Four W 30 (‘Pearl’)
·
Thanks to David:
o
For
asking me to speak
o
For
tolerating what I might say (since he and I differ on some things, and possibly
most of all on poetry)
o
For
generously arriving at my house year after year with a copy of the latest Four W
o
And
most of all, for being a tireless advocate for literature throughout his long academic
career, and an enthusiastic performer
of literature to listeners who don’t necessarily breathe the rarified air of
academia and ‘literary fiction’.
·
I’m here under false pretences:
o
I’m
not a ‘Writer’ in the sense that many of you are. I don’t write out of a sense
that literature is my vocation, I just write because I have to
o
Most
of what I have published in my life has been non-fiction, and it has never sold
well.
o
I began
writing poems in 2009—ten years ago now, when I was 63 years old. I’m only a
published poet by courtesy of Stephen Matthews at Ginninderra Press, who
accepted a collection that included some of the same poems that the Poetry
Editors of a number of reputable literary magazines had turned down!
o
Even
less am I a short story writer. I’ve completed three, but none has been
published so far.
·
Nevertheless,
I have been a reader all my life, and believe I have some understanding of what
makes a good poem, and of what makes a good story. And in this speech, I intend
to elaborate on my convictions, and mention some of the contributions to Four W 30 which fulfil my criteria for good
writing in their genre. I’m not an academic, and I don’t speak Post-Modern, so relax,
you’ll be able to understand what I say. But you may be alarmed at its
bluntness, and possibly conclude that I am a ‘grumpy old man’. Which I probably
am.
Writing verse
does not make you a poet.
A poem is not a
piece of snappy prose, cut up into lines and printed with no punctuation
Refusing to
capitalise the word ‘I’, and using an ampersand instead of the word ‘and’ do
not make you a poet (only an imitator of EE Cummings).
Producing verse
heavily freighted with clever similes and metaphors does not make you a poet. You
are mistaking the appearance for the substance.
In our embracing
of ‘freedom of expression’ and our fatuous belief that ‘every child (adult) can
be creative’, I think we have lost sight
of what a poem involves:
·
A poem should have some sort of music, or an equivalent of music. After all, poetry
evolved out of music, aeons before written language existed.
‘Oh
no!’ you’re thinking, ‘he means poems must have metre and rhyme!’ I don’t mean
that.
I
attend a monthly ‘Poetry In the Pub’ event at Katoomba. Its tiny audience,
mainly made up of the poets themselves, seem most to appreciate bush poetry. That
could be because bush poetry competes best with the sounds of rattling ice and
smashing glass (and the roar of the televised footie from the screens in the
next room) but that’s not the real reason. I don’t personally warm to sing-song
rhythms and wearily predictable rhyming couplets, but I know what that audience
is responding to in the bush poetry they applaud: a recognisable music, the
nostalgia of remembering Lawson and Patterson’s verse from school, the comfort
of predictability (rhyme, when done well, can be very comforting, especially at
the end of a poem that hasn’t had any rhyme at all). It’s easy to follow, it
tells a story, and it has shape.
I
don’t think poems need to rhyme, or have any recognisable metre, but they
should have ‘music’ in some form—they
should sound good when read aloud. And they should offer us the
gratification of listening as a design works itself out, in just a minute or
two (or three).
·
A
good poem involves the distillation
of language into a few words that pull their weight, and say much. That is a
long way from writing verse studded with large, obvious ‘big words’ and clever
images—the written equivalent of costume jewellery.
At
primary school, kids are praised for their ability to use ‘big words’ but a
real poet must learn to see that poetry is not a display of your extensive
vocabulary, or a demonstration of how easily you can baffle the reader by using
a word they can only guess at the meaning of! It means using the right word, the necessary word, and you only get to know that by reading heaps of
what other writers have written. Having good models. You need to recite great
poems as you walk, poems that you’ve memorised. I walk a lot—maybe you don’t,
but probably even in a car, you can declaim your favourite poems aloud to
yourself. It’s probably less dangerous than texting, anyway!
·
Good
poems are about economy of means.
Doing more with less. A poem should be no longer than it needs to be.
·
Poems
also should ‘go somewhere’ in the sense that they need to end meaningfully, not
just tail off. They don’t need to tell a
story, exactly, although they may do that, but they do need structure and a
sense of movement.
·
And
it helps a lot if you are writing about something meaningful, not just any old
thing. Here I can appreciatively quote Greg
Pritchard’s contribution to Four W 30:
I spent thirty dollars on a
book of contemporary Australian poetry
It worked out as one dollar
per poet
I wasted thirty dollars on a
book of contemporary Australian poetry
There are no meaty bones
here, or if there are, they are small …
I’m compelled to
think of that crude anti-Nazi rhyme that was sung in Britain in the earlier
days of World War Two:
Hitler—has only got one ball (it was true!)
Goering—has two but they are
small
Himmler—is somewhat sim’lar
But Goebels—has no balls—at
all.
In his poem, Greg takes a single metaphor (the
‘ossuary’ or collection of bones) and works it out all the way through, not
overdoing it, not ‘going on and on’ (which is sometimes a problem with bush
poetry, and not just bush poetry either!). The only ‘big words’ in the poem are
the anatomical terms for the bones. And I agree with Greg that poetry should
address meaningful subjects.
I liked Wes Lee’s ‘Bar Bright’ and Jenny
Blackford’s ‘Snow’. They’ve both caught the pathos of the human condition,
bodies brought low, reduced to faltering and shame, by degenerative disease, or
by drink.
Ten
years into the long, slow forgetting
He still recited lines from Latin
poets,
Listed actors in obscure
Russian films, determined to defeat his misbehaving brain.
Bodies and easy prey for
Parkinson’s,
Minds a delicate dessert.
Have you tried
reading your own poems aloud? Do you realise that reading them aloud will give
you a better handle on what works than
any amount of on-screen revision? Why are so many poets so unable to speak
their own poems with conviction and without embarrassment? Maybe because the
act of voicing them aloud actually shows what’s wrong with them? Get those things fixed before you perform your poem in public, not after!
Do you realise
that if you eliminate all
punctuation, then the person reading your poem aloud (even if it’s yourself!) has
absolutely no guide to how to read your lines meaningfully. Or does nobody dare
to read it aloud in case they ‘get it wrong’ and therefore violate your
creativity?
Marie Clear’s ‘Stolen Life’ is simple, direct and effective. I like
the fact that she’s not scared to use ordinary words. She doesn’t need to stud
her poem with clever verbal tricks that actually detract from the power of what
she’s saying.
Denise O’Hagan’s ‘Vermeer in Boston’ was my pick of the poems in Four W 30. Of course, I know the famous
Vermer painting that is her point of reference—so it doesn’t require me to make
a massive effort to imagine what on earth the poet is talking about. And, if
you do know that painting, you’ll know how her rendering of the young woman in
the painting is so very accurate:
I met her painted gaze,
unflinching,
Wondering, even then, what
she’d been writing,
(And to whom, and why).
She’d raised her eyes,
unblinking,
Poised and faintly mocking
Too intelligent, I couldn’t help
thinking
For twentieth century
positivity.
There is minimal
punctuation, but the lines are arranged so that I don’t ever need to worry away
at what happened to the sentence I thought had begun a while back! The words
that she needs are there, but no more, no showing off, no obvious cleverness.
Just good writing.
****
Stories
Anyone can learn
to describe a thin slice of their own life with an amusing combination of
embarrassment and insight. But how does that ‘slice’ become a ‘short story’? Is
a ‘story’ a bit of life with a bit of shaping added and some clever turns of phrase?
What you turn out at as an exercise at a writers’ workshop? I think it needs to
be something more than that.
Was it a bit of
your life that was intensely joyful, or painful for you? Emotion, especially
recollected emotion, propels us to write, but it doesn’t necessarily mean we
have a story when we write something
based on it.
All writing is to
some degree an ego trip, but your job as a proper writer is to minimise the
ego, and maximise empathy for your possible readers. Your readers shouldn’t be
admiring your cleverness, they should be pulled into your story, and starting
to care about what is happening to the people in it. Otherwise, it isn’t a
story, just a ‘piece of writing’. Just as with poetry, too many adjectives, too
many metaphors, too many funny bracketed interjections, too many words that
aren’t needed—when we write like
this, we revert to nerdy adolescents at high school, showing the teacher how
many ‘big words’ we know!
·
A proper
story should go somewhere. That is
the nature of story. We are drawn through art into a quest—to uncover the
mystery, to know more about the characters, to find out what happens to them. Michel Dignand’s ‘Awake’, Louise D’Arcy’s
‘The Lovemeister’ and Melissa Chip’s ‘Two Imposters’ all go somewhere. I continued reading
because I wanted to find out what was going to happen to the characters, not
because I was admiring the authors’ fine writing!
Alan Fettling’s ‘The Balsa
Canoe’ goes somewhere. It
manages to convert personal experience into something of wider significance.
Alan memorably shows us how different a person’s memory can be from that of his
own siblings—something I’ve recently and painfully experienced myself, when my
own brother and sister angrily rejected my account of previous generations of
our family as ‘disgusting’ and ‘unethical’.
‘The
Balsa Canoe’ encapsulates the sadness of the narrator’s relationship with his
father—a child being forced into something he didn’t ever want to do, that he
can’t do, and that someone else ‘owns’. A father desperately wanting to
‘complete himself’ through his son. All beautifully understated. The writing is
never self indulgent. The one ‘dramatic action’—the smashing of the
canoe—stands for a whole world of pain.
·
A good story can remind us, vividly, of
things we already know,
and enable us to recognise things in
that experience that we didn’t know we knew.
Helen Lyne’s ‘Last Day of
Term’ immediately lights
up memories of my own, of a very similar teacher, in a very similar classroom,
now sixty years age. And I like Helen’s understated recognition of the fact
that significant things repeat themselves—we ourselves become the
people we once observed caustically from the outside … Each of these
recreations give us recognition: we
are (as T. S. Eliot put it) taken back to where we started, but know the place for the first time.
Ellen Rodger’s ‘Laundromat
Café’ could have been
just a succession of observations of life in one of the Western Suburbs, but it
ends up something more. Sad and almost haunting in its bleak fragments of
conversation and image. Again, I know
this place, these people. I’ve been there, I’ve heard them talk. The story
leaves us thinking, ‘Is this all human life is?’ Is it better if you have money
and choices? Perhaps, but I ended up wondering!
The
final story in the issue, by Robyne
Young, shows (to me, anyway) the selfishness, superficiality and brittle
cleverness of two people who’ve just substituted ‘hooking up’ for the real
connection they really desperately long for. I haven’t lived this sort of behaviour, but I catch glimpses of it every day,
in cafes, from couples sitting at the next table. It doesn’t make easy reading.
It confronts us with how incredibly petty, superficial and dishonest most of us human beings really are!
·
Stories confront us with life’s dilemmas,
rather than offering superficial ‘solutions’ to them.
Familiar family
tensions in Sean Mackel’s ‘Borderlands’—his
story reminds me that the stuff of writers is so often the stuff of
therapy—writing about it doesn’t heal it; but talking about it with a therapist
doesn’t necessarily heal it either. Family bonds are the strongest we know, and
family antagonisms the most resistant to healing. Some storytellers could have
been therapists; some therapists could perhaps have been storytellers—but have
settled for being ‘editors’ of the stories their clients tell them.
Arna Radovich’s ‘The Limits of Forgetting’ is about the Holocaust survivor’s story,
his daughter’s wish for him to tell it, and his wish to leave it well alone.
She says, ‘Otherwise, what was the point of it all?’ For her and the future generations there is a point, but not for him.
So who should ‘win’? Stories pose the unanswerable questions of human life.
Therapists try (often in a facile, arrogant way) to actually answer the
questions, resolve the dilemmas. And fail as often as they succeed.
For me, a really
good short story is one that I’d want to read again. Not one that depends
entirely on a ‘twist’ at the end, in which the reader realises he or she has
been tricked. I probably wouldn’t want to read that sort of story again.
Any good piece of
writing offers us something real, a ‘meaty bone’ we can chew on, an
accurately-detailed picture we can return to, a challenge to our established,
comfortable ways of seeing the world, an insight into people unlike us, a
widened sympathy for the human predicament.
Similarly with
poems. If it only works the first time you read it, it’s unlikely to be a
really good poem. And it should sing!
Hugh Crago, December 7, 2019.
