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Jill Jones

Review of
Collected Poems by John Forbes, and
Homage to John Forbes, edited by Ken Bolton

Collected Poems, by John Forbes, Brandl & Schlesinger, 2002

Homage to John Forbes, edited by Ken Bolton, Brandl & Schlesinger, 2002

This review article was published in the US journal Poetry International, Issue VI, 2002, pp. 190–2. It was written specifically for a US audience who may have had little or no knowledge of John Forbes and his work.

It would seem every poet in Australia has a John Forbes story, even myself. I cannot really think of any other contemporary Australian poet who, upon their death, would have provoked such an outpouring of in memoriam poems followed by a homage volume such as that just issued by Adelaide poet, Ken Bolton.

John Forbes peaked early, then died at the age of 47, apparently worn down by the excesses of alcohol and other substances, in particular, his favourite codeine-based cough syrup. He was born in 1950 in Melbourne but lived most of his early life in Sydney and moved back to Melbourne later in his life. His father, Len, (who edited his Collected) was a civilian meteorologist with the RAAF so the family also moved around Australia as well as to Malaya and New Guinea. He was schooled at De La Salle College in Sutherland Shire in the south of Sydney and, although he rejected Catholicism, it still marked him in many ways: a metaphysical spin in his rhetoric (though he would have absolutely refused that term), his sense of being of service to by mentoring younger poets, his interest in church history, among other things.

He was first published when he was 19 and was in the process of preparing his last book, Damaged Glamour when he died of a massive heart attack while talking to two friends in his Melbourne flat one night. His output was hardly prodigious, amounting to four main volumes previous to this final Collected, plus numerous ephemeral publications (remember the era of roneo). It is frequently said in the Bolton book and elsewhere that Forbes, unlike most of us, rarely published a weak poem.

Forbes loved urban Sydney poets such as Kenneth Slessor and Christopher Brennan as well as the English poets like Hopkins (he knew “The Windhover” by heart), Cowper, Gray, Milton and Marvell. In fact, poet and keeper of the Forbes flame, Alan Wearne, refers to him as an Australian Andrew Marvell, “since both have precision, concision, wit and intellectual passion”. However, his most commented-on influences are the New York school poets such as Ted Berrigan, John Ashbery — whom he “imitated” in a couple of his more meditative, less speedy poems — and most of all Frank O’Hara (particularly the timing, wit and energy). His unfinished MA thesis at Sydney University was on O’Hara.

Of course, Forbes’ work was not universally loved, but even the most grudging and conservative of Australian critics and readers have admitted there is something important in his work that stands the test. There are others, of course, who think he’s “the man” and go on to maintain that he is a, if not the, major influence on an upcoming generation of Australian poets.

His work is fierce, funny, intelligent, parodic, rigorous, excoriating with some very occasional sentimental dips. His words were chosen carefully and had a real formal polish; he was never afraid of using rhyme and loved the ampersand. He was also never afraid of mixing it with the political, the social and the quotidian. One of his favourite bands was The Ramones, one of his most famous poems is about the then Australian Federal Treasurer, Paul Keating; his work is peppered with references that would keep a cultural studies course busy for years.

Forbes wasn’t much exercised by questions of truth and falsehood but he was always ready to “have a go” at pretense and excuses. It was as though you could never take things too seriously, or not seriously enough. This is not unlike a certain kind of, mainly male, Australian way of regarding the world. Forbes happened to be much sharper, more intelligent, more adept and far more talented than most. And he probably cared more as well but was careful not to show it, often using self-deprecation to rein in any potential sentimentality. Thus, the beginning of “Love Poem” appears to be about modern war: “Spent tracer flecks Baghdad’s/ bright video game sky,” yet it ends, poignantly, “Our precision guided weapons/ / make the horizon flash and glow/ but nothing I can do makes you/ / want me. Instead I watch the west/ do what the west does best/ / & know, obscurely, as I go to bed/ / all this is being staged for me.”

This working of the public and the personal happens in one his most well-known poems “Death, an Ode”, which begins “Death, you’re more successful than America/ even if we don’t chose to join you, we do”.

Representation is a game in Forbes’ work. You may ask, “what are these poems about?” but there is not always an obvious answer. He diverts and deflates expectations as the poems shift among high and low discourses, much like life. Using his own take on a favourite form, the ode, he writes: “Luminous substrate/ our views are just a veneer on, or like/ the slats in a venetian blind/ changing with the weather or the mood I’m in” (“Ode to Doubt”).

They’re intelligent and syntactically brilliant poems but not “up themselves” and loaded with Australian as well as other referents that Forbes uses as a kick start, so that out of the bland and brain-dead rhetoric of every-day life he made poetry. Here is the brilliant introduction to one his best poems, “On Tiepolo’s Banquet of Cleopatra”: “Any frayed waiting room copy of Who/ could catch this scene: flash Euro/ -trash surveys a sulky round faced/ überBabe who’s got the lot — what else/ could this painting mean ...”

Ken Bolton’s Homage to John Forbes is an apparent grab-bag of post mortem tributes and poems, reprinted interviews and letters. Yet, out of this emerges a portrait of the man that possibly a careful biography might not colour in as accurately. Forbes lived a messy, itinerant kind of life at one level that is counter-pointed by the razor sharp poetry in the Collected. Compare, indeed, the covers of the two volumes. Both show Forbes with cigarette. In one it is a younger pensive Forbes, blowing smoke and staring off to the left, in the other it’s an older bulkier man facing the camera waving a smoke in a jaunty yet slightly weary gesture.

Most of the contributors to the Homage volume are the usual suspects, in the sense that they are the people who knew the man best: Laurie Duggan, Pam Brown, Gig Ryan, John Kinsella, Alan Wearne, Rosemary Hunter, Chris Burns, John Tranter, Tracy Ryan, Ken Bolton, and Cath Kenneally. Other perspectives are offered by critic and editor Ivor Indyk, ex-patriate poet Peter Porter and one of the many younger poets Forbes mentored, Cassie Lewis.

It is a book is born of love and affection yet the stories and opinions are not hagiography. One senses how frustrating it sometimes was to deal with the unpredictable Forbes on a day-to-day level. The book also does not shy away from his unhappiness, his addiction to various substances and to unobtainable women.

Bolton also claims the volume, “[I]n many ways ... is a guide to the state of Australian poetry in the twentieth century via one of its leading figures.” This is partisan, as it should be. Bolton says Forbes was, “our token, our talisman, our mascot”, then explains that “our” means “our side, our faction, our tendency”. That Forbes was a leading figure there can be little doubt, but this book isn’t the full story and to misread Bolton’s words and assume it represents “the” story of Australian poetry would be drawing a rather long bow. However, the book does say a lot about an influential circle of poets and gives a real flavour of a critical time in Australian poetry.

One of the things that stands out about Forbes is his absolute engagement with poetry, and his effect on the poets around him, which is where every Australian poet’s Forbes story comes in. He was the centre of a circle that was always circulating and critiquing each other’s work, but also he helped younger poets. Cassie Lewis describes him as “a sharp incandescent tutor”, who was toughminded but also capable of dealing with the mentee’s concerns rather than pushing his own. He even wrote a late poem, “Lessons for Young Poets” which begins, “it’s important to be major/ but not to be/ too cute about it”.

I met Forbes on only a few brief occasions. He was always unfailingly friendly and he was clearly aware of my work. During the period he was poetry editor in the early 1990s of the influential journal, Scripsi, he gave me useful feedback on poems he was rejecting. When I took his guidance to heart, he accepted some reworked poems. Unfortunately, the magazine folded before they could ever appear.

Above all, Forbes is unashamedly Australian. He may have looked to American poets, he may have loved Milton and Marvell, and he may have revelled in sojourns overseas, but he saw this all from an Australian perspective, ironic and self-deprecating, quite well aware what others think and not giving, quite frankly, a flying fuck. So, from this poem called “Songs for Charles Darwin”, posthumously published in 1999:

“ ‘You know what’s wrong/ with this place?’/ of Cambridge, England John Kinsella said,/ you can’t be a dickhead here,/ not for a moment!’/ ‘Well’ reply/ 6 generations plus ring-ins plus me/ ‘You can always try’ “.

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