Six Poems for Dr Kennedy: Some Unpublished Work of Bruce Beaver

The prolific Australian poet Bruce Beaver (1928–2004), author of a dozen collections of verse, from Under the Bridge (1961) to The Long Game and Other Poems (posthumously published in 2005), was born in the Sydney seaside suburb of Manly and spent most of his life there. As is noted in the online Australian Poetry Library, Beaver’s work “had a considerable influence on the development of the ‘Generation of 1968’ and the ‘New Australian Poetry’ of the 1970s”. He won several major Australian literary awards, including the Grace Leven Poetry Prize (1970, for Letters to Live Poets), the C.J. Dennis Prize (1995, for Anima and Other Poems), the Fellowship of Australian Writers Christopher Brennan Award (1982), and the Patrick White Award (also 1982). Beaver was made a Member of the Order of Australia, in 1991, for service to literature. Yet his formidable achievement is less remembered today than that of other Australian poets of his era, such as Les Murray and Judith Wright.

Beaver endured much ill-health and, from the later 1980s through to his death, he was under the care of a Manly consultant physician, Dr Michael Kennedy, FRACP. Describing Beaver as “a true gentleman, who bore his trials and tribulations of life with dignity”, Dr Kennedy recently contacted me to let me know of several unpublished poems in his possession that were specifically written for him and given to him by the poet. He sought advice about their quality and wanted to discuss where they might be best deposited for the benefit of future readers and researchers into Beaver’s life and work. “I had the impression”, Dr Kennedy remembered, that “poetry was his entire life”.

While the relationship between the two men was “always a formal one between specialist and patient” (in correspondence, sending his poetry, Beaver always addressed Dr Kennedy formally), the doctor pointed out to me that, nonetheless, “room consultations are a minimum of thirty minutes and can extend for an hour or more, so there is ample time for interesting issues to surface”.

The several poems which the poet gave to his doctor focus on topical events which they had discussed during consultations, such as the role of drugs in sport, the Sydney Olympic Games, and the 9/11 terrorist attack.

Before turning to these, we should note the one published poem amongst Kennedy’s Beaver papers (which he has in the poet’s original typescript): “Sonnet for Dr Michael Kennedy”, which is to be found in Beaver’s New and Selected Poems, 1960–1990 (pp. 275–6). Dated September 23, 1988, it celebrates their association and captures the shared quality of their two apparently very different vocations. Here is the opening quatrain:

Good doctors and good poets share a calling
that seems to be the only one in life.
Both see the world as beautifully appalling,
the inhabitants survivors of its strife. 

And this is the sonnet’s affirmative closing couplet:

But at the end, whether by pen or knife,
they know the one imperative is Life.

Beaver’s six unpublished manuscript poems that he sent to Kennedy are on A4 sheets, written in clearly legible cursive hand, but with evidence of some shakiness in the writing.

Noting these chronologically, the first is “Verse letter to Dr and Mrs Kennedy on their joint Medical Ethical Publication” which was inspired by the couple’s co-authored article (Dr Kennedy’s wife, Judith, is a psychologist and ethicist) in the Medical Journal of Australia: “Ethics of prescribing drugs to enhance sporting performance: Crossing the line between good medicine and cooperating with unhealthy or illegal behaviour”, published on August 17, 1999. Written in rhyming couplets, Beaver’s thirty-four-line poem elegantly indicts the hypocrisy and corruption of the sporting world and its so-called “heroes”, “who kick the ethics out of exercising / And concentrate upon their plexus rising”. Various nations’ dealing with drug issues are glanced at:

The noble Swiss gave heroin a trial
But only from a self-administered phial;
Their ethics are world famous and would never
Upset the workings of a watch’s lever.

And the Australian Academy of Sport is especially singled out for criticism:

It seems that A.A.S. must take the cake
To body boost the non-athletic fake
Who manages to flex eye-opening muscles
One millionfold in pseudo-taxing tussles.

The poem concludes—appropriately, given its addressees—with a monitory message to practitioners:

The doctor comes off best who trusts to sense
And ethics shown in honesty’s defence.

Then Beaver wrote two poems for Kennedy on the 2000 Olympic Games, held in Sydney. The first of these invokes Pindar (“I call on Pindar …”), an ancient Greek poet of the fifth century BC, often credited with creating the ode, a formal poetic utterance addressed to a particular subject (as in John Keats’s several odes). The Pindaric ode itself consists of a strophe, an antistrophe and an epode. Beaver does not imitate this classical structure in “Verses on the 2000 Year Olympiad for Dr Michael Kennedy”, but uses the rhyming couplet (again) over thirty-eight lines. Beginning in a celebratory mode, Beaver names various notable participants in the Sydney Games:

Cathy Freeman, Hackett, Michael Klein
Hawkes, and King, Matt Walsh (all praise to him),
Brendan Burkett, Paralympic King,
Fairweather, Ian Thorpe—“of thee we sing” …

With that rather odd borrowing, in this context, from “America, of Thee I Sing”.

However, in the second half of the poem, the theme of the earlier verse-letter on drugs re-appears:

                    Weights beyond the body’s sum
Are raised until the flexing arms become
As if they were two sturdy bands of steel
Upholding all the body would anneal.
Here the light of glory dims, abates,
And lurking doubt annuls uplifted weights
When to the shame of some contestant strength
Enhancing drugs are surely found at length.

“Chemical supportives” are seen to “hover over all”. But Beaver is reluctant to close the poem negatively, given the plaudits he has generously distributed earlier, yet somehow the closing two couplets fail to assuage the negativity that has immediately preceded them:

Faces of youth will light our memories,
Perfect young bodies that can only please
The sight will linger with us through all time
And bring a bright conclusion to this rhyme.

This brightness has a hollow ring (if one may mix metaphors) in the wake of the critique of drug-taking. That is what “lingers” when we have finished reading this poem.

Then, in the second of these (“Olympic Games 2000—for Dr M. Kennedy”), Beaver invokes Pindar again, and summons William Wordsworth and John Milton too: “O Pindar were you living at this hour …” This recalls the beginning of Wordsworth’s famous sonnet on Milton (“London, 1802”):

Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee …

In that poem, Wordsworth wishes that the seventeenth-century Puritan epic poet were alive to inspire a morally-corrupted society:

                                We are selfish men;
Oh! raise us up, return to us again;
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.

In this longer work, of sixty lines, Beaver is more critical of the Games than he had been in the shorter, earlier one. In Pindar’s time, he argues, “sport was sport, not earnings, drugs and power”. And he notes that the ancient Olympics included religious celebrations, and that artists such as sculptors and poets participated, along with the athletes:

But since the Games no longer honour art
We’ll concentrate upon the hero’s heart.

The issue of drugs in sport dominates now (resonating, again, with Dr Kennedy’s professional interest in this matter), and with a witty coinage:

Steroids are troubling many sporting heroes:
Perhaps we should retitle them as “steroes”.

The Australian religion-substitute of sport is also lambasted, with the wry observation that the so-called great sporting nation is, in fact, mostly a sport-watching nation (and now a world champion in the obesity stakes), in which the hagiography is focused on such as Bradman and “Kazaley” (the way-off misspelling of Roy Cazaly’s name perhaps indicating the extent of Beaver’s participation in the hero-worship). Crowds “will celebrate with punch-ups as they cheer / Their side and pelt the ref. with cans of beer”. For “every Tom and Dick and Harriet”, sport “makes their lives complete”.

Yet the poem is not entirely negative. It closes with a hope that the Sydney Games will exemplify the best in sporting competition, although the apotheosis that Beaver imagines, may, by its conspicuously exalted elevation, contain a closing element of satire:

If only once Olympia succeeds
In winning from us all true sporting deeds
The new Millennium will greet the old
In re-establishing an Age of Gold.

Next are two poems which were prompted by the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in Manhattan and the Pentagon in Washington DC on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, killing 3000 people and injuring 25,000—another of those days in human history that will live in infamy. Sending the first poem, titled “On the Muslim Rape of New York and Washington”, to Kennedy, on September 23, 2001, Beaver wrote:

Dear Dr Kennedy,
Well, here it is, my racist, intolerant and prejudicial rant against the Taliban skunks mainly inspired by our discussion the other day. I hope it meets with your approval.

Yours ever,
Bruce Beaver

The poem, sixty-five lines long, consists of thirty-two rhyming couplets, and one unrhymed line, following a point in the poem where Beaver takes to task those who “‘tolerance’ absurdly bleat”:

To any sanely minded person
They taint the land and put a curse on
Every balanced human act.

In this understandably enraged poem, Osama bin Laden receives particular execration:

In far off Hellish Afghan climes
Where he could multiply his crimes
With trashy brutes in human shape
To foully terrorise and rape
An otherwise pacific world
While on the innocent he hurled
The filth of his barbaric faith
Of Fundamentalism’s wraith.

Beaver imagines an apt and mortal punishment for the terrorists:

May they be piloted en masse
By their ideals to some crevasse
Where they are dumped to rest in peace
Just so their babbling rot may cease.

Of the same length is the second poem, “Battle Hymn of the New Crusaders Against the Old Pagans/Saracens”, but its subject is broader: a wider-ranging attack on Islamic fundamentalism. Dr Kennedy thinks that it was written “a bit later by a couple of months [than the previous poem] as they came at the time of different consultations”. And as the first was specific to the 9/11 attack, the second is a more general indictment.

The poet focuses on a different kind of violence now—that perpetrated specifically on women:

In Allah’s name they mutilate
Their daughters and their wedded mate.
All women who look twice at males
They stone to death with pious wails …

Before they practise cliterodectomy
Tell them to think about vasectomy
With five hundred lashes for every male
Caught without wearing a facial veil.

There is an extended discourse on the prophet Mohammad, alluding to H.G. Wells’s negative assessment, and the poem closes with a charge to eradicate the scourge of religious fundamentalism from the earth, “down the abyss to total perdition”.

Finally, there is Beaver’s work of 2002, “Poem for the Preservation of Manly Hospital”. Dr Kennedy was active in this campaign, and Beaver originally sent his poem to the Manly Daily for publication. It was sent back, rejected, with a line drawn right through it and “NO” in capital letters at the top. Beaver then sent it on to Dr Kennedy.

The shortest of these unpublished works, it is twenty lines long, and, unlike the previous poems, written in free verse. It is in the poet’s shakiest hand—he was to die two years later—and it is the least accomplished of these texts.

Beginning very personally, Beaver writes:

My alma mater, saving my life three times
Is said to be in danger of foreclosure.

He calls upon the “people of this brave historic village / To make their voice one loud collective chorus”,

To save this institution where so many
Have come and gone along Life’s Blessed Way.

He closes, with strong feeling clearly resonating with his own experience of hospitalisation there, evoking the “million dollar view”,

So advantageous to reviving health
Of Sydney’s life-invigorating Harbour.
The campaign was ultimately unsuccessful, the hospital finally closing in 2018.

These unpublished poems of Bruce Beaver are variously witty, satirically provocative, forthrightly critical, moving and technically polished. They are not great poetry, but, for anyone interested in the poet’s life and work, these texts are invaluable for understanding aspects of his thought and of his craftsmanship. Dr Kennedy advises that they have been deposited, with Bruce Beaver’s other papers, in the Mitchell Library in Sydney.

Barry Spurr, Australia’s first Professor of Poetry, is Literary Editor of Quadrant.