Hugh Crago's Launch Speech fourW thirty: Pearl

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.