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“I look at these poems submitted to Poetry Magazine, think of good old Blake who caught the Philistines — who call energy evil, destructive. Out of the mouths of mad men, babes,” writes Robert Adamson, born Sydney 1944, one of the editors of New Poetry, and praised for his first collection of Canticles o[n] the Skin (1970). “How fecund is the marriage of maturity and vision?” Adamson asks in a series of rhetorical questions. “How hard must the poetic artery be? What’s the reward for long and faithful service to the Poet Party?... [But] even if it’s frightening, we’re here, uprooting ghostgums to know the slums of the city of men and women.... Here we must learn to take bearings from within ourselves and quickly — no time to spell out [A N D Norman Talbot jots the ampersand...].... Here we must learn to look hard and state our briefs pointedly. Now’s the time for indignant questions.... Now, any failure has more to teach us, more than another minor, well-rehearsed success... ” [note 2]
The statements, the questions, are rhetorical, romantic, self conscious, self congratulatory, but they do reflect a demand to be taken seriously, to see poetry as a “profession”, a way of living, and this is important. The problem for these young poets seems to be to extend the caught moment, to give it a universality, a context, and that is perhaps where the marriage of maturity and vision has relevance.
“What a heap of old rope has hung us up”, says Adamson, “all this juiceless counsel about maturity of vision and expression.”
But the kind of juicelessness he is condemning has not just been the province of the older generation of poets.
In 1966 Rodney Hall and Tom Shapcott wrote an introduction to their anthology “New Impulses in Australian Poetry”, not published until 1968.
The aim of the anthology they said was to clarify the accomplishments of Australian poetry in breaking fresh ground, particularly since 1960. The anthology included “no poems of the accepted hierarchy”. There was to be “no going back to previous assumptions and previous standards”. Two years later Alexander Craig, editor of “12 Poets 1950-1970” makes this damning assessment of “New Impulses in Australian Poetry”:
The impulses in it are generally older ones, and the book’s flavour on the whole is somewhere between mainstream and conservative compared with other English mainstream poetry.
Yet the only additions in Alexander Craig’s anthology are Peter Porter, Michael Dransfield and Richard Tipping. He has excluded Evan Jones, Charles Higham, Geoffrey Lehmann, David Malouf, David Rowbotham, Vivien [sic] Smith, Andrew Taylor, John Croyston, Craig Powell, Tom Shapcott and Kath Walker (what on earth was she doing in Hall’s Impulses?)
Craig makes a special point of regretting the exclusion of Evan Jones, J. M. Couper and John E. Trantor [sic], but his method is to use fewer poets than Hall and Shapcott, and give them greater coverage.
In a review of New Impulses in Australian Poetry written at the time by Robert Ward in Australian Book Review, Ward wrote:
Perhaps the most outstanding features of this new poetry are its niceness and politeness. These poets never raise their voices either in love or outrage, but prefer rather simply to note a small irony here, a quaintness there, a slight unease of conscience, a satisfied chuckle. With neat forms and generally effective images, well behaved at all times, one sees that the new orthodoxy is also an old rank conservatism. [note 3]
Is it then all in the eye of the observer? Not only are today’s revolutionaries tomorrow’s establishment, as Tom Shapcott admitted in his article “Hold onto your Crystal Balls”... ‘It is no doubt chastening to realize by 1980 they (the new poets )will be well and truly considered the passé generation’ [note 4] ...but to some readers, today’s “new directions” are “rank conservatives” already.
The editors of New Impulses and the Editor of 12 Poets maintain that they do not and cannot seek to be objective. Their choices are individual, yet this does not explain why Alexander Craig chooses nine of the same poets as Shapcott and Hall, and yet seems to consider most of them “liberated traditionalists” in his own anthology, and mainstream and conservative in Hall and Shapcott’s earlier anthology.
Perhaps the explanation lies in the fact that very few of the poems overlap. The great proportion of poems chosen by the poets themselves are quite different in 12 Poets, and I think it would be fair to say that, on the whole, they are livelier, and perhaps more experimental, if not in form, then in attitude.
This is Alexander Craig’s point. He does not make the same large gestures as Shapcott and Hall. He is content to say that “some of the experimentation is unobtrusive”. These are not experimental concrete, serialist or kinetic poets. He makes the important point that all the poets of the 1950s wrote “in the long shadow of Ern Mallev” (mid 1944) and that the Malley hoax was not just directed at experimentation in Australian poetry, but against the new Apocalypse poets in England, the American modernists, Dylan Thomas, and even Eliot and Pound. The result was an inhibited, over-cautious poetry in Australia, which, in my opinion, still acts as a straitjacket on poets who tend to distrust the large gesture, and use the neutral tone.
It is an atmosphere beautifully caught by Chris Wallace Crabbe in his “A Wintry Manifesto”... the stoic resignation, the shrunken neighbourhood
“And what we drew on was not gold or fire,
Not cross, nor cloven hoof about the pyre,
But painful, plain contracted observations:
The gesture of a hand, dip of a bough.”
Thus Wallace Crabbe makes a virtue out of necessity, but knows that
“a whole dimension
Has vanished from the chambers of the mind.”
One of the interesting aspects of 12 Poets is that the dating of the poems enables us to see the development of the poet. One of the most noticeable changes is in the poetry of R. A. Simpson, who says, “I feel and hope, my poetry has moved from preoccupations with formal neatness towards a kind of poetry that is more flexible”. Simpson wants his poetry to be far more interesting in terms of form, and this takes him closer to the younger experimentalists, particularly in the poem “Being Demolished”.
To me Bruce Dawe is also a poet of his own “wintry manifesto”. At best his satire and his occasional tenderness has a good cutting edge, at worst it tends to be flat and banal as the suburbia he writes about. His poetry is often very disposable. It celebrates a newspaper headline or an item of news that loses relevance with the passage of time. Dawe wrote a satirical public poetry at a time when this genre was sadly lacking in Australia, but, in this anthology and particularly in his recent “Condolences of the Seasons” gathered from four collections, with nineteen new poems, it is possible to see Dawe’s strengths and weaknesses, and to trace what seems to me to be a slackening off of tension and bite.
For me too Rodney Hall is one of those poets whose self-consciousness and icy self-control sometimes result in a brutal strength, but more often chills with intellectuality, and lack of passion. He has gone on record as saying that he distrusts the large gesture.
He is enormously industrious and hard driving, having published six collections since 1961, and exercises a good deal of power in the poetry scene, through his job as poetry editor of The Australian, where his policy is to deliberately encourage and publish the young and experimental.
The strongest poets in 12 Poets are for me Francis Webb, Vincent Buckley, Gwen Harwood, and Randolph Stow. Sensuous, tingling alive, because the poetry has a muscular, straining intellectual control, Buckley has developed enormously in the last ten years. I agree with Alexander Craig that Gwen Harwood is the best woman poet in the country since Judith Wright. She manages too to walk that tight-rope between passion and intellect. They run together and create her fascinating amalgam of autobiographical experience passionately recreated, but never allowed to be self-indulgent.
Randolph Stow is a romantic, who creates a regional landscape that extends into universality. His poetry is rich and sensuous, but he too controls his romanticism with a gentle self-mockery. He has a gift for satire, and a gift for the rhythmic cadence, which is not often used in modem Australian poetry. Many of the younger poets could learn a great deal from him, because he has managed to do what they in their plastic disposable world have been unable to do... universalize experience.
Francis Webb’s great, strange, surrealistic web of poetry is perfectly described in his own introductory note to his ten poems... “I said, thinking of poetry and its range ‘All beauty, all joy? Yes, and all pain and disfigurement’.” Francis Webb, since he was “discovered” in the 40’s has gone bis own way, but he has had a central influence on serious poetry in Australia, and Michael Dransfield, who is only twenty-one, may come up from the “underground”, but shares qualities with Webb, and perhaps with Stow. There is the same essentially romantic disturbed dark vision, the fantastic hallucinatory imagination, spoiled in the younger poet by posturing and attitudizing. Like all these younger poets Dransfield has a problem with the limitations of imagism. If you only have images how can you make images more exciting, mean more, tell more?
In his first collection, “Streets of the Long Voyage”, Dransfield is trying to fix random, broken images into patterns. There is a contemptuous isolation in his poems which is a long way from the tenderness of a Francis Webb, or the wry self-amusement of Stow. Self absorbed in his bric-a-brac Gothic world he is a rather frightening example of the end result of the romantic rebellion. He tries to control his extravagances by being cooly detached and rational about savage experiences. The result is a black comedy tone reminiscent of [the plays] “Loot” or “Entertaining Mr Sloan”, which has its limitations too.
“Among the mirrors, crystal palaces, tunnels of unaccountable
reflections, images, baffled eyes
glimpse now and then some echoing
hint of reality, a month or two
of corridors and halls, passages, music
like the tracery of endless inventive
spiders who will involve me in their enchanted
scheme of poisons, prisons subtleties great rococo
intricacies doubled by a looking
glass, trebled, endless and frozen in sight.”
— ‘Biographies. I Barcarolle’
Richard Tipping, born late in 1949, and co-editor of the underground Mok magazine, uses typographic innovations, headlines, concrete poetry, shapes like tears, humour, satire, radical politics, lyricism and irony. Alexander Craig chose these two young men as representative of the last three years in Australian poetry, and they do give a radically different flavour to the anthology.
Imagist... romantic... the two terms might just as easily have been used in praise or blame for the pre- and post-war young poets, before the chill set in... and perhaps for the same reasons.
We were young... we were almost as uneasy with the future as this generation. Therefore we too tended to believe only in the moment, the here and now, to grasp at the concrete image, smell, see, bear, touch the world, prove it on our senses, and, because we were young, sensuously identify. We too became radical, social, public in our responses.
J. S. Harry (Jan Harry), the Sydney poet, and contemporary of Dransfield and David Malouf, has described the credo of the new imagists in her review of David Malouf’s collection “Bicycle” [note 5]
She sees Malouf’s poems as “full of the details of a person’s living, salt, sandgrit, sun, galoshes and angels”. A number of poems “present their world through a steady build up of objects. It is a world that can be seen, felt, heard and consequently one that can be readily entered into... the surface is crowded with small sharp or bright details that create a kind of tapestry weave”.
If you put 12 Poets 1950–1970 beside the pleasantly produced and economical Paperback Poets, the useful, just as cheap, but not so attractive Lyre-Bird Writers, plus Robert Adamson’s Canticles o[n] the Skin, you’ll give yourself a crash course in Australian poetry now, and probably be pleasantly surprised at its diversity, energy and potential. And what comforts and sustains me is that in spite of their brashness, posturing, clumsy derivatives, uneasy rhetoric and deliberately limited vision, the young now are better poets than we were, there are more of them and, apparently, they have a bigger audience than just themselves.
The student revolution has more fish to fry than straight politics. Perhaps one of their greatest strengths is that they refuse to separate the components of living. Poetry is a kind of demonstration too, against the philistines, and admass culture; a great raid on the inarticulate by a generation brainwashed by McLuhanism.
In a country like this it’s doubly important, where the tribe’s dialect is overdue for a big dose of purification.
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