“Nothing is more transient than our feelings, and nothing more enduring” – Thomas Hardy

Poetry is defined by poetry and judged by poetry. In Whitman, his first readers recognised the marks of poetry.

“Everything has to change so that everything can stay the same” – Lampedusa

What we seek in a work of art is reassurance about the nature of human beings.

The content is not the poem, except where it is.

There is a possibility that haunts us: that the world we know is not the world as it is, but a sham; that the world is unknowable, or is reduced to our small measure.

“Practical experience is the criterion of truth” – Engels

In the world, we encounter only physical objects and the properties of objects.

“Sensuous qualities are what is most precious to us” – Dewey

A materialist understanding of life finds its appropriate expression in an imagist style – a style that presents only physical things, out of which something “spiritual” occurs.

A great poem is a remark the world can’t forget.

In poetry, one sees also with the ear. “The horses’ lumpy hooves clump on the planks . . .”

Poetry is the mimetic use of language. Although mimesis is fundamental, it is best when it is not overdone (as is readily seen with alliteration, one of its forms).

Poetry uses the non-semantic elements of language – rhythm, texture, enjambment, spacing, tone, rhyme – to intensify the semantic.

Metaphors easily become symbols, and devalue the independent nature of their parts; or they imply an idealist point of view (that of “the fundamental Oneness of things”), again devaluing the particular. They muddy the image: “He is a lion.” One sees something grotesque and imprecise.

Simile, in the act of evoking an object, by showing its surprising similarity to an aspect of something else, at the same time insists on its difference from that thing, and thus both terms are illuminated. We have an intuition of the actual, wordless object; the thing steps through the words.

Keeping separate the things it relates, a simile acknowledges that each has a unique nature.

“A thing is itself and not another thing” – Butler

At the same time a simile shows things as being experienced relatively: they are seen in the light they throw upon each other.

The simile is Classical; the metaphor Romantic. The great exponent of simile is Homer. Everything stands forth clearly, in Greek light. Metaphor lends itself to Christian doctrine. One term, which might be called the “earthly”, is subsumed in the other.

Metaphor, simile: universal, particular.

Similes don’t have to use “like” and “as”. Ezra Pound’s Haiku-like poem “In a Station of the Metro” functions as a simile by separating its terms onto different lines. A simile has space.

Poetry occurs when a poem has ended. It is an emanation of the words.

Language, which carries knowledge, is one of our senses – it helps us to see. But this doesn’t mean we only experience within language. The world often contradicts our hypotheses.

The poet has to be aware of all in the world against which language fails, if he is to find something original to say. Language is made fresh by struggling with what is not language. Intractable material is our luckiest gift.

Art’s function, since the time of the cave artists, has been to provide vicarious experience.

Ultimately, it is the technique of a poem that sanctifies its content – only technique can keep the content fresh.

The form chosen for a poem is an allusion to other poetry, and is part of its meaning.

Order in poetry isn’t a matter of following rules, but arises from within the writer, as a river creates its own banks.

The line in free verse is a gesture for the voice. It is like a free line-drawing.

A sense of the limitations of lyric poetry can give rise to an interest in aphorism. The aphorism is an attempt to speak more directly, with more of intellect, than the lyric allows. Like a poem, an aphorism presents, it doesn’t argue; it strives for maximum compression; it is highly worked; it has a rhythmic balance in its expression.

The sense of all things being physical will by no means devalue the mystery of their existence.

The morality of a poem is in its tone.

The stricture against sentimentality is not a formalist judgment, and neither is that against sadism, its obverse, which ought to be equally condemned.

The formalist believes we must bring none of the emotions of everyday life to the contemplation of art. He would have us check our humanity at the cloakroom.

The reductive rage is also found in philosophy and in science – it is an irritable tidy-mindedness.

Symbolist poetry favours an elusive, ungraspable content as a means of representing, of asserting, the numinous. It is indicative of 19th century intellectuals’ panic in the face of science.

The individual is the moral agent. A poem need only affect one person to be humanly significant.

Exponents of “New Criticism” devalue the poet’s intentions, when all of the formal decisions in his work were based on these.

Hume, many are yet to acknowledge, is the last philosopher, in pointing out how we are “constrained” to accept the commonsense world.

The fact that has to be allowed for, by formalist critics, is that the content of a poem is often moving. This can’t be merely ignored.

If we demand of our writers that they have virtuous lives, we will not find much to read. But the human being is very complex.

We do not want a poetry of humanistic platitudes.

It is a mistake to meet writers one admires: if they are more interesting than their work, they have failed as artists; if the work is more interesting than they are, we have wasted our time.

Language tells us what we are feeling. The finer discriminations of language are the poet’s specialty.

One writes poetry to experience a revelation.

It is a requirement of common sense that the rhythm of poetry be appropriate to its content. To take an obvious example, the tripping rhythm of Hood’s “The Bridge of Sighs” is distasteful; it doesn’t show the feeling it claims to have for its subject, but rather expresses something like a perversion:

One more Unfortunate,

Weary of breath,

Rashly importunate,

Gone to her death!

Take her up tenderly,

Lift her with care;

Fashioned so slenderly,

Young, and so fair!

. . .

Contrast this with the folk song, “St James Infirmary” (given here in one of its many versions):

I went down St James Infirmary

And I found my baby there

She was stretched on a long white table

So cold so lean so fair.

. . .

In its pace, in its sombre steps, there is here the dignity of sadness.

“The music of the word is never just a matter of sound . . . it results from the relation between the sound and its meaning. And meaning, content, must always lead” – Pasternak

Poetry is the spirit that is generated out of matter.

Line-breaks in free verse are the meaningful pauses or emphases of speech. “The lingering of the voice according to feeling,” as DH Lawrence says (yet he does not explore this: he uses almost always an end-stopped line).

Like Hegelians, we must both affirm and negate the content in the poem. As are all true things, this is a paradox.

Human beings are catalysts of the possibilities of the Earth. By means of the wind to sail against the wind. By means of words to see around language.

Civilisation is to do all things artistically – to pursue them for their own sake.

What cannot be said can be shown, through images, and the juxtaposition of images.

“No argument can transcend experience” – Hume

Chinese poetry, as it is known in translation, has become a genre of 20th century English-language poetry. This is a form that never existed before, in East or West. Such poetry is restrained to the maximum extent, in thought and feeling. Its technical pleasure is a rhythmical precision, and the calm strength of its end-stopped lines. It has a new tone of voice, a murmuring voice. It has a down-to-earth location. Arthur Waley’s are the paradigmatic versions, wherein we find his own voice abetted by that of a particular figure, Po Chu-i. The voice of his poems is more original than that of Ezra Pound, which, by comparison, has a slight vulgarity, a brashness. Such “Chinese poetry” confounds all arguments against content in verse – this poetry survives almost entirely on its content.

Art exists for the improvement of the senses.

The “pathetic fallacy” must have greatly intensified the early human experience of nature. We can preserve something of such feeling now, if we treat it as similitude.

As observers, matter exceeds our expectations.

Hume’s answer – that nature compels us to live by commonsense beliefs – means intellectuals count for little. The rage of the intellectual is that of Caliban “at not seeing his face in the glass”.

Nature forces on us belief in the external world, other minds, inference, the communicative possibilities of language, causation, a possible accuracy in memory, and the compatibility of choice with determinism.

Political protest in poetry is self-righteousness.

“You need to create the poet while you write the poem” – Machado

The most obvious trait of real poetry is that you want to read it again.

“The romantic is deficient or under-developed in his ability to distinguish between fact and fantasy, whereas the classicist, or adult mind, is thoroughly realist, without illusions, without daydreams, without hope, without bitterness, and with abundant resignation” – TS Eliot, The Criterion, October 1923

Under the regime of Modernism, rhyme only survived in popular song. We found song-writers are able to hear subtleties – they love imperfect rhymes. “I know I laughed when you left/ but I only hurt myself . . .”

Content in poetry, or the subtlety of emotion, which is “to airy lightness beat,” is caught out of the corner of the eye and allowed to cling in the words. It is the outcome of the endeavour of style.

Poetry itself has been for many “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”.

© Copyright Robert Gray 2015

My mother told me she had often stayed awake

in those years, and of a certain night

at a rented farm,

on the end of the dark leaf-mulch of a drive,

where she sat in the doorway with mosquito-smoke,

listening for my father, after the pubs had closed, knowing he would have to walk

‘miles, in his state’, or sleep in weeds by the road,

if no-one dropped him at our gate

(since long before this he had driven his own car off a mountain-side

and becoming legend had ridden

on the easily-felled banana palms

of a steep plantation, right to the foot and a kitchen door,

the car reared high, and slipping fast, on a vast

raft of sap-oozing fibre,

from which he’d climbed down, unharmed, his most soberly polite,

had doffed his hat

to the terrified

young woman with a child in arms—who must have appeared

slowly as a photograph

developing in a dish—and never driven again).

This other night, my mother was reluctant to go out, poking with a stick

under the lantana, down every slope,

and leave us kids in the house asleep, a cough

trundled among us,

and fell asleep herself, clothed, on the unopened bed,

but leapt upright, sometime later, with the foulest taste—glimpsed at once

he was still not home—and rushed out, gagging,

to find that, asleep, she’d bitten off the tail

of a small lizard, dragged through her lips. That bitterness, I used to imagine;

she running onto the verandah to spit,

and standing there, spat dry, seeing across the silent, frosty bush

the distant lights of town had died.

And yet my mother never ceased from what philosophers invoke,

from extending ‘care’,

though she only read the Women’s Weekly,

and although she could be ‘damned impossible’ through a few meal-times, of course.

That care for things, I see, was her one real companion in those years.

It was as if there were two of her,

a harassed person, and a calm, who saw what needed to be done, and

stepped through her, again.

Her care you could watch reappear like the edge of tidal water

in salt flats, about everything.

It was this made her drive out the neighbour’s bull from our garden with a broom,

when she saw it trample her seedlings—

back, step by step, she forced it, through the broken fence,

it bellowing and hooking either side sharply at her all the way, and I

six years old on the back steps calling

‘Let it have a few old bloody flowers, Mum.’

No. She locked the broom handle straight-armed across its nose

and was pushed right back herself

quickly across the yard. She

ducked behind some tomato stakes,

and beat with the handle, all over that deep hollowness of the muzzle,

poked with the straw at its eyes,

and had her way, drove it out bellowing;

and me, slapping into the steps, the rail, with an ironing cord,

or rushing down there, quelled also,

repelled to the bottom step, barracking. And all,

I saw, for those little flimsy leaves

she fell to at once, small as mouse prints, among the chopped-up loam.

2

Whereas, my father only seemed to care that he would never

appear a drunkard

while ever his shoes were clean.

A drunkard he defined as someone who had forgotten the mannerisms

of a gentleman. The gentleman, after all, is only known,

only exists, through manner. He himself had the most perfect manners,

of a kind. I can imagine no-one

with a style more easily and coolly precise. With him,

manner had subsumed all of feeling. To brush and dent the hat

which one would raise, or to look about over each of us

and then unfold a napkin

to allow the meal, in that town where probably all of the men

sat to eat of a hot evening without a shirt,

was his dry passion. After all, he was a university man

(although ungraduated), something more rare then.

My father, I see, was hopelessly melancholic—

the position of those wary

small eyes, and thin lips, on the long-boned face

proclaimed the bitterness of every pleasure, except those of form.

He often drank alone

at the RSL club, and had been known to wear a carefully-considered tie

to get drunk in the sandhills, watching the sea.

When he was ill and was at home at night, I would look into his

bedroom,

on the end of a gauzed verandah,

from around the door and a little behind him,

and see his frighteningly high-domed skull under the lamp-light,

as he read

in a curdle of cigarette smoke.

Light shone through wire mesh onto the packed hydrangea heads,

and on the great ragged mass of insects, like bees over a comb,

that crawled tethered

and ignored right beside him. He seemed content, at these times,

as though he’d done all he need

to make a case against himself, and had been forced, objectively, to give up.

He liked his bland ulcer-patient food

and the heap of library books I brought. (My instructions always were:

‘Nothing whingeing. Nothing by New York Jews;

nothing by women, especially the French; nothing

translated from the Russian.’)

And yet, the only time I heard him say that he’d enjoyed anything

was when he spoke of the bush, once. ‘Up in those hills,’

he advised me, pointing around, ‘when the sun is coming out of the sea,

standing among

that lifting timber, you can feel at peace.’

I was impressed. He asked me, another time, that when he died

I should take his ashes somewhere, and not put him with the locals,

in the cemetery.

I went up to one of the places he had named

years earlier, at the time of day he had spoken of, when the half-risen sun

was as strongly-spiked as the one

on his Infantry badge,

and I scattered him there, utterly reduced at last, among the wet,

breeze-woven grass.

For all his callousness to my mother, I had long accepted him,

who had shown me the best advice

and left me to myself. And I’d come by then to see that we all

inhabit pathos.

Opening his plastic, brick-sized box, that morning,

my pocket-knife slid

sideways and pierced my hand—and so I dug with that one

into his ashes, which I found were like a mauvish-grey marble dust,

and felt I needn’t think of anything more to say.

Notes on the Poem

Off to one side, the smoke of different fires in a row,

like fingers spread and dragged to smudge:

it is a rubbish dump, always burning.

Behind us, the city

driven like stakes into the earth.

A waterbird lifts above this swamp

as a turtle moves on the Galapagos shore.

We turn off down a gravel road,

approaching the dump. All the air wobbles

in a cheap mirror.

There is fog over the hot sun.

Now the distant buildings are stencilled in the smoke.

And we come to a landscape of tin cans,

of cars like skulls,

that is rolling in its sand dune shapes.

Amongst these vast grey plastic sheets of heat,

shadowy figures

who seem engaged in identifying the dead—

they are the attendants, in overalls and goggles,

forking over rubbish on the dampened fires.

A sour smoke

is hauled out everywhere,

thin, like rope. And there are others moving—scavengers.

As in hell the devils

might poke about through our souls, after scraps

of appetite

with which to stimulate themselves,

so these figures

seem to come wandering, in despondence, with an eternity

where they can find

some peculiar sensation.

We get out and move about also.

The smell is huge,

blasting the mouth dry:

the tons of rotten newspaper, and great cuds of cloth . . .

And standing where I see the mirage of the city

I realize I am in the future.

This is how it shall be after men have gone.

It will be made of things that worked.

A labourer hoists an unidentifiable mulch

on his fork, throws it in the flame:

something flaps

like the rag held up in ‘The Raft of the Medusa.’

We approach another, through the smoke,

and for a moment he seems that demon with the long barge pole.

—It is a man, wiping his eyes.

Someone who worked here would have to weep,

and so we speak. The rims beneath his eyes are wet

as an oyster, and red.

Knowing all that he does about us,

how can he avoid a hatred of men?

Going on, I notice an old radio, that spills

its dangling wire—

and I realize that somewhere the voices it received

are still travelling,

skidding away, riddled, around the arc of the universe;

and with them, the horse-laughs, and the Chopin

which was the sound of the curtains lifting,

one time, to a coast of light.

Notes on the Poem

I stay to watch

from a balcony, as it goes up onto

the huge, dark harbour,

out beyond a gangling jetty;

the palm tree tops

make the sound of touches

of a brush on the snare drum

in the windy night. It goes beyond

street lights’ fluorescence

over dark water, that ceaseless

activity, like chromosomes

uniting and dividing, and out beyond

the tomato stake patch

of the yachts, with their orange

lamps; leaving this tuberous

shaped bay, for the city,

above the plunge of night. Ahead,

neon redness trembles

down in the water, as if into ice, and

the longer white lights

feel nervously about in the blackness,

towards here, like hands

after the light switch.

The ferry is drawn along

polished marble, to be lost soon

amongst a blizzard of light

swarming below the Bridge,

a Busby Berkeley spectacular

with thousands in frenzied, far-off

choreography, in their silver lamé,

the Bridge like a giant prop.

This does seem in a movie theatre;

the boat is small as a moth

wandering through the projector’s beam,

seeing it float beneath the city.

I’ll lose sight of the ferry soon—

I can find it while it’s on darkness,

like tasting honeycomb,

filled as it is with its yellow light.

Notes on the Poem

nothing much in my pockets but sand

from the beach. A Shell station (with their ‘Mens’ locked),

a closed hamburger stand.

I washed at a tap down beside the changing sheds,

stepping about on mud. Through the wall,

smell of the vandals’ lavatory,

and an automatic chill flushing in the urinal.

Eat a floury apple, and stand about. At this kerb

sand crawls by, and palm fronds here

scrape dryly. Car after car now—it’s like a boxer

warming-up with the heavy bag, spitting air.

A car slows and I chase it. Two hoods

going shooting. Tattoos and greasy fifties pompadour.

Rev in High Street, drop their first can.

Plastic pennants on the distilled morning, everywhere;

a dog trotting, and someone hoses down a pavement;

our image flaps in shop fronts; smoking on

past the pink ‘Tropicana’ motel (stucco with sea shells);

the RSL, like a fancy-dress pharoah; the ‘Odeon’,

a warehouse picture show. We pass

bulldozed acres; the place is becoming chrome,

tile-facing and plate-glass, they’re making California;

pass an Abo, not attempting to hitch, outside town.

Notes on the Poem

out the back, where concrete gutters

crawled off

heavily, and the hot, fertilizer-thick,

sticky stench of blood

sent flies mad,

but I settled for one of the lowest-paid jobs, making mince,

the furthest end from those bellowing,

sloppy yards. Outside, the pigs’ fear

made them mount one another

at the last minute. I stood all day

by a shaking metal box

that had a chute in, and a spout,

snatching steaks from a bin they kept refilling

pushing them through

arm-thick corkscrews, grinding around inside it, meat or not—

chomping, bloody mouth—

using a greasy stick

shaped into a penis.

When I grabbed it the first time

it slipped, slippery as soap, out of my hand,

in the machine

that gnawed it hysterically a few moments

louder and louder, then, shuddering, stopped;

fused every light in the shop.

Too soon to sack me—

it was the first thing I’d done.

For a while, I had to lug gutted pigs

white as swedes

and with straight stick tails

to the ice rooms, hang them by the hooves

on hooks—their dripping

solidified like candle-wax—or pack a long intestine

with sausage meat.

We got meat to take home—

bags of blood;

red plastic with the fat showing through.

We’d wash, then

out on the blue metal

toward town; but after sticking your hands all day

in snail-sheened flesh,

you found, around the nails, there was still blood.

I usually didn’t take the meat.

I’d walk home on

the shiny, white-bruising beach, in mauve light,

past the town.

The beach, and those startling, storm-cloud mountains, high

beyond the furthest fibro houses, I’d come

to be with. (The only work

was at this Works.)—My wife

carried her sandals, in the sand and beach grass,

to meet me. I’d scoop up shell-grit

and scrub my hands,

treading about

through the icy ledges of the surf

as she came along. We said that working with meat was like

burning-off the live bush

and fertilizing with rottenness,

for this frail green money.

There was a flaw to the analogy

you felt, but one

not looked at, then—

the way those pigs stuck there, clinging onto each other.

Notes on the Poem

as if on board a clipper

clambering at sea,

and it’s the train that booms and cracks,

it tears the wind apart.

The man’s gone

who had the bunk below me. I swing out,

close his bed and rattle up the sash—

there’s sunlight rotating

off the drab carpet. And the water sways

solidly in its silver bowl, so cold

it joins through my hand.

I see, where I’m bowed,

one of those bright crockery days

from so much I recall.

The train’s shadow, like a bird’s,

flees on the blue and silver paddocks,

over fences that look split from stone,

and banks of fern,

a red bank, full of roots,

over dark creeks, where logs are fallen,

and blackened tree trunks.

Down these slopes move,

as a nude descends a staircase,

slender white eucalypts;

and now the country bursts open on the sea—

across a calico beach unfurled,

strewn with flakes of light

that make the compartment whirl.

Shuttering shadows. I rise into the mirror

rested. I’ll leave my hair

ruffled a bit, stow the book and wash-bag

and city clothes. Everything done, press the latches

into the straining case

that for twelve months have been standing out

of a morning, above the wardrobe

in a furnished room.

Notes on the Poem