wykes) 522–23 Motion, Andrew 353 Mouhot, Henri 465

SPATIAL RELATIONS

a

Movement, The 248, 259, 262 Mudrooroo 17, 44, 69, 74, 85 Mulvany, Kate, The Danger Age 510–11 Munkhouse, Fidelia —See: Fidelia Hill 91 Murnau, F.W. 535 Murray, Les 13, 22, 23, 24, 27, 39, 40, 42, 43, 44, 46, 49, 55, 65, 67, 68, 69, 71, 72, 73, 75, 77, 86, 88, 99, 115, 116, 121, 126, 128, 129, 135, 137, 146, 162, 217, 218–24, 246, 248, 270, 354, 515; “The Boeotian Count” 72; “Bulahdelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle” 42; Ethnic Radio 42; “The 41st Year of 1968” 223; “The Grassfire Stanzas” 22; “Infinite Anthology” 222; “Lalai (Dreamtime)” (tr. Murray) 77; “The Monroe Survey” 224; “Refusing Saul’s Armour” 223; Subhuman Redneck Poems 219, 221, 222; Taller When Prone: Poems 222, 223; “Thinking About Aboriginal Land Rights, I Visit the Farm I Will Not Inherit” 115; “The Tin Wash Dish” 223; Translations from The Natural World 221; The Vernacular Republic 42, 220; “Walking to the Cattle Place” 220; “WaterGardening in an Old Farm Dam” 221 —See also: Boeotian / Athenian binary Murri people 15, 18, 56, 66, 74, 85, 190, 191, 193, 195, 197, 198, 200, 241, 344, 379 “Musée des Beaux Arts” (Auden) 210 Musselwhite, David E. 299 “My Fishing Boat” (Adamson) 163 “my mother’s garden” (Susan Stewart) 446

My Second in Kentucky (Hashmi) 386 “My Sister and M.S.” (Stead) 366

a

561

Onomastic Index

“Naked Girl and Mirror” (Wright) 335 Namatjira, Albert 81 “Napoleon” (Gig Ryan) 496 Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, The (Poe) 483 Ned Kelly 244 Neilson, Shaw 21, 38, 75, 95; “Crane” 75; “May” 75; “The Orange Tree” 38, 75; “Schoolgirls Hastening” 75; “To the Red Lory” 75 Neither This Time / Nor That Place (Hashmi) 386 Neruda, Pablo 376 New Guinea 103, 176, 177, 181, 279, 281, 288, 322 New Hebrides 311 New Poetry (journal and movement in Australia) 25, 30, 40, 54, 348 New South Wales 49, 91, 94, 95, 162, 187, 219, 223, 247, 264, 330, 382 New York School 12, 25, 26, 40, 50, 90 New Zealand 357, 363 —See: James K. Baxter; Michelle Leggott; C.K. Stead; Robert Sullivan; Hone Tuwhare; Albert Wendt Ngarrindjeri people 482 Night Parrot (Dorothy Porter) 36 Night Square, A (Prynne) 393 “No River, No Death” (Adamson) 160 “Nocturne vs. the Girl with the Faulty Pleasure Instinct” (McComb) 207 Nolan, Sidney 81, 290, 301, 302, 303, 305, 309 Norfolk Island 92 “Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction” (Stevens) 329 Notley, Alice 350 Not-You (Prynne) 394 Nowlan, Alden 373 Nullarbor 165, 361, 363, 480

“Nu-Plastik Fanfare Red” (Rodriguez) 78

Nyungar people and language 16, 97, 115, 116, 118, 352, 519 O’Brien, Sean 262, 263, 264, 265, 269, 270, 274, 276, 277, 449, 451 O’Dowd, Bernard 284 O’Hara, Frank 40, 394 “O’Ryan’s Belt” (Donaghy) 450, 454, 455, 456 “Occam’s Razor” (Donaghy) 450 “Ocean Beach Hotel” (McComb) 211 “Ockers” (S O) 381 “Octet Rule, The” (Fagan) 494 “Ode to a Nightingale” (Keats) 38 “Ode to January 1989” (McComb) 211 Odes (Robinson) 92 Odyssey (Homer) 540 Ohio, central, and Kinsella 193, 276, 540

“Old Prison, The” (Wright) 331, 332 Olson, Charles 46, 151, 163, 391, 394, 413, 416, 453 “On a Favourite Cat” (Stow) 289 “On A Fifteenth-Century Flemish Angel” (Ray) 430 “On First Looking into Chapman’s Hesiod” (Porter) 72, 88, 219, 269 “On first looking into Fairfax’s Herald” (Gig Ryan) 495 “On Moncur Street” (Hewett) 30 “On Northern Downs” (Stow) 304 “On Receiving from England a Bunch of Dried Wild Flowers” (Brockman) 84 On the Road (Kerouac) 187 “On This Day I Complete My Fortieth Year” (Porter) 269 Once Bitten, Twice Bitten (Porter) 242 “Oncomouse (R) DuPont” (Day) 485

562 “One Hundred and Fifty Years” (Davis) 17

Oodgeroo Noonuccal (Kath Walker) 17, 20, 44, 83, 97, 236, 334 “Orange Tree, The” (Neilson) 38, 75 “Orlando’s Parrot” (Porter) 273 Otherland (poetry journal) 10, 230, 231, 235, 380 Oulipo group 27 “Out of this World” (Zwicky) 498 “Outback” (Horst Kornberger) 124 Outrider: Poems 1956–1962 (Stow) 279, 281, 282, 296, 298, 301, 302, 303, 305, 307, 308, 309, 310, 318, 319 “Outrider” (Stow) 296, 318 Ouyang Yu 9, 10, 83, 90, 100, 101, 102, 105, 224–36, 380; Kingsbury Tales 224–29; “Two Bulletin tales” 228 Overland (journal) 68 Owen, Wilfred 11, 96 Page, Geoff 35, 50, 133 Pakistan 384 —See: Alamgir Hashmi Pang, Alvin 9, 103–107 “Panther, The” (Rilke) 210 Papertalk–Green, Charmaine 19, 236– 41, 278; “Wanna Be White” 74 Papua 103, 279 Parabolas: Prose Poems (Taylor) 327 Paris Review (journal) 348 “Paris” (Stead) 363 Parisi, Joseph 408, 409, 410 Parker, Dorothy 203, 210 Paroles (Prévert) 173 “Pas de deux for lovers” (Dransfield) 183

Patchen, Kenneth 410 “Pater Noster” (Brooks) 172 Paterson, A.B. ‘Banjo’ 23, 38, 82, 85, 129, 146, 336

SPATIAL RELATIONS

a

Paterson, Don 264, 265, 270 “Patterns” (Wright) 337 Pavelin, Joanna, “That Girl Was Me” 397

“Pavement on the First Day of Summer” (McComb) 207 “Pavlova’s Physics” (Jo Shapcott) 400, 401

Paydirt (Kinsella) 539–41 Peacock, Thomas Love, Melincourt 271 “Pear” (Susan Stewart) 441 “Penelope” (Gig Ryan) 495–96 “Penelope” (Stow) 305 “Penelope Spins” (Zwicky) 500 People’s Otherworld, The (Murray) 99 Peppermint Grove 217 Perry, Grace 98 “Persephone” (Stow) 305, 309, 316, 317, 319 Perth Theatre Company 507, 508, 517, 518, 527 Perth, as birthplace of Kinsella and David McComb 205; as writing base of Dorothy Hewett 29; childhood of Kinsella in 348; death of David McComb in 215; early writing activity of Randolph Stow in 281; education of Randoph Stow in 285; friends of Randolph Stow in 299; in stories of Tim Winton 479; in work of James Quinton 147; influence of on creativity of David McComb 205, 211, 217; location of Kinsella’s family 398; music culture in 216, 217; poetic activity in 429; referred to by Dennis Haskell 33; setting of Paydirt 539–40; student activism in 228; theatre activity in 132, 507–509, 511–13, 514–17, 522–24, 527–28 Peyre, Henri 165 Phantom Dwelling (Wright) 20, 21, 337

a

563

Onomastic Index

Phar Lap 244 “Phar Lap in the Melbourne Museum” (Porter) 244, 269 “Phasing Out The Mangroves” (Adamson) 161 Phillip, Governor Arthur 91, 461, 463 Phillips, Glen 123, 136, 138, 139, 140, 141

Phnom Penh 466 Piaget, Jean 14 “Pickings” (Thorpe) 425 “Piero di Cosimo on the Shoalhaven” (Porter) 265 Pinjarra massacre 17 Pinsky, Robert 353, 356 Pinter, Harold 512 S O 35, 90, 98, 125, 380; “Ockers” 381; “24 Hours” 125 Pisan Cantos (Pound) 450 Plath, Sylvia 47, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 407; “The Arrival of the Bee Box” 130; The Bell Jar 132, 133; “The Colossus” 134; “Cut” 131, 132; “Daddy” 134, 371; “For a Fatherless Son” 134; “Gulliver” 134; “Lady Lazarus” 132; “Sow” 134; “Wintering” 130 Plato 419 “Platypus” (Wright) 330 Plumb, Luke 493 Pocahontas 280 Poe, Edgar Allan 84; The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym 483 Poems (Prynne) 396 Poetry (Chicago) (journal) 28, 135, 407–12 Poetry Australia (journal) 25, 40, 54 Poetry Society (Australia) 25 poetryetc 10, 67, 348, 350, 351, 352, 378

Poignant, Axel 163

Poignant, Roslyn, Mangrove Creek 1951 152

Pol Pot 379, 466 Pomo Oz: Fear and Loathing Downunder (Lucy) 472–76 “Pond, The” (Donaghy) 456 Ponge, Francis 168 Poor Fellow My Country (Herbert) 230 Pope, Alexander 248, 258, 262, 532 “Pornography” (Hull) 58 “Porter Songbook, The” (Porter) 269 Porter, Christine 272, 273 Porter, Dorothy, Driving Too Fast 36; El Dorado 36; The Monkey’s Mask 36, 50; Night Parrot 36 Porter, Jannice 244, 261 Porter, Peter 23, 24, 48, 49, 55, 65, 68, 69, 71, 72, 73, 74, 76, 77, 86, 88, 126, 129, 137, 219, 241–73, 274, 275, 276, 450; “After Martial” 269; “After Schiller” 269; “Afterburner” 269; “An Angel in Blytheburgh Church” 265; “Annotations of Auschwitz” 269; “An Australian Garden 266; The Automatic Oracle 262; “Basta Sangue” 265, 269; Better Than God 247, 249, 253, 261, 269; “Better Than God” 253; “Birds in the Garden of the Cairo Marriott” 251; Both Ends Against the Middle 241, 265, 267, 268; “The Burning Fiery Furnace” 254; “By Whose Permission Do These Angels Serve?” 256; “A Chagall Postcard” 268; “Christmas Day, 1917” 255; “Clichés as Clouds Above Calstock” 272; The Cost of Seriousness 244, 252, 261, 265; “The Delegate” 242, 244; “Doll’s House” 269; Dragons in their Pleasant Palaces 266; “Duetting with Dorothea” 273; English

564 Subtitles 242; “An Exequy” 244, 269; Fast Forward 242; “Hardy, 1913” 266; “A Hoplite’s Helmet” 266, 267; “How the Eureka Stockade Led to Boggo Road Gaol” 254; “The Kipling Donkeys” 272; “The Last of England” 247, 269; “Last Words” 271; Living in a Calm Country 246, 266; Max is Missing 270, 271, 272, 273; “Max is Missing” 269; “Mort aux Chats” 260; “On First Looking into Chapman’s Hesiod” 72, 88, 219, 269; “On This Day I Complete My Fortieth Year” 269; Once Bitten, Twice Bitten 242; “Orlando’s Parrot” 273; “Phar Lap in the Melbourne Museum” 244, 269; “Piero di Cosimo on the Shoalhaven” 265; “The Porter Songbook” 269; Possible Worlds 268; “Ranunculus Which My Father Called a Poppy” 258; “Recreational Drugs” 241; Rest on the Flight 261, 263, 267, 269, 270; “The Rest on the Flight” 269; “River Quatrains” 257; “River Run” 269; “Sex and the Over-Forties” 269; “A Short Ballad of Unbelief” 243; “Sir Oran Haut-Ton on Forest Conservation” 271; “Strontium to Mendeleyev” 258; “Sydney Cove, 1788” 269; “Three Transportations” 264, 265; “The Violin’s Obstinacy” 249; “Voltaire’s Allotment” 250, 251, 269; “Wittgenstein’s Dream” 269; “Young Mothers in the Square” 252, 253; “Your Attention Please” 267

Porter, Robert 254 Possible Worlds (Porter) 268 Pound, Ezra 10, 11, 89, 167, 173, 179, 199, 206, 362, 365, 408, 410;

SPATIAL RELATIONS

a

Cantos 450; Cathay 450; “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” 450; “In a Station of the Metro” 407; Pisan Cantos (Pound) 450 “Prayer for One” (McComb) 206 “Praying Mantis” (Hull) 58 “Pretty Young Wife, The” (Zwicky) 501 Pretty, Ron 55 Prévert, Jacques, “Barbara” (tr. Brooks) 173; Paroles 173 Pribac, Bert 173 Prince (musician) 218 Prince, The (Machiavelli) 378 Propp, Vladimir 36 Prynne, J.H. 89, 138, 263, 345, 346, 39–96; Brass 393; Down Where Changed 394; Fire Lizard 393; For the Monogram 392, 394; Her Weasels Wild Returning 394; Into the Day 393; Kitchen Poems 393; A Night Square 393; Not-You 394; Poems 396; “Rich in Vitamin C” 394–96; They That Haue Powre To Hurt 346; The White Stones 393; Word Order 394 Purdy, Al 373, 375 Pye, Henry James 356 Pynchon, Thomas 473 Quasimodo, Salvatore 183 Queensland 18, 20, 32, 51, 56, 115, 171, 190, 193, 230, 330, 380 Queensland Theatre Company 513 “Quick Sing (Translation)” (Fogarty) 195

Quinton, James 124, 142, 143, 146, 147, 148; “All the Albums We Listened to Together” 147; “Art for Life’s Sake” 147; “The Great Thing About a Hypothetical Self” 124; Little River 146; “The Lookout 148

a

565

Onomastic Index

Ramazan Libation, The (Hashmi) 384, 388

Ramke, Bin 437–39; Airs, Waters, Places 437, 438 “Ramon Fernandez” (Donaghy) 453 “Ranunculus Which My Father Called a Poppy” (Porter) 258 Rapunzel in Suburbia (Hewett) 30, 48 “Rat Theses” (Brooks) 169 Ray, David 427–30; “The Buffalo Waiting Room” 428; “Custer’s Last Stand” 430; HeartStones: New and Selected Poems 427–30; “On A Fifteenth-Century Flemish Angel” 430; “Reply From New Zealand” 429; “That Fantastic Space” 430; “Variations On A Line By William Stafford” 430 Read, Herbert 12, 175 “Reader, The” (Frieda Hughes) 488 “Reading” (Zwicky) 498 “Reality’s Crow” (Haskell) 469 “Recluse, The” (Stow) 318, 319 “Recreational Drugs” (Porter) 241 Red Movie (Tranter) 26, 70 Red Rover (Susan Stewart) 442–49 Redgrove, Peter 242 Reeve, N.H., & Richard Kerridge 391 “Refugee Girl Makes Good, The” (Hashmi) 386 “Refusing Saul’s Armour” (Murray) 223

“Remember Something Like This” (Fogarty) 191 Removalists, The (Williamson) 517–19 “Reply From New Zealand” (Ray) 429 Rest on the Flight (Porter) 261, 263, 267, 269, 270 “Rest on the Flight, The” (Porter) 269 “Return to the Sea” (McComb) 208

Rexroth, Kenneth 376 Reynolds, Henry 102 “Rhino Gate, The” (Ellenbogen) 432– 34

Rice, Jeremy (theatre director) 520 “Rich in Vitamin C” (Prynne) 394–96 Rich, Adrienne 47 Richardson, Henry Handel 7 Richardson, Sally (theatre director) 510 Rilke, Rainer Maria 183, 373, 376, 400; “The Panther” 210; “To Hölderlin” 210

“Rimbaud and the Modernist Heresy” (Tranter) 42 Rimbaud, Arthur 26, 80, 166, 183, 184, 185, 204, 212, 285, 307, 308, 309 “RIP” (Gig Ryan) 496 “River Glideth Of His Own Sweet Will, The” (Donaghy) 456 “River Quatrains” (Porter) 257 “River Run” (Porter) 269 Roberts, Nigel 146 Robinson, Michael Massey 25; Odes 92; “Song (To Celebrate the Anniversary of the Establishment of the Colony)” 79 Rochester, John Wilmot 326 “Rock and Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution” (AC/DC) 503 Rodriguez, Judith 35, 51, 55, 78, 137; “Nu-Plastik Fanfare Red” 78 Roethke, Theodore 407 Rolling Stones 194 “Romantic Lunch in Karrakatta Cemetery” (McComb) 211 “Romanticism in the 1990s” (Haskell) 470, 471 Romney, Jonathan 216 Rooksby, Emma 142, 146, 147; “Early afternoon” 144; “Guardians” 144; Time Will Tell 143; “Winter” 144

566 Rose, Peter 49, 57, 76; The Catullan Rag 50; The House of Vitriol 50 Ross, Robert 345 Ruby Moon (Cameron) 520–21 Rudd, Kevin 226, 473 Rudd, Phil (AC/DC) 503 Ruhl, Sarah, The Clean House 513–14 “Ruins of the City of Hay” (Stow) 292 Rukeyser, Muriel 407, 410 Rumour, The (Adamson) 70, 162 Rutherford, Anna, & Andreas Boelsmand 291, 293 Rwanda 526 Ryan, Gig 24, 31, 42, 45, 49, 56, 65, 69, 76, 89, 126, 136, 137, 495–97; “Achilleus” 495, 496; Excavation 495–97; “Excavation Excavation” 497; “Love’s Pillage” 496; “Method” 496; “Napoleon” 496; “1965” 497; “On first looking into Fairfax’s Herald” 495; “Penelope” 495–96; “RIP” 496; “Stint” 497; “Too Bad” 497; “Tripping Out” 497; “Two Winters” 31; “Wind” 496

Ryan, Tracy 47, 56, 57, 66, 73, 130–34, 137, 142, 189, 539; Bluebeard in Drag 133 “S21” (Aitken) 466 “Sadness” (Brooks) 168 Safest (Donaghy) 449–57 “Saigon the Movie” (Aitken) 62 Saint-John Perse 285 Sallis, Eva 90 Salom, Philip 35 Salt (journal) 56, 68, 345, 347, 348, 350, 431 Salt (publisher) 138 Salzman, Eva 396, 398

SPATIAL RELATIONS

a

San Francisco Renaissance (poetry school) 25 Sandsprings 281, 298, 303, 311, 321 Sandstone (Taylor) 49, 328 “Sandstone” (Taylor) 328 Sapphires, The (Briggs) 509–10 Savige, Jaya 25, 98 “Scenic Wonders – We Nulla Fellas” (Fogarty) 196, 198 Schiller, Friedrich 269 Schmitz, Marcelle (theatre director) 519 “Schoolgirls Hastening” (Neilson) 75 Schultz, Susan 52 “Scoria” (Stead) 363 Scott, Bon (AC/DC) 502, 503 Scott, John A. 24, 126, 137 Scott, Kim, Kayang & me 16 Scott, Walter 463 “Searching for Words” (Wei Wei Lo) 142

“Seashells and Sandalwood” (Stow) 283 “Second Coming, The” (Yeats) 484 Second Month of Spring, The (Dransfield) 184, 189, 494 Seinfeld 426 “Separation Landscape” (Hull) 60 “Serpents Breath, The” (Adamson) 151 S E T I S site (Sydney University) 6 “Seven Poems from the Welsh” (Donaghy) 451 Sewell family (Randolph Stow) 298, 305

“Sex and the Over-Forties” (Porter) 269 Sexton, Anne 134, 376 Shaffer, Peter, Equus 507–508 Shakespeare, William 98, 180, 207, 243, 253, 284, 490, 540; Twelfth Night 515 Shapcott, Jo 400–403; Her Book 401; “Pavlova’s Physics” 400, 401

a

567

Onomastic Index

Shapcott, Thomas 24, 35, 51, 88, 126, 350

Shape of the Dance, The (Donaghy) 450, 455 Shape of Things, The (LaBute) 511–12 “Sharpies” (Hull) 60 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 163, 165, 166, 183, 186, 472 Shibboleth (Donaghy) 450, 451, 454 “Ship Becalmed, The” (Stow) 318, 319 Ship, The (Day) 483–86 Shoemaker, Adam 115, 116, 121 “Short Ballad of Unbelief, A” (Porter) 243

“Sides of a Pit (Woman Sleeping)” (McComb) 205 Siglo (journal) 56, 68 Silliman, Ron 412, 414 Simenon, Georges 289 Simpson, R.A. 49 Singapore and Australia 9, 103, 104, 105

“Sir Oran Haut-Ton on Forest Conservation” (Porter) 271 Skovron, Alex 383 Skrzynecki, Peter 383 “Sky Writing” (Day) 484 Slessor, Kenneth 6, 11, 38, 78, 81, 87, 97, 98, 163, 183, 297, 468, 471; “Beach Burial” 86; “Five Bells” 75; “Metempsychosis” 469 Smith, Vivian 35 Smith Street (Kinsella) 539 Snarski brothers (Perth musicians) 217 “Snow” (Hashmi) 387 Solanas, Valerie 468 Somalia 526 “Some Recollections of the Last ORT Classes in the Warsaw Ghetto” (Ellenbogen) 432

Some Values of Landscape and Weather (Gizzi) 439 “Song (To Celebrate the Anniversary of the Establishment of the Colony)” (Robinson) 79 “Song of Hungarrda” (Unaipon) 74 “Song of Myself” (Whitman) 89, 311 “Songs of Adam” (Susan Stewart) 444 Sons of Clovis, The (Brooks) 174, 175, 176, 177 Sontag, Susan 153, 154, 155, 156 Sophocles 540 South Australia 48, 91, 280, 299 South Australia-based poets 50 “South by South-West” (McComb) 212 “South of My Days” (Wright) 38, 39, 336

Southerly (journal) 32, 40, 56, 68 “Sow” (Plath) 134 Spence, Pete 416 Spender, Dale 134 Spies, Johann 531 Springsteen, Bruce 218 Stafford, William 435 Stand (journal) 348 Stanley, Thomas 345 Star Waka (Sullivan) 358, 359 “Stations: Suite for Three Voices and Three Generations” (Stow) 312–15 Stead, C.K. 361–66; “Deconstructing the Rainbow Warrior” 364; “My Sister and M.S.” 366; “Paris” 363; “Scoria” 363; “S-T-R-O-K-E” 362; “Walking Westward” 363; “Yes T.S.: a narrative” 365 Stein, Gertrude 146, 264, 344, 413, 540 Steinbeck, John 207 Steiner, George 58, 372, 435 Stendhal 535 Stephens, A.G. 85

568 Stesichoros 425, 427 Stevens, Wallace 263, 376, 407, 409, 411, 434; “Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction” 329 Stevenson, Robert Louis, A Child’s Garden of Verses 251 Stewart, Douglas 11, 98, 175, 177, 178, 180, 181 Stewart, Harold 179 Stewart, Susan 439, 440, 441, 442–49; “When I’m speaking, I’m not crying” 445; “Apple” 441; “Braid” 441; Columbarium 439, 440; “Elegy Against the Massacre at the Amish School in West Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, Autumn 2006” 448; “The Field of Mars as a Meadow” 444; “The Former Age” 447; “Games for Children” 445; “In the Western World” 448; “King of the Hill” 445; “my mother’s garden” 446; “Pear” 441; Red Rover 442– 49; “Songs of Adam” 444; “Variations on the ‘The Dream of the Rood’” 442, 443; “Wrens” 447 Stieglitz, Alfred 157 “Still Life with Amaryllis Belladonna” (Stow) 290 “Stint” (Gig Ryan) 497 Stockholm (The Triffids) 215 Stolen Generations 19, 96, 481 Stow, Randolph 40, 278–324; “Anarchy” 290; “Annis and the Merman” 295; The Bystander 281; “Child Portraits, with Background” 304; “Clichés” 289, 319; “The Clock in the Empty House” 322; A Counterfeit Silence 281, 283, 284, 288, 290, 293, 304, 309, 310, 312, 318, 319, 322; “Dust” 303; “Efire” 305; “Endymion” 305, 319;

SPATIAL RELATIONS

a

“Enkidu” 305; “From The Testament of Tourmaline: Variations on Themes of the Tao Teh Ching” 293; “The Ghost at Anlaby” 312; The Girl Green as Elderflower 288, 291, 295, 296; A Haunted Land 281, 288, 312; “Ishmael” 305, 306, 310, 319; “The Land’s Meaning” 286, 301, 302, 303; “Masks” 291, 305, 306, 316, 318, 319; “Merry-go-round” 290, 320, 322; The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea 287, 310, 321, 322; Midnite 296, 300; “Montebellos” 290; “On a Favourite Cat” 289; “On Northern Downs” 304; Outrider: Poems 1956–1962 279, 281, 282, 296, 298, 301, 302, 303, 305, 307, 308, 309, 310, 318, 319; “Outrider” 296, 318; “Penelope” 305; “Persephone” 305, 309, 316, 317, 319; “The Recluse” 318, 319; “Ruins of the City of Hay” 292; “Seashells and Sandalwood” 283; “The Ship Becalmed” 318, 319; “Stations: Suite for Three Voices and Three Generations” 312–15; “Still Life with Amaryllis Belladonna” 290; “Strange Fruit” 282; The Suburbs of Hell 289; “The Tender Trap” 292; “Thailand Railway (for Russ Braddon)” 288, 310; “Three Poems by Clément Marot” 285; To the Islands 279, 281, 287, 288; Tourmaline 288, 291, 292, 293, 295, 298, 302; “The Utopia of Lord Mayor Howard” 291; Visitants 288, 306, 308, 310; “Western Wind When Will Thou Blow” 310; “The Wild Duck’s Nest” 318, 319; “A Wind From the Sea” 284 —See also: Peter Maxwell Davies Stradbroke Island 20

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569

Onomastic Index

“Strange Fruit” (Stow) 282 Stravinsky, Igor 252 “S-T-R-O-K-E” (Stead) 362 “Strontium to Mendeleyev” (Porter) 258 Subhuman Redneck Poems (Murray) 219, 221, 222 Suburbs of Hell, The (Stow) 289 Sullivan, Robert 357–60; Star Waka 358, 359; “Waka 88” 360 “Sunset – Trafalgar Square” (Ellenbogen) 436 Surrealism 45, 98, 125, 413 vankmajer, Jan 535 Swamp Poems (Taylor) 328 Swamp Riddles (Adamson) 162 Swan River / Valley 147, 205, 274 Swift, Jonathan, Gulliver’s Travels 134 Swinburne, Charles Algernon 76, 183, 186

“Sydney Cove, 1788” (Porter) 269 Sydney Worker (newspaper) 94 Sydney-based poets 26, 50, 81, 99, 137, 166

Sydney–Melbourne axis 31, 49, 67, 70, 127, 137, 429 Sykes, Bobbi 44, 51; Eclipse 51, 53 Symbolist poets (France) 98, 176, 177; influence in Australia 26, 27, 87, 95, 171, 175, 176, 184, 285, 310 Szabó, István 535 Tagore, Rabindranath 407 “Tale of the Great Smokies, A” (Zwicky) 499

Taller When Prone: Poems (Murray) 222, 223 Tao Tê Ching (Lao Tz×) 294, 303 Tasmania 91, 103, 108, 197, 238, 351 Tasmanian Tiger (thylacine) 107–10, 114, 116, 117–21, 486

Taylor, Andrew 35, 49, 235–29; “Adelaide Winter” 326, 327; Cat’s Chin and Ears: A Bestiary 326; The Cool Change 325; The Crystal Absences 328; Parabolas: Prose Poems 327; Sandstone 49, 328; “Sandstone” 328; Swamp Poems 328; “The Windows” 329 Te Mata Estate New Zealand Poet Laureate 355 “Tea Vendor, The” (Beveridge) 54 Teatro Sunil 524 “Temple, Somnapurna, The” (Zwicky) 499

Tench, Watkin 463 “Tender Trap, The” (Stow) 292 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord 76, 204 “Thailand Railway (for Russ Braddon)” (Stow) 288, 310 “That Fantastic Space” (Ray) 430 “That Girl Was Me” (Pavelin) 397 “The Shadow of Fire: Ghazals” (Wright) 337

Theocritus 127 Theophilus of Adana 530 They That Haue Powre To Hurt (Prynne) 346

“Thinking About Aboriginal Land Rights, I Visit the Farm I Will Not Inherit” (Murray) 115 This Time in Lahore: New Poems (Hashmi) 386 Thomas, Dylan 450, 453 Thomas, Rover 81 Thorpe, Adam 425, 426; From the Neanderthal 425; “From the Neanderthal” 426; “Pickings” 425 “Three Early Poems” (Brooks) 167 “Three Poems by Clément Marot” (Stow) 285

570 “Three Transportations” (Porter) 264, 265

“Tiananmen Square June 4, 1989” (Zwicky) 498 Time Will Tell (Rooksby) 143 “Tin Wash Dish, The” (Murray) 223 Tinfish (journal) 52 Tipping, Richard 41 “to a telegraph pole” (Maurice) 80 “To Hölderlin” (Rilke) 210 “To My Generation” (Wright) 21, 332 “To Play” (Coleman) 495 To the Islands (Stow) 279, 281, 287, 288

“To the Red Lory” (Neilson) 75 Tolkien, J.R.R., Lord of the Rings 475 Tompson, Charles, Wild Notes from the Lyre of a Native Minstrel 80 “Too Bad” (Gig Ryan) 497 Tourmaline (Stow) 288, 291, 292, 293, 295, 298, 302 “Toys” (Hull) 60 Traherne, Thomas 440 Trakl, Georg 178, 180, 376 Translations from The Natural World (Murray) 221 Tranter, John 12, 20, 21, 24, 26, 27, 28, 32, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 46, 50, 54, 55, 57, 65, 68, 70, 76, 78, 88, 89, 90, 99, 126, 136, 137, 146, 184, 346, 350; “Christopher Brennan” 27; Red Movie 26, 70; “Rimbaud and the Modernist Heresy” 42 Triffids, The (WA band) 205–18; The Black Swans 215; Born Sandy Devotional 214; Calenture 214, 216; Stockholm 215 —See also: David McComb “Tripping Out” (Gig Ryan) 497 Trobriand Islands 288

SPATIAL RELATIONS

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True History of the Kelly Gang (Carey) 461, 482 Tsaloumas, Dimitri 383 Tsvetayeva, Marina 204 Turning, The (Winton) 476–80 Tuscany 245, 246 Tuwhare, Hone 355 Twelfth Night (Shakespeare) 515 “Two and Two” (Clay) 108–14 “Two Bulletin tales” (Ouyang Yu) 228 “Two Dreamtimes” (Wright) 332, 334 Two Fires, The (Wright) 332 “Two Spells for Sleeping” (Donaghy) 457

“Two Winters” (Gig Ryan) 31 Tzara, Tristan 413 Ugly One, The (von Mayenburg) 527 Ulitarra (journal) 56 Unaipon, David 74, 95; “Song of Hungarrda” 74 Under Capricornia (Herbert) 230 University of Western Australia 281, 285, 429, 539 Urban Elegies (Brooks) 167, 170 “Urban Elegies” (Brooks) 167, 168 “Utopia of Lord Mayor Howard, The” (Stow) 291 “Valediction: Forbidding Mourning, A” (Donne) 322 Vallejo, Cesar 376 van Loon, Julienne 138, 141 “Variations On A Line By William Stafford” (Ray) 430 “Variations on the ‘The Dream of the Rood’” (Susan Stewart) 442, 443 Varuna community (Blue Mountains) 31 Varuna Writers’ Centre 538 Velvet Underground, The 215

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571

Onomastic Index

Verlaine, Paul 176 Vernacular Republic, The (Murray) 42, 220

Versary (Lilley) 490 Vicaire, Gabriel 176 Vietnam War 24, 28, 40, 70, 86, 88, 96, 97, 185, 186, 344, 379, 380, 413, 418

“View of a Pig” (Hughes) 134 “View of The Artist’s House and Garden, in Mills Plain, Van Diemen’s Land, A” (Glover) 129 Villon, François 183, 204, 212, 216, 377, 418, 466 “Violin’s Obstinacy, The” (Port P) 249 Virgil 127, 128, 182, 418, 441, 495 Visitants (Kinsella) 376 Visitants (Stow) 288, 306, 308, 310 Voltaire 250; Candide 251 “Voltaire’s Allotment” (Porter) 250, 251, 269 Voyage into Solitude (Dransfield) 184, 189

Waltzing the Wilarra (Milroy) 523–24 Walwicz, Ania 14, 78, 90, 383; Boat 14; “Little Red Riding Hood” 78 “Wanderer, The” (Kefala) 382 Wang Wei 320, 498 “Wanna Be White” (Papertalk–Green) 74

“War, The” (Lane) 371, 372 Ward, Diane 414 Warhol, Andy 213, 365, 427, 512 Warmun School (painters) 81 Warton, Thomas 356 Wasps, The (Kinsella) 539 Waste Land, The (Eliot) 311 “Water-Gardening in an Old Farm Dam” (Murray) 221 Watergate 70, 344, 413 Waving to Hart Crane (Adamson) 162 Wearne, Alan 40, 42, 49 Webb, Charles, The Graduate, adapt. Johnson, 516–17 Webb, Francis 12, 40, 70, 76, 163, 179, 516

Webster, John, The Duchess of Malfi Waits, Tom 524 “Waka 88” (Sullivan) 360 Wakefield Press 48 Walcott, Derek 270, 354 Waley, Arthur 294, 303 Walker, Kath —See: Oodgeroo Noonuccal Walking to Clear Point (Brooks) 167 “Walking to the Cattle Place” (Murray) 220

“Walking Westward” (Stead) 363 Wallace, William 111 Wallace–Crabbe, Chris 49, 137 “Wallflowers” (Donaghy) 455 “Walt Whitman in Hell” (Hummer) 418 Walt Whitman in Hell: Poems (Hummer) 417–424

528

“Weeds” (Lane) 372 Wei Wei Lo, Miriam 104; “Searching for Words” 142 “Weighing of the Heart, The” (Kearney) 124

Welsh, Frank, Great Southern Land: A New History of Australia 480–83 Wendt, Albert 358 Westerly (journal) 33, 40, 56, 68, 142, 143, 285, 290 Western Australia 15, 16, 17, 19, 29, 30, 48, 81, 82, 84, 85, 94, 97, 106, 108, 110, 119, 121, 122, 123, 124, 138, 139, 140, 141, 143, 146, 201, 205, 209, 216, 239, 274, 280, 292, 297, 314,

572 322, 348, 383, 385, 398, 476, 477, 488, 501

Western Australian Institute of Technology 217 “Western Wind When Will Thou Blow” (Stow) 310 “What Do You Do For Money Honey” (AC/DC) 503 “What’s Slaughtered’s Gone” (Adamson) 155 Whately, Richard 77 wheatbelt (Western Australia) 7, 30, 81, 106, 121, 141, 167, 201, 290, 297, 314, 542 “When I Consider How My Light is Spent” (Milton) 38 “When I’m speaking, I’m not crying” (Susan Stewart) 445 Where I Come From (Adamson) 162, 163

{where n equals} a determinacy of poetry (Mitchell) 144 White Australia policy 97, 102, 232, 379, 380 White Point (WA) 479 White Stones, The (Prynne) 393 White, Patrick 179, 288, 311 Whitehouse, Carl 308, 309, 310, 318 Whitlam, Gough 481 Whitman, Walt 80, 210, 413, 418, 419, 421, 423; “Song of Myself” 89, 311 “Whole Lotta Rosie” (AC/DC) 504 Wickham, Anna 70 Wiggins, Adrian 52, 55 “Wild Duck’s Nest, The” (Stow) 318, 319

Wild Notes from the Lyre of a Native Minstrel (Tompson) 80 Wilder, Thornton, The Bridge of San Luis Rey 322

SPATIAL RELATIONS

a

Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland 20, 336 William’s Mongrels in the Wild Life (Hull) 51, 54, 60 Williams, Cliff (AC/DC) 503 Williams, Raymond 476 Williams, William Carlos 320, 376, 410, 413 Williamson, David, The Removalists 517–19 Wilson, A.N. 543 “Wind” (Gig Ryan) 496 “Wind From the Sea, A” (Stow) 284 “Windows, The” (Taylor) 329 “Winter 13” (Lane) 375 “Winter 15” (Lane) 375 “Winter 20” (Lane) 374 “Winter 33” (Lane) 368 “Winter” (Lane) 367, 374 “Winter” (Rooksby) 144 “Wintering” (Plath) 130 Winton, Tim 476–80; “Aquifer” 477, 479, 480; “Big World” 478; “Boner McPharlin’s Mole” 478; “Commission” 480; “Defender” 477, 479; “Fog” 479; The Turning 476–80 “Withdrawal” (McComb) 212 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 159 “Wittgenstein’s Dream” (Porter) 269 Woolagoodjah, Sam 77 Wooroloo (Frieda Hughes) 486–89 Word Order (Prynne) 394 “Words” (Hooton) 81 Wordsworth, William 11, 243, 271, 321, 391, 441, 503; “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge” 456 Working Girl Can’t Win, A (Garrison) 425, 427 Working Hot (Fallon) 467 World War One 86, 99, 255, 272, 279, 344

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573

Onomastic Index

World War Two 8, 12, 28, 86, 98, 99, 100, 176, 187, 287, 298, 310, 379, 398, 399, 409, 510, 523 “Worlds of Helene Leneveu” (Ellenbogen) 431, 432 “Wrens” (Susan Stewart) 447 Wright, Judith 12, 19, 20, 21, 35, 38, 47, 48, 78, 85, 86, 98, 130, 137, 179, 189, 284, 297, 315, 329–38; Alive 332; “At Cooloolah” 85, 332, 333; “Bora Ring” 315, 332, 333, 335; “Brennan” 21; “Bullocky” 19, 38, 39, 284, 336; The Cry for the Dead 20; “Extinct Birds” 337; “For a Pastoral Family” 21, 332; From Woman to Man 332; The Generations of Men 20; A Human Pattern 337; “Metho Drinker” 38, 336; “Naked Girl and Mirror” 335; “The Old Prison” 331, 332; “Patterns” 337; Phantom Dwelling 20, 21, 337; “Platypus” 330; “The Shadow of Fire: Ghazals” 337; “South of My Days” 38, 39, 336; “To My Generation” 21, 332; “Two Dreamtimes” 332, 334; The Two Fires 332 “Wrong Side of the Bed, The” (McComb) 210 Wyndham, John 214

Yeats, W.B. 51, 290, 359, 376, 407, 454, 470; “The Second Coming” 484

“Yes T.S.: a narrative” (Stead) 365 Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company 514, 522, 523 Yock, Daniel 18, 35, 191 York (WA) 274, 352 “You Shook Me All Night Long” (AC/DC) 503 “Young Mothers in the Square” (Porter) 252, 253 Young, Angus (AC/DC) 503 Young, Malcolm (AC/DC) 503 “Your Attention Please” (Porter) 267 Yu, Ouyang —See: Ouyang Yu “Zoo Ark, The” (Hull) 35 Zukofsky, Louis 413 Zwicky, Fay 35, 51, 65, 76, 122, 140, 142, 498–501; Ask Me 498–501; “Broadway Vision” 501; “China Poems 1988” 498; “For Jim 1947– 1986” 501; “Four Poems from America” 500; “Home Care” 498; “In Memory, Vincent Buckley 1925– 1988” 501; Isaac Babel’s Fiddle 498; Kaddish 498; “Out of this World” 498; “Penelope Spins” 500; “The Pretty Young Wife” 501; “Reading” 498; “A Tale of the Great Smokies” 499; “The Temple, Somnapurna” 499; “Tiananmen Square June 4, 1989” 498

Yamaji people 19, 237, 239, 240, 278, 283, 312, 313 Yang Lian 230

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