poet of the month
LES MURRAY
Everything except language
knows the meaning of existence.
Trees, planets, rivers, time
know nothing else. They express it
moment by moment as the universe.
Even this fool of a body
lives it in part, and would
have full dignity within it
but for the ignorant freedom
of my talking mind.
Australian. Born 1938. Has lived near his birthplace on the coast of New South Wales on a 40 acre farm in New South Wales since the 1980s. Travels the world to give readings. Attended Sydney University. Literary editor of Quadrant. Winner of many awards, including T.S.Eliot award 1996. The Biplane Houses will be published by Carcanet in the UK in September this year. The son of a farmer, bullied at school, scornful of both the literary and liberal elites of his own country, Murray explores the human, psychological and mystical dimensions of rural Australia. He describes himself as having been chronically depressed until the age of 58. Married, with five children, Murray has dedicated two volumes of his poetry to 'the glory of God'.
poem of the day
MUSIC TO ME IS LIKE DAYS
Once played to attentive faces
music has broken its frame
its bodice of always-weak laces
the entirely promiscuous art
pours out in public spaces
accompanying everything, the selections
of sex and war, the rejections.
To jeans-wearers in zipped sporrans
it transmits an ideal body
continuously as theirs age. Warrens
of plastic tiles and mesh throats
dispense this aural money
this sleek accountancy of notes
deep feeling adrift from its feelers
thought that means everything at once
like a shrugging of cream shoulders
like paintings hung on park mesh
sonore doom soneer illy chesh
they lost the off switch in my lifetime
the world reverberates with Muzak
and Prozac. As it doesn't with poe-zac
(I did meet a Miss Universe named Verstak).
Music to me is like days
I rarely catch who composed them
if one's sublime I think God
my life-signs suspend. I nod
it's like both Stilton and cure
from on harpsichord-hum:
penicillium -
then I miss the Köchel number.
I scarcely know whose performance
of a limpid autumn noon is superior
I gather timbre outranks rhumba.
I often can't tell days apart
they are the consumers, not me
in my head collectables decay
I've half-heard every piece of music
the glorious big one with voice
the gleaming instrumental one, so choice
the hypnotic one like weed-smoke at a party
and the muscular one of farty
cars that goes Whudda Whudda
Whudda like the compound oil heart
of a warrior not of this planet.
(the poem below by last month's featured poet, Mary Oliver, will be archived shortly - apologies for its continued appearance here)
ALL TRUTHS WAIT IN ALL THINGS from SONG OF MYSELF
By Walt Whitman
30
All truths wait in all things,
They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it,
They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon,
The insignificant is as big to me as any,
(What is less or more than a touch?)
Logic and sermons never convince,
The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.
(Only what proves itself to every man and woman is so,
Only what nobody denies is so.)
A minute and a drop of me settle my brain,
I believe the soggy clods shall become lovers and lamps,
And a compend of compends is the meat of a man or woman,
And a summit and flower there is the feeling they have for each other,
And they are to branch boundlessly out of that lesson until it
becomes omnific,
And until one and all shall delight us, and we them.
31
I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars,
And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg
of the wren,
And the tree-toad is a chef-d'oeuvre for the highest,
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,
And the cow crunching with depress'd head surpasses any statue,
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.
I find I incorporate gneiss, coal, long-threaded moss, fruits,
grains, esculent roots,
And am stucco'd with quadrupeds and birds all over,
And have distanced what is behind me for good reasons,
But call any thing back again when I desire it.
In vain the speeding or shyness,
In vain the plutonic rocks send their old heat against my approach,
In vain the mastodon retreats beneath its own powder'd bones,
In vain objects stand leagues off and assume manifold shapes,
In vain the ocean settling in hollows and the great monsters lying low,
In vain the buzzard houses herself with the sky,
In vain the snake slides through the creepers and logs,
In vain the elk takes to the inner passes of the woods,
In vain the razor-bill'd auk sails far north to Labrador,
I follow quickly, I ascend to the nest in the fissure of the cliff.
Les Murray on poetry
There seems to be a law inherent in this life, this stage of our evolution, that we can experience wholeness, the fully-present sense of all that we are and can be, but that we can’t endure it as a steady, permanent state. The fusion persists in the product, but not in us. This, I suggest, is the essential model and structure of all human creation, and the reason we never stop creating, however lame the soul-bodies we make may be.
a heavily Literary lifestyle tends to indicate a short circuit in which poetic energy isn’t going into the Works.
If on the other hand the poem is properly independent, not meekly obedient to its time or to overbearing sensibilities other poems have established, it is as important a thing as the largest historic poeme, the full equal of, say, Revolution or Florence, and may last longer than they. They have elaborators and polluters: it is complete and needs nothing more. At the heart of any poem an act of composition is likely to be still in progress, drawing available energies in to itself more or less greedily. Thousands or even millions of people may be working on it, and perhaps getting ground up in it.
THE INSTRUMENT
Who reads poetry? Not our intellectuals:
they want to control it. Not lovers, not the combative,
nor examinees. They too skim it for bouquets
and magic trump cards. Not poor schoolkids
furtively farting as they get immunized against it.
Poetry is read by the lovers of poetry
and heard by some more they coax to the cafe
or the district library for a bifocal reading.
Lovers of poetry may total a million people
on the whole planet. Fewer than the players of skat.
What gives them delight is a never-murderous skim
distilled, to verse mainly, and suspended in rapt
calm on the surface of paper. The rest of poetry
to which this was once integral still rules
the continents, as it always did. But on condition now
that its true name is never spoken. This, feral poetry,
the opposite but also the secret of the rational,
who reads that? Ah, the lovers, the schoolkids,
debaters, generals, crime-lords, everybody reads it:
Porsche, lift-off, Gaia, Cool, patriarchy.
Among the feral stanzas are many that demand your flesh
to embody themselves. Only completed art
free of obedience to its time can pirouette you
through and athwart the larger poems you are in.
Being outside all poetry is an unreachable void.
Why write poetry? For the weird unemployment.
For the painless headaches, that must be tapped to strike
down along your writing arm at the accumulated moment.
For the adjustments after, aligning facets in a verb
before the trance leaves you. For working always beyond
your own intelligence. For not needing to rise
and betray the poor to do it. For a non-devouring fame.
Little in politics resembles it: perhaps
the Australian colonists’ re-inventing of the snide
far-adopted secret ballot, in which deflation could hide
and, as a welfare bringer, shame the mass-grave Revolutions,
so axe-edged. so lictor-y.
Was that moral cowardice’s one shining world victory?
Breathing in dream-rhythm when awake and far from bed
evinces the gift. Being tragic with a book on your head.
on his vocation
In my mind I always cast myself in the loner-outcast role. You know how we each have a poem in us, and ‘cast’ ourselves and others in its narrative? One is reality, two or three is company, many more than that’s a lynch mob, is how my poem goes.
on craft and tradition
But alas! If modernism gave us a sophisticated new readership, it also blew away all our older readerships and made us dependent on itself. And it had agendas and class purposes of its own. For some, writers and critics, it was principally an aesthetic, for others it was a political programme. And, one bright day or another, each of us realised or were told that we were owned, and that certain conscript service would be expected, certain themes handled in an approved way or left alone.
on method
Looking inside myself, I detect that when I write a poem, I do so in a kind of trance which integrates my two minds with each other and with their master-servant my body. The impulse to write the poem may come from any of the three, and each makes its contribution to the trance of composing. Waking consciousness supplies words, most ideas and probably much of the poem’s design. Dream lends it its aspect of timelessness, and its aura of mystery and the supernal; I suspect that many of the more daring flights and connections of any poem, the ones the mind might resist were it not charmed to silence, are carried on the flying carpet of our dream-life! The body, in turn, supplies feeling and rhythm, the free-and-bound dance of the words and images and it also supplies the laws of breath which shall obtain in the work. A man with a deep barrel chest will, at least sometimes, write very long lines because he has the puff for it. All of these contributions fuse in a dazzling simultaneity, if one has come to the poem at the proper moment in its growth within oneself. Start writing it too early in its gestation, and it is liable to be a mess, confused and uncooked; too late and it may emerge overly cut-and-dried, like a programme.
I learned from movies how to frame sequences, how to move quickly, how to keep the thing in focus and yet moving. People are used to going at great speed in movies, they’re used to literature taking a lot more time. I noticed some of my critics have been saying the book moves very quick, I suppose partly because there’s a lot in it. I thought yeah well where I got that from is two things. One is that Fredy’s looking back into the past, and when you’re reminiscing you call up a lot of stuff fairly close together. The other thing is how to frame it, and I got that mostly from films.
you don't just transpose an existing myth into modern dress', not at this major-poem length anyway. The decent thing for an epic-sized composition is to invent your own brand-new myth!
on God
I once said that any real religion is a big slow poem, while a poem is a small fast religion
My contribution to religious thought has been that God has to share in our disaster and to be punished for what had been done. To take on our nature including the dreadful things we do to each other... If a great deal of pain is involved—the pain of the innocent—then He who provided the opportunity for it to happen has some responsibility for it as well
on himself as a school boy
They had probably had a bugger of a time from other boys and here was one that was such a droob, such a helpless weirdo, that they could get their own back on the male race ... They were probably having a hell of a time with their own identity and their own fears because in that merciless world of teenage girls, nobody's ever pretty enough and nobody's ever got few enough pimples and nobody's ever got the right clothes. It's merciless, merciless. You need a valve, something to take it out on.
on poetry and the Australian continent
The continent on which I live was ruled by poetry for tens of thousands of years, and I mean it was ruled openly and overtly by poetry. Only since European settlement in 1788 has it been substantially ruled by prose. The sacred law which still governs the lives of traditional Aborigines is carried by a vast map of song-poetry attached to innumerable mythic sites. Each group ‘sings’ the tract of country it occupies, just as each initiated person sings the ceremonial songs of the holy places for which he or she is responsible within that territory.
publications
POETRY
1965 The Ilex Tree
1972 Poems against Economic
1976 the Vernacular Republic
1980 The Boys Who Stole The Funeral
1983 The People's Otherworld
1986 Selected Poems
1987 The Daylight Moon
1990 Dog Fox Field
1992 Translations From The Natural World
1996 Subhuman Redneck Poems
1998 Fredy Neptune
1999 Conscious and Verbal
2001 Learning Human: New Selected Poems
2002 Poems The Size of Photographs
2002 Full Dress
2002 Collected Poems 1961-2002
2003 New Collected Poems
2006 The Biplane Houses (forthcoming)
PROSE
1974 Lunch and Counter Lunch
1978 The Peasant Mandarin
1984 Persistence in Folly
1990 Blocks and Tackles
1997 A Working Forest
1998 A Defence of Poetry
1999 The Quality of Sprawl
links