Short Takes XXI

3/1/15 Saturday makes review palaver

From today’s reviews the poets get two reprimands. First I learn …

… that our loveable envoy, Clive James, is unhappy with Australian poets because he finds them oafs regarding their expertise in prosody. Largely he’s right, and certainly to practise poetry as a craft in Oz is to live on Torpor Mews. But I do live here and did apply myself to learn my numbers and echo-craft. So how can I not take Clive’s unhappiness with us all personally? Who, after taking pains, can bear to be overlooked by an expatriate practitioner also adroit with his numbers? Staunch as Clive has been for the disciplined work of Stephen Edgar, could our envoy not have risked his ear abroad a little more to where feet and cadences pulse among us before consigning Oz poets as a class to the bin of lineated-prose? The exuberant Kiplingesques of Alan Wearne, the internal rhyme-momentum of Jordie Albiston, the stylish sonnets and sapphics from John Tranter, why, even the metric and stanza versatility of Gouldilocks, for instances? For do we not know how versecraft has a DNA in Australian poetry despite the present infestation of our tin-eared wannabes who must sneer at what their Cretive Writ’n courses have told them is an offence under The Sensibility Code?

Now look! How petty one becomes, nudging for consideration from those one hoped were colleagues but who The Press must turn into oracles!

In this same review (of Black Inc’s Best Australian Poems 2014) Andrew Riemer tells us, No! Clive is quite wrong in his complaint! Stress and drumbeat are actually too abundant in this anthology. If only it contained more EXPERIMENT! What nonsense! All writing from imagination is experimental, sometimes circumspect, sometimes reckless, always subordinate to result. Experiment is a condition of the composing mind, not a badge to be flaunted by the exhibited work. Riemer, critics and readers broadly, look surely, not for what shows trial-and-error, but for what succeeds in charming attention and extending the presence of a given substance. If the writing has been successful, the evidence of experiment should have quietly vanished at the moment the reader is taken in. But Andrew, bless him, must intrude the dreary fret of insecure literary discourse. How can we believe we belong to a vibrant and authentic culture unless we are assured EXPERIMENT is flagrant? Are we not under constant surveillance from those centres of the sophisticated writing we envy and who we fear will deem us inconsiderable?

This insistence that the experimentalism of our arts must be showy perplexes me. It appears to perpetuate a colonial diffidence in our sense of the things we have made from imagination. What happened to the self-possession of a literary culture containing, say, Furphy’s Such is Life, Patrick White’s Riders in the Chariot, or Ken Slessor’s Collected Poems? Can such self-possession actually go into reverse to become fretted about how the thing it offers will measure up against the innovations of elsewhere? What is it declines in us? The vitality of our poetry or the calibre of the readership available to us? What, for instance, accounts for today’s crude and common view that if formal prosody is at one end of a spectrum, experiment must necessarily be at the other? It has nothing to do with actually enjoying poetry, I reckon, nor even reading it, in the engaged sense of that verb.

29/3/15 The Christian challenge

Over the past twenty years I think I have become Christianised without becoming Christian, for I cannot repeat the Apostles’ Creed and believe it, and yet I have no doubt Christ’s life and counsels brought about the most profound revaluation of human values in our history.

So what is this challenge? I take it as twofold. First, clearing away the distractions, I cotton on, which is to say I isolate the warm idea, of mindfulness of The Other, whether Deity, Caesar, Neighbour, Peacemaker, or Lily-of-the-Field, because this mindfulness animates Christ’s counsels and lifetime insofar as the historical record have them, and the rest is extrapolation or clutter.

Second, and harder, I sustain this in the everyday of my mind, knowing how native to mind are both the reasonable challenges and mind’s reptilian provenance.

And an Afterlife? Christ and Darwin chatting usefully.

24/4/15 Gallibly

For weeks now, rampant along every conduit of dissemination, Gallipoli, Legend of Nationhood, by its very hype being transformed into a National Disease!

10/5/15 Larkin’s days

What are days for, asks Philip Larkin, whose Collected Poems I have just read through. Bad day, good day, dull day, vibrant day, things happen and involuntarily we accord the day a character.

Today, all day, an icy wind impels cloud across our roof, while horizons south and west bruise with momentous snowcloud. I woke, fretted by my responsibility to clear the furniture from my father’s coast house as settlement day for its sale approaches rapidly and contingencies prevent me taking effective action. My ute misbehaves, on the telephone the coastal pick-up agencies are unwilling. My sister rings me, also fretting at this task, and suggests the expensive option of hiring a Canberra truck firm to bring the whole caboodle back over the mountain. We could do that; they’ll eat our profit whole.

Impossible to get warm. I go to my workshop to do some soldering for the copper fittings on the bowsprit of my latest ship model. Delicate work, but with my six-inch metal rule that could measure the diameter of spiderweb, I make my measurements, apply the smoking solder, still botch it and again botch it. Geysirs of Wrath! Is this really me who foams? What is it spites me? What is a Gremlin? Answer, a malice in inanimate things that can convert a human into a vulcanological curiosity. I destroy my imperfect handiwork, storm from my workshop.

Come afternoon, I sit down to my present essay because a day is not a day unless it attends a result. My room is glacial. Fetching the heater, I roll it through the house on its little wheels where it must catch on every carpet and be freed by grind-and-flex of my bone-on-bone hips. Installed, I find the apparatus has a defective plug. In the old days one could replace plugs, but now they come plastic-sealed. I have resource; if somewhere I have an old plug, I’ll cut, bare wires, reconnect. I have no old plug so Gremlin insists I write my essay in glacial conditions. Today has taken a fierce dislike to you, Gremlin tells me.

Late afternoon, too disconsolate to write anything requiring the serene mood for thought, I hear the phone ringing. Recent phonecalls have disclosed Asian voices masquerading as officials of the Taxation Office trying to spook me with tax irregularities. I deal them geysirs … You are telling me lies. You know this! Leave your office now and get a job for which your mother might respect you. But the calls have persisted.

Hello?

It is my sister. She tells me her quiet, good-natured son and his mate have offered to hire a truck, go to the coast tomorrow, clear the house, distribute to Salvos, recyclers, tip. No probs.

Dissolution of fret in humans is a palpable sensation. And look! The snowcloud bruise has warmed to steady good rain. What are days for? This one could have seen me eat my hot soldering iron and drink down the toxic flux to spite a self seemingly repudiated by all fair fortune. Instead, I have been shown that days also exist to display how mutable fortune is, no priest or doctor in their long coats running across the fields proving necessary.

18/7/15 Behold the lilies of the field

My author job, when considered as work, can nonplus me. If for a given month I examine the quantum of work I put into my livelihood, then measure this against the livelihood that actually comes in to me, can I say I’ve earned what I get in a world where builders, treeloppers and nurses must graft their long shifts, where the ants on our bridle path and the mynahs among our trees are never seen to be still?

Of course I know the necessary daydreaming that attaches to a finessed book, and the slight unease of that idleness. How is an armchair a shopfloor? How is a woodland walk shiftwork? How is phantasmagoria quantified? But I also know the fever of last draft when the life-in-words goes from crude to comme il faut. Too often poets make many plaints against their livelihood, and I’ve made my share. So, what follows will be a species of anti-plaint.

At sixty-six I scribble away wherever scribble still affords me an opening to try words on a readership response, and I take the long furloughs of reverie this composing seems to need. If I assess my fortune over four-plus decades I can say I’ve had sufficient encouragement to persist with scribble as a worthwhile life’s work, but not sufficient to thrive. Were I a Tudor glove-maker or a Victorian engraver I’d live in penury. But in the lit-biz you charm or you don’t, that is its condition and it is not moral.

Yet scribble and reverie over forty-plus years find me today debt-free, co-owning a house on a pleasant hillside, having never been seriously hungry, and with some whisky usually in the cupboard. I do indifferently, yet I prosper sufficiently well. There is more that sustains me than I have worked for.

10/8/15 The tuba

Can non-verbal music be droll? Is a tuba inherently more comical than an organ? Does the violin have quicker wits than the cello?

I listen to Vaughan Williams’s Tuba Concerto. How delightfully the big instrument makes synaesthesia, placing its big feet circumspectly as the orchestra crashes around it like a school playground. How tentatively, like a kindly giant aware of his power to scare, it looks for its melody, its very uncertainty emphasising its brassy plumpness and complexity of pipes and stops. How its basso notes will trip and pause with “Should I?” and “O, it seems I did!” So shy and a-dream, someone’s overgrown brother at the edge of company, not sure quite how to be witnessed, nor quite wishing to be. Jumbo-trumpet, its vibrations of air finding exquisite tunes so close to eruptive flatulence, comic and heartrending, bless old Ralph Eyebrows for finding music here.

And while we are in this wonderful composer’s company, what is the eye that non-verbal music sees with? I take his London Symphony, where, in the first movement of that work he brings the great city awake, alley by alley, shop-awnings, omnibus and barrow boy, the cellos trailing colliers and their sacks in the pre-dawn, a glint on some cobbles, a melody furrowing light on the old river, then full orchestra for the city-map on its spindle of Thames. Here is the Now innate with Then. I was born in this town, as was my father, and now my younger son has moved there and likes it so well he is likely to stay and thus be remote from us. London-born, I had hardly given the matter a thought until I listened again to this sound-fabric, and then could sob for complex gladness.

29/8/15 The mynahs

My darling has shown me where the Indian mynahs are building a nest in one of the olive trees of our garden. These small, invasive birds have been constructing home from whatever has been available, twig, tissue paper …

“And look! That’s dentifloss!”

Yes, indisputably. Some of the engineering of this treetop home did appear to be some woven dentifloss. Where did they obtain dentifloss from?

“No idea,” says Anne. But encouraged by the resource of these little birds in recent days, she has taken to leaving scraps of wool and other detritus in the vicinity of this nest.

“And Goulie,” she briefs me, “we shall leave them your hair when I trim you next week.”

“Some people consider mynahs a menace,” I offer.

“Well, I think it is fascinating, how they alight on what is available,” she retorts, her face both enthused and self-consciously amused by her own outlandishness.

6/11/15 Good cheer

There is celebrity, and there is demi-celebrity. Our local shops were still buttery with daybreak and few people about when I came from the baker’s with scones and croissant, my newspaper underarm, and heard myself hailed.

“Alan! Mate! How’s it going with you these days?”

My caller was a gingery, bespectacled fellow on the plumper side of burly and I was dubious I had ever seen him before. But if he was confident he knew me …

“Good, mate. And yourself?”

He assured me he was good, then fired me a question I did not quite catch, so he repeated it, and it came to me with the same indistinctness, something like, “Still in the same old hole?” Was there a barb in this? I could not quite match the seemingly boorish question with the affability that shone from his spectacles. Ha! I supposed I was, I offered guardedly, and with a “Good to catch up”, escaped towards my venerable ute.

“Love the hair-do,” he called after me. And I thanked him for the compliment, not doubting throughout our exchange his splendid good-will, whatever it was that smudged question had truly wished to learn.