A Geology of Contemporary Australian Poetry

I Scheme: The Good, the Bad, and the Bland Rhetoric has a bad name. And for good reason. Not only does it suggest insincerity and verbal manipulation, it also has a strong odour of scholasticism about it. It is with some trepidation, therefore, that I turn to ancient rhetoric to urge upon you two terms I find useful in thinking about contemporary Australian poetry. I will make it as palatable as I can and hope it doesn’t choke going down. Whether it is nourishing or not, I leave you to decide. The two terms are ‘trope’ and ‘scheme’. They were employed in rhetoric to make a distinction between what were called ‘figures of thought’ and ‘figures of speech’. Tropes included such figures as simile and metaphor, while schemes referred to devices such as personification and rhetorical questions. There were hundreds of such terms; one’s eyes glaze over just thinking about them. But I’m going to focus on only two in order to suggest a way to reconfigure our approach to poetry. I begin with a scheme, one akin to what is called a ‘chiasmus’ where meanings cross over, as ‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair’. By now, I suppose, the other definition of ‘scheme’ – as in an ‘underhanded plot’ or ‘secret design’ – has entered your mind, but please bear with me. Keeping our notion of scheme in mind, we can subtitle this first section ‘The Good, the Bad and the Bland’. I’ll start by stating the obvious: we read poems differently in different contexts. It makes a difference, for instance, if I approach a poem as a poet, a critic, a scholar, or an editor, all roles I am called upon to assume at different times (even if I mostly read for pleasure). As a poet, my concerns tend to be with the effect of a poem and how it is achieved; as a critic, I evaluate and analyse the poem under the sign of a problematic or question; as a scholar, I study it textually and historically; while as an editor, I make a qualitative judgment about its aesthetic value and its suitability for a particular journal or anthology. With regards to Australian poetry, I have looked at poems in all these ways, but here I want to say something about the last category or context. For about fifteen years I have served as poetry editor for Antipodes (a North American journal of Australian studies), and as a result have become acquainted with a range of work not normally available to most readers – not available, that is, because a good deal of what I see never gets published, as far as I know. And it never gets published because, to put it bluntly, it is bad. Of course there is nothing unusual in this; it is surely the case for any poetry editor in whatever language or country. But the point I want to make is that, with reference to Australia, the badness of such poetry is quite illuminating: it tells us something about common perceptions of poetry in Australia, and it can be taken as well as a virtual critique of much contemporary poetry. I am not talking here about poems that aren’t quite good enough to publish; I’m talking about truly bad poems. And I do not mean to condescend; indeed, if there is anything worse than bad poetry, it is bland poetry. Admittedly, these categories of good, bad and bland are quite subjective and, here anyway, unexamined. But, for the sake of developing an argument, I ask you to indulge me and extend the benefit of your doubt. I would love to give some examples of bad poetry here, but I could hardly do so without the authors’ permission. So I will have to generalise. In the first instance, almost all bad poetry rhymes: for instance, to construct a composite example: ‘His starry eyes stare at the rain / while the hidden bird whistles again.’ This points to what remains a stubborn fact, that a great many people continue to expect poems to conform to traditional patterns. All poets who venture outside coteries know this to be true. Second, in Australia, the setting is often the Bush or a shoreline; that is, it concerns the old romantic topos of the self in nature. Third, such poems are frequently elegiac in tone and not infrequently about death itself. And finally, the diction is generally uncomplicated and there is a discernible intent to follow the rhythms of common speech, though in a somewhat heightened mode. This all makes a nice contrast with bland poetry, which invariably is in free verse and features a self-conscious narrator whose intimate epiphanies are tinged with what is felt to be a saving irony. The setting is often indiscernible, and the disposition of the poem on the page suggests a somewhat mild regard for form. Bland poetry is not nearly as interesting as bad poetry. But what is most interesting about bad poetry (once we look beyond its relative ineptitude) is its relation to good poetry. And this brings me to the topic I want to explore. For what do we say about two exemplary Australian poets (both of whom died in 1995) whose poetry exhibits exactly the characteristics of bad poetry mentioned above? The two poets I have in mind are Gwen Harwood (1920–1995) and Philip Hodgins (1959–1995), each of whom published a final volume in 1995: The Present Tense and Things Happen, respectively. Each writes impressively in a variety of modes (lyrical, meditative, loco-descriptive, narrative) and in various forms, whether as formal verse or free verse. Each poet’s work could be divided into the categories of the rural, the urban and the urbane. But what strikes one particularly in both is the ease with which they take up the elements that bad poets so dearly love. At times they will write verse that announces itself as traditional in form, as in Harwood’s ‘Night Thoughts’, where the rhymes are deliberately prominent: ‘Hell is for those who doubt that hell exists.’One of the elohim with whom I fightfrom 4 a.m. to cockcrow, told me this.He hit me in the thigh for emphasis.Is it a dream? If so, the dream persists. Or, similarly, in the case of Hodgins, the opening of ‘Bucolica’: ‘A paddock is a poem,’ wrote the man,‘Each paddock has its own peculiar form. With paddocks, as with art, there is no norm. You comprehend a paddock when you can.’ Such poems call upon the resources of verse in ways that are both conventional, because traditional, and unconventional, because they are unfashionable. To write in a strong measure of decasyllabics and rhyme is to call upon our deep-seated feeling for the regularity of most poetry in English, what we might term its centre of gravity historically. At the same time, in calling attention to itself in this way, such poetry marks out a position at variance with the practices of most Australian poets today. This is not to say that these poems are polemical in intent, but that they simultaneously call upon the past and, I think, call to the future of poetry. This double voicing is what differentiates good poetry from bad, since the bad knows only the past and cannot speak to poetry’s future. What the bad recalls is often the good of generations before, as if the impulse to write entails a desire to preserve a cultural memory. Bad poetry often turns upon a wish for strength, fondness and truth, and there is, perhaps, an unintentional criticism involved in this unspoken appeal to the past, whereby much contemporary poetry appears by contrast to be weak, aloof and false. To return to Harwood and Hodgins, there is another mode of verse we need to attend to. Beyond the self-evidently formal verse, it is the subtle incorporation of formal features in a conversational idiom that strikes me as indicative of much of what is best in contemporary Australian poetry. For instance, from the close of Harwood’s title poem, ‘The Present Tense’: I drewnear to your house. A man was sittingon a low garden wall, outlinedin evening light, his body fittingitself to age and pain. He heardmy footstep, rose and smiled. We twinedarms, and walked on without a word. And from Hodgins’s ‘The Exploding Snake’: To him the road is a big rockand he lies along itpointing the same route,a black line amongwhite ones, taking stockof the worldwith his lively tongue. Setting aside the precision and visual acuity evident in both examples, what we sense above all is the poet’s – or the poem’s – desire for a recalcitrant shape, a force of resistance, which is not form for its own sake but for the sake of the poem. It is another sort of call, a call upon the resources of the poet, upon inventiveness, delight and dedication – as if to write is, for the poet, a sacred calling. Such poetry is not comprehended by formal verse alone, but the impulse to incorporate tradition, including modern traditions, bespeaks a desire to keep poetry open to all its sources of power. The good needs the bad as much as the bland needs the good. My scheme then is a complex chiasmus, since the Good is like the Bad and the Bad is like the Good; while the Bland is in fact the Bad; and what’s generally considered the ‘Good’ is really the Bland. This interconnectedness, therefore, gives us a schematic, if reductive, view of contemporary Australian verse. II Trope: A Seismic Shift I turn now to my trope by asking, what is the predominant metaphor one hears most often in descriptions of Australian poetry (or literature)? I would answer, still, the romantic trope of organic growth. That is, Australian poetry is represented as if it were somehow a plant or, more often, a person who moves through a natural progression of infancy, youth and maturity. Thus, early colonial poetry is immature or unformed but, after a long adolescence and youth, mid-twentieth-century poetry has advanced upon maturity and has gone on to reap the benefits of a more secure cultural identity. To be sure, many thoughtful critics have criticised and abandoned this view, yet it remains remarkably tenacious as a master trope. There are a number of obvious difficulties with this metaphor. In the first place, its logic suggests that after Australian poetry has flourished it will eventually die (if like a person) or go to seed (if like a plant). Resurrection or cyclic regeneration is possible, I suppose, but one never encounters that further exfoliation of the trope. Second, such a metaphor inevitably prejudices attitudes toward earlier poetry, since such poetry is by definition jejune. For a long time this view tended to disallow serious consideration of nineteenth-century Australian poetry, though now, thankfully, earlier poets are receiving the close attention they deserve. What seems apparent at this juncture is that the organicist metaphor simply masked an imaginative poverty in earlier twentieth-century poets and critics; they could not bridge the cultural difference or gap which had opened up subsequent to that shift in aesthetic and ideological ground we refer to as Modernism. The third problem with the romantic trope of organic development is that it lends a teleological tone to discussions of Australian poetry, which is surely false. There is nothing either inevitable or predetermined about Australian poetry’s historical course. Contemporary poets are not the culminating embodiment of poetic progress. In poetry, at least, contingency rules; it is, at best, a chancy undertaking at whatever historical period and we need to resist the temptation to see ourselves as the enlightened beneficiaries of a benighted past. However, there is no getting away from tropes, so I would like to propose another metaphor, one also taken from the natural world but not strictly organic. Let us think of Australian poetry in geological terms, as a landform made up of various strata – a unique territory composed of layers set down gradually over time. In excavating it critically, we would work backwards through a variety of sedimentations in the century, down into layers of the nineteenth century – the 1890s, the mid-Victorian, the early colonial and so on – into a thin layer of eighteenth-century verse. Below that would be a thick crust of Aboriginal oral poetry, though most of it too far down to reach with our present tools. Without pressing the metaphor too far, we would want to add that this formation is not static but dynamic, that there is constant movement: tremors, quakes, folding, faulting, even an occasional eruption – all indicating a condition more like the Pleistocene or Pliocene epochs than our own geologic period. The point is that these layers are not necessarily cut off from one another but are porous enough to allow elements to percolate upwards. In addition, through processes of faulting and folding, earlier layers will be lifted up into direct contact with later eras, making portions of the past contemporaneous with the present. Indeed, the nature of poetic influence entails the ongoing presence of the past, so the continent of Australian poetry will be an ever-active, ever-developing land form. In employing this metaphor I am thinking about the ways in which Australian poetry can be conceived of as a discrete entity, while at the same time part of a global mass. Much attention has been paid to influences that have come from abroad, primarily Britain and the United States, and there is no doubt such influences have been, and continue to be, crucial in shaping Australian poetry. But at the same time my own reading has led me to think that Australian poetry has entered a new epoch where the white indigenous tradition is fast becoming the primary source of its own renewal. That is why I urge this geologic trope since it helps explain a shift in Australian poetic consciousness: poets today are writing with a sense of their own poetic milieu, their own poetic tradition (which is not simply a ‘sense of place’). Because there continues to be so much interest in poetry from abroad, this change may be obscured, but it is, I think, fundamental. Increasingly, in poems and interviews, one sees evidence of the importance one generation of Australian poets holds for the next, and to a degree not apparent before. This is not merely a matter of ordinary influence or indebtedness; Australian poetry has become the condition of possibility for Australian poetry. While this appears to be a recent occurrence, I suspect we will discover that it has been true to a lesser degree all along. Where particular poets have had Australian precursors we can say that a folding and faulting between historical layers has occurred. Hodgins is a deeply read poet, whose ‘Second Thoughts on The Georgics’, for instance, follows quite precisely the thematic progression of Virgil’s original. Hodgins’s range of reference in his work is as broad as it is subtle. But his sense of his poetic environment is clearly Australian. One sees this too in Gwen Harwood. For all of Harwood’s erudite allusiveness and her evident love of a host of European and American writers, she situates herself squarely in an Australian context. One of the few poets who never travelled abroad, Harwood found nourishment at home in Tasmania and in the person and work of her fellow poets. In her last volume, there are three poems dedicated to Vincent Buckley. For Harwood, Buckley was very much a mortal poet, someone to argue with and learn from, someone who made a difference in her personal and poetic life. When Harwood inscribes poems ‘I. M. Vincent Buckley’ one suspects the abbreviation also stands for ‘Immortal’. Such filiations are crucial to the life of a country’s literature, and they will be the focus of much critical attention in the future, when the story of twentieth-century Australian poetry is written. That Australian poetry should be the ground of Australian poetry will come as no surprise: it is already a continent unto itself, both connected to and separate from other continents. This in no way diminishes the international context of Australian writing. But in the end, to understand fully the dynamics of poetic influence, we may need a version of plate tectonics in a geology of poetry.

I Scheme: The Good, the Bad, and the Bland

Paul Kane

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