No Rhyme No Reason

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday October 3, 1998

DON ANDERSON

WRONG, wrong, wrong! / That is the burden of my vernal song. Do not ask me who is going to win today's Federal election; I did not get within a stuffed kookaburra's cooee of what won the ABC's "Australia's Favourite Poem" vote. I confidently predicted the laurels would go to something sentimental, rhymed and metrically absolutely regular. If one is to judge by readers' poems that have appeared in the Herald's Stay In Touch columns since National Poetry Day on September 1, punters prefer poetry that is rhymed (preferably badly), in couplets and metrically more-or-less-but-not-quite-absolutely regular. "Loaded doggerel," so to speak.

Some of the Top 10 were rhymed and regular: My Country, Clancy of the Overflow, The Man From Snowy River, Bellbirds. Others were more rhythmically subtle: Judith Wright's South of My Days, Les Murray's An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow, W. H. Auden's Funeral Blues (courtesy Four Weddings and a Funeral ?) and Wilfred Owen's Dulce et Decorum Est. The wild, unrhymed card was surely American Allen Ginsberg's HOWL - there must be a lot of aging hippies out there who go against type and vote - in poetry competitions, at least.

But Australia's Favourite Poem, for which Andrea Stretton assured us "thousands" voted, was Kenneth Slessor's Five Bells, which is essentially unrhymed and which, though iambic pentameter dominates, is rhythmically variable. The poem is suffused with Slessor's subtle patterns of alliteration and assonance ("ecstasies of rectitude", "Ferry the falls of moonshine down").

What does this choice of a national favourite poem tell us about ourselves? That HSC syllabuses shape our taste? That Sydney Rules!, OK? Not that we are obsessed with an inland, rural mythology of an heroic past, that's for sure.

Perhaps, given the manner in which it was read on national television on September 1, Slessor's poem should be retitled Six Bells. How else explain the choice of a female actor, Lucy Bell, to read a variation on masculine "mateship", written by a man, spoken by a masculine voice and addressed to a drowned man? "Equal opportunity" or sheer perversity? Not, sadly, a success.

On October 7, the eve of Britain's National Poetry Day, the Forward Poetry Prizes, total value #16,000 ($47,000), for Best Collection, Best First Collection and Best Single Poem will be announced.

Brisbane-born Peter Porter is shortlisted in the third category. The Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes, must be the favourite in Best Collection, unless the panel of judges be composed entirely of unforgiving feminists. His Birthday Letters concerns his dead wife, Sylvia Plath.

Some of the poems, like The Minotaur, speak of the violence that is in marriage. Others, such as The Literary Life, are much calmer, and in this case celebrate one of the century's great poets, who was almost never rhythmically regular:

We climbed Marianne Moore's narrow stairs,

To her bower-bird bric-a-brac nest, in Brooklyn,

Daintiest relic of Americana.

Her talk, a needle

Unresting - darning incessantly

Chain-mail with crewelwork flow ers . . .

Being a Sydney Rules! OK? sentimental bloke, I want the prize to go to Gwyneth Lewis, who was a quiet star at this year's Sydney Writers' Festival. Her second book of poetry, Zero Gravity (Bloodaxe), is shortlisted along with Hughes, Anne Carson, Derek Mahon and Glyn Maxwell. Her second book in English, that is, for Lewis is bilingual, having published two volumes of poetry in Welsh. Being bilingual in English and Welsh is not the same thing as being bilingual in English and, say, Spanish, or English and Chinese, a complex fate Gwyneth Lewis, Welsh-born and educated at Cambridge (UK), Harvard and Columbia (US), wryly addressed while in Sydney.

Various as her poetry is, Lewis deftly shows that rhyme has a role, in for example her A Soviet Waiter in Parables & Faxes (Bloodaxe, 1995). I feed on the diners' waiting,

grow fat on their silent rage.

Bugger the boys in the Kremlin,

This is the waiter's age.

Gwyneth Lewis's new book comes larded with plaudits from the late Joseph Brodsky, Peter Porter and Les A. Murray ("She is the one to bet on"). The brilliant and contrary Murray was the subject of a documentary - or was it a "loaded dogumentary"? - made by his mate Bob Ellis, titled The Bastards from the Bush and screened on National Poetry Day. Let no man say Ellis is not a genius - anyone who can think of running the actor John Howard against the politician John Howard in the Prime Minister's electorate in the expectation that the actor would win because he is taller, better-looking and a more accomplished public speaker is surely inspired.

"After the flowers of friendship faded, friendship faded," Gertrude Stein alliterated. One trusts that the life-long Murray-Ellis friendship has survived Ellis's steely peroration: "I fear that Murray in being only a poet has failed in his duty to be also completely a citizen. I fear he has done too little with his life."

Who does Ellis want Murray to be? Sir Paul Hasluck? John Bray, CJ? Sir Henry Parkes? Murray, I have no doubt, would hold that there is no such thing as "being only a poet".

© 1998 Sydney Morning Herald

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