Sydney City Poet

Quotation, Context, Connotation

Read More

No Words

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.

Double Duty Report, Redux

With the posting of the last of four blog posts at Southerly I’ve completed my month of guest blogging for this publication—and with great thanks to Southerly for asking me to write for them. Effectively the pieces I wrote for Southerly are pieces that I might have otherwise posted here as entries in my “Diary of City Poet” pieces—ie, they are essays musing about elements of the writing and reading life. I know there are readers here who have already followed the posts, but I thought I would whet your appetite for the four essays, and encourage you to head over to Southerly not only to read these, but to explore the site more generally. Our literary journals are an important space for writers. Anyway, let me take you on a little tour of what I was up to over there this month…

The first piece I wrote was “The Lives of Other Writers.” Thinking about my own penchant for literary biographies, as well as the letters and diaries of writers, also led me to think about how reading such books makes me think about my own writing life. 

While our literary commentators are often pronouncing the forthcoming obsolescence of the novel or poetry (Can Poetry Matter?Dana Gioia asks and everyone wrings their hands again…) one form that seems to be in no danger is the biography. We never get tired of talking about the way we live, and wondering if it’s the right way. Many of us turn to biographies for examples of right and wrong turns, as well as for a particularized vision of an era or a milieu that interests us: they make very palatable history lessons. The genres of biography and memoir of course run the gamut of type and quality, from the masterful multi-volume consideration of the life of Henry James by Leon Edel to the “unauthorised” biography of the latest starlet, who at sixteen or seventeen already is deems worthy of a report on life in progress. 

For myself, and for many other writers I know, biographies and memoirs of writers are a great pleasure to read—side outings into the letters and diaries of writers, often published posthumously, also count here. …Keep Reading Here…

*

The second piece I wrote wandered through the inescapable language of our high-tech world. After reading Emily Nussbaum’s television column in the New Yorker—an essay focussed on the way the television show The Good Wife uses technology in smart ways that reflect its pervasive spread into our lives—I recalled those word-of-the-year lists that the dictionaries and lexical associations of the world compile. So many of those words in the past decade were associated with our online lives or with our new devices. And I turned to poetry—because that’s what I do. In particularly, a wonderful poem by Jaya Savige, “The Fig Tree,” which I plan to return to at greater length here in the future. Anyway, a sampler of “Brave New World: High-Tech Words”: 

In a recent edition of the New Yorker, television critic Emily Nussbaum wrote about the television show The Good Wife. As television shows produced for the major free-to-air networks in the United States go, The Good Wife is remarkably grown-up: the adults act like adults, with nuanced, contradictory opinions and mannerisms, the parents behave like parents, and the few teenagers that appear on the show act maddeningly like teenagers. The search for the grown-up is not a new phenomenon in this time of teen-oriented media saturation: Virginia Woolf famously declared George Eliot’s masterpiece Middlemarch “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” Like The Good Wife, Middlemarch is an in-for-the-long-haul novel, as characters making ordinary decisions become fully aware of their consequences and deal with those consequences in wrenchingly human ways. So it is with The Good Wife: while the procedural case-of-the week format of the show can be hit and miss, the long-term build up of these characters and the legal/political milieu of the show’s version of Chicago is multi-faceted, and therefore satisfying. But this is not a television review.

I was interested in Nussbaum’s article not only because I am a fan of the show, but because she proposed that The Good Wife is “the first great series about technology”—technology in contemporary life, that is, and in a recognisably ordinary world. (Of course science-fiction frequently offers often-brilliant musing on technology.) The Good Wife explores social media, twitter, e-currency, online personae, the ins-and-outs of surveillance in the iPhone camera age among a myriad of other digital minutiae. Characters display greater or lesser facility in dealing with their technology, but what elsewhere could be turned into simplistic buffoonery—hey, grandma doesn’t know how to turn on a computer!—here becomes part of the debate about, to use Anthony Trollope’s phrase, “The Way We Live Now.” Or, in Nussbaum’s words,

as the show goes on, its plots have become a dense, provocative dialectic, one that weighs technology’s freedoms against its dangers, with a global sweep and an insider’s nuance. …“The Good Wife” stands in contrast not merely to other legal shows, with their “The Internet killed him!” plots, but also to the reductive punditry of the mainstream media, so obsessed with whether Twitter is making us stupid. 

The writers, husband and wife team Michelle and Robert King, are aware that these technologies are here to stay—at least until they morph into something else—and through their show they want to explore what this means for human relationships. …Keep Reading Here… 

*

From there I took a turn towards readerly obsession and guilty pleasures: my own great love is the boarding school book, and I looked at such works in their childhood story, literary and memoir incarnations in “Guilty Pleasures (Lights Out! Meet in the kitchen in one hour for a Midnight Feast!)”:

While I often deny the word “guilty” in relation to pleasures, I admit the phrase has its attractions and, yes, usefulness. A guilty pleasure has a little subversive thrill embedded, and is often something enjoyed when we feel we “should” be doing something else. That feeling of “should” could come from an awareness that we are procrastinating, but just as often I’m sure it comes from the idea that we could be spending our time on something with greater seriousness. One of my teachers and friends, the wonderful fiction and non-fiction writer Sugi Ganeshananthan, once said, “Guilt is a useless emotion. You should dispense with it.” I’ve treasured that as much as possible, and I’m sure it has greatly cut down on the amount of guilt I feel, though not eliminated it altogether. I feel guilt about not getting things done immediately (usually when I am juggling too many things at once) but not about enjoying non-canonical reading or watching television or seeing the latest dance movie, no matter how terrible. The mind needs rest too!  …

I know that many writers have their guilty pleasure genres. Dorothy Porter used to talk about her love of detective fiction—how much she must have loved being able to bring that out in her verse novel in that genre, The Monkey’s Mask! And how much she must have enjoyed that book’s great success! Another friend and mentor, poet A. Van Jordan is a huge fan of comic books and graphic novels, a love that shows up in his poetry at times.

For me it’s not so much a genre as a milieu that I can’t bypass: the boarding school. I’m pleased to say I’m not the only person I know who has a great love of boarding school books (to my delight, when I mentioned these books to my father, he went to the bookshelves and brought back Rudyard Kipling’s Stalkey and Co., a favourite of his own from childhood) though I’m often greeted with a somewhat mystified expression when I mention my addiction—and with the question, “Did you go to boarding school or something?” (No, I did not.) …Keep Reading Here…

*

Finally, I turned to poetry and ekphrasis, particularly two great poems—one by William Carlos Williams, one by W. H. Auden—that explore the same painting by Pieter Brueghel, “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.” While ekphrasis has been on my mind in general for the past year or more, I had the opportunity to pull my thoughts together when I was asked by the Rockdale City Library to give a talk for them. It was a pleasure to do so, and from this talk I pulled my notes together to write “Icarus Downstage, Right: Writing Art”:

This past week I gave a talk on ekphrasis and the ways in which pictures in themselves may tell stories. In part I wanted to give a little history, and so looked back to Homer’s description of Achille’s Shield, as well as to consider the ways in which, despite being saturated with images, we are less skilled in reading them now—simply because we are no longer accustomed to spending a lot of time with a single image.  The other aim of the talk was to discuss my own practice and think about the different ways I have approached writing about artworks in my own poetry; in the middle of it all, however, I looked at two poems I particularly love that take the same great painting by Pieter Brueghel the Elder as their starting point—“Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.” ...Keep Reading Here… 

*

Putting these things together, I realise yet again how much I wander across different interests in my daily and writing life—but also how those interests return again and again to the work of writing (and, one of the most vital parts of that work, to reading). The riches of such contemplation are not monetary—but they don’t need to be. So let me add a note to express my gratitude to readers who follow the tapestries my mind weaves: even without readership, the creation of the words is what counts, but knowing that words are becoming part of a conversation is so very meaningful to me. Let’s keep wondering together.

Second Draft

They say all writing is rewriting; what they don’t say is that rewriting—yes, vital—often feels like stasis.

When I talk with writer friends about what constitutes a “good day’s work” we will nearly all say that the best feeling is to have written something new. To go back to something old—whether it’s looking over something that appeared on paper only the day before, or pulling a piece out of the drawer where it’s been sitting for six months or six years—can be a wonderful experience. But it can also be frustrating.

When it comes to poetry, I write my first drafts by hand—and usually the second draft too; maybe even the third, fourth, fifth and sixth as well. Though the lines may change when a poem is transferring to the computer (because the length of the line in handwriting can be different from the length of the line in typescript, among other things) it is nearly always true that the words themselves are nailed down. At times I write the initial drafts in prose, and treat lineation as an entirely separate process. While form and content really are inextricably linked, both form and content take time to nuzzle into being and don’t necessarily arrive at the same time; even so, changing the line, the stanza, the shape can also bring about small changes in the words themselves. Minor changes I enact at the keyboard; major operations take me back to pen and paper.

All of this, of course, is work—but at the end of the day it doesn’t feel like work, especially if the thing isn’t finished. To rewrite a poem for hours, or go over and over an essay of a few thousand words and to come back with no definitive “solution” (no solution is really definitive…) is disheartening. What makes it even more disheartening is that I end up feeling I have done nothing at all.

Read More

Poems Revisited: “A Consumer’s Report” by Peter Porter

When Peter Porter died in 2010, I found that many friends outside Australia—who regularly read poetry—were not at all familiar with his work. I shared with them a small number of his poems to whet their appetites: among those I chose was “A Consumer’s Report,” which proved a hit among friends and students alike. This poem initiates the reader into its modus operandi from the outset, with the opening tercet putting the joke on the table. The reason the poem works derives from the fact that Porter sustains this joke for the duration of the poem, and then, when the reader believes the joke has been stretched to its ultimate end, the poet adds yet another surprise.

One of the main pleasures of poetry is that it returns the reader to consider the precision of language itself. In day-to-day life we’re used to hearing words mangled or emptied of their meaning through overuse. (Don Watson’s book Weasel Words tracks such emptiness in the language of management at length.) At times, when corporate or political-speak gets excessive airplay, I can’t help but feel we really are living in the world of Orwell’s “Newspeak.” In “A Consumer’s Report” Porter reminds us that even language that seems to have been repurposed by the corporate world can in fact be reclaimed and renewed. Often this reclamation can happen simply through the application of a set of familiar terms to a surprising new context: this is exactly what Porter does in his poem here, taking the language of marketing, and billing life itself as a commodity to be test-driven as you would a new car or skincare product. In so doing Porter wittily leads the reader both to examine the nature of the titular consumer’s report, but also prods his reader to a serious consideration of life itself.

Clearly our consumer has had a particular experience of life—life has, after all, been “gentle on the hands” of the writer; however the particularity of this example is countered by more general truths that all of us must face: none of us are aware, after all, just how long it will be until the built-in redundancy kicks in. Porter pulls apart familiar phrases—what does it mean to be “on the side of” life?—and places the terms “market researcher” and “philosopher” on two sides of the same coin. This balancing act between terms we would never normally equate anticipates the poem’s end, in which Porter informs the reader that, when all is said and done, there is still another weighing act to be completed: the unnamed “competitive product” (ie. death) must be experienced for a true comparison to take place. This final move drops us into a more serious realm, and we realise that the comic tone we have enjoyed until now has always had a sting to it. In fact, the ending prompts the reader to begin again: and that’s what the best poems do. Invite you to experience them over and over.

“A Consumer’s Report” appears in Peter Porter’s The Rest of the Flight: Selected Poems.

_______________________________

A Consumer’s Report

The name of the product I tested is Life,
I have completed the form you sent me
and understand that my answers are confidential.

I had it as a gift,
I didn’t feel much while using it,
in fact I think I’d have liked to be more excited.
It seemed gentle on the hands
but left an embarrassing deposit behind.
It was not economical
and I have used much more than I thought
(I suppose I have about half left
but it’s difficult to tell)—
although the instructions are fairly large
there are so many of them
I don’t know which to follow, especially
as they seem to contradict each other.
I’m not sure such a thing
should be put in the way of children—
It’s difficult to think of a purpose
for it. One of my friends says
it’s just to keep its maker in a job.
Also the price is much too high.
Things are piling up so fast,
after all, the world got by
for thousand million years
without this, do we need it now?
(Incidentally, please ask your man
to stop calling me ‘the respondent’,
I don’t like the sound of it.)
There seems to be a lot of different labels,
sizes and colours should be uniform,
the shape is awkward, it’s waterproof
but not heat resistant, it doesn’t keep
yet it’s very difficult to get rid of:
whenever they make it cheaper they tend
to put less in—if you say you don’t
want it, then it’s delivered anyway.
I’d agree it’s a popular product,
it’s got into the language; people
even say they’re on the side of it.
Personally I think it’s overdone,
a small thing people are ready
to behave badly about. I think
we should take it for granted. If its
experts are called philosophers or market
researchers or historians, we shouldn’t
care. We are the consumers and the last
law makers. So finally, I’d buy it.
But the question of a ‘best buy’
I’d like to leave until I get
the competitive product you said you’d send. 

—Peter Porter

Double Duty Report

As well as continuing on with this site, I have also been asked to be a guest-blogger for the journal Southerly for the month of March. I’ll be posting there once a week all month—the first piece, musing on my attraction to reading the biographies of other writers—is now online. Nonetheless, I’ll still be posting here—there are more interviews, Poems Revisited essays and “diary” entries to come. So join me here—and there!

Writerly Ancestry, or Influence and Anxiety

I love to argue with the literary critic Harold Bloom: my copy of his The Western Canon, for instance, is incredibly dog-eared, edge-worn and marked up. Especially the lists at the back, his extensive proposal for a canon of Western literature. I bring up Harold Bloom because he’s the one that introduced that phrase, with his book of that title, The Anxiety of Influence. As poets, we are almost honour-bound to reject the generation immediately above us, seeking out other models. I argue with this too: like all poets, I have groups and poets who attract me, and those to whom I feel an inexplicable aversion—but mostly I welcome the sheer variety of poetic forebears, and when feeling lost about what it is I’m doing, where I’m going, I’ll return to someone I haven’t read in years, or else I’ll push onward to someone I’ve never read, or never read intensively, before. I’d like to think that the “when” of these poets’ careers doesn’t come into the equation.

This is on my mind because this week I’m going to be in conversation with poet and podcaster Fiona Wright at the NSW Writers’ Centre as part of their “Talking Writing” series, considering the career of Judith Wright. A colossal figure in Australian poetry, I remember discovering her work in the Norton Anthology of Poetry as a teenager and thinking that, after all, it was possible to be Australian and to be a poet. As time has gone on, I’ve been interested, too, in the way Wright uses and addresses the landscape in her work, and have spent a considerable amount of time thinking about her use of form. Of particular interest to me in this area are the poems she called “ghazals.” In fact, these poems only glancingly resemble the ghazal, but what fascinates me was that she was looking to this different poetic tradition years before others. The ghazal had a moment in vogue in the Romantic era—amongst the German poets, including Goethe—and was then overlooked by poets outside the traditions of Arabic, Persian and Urdu poetries until very recently. Though I rarely publish “formal” poems, I have actually written quite a lot of poems that either adhere to or play on traditional forms, and Wright’s approach to the ghazal is one of the most interesting adaptions I have found. There are poets who have become gatekeepers for the form in recent years—no doubt worried about the way in which a longstanding tradition in Middle Eastern verse has been so quickly taken up and broken down by the Western poet—would most likely be horrified by Wright’s incredibly free interpretation of the form. Nonetheless, the poems are gorgeous and suggest ways to play upon poetic traditions closer to home.

Reading so much poetry, I often find it difficult to assess the impact any one poet has had on the way I myself think about poetry—but it’s a real pleasure to have a reason to revisit Wright’s work and to ask myself questions about the ways in which her example has suggested avenues for my own work, directly or indirectly. I’m looking forward to hearing Fiona’s thoughts on the subject, too: as two young female poets, separated by a small number of years, I’m interested to know how she came to Wright’s work (in the classroom? in anthologies?) and where she slots Wright in when it comes to her own personal canon or anxiety of influence. When I sit down to write, what I think nearly always becomes clearer as I keep at it; likewise, in conversation more facets of my own understanding come out as they are pressed against the knowledge and intuitions of another.

This conversation is a free event for members of the NSW Writers’ Centre. For non-members admission is $20—or you could just think about joining the centre, and enjoying more events in the future.

Talking Writing: Judith Wright and Poetry in Australia

Thursday 8 March, 6:30-8:30

NSW Writers’ Centre

Garry Owen House, Callan Park, Balmain Rd, Rozelle

On Translation, Poet Translators and the Creation of New Work

Poet, Editor and Translator Michael Hulse

A number of years ago I ran into an acquaintance in the library (he worked there; I merely frequented the place) and he asked what I’d been reading lately. I mentioned that I had recently begun reading a lot of Polish poetry. His response was that he didn’t really respond to the work of Cseslaw Milosz. This event has stood out for me for a long time because it wasn’t Milosz I was reading at the time, nor was it Szymborska, the other Nobelist—I had stumbled across the work of Adam Zagajewski and Zbigniew Herbert. 

This was before the larger selections of their work were commonly found in Australian bookshops, so the university library was my connection to their work. Nonetheless, his reply wasn’t surprising: because when it comes to writers in other languages, we really do tend to know only one or two names. Nonetheless, translators are working away on the books of many, many more authors—and many of these authors are just as deserving of attention. I wonder if sometimes we have a bit of a “one and done” attitude with non-Anglophone literatures. There is, after all, so much to read—if we know the work of Milosz, we know something of Polish literature in the second half of the twentieth century. (With the recent death of Szymborska—a sad event that at least had the happy consequence of bringing attention to her poetry again—Zagajewski will now be the prime living representative of Polish poetry for the outside world; Piotr Sommer will no doubt be next up.) Similarly, if readers know the work of Syrian poet Adonis or Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish they know something of recent Arabic-language poetry. I too am guilty of this, no matter how much I constantly try to address my own ignorance.

And it’s a lot to ask of any reader that they delve further: the world of so-called “world literature” is enormous, and often only translations of the biggest names are readily available. Only a couple of hundred books in translation are published in the United States every year, and no doubt only a fraction of these are published in Australia.

In a poem in his recent book Southern Barbarians, the poet John Mateer declares that “translators are angels.” I too subscribe to this opinion: translation is perhaps the ultimate labour of love. One translator I know translated a contemporary novel and for his efforts received only $500. Merely retyping a novel would surely cost more at any decent hourly rate; rendering the work in a different language would take much, much longer… Another friend translated Estonian poetry: among readers there doesn’t seem to be a high demand for this, and I doubt he’ll ever profit much from his efforts. But literary translators—especially of poetry—are rarely in it for the money. And though a few translators names are known—William Weaver, for instance, the translator of Italian authors Umberto Eco and Italo Calvino among others is well known—being a translator is often akin to being invisible. Yes, your name goes on the book as well, but the average reader pays little attention to it. The flipside is that many successful translators are also creators of their own work, yet it is their translations that reach a wider audience. Khaled Mattawa, an American poet of Libyan birth, and my former teacher, is now Adonis’s translator: he recently toured the United States with Adonis, and the pair gave bilingual readings. I was privileged to attend one of these readings in Michigan a year and a half ago. But Mattawa is also a poet of considerable power: I believe his recent book Tocqueville deserves serious attention. The book has received some of that attention in the United States, but coming from a small independent publisher, it remains unknown in Australia.

All this is on my mind because Michael Hulse is in town, and will be reading and talking at UTS tomorrow night. Hulse has a formidable record as a translator: best known for his translations of three of W. G. Sebald’s works (The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn and Vertigo) Hulse has done much, much more through his career—and has a lot of work ahead of him. He has translated authors from a range of periods, and is one of the foremost translators of German literature. Whether it’s a rendering of Goethe, Rilke or Elfriede Jelinek, you are in good hands when it comes to Hulse. And like many translators he is also a writer: he has published a number of books of poetry, the most recent being The Secret History in 2009, which followed on from Empires and Holy Lands: Poems 1976-2000. We know poetry won’t sell in the same numbers as, for instance, a Penguin Classics edition of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, but his poetry is well worth reading.

Beyond that, Hulse is an accomplished editor and anthologist. He edits The Warwick Review at present, and acted as the co-editor of Bloodaxe’s The New Poetry and, most recently, The 20th Century in Poetry. I’m looking forward to hearing him read and discuss his work tomorrow night; the event is free and open to the public, so please join us.

Michael Hulse Reading and In Conversation

UTS Building 3 (Bon Marche), Level Two, Room 221/2

Entrance on Harris Street, Ultimo

Tuesday 28 February 6:30-8pm

Poets + Picnic

I am delighted to be included in the line up for this year’s Poets’ Picnic run by Woollhara Municipal Council and the Woollhara Library, taking place this coming Tuesday evening, 21 February. I’d heard about this annual event from a number of people, and was honoured to be invited to contribute to the reading, taking place at twilight in the Blackburn Gardens. It’s a free event, and sure to be delightful. (Here’s hoping for good weather…)

Please join me, alongside Kit Brookman, Tricia Dearborn, Carol Jenkins, Vivian Smith and Alan Wearne reading poems loosely allied with this years’ theme, “Talking About My Generation.” There’s live jazz at 5:30, and the picnic kicks off at 6pm. This year it’s being hosted by Simon Marnie of ABC Radio.

Poets’ Picnic

Blackburn Gardens (next to the Double Bay Central Library)
New South Head Rd,
Double Bay

Tuesday, 21 February, 6pm