Welcome to Australian poetry - February 2005

18 januari 2006 In the first volume of his autobiography, Robert Adamson recounts his final departure from gaol and the fate of his first poetry manuscript:

The next morning I took the folder with me when I went down to reception. Dong turned up to say goodbye, which confused me, and then before I knew it I was signing release forms and being escorted to the gates. Then the screw at the front gate stopped me to ask what was in the folder.

This was the same screw who’d charged me. He was still looking for ways to upset me. Well, two could play at that game. I told him I had my poems in a folder and asked if he’d like me to recite one – whereupon he snatched it from me, opened it up and started flicking through the sheets. “If you take this through the gates,” he said, “I’ll be ringing the Maitland police and you’ll be charged with theft.”

I asked him what he was talking about and he pointed to the fine print down at the bottom of the letter-forms: ‘printed by V.C.N. Blight for the New South Wales Department of Prisons.’ “Your poetry,” he said, “is written on government property. If you take this through the gates, it’s stealing.”

I could hardly believe what was happening, but knew he meant it. I stood there feeling sick while he told a trustee to take the folder away.

I was standing next to the open gate. I had only to move forward. It was like stepping out into space.

This sense of open space, of stepping beyond a hostile threshold into the unknown, is common to much Australian poetry. There is a sense of the void at the heart of much Australian poetry, of operating slightly akilter to, and in defiance of, the broader Australian culture, typified and stereotyped by the afternoon barbie, with plenty of beer, and the cricket or footie playing in the background (a scene Tranter brilliantly employs in ‘Backyard’ published here). As Adamson’s ill-fated contemporary Michael Dransfield once noted, “To be a poet in Australia is the ultimate commitment”, and despite the romantic melodrama of such a statement, there is a truth to it (a truth perhaps underscored by Dransfield’s inability to survive beyond the age of twenty-four) as Adamson’s experience illustrates.

In Australia, poetry often seems like a stranger in a strange land. The reception and publication of poetry here has gone through periods of growth and decline and regrowth in recent decades, various manuscripts meeting similar fates as Adamson’s first, as poetry is not seen as commercially viable. Currently, while the country’s big publishers largely ignore poetry for the better-selling cookbooks (and autobiography), smaller publishers such as UQP, Salt, Giramondo, Monogene, Paper Bark Press, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Black Pepper, Five Islands Press and Vagabond continue to fill the gap, showcasing an otherwise vibrant period in the writing of Australian poetry and literature generally.

Even so, the deeper reaches of that void persist, the ‘weird melancholy’ that continues to haunt the Australian landscape – rural, urban and suburban – and poetry alike. For a writer such as Ouyang Yu, there appear to be gaps and absences, fault-lines in Australia’s cultural identity that drive across the broadest determinations of what it might mean to be ‘Australian’ while cutting across the individual coming to terms with him- or herself in this space. In a poem titled ‘The Double Man’, Yu writes:

my surname is china
my given name australia
if i translate that direct into englishmy surname becomes australia
my given name china
i do not know what motherland means
i possess two countries
or else
i possess neither

Yu’s sense of division, if not dispossession, couples with a strong-willed desire to make this Australia – seen clearly for its hypocrisy and generosity, its truths and lies – his own. It is a peculiar trait of much Australian poetry, that there is a drive to embrace a sense of void and contradiction. That is not to say a latter-day Beat satori, but the dead-heart of Australia: its own peculiar and profound absences that stretch back with the arid timelessness of the land and the jerry-rigged crucible of its culture. Absences inhabited – geographically, psychically, spiritually and culturally – by waves of migrants and refugees, white, black, yellow, coming by force or will, through misfortune or in hope, to create a homeland. Australia is a home built invariably in relation to the absence or loss of home. It is not a long leap of the imagination – perhaps only a leap over one of the several fault-lines that bind as they divide ‘Australia’ – that Yu’s interrogation of this division between two countries, this possession which is equally dispossession, would speak to a majority of Australians, old and new.

It’s difficult not to wonder what Australia has already lost in recent years, with numerous new Australians being turned back at our ever-warping borders and ‘exclusion zones’. Strange too, to think of the manuscripts lost or waiting, written by Australian hands but in languages other than English, that haven’t reached a broader public, confined as it is to predominantly English-language poetry when its living culture embraces so many other languages. Yu has it right in his ‘Going through the cards’; the idea of “some pure land called ‘terra australi incognita’ or ‘australi felix’”dissolves when confronted with the most basic of truths, a list of Australian names: “arranga or zareski or chan or ng or pitruzzello or karogiannis or truong . . . ”. Elsewhere, years after that initially hostile encounter on the threshold of a new freedom, Adamson’s hard-won self-knowledge and compassion, might show us a way in this space or void:

Everything that matters comes together
slowly, the hard way, with the immense and tiny details,
all the infinite touches, put down onto nothing –

each time we touch
it begins again, love quick brush strokes
building up the undergrowth from the air into what holds
(‘On not seeing Paul Cezanne’)

Unravelling love through hardship, being through connection to another, “the infinite touches, put down on nothing”, Adamson gathers a sense of art that might equally lead onto a sense of life in our lucky and unknown Australia.

There is a lot of great reading in this third issue of Australian Poetry International, much to be excited about – new poems from Robert Adamson and Ouyang Yu, and the first introduction here to Judith Beveridge and John Tranter. Thanks go to the contributors to this and earlier issues for their ongoing support of the site.

It is a great pleasure to be able to present a selection from Tranter’s oeuvre, including as it does some of the most important modern Australian poems. Poems such as ‘Lufhthansa’, ‘Enzensberger at “Exiles”’ and ‘Rimbaud and the Modernist Heresy’ are exempla of Australian postmodernism and have formed vital reference points for two subsequent generations of Australian poets. Equally, it is a joy to present a short sample (to be built upon later) of Judith Beveridge’s work here, touched as it is by a genius for form and music. Beveridge is without doubt one of the most gifted of makers among Australian poets; her ear for cadences, for the inner flesh of words, as sharp as her eye for the perfect line.

I hope you enjoy reading and re-reading the poetry in this issue of Australian Poetry International Web, dancing as it does over the abyss with grace, compassion and skill, and not a little harrowing wit and hard-won insight.