Welcome to Australian poetry - August 2007

Bruce Beaver’s Letters to Live Poets (1969) remains one of the key works in Australian poetry. Perhaps more than any other collection, it can be seen to have initiated the freeing up of Australian poetry, and to be a central force in the movement away from traditional forms and concerns begun in the late 1960s. The concurrent development of the demotic, the spiritual and the social, which sets Beaver’s work as a whole aside as remarkable, can be seen recast in the writing of subsequent Australian poets such as Les Murray, Fay Zwicky, Adam Aitken and Robert Adamson, in ways as different as they are re-invigorating to the many valencies of contemporary Australian poetics.

For this issue, I asked Dorothy Porter to guest-edit and introduce the work of Bruce Beaver for Poetry International Australia. Beaver was a long-time mentor and close friend to Porter, while, in turn, Porter was a confidant, a sounding board for poems and, at times, a muse for Beaver. Their correspondence ran from 1982 to 2004, and is an example of the cross-generational ties that bind Australian poetry into a community. Further, Porter notes that it was Beaver’s ‘Tiresias sees’ sequence, poems from which are presented here, that sparked the writing of her first verse-novel Akhenaten. Equally, their deep friendship can be seen as integral to Porter's subsequent output both lyrical and verse-novels alike, such as The Monkey's Mask and most recently El Dorado. The twenty-two poems Porter has selected are shining examples of Bruce Beaver’s gift of uncovering the visionary within the immediate and apparent. Heartfelt thanks are due to Dorothy Porter for editing the pages, as well as Bronwyn Lea at the University of Queensland Press, Veronica Sumegi and Andras Berkes-Brandl at Brandl & Schlesinger for making the work available.

While preparing the selection of poems for Peter Boyle’s pages, I felt a little like the shepherd Mohammed Ahmed el-Hamed might have felt when he came across the Dead Sea Scrolls in Qumran in 1947, as uncertainty and surprise led to bewilderment and astonishment. I had thought that Boyle had been relatively quiet in recent years, since the release of Museum of Space in 2004, and wondered what it was he had been working on along with his translation work. As I started reading The Apocrypha of William O’Shaunessy, it was hard not to mutter like a zealous initiate from the Hermetic tradition “magnum opus, magnum opus, magnum opus.” For in this ambitious and masterfully executed seven book, four hundred and fifty page long work, Boyle has created something unprecedented in Australia writing, and as near to the genius of his fellow antipodean Juan Luis Borges as imaginable. In a way that might recall shades of the Dead Sea Scrolls’ impact,  The Apocrypha of William O’Shaunessy creates a vast range of interpolations that at once fill gaps and create lacunae in some of the basic histories and myths of Western thought, and so demands the reader re-think the foundations to the real and imaginative alike. Along with a large sample from the Apocrypha, there is a substantial selection of poems from across Boyle’s career to enjoy. It's a rich feast to savour, though but the smallest part of an exceptional oeuvre still in the making.

Over the last three months, a lot has been happening in Australian poetry. Amidst the healthy output of publishers of Australian poetry, such as University of Queensland Press, Giramondo Publishing, Salt Publishing, Black Inc., and others, there have been several outstanding new collections released. Most notably among them are David Malouf’s Typewriter Music from UQP and J.S.Harry’s Not Finding Wittgenstein from Giramondo. The Australian Poetry Resources Internet Library (APRIL) has also got underway recently, with the aim of becoming fully functional by mid-2008. In the good hands of Professor Elizabeth Webby and Professor Creagh Cole, and funded by the Australian Research Council and the Copyright Agency limited, APRIL aims “to increase the circulation, reading and understanding of Australian poetry within Australia and internationally.” The prototype of APRIL was devised by poet and editor of Jacket, John Tranter, and alongside Jacket, is testimony to Tranter's efforts to get Australian poetry before a larger readership. APRIL will be a very welcome addition to the sites already publishing Australian poetry online, especially as it aims to provide access to complete collections of Australian poetry and develop a database of critical material, which hopefully Poetry International readers will take advantage of, pursuing the work of poets first discovered here in more depth through APRIL.

Last month, on the morning of July 11th, Australian poet Noel Rowe died after a fight with cancer that was marked by the same wisdom and gentle humour that had been constant throughout his life, his years teaching and his poetry. He will be deeply missed by the community blessed by his friendship as well as no doubt by his fellow poets and many readers. I hope readers will especially enjoy this issue’s update of Noel Rowe’s pages where the music and beauty of language are settled amongst the often harsh and hard realities of the present day. Vivian Smith has kindly sent on the tribute he gave to  Noel Rowe as a poet, teacher and a friend at Rowe’s funeral in Sydney.

Finally, while preparing this issue and with Australia racing headlong toward an election later in the year, I was struck by Bruce Beaver’s tribute to Frank O’Hara in Letters to Live Poets. Written in 1969, Beaver meditates on the untimely and unusual death of O’Hara, Australian-American relations and the American War in Vietnam. Almost four decades on, the parallels of the latter to the present-day American War in Iraq and Beaver’s meditations may prove eerily and uncomfortably acute to contemporary readers inside and out of Australia:

The truth reaches us slowly here,
is delayed in the mail continually
or censored in the tabloids. The war
now into its third year
remains undeclared.
The number of infants, among others, blistered
and skinned alive by napalm
has been exaggerated
by both sides we are told,
and the gas does not seriously harm
does not kill but is merely
unbearably nauseating.
Apparently none of this
is happening to us.

Whether the news still reaches us slowly amidst fibre-optics and satellites is debatable. Considering the events of the last few years, the news appears to reach us, but the public memory, or conscience, seems to have been truncated or lulled further into apathy by the same sense that “apparently none of this/ is happening to us.” Equally, while reading through the magical worlds of The Apocrypha of William O'Shaunnesy, I came across the following:

How do you live in a country that is travelling backwards? Each day it loses more of itself. Year by year its leaders strive to remove whatever elements of justice or compassion its people had slowly acquired. It prides itself on destruction and believes every reality can be renamed. So the great vanishing grows.

Difficult not to see in this the shadow of Australia’s contemporary reality. The last years, the spiral into a politics ruled by fear and mendacity might almost seem drawn from some lost tragedy by Sophocles or Aeschylus, if the antagonist was not so effectively and insidiously dulling and dumbing, and the truth of the damage done to Australia’s identity and possibility not so oppressively real. As the “great vanishing” of justice and compassion continues to unfold in Australia, it won’t be the poets that save us from ourselves but some part of what they say might remind us of the things lost, the possible worlds we might choose — a hardy and compassionate, an imaginative and wry, self-critical and self-aware Australia — perhaps only an election or so away.