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Welcome everyone to our final copyright agency lecture for 2013. I would like to acknowledge
the Eora people who are the traditional custodians of this land and pay respects to the Elders
past and present. Can I ask you to turn off your mobiles, as
they interfere with the recording. This is being recorded.
Over the past 30 years the writing program at UTS has supported more Australian writers
through teaching opportunities and scholarships than any other tertiary institution in the
country. [Applause]
The number of established writers who have taught here on a casual basis is staggering,
and the number of graduates who have gone on to publish their fiction and non-fiction
is even larger. What we have developed here in the writing
program over that time is unique, and our partnership with the copyright agency's cultural
fund builds on that great success by bringing some of Australia's leading writers into the
program and making their work available to a new generation of writers and readers.
The cultural fund does an outstanding job encouraging and supporting Australian writers,
and I want to publicly acknowledge the fine work that Zoe Rodrigues and Jim Alexander
continue to do. Bob Adamson has published over 20 books of
poetry, including the triple prizewinning 1990 collection The Clean Dark. His autobiography
Inside Out, which is a great read, was published in 2004. In 2011 he was awarded the Patrick
White award and the Blake Prize for poetry. His latest book of poetry, The Kingfisher's
Soul, is published by Bloodaxe Books. Bob's previous three lectures are available on the
Centre for New Writings website if you want to listen to them after this talk tonight.
Please welcome Bob Adamson.
Thanks John. I'd just like to say thanks to John and the other people that have helped
me in the department, and Veronica and Martin Harrison, who just made me feel at home here.
To my wife Juno, who I haven't been able to really talk to for the last three weeks or
so because I've been buried in books and writing this lecture, so thanks, Juno [laughs]. That's
about it. My mind's gone blank. It's full of this lecture.
I've called it Where I Come From, which is the name of one of my books, the title of
one of my books, that I published in 1978 with a press that I started with Dorothy Hewett.
At the time no one would publish Dorothy Hewett's work, so we invented our own press and published
our two books. I called mine Where I Come From. I couldn't think of a title at the time
and I had that in my mind, that AA Milne, I think it is, where I come from nobody knows;
where I go to, everybody goes. I was drinking at the time and Dorothy said that's right,
that's what will happen to you. You'll just disappear into your glass of whiskey.
The great American poet Wallace Stevens insists, the nobility of poetry is a violence from
within that protects us from a violence without. Seamus Heaney responded to this line of Stevens'
in one of his Oxford lectures. He said it's the imagination pressing back against the
pressure of reality. So this lecture will be about the opposing poles of reality and
the imagination. How do you become a poet? Are you born a poet?
What are your poems about? These are certain questions that hover in the air. I'll explain
why they are impossible questions and outline some of the influences on my poetry, along
with the experiences that created an opening of the field where I discovered I was able
to write poetry. Certain teachers have appeared along the way,
but they weren't always the regular kind of teacher. They appear in many guises. A primary
school teacher, an old fisherman, a fishing writer, a master pastry chef, several priests
and ministers, painters and photographers, even a couple of professors, though mainly
other poets, the ones who became friends especially, and all the others like Shelley, Emily Dickinson,
Mallarme, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop whose books travel with me wherever I go.
Certain misunderstandings can be turned about as simply as this. Robert Creeley wrote an
essay in 1974 based on a question an audience member asked one of his poet friends after
a reading at a college in Chicago. The question was, after this magnificent new poem, someone
stood up and said was that a real poem or did you just make it up yourself? Creeley's
response was well, that stuck in my head so lucently for so long it eventually became
a title for a lecture of Creeley's. People have expectations about poetry because
it's been around so long. Creeley says - this is a couple of lines from his lecture - American
poetry, like they say, soared to the stars and we have this thing of make it new. It's
got to be better than what's come before it. It's like it's a manufacturing system or something
that eternally has to be better and has to develop continually. Creeley says centres
of progress, also familiar, really want that in the worst way. I don't know where it's
supposed to get to in that sense, more than to persist in the clarity of human recognitions
and wonder. Poetry, as Robert Duncan says, comes from
a well deeper than time. It's contemporary in the way that fire, air, water or earth
might be said to be particularly involved in any apprehension of present existence.
Sadly, it can, as these, go away, be lost to other appetites and acts.
Robert Creeley gave another lecture in Berlin in January 1967 entitled I Am Given to Write
Poems. Peter Quatermain has commented about the precision of this lecture's title. Creeley
was, he said, given to it, not then, that it was given to him. Creeley says in the lecture
there is never a subject about which one constructs an activity called poetry. Here is a quote
from that lecture, from Creeley speaking. At first I was intent upon getting anything
to hold so that the expectation, the experience of reading, had the same qualities as the
impulses in writing. But then I don't really know, nor have I ever, what is being said
until it comes to a close, and it's now there to be read through as one thing. I don't want
to write what is only an idea, particularly my own. If the world can't come true in that
place, flooding all terms of my thought and experience, then it's not enough, either for
me, or equally anyone else. It must be somehow revelation, no matter how modest that transformation
can sometimes be, or vast, truly the world in a grain of sand.
Wallace Stevens wrote much of his best poetry after the war in the 40s and 50s. Wallace
Stevens was the president of the Hartford Insurance Company, a most unlikely-looking
person for a poet. He was a very sophisticated, large man who wore beautiful suits and just
didn't look like a poet. He won the Pulitzer Prize and the major TV - CBS went to his office
and asked if they could interview Wallace Stevens and his helper, the guy that was in
charge of the office, was named Wally, and they said to Wally what do you think of Mr
Stevens? He said well, he invited me into his office once and said listen, Wally, what
is the imagination? Wally said, I never heard anything like it
in my life and the phone rang and I left, and he never asked me again, thank God. We
didn't know Wally wrote poetry, because Wallace Stevens was calling, Wally, Wally and he was
Wally - [like] Stevens poem. So even the people that he worked with for
over 40 years didn't know that he wrote poetry, and when he was courting his wife he wrote
a series of love poems to her and he gave them to her each Valentine's Day. After about
two years, just as they got married, he had them published and presented her with the
volume dedicated to her and she went off her brain. She said you've given them to people,
these are about us. He didn't talk to her again about poetry, or anyone else from then
on, and went on to publish about 12 major, major books and win the Pulitzer Prize.
One afternoon in his office in the Hartford Insurance Company he wrote this line. The
death of one god is the death of all gods. Stevens dealt with a question Albert Camu
posed after World War II. How does one continue to live when one neither believes in God nor
totally in reason? Remember that Stevens wrote the line poetry must resist the intelligence
almost successfully. So he continued living by writing poetry that created a world.
Here's one of his poems that constitutes that world. As it is read aloud, it flashes with
a multiplicity of meanings. On the page it splinters into kaleidoscopic shards, the imagination
sliding and forming into new patterns, new worlds that do resist the intelligence almost
successfully. There are images of a palm tree and a golden
bird. The bird is perched in the palm tree on the edge of space, at the end of the mind,
beyond the last thought. This is the poem: Of Mere Being, Wallace Stevens.
The palm at the end of the mind, beyond the last thought rises in the bronze distance.
A gold feathered bird sings in the palm without human meaning, without human feeling, a foreign
song. You know then that it is not the reason that makes us happy or unhappy. The bird sings,
its feathers shine, the wind moves slowly in the branches. The bird's fire-fangled feathers
dangle down. They wouldn't let you get away with that alliteration
in the last line anymore. Whole PhD theses have been written about this poem, of course,
but it doesn't say anything more than what you just heard. It exists in its own right.
It's impenetrable. It is to be enjoyed for what it is, an act of the imagination. Stevens
wrote that poem in 1954, a year before his death. He was an American mystic whose visions
became poetry. He insisted among many other contradictory statements that it is the belief
and not the god that counts. Stevens can be seen as a pole in the poetry
of the imagination hemisphere. Maybe another pole in the poetry, in that hemisphere, the
opposite, the poetry of recalled experience, could be Robert Lowell. Lowell was a very
public poet and he is not known for imaginative experiments, however, in a late poem, Epilogue,
Lowell talks about the difference between wanting to write something imagined rather
than something based on memory or experience. In a poem he says - this is the poem, in the
end of the poem Epilogue - those blessed structures, plot and rhyme, why are they no help to me
now? I want to make something imagined, not recalled. I hear the noise of my own voice,
the painter's vision is not a lens. It trembles to caress the light. Yet why not say what
happened and pray for the grace of accuracy? In '88, Lowell was on my mind because Robert
Duncan, the poet I gave the second lecture about, mentioned him in a letter that he wrote
to me not long before Duncan's death. Duncan here is referring to his Australian reading
tour. He says I was excited by the ferment of Australian poetry and the transformations
and inventions of possibilities, something quite different from being influenced. Your
absorption in the new American poetry and in Australian terms, as in your work, Robert
Lowell is not that far from Robert Duncan. I was very surprised at this at the time,
because I had assumed Duncan wouldn't be interested in Lowell. They were in different schools
of poetry. I wrote a poem in response to Lowell. Not a direct engagement with his poetry, rather
a playful experiment in a Lowellian mode. I'll read the first two stanzas from Robert
Lowell's poem first: Waking Early Sunday Morning. I'd say this is one of his great poems.
Waking early Sunday morning. Oh, to break loose like the Chinook salmon jumping and
falling back, nosing up to the impossible stone and bone-crushing waterfall. Raw-jawed,
weak-fleshed, stopped by 10 steps of the roaring ladder and then to clear the top on the last
try, alive enough to spawn and die. Stop, back off. The salmon breaks water. And now
my body wakes to feel the unpolluted joy and the criminal leisure of a boy. No rainbow-smashing
dry fly in the white run is as free as I, here squatting like a dragon on time's hoard
before day has begun. Fierce, fireless mind running downhill. Look
up and see the harbour fill. Business as usual. An eclipse goes down to the sea and ships.
Wake of refuse, Dacron rope bound for Bermuda or Good Hope, all bright before the morning
watch, the wine-dark holds of yawn and ketch. I watch a glass of water, wet with a fine
fuzz of icy sweat, silvery colours touch its sky, serene in their neutrality.
Yet if I shift or change my mood, I see some object made of wood, background behind it
of brown grain to darken it, but not to stain. Oh, that the spirit would remain tinged but
unvarnished by that stain. In my response to Lowell was Clear Water Reckoning.
I attempted to describe writing a poem as the poem itself unfolded, and with Lowell's
confessional poetry in mind to take up writing itself as the subject of the poem. As William
Carlos Williams noted, the poet thinks with his poem. So line by line, I moved on into
a sort of narrative, heading for some luminous place across the border of human geographic
space, forgetting about time. However, I wanted to anchor the poem in the local, in the Hawkesbury
where I lived, and move it outward as it grew. My wife Juno was away from home in Hungary.
She was attending a photographic exhibition of her work in Budapest. So the poem became
a description of itself and an epistle to Juno on the other side of the planet. As I
wrote the poem, it refers to some events that were televised for the bicentenary of Australia
that was celebrated in 1988. The ads were just saying over and over again how great
we are, which kind of annoyed me, but I left the television on in the background. I was
so absorbed in writing, I was too lazy or too - I'll get to it.
Clear Water Reckoning. I write into the long black morning out here on the end of the point,
far from my wife in Budapest. As the river cuts through a mountain, in Sydney a poet
is launching his new volume, Under Berlin, and I feel like Catullus on Rome's edge. But
this passes, and I turn to face the oncoming dawn, the house breathes tidal air as the
night fires outside with barking owls, marsupials rustling, the prawn bird beginning its taunting
dawn whistle. I burn the electricity and measure hours by the line.
I have strewn words around my living room, taken them out from their sentences, left
them unused wherever they fell. They are the bait. I hunch over my desk and start to row.
Let the tide flow in, watch the window with the door locked now. I wait. I hear satin
bower-birds scratching out the seeds from the bottlebrush. Dawn is a thin slit of illuminated
bower-bird blue along the mountain lines. In this year of *** and bull celebration,
the TV goes on unwatched upstairs. I hear it congratulating us for making Australia
what it is. The heater breathes out a steady stream of heated air. I go deeper into my
head. I see the Hawkesbury flowing through Budapest. The Hungarians do not seem to mind.
They are bemused. The river parts around their spires and domes. I see other cities, whole
cultures drawn from territories within. Though, with this freedom comes a feeling
of strange panic for the real, so I get on with it, writing out from this egg, holding
my thought in a turbulent knot, a bunched-up octopus. I steer away from anything confessional,
thinking of Robert Lowell crafting lines of intelligent blues, his jelly roll of a self-caught
mess deep in spiritual distress. Outside, the river pulls me back. Shafts of
light disintegrate into clues. Flecked symbols shine with order. The bower-birds have woven
colour around the house. Through the bushes, blue patterns of themselves, traced about
the place. Half the moon can topple a mountain. Anything is possible here, I remind myself,
and begin to hum, flattening out all the words that were impossible to write today. I hum
out all the poems I should have written. I hum away now also the desire to write from
memory. There is enough sorrow in the present. I look out over the incoming tide. Dark wracks
of oysters jut from its ink. That was published in my book The Clean Dark
in 1989. Larry Swartz, a great journalist and poet,
interviewed Seamus Heaney in Melbourne for The Age in 1994, talking about craft and poetry,
sonnets in particular. Heaney says it was Mandelstam who compared his own writing to
the work of the makers of Brussels lace. His aim was to produce air, perforation and truancy,
because lace is about the holes between the thing. Summing up, Heaney says that sense
of poetry as a loophole for the spirit to allow it to fly.
Before this, Heaney had used digging and water divining as metaphors to explain poetry. During
the interview, Seamus spoke in terms of the work done by his father's grandfather, a tailor.
He said I think that at this stage of my career, I see my great-grandfather on the road with
a needle as a poet's figure, stitching and stitching.
I have also used the metaphor of sewing and stitching, long before knowing Seamus Heaney
or reading this reference to stitching above. Since a boy I have been fascinated by all
forms of making. Drawing, stitching, sewing. I watched fly catchers weaving their nests
with dried grass and mud. My grandfather making his fishing nets, my mother and grandmother
sewing and knitting, my father weaving wire mesh for fish traps and fowl runs. So I wrote
a poem in praise of the net-makers. They stitched their lives into my days. Blue
point fishermen with the smoke stuck to their bottom lip, bodies bent forward, inspecting
a whole net's wing draped from a clothesline. Their hands darting through the mesh, holding
bone net needles, maybe a special half-needle carved from tortoiseshell. Their fingers browned
by clusters of tobacco tar and freckles, slippery with speed. They wove everything they knew
into the mesh, along with the love they had or had lost or maybe not needed.
During my school holidays I watched them and came to love this craft of mending. In our
backyard, by the harbour, surrounded by copper tubs brimming with tanning soup, brewed from
bloodwood and wild apple bark. These men could cut the heart clean from a fish with a swipe
of a fillet knife and fill buckets with guts flecked with the iridescent backs of flies
as it fermented into liquid fertiliser. I'd water my father's beds of vegetables,
rows of silver beets, a fence of butter beans. In the last of the sun I'd watch our peacock
spread its fan. The hose sprayed water from a water tank, house high and fed by gravity.
That's a fairly recent poem. That was published in the Sydney Morning Herald about a year
or two back. It's not in a book yet. It'll be in my next book. This poem was written
recently but is imagined from experiences from around the age of nine, about nine years
old, looking back and remembering how I felt and what I saw. A while later at school I
became obsessed with drawing, especially birds. At first it was a struggle to make the drawings
look like real birds, then my teacher, Mr Roberts, suggested that I should think of
the drawings as lines rather than creatures from a world with three dimensions.
The new drawings of made-up birds drawn with lines, some cross-hatched, impressed the class
far more than any of the early drawings of what I thought were real birds. Was that a
real bird or did you just make it up yourself, as Creeley puts it. The line is, after all,
the measure of the man writing. His term, particularly, as he writes, weighing in the
silence to follow the particular word and sense necessary to his own apprehension of
the melody, the tune, what he hears to write. The year I turned 10, 1953, was my best year
at school. In fact, it was the only time I did well at school. I was also the class captain
for the final term. This was the year of Mr Roberts, the teacher who introduced me to
poetry and what they called nature studies. Mr Roberts would read poems to the class and
go through them line by line, explaining what they meant and how poetry worked. The Highwayman,
by Alfred Noyes, was the first poem I loved. I learnt it by heart and would recite it to
the class. I'll read one stanza. I've got to do this. I told a couple of my friends
I'm going to read The Highwayman and they said you're not.
Over the cobbles he clattered and clashed in the dark inn yard. He tapped with his whip
on the shutters, but all was locked and barred. He whistled a tune to the window, and who
should be waiting there but the landlord's black-eyed daughter, Beth, the landlord's
daughter, plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair.
Louis Untermeyer, the editor of Modern American Poetry, called Alfred Noyes a minor poet in
1919. Creeley said tell that to thousands of schoolteachers and students. However, aside
from this later judgement, when Tennyson was an old man he was the first person to be raised
to a British peerage for his poetry alone. He was like the first rock star and lived
on the Isle of Wight. He arranged to have Noyes brought to his country home, Farringford,
on the Isle of Wight. Tennyson wanted Noyes to read him The Highwayman as he was dying.
Robert Creeley, at school in Massachusetts in the 30s, also learned The Highwayman by
heart and remembered it fondly all his life. He writes about this in a book called A Day
Book. I memorised many other poems including Kublai Khan by Coleridge and Tennyson's long
ballad The Revenge. There was a state school competition for the recitation of poetry.
I was chosen to represent Neutral Bay Public on the ABC radio program. I left school after
I was 13 and spent time in reform schools, for among other things stealing a bird of
paradise from Taronga Zoo. When Juno tells that story she says he liberated a bird of
paradise from the zoo. I wrote my first poem in Long Bay Prison,
holding single lines in my memory for weeks on end, maybe not quite lines but phrases
before writing them down with a pencil on letter forms. Its title was Jerusalem Bay
and through the hundreds of drafts and revisions it went through its title was the only thing
that didn't change. I eventually published it in my first book, Canticles on the Skin.
I was under the spell of Dylan Thomas and Gerard Manley Hopkins and everything I wrote
was spiked with their cubist-like syntax and infectious assonance and alliterations.
Hopkins was so in love with life, but he was torn between the Church and God and found
comfort in nature and wrote about a kestrel, The Windhover. Just a few lines from it.
I caught this morning morning's minion, kingdom of daylight's dauphin, dappled-dawn-drawn
falcon, in his riding on the rolling level underneath him, steady air, and striding high
there. How he hung, wrung upon the rein of a wimpled wing in his ecstasy. Then off, off
forth on a swing as a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow bend. The hurl and gliding
rebuffed in the big wind, my heart in hiding stirred for a bird, the achieve of the mastery
of the thing. I love that. It's very hard to read. Dylan
Thomas wrote in his poem The Ballad of the Long-legged Bait the sheath deck jacks a queen
with a shuffled heart. Out of the windy west came two-gunned Gabriel, black-tongued and
tipsy from salvation's bottle. I didn't see it at the time, but now I recognise
while writing this, Dylan Thomas's influence on Bob Dylan, quite clearly in these lines
from Thomas's Altarwise by Owl-Light and the following lines by Bob Dylan. The motorcycle,
black Madonna, two-wheeled gypsy queen and her silver-studded phantom cause the grey
flannel dwarf to scream. It's interesting that Dylan writes in perfect iambic pentameters
but the symbolism and the shuffled deck, the heart, the two-gunned Gabriel, the motorcycle,
black Madonna, is so close and yet distinctly their own voices.
I discovered that I was given to write poems in prison. Poetry ended up literally saving
my life. While I was inside it kept my body and soul together. I was writing lines of
poetry in my head, mixing imagination with the actual, and the sharp reality of the prison
became less cutting. I would read Shelley and Hopkins from the moment sunlight came
into the cell each morning until the screws turned out the lights each evening.
One night my cell was searched and they discovered I possessed items of contraband. Books, writing
materials. This put an end to reading and writing for a couple of months. Eventually
I applied for a correspondence course so that I could write poetry on the sly. I was in
Long Bay for my 21st birthday and didn't feel like my life was going to improve. After attempting
suicide, I was charged with having self-inflicted wounds. I remember my bemusement at the visiting
Justice's language as he ordered that I serve 48 hours cellular confinement.
This quaint phrase meant two days and two night solitary in a black slot, six foot long,
four feet wide, with no ventilation or light, even by day. I remember walking out into the
bright sunlit exercise yard after that stretch in solitary and feeling as soon as the light
hit that I just couldn't go on any longer. Two days later I was back inside again, but
this time with a straitjacket. I felt a total fake. I couldn't stand my life but I couldn't
do myself in. Back in the dark cell I thought about insanity as a space I might occupy,
a possible space where I could create an imaginary world safe from prison life.
I wouldn't have known this language at the time, though I'm sure I was feeling an impulse
to create what Seamus Heaney called the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality.
In the darkness, as I tried to will myself into a counterfeit silence or some kind of
oblivion, I emptied myself of memories and affections, what was left of them. I tried
to strip away the structure of reason. Nothing happened. I lay on the floor in the pitch
dark with the cockroaches and recited out loud poetry that I had committed to memory
at school, stanza after stanza. The Revenge by Lord Tennyson. I knew it by
heart. A ballad about an Englishman's determination never to surrender. What a black joke. Nothing
cracked inside my head. Instead of a murky release, I stumbled into lucidity. I'd been
reading a Penguin copy of Hopkins a priest had given me for the last month, and I'd been
trying to memorise another poem without much success; however, in the dark isolation, a
few lines came to mind and I gradually pieced them together. They had been drifting separately,
deep in my memory. Here they are, a quatrain from Hopkins' Carrion Comfort.
Not, I will not carrion comfort. Despair, not feast on thee, not untwist, slack they
may be. These last strands of a man in me, almost weary, cry I can no more. I can, can
something. Hope, wish, day come, choose not to be.
I had them in order and recited them over and over. Gradually their full meaning became
clear. They held the key to freedom, not from reality but into the reality of the imagination.
Self-pity or the comfort of despair could weigh down on your imagination. According
to Hopkins, the bitterness of despair would grow as a chip on the shoulder, blocking the
imagination. Reading these lines now, they seem like an optimist's version of Beckett's
line I must go on, I can't go on, I will go on. Although Beckett himself seems fairly
optimistic in the climate of our times. Now, the black [unclear] was in the basement
area of range two. The boys wing, the oldest block in the complex. It was over a century
old then. The three-foot thick sandstone walls were so damp that lichen grew there between
the gaps of *** carvings made by the crims over the generations, Braille-like broken
calligraphy. The only light to penetrate that black oblong was a pencil-thin strip of neon
slanting through the crack along the bottom of a roughly-cut plate steel door.
The sandstone got me thinking about the Hawkesbury River, and if there was a reason to go on,
it would be beyond thought. I started visualising the river and its creatures, the fish and
the birds. I had been working on my poem Jerusalem Bay for six months, although the manuscript
had been confiscated when the screws searched my cell. I started to draw back lines into
my mind gradually. After a couple of days I was able to reconstruct most of them, then
gradually I had it written down. It's the only long poem of mine that I can recite.
Here's the first stanza. This is the first thing I ever wrote, but as I said, it was
many, many drafts. This is only the first stanza.
I walked through a solitude of mist by a river reflecting a spiral of stars. At the top spun
Mars, as tense as my fist, and down the valley shaped of crosses with the stab of my eyes
on the tide ebbed still, as the crab-etched mud fell into craters where nippers skated.
It's four pages long and was published in my first book, Canticles on the Skin, in 1970.
I decided to push through what was left of my sentence until my day of release. I had
to see the Hawkesbury once again. God was beyond me at this stage, even though I had
attended Sunday School as a child and the Kirk as a young boy. I couldn't really believe
in Christ anymore. Fifty years later I wrote the Kirk we attended appears, the place where
the minister refused to tell me exactly what a soul might be, although mine, come Judgement
Day, would be flung into Hell with all the others who weren't chosen. The Presbyterian
soul is not mysterious; rather, it's something we were lumped with.
This was at the Kirk at Neutral Bay, the same place that Michael Dransfield had his funeral.
Although I am sure GM Hopkins SJ was the only guide tough enough to get me through the prison
gates of reality and of mere being into the world of the imagination. This is the first
part. There's one last quote from Hopkins to wrap that up.
Oh, the mind, mind has mountains, cliffs of fall, frightful, sheer, no man fathomed. Hold
them cheap may who ne'er hung there, nor does long our small durance deal with that steep
or deep. Three years after my release, I had my first
book published and I was the president of the Poetry Society of Australia, also the
editor of the main poetry journal in the country, Poetry Magazine, which we later renamed New
Poetry. I was also teaching creative writing twice a week at the WEA through Sydney University,
which I have Don Anderson to thank for. This is where I started to discover the poems that
had depth, because they needed to have a grip, because instead of teaching the students how
to write, I decided to teach them how to read, how to read poetry.
These teaching poems had to be convincing because my classes contained people of all
ages and from many different backgrounds. A poem that held us week after week was The
Cold Heaven by WB Yeats. It taught me about the way imagination needs to be caged by form
before it can actually sing about the reality of our mortality. Here it is, The Cold Heaven
by William Butler Yeats. Suddenly I saw the cold and rook-delighting
heaven that seemed as though ice burned and was but the more ice; and thereupon imagination
and heart were driven so wild that every casual thought of that and this vanished and left
but memories that should be out of season with the hot blood of youth, love crossed
long ago; and I took all the blame out of all the sense and reason until I cried and
trembled and rocked to and fro, riddled with light. Ah, when the ghost begins to quicken,
confusion of the deathbed over, is it sent out naked on the roads as the books say, and
stricken by the injustice of the skies for punishment?
It's a great little poem. It's a lot tougher than many of the Charles Bukowski and the
poets put up as tough these days. When you get to the bottom of that poem, you go through
it line by line and talk about it with a class of people that don't know a lot about poetry,
they become - they all want to become poets. During the 70s I got to know Brett Whiteley
well. He became another kind of guide and teacher. I learned about painting. He read
my poems and commented on them. We shared a fascination with birds. Brett drew birds
so effortlessly. He knew how to read sensation and understood the difference between imaginative
flight and real flight. We shared a love for Bob Dylan and Brett introduced me to other
musicians and singers. We often spoke of Cezanne and Mondrian and sometimes Brett's disagreements
were more eloquent than his enthusiasms. His favourite Wallace Stevens poem was The
Man with the Blue Guitar, inspired by Picasso's The Old Guitarist, published in 1904. Cezanne's
paintings were like maps for me. They pointed to ways to drop narrative from my poetry,
to distil reality with fragments of imaginative colour using the line as a measure to pay
attention to language. In a phrase Dylan Thomas invented, you can achieve this with the colour
of saying. In 1998 a great exhibition of Cezanne paintings
and drawings came to Sydney. It was called Classic Cezanne and I was looking forward
to seeing it immensely. Juno even booked tickets for us weeks before it opened. Then I promptly
forgot about it. Time passed, and then one night Juno said tomorrow it's Cezanne. I replied
I can't go, I have to finish writing this poem I'm working on for my new book. The next
day, Juno, knowing how much I love Cezanne, went off to the gallery shaking her head.
Not long after she left, it hit me that I was so locked into writing poetry while my
life was passing by. However, as they say, writing poetry about
poetry is as real as any other activity. Well, maybe. Wallace Stevens says at the end of
his life, quote, I wonder have I lived a skeleton's life as a disbeliever in reality, a country
man of all the bones in the world? Here is a poem I wrote at home while Juno was in looking
at the Cezanne exhibition. Turns out to be a love poem to Juno. It's called I'm Not Seeing
Cezanne. I think of the waste, the long years of not
believing, the tongue pretending in the midst of words to speak, to keep walking that bend
in the road. I curse myself for not having spoken. The blank sheets of air could have
added words smudged out and revised with a colour, stroked instead of butting, coming
to the shape by layers, stumbling in from the corners and rubbing out the hard light.
The countless fish flapping on boards - have they just disappeared? There is no way back
to the water to catch again that possible colour.
Outside the window in the black night, mosquitoes gather under the floodlights on the pontoon
until the empty westerly blows. Everything that matters comes together slowly the hard
way, with the immense and the 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. In the 70s, when I was editing New Poetry
Magazine, I became friends with three poets who became deep influences on my work. Gwen
Harwood, Dorothy Hewett, and Fay Zwicky. I visited Gwen in Tasmania, stayed with Fay
in Perth while I was a writer in residence at the University of WA where we together
conducted seminars on William Blake. They were wild. I collaborated with Dorothy on
two plays and a film script and worked with her on our publishing venture, Big Smoke Books.
We all corresponded and even reviewed each other's books in newspapers and literary journals.
I loved their poetry and they influenced me in many ways. We had different tastes, but
there was always one poet we all agreed on; Elizabeth Bishop. Here's the final part of
Bishop's poem At the Fish Houses. She returned to the place she came from to
visit relatives in Nova Scotia. Behind her were great plantations of the famous Douglas
fir trees which were growing. This is just the end part of the poem At the Fish Houses.
I think this is just one of the great poems of all time.
Cold, dark, deep, and absolutely clear, element bearable to no mortal, to fish and seals.
She's at the edge of the sea. One seal particularly I have seen here evening after evening. He
was curious about me. He was interested in music, like me, a believer in total immersion,
so I used to sing him Baptist hymns. I also sang A Mighty Fortress is our God. He stood
up in the water and regarded me steadily, moving his head a little; then he would disappear
and suddenly emerge, almost in the same spot with a sort of shrug as if it were against
his better judgement. Cold, dark, deep, absolutely clear, grey icy
water. Back behind us, the dignified tall firs begin; bluish, associating with their
shadows, a million Christmas trees stand waiting for Christmas. The water seems suspended above
the rounded grey and blue, blue-grey stones. I have seen it over and over, the same sea,
the same slightly indifferently swinging above the stones, icily free above the stones, above
the stones and then the world. If you should dip your hand in, your wrist would ache immediately.
Your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn as if the water were a transmutation
of fire that feeds on stones and burns with a dark grey flame.
If you tasted it, it would taste first bitter then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be; dark, clear, moving, utterly free, drawn from
the cold, hard mouth of the world, derived from the rocky ***, forever flowing and
drawn; and since our knowledge is historical, flowing and flown.
Bishop also wrote a great poem about catching a big fish. After looking at it for several
minutes alongside the boat, she sets it free. I have, as a professional and amateur fisherman,
caught quite a few large fish with both nets and hand lines, or these days by rod. I go
fishing when we need fish for food and never as a sport or occupation these days. I was
brought up in a fishing culture where one large fish, say an 80-pound mulloway, could
feed a family for a week or pay for fuel and running costs. I wrote the next poem, The
Gathering Light, about a large fish and how I felt about catching it at the time.
It's the opposite to Bishop's poem, because in the end I keep the fish rather than letting
it go. We smoked this mulloway and supplied several families at Christmas with fillets.
I must stress that I didn't set out to write on this subject. The poem followed after I'd
written a few lines about sunlight hitting the enamel on an outboard motor. This poem
went through many drafts before I knew how it would end. It's an example of a poet thinking
with the poem. The Gathering Light. Morning shines on the cowling of the Yamaha
locked to the stern of the boat. Spears of light shoot away from the gunmetal grey enamel.
Now I wait for God to show instead of calling him a liar. I've just killed a mulloway. It's
85 pounds, 20 years old. The huge, mauve-silver body trembles in the hull. Time whistles around
us, an invisible flood tide that I let go while I take in what I have done.
It wasn't a fight. I was drawn to this moment. The physical world drains away into a golden
calm. The sun is a hole in the sky, a porthole. You can see turbulence out there, the old
wheeling colours and their dark forces. But here, on the surface of the river, where I
cradle the great fish in my arm and smell its pungent death, a peace I have never known
before, a luminous absence of time, pain, sex, thought, of everything but the light.
I might skip a bit. I'll just - how much longer have I got to go? I've only got two pages.
I'll just skip a couple of pages. I shouldn't have made all those asides. Here's a quote
from an abiding influence on my work, Hart Crane. I'd need a whole lecture to talk about
his poetry. Maybe I'll give one. But here I'll quote four lines from his poem The Broken
Tower, as an epigram to the final part of the lecture.
And so it was I entered the broken world to trace the visionary company of love, its voice
an instant in the wind I know not whither hurled, but not for long to hold each desperate
choice. Crane's poetry addresses the broken world
of visions, alcohol, American colonisation and history. He takes up from where Yeats
left off. He tries to write against the bleak vision Elliot left us with The Wasteland.
Crane can write of workers, marginalised people, factory workers, the farmers and the fishermen.
My father's family were Irish Catholic fishermen. There was a culture of drinking among them
on the Lane Cove River where my father fished and the Hawkesbury where my grandparents lived,
farming oysters and fishing with mesh nets. Here is a poem of mine that looks directly
at their situation. I took WB Yeats's advice and threw off the cloak of the idealised river
mythology and poetry itself and tried to find the truth in walking naked, writing without
literary illusions or imaginative metaphors. It's a poem about the life of a family whose
income comes solely from fishing. My Granny. When my granny was dying I would go into her
bedroom and look at her. She'd tell me to get out of it, leave this foul river. It will
wear you out too. She was very sick and her red curly hair was matted and smelt of gin.
Sometimes I sat there all day listening to the races and I would put bets on for her
at the shop. I sat there the afternoon she died and I heard her say her last words. I
sat there not telling, maybe three hours beside the first dead person I had seen. I tried
to drink some of her gin. It made me throw up on the bed. Then I left her. She said the
prawns will eat you if you die on the Hawkesbury River.
That poem is from my book Where I Come From. So without God, as such, with painkilling
drinks, and a need for something other than constant work and poverty, river folk create
their own myths or do away with it all or stare into the abyss with a Jack and Coke,
country music, old time religion, slightly sentimental, slightly tough as nails.
So instead of hymns we have Emmylou Harris, swimming out with Emmylou Harris, a long,
curved horizon, the hazel-coloured tide and Lion Island going by. A CD player skips on
the line, a quarter moon in a 10-cent town. On the swell our wake shatters the reflection
of the real moon. We cut through the sound of swimming, the meaningless joy of living,
the random punishment of birth. The song says we all live up to what we get, but out here
you believe whoever writes the script. Yesterday is reflected back by the moon. Mothers
wash the sickly smell from a dozen ruined shirts every Saturday afternoon. Wives turn
their heads. There's an old grey stingray spread-eagled across the front of the chicken
run. Three crows hop around it, the breeze ruffling their satin collars. They plunge
their black beaks into the lukewarm flesh. Emmylou, your sweet holy music drifts through
the new curtains. Your song folds itself around the shack, filling the back yard, flowing
through our days out on the back veranda where old Dutch sits slumped two days into his latest
coma. Sweet lord, sweet poison, sweet sweet music.
There's just two more poems. My book The Goldfinches of Baghdad was published in Chicago in 2006.
Juno and I set off that year on a reading tour set up by my American publisher to publicise
the book. It must have worked, because the book is now in its second edition. We criss-crossed
America and I read at 10 universities and several other venues. I gave lectures on Australian
poetry at the University of Chicago, at MTM in Boston. We travelled from Boulder to Birmingham,
just like Emmylou Harris did in her song. I was delighted to read at Naropa University
in Boulder, Colorado, where I did a reading with Tom Raworth. This coming poem is based
on the sighting of a great horned owl I saw perched on a telegraph pole outside a branch
of FedEx at 2:00 one morning. It also mentions an exhibition of Joseph Cornell's work at
the Metropolitan Museum we visited in New York. It's an example of a poem that draws
on the two strands of this lecture, imagination and reality. Also, I find it interesting that
the poem turns out to be firmly on the ground as it speeds along the Pacific Highway beside
the Hawkesbury River. I wanted to write about the experience of
reading poetry in America, but like the birds, the poem migrates back to the river. We were
with these Buddhist monks who were teachers at Boulder at the Naropa University and I
said do you see many - because I knew, I'd been reading all the bird books - are there
many horned owls around here? They said no, we never see them. We went to post off books
at 2:00 in the morning at FedEx and they went into the office and I looked up on the light
post and there was a horned owl, sitting there. They came out, these two Buddhist monks, and
I said look, there's a horned owl. You said there aren't any. He looked at us, went whoo,
and then flew away. It was great. Joseph Cornell's Tools.
Joseph Cornell used these sturdy tools and instruments to create boxes, time machines,
constructions made from bits and pieces, three-dimensional frames containing fans, lace, feathers, and
other found objects, including a torn fragment of photography, an image of Mallarme's hands.
One contains an illustration of a hummingbird. It seems to hover in the space between the
glass and the backing of the box. In another, an etching of a great horned owl, like the
bird I watched one night perched on a light post in Boulder, Colorado.
It swoops from memory, filling my study with silent flight, as I recall another visitation.
This afternoon, returning from the post office, I drove ahead of an approaching storm. Trees
shook and a black cockatoo flew out of them. It sailed on, just ahead of my car, for almost
a minute, a long time given the situation, stroking the air before the windscreen, following
the road, so close I could see details of its plumage. Two red patches across the tail
feathers. Something other than beautiful. Fleeting.
I'll finish up by reading the title poem from my book, The Kingfisher's Soul, published
in the UK by Bloodaxe, the poem that brings together the things I have learned from various
and opposing schools of modern poetry that reaches back to the metaphysical poets like
Marvell and John Donne and uses some devices that I mentioned earlier in reference to Robert
Lowell and Robert Duncan. And like Creeley and Elizabeth Bishop, it takes on the subject
of love without, hopefully, sentiment or gush. Behind all these poets, though, except for
his high-toned manner, stands the figure of WB Yeats with his golden bird, his fisherman,
with a poem maybe as cold and passionate as the dawn. That's what the last line of his
poem, The Fisherman - that's the poem I've always wanted to write. One day I'll get there.
The Kingfisher's Soul. This is for Juno. A wave hits the shoreline of broken boulders,
explodes, fans into fine spray, a fluid wing, then drops back onto the tide, a spume of
arterial blood. Our eyes can be gulled by what the brain takes in. Our spirits take
flight each time we catch sight out. Feathers of smoke dissolve in air as we glide toward
clarity. In the old days I used to think art that was purely imagined could fly higher
than anything real. Now I feel a small, fluttering bird in my own pulse, a connection to sky.
Back then, part of me was only half alive. Your breath blew a thicket of smoke from my
eyes and brought that half to life. There's no evidence, nothing tangible, no philosopher
of blood considering the possibilities, weighing up feathers or souls. One day some evidence
could spring from the shadows as my body did in rejecting the delicious poisons, the lure
of dark song. You came with a wind in your gaze, flinging away troubled screw, laughing
at the king of hell's weird command. Don't look back.
You created birthdays and cheekbones of family. I was up gliding through life and my fabrications,
through thought's soft cradle. I scoured memories, tricks from my own memory, its shots and score
cards, those ambiguous lyrics. Clear bird song was not human song. Hearing became nets
and shadowy vibrations, the purring air full of whispers and lies. I felt blank pages,
indentations created by images, getting by with the shapes I made from crafted habit.
You taught me how to weigh the harvest of light. There was bright innocence in your
spelling. I learned to read again through wounded eyes. Wispy spiders of withdrawal
sparked the static electricity across skin, tiny veins, a tracery like coppery wires,
conducting pain to nerve patterns. All light weights to your blood's iron. You brought
along new light to live in as well as read with.
Before you came, whenever I caught a glimpse of my own blood it seemed a waterfall of bright
cells as it bled away; clouds of euphony created by its loss became holes in thinking, pretend
escape hatches. You're now a rush, wings through channels of my coronary arteries. We slept
together when you conjured a bed in your Paddington tree house, barbless hours. Peace appeared
and said soon. The future awaits you. I stepped into the day by following your gaze.
[Applause] Thank you. I'd like to thank Chris Mansell,
who after the last lecture we went to dinner with Juno and Richard Tipping and I said what
am I going to do my next lecture on and Chris said why not do it on your own work? I said
oh, that's a bit shocking. I said to John Dale - I sort of mentioned something about
that and John thought about it for a while and he came back and said what about influences?
So I put the two together. So through John and Chris's suggestions. I didn't know it
would lead into such a difficult, torturous road, but I hope it turned out okay for you.
Thanks so much. Are we going to have many questions? Anybody want to ask any questions?
Were those influences conscious? Did you - is it retrospective that you can see that those
were people who influenced you, or were you drawing on them the whole time?
Yeah, that's interesting. I think it's retrospective. I think I started to realise it when I was
writing my autobiography. I wrote about this fisherman who just came at the spit down past
Balmoral there and started teaching me how to use certain types of fishing techniques
that weren't commercial like my grandfather's, and he went to an enormous trouble and I spent
two or three days with him, day after day. He must have been a retired guy, but he went
to - and later on I realised I didn't even know his name and he taught me so much.
Then I thought about my boss, when I was an apprentice pastry cook. He was a Dutch guy
who had been a master pastry chef in Paris and he used to throw trays of boiling hot
chocolate eclairs at me. But he never praised you, and so I worked so hard to get some praise
from him, but he taught me - on the Thursday, because it was an apprenticeship, I would
go to East Sydney Tech and he had to give me that day free. It was part of the government
program that it wasn't paid. So I would come back on Friday and he'd say
what did you learn yesterday? I'd say I learned how to make chocolate eclairs. He'd say I
already taught you that. These people - I learned so much from him
about cooking, but that applies to poetry, and so much from my grandfather, who was a
carpenter, who showed me how to make dovetail joints in cedar. That's similar to making
Petrarchan sonnets. It's this intricate putting together, as I was saying all the way through,
line after line. But looking back, I really think I did know
that Mr Roberts is the only teacher I know his name, was good, kind to me or something,
because suddenly I went from the bottom of the class to doing quite well, but then as
soon as - that was in sixth class in primary school. Then I went to high school and I just
fell apart again. So it was his direct encouragement of things I was good at, rather than telling
me I was a failure because I couldn't do mathematics or whatever the other teachers used to say.
But yeah, I think looking back I see patterns of the people. It's more - I kept trying not
to go into too much descriptive detail in the lecture, keeping it to the imagination
and reality, but as you know, in my autobiography this pattern of teachers is quite clear. I
know I look for them and they don't seem to come anymore, but then later - you don't know.
You're right. It's an interesting question, because you're really not quite sure what's
happening, and really true teachers don't make a big deal of it. They share their knowledge
with you because they're enjoying it somehow, that they're passing it on. All those traditions.
I think it's in that poem about my grandfathers mending the nets too. I realised I liked watching
them and I didn't really know why at the time, but they were mending things and that became
a metaphor, because aside from the drunken arguments and all the rest of it, they did
things that were mending. I guess that's a good word. I talked about that word. It's
like an Irish word, mending, I think. All these words are particular words that
I couldn't trace. My grandfather used to use a word for the anchor called kellick. Throw
out the kellick. I just took it for granted it was the anchor. It was always - and I looked
it up and I couldn't find it in any dictionary, but it's an old Irish word that's used in
certain counties in Ireland and in travel out from those locations. I put it in a poem
and people love it. What's a kellick? But you know it's right when it's in the right
context. I feel there's a poem coming on.
Good. Mending.
Mending. Mending the line, remembering.
Yes, they're all intertwined, aren't they? The reason that it seems to be is the assonance
of it. It's inexplicable but musical. Well, poetry is totally inexplicable. If you
look it up in the dictionary, look up poetry, it says poetry is written by a poet, and then
you look up poem, poem is something that poets write, and you look up poet. It's nothing,
there's no definition. Robert Creeley... So reality is reminding. When you're mending,
you're reminding. Yes.
So it's a healing, a mental healing. I'm imagining you watching the nets and coming back to the
answer you gave. You were not conscious that you were actually participating in a healing
of the mind. Exactly, and this is - these are things that
happen when you write a poem that you mightn't be conscious of or might never be conscious
of, and when you become conscious of them it adds to your life, it adds to the life,
the richness of your life. You made [unclear] or there was something
that you abstracted about form, too. I didn't write it down but it vibrated, something about
it's only after when your set's been formed, you're then informed and then you - I just
don't know where it went to. Well, the lecture will be on the UTS site.
I can't remember. My mind's gone blank now. I just wanted to say that your lecture was
poetry in itself. Oh, that's good.
In other words, even when you were just talking, it made poetic sense. Well, it did to me,
anyway. An American poet, the one that I talk about
all the time, Robert Creeley, who was to me one of the greatest lyric poets of all time,
once told me after a couple of nights drinking and talking, I wish you wouldn't read poems.
Why don't you just talk? That's your poetry. You're much better at talking than writing
poetry like an American. Just talk like an Australian. That's your real poetry. That's
when I wrote that poem To My Grandmother. That was after him telling me that there was
too many Australian poets just copying American poetry and he said we spoke like magpies,
like it was a distinctively different song that we sang in our conversations.
Creeley wrote like he was talking. He did, he did. Yes, he did, exactly. Exactly.
But when you look at those forms, they're so tight. He went back to the early 17th century.
Robert Herrick was one of his favourite poets, and Marvell, and people like that. When I
said to some of my contemporary - my peer group about reading The Highwayman at UTS
in my lecture, they were just going no, not again, and I said Robert Creeley likes him
and they just refused to believe it because you're not meant to like that sort of thing.
We're in our regimented schools and they're so tight and they're so dictatorial, they're
so doctrinaire that anything vaguely outside is not authenticated or given - you're not
given permission to - Robert Lowell was really, really out of fashion, probably still is in
Balmain when I lived there in the 70s. They hated Robert Lowell, and I asked people why
do you hate - he's a Boston Brahmin, he's rich, he's got all this money, he comes from
this family. What has that got to do with his poetry?
One particular poet came round to my study one day and picked up a selected Robert Lowell
and held it like that and said what is that doing here? So I used to put it inside a big
encyclopaedia, a big Oxford concise dictionary, and read it like it was pornographic or something.
I had to hide it. It was unfashionable and he was - but, you know, he was, as Creeley
says, he was a public poet. He was also the first modern poet, the first contemporary
poet to be ever put on the cover of Time Magazine and the cover was drawn by Sydney Nolan.
It was a rough drawing of Lowell's face with a laurel crown, typical Nolan kind of drawing,
but the whole major lead article was on Lowell and his confessional poetry and it started
off by saying this is an outrageous poet. This was in 1964 and it said Robert Lowell
is so outrageous, he mentions things like Coca-Cola and Joan Baez in a poem. That shows
you - that's not that long ago that they were outrageous things to talk about. It's incredible.
The fashions just go on and the poems that are good stay. As Robert Duncan said, it comes
from a place deeper than time and will continue to go on.
It's interesting. I love the way Wallace Stevens constantly tried to substitute poetry for
the religion that he lost. A lot of the - I noticed a lot of the American poets that were
Puritans or Protestants had more of a desire to find poetry as a substitute when they - especially
the ones that had been to university and studied philosophy. As I said in the lecture somewhere,
God was no longer viable. I often get poets telling me you can't mention
soul in a poem. How do you do that? You just write it down. But there are other poets,
modern poets, contemporary poets, that are brilliant people. One, for example, Kevin
Hart, who taught in Notre Dame. I wrote to him and said I've been told I'm not allowed
to use the word soul in my poem by a few of the poets in Sydney, Kevin. What do you think
of that, as a person that studies religions, comparative religions and theology?
He was a professor of theology and philosophy as well as poetry, and I said what about this
word soul? Should I use it? They're telling me not to use the word, and he said all the
more reason. So it's interesting. But you can use it in terrible - when you use these
words you've got to be on guard, because that's when you can turn into a lot of sentimental
slush. As Anthony Lawrence said in a review in the
Herald about love poems, it was a really interesting review that he was saying that often poets
think by putting in soul, heart, and such and such it's a love poem, but there's got
to be more to it than that, than just naming things. If you use those words, you've got
to make them work. That's why I said The Kingfisher's Soul, mainly because humanism didn't allow
for animals to have souls. I said to my English publisher, Neil Astley,
who's a pretty tough guy, what do you think of my title? How do you think that will work
in London, in England? He said oh, that'll be great. They'll see it in the window, The
Kingfisher's Soul, and they'll have to pick it up. Humanists and the Church denied that
anyone had souls except us, like we're the centre of the universe, we have souls, nothing
else does, not forgetting that the birds around us are angels anyway, or the closest thing
- representation of an angel, in that sense. The Kingfisher is Christ the King.
Oh, yes, that's right. It's got the symbolism of Kingfisher is vast.
That's why you were watching the nets. That's right, exactly. Thank you.
[Applause] Thanks very much everyone. Bob will be doing
two more next year. They're really enjoyable.