Sydney City Poet

I often think that it is in the final line of a poem that the reader’s relationship to a poem really begins: it’s the last line that sends a reader back to the beginning of a poem that they will really love. These endings may open the poem out, resist a definitive “reading”, or they may feel like everything shuts up tight, a sprung trap. I’ve certainly heard arguments for both, and there are poets that have a decided preference for “open” or “closed” endings. For myself I find both approaches offer much to the reader: the widening view, the well-handled but slightly diffuse ending of course invites rereading as we seek to find out more about the processes, mechanisms, language, world of the poem; on the other hand, that sprung-trap feeling of a poem that brings everything together does not cut off the relationship of reader to poem, and invites the question “How did he/she do that?” just as much as the poem that contains, in Whitman’s words, multitudes.

David Campbell is a poet whose work I first encountered as an undergraduate: I was in a teacher’s office, and he was looking at some bits of poems for what I thought might turn into a verse novel. A particular phrase made him pull down a volume from the shelf and open to this poem, “Mothers and Daughters.” The longer I’ve spent with this poem the more astonished I am at its simplicity, and the way in which is simply works. Though I doubt I will ever write a verse novel now, I’m grateful that this long-aborted project brought me the gift of this poem. 

The whole poem is a single sentence—a difficult feat, not made much easier for being just eight lines long; the lines are short, with two or three “beats” per line. There is enough regularity here that the poem may, overall, be considered formal, though enough variations in that regularity that the suddenly straight iambic motion of the last two lines have the effect of great propulsion; similarly, the rhyme scheme—a balladic ABCB—is only gentle in the first stanza of the poem, as the slant rhyme of “forty” and “beauty” hits the ear as intentional, but also loose. That slant rhyme also plays out something of the poet’s vision of the relationship between “forty” and “beauty”: in this poem they don’t quite meet. As such when the second and final stanza uses the full rhyme in conjunction with the regular meter, the whole poem falls—seemingly effortlessly—into place.

So much here, too, is carried in the adjectives: there is nothing flashy about the words Campbell chooses, but they all feel terribly apt and irreplaceable. The once-“cruel girls” are held up against their “subtle daughters”; it is not just the eyes of these daughters but their stare that is “blue” (a hue that, of course, has both visual and emotional registers) and “cool” with surprise; against the subtlety and coolness of the new generation, the “anxious mothers” almost bristle, so that when these two generations are collapsed into one attitude, the tensions rise even as the poem locks into place. The girls who stare at their mothers “with their mothers eyes” presumably bear the cruelty and anxiety of their mother, while those mothers reflect coolness and a hint of mockery. The poem is elegant and taut, but in its eight lines presents the complexity of the relationship depicted with a startling clarity that is anything but simple.

A selection of David Campbell’s poems is available in the volume Hardening the Light, published in 2006 by Indigo.

______________________________

Mothers and Daughters

The cruel girls we loved
Are over forty,
Their subtle daughters
Have stolen their beauty;

And with a blue stare
Of cool surprise,
They mock their anxious mothers
With their mothers’ eyes.

—David Campbell

Many years ago I wrote a poem dedicated to one of my teachers that ended with the lines “Still I seem to need so much teaching/ still I am so unteachable.” Besides giving the poem as a small gift, I haven’t done anything else with it except, I hope, build on whatever skill I had at the time I wrote it.

Since that time, I suspect the sentiment of these lines has stayed true, though I have come under the eye of many more teachers in the intervening years. I’ve been thinking a great deal about my choice to study poetry: I was initially resistant to undertaking an MFA (Master of Fine Arts) degree in writing because I too questioned the degree to which creative disciplines could be taught. Having acted as both student and teacher, I have come over the course of many years to believe that, in fact, a great deal can be taught—and that at the same time what is “so unteachable” is a certain wildness that is perhaps what I most seek out when I look for new poets to read.

And despite this notion that, at the core of it all, there is something that can’t be taught, can’t be learned, the truth is that I have learned an incredible amount from both formal and informal relationships with more experienced poets—as well as from younger poets, friends and peers, from students, and of course from books.

I first realised how much I needed teaching when I gave my first attempt at blank verse to my first teacher, poet Chris Wallace-Crabbe. He had been very encouraging with the poems I had shown him previously. When he gave me back this one the only words written on it were “Flat as a pancake.” No comment on the fact that I was writing in a formal metre, or any other elements—because, in reality, there was no reason to comment on these things. What I had given him was a failed poem, and though I was proud for having tortured language into an iambic flow, all that hard work had killed off whatever was special in the poem. Perhaps if I had never been taught anything else that single line of feedback would have been enough: I think it is still the most significant I have ever received.

It was this feedback, which stung my eighteen-year-old self greatly, that made me realise how much work is involved in poetry. That maybe after I’d written another one or two hundred iambic lines I would find a good one; that after I’d experiment with another one or two hundred caesuras I would be able to see the ways in which a pause best enhances the line.

I was told a story by another friend and mentor about her own early days writing poetry, relating one of the first times she read her poetry to an audience. Afterward, amid the congratulations, someone said to her, “You are good, but you need to write another hundred poems.” Though this was a lesson received second-hand, it’s another I have come back to. Several years ago I took trapeze lessons, and one of my teachers told me that he was only ever allowed to perform a trick without the harness after he had performed it perfectly over a hundred times. All those studies on the passage from novice status to something like expertise are right. There are things that can be taught (such as how to recognise when your work is flat as a pancake) and other things that can’t be—such as the grit to recognise that a poem is a failure, and the next ten, or one hundred, may well be failures too, but to keep working anyway. That when you’ve worked so hard on a poem that the seams are showing, that you need to work as hard again to make the thing seamless.

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Around ten years ago, as a startlingly unknowing undergraduate, I took a class boldly titled “Literary Classics.” The thing I remember most clearly about this class was feedback I received on my first essay: do not, I was told, quote an author’s summing up of his opposing argument as if the author was supporting your own argument. When Harold Bloom gathers his not inconsiderable pith to sum up what he is writing against, don’t then quote that section of Harold Bloom out of context as though he agrees with what he opposes.

Last week I quoted myself. This week I got quoted by Andrew Bolt. If there’s one thing weirder than quoting one’s self, it’s ending up in a Bolt column. And perhaps more sobering than appearing in Bolt’s column was the verb with which he introduced my words: Kate Middleton confessed.

In truth, when I wrote my piece for the Sydney Morning Herald last week about the cancellation of the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards, I knew perfectly well that one sentence could raise some eyebrows. “When so many writers lean towards one side of politics, a perception grows that the arts are not for everyone, but for one party only.” With more space I could have course expanded on this—I still think it’s a point worth raising, but at the same time it’s important to acknowledge both that in different eras that “one side” of politics flips (though we remember Ezra Pound’s long one man pro-Fascist rally, we less frequently do the roll-call of all the other modernists who were enamored with the extreme right before they saw the results and backed off their position) and also that what was implicit in my statement was that the perception is not necessarily the reality. Yes, at times the creators often cluster around particular ideologies, art is malleable, and art is for anyone who wants to take it in. It’s not always easy, and it’s not going to be a checklist of things you agree with. Art is challenging—just like playing a team sport can be challenging—and that’s why we bring it into our lives. One of the quotes that would lead off my own commonplace book comes from my childhood reading. In The Horse and His Boy, C. S. Lewis writes, “If you do a good deed your reward is usually to be set to do another and harder and better one.” The desire to strive for more is not elitism; it is a combination of grit and the longing for transformation.

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If you have ever read a poem or novel or literary essay and loved it, then you, too, value literature: you don’t need to spend every waking hour dedicated to the temple of words in bookish idolatry to say that a work made of words has enriched your life.

Weirdly, I am quoting myself. On Tuesday night, after hearing about the cancellation of the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards I wanted to write a response. I questioned myself, wondering: “Who am I to respond?” There are many more established voices than mine, and many who have previously won the Queensland award, which I have not. However, I suppose I remembered the words a teacher and friend once said to me:  when I expressed doubt over my position in the academic world musicologist Linda Kouvaris told me, “No-one’s going to tell you you’re sitting at the big kids’ table.” I had something I wanted to express, and I wrote it. I am gratified that the Sydney Morning Herald saw fit to run the piece today.

I’ve been following comments written in response to various articles since the news broke on Tuesday, and am not surprised to see how polarized opinion has been. Amidst this, there has been a call for a new defense of literature.

My defense of literature essentially boils down to the words above. I am one of those who has spent my life in “bookish idolatry,” but I have plenty of friends who have chosen other paths, other passions. Nonetheless most of them read, and allow themselves to be transported and transfigured by the words of others. Some express regret that they don’t seem to have the time to read for pleasure anymore—and yet will recall a book they have loved, whether its Dr Seuss or Frank Herbert’s Dune. If it’s as far back as Dr Seuss, I might teasingly urge them forward with something like Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark or Lear’s Collected Nonsense on them, but I appreciate that most readers let book lead to book in their own time. Similarly, someone who may not be a reader of novels could still be thrilled by Norman Mailer’s evocative writing about boxing; locally, it’s a delight to read Robert Adamson on fishing—probably more delightful for those who actually go fishing; hell, in the days that Nabokov was a regular contributor it was really possible to read Playboy “for the articles.”

Among my own recent reading, I’ve been plunging hungrily into the essays Eliot Weinberger. His essay on James Laughlin, the founder of the publishing house New Directions, was a true delight - it can be found in his collection Oranges and Peanuts for Sale. It reminded me of something worth pointing out when people object that the market should really pay for literature: classics grow over time. New Directions has a policy of never letting their works go out of print, and Weinberger points out that this policy derives from the fact that literary works are often sleepers. A decade or two after first appearing, many New Directions books  that had seemingly slipped by unnoticed made it onto syllabi and suddenly found their readership. There are plenty of famous-after-the-fact stories in the arts: this doesn’t negate the fact that there are also plenty of here-and-now success stories, but there’s more than one timeline when it comes to art finding its audience. Similarly, just because a writer eschews populism doesn’t mean that writer is an elitist or denigrates a popular readership.

Today the NSW government has announced that the NSW Premier’s Literary Prize, which had been placed under review, will be going ahead on a delayed basis. I can’t help but think the timing of this announcement is a response to the outcry at the outright cancellation of awards by the Queensland government, and I’m glad to read the news. Public opinion does count for something, so make your thoughts known.