The Radicals.

What is our being?
Why are we here?
Do we get to take a step further?
Are we coming near?

Do we smile now
And nod our heads to agree?
Is that the way we succeed
In contemporary society?

Does having the same thoughts
And aspirations intend
To make us individuals
Of which we heartily defend?

We're all just running in circles
Not sure of our direction
Hoping to meet up with it
Under conservative protection.

13th January 1980
Kym Matthews

My Home

How you calm me
With your pounding.
How you ease me
With your strength.
How could I live without you?
Or even attempt to try.
You were my companion during youth
And also my advisor at certain times.
So much power I feel
From you.
Your music is sweetest
On silent summer nights,
Accompanied perhaps by the shrill song of cicadas
Announcing their arrival.
Your beauty is boundless.
I sit here, still at awe
By your unyielding temperament.
Let your waves lick my wounds,
For the ocean is my home.

The Digital Age

The digital age is a marvellous thing
It promises a lot -
More quality time with significant others
Looking at a screen,
Signing up to Facebook
To see holiday snaps.
Is this the quality to which we aspire
I think not.

The digital age is a marvellous thing
Less use of paper the claim.
Opening centres in regional towns
Accessing the 'net at last.
Negotiating budgets, plans, policies and more
For the bureaucratic beavers consuming copies galore.
Unfettered appetite sees our forests feverisly felled.
When will it stop?
Shame, shame, shame.

The digital age is a marvellous thing
Do all your business online -
Myriads of numbers controlling the process,
Passwords remembered each time.
Call centre assistance available 24/7,
Web support and tech help for the masses
Structures in place that never deliver -
Unlike that age-old tradition
Of drinking very fine wine.

17th February 2008
Kym Matthews

Interview with Peter Porter

The following is an interview with the poet Peter Porter from The Australian Review, written by Darleen Bungey
I thought it was an interesting addition to the discussion about poetry.
Cathy


DREAM WORLDS

IN 1935, when he was six, Peter Porter was standing on the veranda of his weatherboard home, shaded from the Brisbane sun by an unlined galvanised roof and a canvas blind, when miraculously, "almost like the angel of the lord", he says, a word appeared.

The word was death. "It came into my mind and it's hardly been out of it ever since," says Porter, now widely considered one of the finest living poets in the English languge. "I have never had a moment without anxiety -- apprehension -- always the feeling of a possible predator over the shoulder."

He was an only child, born after his parents suffered five miscarriages, and no doubt his anxiety was forever heightened when, three years after he grasped the concept of death, it was made real by the his mother's sudden death from a burst gall bladder. In 1974, Porter's first wife committed suicide.

The Norton Anthology of Poetry, an international honour roll for poets, includes three of Porter's poems: two tragic, one satiric, a good indication of the weight of Porter's oeuvre. One of the poems is Porter's intimate and moving funeral rite to his partner.

Titled An Exequy, it begins:

In wet May, in the months of change,
In a country you wouldn't visit, strange
Dreams pursue me in my sleep,
Black creatures of the upper deep --
Though you are five months dead, I see
You in guilt's iconography

Porter's dreams, he let slip in an earlier conversation, are still apocalyptic and continue every night. By day, he hunts them back down and fashions them into intricate works. "Poetry has to be made, it doesn't lie around waiting for you to pick it up; words are its material," he says. Porter doesn't use these images from what he calls "the alternative world" directly, but tries to capture their strange atmosphere. "The waking life is constantly under control but produces all the material the sleeping life uses," he says. "Things that are only reportage in life come alive in the experience of the dream world. A poet has to have invention, like a novelist, you don't just sit there and pour a bucket of blood over the page."

Porter's invention is broad. He employs all manner of rhyme, meter and form, with a rich variety of stage and cast, from the interior of a quiet English church to a war-waging Greek god; from felines to contemporary fat cats; from a Renaissance painter to a serial killer; from the shores of the Shoalhaven River on the NSW south coast to the mouth of the Deben Estuary in Suffolk, England.

While he often uses colloquialisms, he freely quotes German and Latin and some of the most obscure words in the English language. "Poetry," he says, "is language at its most concentrated form."

For all his wry takes on life and his expositions of pain and death, the essence this poet so often distils is battle-worn hope. In An Exequy, he takes loss and loneliness and redeems it. He encourages understanding: "No one can say why hearts will break / And marriages are all opaque". He shows how aloneness -- "I have no friend, or intercessor / No psychopomp or true confessor" -- can live alongside connectedness: "But only you who know my heart / In every cramped and devious part".

Is it Porter's sense of impending doom, along with the 70 steep steps leading to his London flat that he has climbed three or four times a day for almost 50 years, that gives Australia's most eminent off-island poet his gusto, and his poetry its zest?

Last October, straight from a gall-bladder operation -- which, given his family history, must have been unnerving -- and a long-haul flight from London, he launched immediately into a speaking tour of Melbourne, Canberra and Sydney, never missing an opportunity to socialise with old friends and colleagues along the way.

For years on most Fridays he lunched with a group of London editors and writers, including Clive James, Martin Amis, Mark Boxer, Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan. The lunches are not so regular now; some of the younger men find it "too dissipating".

Not Porter. Although he's not particularly interested in food, he is a self-proclaimed "gentleman who lunches". The lure is conversation. His is always served spiced with wit, peppered with quotes and garnished with metaphors, all of which enhance but never overwhelm the main ingredient, directness.

Another longstanding friend, Porter's biographer Bruce Bennett, a leading scholar of Australian literature, when asked what he wanted as a farewell honour replied that he would like to bring Porter home to take part in a two-day discourse on "place".

Place is often the question where Porter is concerned: Why did he leave Australia? When will he return? Porter has lived in London for 57 years and is often referred to as a British poet. But open the cover of any volume of his poems and the sounds from the land of his birth come bursting forth. A breath of air, the "red wind carrying dust on to my Sunday shoes", the whisper of leaves of "eucalyptus slipping past", the creak of "old windmills with their corrugated-iron sails", and the cackle of "kooka / with its caco-creado, magpie mutts / what messages they drag across the sky!"

The conclusion of Porter's poem, National Service, suggests the cord will never be cut:

I moved on: I live in London: I've grown quite mannerly.
But death will put me on the tram to Annerley
And I'll look out for the familiar sign on the shop
Bushells' Blue Label: I'll have got to my stop.

While Porter often portrays Australia as a disappointing, sometimes fearful, encounter -- he has described Sydney Harbour as the River Styx -- he also speaks of early memories with all the recall of a man describing the first sighting of a lover. Little of those long, and long-anticipated, trips to Sydney that he made as a small boy with his mother every Christmas has been forgotten: the train travelling along the Northern Rivers district, seeing jacaranda trees at Grafton, watching the dawn break over Woy Woy, then the Town Hall clock signalling their arrival, and the street photographers on the concourse jostling to seal the moment.

Finally, Circular Quay and a clanging gangplank leading on to a ferry named after a governor-general's wife -- the Lady Denham or the Lady Chelmsford -- and the excitement of the boat trip carrying him past boat houses to the stone house built by the hands of his maternal grandfather. And there, as Porter recalls in Landscape with Orpheus, "and there is the old latch / The gate, the pepperina tree, the ferry rounding / Onions Point".

In his early 20s, believing Brisbane a blight, Porter fled to Britain. He talks of London as an office, a place of work: he likens his knowledge of it to negotiating a supermarket.

His accent, even after such an immense absence, is still Australian but his charm and self-deprecation are English. He claims that his name is so "silly", no one could take him seriously as a tragic poet. He also says he has always thought of himself as "someone you wouldn't particularly want to know". He is chronically diffident, especially when he returns to Australia. "I left, there's no excuse for that," he says.

But there is a caveat. "If I were 21 in 2008, I wouldn't go to Britain. I'd wait until I had achieved what I wanted in Australia. There are opportunities here now, people are interested now." If he has any criticism it is that there is "too much navel gazing; for where Australia stands in the world and what people think of us".

Does Porter feel at home anywhere? His poems would suggest not. He is probably most at home in the middle of a good lunch, anywhere. Or perhaps contained within the borders of his large, white slip-covered chair, the centrepiece of a room devoted to books and manuscripts. By day the chair is lit by the northern sun washing off the white walls of the neighbouring Victorian building in the Paddington Square; at night it is illuminated by a small blue china lamp perched on the mantel above his head, wire dangling down past the back of the chair. It is here he reads.

Porter memorably once said, "The best way to learn anything is like a dog: to roll in it." He doesn't believe in courses or creative writing classes. The aspiring writer should "just read, read, read". In London, a job as an advertising copywriter, which supplied material for his sardonic, often quoted A Consumer's Report, kept him fed but unhappy. He quit when his work as a freelance critic became frequent enough to make it possible. He has contributed thousands of reviews for journals and newspapers and is a constant voice on the BBC. In the early years, radio was a saviour. "A lot of keeping myself alive was turning up at the studios and talking," he says. Penury, Porter claims, is the penalty for being a poet. If he were ever to contemplate returning to Australia -- packing up his many awards, including the Whitbread Poetry Prize and the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry -- he would have no real residence. "I don't have a house, any money. I haven't accumulated any possessions apart from books and records."

There has been no alternative to this life of glittering prizes but little financial reward: "If you don't write poems and you're a poet, you feel sick," he says.

When his friends gather in London next month to salute him on his 80th birthday, he will be signing his 22nd volume of poetry, Better Than God. He is still exploring, still looking to expose himself through his poetry and, he says, if that means "getting into trouble so much the better".

He says he would like his epitaph to be "last to leave". His readers will be hoping that, in his ninth decade, he will continue getting himself into all the trouble in the world.

THE ANT RACE

Busy, busy little ants
racing round my patio,
missing poles and dodging plants
as though controlled by radio.

But these mighty insect midgets,
while boosting their ecology
spurn all those magic widgets
created by technology.

Like birds on their migratory wings,
they navigate by wondrous instinct,
keeping formation, avoiding pings
however narrow is their precinct.

Their traffic flow across my yard,
dense in scale as any freeway,
is orderly and never marred
by prangs requiring towaway.

There they scurry in single files,
marching with regimental zeal,
criss-crossing pavings, skirting tiles,
heading home for the evening meal.

- Bill Guy, Adelaide, January 2009

Seven consecutive days of 40C-plus heat in Adelaide last week were not conducive to the writing of serious poetry (although South Australia would have made the ideal setting for Dante's Inferno). I, therefore, indulged myself in the above little frolic as my contribution to the latest session of the Aldinga group on the theme of Insects. Warmest (!) wishes to all my highly creative ExStanza colleagues.

A word on words poetic

Cathy has drawn my attention to a very interesting article in the December 27 – 28, Weekend Australian Review. She has, by now, possibly passed it on to all the members of ExStanza, if not do contact her. It is written by Kerry Cue and it questions the quality of today’s poets and the poetry they write, which she points out is written, in the main, without due diligence to the reading public.
The appreciation of poetry is so personal that it is very difficult to write in such general terms as has Cue but she may have had in mind the fundamental rules, which I would think, anyone who aspires to write meaningful poetry must take into consideration and indeed abide by, otherwise the end result can not and must not be taken as poetry.

Our group, I do believe, puts in an enormous amount of creative effort, working with a dedication and sincere commitment, with automatic focus on the ‘rules’ to allow each piece to be called or understood as ‘lyrical poetry’, though some among us do disagree on a particular poem, its style, construction and by times, an ultimate meaning. That is how it should be, must be. Thank goodness for the freedom to be critical. That brings me to the vexed question of what actually constitutes a lyrical poem or in fact good poetry. Is there bad poetry? What might appear good to one may be bad to another. Subjectivity again; it will keep rearing its head.

S. M. Schreiber, (a very short bibliography is included at the end of this little essay) in his book An Introduction to Literary Criticism, has some very strong words to say on the subject of ‘good poetry’. He uses a number of high powered poets to back up his argument. In the chapter titled, WHY DO POETS WRITE IN VERSE? SOUND IN POETRY, he states, and I quote. ‘So habitually do poets write in verse that it is not uncommon to find the two words, verse and poetry, used as if they were interchangeable. Yet, of course, “Thirty days hath September…” (which is Coleridge’s example of verse, which is not poetry), or:

In sixteen hundred and sixty-six
London burnt like a bundle of sticks

have no more relation to poetry than would the same two statements were they made in prose. And, conversely, the prose translation of the Song of Solomon in the Authorised Version of the Bible is as much poetry as in any verse poem which we read. Whether any piece of writing is poetry or not depends upon its content, (although, as you will see later, it is true that the poetic content does not become “a poem” until it has found its appropriate form): “verse” and “prose”, on the other hand, have reference solely to form. The word “verse” simply indicates any piece of writing in which the syllables are so arranged as to produce a recurring rhythm, regardless of what that rhythmical arrangement of words in used to convey to us. Any piece of writing in which the rhythm does not recur *(Free verse apart. See note below) is prose, again irrespective of its content. Yet, nevertheless, two facts remain: not only have the vast majority of poets, major and minor, chosen verse as their medium but – even more significantly – every one of the greatest has done so; there is no prose poem in existence which can challenge comparison with the verse-poetry of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare. This cannot be by chance; great poets are not sheep, unthinkingly following the herd; were it possible to transmit the supreme poetic experience in the form of even the most “poetic” of prose some one or other of them would, by experiment, have made the discovery. Hence the verse form must possess some virtue which, when a poet uses it, can transmit “poetry” to us as no prose is able to’.

Schreiber includes a note on “Free Verse” at the end of the chapter but suggests that it will complicate the issue this early in the piece and we should ignore it. If these little essays continue I will include it at a later date.

He details a significant amount of material in a not too intellectual discourse on the various attributes of poetry; its construction, form, sound, ear-training for the correct reading and thus understanding of a poem and under a separate section, deals in great detail with imagery but I shall leave that for another day.

I would like to quote him further on his discussion of, What is Poetry? This section, which I will not print in full is a rather enlightening piece and I wonder if anyone else will agree with him or find some of his comments rather old and out of date? He says, ‘Poetry, in the general sense, is the expression of the imagination” (Shelly, A defence of Poetry). The content of pure pose is facts or ideas directed to our understanding; it tells us something. Poetry, on the other hand, however much our understanding may be engaged (and it may have profound intellectual content), sets out not primarily to tell us something but to make something happen to us. And what “happens” is the re-creation in our imagination, as a first-hand experience, of something which the poet’s imagination has created. When we remember a prose book we remember what the author said in it or if it is a novel, what happened to the characters; when we remember a poem we remember something which that poem has made us ourselves see, feel, experience’.

Here, I would like to digress, for in the above I have to take issue with him, particularly with reference to the characters in a novel. I have read many a novel in which I have not just remembered what happened to the characters, I have been deeply affected by descriptions of scenes: places of great beauty or of devastation, in which no character was actively participating, involved or engaged in any activity. Prose writing often does create its own very special emotional reaction and is that not seeing, feeling and ultimately experiencing?
He goes on in the same section, ‘When we have read Keats’s Ode to a Grecian Urn what we remember is not that Keats, in the year 1818, saw (in his imagination) an urn with certain scenes depicted upon it, that he so felt its unchanging beauty that he underwent the experience of passing out of time into eternity; rather it is what we ourselves, in proportion to our capacity for response, have seen the “still unravish’d bride of quietness”, changeless beauty untouched and untouchable by time and that we in our own person have, momentarily, passed out of time into timelessness where beauty is the eternal absolute’.

I have to leave it there for now because I think Mr Schreiber has gone a bit over the top. Yes, Keats Ode is a superb poem but I certainly did not drift of into the ether when I read it at school, nor did I when I read in as a young adult, even though I could sense its greatness and when I read this particular piece, I once again took to the Ode, hoping to finally break through the mist of ignorance and be touched by the brilliance of the work. Well Mr Schreiber, I have failed once again. I find the poem, long, difficult to come to grips with, uneven in its metre and certainly noting of the beauty which Keats discovered. Obviously I am missing something either very basic or perhaps the quality of superb poetry eludes me still. I much preferred his Isabella.

Now I know full well that Keats observed all the ‘rules’ and ‘regulations’ in his poetry writing. I know full well that the Ode is recognised as a masterpiece. But yet, I fail to be emotionally snared by its beautiful words and I have to admit, though even still reluctantly that there are plenty of excellent words in amongst the majority, which do not touch me so much. Let me quote a few. The last two lines in of the second stanza,

She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Indeed I can see the painted figures, black against the earthen background, so I suppose I am able to accomplish some of what Schreiber has said, but it is far from going into a state of ecstasy about the blessed thing. I have been much more moved by more down to earth topics.
In stanza three there are lines which I fine quite touching.

And happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy, happy love!

There is a soft, gentle rolling off the tongue in the second line, which make me feel pleasantly calm, though spoiled somewhat by the repetitive happy in the next. I accept the fact there are many who find this poem a delight. I think that because I find it so damn difficult to have my imagination work on any idea I might dig up for a poem that I might feel a bit of envy for Mr Keats and his, when it delivers a poem that the world of well educated, well read, literary boffins declare is a masterpiece.

Now a bit of information on S.M.Schreiber. I do not know what the two initials stand for but will hunt him up on the Internet and advise later. He is or was, (I do not know if he is still working in the field of education, I would doubt it) a lecturer to students who were preparing for the Oxford and Cambridge Entrance Examinations in Classics, Modern Languages and English and the book from which I have taken his comments was produced under the auspices of the Commonwealth and International Library and published by Pergamon Oxford English Series in 1966. Over forty years ago yet the same rules and fundamentals for writing poetry hold good today as they did then. Do they? I wonder.

I wonder what, if any comments, this piece might inspire? Surely, there must be some argument about whether the ‘rules’ are applicable today or whether we can go hell for leather and write whatever we like and call it poetry, prose poetry, free verse, abstract or whatever. Do we think the philosophy that Aristotle, in his seminal work ‘Poetics’, ascribed to poetry is alive and well in the lyrical poetry of today’s writers? Closer to home, do we think that we, as a poetry group, display the quality and standard in our poems that would make Kerry Cue change her comments from those in the article that started me off on this quest?

Scaliger turns deadly pale at the sight of watercress. Tycho Brahe, the famous astronomer, passes out at the sight of a caged fox. Maria de Medici feels instantly giddy on seeing a rose, even in a painting. My ancestors, meanwhile, are eating cabbage. They keep stirring the pot looking for a pigfoot which isn’t there. The sky is blue. The nightingale sings in a Renaissance sonnet, and immediately someone goes to bed with a toothache.


Charles Simic


Cathy McCallum writes: This is a prose poem by Charles Simic, the poet laureate of the United States. It's from his book The World Doesn't End which won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize. I really like the oddness of his imagery, the way he sets up a thought visually. You don't need to know the people he mentions to 'get' it.