CURRENT POETRY AND THE WILD ANIMAL. (Transcript of an informal lecture given at an ELLA Seminar at James Cook University, 14 July 1973)
I think that our current poetry has a certain anonymity about it. There is very much good poetry being written and as it is not contained within the thumping, bumping syntax dir- ecting a G.K. Chesterton's "Don John of Astria ... etc", it
is often necessary to look below the column of a poem to ascertain the author's name before credit can be ascribed.
However, I will not accept, on these premises, that current poetry lacks an identity. Rather, it has so many faces that writers' names become a bore to register. Instead the anon- ymity of the crowd contains the fascination - the variety of faces. The various individual styles of writing.
I grabbed a handful of poems almost at random from Saturday press clippings of poetry. All were published within 1972- 1973, and they are not the best, or the worst poems I could have taken. A few of them, such as 'Book Review', I think are good, a few very bad, and a few with the old stamp "Tra- ditional", upon them. All authors' names are scored out.
Names are not nearly as important as poems. I don't intend to interpret their meanings or see any particular philosphies which I may read into them.
Not to humbug anybody, that some may yawn, and others smiI while I remain blind behind reading glasses as 1 talk; immed- iately, I reveal, that I cannot see a yard with those mostly old poet-critics and their coteries who look upon poetry as a sort of patron age extending from Chaucer right down to Yeats to, and say, Hugh Macrae, to themselves, to you if you run with them and write nice and dull stuff. Being a fringe- punter, one of the dollar-a-horse boys, I liken these poet prophets to the pink page racing "tipsters" with theit Friday hot-tips column, and Sunday hind sight on once ''sure-thing"
Southeys and Bernard O'Dowds.
Such poet-critic prophets prefer to pontificate about the
"major" poem and the "minor" poem; the pre-eminence of the epic, the quality of the lyric; insist upon metre, rhyme and form, to the neglect of the search for the vitality of the in- dividual poem. Their whole endeavour seems to be to relate all poetry to a past level of performance. It is an exercise in futility because today's new poet after new poet writes in a free style impossible truthfully to relate to an artificially proposed tradition; and it side-steps the job of cutting out much of the deadwood that remains accepted, as poetry, be-
Cause it was once the pleasant woods through which an old poetry liked to stroll thoughtless
Far from the academic acceptance by our so-called "leading"
poet-critics that poetry is essentially in inheritance tradit- ional - that is, what they accept as poetry - it is necessarily the reverse, a break away from tradition. It is an interpre- tation of current ideas and philosophies. I can cite the break aways Wordsworth, Pound and Eliot in their times, eschew- ing their period's traditional poetical syntax.
I think that the misconception of the writing of poetry being a traditional "hand-down" stems from the reading of poetry;
not from its writing or composition. Carrying on the deceit, in my opinion, aids the lazy lecturer and builds an immense prosody upon which a false scholarship is founded.
Forced into the role of writer in my youth by a compunction for the living minute, my first voluntary approach to poetry was through the Thomas Carlyle stricture. I read the complete works of every imaginable English poet - "Paradise Lost" -
"Regained" the lot. Strangely, I saw poetry, then, in poems in which I couldn't see it now. I tried to write in the manner of the old poets for ten years and never produced a real poem.
Since those years I have recognised that in poetry we glimpse a "wild animal" - "animal" not in the sense of "monster"
- "that fiercest monster, man." It is terrifying to understand that there is not one creature of the flesh remaining in the truest sense; i.e. without patronage, "wild". There is only this creation in the minds of human beings, remaining in the truest sense, wild; whether it lurks in plastic art, music, or in words, or elsewhere. I can't know it unless I explore its latest haunts, keep up with it, and sight it.
It can't be captured and shut up for ever in any book, or preconceived confinement. When I think it has been I find it is in a stage of dying like an old man, or a young-old man.
Put it to a patronage stud to breed back to the old strains and release its progeny, and you will find they get to be some of those impossible blue horses in a very bad poem.
I will be amazed if all present sight the "wild animal", poetry, in the same poems presented for this talk and sub- sequent general discussion, as those in which I catch a glimp- se of it. Some may say not in any. I have set the net wide, even though not very high.
BOOK REVIEW
Once at a literary seminar, he and his wife were introduced to me and mine. Like adults eating food they do not care for, we all tried talking small but nothing we found was small enough.
(Children of course will simply spit it out, only consuming the stuff that they enjoy). After dinner he lectured to the grown-ups on aspects of contemporary poetry.
I don't know where his wife
had gone but mine was a long way off holding my hand. Nothing he had to say agreed with me and I didn't like the way he smoked his cigarette.
Academics synthesise or analyse but rarely explore. I take the risk of a goo1 lung full and do not fiddle with my cigarette. His poems
which poke up periodically are butted befoie they've had the chance to burn.
But still, I've purchased his first thin book. I was surprised to find two or three poems that I judged successes. I suppose it would be unreasonable to ask for more.
If you don't keep press clippings of poetry I don't think you can name the poet who wrote "Book Review", not that I would give you a quiz credit if you could. You would also have to be pedantic to classify it as a lyric. If I was pressed to pigeon-hole it, I would be more inclined to put it to roost with narrative poetry of a subjective trend. There is a glimpse of the "wild animal of'poetry" in it, because there is some- thing with in the words recognisable as an elementary truth.
It is not a truth either of the Keatsian variety, or definition.
It is not straining after Shaw Neilsen's "bells" and "tunes"
and other lyrical paraphernalia. There are no line-ending rhymes, no regularity in numbers of syllables, or syllabic beats to the line; no iambic pentameters, or verse structure.
It can conveniently and, as it is not extreme, safely be lab- elled "free verse". The tabulation is unsatisfactory. There is no attempt to versify discernible in its structure.
If its syntax is to be studied and understood, old "Bonds of Poetry" rules must be forgotten. Rather, methods em- ployed to interest the reader become important.
Firstly, early in the poem there is fixation of time and place; and I always believe it is perilous to neglect any reader's right of orientation too long, before he is asked to become involved with the proposition of a poem. Then the silent reader (to me also the audience, because I listen within the ear when I read silently) hears the narrative in speech rhythms pitched to the strain of the narrative; and it is a narrative in this poem.
Current poetry forsakes rhyme mainly, I think, because it is a hindrance to narrative which speech rhythms convey much more effectively than restricting metre. Scansion of speech rhythms is a waste of time, of course; and because it is we have inexperienced writers really chopping up prose, as die-hard traditionalists protest; regaining some mileage for their old vehicles of metre and rhyme. Chopped- up prose is only the doggerel of current poetry.
Examining the line endings of "Book Review", one may notice that each end-word has some purpose. Very often the line of a rhymed poem ends for the sake of a rhyme;
the argument of the poem has to be treated repetitiously so that a rhyme can be slipped in.
In current poetry, using speech rhythms, as in "Book Review", line end-words are often "exploratory" carrying narrative forward at a desired varying pace. Sometimes there is the use of 'suspense' end-words. Lines may end with conjunctions. I sometimes like to use ''a", the art- icle, as an exploratory end-word. There is not a line in
"Book Review" that ends just out of the sheer caprice of its author: The poem uses casual - talk language. in an economic and effective style which gives it every right to be classified as current contemporary poetry.
CARNAL KNOWLEDGE Roll back your fabulous animal be human, sleep. I'll call you up from water's dazzle, wheat-blond hills, clear light and open-hearted roses, this day's extravagance of blue stored like a pulsebeat in the skull,
Content to be your love, our fool, your creature tender and obscene I'll bite sleep's innocence away and wake the flesh my fingers cup to build a world from what's to hand, new energies of light and space wings for blue distance, fins to sweep the obscure caverns of your heart, a tongue to lift your sweetness close leaf-speech against the window glass a memory of chaos weeping
mute for s hammering for shape sea-strip and sky-strip held apart for earth to form its hills and roses its landscape from our blind caresses, blue air, orizon, water-flow
bone to my bond I grasp the world.
But what you are I do not know.
I am afraid I never glimpsed the "wild animal" in this poem in spite of its title. Mentally I hand it back to the tràditionalisth. I prefer to see it as the traditionalists' acceptance of their free-verse. From its rhetorical and esoteric opening lines it seems to have nothing to do with me. It becomes an over- crowded repository of cliches.
Read aloud in a larger than life voice it may hold together at a poetry reading; one reason I attend such functions as rarely as possible. Noise can drown sense and be pre- ferred, where an audience is only capable of distinguish- ing noise.
However, for my hearing, and I think for an audience which has allowed current poetry to shape the way it has, I be- lieve that common sense, or sensibility, is an essential ingredient of the text. The present poem certainly has little respect for my opinion.
The whole poem is phrased in this rhetorical manner ex- pecting the reader to respond to the abstract throughout.
There is use of a six line verse, for some purpose that escapes me - curtsey to the "traditionalist hand-down", is the only reason apparent to me. Each line has an in- built finality at the end-word, which leaves the poem to make its own arrangements about carrying forward the
narration. This the poem contrives to do by making up lists:-
"Wings for blue distance, fins to sweep .. a tongue to lift your sweetness close
a memory of chaos weeping
mute forces to hammering for shape"
and after all the mental cataloguing the punch-line at the end lamely says
... "But what you.are I do not know".
A very good reason why I couldn't catch a glimpse of the
"wi Id animal" of poetry here. I don't consider the piece to be part of current poetry although it has been recently published.
It puts me in mind of a poem, Carl Sandburg's "Love"
(?) which Bette Davis recently delivered on a David Frost show. The old actress read it magnificently, I thought, so intelligently that I could bear to listen to what I could- n't bear to read. Analysed, the poem is a long catalogue of what love is, or is supposed to be... "Love is a white bird" etc etc. Such "catalogue" poems as I call them lend themselves to a bulk production and can impress people not poetically analytical, at a first reading.
AT A PUBLIC DINNER
No, I'm not eating. I watch the champing jaws, solemnly eating and drinking my country's honor, till nothing's left. The gravy's dripping red, a nourishing stew for business. She's a goner - mourned by complacent speeches, toaster in wines the color of blood. But wounded past recall.
Let this occasion be her memorial.
It was all there in the first step on to land, the flag raised,
the cannon fired.
No-one but Harpur called her the land of equals, the new Utopia...Go away, we're tired;
we're tired of being asked about tomorrow.
Today the profit. Today the hideous old, the rising price of uranium, beef and gold.
Today, for the dreamers, the totally useless sorrow.
This poem, or sonnet, is interesting technically. It uses speech rhythms instead of metre. It would be naive to apply any scansion of metre to the lines. It is written in - the current idiom of poetry, although it doesn't discard
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rhyme; but it is essential to subdue it and not let it dom- inate a poem. In this sonnet the mastery over rhyme is note worthy; except in the second and third last lines where I think "gold" slips in legitimately, but to me, a little too facilely under "old". Probably a personal quib- ble arising out of my dislike of the "heroic couplet".
There is plenty of sensibility in it. Too much to let us read it and escape unscathed from the "wild animal"
that lurks in its lines, especially in the last lines sum- mation -
"Today, for the dreamers, the totally useless sorrow".
It is a true sonnet. Its 8th line because of the length extends over the margin. I don't know why the old sonnet form is still in use in current poetry. It appears quite frequently; in fact is the remaining regularity when rhyme and traditional metre are mostly passed over.
I see its use, here, and the conventional use of rhyme as part of the poet's instinct to convey the dark messageof foreboding which the sonnet conveys. It's a very ominous message which one cannot read without experiencing a feeling of its despair, not only for the impending disaster, but more for the diners who choose to ignore the signs and gourmandise the last scraps, leaving -
"Today, for the dreamers, the totally useless sorrow"
PERSEUS Behind the poem that will not rise rises the improbable, levitating poem, evasive as oracles, pitched on in surprise, inside the blowsy buffoon blundering futile among manikins on soles of fat
the ready and delicate heart awaits befriending - Medusa's head, that won't be had
except by looking back and striking blind
a stroke that can hardly be foreknown and practised;
and before we discern Andromeda distraught
Shuddering from her vigil by the monster-fathering gulf, which of us tempts his headlong worst lot
for a dare, for the tag-end of a tale of vision;
or earns dread talismans, deadly to lesser fates, to set over curse and curse paired constellations?
I stated at the outset that I had grabbed a selection of poems, almost at random, from current press clippings.
I knew I had some bad poems in the haphazard pick-up;
but I thought their inclusion would help me to explain what I believe is nauseating in poetry pretending to be current.
If there is a fault in current writing of poetry, it is the sickliness of pretension. I really blame editors for sus- taining this fault.
I suppose we could exclude Perseus from this censure by saying it is a "conceit", an acceptable ingredient in our mythological pudding. Right, or wrong, 1 cannot digest a poem that hasn't a mixture of commonsense in it. The impossible proposition of the opening lines of this poem make it a dob of sour dough for my stomach immediately.
Opening lines must appetise a reader on sight. Just how does one savour the nonsense of
"Behind the poem that will not rise rises the improbable, levitating poem".
Dished up without rhyme, although it was recently pub- lished it is not really current poetry. It savours of the traditional with its metre saucing over the mess. It is my opinion that those who swallow such muck do so from habit of necessity - having had to appease their literary taste in the past with sing song fare.
I always revolt against any poet mixing an impersonal me in his poem - quoting here for example
"before we discern
"which of us tempts his headlong worst lot"
The imperative "we" and "us" pasted upon us. Rhetoric is a very dangerous recipe for poetry. Where a poet uses
"We", a "you" or an "tis" he should do so subjectively and not objectively for the most part. -
Of course this poem is objective. I was first allowed to publish only in the objective manner; which is really the die-hard traditionalist's criteria of the "hand-down" the- ory. Good current poetry is mainly subjective; it concerns
the living poet and his experiences; more than the objective style which strives to explore the universal situation for us. One is personal, the other is impersonal. "Perseus"
is quite impersonal the antithesis of the first poem read,
"Book Review".
To me it lacks any real warmth of conviction. It's leg- itimate, but as far as Australian poetry is concernedcrusty, hearking back to mythology for the recipe for apoem. I don't think a hungry'dingo would sniff at it.
SATURDAY MORNING Dark swamping rain, then morning shine;
And silver puddles in the path Shatter where starlings take a bath;
A sheet drags loosely from the line.
Gulls toss at random on each gust, A raven heavily flies low.
The lesser hills are crowned with snow.
Another day to take on trust After the tempest of the night:
Boy's voices from the Home next door Ring out like chimes; and every chore Seems blest in ordinary light:
Firewood is cut, and sodden leaves
Are scooped in handfuls from blocked eaves, NOCTUR1E
A gull flies low across the darkening bay.
Along the shore the causerinas sigh.
Resentful plovers give their racheting cry From the mown field scattered with bales of hay.
The world sinks out of sight. The moon congealed in cloud seems motionless. The air is still.
A cry goes out from the exhausted will.
Nightmares and angels roam the empty field.
Two lyrics! Current? Well, written currently. Comfortable Saturday morning press fill-ups while the crowd shops or goes to the T.A.B. to get a better "kick". "Saturday Morning" proposes to be a sonnet, I suppose. Intended to be a "pure" lyric. It rhymes, does everything that prosody requires of it, dead right; but it is not current poetry, however recently written.
Reading a Iyric" such as this sets out to be lfeel an obligation to adapt to an attitude. I feel that I am supposed to sweeten up my mind, listen through ear trumpets for tinkles, before I am qualified to read on; and when I read such a line as
"And silver puddles in the path"
and let my Elysian tension slacken for a moment, I get the image of my little apricot poodle, and all is lost. I have to hose the puddles away. I am afraid I cannot be bothered to wait for that mesmeric state of mind to react to such
"set-out-to-be" lyrics. Never a "slush straw hat" in them as we shall chance upon in the last poem to be ex- amined - "For or Against Beauty". Shaw Neilsen did this
"purer." object sort of poem - enough for Australian Lit- erary archives.
I don't think Saturday Editors would accept a lot of them if they were sent in by Neilson's nameless ghost today;
and I am not trying to say his poems were bunkonly that they are not current.
Perhaps a paper like the Courier-Mail ) which publishes no current poetrymay open its columns to poems like them if it ever decides to publish anything with the slightest pretensions to poetry other than some occasional prize winning infant's poem, or some chance jingle through the columns of Letters to the Editor, or a national anthem.
But to return to my discussion of "Saturday Morning"
more directly I think it is written without very much in- gredient of commonsense, not that I object to a current nonsense poem if it shows me a new gap, a black star in sense; but this "lyric", as we must accept it on the old traditionalist plane, strives too much for the "beauty"
recipe. Hearking back to my original idea of the "wild animal" that lurks in poetry, I think the beast "would smell the scent of too many old hands" on the mixture of the bait of "Saturday Morning" to come near it.
Nocturne.
This is, of course, another "I'm-a-lyric", as my contemp- oraries of whom most I am ashamed, for their stagnation, would proclaim. In exactly the mould of "Saturday Morn- ing" it makes one wonder whether the editor abbreviated it, or whether the author tired of the platitudes of "gulls"
flying low across bays, sighing casuarinas, mown fields scattered with bales of hay etc. It appears likely, when
the cry goes out and "nightnlares and angels" walk about.
They'd scare away any "wild animals" of poetry, It is time (sorry for the plagiarism) to reject such fatuous work in the reading and writing of current Australian Poetry and instead of trying to read into such writing meanings and philosophies that are hot there.
LANGUAGE TALK TO ME Language talk to me, language
tell me what I know after forty years - language, will you show the way out of the labyrinth to me, rnopic, slow and singular as when I fell in love with you twenty odd years ago?
Language talk to me, language, while I listen for
the wheezing snuffling clumping of the Minotaur:
now from your endless store recruit a devotee who set on this illegible shore lost, without a clue, turns as ever to you.
Language talk to me, language teach me what to say
in the face of disaster, in the height of hope, as things fall away.
Mother-tongue, lingua franca,
all that anyone knows, bring me, kindly bring me to a perfect close.
I apologise for this piece creeping into my discussion of current poetry. It stems out of a lapse of some editorial judgment to publish it. Perhaps it is published to give heart to beginners that they can do much better; or perhaps as an example of the inanities of rhetoric.
The only clue that I got out of it., the dafter forty years' assuming he or she began writing such esoteric stuff
in the late teen years, he or she would be of my set and mind-made-up-mate generation.' Sometimes people say to me that 1 equivocate "You said that yesterday, now you say this today." How right they are. I hope it will ever
be so. I fear the day when I have to exhort 'language to talk to me', totell me what I used to know'.
I hope you can see the 'wild animal' of poetry in this poem as the editor must have sighted it. I absolutely can't. For me there is not a grain of commonsense in the poem; and I still warn that when innate sanity, or common- sense, is neglected in a poem, the poem hasn't too long to escape the screwed up paper stage.
It is understandable to me that some or all have thought, even remarked. 'Why did he select such indifferent poems to speak about when he keeps on condemning the accepted English Poetry traditional theory'. But it is not condemn- ing old poetry that I intend. I am criticizing the theory that poetry is written on an inheritance level, and that the good poetry always conforms to certain set standards or patterns which suit scholarship. I have tried to dis- tinguish good poetry by recognition of the reader's glimpse of a "wild animal" in it, but not the distinct pad of the
"wild animal" regularly beating through a classified for- est of poetry. I emphasise that it is a false trail traced directly through Browning-Hardy-Yeats to continue through our so-called "leading" Australian poets today. A poet is a poet in his own right, otherwise he is a false poet.
He makes his own poetry as he feels it and becomes a true poet only when he writes in a way that is current with the day it was written.
AGAINST or FOR. BEAUTY Peasant women etc
ox paddyfield & soon plough slush sträwhat child in arms etc etc delete arms insert on back child on back - rub out back insert backwards child strapped on backwards Peasant woman etc
screech run fall & so on bullets napalm schrapnel child in mud etc etc delete mud insert broken child broken - rub out broken insert blown apart child mangled blown apart
Peasant woman etc what can we do & so on being sickened is a luxury aesthetics of pain etc etc delete pain insert revolution aesthetics of revolution - rub out aesthetics insert beauty
revolution must be
Here is a poem of consequence in current poetry, probably more suited to visual reading, I prefer silent reading of poetry, receiving the rhythm of its breathing, its sound, as it appears on the page, personally. Spoken poetry, I think, often makes a bad poem seem good from the voice quality and personality of its narrator, whereas a good poem can sound mediocre when delivered badly spoken.
Then there is the word-sense spillage. Listening, it I miss phrase or a word through my lack of concentration the true poem is lost to me. I may hear a pleasant voice delivering rhythmical noise, perhaps, tap-dripping rhymes, but I have lost the poem. I am listening to elocution, which is not my purpose when I read a poem. Another thing which applies to poetry readings, and I have taken part in a few in Adelaide, Sydney and Brisbane - to me they are too much like a beauty competition. The person with youth and voice quality, must prevail in appeal over an old stumpy poet with an indifferent voice and delivery.
The poem is secondary; and for me, involved in poetry, this should not be. Every word, every letter, sometimes notation on the page, matters in the interpretation for me.
It must be there for me to stumble back on, to reread as I go through trying to glimpse the 'wild animal' the untame- able spirit of poetry in a poem. I recollect a short current poem by. Bill Beard in the Australian, about tears, or I remember tears in the poem. Small case letters were ap- propriate to the poem's anonymity in harmony with sorrow and one short line of the brief poem began with a colon.
How would you voice that line? Placed as the double dot notation, the colon about midway through the poem, gave a fleeting impression of two falling tear drops without pathos, unspoken about, but just present - in the poem.
How is a narrator to convey this adornment? And in the poem just narrated, on the page, there is use of amper- sands which is effectively made; and, also the abbreviation for etcetera. Perhaps they may be misunderstood aseccent•
ricities of "verse or worse" which R.D. FitzGerald con- demns in his article "Verse or Worse" published in the latest issue of Southerly - R.D. FitzGerald emerges
here in an old suit of armour, to the attack with the 'Brown- ing-to-thou-to-me' army of old literates.
How do you speak the ampersand to make certain its affect is fully conveyed? Almost as an abbrefiated "n" sound I would suggest. That's how I would read it visually.
I have published it as the conjunction appears. The am- persand and the abbreviated etc are part of the technique of this poem which is an example of true current poetry - I have avoided the use of the words "modern" and "con.
temporary". Poetry was "modern" and "contemporary"
when I was a youth, also "avantgarde''. I have found out that, always in the flux of time, the ''avantgarde" just av'nt gard it; "contemporaries" become full of ''contempt"
as literary judgment of some of my contemporaries; and the mode of the "modern" changes with alarming alacrity even as winter sales in the shop windows reminds us.
I have personally glimpsed the untameable animal of poet- ry more in this poem than in any of the others here pre- sented. As with the first poem read (and of the eight poems I think only three are successful viz.
Book Review
At A Public Dinner, and Against or For Beauty
I don't think the most profound pundit could categorise this poem as a lyric. To me it is narrative poetry through which runs the "wild animal" of the poet's imagination.
It is art of its own genre, rather than a Iyriq, a montage of reality of moments.
I always feel when a poem is good. When I first read a new poem that is good, I feel envy - never of the poet's name, but for his poem. It is the only envy I egister in life, you can have the remainder of the world, all its burnt out staleness. Only in one direction I am still the hunter, happiest after the chase to glimpse the "wild animal"
that stalks in poetry.
While it is essential to teach language, it is impossible to teach poetry. Poetry is instinctive and the good poem is written out of inspiration and not constructed.
I have never written an acceptable poem that was pre- planned. What happens is that you live a life. If you have to artificially stimulate that life by flying around the world until you're giddy, to broaden (is it the only way - going
abroad?) your outlook, knowledge, visions, or whatever you pick up abroad, you will have to do just that. But you can live in one region only, all your life, and become a poet as poets have for thousands of years The main stricture is that you cannot become a poet Yor a day or a season or a year. It is a lifetime commitment after which duration you are most fortunate if the world says
I was surprised to find two or three poems that I judged successes. I suppose it would beunreas- onable to ask for more".
JOHN BLIGHT
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