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Laurie Duggan

a poem is a house into which / words are inserted // permeable, vapour or rain / altering the light outside ...

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Laurie Duggan’s study of ‘imagined space’ in Australian visual culture arrived on my desk, with a certain synchronicity, the day after I saw the film Memento. In their distinctive ways, both these works seem indicative of our age, offering unstable and fractured accounts of space and time at a moment when virtual reality seems to be untying our formerly fixed Western notions of these concepts.

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I’ve been fortunate enough to talk to a number of older poets, many of whom are no longer with us. I count myself fortunate to have met poets such as Carl Rakosi, Gael Turnbull, Ed Dorn, Jonathan Williams, Lee Harwood, and Tom Raworth. If I could use a time machine, I’d like to talk to William Carlos Williams, especially about the radical work he produced in the 1920s.

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In all of his books, Laurie Duggan has tended to avoid the ‘well-formed poem’. His poems are not of the kind that unroll like carpets: replete with interconnected images, sonic patterning, argument. A large part of his poetic approach emerges from an attempt to not speak over what is already there, or, as he writes in one poem, to ‘not neutralise / the effect of atmosphere’. This might be described as permitting the incidental, letting things in, but it’s also – Duggan being a self-described minimalist – much to do with omission. The model his oeuvre provides is one that prioritises listening (and looking) over speaking, and in that sense it is anti-bardic. ‘The poem’ as a discrete object is often, and almost entirely within this collection, given over to the series, allowing Duggan to retain qualities of the short lyric while building long-form structures whose rhythms become apparent over years or, in the case of ‘Blue Hills’, over decades.

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In The Resistance to Poetry (2004), James Longenbach claims that ‘Distrust of poetry (its potential for inconsequence, its pretensions to consequence) is the stuff of poetry.’ The Australian poet Laurie Duggan has based a career on a creative distrust of poetry, or at least a certain kind of attitude to ...

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1

Camperdown’s for dogs,
Friday evening in the park off Church Street

a barefoot man
carries a plank:

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In the ‘March’ section of his new collection, Laurie Duggan writes, ‘(but I am the neighbours) // (I am, perhaps, Neighbours)’. The couplet points to several things: being an Australian in England; Duggan’s persona of observant neighbour; the banality and plurality (‘neighbours’) of Duggan’s perspective. The plurality is one of many levels: Duggan’s neighbourly approach is applied not just to the physical world but to ideas, reading, poets, music, politics and history. He is, paradoxically, a neighbour to himself and his own writing.

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How to convey the pleasures of a whole collection of Laurie Duggan’s poetry? They are so various, one reason why Duggan is a source of perplexity to anthologists in search of a definitively characteristic poem. Anything as long and wilfully extravagant in spacing and layout as the anti-rhapsody ‘September Song’ almost automatically excludes itself; something epigrammatic then, say ‘A Little Book of Wisdom’ – but what about a virtuoso pastiche, the sonnets of ‘In Memory of Ted Berrigan’, or a ‘Blue Hills’ poem, with that imagist ‘minimalistic elegance’, which ‘Upside down’ declares: ‘unattractive / as the description of a potential residence / though ok if applied to / a book of poems ... my poems.’

It is even more difficult to find a Duggan poem that will slot neatly into the discourse of a thematic anthology. Against the grain of solidity in so much Australian poetry, there is something elusive here, an unreadiness to be ‘formulated, sprawling on a pin’ like that prototype of modernist angst Prufrock, whose ‘Do I dare to eat a peach?’ mischievously morphs to ‘Do I dare to eat a Porsche?’ in ‘Fantasia on a Theme by TS Eliot’. Mischief is part of Duggan’s very considerable satirical armoury against solemnity: consider ‘this country is my mind’: ‘just two minutes after / Les Murray became a republic / somebody cancelled my visa.’ But mischief is not all; there is something coldly sobering about this other glimpse Duggan offers of the relationship between politics and poetry: ‘At the centre of empire / the poets, stitched, bound / and acid-free.’

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Mangroves by Laurie Duggan

by
April 2003, no. 250

Poems are like mangroves. They lodge and grow in the mind, becoming part of us, just as these plants take root in estuarine silt. Even on the page, there is sometimes a resemblance. As its title suggests, Laurie Duggan’s first volume since New and Selected Poems (1996) is substantially a product of his recent move to Brisbane, containing a large section of poems coloured by references to the city’s subtropical conditions. However, Mangroves also brings together varied material that dates from 1988 to 1994, some of which – notably the ‘Blue Hills’ sequences – has been published elsewhere.

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When I started publishing my poems back in the early 1970s, I did so amidst a concern that Australian poetry was being Americanised: Coca-Cola, the pizza parlour, and the rock and rollers’ preoccupation with that thing called ‘lurve’ had swept all that was pure and true into the trashcan of history, and we with our Olsons, O’Haras, and Berrigans were unwitting accomplices to this annulling of our own birthright. My defence at the time would have been, ‘well, we’re taking aboard all that’s repulsive in American culture: their military and economic theses, their particular variety of consumerism, and no-one is protesting much about this – so why do they get so upset when we pick up on something of value from that culture?’ American artists themselves had absorbed things from other cultures without anyone there worrying about it. A great deal of the motivation behind the ‘New York School’ came from the French surrealists, though in translation surrealism had its more harebrained ideological aspects removed painlessly. In fact this ‘translation’ was a model of cultural appropriation, showing what a sea-change (and a change of tongue) can do to some seemingly immutable items.

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