Bunyip: (say ’bunyuhp)
noun 1. an imaginary creature of Aboriginal legend, said to haunt rushy swamps and billabongs.
2. Obsolete a full-grown beast (def. 2) which has remain unbranded.
3. Obsolete an impostor. [Aborig.; Wathawurung]
Bunyips, apparently, are nocturnal creatures known to haunt waterholes. It’s been suggested that there are more than a couple of Australian poets to whom this description might apply. This, certainly, is a rich poetry issue, a nest-full of the finest new writing, from Jennifer Maiden, John Kinsella, Maria Takolander, Michael Farrell, Craig Powell, Michael Sharkey, Kate Middleton and many others (several of them quite tee-totalling), plus essays by Kevin Hart on A.D. Hope, Lachlan Brown on Kevin Hart, Michael Buhagiar on Christopher Brennan, Suzie Cardwell on John Scott, Mike Ladd on poetry and radio, John Jenkins on poetry and film, Michael Ackland on Murray Bail, and, here and in The Long Paddock, further bunyipery of the highest order: reviews of many new poetry collections, an interview with Laurie Duggan, and a striking selection of new short fiction.
Pip Smith
What makes a good reading? I have no idea. Or rather, I only have smatterings of vague hunches. And thankfully, there’s no rubric by which to judge a person’s vague hunches. One thing is certain, though – no matter how Nobel Prize-winning your prose is, there is no excuse for reading to a crammed room for twenty minutes, pausing for a breath, and then continuing on as people shift in their seats, answer phones, and leave the room. There’s especially no excuse to then ask if it’s alright to read another, longer story, and when no one says anything, take that silence as a resounding yes please! and continue to read on.
At Melbourne’s Slow Canoe reading last Friday night, this is what happened.
Slow Canoe describes itself on facebook as being a forum “for the sharing of stories, for writers to have their work heard and appreciated aloud, as well as for lovers of stories to hear writing brought alive by the authors.” Each month they gather in the chapel at the Schoolhouse Studios in Abbotsford to listen to five writers read their work. April’s event featured stories by David Mence, Emily Bitto, Steven Amsterdam and Antonia Pont, all excellent writers, most of whom could have read half of what they brought, and we still would have left groggy with hearty fiction.
I am not attempting to compare the readings at salons such as Slow Canoe to the high-energy performative approach you might find at a slam poetry night. They are different things attempting to achieve different ends. Personally, I’ll take either, as long as the writer has thought deeply about what they’ve written, their writing doesn’t obviously fit a prescribed mould, is nuanced, specific, and emotionally engaged. I’d rather hear a considered story, gently delivered, than something written on the bus on the way to the venue, then dazzled up with jazz hands behind the microphone. But even so, reading for a short aeon doesn’t do a piece of writing, or an audience, any favours. I have sat through several of my own reading nights internally angsting over the same tendency and wondering how to nudge a 20 minute mic-hog politely off the stage.
Salons like Slow Canoe feature writers on the gentler end of the reading spectrum. At Slow Canoe, audiences are expected to shift their experience of time down a notch from the usual mania of peak hour Melbourne. I was so eager to attend the Slow Canoe reading that Friday, that I side-swiped the fence reversing out of the driveway, broke my left side mirror, sped through a few 50 zones, then parked in what may have been someone’s driveway. If the tempo leading up to such an event was fuckruninglatewhere’saparkI’malreadylatefuckfuck (or similar), the moment I stepped into a crowded hallway to hear David Mence read a story about a whaling town set in an Australia 100 years ago, I was faced with a choice: give in to the story’s slow pull, or continue to chew over whether or not I parked in someone’s driveway. Usually, the choice to engage at these quieter, slower reading nights is yours. No one’s going to bust out a break dance to keep you interested.
At Slow Canoe I made the choice to turn my phone off, lean against the hallway wall, and give in. As the whaling story unfurled, it felt good to be transported to a cold, blue place of solace between attempts to find a park. There were flashes of violence in the story, but they were the kind of flashes of violence you might dream up while floating on your back in a swimming pool. But then the solace continued. And continued. And continued. Some people left. And the final three readers read to noticeably smaller, limper audiences.
Contrast this with the launch of six Vagabond chapbooks by six vastly different poets three Fridays ago at the Alderman in East Brunswick. The event was held in a similarly small room and was also crammed full of eager listeners. While the reading followed a petcha kutcha-style short, fast reading formula, this compression of writers’ airtime did not result in a diminution of depth, quality or content. Interestingly, by giving each reader no longer than 3 short poems each, and not fleshing out the night with protracted breaks, something happened to the tone of the whole event, so that the collage of voices and approaches to poetry amounted to something larger than the sum of the night’s parts. Hearing Hoang Nguyen’s contemplative tone rub up against Eddie Patterson’s stark wit and jagged cut-up aesthetic tweaked the contrast knob on each poet’s differences. As a result, the range of voices stretched my taste for poetry in six quick bursts, and the brevity of the readings left me wanting more, not scouting out the room for the nearest fire escape.
Why give Slow Canoe such a comparatively harsh review, you might ask? Surely these are sensitive, socially awkward writers you are talking about! Go gently! Go gently!
The thing is, I love listening to writers read, so I get stroppy when they don’t read well. I enjoy hearing how nervous energy sets a text that came from that writer’s imagination into motion. What emerges are un-conscious nuances and intricacies that are simply lost if you read these pieces to yourself, in your head, lying in bed.
Friend and poet Rob Wilson once gave me recordings of Allen Ginsberg and William Carlos Williams reading their own work. I’ve listened to the recordings more than I’ve ever picked up one of their books. Hearing William Carlos Williams read Portrait of a Woman in Bed is, to me, so much more rewarding than reading it on the page. On the page, the poem’s ten exclamation marks can so easily be read as: ‘shout’! or, ‘louder’! or ‘more intense!’, but when WCW reads the piece the exclamation mark after ‘I’m sick of trouble!’ isn’t so much a hands-in-the-air outcry, as a sob, and the line ‘My name’s Robitza!’ isn’t so much a declaration, as a digging in – a stubborn, hardened, claiming of turf.
Of course, this poem is open to interpretation, and the biggest benefit to archiving a poem in text form is the freedom afforded new generations’ readings of the poem. That said, how often do you hear someone perform any of these old poems out loud, let alone give them a new interpretation? You would be hard pressed to find a single year a Shakespeare play wasn’t performed in Australia. And yet what about readings of ground-breaking 20th century poetry and short fiction? (Cate and Andrew! Where is this? I ask you!)
It also surprises me that Auden’s view of poetry as ‘memorable speech’ is only really upheld by the spoken word crew. Perhaps, because so much writing happens as a silent communion between mind and computer, writers easily think of reading out loud as being nothing more than a marketing tool to promote a book or story. I wonder (and secretly hope), that with the huge surge of interest in podcasts such as the New Yorker Fiction Podcast, we might reach the point when writers will be commissioned to read their work as a form of publication in its own right.
I’m often amazed that capital W-writers who consider the importance of every word on the page, especially poets who are taught to consider line breaks, and the specific placement of words across the page, so often deliver long, monotonous, and ill-considered readings. Both readings and print publications are a means of disseminating work, and in some cases I would argue that writers might even reach more readers at a reading than if they were published in a journal or book that will live out its life yellowing on a shelf in storage at the National Library.
Before I get too vitriolic, however, I’m going to yank James Ellroy out of the wings to share his own slightly sleazy rubric for reading out loud, stolen from an interview in the 2009 Autumn edition of the Paris Review:
I semi-memorize the passage so that I can stand at the podium and share eye contact with the audience. I read shorter sections with as few differentiations in dialogue as possible. Never go long. Never try the audience’s patience. Never put in something too plot deep. Never hem, haw, pause, or do anything that isn’t dramatically effective. How many times have you seen people go for forty minutes, lose it routinely, wet the page, cough, fart, belch into the microphone, say “um,” and do everything short of take a shit on stage. It’s deadening.
I walk in and situate myself. I hunker down and read something outrageous. Something with race, class, dope, sex, insane language. I read a section about rug burns—that’s when you’re fucking on a rug and you scrape your knees. Do you want to hear some candy-ass artiste saying, Oooooh, I’m an artist, my characters do things that I didn’t intend? Or do you want to hear about rug burns and get some yucks?
I don’t read for more than fourteen minutes, tops. Then I answer questions for twenty minutes. Afterward, you don’t short-shrift anyone—you talk to everybody. You scope out the women. You have a gas. You’re happy, you’re grateful, you’re God’s guy.
Mild misogyny aside, Ellroy makes enough good points that this is an interview I often remember when I’m restless and fidgety at a reading night. “How many times have you seen people go for forty minutes, lose it routinely, wet the page, cough, fart, belch into the microphone, say “um,” and do everything short of take a shit on stage. It’s deadening.” Indeed it is. And it doesn’t have to be.
I’d like to end this blog post by calming down slightly, and assuring you it’s safe to come out of your homes and read. Please. Get out there, and work out your own rubric by reading out loud (but not for too long) and contributing to the great aural literary journal that is your city’s cafes, houses and bars at night. Reading events are not just for young hopefuls. They are chances to disseminate ideas in a place where the buzz happens live, and with wine. They are potentially a place for lively, considered readings of excellent work by established, as well as fledgling, writers. The only way we can make them better, is if we keep attending them, contributing to them, and thinking of our readings as forms of publication in their own right, without, somehow, taking them so seriously that we forget to let our audiences have fun.
Like this:
Bunyip: (say ’bunyuhp)
noun 1. an imaginary creature of Aboriginal legend, said to haunt rushy swamps and billabongs.
2. Obsolete a full-grown beast (def. 2) which has remain unbranded.
3. Obsolete an impostor. [Aborig.; Wathawurung]
Bunyips, apparently, are nocturnal creatures known to haunt waterholes. It’s been suggested that there are more than a couple of Australian poets to whom this description might apply. This, certainly, is a rich poetry issue, a nest-full of the finest new writing, from Jennifer Maiden, John Kinsella, Maria Takolander, Michael Farrell, Craig Powell, Michael Sharkey, Kate Middleton and many others (several of them quite tee-totalling), plus essays by Kevin Hart on A.D. Hope, Lachlan Brown on Kevin Hart, Michael Buhagiar on Christopher Brennan, Suzie Cardwell on John Scott, Mike Ladd on poetry and radio, John Jenkins on poetry and film, Michael Ackland on Murray Bail, and, here and in The Long Paddock, further bunyipery of the highest order: reviews of many new poetry collections, an interview with Laurie Duggan, and a striking selection of new short fiction.
Please come to the launch of the latest issue of Southerly, A Nest of Bunyips. The launch will have food and wine, and of course, lots of readings from our fabulous contributors.
Where: John Woolley Building, University of Sydney, N395 lecture theatre
Map: http://db.auth.usyd.edu.au/directories/map/building.stm?ref=d08h15
RSVP: southerlyjournal@gmail.com
Pip Smith
Over the past few years, it seems many of the communities that tend to swarm around microphones – poetry slams, radio shows, comedy gigs, literary soirees – have become entranced by conversational, back-to-basics storytelling. In Sydney, we have Story Club at Hermann’s Bar, which sits more at the comedy end of the spectrum, and FBi Radio’s All the Best, which firmly models its content on the personal, narrative journalism heard on NPR’s This American Life, amongst others. The short story night I’ve curated since 2008 – Penguin Plays Rough – finds itself attracting interest from the literary community, but, like Story Club and All the Best, also makes a point of resisting any overt ‘literariness’ in exchange for something more informal, conversational and irreverent.
Stripped of funny voices, hands punctuating rhyming words in the air, or insincere references to Proust, this conversational mode has been used to encourage journalists to sound less like robots, comedians to stop desperately clutching at punch-lines, and poets and literary prose writers to relax, take a breath, and stop trying to be too clever for their own good. It’s also quite possibly a resistance against over-produced theatre and TV shows, and an attempt to ‘return to the source’, cut through the bullshit, and hear a ‘real’ story.
While I’m a huge fan and proponent of this brand of aural storytelling, the hype surrounding the belief that these stories should be true, or that they feel in some way more ‘real’ has me asking many questions. What is this ‘real-ness’ we’re reaching towards? In the telling of ‘true’ stories, most of us are prone to fabrication, and the shape of what many of us consider to be a story arc often distorts ‘what actually happened’ into shapes it doesn’t naturally fit. So if a story can never really be real, why is everyone so excited by the idea that these stories are at least closer to a feeling of ‘real-ness’? And why should Southerly’s readers care? Are such events of any concern to those interested in literature? Or do they represent a kind of anti-literature?
In order to answer some of these questions, it might be useful to go back to one of the seeds of this new breed of storytelling event, sewn in New York in 1997 at a gig called ‘The Moth’. Held in poet and novelist George Dawes Green’s living room, the nights were an attempt to ‘recreate, in New York, the feeling of sultry summer evenings in his native Georgia, where he and his friends would gather on his friend Wanda’s porch to share spellbinding tales.’ The nights soon outgrew Green’s livingroom, and developed into the ‘true stories, no notes’ events now found not only in bars and cafes round New York, but also in Chicago, St Louis, LA and other cities around the States, as well as being produced into podcasts available on iTunes.
Part of what makes the Moth so successful is the underlying idea that anyone can tell a story – from the ex-Mayor of New York, to a mum whose child committed suicide as a result of bullying. But even though the Moth isn’t specifically a night for writers, it was touted as ‘New York’s hottest and hippest literary ticket’ by the Wall St Journal, and is programmed at such beacons of all things writerly as the PEN World Voices festival. If people are simply standing behind a mic telling stories without notes, what is it about the Moth that is “literary”?
The Moth acknowledges that stories – even nuanced, well told stories – are not the exclusive property of “writers” or “comedians”. The Moth acknowledges that we all can, and need, to tell and listen to stories from a range of different voices, not just those who have an MFA from a graduate writing programme. What the Moth has done for open mic nights not only in the States, but also in Australia, reminds me of what Raymond Carver’s stories did for short fiction writers in the 1980s: stripped them of bullshit, and said – this is all you need.
But where does that leave writers and writing? Well, pretty much exactly where they were before. I’m not being so obnoxious as to suggest Language poets should ditch their Ashbury compendiums and tell us about that time their dog peed on their kid’s school bag – a healthy cultural community is a tangled and diverse wilderness after all – but I think what other artists and writers can borrow from events like the Moth is a humbling reminder not to get lost in the intricacies of language forever; that the need to communicate is what underpins a story, and that it really makes no difference if the words that make up that story are written down, or spoken. I suspect that the Moth’s focus on ‘true’ stories is a shortcut the organisers have of asking people to tell stories they care about, and know about, so they don’t get caught up in trying to overcomplicate what doesn’t need to be anything more than effortless. There is also a sense, when listening to the Moth podcast, that you’re listening to a different kind of news – an anecdotal news. These are all the things that are really happening in your world right now, but that you will never hear on Lateline.
Back in Sydney, what I love about this new fascination with storytelling, is that no one particular creative community has claimed it as their own. It’s brought performance artists, novelists, comedians, poets and journalists into the same room, reading from the same chair. Non-writers might not approach the short story with the same gravitas as someone who studied Dostoyevsky for three years might, but they’ll probably see things in the form that those who obsess over it miss, and imbue it with something new.
I am currently in Melbourne, trying to see as many different reading nights as possible. The first event I attended just so happened to be a story slam, modelled to fit the Moth’s mould. Perhaps it was because the Comedy Festival was erupting from every crevice of the Trades Hall, but rather than be a direct replica of the Moth, Rocket Clock Story Slam at Bella Union ended up sitting somewhere between the Moth and a frat boy comedy night. Roughly six storytellers told five minute stories around the theme Anarchy and Authority, in between which the host, Jon Bennett, told stories of his own. At the end of the night, a prize was awarded: a gift voucher, and copy of Bennett’s book ‘Pretending Things are a Cock’ – a collection of photos of the host thrusting in front of rainbows, lying down in front of monoliths etc etc.
What made me most uncomfortable about Rocket Clock Story Slam, was that it was a competition – as if the organisers suspected that the stories mightn’t be interesting enough on their own, so thought they’d better add some external suspense in advance. The Moth do this also, and I’m still not sure why. The second most uncomfortable aspect of the night was that it felt like a comedy night that had been re-branded to cash in on the storytelling craze; in other words, Rocket Clock was heavy on comedians still trying desperately to out-funny each other as if they were at a stand up gig. Thankfully, though, because of Rocket Clock’s sneaky re-branding, some people performed stories which were not only funny, but interesting and personal as well.
The most notable story of the evening was by the most unlikely competitor, Kathryn Bendall. Unlikely, because she wasn’t a prime example of the demographic that might like to win Bennett’s book. Kathryn was the eldest contester, with some significant life experience, and calmly ploughed through the time keeper’s four minute bell. A former Labour councillor in Hunters Hill, she told the story of how her political career ended when her marijuana crop was discovered by her arch nemesis, the council building inspector. What I liked best about Kathryn’s story was that it was an example of the type of story that wouldn’t be heard at the open mic nights that existed before these storytelling events emerged. Not cut throat enough for a comedy night, or constructed enough for a literary night, this was the kind of story you’d walk home buzzing with after a dinner party at an eccentric aunt’s house.
As it turned out, Kathryn is starting her own storytelling night at Sydney’s Camelot in Marrickville. Called Tell Me A Story, she has business cards, has already done her research into similar Sydney events and was confidently working the room. I left Rocket Clock wondering what will rise up in opposition to storytelling events, once they – almost inevitably – become institutions as rigid in their dictums of effortlessness and irreverence as the hackneyed scenes they are resisting.
Please join us for the launch of Rawshock, by our poetry reviews editor Toby Fitch,
When: Sunday April 22 from 2pm
Where: Brett Whiteley Studio, 2 Raper St, Surry Hills
Using the Rorschach inkblots as metaphors, conjuring the wondrous and the monstrous in his poems, Toby Fitch brings a unique vision to Australian poetry. Old modes of expression—such as the mythic, the romantic, the symbolic and the surreal—are revived and reshaped in poems that mythologise love, anxiety, the self and city living, dovetailing inner and outer worlds with a healthy antipodean dose of absinthe and pattern poetry.
Like this:
Pip Smith,
Hello Slightly More Northern Southerly Readers,
Though I am usually Sydney-based, this month I’m coming to you, mildly diseased and wind-ruffled, all the way from Melbourne.
Here, Autumn is like a pick ‘n mix bag of summer and winter days, and you don’t know what you’re going to get until you’re five ks from home in a summer dress staring up at a wall of black cloud. Nowhere else in Australia have I had to buy gloves with penguins on them out of climate-inflicted necessity. For that, Melbourne, I thank you.
My journey to Melbourne, though, was not meant to be an elaborate means of buying surprise penguin gloves. I arrived on April 2nd, ready for a three-month stint in Australia’s only UNESCO-approved City of Literature for a kind of lifestyle sabbatical. My stay here happened to coincide with a blogging stint for Southerly, so I thought I’d force the two into a marriage of convenience and provide Southerly’s readers with a round up of Melbourne’s literary events while I’m here.
Soon after I arrived, I stuck my head in a bookstore and asked the lady behind the counter if there were any readings on around town. She looked at me blankly and wrote Open University on the back of a business card. I left suddenly aware that perhaps bookstore sales attendants aren’t the human-shaped Internet search engines I’d always secretly believed they were. I now feel slightly older, but more worldly, and for that, Bookstore Lady, I thank you.
During the days that followed I tried to write some short stories, failed, sulked, and finally went for a walk for inspiration only to find a city void of life: construction sites frozen, bulldozers poised mid-dig, cafes shut up, bill posters advertising gigs from weeks ago flapping in the drizzle. It was a Friday. Since when is everything shut on a Friday? Well done, Pip, I thought, you have brought disease upon Melbourne, and with it, the end of its cultural hey day. But it wasn’t just a Friday, it was Good Friday, and all of Melbourne was off doing secret Good Friday things, like eating chocolate, or reading books, or polishing their miniature trams.
After the first eight days all I could confidently report back to you about was the ineffectiveness of Paracetamol in making a person less mildly diseased, but now! Finally! I have braved the almost illegal world of Cold and Flu tablets and – turbo-charged on pseudoephedrine – have cobbled together a kind of reading nights calendar for the month of April.
So far, I have seen one (1!) event! But fear not, Reader, I have a hearty six (6!) more readings to attend, and feel I have a good range lined up full of live story-telling, slam poetry, bookish poetry, short fiction, and witty correspondence! Also, I urge you to let me know if you think I’ve missed anything really bloody obvious, and will endeavour to catch that as well.
So, over the next few weeks I will attend and review:
11/4 – Rocket Clock Slam @ Bella Union
13/4 – Six Poets, Six Vagabonds @ The Alderman
16/4 – Debut Mondays @ The Wheeler Centre
19/4 – Slammadingdong @ Bella Union
20/4 – Slow Canoe Readings @ the Schoolhouse Studios
26/4 – Willow Tales @ Willow Bar, Northcote
29/4 – Women of Letters @ Thornbury Theatre
Many thanks to our March guest, Kate Middleton. The next few weeks shall be turned over to Pip Smith, whose bio is below.
Pip Smith runs the monthly short fiction night Penguin Plays Rough, and edited the group’s first book The Penguin Plays Rough Book of Short Stories, launched at the Sydney Writers’ Festival in 2011. She has had her poems and stories published in Voiceworks, HEAT, Island Magazine, Pan Magazine and Going Down Swinging, and recently as part of Picaro Press’ Wagtail series. With the help of a Varuna Fellowship, she has a collection of poems forthcoming in 2012, and is currently a doctoral candidate at UWS. 2012 will see her finalising a digital poem made of transcripts from Wayside Chapel written for the Red Room Company’s Clubs and Societies project, and co-directing the National Young Writers’ Festival.
Kate Middleton
This past week I gave a talk on ekphrasis and the ways in which pictures in themselves may tell stories. In part I wanted to give a little history, and so looked back to Homer’s description of Achille’s Shield, as well as to consider the ways in which, despite being saturated with images, we are less skilled in reading them now—simply because we are no longer accustomed to spending a lot of time with a single image. The other aim of the talk was to discuss my own practice and think about the different ways I have approached writing about artworks in my own poetry; in the middle of it all, however, I looked at two poems I particularly love that take the same great painting by Pieter Brueghel the Elder as their starting point—“Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.”
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
Of course the story of Icarus is a particularly human story: having been granted a godly ability—flight—Icarus in his imperfection and ambition ignores his father Daedelus’s instructions and flies too high: proximity to the sun melts the wax that binds his wings and he drops. If pride goes before a fall, surely Icarus’s fall is the greatest of them all; and, too, surely this story shows us that we must respect the word of engineers when it comes to safe use…
In my mind I can easily picture an ecstatic Icarus in full flight; I can, too, imagine his fall, and the terror he is feeling. What is fascinating about Brueghel’s picture, though, and what no doubt captured the attention of both William Carlos Williams and W. H. Auden who responded to the painting in two great poems, was that the fate of Icarus was, in this artist’s view, not necessarily any more important or interesting than the ordinary lives of those around him as he experienced his ultimate drama. The spectacle of his fall is almost no spectacle in his painting—though the title tells us Icarus is there, and in its way, the hunt for the tragic figure is not unlike a highbrow game of “Where’s Wally?” Oh there he is, in the bottom right-hand corner—or rather, there’s half of him. His top half is already submerged. (Fly too close to the fire and you’ll get doused with so much water you’ll drown—or more likely, die on impact.)
William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) is one of the American poets most held up as necessary to the development of an “American poetry”; alongside his poetic practice he also kept up a medical practice: Williams was a paediatrician (who delivered, to my delight, the seminal Earthworks artist Robert Smithson, in New Jersey) and a GP. I don’t know if it’s apocryphal, but I’ve heard around the place that one of the reasons his poems are so slender is because he drafted them on slender prescription pads. If true, then again necessity becomes the mother of invention: his line, and, later in his career, his tri-step indentations are part of his poetic footprint. While left-aligned, “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” is a typically skinny poem, making use of line breaks that highlight the work done by even the smallest parts of the sentence. This is his text in response to Brueghel’s painting:
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring
a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry
of the year was
awake tingling
near
the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself
sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings’ wax
unsignificantly
off the coast
there was
a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning
—William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams
There are many things I take away from this poem: it is so skilled in staying entirely within the frame of the picture itself; the way the poem proceeds follows the eye’s arc. Of course we start with the light, of course we are drawn to that vibrant tunic worn by the farmer in the centre of the image; we scan the foreground, then move to the background. Indeed, if the painting was untitled I can imagine that many viewers passing the painting in a gallery today would not notice that pair of legs down in the right hand corner of the frame—that “splash quite unnoticed” is the occasion of the painting, yes, but more than that the Brueghel is so deliberate in downplaying the great drama of the image. So too with the final lines: “this was/ Icarus drowning”—the line break eschews drama. Williams could have just as easily have broken the line “this was Icarus/ drowning” presenting us the mythic figure on one line, and saving his fate for the step down the page. It’s hard to quantify the way the psychological impact of these line breaks, but the effect would have been different and, in my view, more dramatic. While there’s nothing wrong with the dramatic, such an approach would have played against the intent of the painting.
W. H. Auden (1907-1973)—a poet as vital to the continuation of the British tradition as Williams is to American poetry—takes up the same painting with his famous poem “Musee des Beaux Arts.” There are a number of differences between Auden’s rendering of Brueghel’s painting and that of Williams—as to be expected from two highly developed, individual poetic voices. Beyond the cosmetic appearance of the poem though—fat vs. skinny—Auden begins his work outside of the frame of a single specific image.
Musée des Beaux Arts
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
—W. H. Auden
Effectively the first stanza of Auden’s response to Brueghel is an essay on the nature of representation and the meaning of the spectacle in relation to the lives of the many. Some spectacles—war, natural disaster—are inescapable. But many more extraordinary events happen in the midst of the bustle.
W H Auden
It’s striking, though, that in the second part of the poem when he enters the painting, the poem follows the same pattern of description as Williams’s approach. Both introduce the particular master, Brueghel, and follow from the central figure of the image—the farmer, turned away, through to the landscape and the “something amazing” that is being ignored. Auden, however, goes a step further in turning away from the action: after he’s located Icarus in the painting, he returns to larger scene, to the ship that “had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.” This final line deflates the extraordinary, and returns us to the opening “essay” in which “the dogs go on with their doggy life.” The ship has more “shiply” concerns than a boy falling to earth (or ocean).
Giving a talk—or writing an essay—gives me the chance to return to work I truly love and articulate something about it, as well as address how such things relate to my own poetry. It’s hard for me to think of two poems that, despite their startlingly similar approach to the central painting, so clearly evoke the two poles of ekphrasis—that is, the choice for the writer to stay within the frame, or the choice to step outside it. Thinking about these poems I have realised how often I think about how much I imagine the scene beyond the edge of the frame, or imagine the audio landscape, the filmic “atmos” that can only be imagined, and how often I invoke that “offstage” world within the body of my own descriptions. Having noticed this tendency, I’m left to contemplate the ways in which this may enhance or disrupt the project of representation, and how to work with that disruption in the future.
Kate Middleton
While I often deny the word “guilty” in relation to pleasures, I admit the phrase has its attractions and, yes, usefulness. A guilty pleasure has a little subversive thrill embedded, and is often something enjoyed when we feel we “should” be doing something else. That feeling of “should” could come from an awareness that we are procrastinating, but just as often I’m sure it comes from the idea that we could be spending our time on something with greater seriousness. One of my teachers and friends, the wonderful fiction and non-fiction writer Sugi Ganeshananthan, once said, “Guilt is a useless emotion. You should dispense with it.” I’ve treasured that as much as possible, and I’m sure it has greatly cut down on the amount of guilt I feel, though not eliminated it altogether. I feel guilt about not getting things done immediately (usually when I am juggling too many things at once) but not about enjoying non-canonical reading or watching television or seeing the latest dance movie, no matter how terrible. The mind needs rest too! (Writer friends Kodi Scheer, Miriam Lawrence and I spent a lot of time talking about television when I lived in Michigan, and I learned a lot—about culture, and about writing—from those discussions.)
I know that many writers have their guilty pleasure genres. Dorothy Porter used to talk about her love of detective fiction—how much she must have loved being able to bring that out in her verse novel in that genre, The Monkey’s Mask! And how much she must have enjoyed that book’s great success! Another friend and mentor, poet A. Van Jordan is a huge fan of comic books and graphic novels, a love that shows up in his poetry at times.
For me it’s not so much a genre as a milieu that I can’t bypass: the boarding school. I’m pleased to say I’m not the only person I know who has a great love of boarding school books (to my delight, when I mentioned these books to my father, he went to the bookshelves and brought back Rudyard Kipling’s Stalkey and Co., a favourite of his own from childhood) though I’m often greeted with a somewhat mystified expression when I mention my addiction—and with the question, “Did you go to boarding school or something?” (No, I did not.)
Boarding school books cover a lot of ground, it turns out. There’s fiction—both for children and adult, both popular and literary—memoir, history… even sociology! I am fond of the Malory Towers and St Clare’s and adore the Naughtiest Girl books by Enid Blyton for their endless rounds of midnight feasts, classroom pranks and little scrapes, and I love the Chalet School series by Elinor Brent-Dyer which leaves readers flabbergasted every time the girls leave for any kind of outdoor adventure without a rope—sure they can all speak three or more languages, but do they never learn common sense?—but these books are not the be-all-and-end-all of the “genre.”
I read the Enid Blyton boarding school books through my childhood. The Naughtiest Girl is a Monitor was a particular favourite. The tempestuous Elizabeth is fierce in her anger, and goes all in when she makes a decision, but of course, in time, is shown to be a “brick,” and a brick with the courage to admit when she was wrong. The Chalet Series I only discovered in early adulthood, and of the sixty-something books published I would only have read a quarter. (Many are not easy to get hold of.) However it was two books written for adults that made me realise my fascination with, and the possibilities of, the subject matter. The first is by the Swiss-Italian author Fleur Jaeggy I Beati Anni del Castigo. In English the title of this work (translated by the wonderful translator, novelist and essayist Tim Parks) is given as Sweet Days of Discipline—yes, this title has caused many raised eyebrows when I bring the book up, just like Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage provokes all manner of jokes. This is a slim novel or a novella, a book that has haunted me since I first read it a decade ago. It is one of those books I see so rarely on bookshop shelves that every time I come across it I buy it, and press it upon friends. Jaeggy writes of her adolescent girl characters with the kind of knife-sharp tenderness that at times, contradictorily, borders on disdain. She captures the particular romance of intense friendships between young women with unsettling coolness, and the entrapment of the boarding school setting heightens the feeling of claustrophobic obsession. Discovering this book led me to seek out her other work: reading her I sometimes feel as I do when looking on the great photographs of Diane Arbus (though, I hasten to add, with Arbus disdain is never present.) I have muddled my way through some of the Italian, too, but generally rely on the crispness of Parks’s rendering. (For all that I can, with plenty of time, understand what I’m reading, my Italian is not yet strong enough to fully understand the cool quality of Jaeggy’s cadence in the language.)
Fleur Jaeggy
The other book that confirmed my addiction was a memoir by the novelist Paul Watkins, Stand Before Your God. An American whose schooling took place in the UK first at the Dragon School, then at Eton, this memoir is a fascinating study of finding individuality in a setting that is so often associated with extreme conformity. In particular, in the final third of the book, Watkins gives a sense of his path towards becoming a writer—he wrote his first novel Night Over Day Over Night at the age of sixteen. (The book was published when Watkins was in his twenties.) Aside from this, the memoir turns so many of the familiar scenes from childhood school stories on their heads, revealing with great humour the abjection experienced by many boarders. While Watkins writes with humour, that same abjection is one of the drives behind the violent climax in Lindsay Anderson’s bleak boarding school film If… Both Jaeggy’s and Watkins’s books are gems, and Anderson’s film is rightly considered a classic.
Paul Watkins
While the boarding school book stretches in many different directions, the discovery of individual identity is almost always present. In fact, there is naturally an arc of the bildungsroman embedded in the majority of these stories. (Coming through boarding school is also part of the bildungsroman of classics such as Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby and David Copperfield.) The formation of selfhood is a topic that endlessly fascinates us, as we ourselves forge identity, stumbling along the way. (In fact, surely our readerly love of the bildungsroman is linked to the enduring popularity of biography, right?) The true bildungsroman must move beyond the school story as the subject reaches adulthood and emerges out of trial-and-error adolescence, and the fact that the boarding school book stays put in teenagehood (unless focussed on the teachers, such as another classic, Goodbye Mr Chips) will meet with resistance among many who don’t want to revisit that period of life—but for me, both its pain and its giddy frivolities find expression in this odd subset of books, and so I’ll stick with them.
Kate Middleton
In a recent edition of the New Yorker, television critic Emily Nussbaum wrote about the television show The Good Wife. As television shows produced for the major free-to-air networks in the United States go, The Good Wife is remarkably grown-up: the adults act like adults, with nuanced, contradictory opinions and mannerisms, the parents behave like parents, and the few teenagers that appear on the show act maddeningly like teenagers. The search for the grown-up is not a new phenomenon in this time of teen-oriented media saturation: Virginia Woolf famously declared George Eliot’s masterpiece Middlemarch “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people”. Like The Good Wife, Middlemarch is an in-for-the-long-haul novel, as characters making ordinary decisions become fully aware of their consequences and deal with those consequences in wrenchingly human ways. So it is with The Good Wife: while the procedural case-of-the week format of the show can be hit and miss, the long-term build up of these characters and the legal/political milieu of the show’s version of Chicago is multi-faceted, and therefore satisfying. But this is not a television review.
The Good Wife
I was interested in Nussbaum’s article not only because I am a fan of the show, but because she proposed that The Good Wife is “the first great series about technology” – technology in contemporary life, that is, and in a recognisably ordinary world. (Of course science-fiction frequently offers often-brilliant musing on technology.) The Good Wife explores social media, twitter, e-currency, online personae, the ins-and-outs of surveillance in the iPhone camera age among a myriad of other digital minutiae. Characters display greater or lesser facility in dealing with their technology, but what elsewhere could be turned into simplistic buffoonery – hey, grandma doesn’t know how to turn on a computer! – here becomes part of the debate about, to use Anthony Trollope’s phrase, “The Way We Live Now.” Or, in Nussbaum’s words, as the show goes on, its plots
have become a dense, provocative dialectic, one that weighs technology’s freedoms against its dangers, with a global sweep and an insider’s nuance. …“The Good Wife” stands in contrast not merely to other legal shows, with their “The Internet killed him!” plots, but also to the reductive punditry of the mainstream media, so obsessed with whether Twitter is making us stupid.
The writers, husband and wife team Michelle and Robert King, are aware that these technologies are here to stay – at least until they morph into something else – and through their show they want to explore what this means for human relationships.
George Eliot's Middlemarch
One of the reasons all this interests me is because I think a lot about the ways in which our virtual lives have come to affect our language. In the past decade, when the American dictionary makers Mirriam-Webster have released their annual top- ten “Words of the Year” list, many of these words have been technology-related. In 2004 “blog” made the top-ten, as blogs slithered from Live Journal musings to mainstream debate tools; in 2006 the verb “google” made it on the list followed in 2007 by “facebook” in its verb-form. Another group to get in on the Word of the Year action is the American Dialect society: for 2009 their word of the year was, not-surprisingly, “tweet.” The 2010 list of nominations included “hacktivism” and the new use of “trend” as a verb specific to online buzz – then voted on “App” as the winning word. The Oxford English Dictionary is also in on the list-making action – for 2009 their pick was “Unfriend.” On the Oxford University Press blog, they note that they refer to the annual Word of the Year season as “WOTY.” How acronym-savvy of them – that is, IMHO.
All of this leads me, in a roundabout way, to literature, and especially to poetry. So often literature is where neologisms arise – though these days it seems that the “newspeak” of technology, and the commentary that surrounds it, is the leader in forging new language. Last week I had the opportunity to hear the poet, editor and translator Michael Hulse speak, and one of the things he said that struck me was that “English is becoming impoverished: it is drifting toward its functional pole”. I do not know if I agree entirely with this view, but sometimes all the tech-talk makes me wonder.
Though it has taken a long time for television to make this nuanced exploration of our current technology, television seems a natural enough place for that discussion to arise: after all, television is itself a new technology, and is now constantly incorporating add-ons, from websites (apparently, by law in the United States any website that appears within a television show must exist in reality) to twitter-feeds. Show-runners monitor online discussion, at times changing the direction of a show as course-correction when chatter reveals viewers’ tastes. How Dickensian! Good television writers are incredibly skilled and, at times, positively artful in their understanding of drama. While we don’t tend to think of television when we think of literary arts, we are willing to make exceptions from time to time. Many viewers followed writer Aaron Sorkin between television shows such as the The West Wing and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and then to the big screen for outings like The Social Network, familiar with his particular cadence. And television writers – the architects behind this contemplation of technology – are used to thinking through the inherent technical aspects of television when writing anyway. Many novelists and poets think about these things on a daily basis, too – but on the other hand, plenty are always meaning to backup their hard drive, and left in a near-catatonic state if their mysterious machines fail them.
Still, as far as I know, many novelists are managing to incorporate all this technology into their work, albeit with some hiccups along the way – and poetry too is getting in on the game. Still, they’ve been slow to investigate its lyric possibilities.
It’s not because poets are luddites – there are plenty of terrific young internet-versed poets running around out there, and, judging by examples like Ron Silliman, John Tranter and Pam Brown, not a few older ones too. And it’s not because poets aren’t fans of neologisms – how many words did Shakespeare coin?
And, yes, there are plenty of ways that technology is coming into verse – some of it is to do with the way poems are written (from flarf to the use of specific programs to generate texts that may remove the human touch altogether), while many contemporary narrative poems of course draw on the ubiquity of all this tech cluttering our lives, and still other poems inhabit the lexicon of coding.
Jaya Savige
One Australian poet whose work shows an interest in the language of technology as part of the lyric poet’s arsenal is Jaya Savige. Savige can slip the brave new parlance into a poem such as “Summer Fig,” from his latest book Surface to Air, as in: “Our backyard god’s/ a giant fig, downloading/ gigs of shade onto the fresh cut grass.” He makes it work. While this is by no means a dominant strain in his work, it’s nonetheless something I notice whenever I pick up his books. Many poems by other authors stay entirely within the world of tech-speak, and often strike me as elaborate word/mind games—in-jokes, if you will—more than successful poems, claiming the language and putting it to use. In “Summer Fig” Savige takes the familiar words and uses them as lyric materials, re-examining the possibilities of this language to tell us something about our relationship to the world. Technology isn’t the point—but it’s a tool and, arguably, an enhancement in the poem. How novel.
