On My Australian Poetry

John Dryden once defined music as “inarticulate poesy” (poetry). Turning that around, I define poetry as “articulate music”, for that is what the best poetry is: sound cut into time as rhythm for harmonies of expression. Hybrid Publishers of Ormond in Victoria, who have published my last five books, clearly like both my Australian poetry and the music it contains, whilst some publishers, most critics and all the arts bureaucracies find it difficult to look past my Greek surname.

I could document examples of discrimination against my work because of my Greek surname at territory, state and federal levels, but it would serve no good purpose. It was never malicious: the purblind political correctness of an arts bureaucracy, or the obediently-cultivated ignorance of a literary critic unaware of his untreatable tin ear, would account for most of it.

I began writing and publishing poetry in 1975 in Canberra, where I had settled in October 1972. It was then tacitly assumed that Australian literature was generally written by people with Anglo surnames; literature written by people without Anglo surnames was necessarily deemed “multicultural”. Although not much has changed in that regard, it didn’t bother me since I knew that my birthplace, my education, my history, my friends and my poetry were all Australian. If I sometimes wondered how my poetry might otherwise have been received had my mother, Olive Emma Browne, been Greek and my father, John Paul Aslanides, Anglo (with names, theirs and mine, to match), I didn’t need to: Patricia Rappolt, the then Literary Editor of the Canberra Times, was happy to publish virtually everything I sent her. And pay me for it.

Judith Wright mentored me in poetry for twenty-one years, whilst Peter Sculthorpe taught me musical composition at Sydney University, from which I graduated BA (Music) in 1967. To theory, I added practice: I sang bass in the Sydney University Choir and was taught piano to AMEB Grade 7 (Hons), then the highest of the grades, by Sydney pianist Freda Franks. I could not have hoped for a better mentoring in poetry, or training in music, as a preface to a career celebrating Australia and Australians in fifteen books of poetry and music.

Seven Australian publishers rejected the manuscript of my first book, The Greek Connection, even though it mostly contained poems previously published in the Canberra Times, the Sydney Morning Herald and several literary magazines. The “connection” here was my fascination with ancient Greek mythology:

 

Endymion

 

I’m quite a handsome fellow, actually,

even if I do say so myself, but you know,

camping out one night

on the mountain grass,

lying on my back

stoned under the stars,

I could have sworn

that the moon made

a pass at me—yes! But whilst

I know that women love to worship

my magnificent body,

there was just no way

I was going to make it

with that rotund lunatic.

God! What with all that

astronautical debris

scattered around the Mountain of Venus,

I could do myself a permanent injury.

 

This very first poem in my very first book has it all: a modernist concrete form in the shape of a very large capital “E” (to reflect Endymion’s vanity), echoes back through English literature (to Keats’s “Endymion” of ideal beauty) and the Middle Ages (with their obsession of a mystical union with God through the moon), to the original Endymion of ancient Greek mythology, a handsome Greek shepherd with whom the moon had fallen in love (hence the oblique reference to dangerous sex in the last two lines). I had no interest in modern Greek civilisation, its dictatorships, civil wars and the rural poverty from which my father had escaped, by boat to Australia, in 1925.

Despite knowing nothing about book design, production or distribution, I decided I had no choice but to publish The Greek Connection myself in 1977. Printed from typewriter masters, my saddle-stapled book looked cheap and amateurish, but the quality of the content won me the British Commonwealth Poetry Prize for 1978 for the best first book of poetry, in English, published anywhere in the British Commonwealth other than England! The Commonwealth Institute and the National Book League, in London, awarded the prize annually on the advice of an international jury of seven judges. After the Australia-wide (indeed, worldwide) publicity had settled down, I allowed myself a quiet gloat by noting that a book published by one of the seven publishers that had rejected mine had been awarded a thank-you-for-trying “commendation”. Now that’s what I call “poetic justice”.

 

I am Australian-born, Australian-educated and Australian-focused. The only Greek I ever knew as a child and as an adolescent (by sound and only later by meaning) was some occasional choice swearing by my father when he was home for a few days every couple of months from his job shovelling coal into the furnaces that heated the boilers of ships plying the coastal trade in the Australian mercantile marine. But I later learnt a lot of Greek when in 1968, aged twenty-four and my father long dead, I boarded a boat for Europe, where I disembarked in Piraeus, the port for Athens. The strong Australian dollar (it bought around US$1.12 in those days) helped me to finance some three years visiting the great cathedrals, galleries and museums of Europe (and Greek islands full of English and American girls). As well, I enrolled in the University of Athens in a special program of modern Greek for foreigners: I wanted to be able to read Cavafy, Seferis, Elytis and other modern Greek poets in the original.

Imagine my surprise, though, when I found that the University of Athens was so conservative that the modern Greek they were teaching (Katharevousa) bore little relation to the Greek being spoken in the streets and by my cousins in the suburb of Amarousion. Paradoxically, this Greek, which was similar to classical (Attic-Ionic) Greek, later proved useful when in 1987 and 1988 in Canberra I studied the (Doric) Greek Odes of Pindar, a poet whose work, in my opinion, is superior to that of Homer.

Modern Greek poetry has naturally had a lot to say about modern Greece and through it, humanity. Indeed, two modern Greek poets have done this well enough to win the Nobel Prize in Literature: Giorgos Seferis in 1963 and Odysseus Elytis in 1979. For me, Seferis proved the more substantial and influential of the two when in 1975 I began writing my own poetry, my Australian poetry, in Canberra.

 

Back in Australia in March 1971 after some three years absorbing Europe like a sponge (and three months in India learning about the sponge), I followed The Greek Connection with Passacaglia and Fugue (1980). Judith Wright generously gave me my requested back-cover comment followed by an unrequested, but very welcome, twenty-one years’ friendship and mentoring in poetry until her death in Canberra in June 2000. Manning Clark wrote me more blurb whilst ex-Prime Minister Gough Whitlam gave me a full-page preface. Though Passacaglia and Fugue showed the influence of Seferis, the subject matter remained Australians and Australian history, topics that clearly resonated with these three luminaries. This was also a valuable lesson for me: if it is obvious that you have it in you to become the best, then if you ask the best to endorse you, they generally will. I also realised how sensible I had been to accept a friend’s advice and move to Canberra. Not only did I save the fifteen hours a week I had spent travelling to and from work in Sydney, but in Canberra I found something that I might never have discovered in Sydney (or the other state capitals): a national perspective on Australia and Australian literature that any would-be national poet must acquire and apply.

Passacaglia and Fugue was the last of my “compilation” collections. All my subsequent books of poetry were theme-based, conceived as a whole and through-composed. The medieval Exeter Book Riddles inspired my third book, One Hundred Riddles, published by Angus & Robertson in 1984. I treated one hundred mostly Australian subjects in the literary riddle form (ostensible answer/actual answer). This is number twenty-four:

 

I am old at the age of fifteen,

and young at the age of thirty.

I am big when low, small when high,

and empty when full.

I move very fast, yet appear to be still.

Now say what I am, that,

when the light of the world

disappears from my face,

even the oceans recede in fear.

[The moon]

 

Penguin Books published my fourth book, Australian Things (1990), after the manuscript had won me second prize for full-length poetry collections in the 1988 Bicentennial Literary Awards. This book took its inspiration from a passing comment, over lunch with Judith Wright, about how she had used linked images as a method of tying together a sequence of poems in a recent book, Phantom Dwelling (1985). Her comment solved a poetic impasse I had come to with notes from a recent and extensive tour of the Kimberley region of Western Australia. Also inspirational was The Pillowbook of Sei Shonagon, a tenth-century Japanese diarist and poet. I adapted Sei Shonagon’s Japanese format, along with the insight provided by Judith Wright, to set out my poems in contrasting pairs. So, “Things best enjoyed from a distance” was paired with a poem about “Things best enjoyed close up”, to a total of forty-eight paired poems. Penguin Books flew me from Canberra to the Adelaide Festival in March 1990 to launch both Australian Things and their Penguin poetry list. Here are the opening lines of “Things about which something should be done”:

 

Adjectives and arts administrators, building societies

in C-sharp major, no carrot cake at interval,

dittoes that don’t repeat, echidnas that ebb on the bitumen,

the False Swamp Rat, gaberdine gardens with

pencil pines, handshakes like wet beetroot,

idolatrous dogs, jet-lagged luggage …

 

Although Penguin’s book design, sales promotion and distribution were excellent, the acid in the pages of the book soon foxed the paper from white to muddy brown; within another forty years, this book will be dust. I have since insisted that all my books are published on (now-inexpensive) acid-free paper.

Peter Sculthorpe was delighted with my fifth book, Australian Alphabet (1992), and wrote me his appreciation of it in a full-page preface.

AnniVersaries (1998), my sixth book and magnum opus at 454 pages, contains 366 linked poems, each consisting of eighteen lines of loosely-sprung elegiac couplets. One poem for every day of the Australian year, the poems are set out chronologically by day and by month, but with the years as they happen. For examples, the poem for 19 December 1857 is “Frank the poet farewells Tasmania”, for 20 December 1915, it is “John Monash farewells Gallipoli”. The poem for 23 December 1923, “Eternity (in marriage)”, is a particular favourite. This poem describes how a young couple, unable to find a priest to marry them where they lived in the Pilbara in Western Australia, arranged to marry themselves:

 

Eternity (in marriage)

23 December 1923

 

Whether or not a priest or celebrant’s involved,

the couple that truly weds still marries itself;

everyone else is there for fashion, the forms-of-words,

consumption of cake and far too much champagne.

So when he and she were married in The Pilbara,

they sat themselves in the best they had near water.

She threw a stone. “Until it floats, I’m true to you.”

He showed her the wedding ring he’d made himself.

“I’ll love you till Port Hedland tides no longer race

across the harbour flats to stranded ships;

till Mulga, Paper-Bark and River Red Gum lose

their Pallid Cuckoos, Doves and Diamond Finches;

until those winds that daily roar across The Bight

cease their search for windmills in Esperance.”

“Those things described,” she said, “conceivably could happen.”

He looked her in the eye and touched her cheek.

“I’ll love you till it rains in Marble Bar,” he said.

She smiled and kissed him, this time as his wife.

 

I have lost count of the number of times this poem has been broadcast on Ian McNamara’s radio program Australia All Over on the ABC of a Sunday morning. This exposure would account for its extensive use by marriage celebrants throughout Australia.

I spent six years researching and writing this book, one year editing and revising it and another year looking for a publisher. Again, the subject matter is unashamedly Australian, though this time the model for the book was Ovid’s Metamorphoses. His theme of change in continuity I adapted to continuity through linkages in a complex cross-referencing of lines in related and unrelated poems. (If you plan to be an English-language poet of any consequence, you need to be familiar with the poetry of the poets in and around the Age of Augustus. These include Catullus as preface, Vergil, Horace, Ovid, Propertius and Tibullus during, and Martial after. You will also need a nodding acquaintance with the best of the ancient Greeks, especially Pindar, Homer and the two surviving poems of Sappho.)

Brandl & Schlesinger, a small Sydney publisher, did the book proud on acid-free paper with superb book and cover design whilst Les Murray, Judith Wright and Phillip Adams provided extensive and insightful comment for the back cover. The print run was 754, of which 700 sold; a good result. My publisher gave me the remainder at no cost. Royalties on sales for the eight years of work amounted to about $1500; poets who answer only to their muse necessarily work in expectation of returns as low as this. I could not have produced this book, and all my other books written since 1986, without my wife’s support.

 

Judith Wright described my seventh book, A Calendar of Flowers: Selected Poems 1975–2000

(2001) as “Original, meticulously crafted, witty and most readable … a major contribution to Australian literature”. Now, nearly twenty years later, it may be time for another Selected, in which my poem on the bunyip will feature again. Never having seen a bunyip myself, I researched the dozens of accounts of people who claimed to have encountered one, and assembled the creature’s reported features in these last six lines of my poem:

 

a long-eared, two-tusked, three-toed, four-legged and very-long-tailed

half-man, half-fish, dark brown, bristle-haired,

saw-toothed, emu-necked, bullock-backed and perhaps horse-tailed,

groaning, hissing, screeching, roaring, booming,

black and furry, furtive and flippered inhabitant

of billabongs, swamps and night shadows.

 

Occasions for Words: Poems for Birth, Marriage, Death and Much Between (2006), are just that in my eighth book and my only volume of poetry published in Adelaide. My ninth, Ruminations: Two Books of Lyric Mysticism (2008), consists of two books in one, each containing 100 numbered stanzas: Love as Song and Singer and Song. The main influences were Asian and Western mysticism and the poetry of Jalaloddin Rumi. Of all my many books of poetry, this one is almost exclusively pure lyric, joyful and otherwise: Sometimes I am so lonely that I wonder / about the mental health of my own shadow.

Perhaps like most poets who tackle the deceptively simple sonnet form, I much prefer the Shakespearean model with its succinct closing couplet to the Petrarchan form with its anti-social rhyme scheme and anti-climactic sestet. The best of both are in my Collected Sonnets: 1974–2004 (2010), my tenth book of poems. Like most good sonnets, they are concerned with love: the finding, making and losing of it (arguably, these are also the concerns of all great lyric poetry).

“Stop words,” noted Wikipedia in 2007, “are those words which are so common that they are useless to index or use in search engines or other search indexes.” Have, her, him, his, shall, she, should are some examples. My list of eighty-seven such stop words became the titles of a series of enigmatic love poems that made up my eleventh book, Stop Words, published in 2011 by Hybrid Publishers, who also produced all my subsequent books of poetry:

 

Shall

 

They say that “will” shall win:

that “shall” is disappearing from the conversation

of people intent on intention,

and their need to obtain, and capitalise, futurity.

“Shall”, they say, will retreat to legal documents,

and linger in delicate, and stylistic, questions.

But I shall save it, and she will help me.

We shall meet again and,

with love now obvious, even to us,

talk unselfconsciously about each other.

We shall sit in extended yesterdays

and muse on the paucity of probable tomorrows.

We shall feel the skin of the present tense on each other’s faces.

And in the dry indicative, I will not cry. Nor shall she.

 

Ancient Greek plays in which the chorus takes a pivotal role in the drama prompted my twelfth book, Versatility or, a Justification for Poetry (2013). My Versatility is a friendly antagonism between a sceptical double a cappella chorus, representing the community, and a baritone, representing the poet. The chorus asks why anyone would want to read obscure and tedious modern verse; it questions why there is so little pleasure to be had from modern poetry. Questions and responses are sung in my settings of my poetry to selected chorales of J.S. Bach. The Resonants, a local a cappella group of some twenty-six choristers, premiered the work in the Great Hall at the Australian National University in September 2012. I made sure that I sat at the end of a row so as to quickly join the chorus and bow to the applause of the audience of some 350 people. The published edition of this book included a compact disc recording of this performance.

 

I had long decided to have my Yamaha upright piano retuned to Thomas Young’s 1799 Well Temperament, one of a number of tuning systems popular at the time and for which much of the piano music of Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin and other classical and romantic period composers had been written. Because the tuning of each key was subtly specific to that key, composers had found that certain keys suited particular moods and selected them accordingly. Hence Beethoven’s sublime grandeur in D minor and C minor, Mozart’s sunny happiness in C major, Chopin’s virtuosic melancholy in A flat major, G flat major and G minor and Schubert’s delightful exuberance in D major.

Pianist and keyboard specialist Geoffrey Lancaster approved my idea, though he did recommend that I also consider Hummel’s 1828 tuning system, which he considered more subtle. However, as I already had the technical data that the piano tuner would require, I decided on Thomas Young’s 1799 Well Temperament with its sumptuous resonances and characteristic colours. The cost, however, was prohibitive: my piano tuner wanted $1000 just for the initial tuning. Moreover, my son John needed a grand piano to prepare for his A.Mus.A. (Associate in Music Australia) examination, so I traded-in my old Yamaha YUX upright on a Yamaha C5 grand piano tuned in modern Equal Temperament. I then transferred my perception of the “flavour” of the various keys in the old Well Temperaments to the character of the poems in my thirteenth book, Temperament: Twenty-Four Love Poems, One in Each Key (2013). Each poem for each key consists of six four-line stanzas of elegiac couplets; here are some lines from the “Study in F major”:

 

My fingers fill with Chopin: I’m a revolutionary study

in altruism, angst and rank absorption.

 

I modulate. Don’t we all? And discover my greatest terror:

women, and the way they make you make yourself.

It’s as if they know what I could be and maybe matter,

not for myself, but the selves I might inspire.

 

The influence on Western literature of the poetry of the Roman poet Ovid is probably second only to that of the Bible. His Heroides, literary letters written in the personas of women in Greek and Roman mythology, served as a model for my fourteenth book, Letterature: Verse Letters from Australian Women (2014). But whereas, with the sole exception of Sappho, Ovid’s women were all mythological, my women, with one exception, actually once lived. The exception is a woman who, though never born, is alive today, though often dead and arguably not a woman. You will have to read the book to discover who she is! Indeed, it is feasible that letters similar to the twenty verse letters I drafted were written to some of the men involved (though not in verses of iambic pentameter, or at the considered length that my fictive epistles are presented): Daisy Bates to “Breaker” Morant, terminating their weeks-old marriage; Nellie Melba to the Duc d’Orleans, ending their affair; Elizabeth Macarthur to her husband John in England, insisting that they stay settled in Australia and not return to England; and Mary Penfold to her son-in-law telling him that she had no intention of selling the Penfolds winery following the death of her husband—that she herself had been making, and would continue to make, all the Penfolds wines and manage the entire operation.

Letterature is probably the first collection of verse letters written by a man in the personas of women since Ovid’s Heroides was published two thousand years ago. It was a joy to revive this neglected genre and establish it as a form of Australian poetry. Some excerpts:

 

I’ll teach you wine, that maturate of patience

grape juice gives to time in oaken casks.

(Mary Penfold to her son-in-law, April 1870)

 

It’s many years since the world discovered us;

how many will we need to find ourselves?

(Margaret Preston to a friend, April 1938)

To live here rents the present, buys a future,

and leases all the life we’ll want to live.

(Elizabeth Macarthur writing from Parramatta to husband John in England, April 1815)

Instead of celebrating what we have,

we write-up replicas of what we envy.

(Dorothea Mackellar to a friend, September 1925)

Remember how we took the air on deck;

on sea legs walked the ship across the waves?

(Caroline Chisholm to her husband in Australia, April 1852)

 

“Keep a diary”, he said. What can I write of

in this scented, parched and saltbush-flavoured

moonlight-soaked and starlight-flooded, huge and

unforgiving, but quite forgetful, land?

(Hannah “Red Jack” Glennan, diary entry, April 1897)

 

My fifteenth and most recent book is Troubadour: Poetry and Original Music for Violin (2016). The twelfth- and thirteenth-century troubadours who lived in what is now south-western France not only wrote their own poetry, but also the music to which the poems were sung. Sometimes instrumental music was included. My Troubadour, set in Australia, contains forty-eight poems about the certainties and uncertainties, joy and despair in the pursuit of love; for twenty-four of the poems, I have added original music for solo violin (instead of setting the poems themselves to music as songs). The spiral-bound book is so configured that in public performance the violinist can read out my poem from the left-hand page and then play my music from the right-hand page. Although the software (MuseScore 2.0) played my music back to me sounding as a violin, I still had to check the playability of the individual pieces with a real violinist because I cannot play the instrument myself. Barbara Jane Gilby, concert master in the Canberra Symphony Orchestra, generously edited my score to good effect.

In writing this book, I had to deal with an interesting problem: some of the violin music that I heard in my head (in association with a particular poem) played itself out in real time. I could not “pause” it and “rewind”. I had to sketch things out very quickly and fill in the detail later. In public presentation, the identities of the troubadour as poet (myself) and the troubadour as performer (the violinist), are deliberately blurred, with the resulting ambiguity seeming to amplify the emotional impact of the performance. Two excerpts:

From the start of the book:

 

She’s settling into Spring in her Australia,

despite Vermont, despite her much-loved Paris,

where sunlight pours carafes of joyous hope

through trees of budding leaves and purple shade,

illuminating market-produce stalls,

the flower sellers’ faces calling custom,

to dance upon the surface of the Seine

which slows its flow to gormandise the light.

 

From the final poem:

 

Love marinaded my imagination

and left me doubly intoxicated,

already drunk on vintages of words:

curated feelings in archived sentences.

 

I never did achieve fluency in modern Greek because I didn’t need to. It has never been my mother tongue. Nor have I ever lived in a Greek community, or identified as Greek. Indeed, I have long forgotten most of the modern Greek I learnt in Athens. But I did learn three valuable lessons from my later study, in Australia, of Pindar’s poetry: one, an appreciation of the dramatic power that national myth can add to a book of verse; two, how to parallel personal experience with national myth so that the public appreciation of the latter enhances the private reader’s pleasure in the former; and three, the responsibility of a national poet to invent such additional mythology as might celebrate our past with contemporary relevance, or immortalise the present for the delight of a distant, but always discerning, posterity.

An old friend from Sydney was musing on the meaning of life as she browsed in the copy of Troubadour I had just given her. “We give life what meaning it has,” I told her, “through the elegance with which we defy death.” She seemed to agree. Well, you’d have to, wouldn’t you?

Australia is not a multicultural country and never has been. Rather, it is multinational in transition for the many overseas-born nationals who contribute to our distinctive culture as they adapt to our way of life and adopt our Australian values. Multiculturalism is a weapon with which “progressive elites” bludgeon Australians and Australian culture in a manic desire to maintain a self-flagellating cultural cringe.

Migrants (and sometimes the Australian-born children of migrants) need time to identify as Australians: to wholeheartedly embrace us and allow us to embrace them. This identification and distinctiveness is the Australian culture that I both document and create, that governs our lives and defines who we are, that you read yourself rich in and enjoy—and what our best poets, novelists, playwrights and essayists produce. It has been the basis of our contribution to world literature for many, many years, won us a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973 and has since demonstrated its preparedness to win us another.