Are Australians better at poetry than sport? – Geoffrey Lehmann

Robert Gray has been a writer-in-residence at Meiji University in Tokyo and at several Australian universities and has won the Adelaide Arts Festival and the New South Wales and Victorian Premiers’ Awards for poetry, in addition to the Patrick White Award. Geoffrey Lehmann has published seven collections of poetry, including “Selected Poems” and “Collected Poems”, edited two anthologies of comic Australian verse and co-edited (with Robert Gray) three anthologies of Australian poetry. Gray and Lehmann, widely recognised and honoured Australian poets, have now edited Australian Poetry Since 1788. Robert Gray and Geoffrey Lehmann addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 8 November 2011 to evaluate their accomplishment of this most recent anthology and some of the critique surrounding its publication.

ARE AUSTRALIANS BETTER AT POETRY THAN SPORT?

GEOFFREY LEHMANN

In the early 1990s, shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union and its empire of satellite states, I was in a taxi to the airport. The driver was an older man. Our discussion was one of those anonymous exchanges between strangers. He told me his father had traveled frequently on business in Eastern Europe before and after World War II – and he himself had also traveled extensively in the same countries. He hinted at a sadness about the collapse of the Comintern. I sensed a deep regret on his part, such as a Roman citizen might have felt in 500 CE about the collapse of the western empire.

While his wife liked traveling to New York to attend performances o the Metropolitan Opera, he was very happy (he said) with opera performances in Prague. They cost a fraction of the price charged by the Met and were just as good. He went on to tell me he was so sickened by Australian newspapers, that he had taught himself German and now got all the news he needed by reading a weekly Swiss news magazine which was mailed to him.

“You know,” he said, “It’s a funny thing. We get excited in Australia when one of our athletes wins silver or bronze at the Olympics. The Swiss become very excited when one of their athletes gets ninth or tenth place.”

Our Olympic medal tallies have improved since then and I’m not knocking the celebration of excellence in sport. But, with rare exceptions, the rest of the world is uninterested in the exploits of Australian sportspersons – any more than we care about Swiss athletes getting ninth or tenth place in an Olympics event. Roger Federer is the only Swiss sportsperson I’ve ever heard of. It is a mistake to believe that public money invested in sport is likely to enhance Australia’s international prestige significantly, with big flow-on effects for tourism and trade. It does not, except for the occasional impact of a small handful of elite sportspersons, and to the extent this investment facilitates the holding of international sporting events in Australia.

However, our substantial public investment in sport is worthwhile. Recognising the excellence in sport of an elite few, and public investment in sports facilities, encourages community participation in sport at the grassroots level – the phenomenon of Saturday morning sport where from the Pacific, to the Indian Ocean, hundreds of thousands of young people in white or colourful uniforms appear like flowers across the green sports grounds of Australia. We are a society with a high percentage of migrants and investing in sport is an excellent way of promoting national cohesion. At the same time international sports events, where men and women of different races and nationalities compete, help to break down stereotyped thinking about people from other countries – an important benefit for a migrant society.

Australians are pretty good in their overall approach to sport. We recognise our sporting heroes and we invest effort and money at the local level.

How good is Australians’ overall approach to poetry compared to sport? Not as good, in my opinion, as some reactions to Australian Poetry Since 1788 have shown. This anthology is the largest ever of Australian poetry, with 1088 pages of poetry and commentary. It has received a number of enthusiastic responses. But we’ve also been criticised on bases that show a fundamental lack of understanding.

One was that our choice as editors was a matter of personal taste. Anyone familiar with Robert Gray’s poetry and mine will be aware that he and I emerge from quite different poetic traditions and influences. For example, when we first met in our twenties Robert’s favourite twentieth century American poet was William Carlos Williams, mine Wallace Stevens, and so on. With this anthology, we each had the right to veto the inclusion of a poem. When we disagreed or were uncertain, which happened often, we typically read the poem line by line, discussing it as we read it. I can assure you it is very inconvenient having a co-editor; it makes the job of editing an anthology much more time-consuming, but it does help to ensure objectivity in your decisions, elusive as that concept may be when making aesthetic judgments. We have represented a wide variety of types of poetry, including free verse, formalists, concrete poetry, parody, comic verse, translations of Aboriginal songs, surrealists, and naive verse.

We’ve also been criticised for omitting too many poets. To allow new voices to be heard, you have to dispense with some of the older voices. We have included many poets who have never appeared previously in a “mainstream anthology”, if you define this as a general anthology of Australian poetry published after 1945 and covering either the entire period from white settlement until the time of publication, or the “modern” period typically starting with Kenneth Slessor.  (Anthologies of the year’s best poems or specialist anthologies fall outside this definition.)  In our anthology there are 22 of these “new inclusions”^[i].

We have also allotted five or more poems to 24 poets who, until our anthology appeared, had only one, two or at most three poems (and often none) in a “mainstream anthology”^[ii]. Four of our poets who are “new inclusions” also have five poems or more in our anthology^[iii].

All sorts of poets have for the first time been given significant representation in a “mainstream anthology”. The anarchist Jas H Duke (whose posthumous book was decorated with many of his porno-satirical art works) has seven poems, and Peter Steele, who was also born in 1939 and was Provincial of the Jesuit Order of Australia for six years, has eight poems.

Some anthologists have made a conscious decision to represent a larger number of poets by a smaller number of poems. I don’t reject that choice. There is a role for consensus anthologies that represent a large number of poets and serve as a historical record. Examples of this are The New Oxford Book of Australian Verse (1986) edited by Les Murray with almost 190 named poets and John Kinsella’s Penguin Book of Australian Poetry (2009) with about 209 named poets.

If we had followed this precedent, bearing in mind our 1,000 odd pages, we could have easily accommodated more than 300 acceptable poets, although it may have been a rather dull book. Anthologies with large numbers of poets represented by just a few poems each – Murray’s Oxford anthology had as his maximum three poems per poet – are useful for readers who are familiar with the field. These readers can skip poets whose work they find unappealing, reread familiar poems they like and look for interesting poems that are new to them. I don’t want to be too critical of consensus anthologies. They do have a useful role.

However, we chose the opposite approach: to have a smaller number of poets with a larger number of poems. Our aim was that each page must be interesting in the same way that every page of the major American and British poetry anthologies are interesting. The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006) with over 1,100 pages, edited by David Lehman, has only 210 named poets, and no poems by Anon. The Lehman anthology has no poet born after 1950 and ours had no birth date limitation. Our youngest poet, Josephine Rowe, was born in 1984. It is striking that an American anthology, based on a longer period of poets writing in English and a population 10 times greater than Australia’s, has roughly the same number of poets as previous Australian anthologies.

American and British anthologists have had much higher standards than their Australian counterparts, and if we want international and non-specialist local readers to take Australian poetry seriously, Australian anthologists have to raise the bar.

This brings me back to the question “Are Australians better at poetry than sport?” I shall rephrase this deliberately meaningless question as “How good are Australian poets? What is special about Australian poetry? Why should we value it? How can we give greater recognition to poetic excellence?” Let me answer these questions in reverse order.

One way in which we can give greater recognition to poetic excellence is to keep significant poets in print, perhaps in individual, modest selected volumes as Angus & Robertson did 20 years ago. Also we need some anthologies which give generous representation to the poets whom the editors think are outstanding. Their judgment of course may be faulty, but that’s what their task is: to edit and select.

A comment we have had from readers of our book is what sad lives many of the poets had. Many, perhaps most, poets die poor. Even Ethel Anderson and Banjo Paterson, who were both from the landed gentry, and could be perceived as members of the “establishment”, were in modest circumstances when they died. Paterson never owned the house he lived in. Professional writers, including poets, have limited access to superannuation, unless they become academics. We should revive the pensions that were once available from the Literature Board of the Australia Council for older writers of distinction as a supplement to the old age pension.

Why should we value excellence in Australian poetry? Whatever your views on climate change are, it is interesting how often over the last year Dorothea Mackellar’s “My Country” has been brought into the debate. Good poems give us a sense of who we are as Australians and as individuals. They continue to be valued long after the poet has died. Poetry is an example of the economic concept of “market failure” – in this case because the creator of value is inadequately compensated. Some public subsidy is justified while the poet is alive – to reward them for the value they provide to future generations.

How good are Australian poets and what is special about Australian poetry? There is an academic literature about migrants and their children being more entrepreneurial than stay-at-homes. Even our involuntary migrants may have been more entrepreneurial. Convicted persons with skills (such as forgers) were more likely to be transported than those without, as there was an appreciation that their skills could be useful in the young colony. Australia’s nineteenth century poetry is outstanding, considering our small population at that time.

Our first important poet is Charles Harpur, born of emancipated parents in 1813. Of Harpur we write:

What is rewarding for the contemporary reader are Harpur’s long, intricate, acutely observed and detailed descriptions of the eastern coast of Australia with its vast, primaeval forests, then barely disturbed by white settlement. They allow us a glimpse into a majestic, if primitive and frightening lost Eden.

The Australian landscape and fauna were different from the European settlers’ homelands, in a way that the North American landscapes were not. In his famous preface to Adam Lindsay Gordon’s poems, which appears in our anthology as a prose poem, Marcus Clarke described the Australian landscape as “weird”. This alien landscape is a theme that runs through our nineteenth century poets. An interest in the Australian landscape, although no longer perceived as “other” or “foreign”, has continued with twentieth century Australian poets as different as Les Murray and Laurie Duggan.

Another feature of our nineteenth century poetry is the convict and bush ballads and songs, initially anonymous and increasingly published under the names of the poets. The Oxford Book of American Poetry was in many respects the model for our anthology, but it has no anonymous ballads, as our anthology does, and little that resembles our bush ballads. Nor does it have one poem by a Native American. The Australian landscape, the bush ballads and the Aboriginal presence and contribution make Australian poetry distinctively different from American poetry in the nineteenth century and beyond.

The ballads of Adam Lindsay Gordon, Banjo Paterson, Henry Lawson and Will Ogilvie were popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth century in a way that no Australian poets have been since then. There was around them a large constellation of lesser balladists, many of them very fine – but too numerous to include all of them in our book.

Nor was “high” literary culture absent. The Bulletin, known as the “Bushman’s Bible” was a weekly magazine that had a circulation of about 100,000. In the week in 1898 when the French symbolist poet, Stéphane Mallarmé died, the entire inside cover page, the famous “Red Page”, was devoted to a discussion of his work. I was startled to discover this when I read though several decades of The Bulletin for a comic verse anthology I once edited. Mallarmé corresponded with Christopher Brennan, referring to the young Australian poet as “Mon cher Brennan, poète merveilleux”.

When American poets were experimenting with form and language during the first half of the twentieth century, Australian poets were still preoccupied with the landscape. Then a big shift in our poetry coincided with the political shift that occurred with the Vietnam War. This is most noticeable with David Campbell who was our leading pastoral poet until the 1960s. His post-Vietnam poetry alternates between poems in a surrealist mode and family memoir. Over the last 50 years Australian poetry may have become less distinctive, but it is also more open to the world.

With a population that is now more than 20 million, we have accumulated over the last 200 years a body of poetry that is world-class. We have many new wonderful poets. Most of them are women. I’ll finish with a poem by Tricia Dearborn (1963- ), whose work has never appeared in a “mainstream anthology” before, and who has five poems in Australian Poetry Since 1788. In this  poem, she writes about the discovery of her lesbian identity:

The Changes

Kissing Louise was a bell. Unlike

the chimes of the genteel drawing-room clock

it gave no warning before it struck.

It was more like the shock of the extra-early

morning alarm

on the day of the journey.

Or the sudden shrilling of a schoolroom bell,

calling me in

to a strange new lesson.

It rang sweet as a tardy dinner gong

summoning me to a meal

of scent and heat.

Resonated like a great church bell

calling the villagers over fields

to christenings, to benedictions.

My throat sang my body

swung my skin shone

and my old life shivered and fell from me

and lay like the sweat of the ringers in the tower.

ROBERT GRAY

We made this anthology because of a certain tidy-mindedness, I suppose, a certain systemizing impulse, which is essential in any field. We wanted to understand who those poets are by whom the language continues to live, in Auden’s phrase, in Australia; and what they reveal about us, through their objectively-crafted subjectivity (which is what poetry is), and which writers still keep this ancient investigation, this ancient pleasure, alive.

Geoffrey Lehmann and I tried to arrive at the most objective way we could for ascertaining these things. We allowed each other the power of veto, to remove anything that one of us felt had been chosen out of a merely personal association. We felt compelled to argue for every poem that one of us might feel was dubious.

As it turned out, Geoff was most often the St Francis, who invited in all the beasts of the field, whereas I was more like Savonarola, more inclined to burn the heretics in the city square. But, then again, at times I had to appeal to Geoff, who became a severe judge and gavelled me out of court.

What we’ve got is something that largely satisfied both of us. There was, at times, I must admit, a vehemence factor, which carried some sway. The paroxsysms of a thwarted enthusiasm are hard to resist. Geoff won me over, on one occasion, when I complained about a poem by Shaw Nielson’s that I felt had been over-anthologised by simply touching his heart.

I discovered from making this anthology that my love of Kenneth Slessor’s work is well-founded. In reading the anthology, since it’s been completed, I find that Slessor’s work really comes alive. With him, a different dimension appears in the book. There is a coruscated, crusted and scintillating language, a natural gift for conveying sensuous experience with words.

It’s surprising to me that Slessor has never received overseas publication. He’s never had a success in the United Kingdom or in America, and yet he’s our best poet. What is so significant about Slessor, in the context of Australian poetry, is his richly European sensibility. His father was a German Jew and he inherited a feeling for the old world. A word that occurs often in his poetry is “old”. He loved the patina of age. He loved the copper spire of St James church, because it looks aged. Any signs of ancient, cultured artefacts were impressive to him.

He should have done better in Melbourne, which is a more European city than Sydney, but he only lasted a couple of years there. He was drawn back to Sydney by the Harbour, beside which he lived, by its sensual appeal. He desired a denser, thicker approach to language than that found in Paterson and Lawson. He greatly enriched the linguistic approach to this country of people like Les Murray.

Another poet who really struck me, re-reading our book, and whom I would have thought I had long since outgrown, was Judith Wright. When I read Judith Wright’s poems, I find they have a sombre, magnificent, moralising grandeur about them. They are moving in their seriousness. She is, I think, superior to Gwen Harwood, our other leading female poet, who is at times too self-conscious.

I’ll read a poem of Wright’s. It’s an example of why poetry remains relevant. It’s a poem about floods in Queensland, floods as we’ve recently experienced again. It was written around the time of the Second World War and still speaks to us of our experience of Australia.

Flood Year

Walking up the driftwood beach at day’s end

I saw it, thrust up out of a hillock of sand –

a frail bleached clench of fingers dried by the wind –

the dead child’s hand.

And they are mourning there still, though I forget,

the year of flood, the scoured ruined land,

the herds gone down the current, the farms drowned,

and the child never found.

When I was there the thick hurling waters

had gone back to the river, the farms were almost drained.

Banished half-dead cattle searched the dunes; it rained;

river and sea met with a wild sound.

Oh with a wild sound water flung into air

where sea met river; all the country round

no heart was quiet. I walked on the driftwood sand

and saw the pale crab crouched, and came to a stand

thinking, A child’s hand. The child’s hand.

That is the news that stays news, which Ezra Pound said poetry is, because it is concerned with the great human themes.

Les Murray is the most renowned Australian poet. We chose 16 of Les Murray’s poems. We could have chosen another 16 and represented him just as well. He is the only person in the book whose poetry was available for such large representation.

The anthology was a labour of love over many years. When people ask me how we were qualified to do it, I say experience. We had made previous anthologies together, and we went back and read everything in its original source.  We were prepared to do the work. Anyone who is prepared to do the work and put their judgement on the line can also do an anthology.

But I must say, I think our anthology has created a desert around it. With Geoff Lehmann’s connections in the corporate world, the book has been funded by generous patrons who have made such a large and complete undertaking possible. A publisher couldn’t have taken on such a book as this without external funding – they wouldn’t have been able to afford it.

This is not just a grand book, in its content, but it’s a feat of engineering. The published volume is a crafted physical object. I advise against reading it in bed, in case you fall asleep and break your glasses. This book will last, in all its aspects. It’s outstanding quality is its open-mindedness, because we disciplined ourselves to take such an approach.

We chose every sort of poem written in this country. We allowed ourselves no prejudice about what poetry should be, as long as what it was convincingly done. Geoff Lehmann, whose own work is more conservative than mine, is actually more liberal in his taste. I write a liberal poetry but am fairly conservative in my taste in other people’s work, and am sceptical of people whom I think are playing fast and loose with the tradition of poetry.

So we complemented each other and were able to produce a book representing everything from concrete poetry to prose poetry, from found to formal poems. I want to pay a tribute to Geoff’s liberality as a person, and to his hard work, as I have to acknowledge that Geoff did more of the research on recent poets than I did.

My particular contribution were the poets of the “golden age” of Australian poetry – from Christopher Brennan to Les Murray. Geoff found the younger poets and was able to convince me about them. Often, when I was at dinner, Geoff would ring up and say, “Bob, let me read you something I’ve just found.” Who could dampen such enthusiasm? I would have to formulate a response on the spot.

Let me, in turn, commend this book to you. It approaches the borders of objectivity, I believe, and it fulfills the function that we set out for it to have, which is to provide pleasure. An audience that seeks pleasure is the only audience that poetry wants to have.

ENDNOTES

^[i] Joseph Furphy (1843-1912), Alexander Montgomery (1847-1922), Alice Werner (1859-1935), “Breaker” Morant (1865-1902), Bellerive (Joseph Tishler, 1871-1957),  Sandy Fitts (1946- ), Alex Selenitsch (1946- ), Homer Rieth (1947- ),  John Anderson (1948-1997),  Jennifer Compton (1949- ), Ian McBryde (1953- ), Elizabeth Hodgson (1956- ), Carol Jenkins (1958- ), Mark O’Flynn (1958- ), Tricia Dearborn (1963- ), Lucy Dougan (1966- ), Greg McLaren (1967- ), Emily Ballou (1968- ), Lisa Gorton (1972- ), Aidan Coleman (1976- ), Stephen McInerney (1976- ) and Josephine Rowe (1984-).

^[ii] Ada Cambridge (1844-1926), W. T. Goodge (1862-1909), Will Ogilvie (1869-1963), Frederic Manning (1882-1935), Ethel Anderson (1883-1958), Dorothea Mackellar (1885-1968), Eric Rolls (1923-2007),  Jas H. Duke (1939-1992), Clive James (1939- ),  Peter Steele (1939- ), Gary Catalano (1947-2002), Peter Kocan (1947- ), Rhyll McMaster (1947- ), Alex Skovron (1948- ), Kevin Brophy (1949- ), Stephen Edgar (1951- ), ∏ O (1951- ),  Andrew Lansdown (1954- ), Judith Beveridge (1956- ), Anthony Lawrence (1957- ), Emma Lew (1962- ), Craig Sherborne (1962- ), Bronwyn Lea (1969- ), Petra White (1975- ) and L K Holt (1982- )

^[iii] Bellerive, Elizabeth Hodgson, Carol Jenkins and Tricia Dearborn