Fruitful Contradictions

Launceston poet Tim Thorne, who died on September 16 at seventy-seven, had a long and various career, starting with Tense, Mood and Voice in 1969 and finishing with this strange but highly entertaining chapbook, Little Pataphysics. Along the way he was associated with a number of divergent tendencies, from the New Poetry of Robert Adamson to his later, fiercely Juvenalian, satires on Australian politics and culture—written from a standpoint well to the left of this magazine.

Importantly, Thorne retained an interest in traditional forms and the contemporary uses to which they might be put. His sense of humour was also a constant. Both characteristics prevail in what we must assume will be Thorne’s valedictory collection.

It is interesting, also, to see that Thorne, whose moral and political compass was normally well-developed, has based this last book almost arbitrarily around two seemingly contradictory figures—the French symbolist and absurdist writer Alfred Jarry (1873–1907) and the Australian pop singer Little Pattie (born 1949). Jarry, often seen as a forerunner to Dada and even postmodernism, was the inventor of the philosophy of pataphysics which tended to be, among other things, a spoof of traditional science and philosophy.

Widely separated from Jarry by both time and geography, Little Pattie, in her early career, with such hits as “Stompin’ at Maroubra” and “He’s My Blonde Headed, Stompie Wompie, Real Gone Surfer Boy”, was also breezily apolitical (though she became a solid unionist later).

The back cover blurb of Little Pataphysics tells us that Thorne “first encountered the songs of Little Pattie and the absurdist pataphysics of Alfred Jarry” sixty years ago and has now “brought these two influences together” in poems that “inhabit a world of fruitful contradictions and light-hearted truths”. In retrospect, Little Pattie’s early songs seem almost self-satirising, though that may not have been her intention at the age of fourteen. Alfred Jarry’s satire was also somewhat self-directed. Certainly, he didn’t take himself too seriously.

From these contradictions and parallels, Thorne has produced sixteen poems, each with a title punning on the syllable “pat” and each one twelve lines long. There is an arbitrariness and consequent playfulness to these restrictions which have served Thorne’s purpose well.

Inevitably, the work varies in quality, with the jokes in some poems coming off rather better than those in others but, in general, the poems hold up well to subsequent readings. Indeed, a second reading may well be essential to “get” some of the book’s more arcane jokes. Some reader-research may also be necessary as most are unlikely to have an equal knowledge of Thorne’s two protagonists. Certainly this reader didn’t.

A reasonably typical poem here is “Little Patchwork”, in which the Frenchman Jarry is imagined as seeing from

an old-fangled flying machine …

the beaches of Sydney

more like tender blankets, curled

around the living spaces of people

who were shockable but no less real

than those who stomped their applause

in Paris or Coogee, squaring

the weird light into portions,

frenzied with laughter or just

swallowing the rhythm again and again.

More personal perhaps is the final quatrain of “Little Patriarch” where Thorne confesses:

Some of us try to make our lives

a combination of theirs.

We aspire to mock gravitas

but keep the sand between the toes.

There’s a nice ambiguity here too. Do we “mock” gravitas? Or is it that we aspire to a “mock gravitas”? Certainly, as pragmatic Australians, we like to “keep the sand between our toes”.

More personal again is “Little Patricide”, where the poet starts by claiming, hyperbolically, “I have killed my father”, and goes on to express resentment at his birth parents for having given him up for adoption. He notes however that his two brothers “refrained from killing him” and wonders, “Was it weakness / or ignorance that spurred my crime?” This might seem too much of a bald statement for some readers but one can still feel the pain below it all these years later. I’m reminded of a much earlier poem where Thorne compares his birth father to the much travelled “Kilroy”, now back in America, “fat and pensioned off / pushing 70 in a Cadillac, remembering one leave”.

Little Pataphysics might seem a strange book for a satirist to leave behind but it does serve to remind us of the virtues of being, occasionally, less than serious—and, like both Little Pattie and Jarry, “stomping away in the cause of / having innocent fun”.

It’s a brave and even consoling message to receive from a poet who almost certainly knew he was dying when he wrote it.

Little Pataphysics
by Tim Thorne
Press Press, 2021, 27 pages, $9.90

Geoff Page’s recent books include Elegy for Emily: A Verse Biography of Emily Remler (1957-1990) (Puncher & Wattmann, 2019) and In Medias Res (Pitt Street Poetry, 2019). More of his poetry will appear in Quadrant shortly