Poetry

As someone whose primary literary interest is Aboriginal writing, reviewing John Kinsella’s aptly titled Ghost of Myself means approaching his poetry with a different perspective from many of his readers. The coolness of the writing, combined with the sombreness of much of his observation of the world around him, gives an end-of-days tenor to the four sections that comprise Ghost of Myself.

The god of lyric poetry in Greek mythology was an attempted rapist. Indeed, one of the primal scenes of Western literature – Apollo’s pursuit of the nymph, Daphne – is a story of attempted rape. When Daphne can no longer outrun Apollo, she transforms into a laurel tree to escape violation. The heartbroken Apollo plucks a leaf from her branches, vowing to honour Daphne by adorning his hair and lyre with laurel and keeping her leaves eternally green. Thus began the long association of the laurel wreath with poetic or artistic achievement in Western culture: the rapist, in his grief, turned to poetry. And his poetry would forever sing of the loss and longing caused by a thwarted rape.

Extraordinary though it is, narrative film has its limitations. It is a truism of film criticism, for instance, that biopics of writers are usually at their weakest when representing the process of writing. It is an understandable problem. How, in the dynamic medium of film, is one to represent the (in)action of writing, which is largely solitary, motionless, and internal? In biopics of poets such as Syliva Plath and Dylan Thomas, the process of composing poetry is usually rendered in a Terrence Malick–like montage of soft-focus, shallow depth of field, handheld shots meant to signify the numinous, visionary experience of poetic inspiration. This cinematic convention is more or less nonsense. Biopics of writers are also largely indifferent to issues of technique – the slow, uneconomical labour of dealing with language as a medium. Who cares if that verb in the last line should be a gerund?

The title of Keri Glastonbury’s latest collection of poems, 51 Alterities, evokes the title of 81 Austerities (2012) by the English poet Sam Riviere. Glastonbury’s collection is, according to its author, ‘offered as a loose “antipodean” adaptation’ of 81 Austerities, a collection that was written ‘in response to the impact of austerity measures on the arts and as a provocation on poetry as a contemporary media in the internet age’. Post-internet poetry, taking on as it does the syntax and lexis of internet discourse (especially, but not wholly, that used in social media), has become a dominant style in contemporary Anglophone poetry. When 81 Austerities was reviewed by The Daily Telegraph the headline was ‘Poetry for the Facebook Age’. Such a caption now seems laughably dated, and perhaps a little naïve, suggesting something of the dangers of writing post-internet poetry. A decade is a long time in cyberspace.

With issues 101 and 102 (Renewing Dialects: New Poetry from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales), Poetry Australia has entered upon the estate of the sage organ. The two issues account fairly representatively for PA’s traditional function – to provide opportunity, a periodic review of contemporary poetic activity, and a reliable voice. Herbert Jaffa leads off 101 with ‘Poetry Australia at One Hundred: An Impression and Appreciation’, a tribute to PA as source material and as a place of opportunity for the newish and oldish poet; and Elizabeth Perkins closes the show with a review essay of its special issues since 1968 (up to, but not including, 102). This essay cogently reminds poets and readers of a basic requirement: that poets keep ‘good faith towards the language they use’. An editor could do worse than start with such a requirement. Both 101 and 102 are clearly open to the possibilities of ‘new’ languages, and alternatives to the sort of ‘I’ catalogue of micromoments that so often puts new readers off. Shifting of the ‘I’ shuffles up some interesting versions of tone.

Grief, depression, and trauma do terrible things to the human body and spirit. The brain rebels callously against its vessel, leaving the wounded mind to wallow in the deepest pits of despair, perpetually refreshing pain and obsessively seeking out the recesses of scarred memories.

The poems of Bathypelagia by Debbie Lim and Re:Vision by Isi Unikowski are poems of cartography; they map the unknown and probe the world with human curiosity, tracing meaning onto elusive places, feelings, and encounters, solidifying these through the writing process. Both collections conspire to understand the world as they construct their realities one line at a time, the poems themselves moving – in the former’s case, vertically from the deep sea, and, in the latter’s case, through the casting of light, the revealing of landscapes.