Short Takes XXIV

13/9/16 My fiddling towards abandon

I have agreed to give a talk later today at a Poetry Symposium on the subject of how and why I revise my work. I’m a little uneasy the topic distracts from any more useful matter that might be raised regarding my art, and that my revisions are not really the business of others. But here goes …

1. I revise poems, and sometimes I revisualise them. I change what I have said and I change what I have seen in a writing I have asked folk to trust aspires to art. Let me first dismiss the obvious. Rethinking is inalienable from the very process of composition. The truer idea, the more piquant word, cues itself as “having thought better”. If I believe my first thought has special status because it mewls still wet from The Muse, this belongs to the art of egotism, not poetry. Poetry’s art, surely, is to fret my first utterance with further reflection in order to make its guise of spontaneity more wholly persuasive. By reconsideration, I can bring my text to where I hope it is stable, but I cannot bring it to where it is inviolable. Not even my death can do that, as the intelligent editing of Shakespearean text by scholars shows. So while I revise for reasons local to any given poem, I do so without conscience, placing no premium on the idea a poem accrues some mystique of freshness at the point it first materialises. Rather I observe the spontaneous in art is a consequence of art. At that flashpoint where the éclat of speech occurs within the formalised resources of an art, as I find it in, say, Yeats or Donne, I find also how the artist has comprehended both “live” speech, and the particular pathos of its occasion. Any redrafting rigour soon demolishes that gladwrap freshness of the poem’s onset in favour of this richer comprehension.

2. I say pathos. I know my expressive self has a beginning, middle and end. Revising poems to give them as much expressive power as my talent allows in the space of my lifetime is therefore the everyday of that pathos and my employment as an author. By “expressive power” I refer to the vibrancy, truth and fairness that I can bring to bear on the substance I try to communicate. The “vibrancy”, as you’ll guess, refers to how deftly I can manage the visual and musical properties of the words comprising my poem. I distinguish between “the truth” and “the fairness” in a poem because I see truth attaching to the validity of what I say, fairness attaching to its sufficiency. Of these three qualities, I favour the idea of “fairness” as the highest of the three values, and that all writing at some level of its witchery, attaches to what is fair—what comprehends amidst all the apprehending.

3. So my hope is that I make improvement. In rereading old work, too often I’ve found a poem ill-emerged from its original inchoate intimation; it should have thought itself through with more thoroughgoing rigour. Or I have found an original bombast still clinging to it like a birth sac. As I developed my practice I became more dexterous with English metre and other resources of prosody, so have sometimes revised in favour of that freedom. Why perform these essentially notational changes? I have been jaded by the relentless masquerade of my epoch of what claims itself as poetry when patently it is prose on the lookout for some extra portent. So I sought the rigour of formal craft precisely so I could know it well enough for it to know me, well enough to find from its numbers its music as opposed to a mere verbal noise.

4. More deeply in this, I sought the community of my precursors in my craft. At some tension in my being, common perhaps to all makers of art, I grew more heedful of kinship with my older family, with Geoff Chaucer, Johnny Skelton, Wystan Hugh, than with the collegiate of my contemporaries. To this degree, I surmise the rapt activity that is revising tracks a movement of spirit, from the negligent egotism of first attempts to the sense of a place in a long continuity—Poetry itself. Revisiting, revising old work, digging old mines for new ore, is to tune the whole intelligence of anyone who gives their lives to poetry, not merely to make an evanescent preference for one word above another.

5. I’m mindful how revision can mar earlier versions, indeed observe it in, say, some of Geoff Lehmann’s reworkings, some of Auden’s. I am now sixty-seven, must keep watch on the flexibility and vividness of my mental powers. I think I will not attempt further adjustment to the poems in my 2005 Selected, The Past Completes Me; I can re-read these and feel satisfied they now do the best job they can. This is also true of a Collected Poems, assembled on Gould’s Screenside in the unlikely event a publisher might take pride in realising such a book. How does this modify revision? It shows it to be the seizure of opportunity permeated by the intelligence of tact.

6. Now to re-visualising. I’m a disaffected practitioner. In my observation the long, essential art of poetry is presently in a period of morbid decline, its future audience more likely to trivialise than actually neglect it. The prospect for that cherished Gould Collected Poems above is slim. Should it appear, it would contain my several more ambitious works, none of which appear in either of my two Selecteds. One of these, “The Skald Mosaic”, is a case where my revising intensified itself from readjustment to reconception. First written in 1971, taken by the ABC—my first acceptance—and then by various journals, it later fell under my disfavour, and I abandoned it as a hopelessly juvenile piece of writing. Yet something in it persisted to remind me it had embraced one vital part of my outlook on the world, some nexus between physical terrain and existential solitariness. It lit some part of my whole, but badly. So, about fifteen years ago I took it in hand, crystallised its setting in time and place, sharpened and matured my watch on its people and, using a variety of skaldic measures, I instilled into it my comprehension of human character and solitude as a fifty-one-year-old that had been inchoate, immature, and yet “onto something” as a twenty-one-year-old. This was more than dabbing a highlight here, darkening a shadow there. It was an entire paint-job because you cannot change a setting in time without recognition that human character is a contingency of particular times.

7. In one of my recent “Short Takes” in Quadrant I wrote this … how can I tell when a poem I have composed has been effective? When I can’t quite believe it was petit moi who wrote it.

27/9/16 Scintillum from Arcadia

Bad things happen in our suburbs, and just last night I have watched the compelling account of how Melbourne detectives hunted down a girl’s murderer, moved by their patience, their good nerve, the searching personal cost of a job that exposed them to such base behaviours. When I watch the vileness of such things it keeps me “earthed”.

But on my morning walk along the bridle path today, I came also to one of those glimpses allowing Arcadia to persist in the human mind. At the Fisher Street fence-gap, where the path turns towards the shops, there was a police car, and two constables, perhaps a little self-conscious, were taking a cardboard box from the back of the car.

“Good day for it,” I said, because spring is presently luminous everywhere, the hillside green as Somerset, two species of ducks wading the temporary stormwater, fairy martins skimming for insects in their dimension of time-lapse speeds, blue starflowers and yellow everlastings like splodges on a palette, the hillside gurgling with freshets from the abundant spring rains.

“Sure is,” said the woman constable, then needing to explain, “We’re just returning an echidna to habitat.” I looked into the cardboard box where the creature with its sheaf of spikes pulsed. “Better that than getting squashed.”

“My oath,” I said, and obscurely wanted to extend further good will. “I’ve got a neighbour with plum trees,” I began. “The echidnas like coming into her garden in autumn when all the plums have fallen and are fermenting on the ground. She reckons they leave drunk.”

“Jeez, eh!” said the lady constable.

“Well … maybe wobbling, to be accurate,” I thought I should qualify for the improvement of the evidence, as they passed through the fence on their scrupulous mission.

29/9/16 Seven ducklings

Our stormwater drain flows with brown run-off between Irish-green banks, and the seven ducklings follow their dame as though Mum and kids were a singular organism, now in chevron, now diamond, now line astern, but the distance between each and the distance from Mum’s tail invariant as molecular bonding, change accommodated by no-change. There were seven yesterday, and if Arcadia is allowed us, there will be seven tomorrow, and respite for each of these fluffballs to mature in plumage, grow its adult insignia and the Japanese eye above the beak. But midnight comes, the foxes trot down from their hides, the frogmouth hunches on the wires, and all celestial space is potent with its dependencies.

30/9/16 A privilege flies in

On my daily walks, I count some sixteen birds as my regulars. Birds do this, so habituating the local strollers to their neighbourliness that if any avian newcomer arrives on a blowy day, rain flecking the stroller’s spectacles, it will not be quite believed.

But there it was, a white-faced grey heron attracted to our transitory wetland, inoculating the shallows now-and-now for whatever life had slimed itself there in this La Ninja-flush of spring rains.

Its careful long legs wore Malvolio’s pale yellow stockings, its plumage was grey as a gunboat, excepting the white flash on its head that suggested the Apache. You homeowners, with your binoculars and waterview properties, don’t give me your Twitcher “So whats?” I live on a usually dry-ish hillside. My birds are familiars. Then suddenly before me on my daily walk is this grey sleuth, this eye with its white hyphen, this inquisitive beak from Cathay.

27/10/16 A commentary too casual

At the poetry reading this evening the dapper fellow with the soporific manner of delivery used the phrase “the tragedy of Dachau” in one of his poems. Well, it is a little over seventy-one years since that camp was liberated by the US Army, so what does the footage of the liberators’ newsreels disclose?

One reaction might be that “tragedy” is rather a limp word when the only effective means of dealing with murdered victims is with bulldozers. Poets have puddled in Dachau and other death camps, and sometimes this has even been without auto-reflection. My own tribute goes to the journalism of Martha Gellhorn, which I have read recently, who arrived on the Dachau precinct a day or two after the liberation and reported her human reaction to the things she saw. She puts herself in the picture at the same time as she does not do so, for this is pre-ego, pre-metaphor. Hateful, how one hears Dachau invoked as a means of proving personal authenticity at a poetry reading, that bulldozed humanity used as part of a sales pitch for unenlivened poems.

4/12/16 Leave your kit this side o’ the wa’

This is a line from Hamish Henderson’s ballad “51st Highland Division’s Farewell to Sicily”, sung by Ewan McColl and others. I have learnt the song by heart, sing it in the shower, and once to an audience at a poetry reading.

Briefly my father was attached to 51st Highland Division as an intelligence officer for the Black Watch at Dover Castle in 1939 and, like them, was sent to France but transferred to an HQ company as a cipher officer. He experienced Blitzkrieg, escaped, not from Dunkirk, but St Nazaire, while the 51st covered the retreat on Dunkirk and so were mostly taken prisoner. The division was reformed in Britain, fought through the Middle East, Sicily, then Normandy to Bremerhaven, where a Pathé News footage records their victory march through the streets of blockish buildings where not a window retains its glass. Because this spectacle of attritionally-won triumph moves me unutterably, I have watched this YouTube footage perhaps fifty times, the massed pipers playing “Hieland Laddie”, the squared companies making their march-past, XXX Corps’ General Horrocks at rigid salute.

Hamish Henderson was also an intelligence officer for the 51st Highlanders and his ballad is lovely, capturing the weariness of the troops, the themes of soldierly protocol mixed with glints of the personal life, the outlandishness with which war juxtaposes types of experience. So why does the balladist remind his soldier listeners to “Leave your kit this side o’ the wa’”? One assumes that, even though the fighting is largely over and the troops are lined up along the waterside ready for embarkation, the other side of the wall was still exposed to sniper fire. But what an exquisite encapsulation of the soldier’s job this casual reminder is! “Old men forget and all shall be forgot,” says Henry V, and it is seventy-three years since that embarkation from Messina. Yet how this facet illustrates the fineness with which we do our remembrancing as we allow those past lives to retain life in us in the very nuance of their own living.