MARTIN LANGFORD

A Poet Responds to the Culture’s Default View

Jane Gleeson-White, Australian Classics: 50 Great Writers and their Celebrated Works

Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 2007, 338 pp

ISBN 978-1-74175-341-7, RRP $29.95

This is a selection of classics made by someone who is steeped in the novel, who has some familiarity with poetry and other forms, but whose choices reflect the mainstream view that the majority of classics will be novels and that everything else will be, if not peripheral, then nevertheless not the main game.

     It has always been a fraught question as to what constitutes parity of achievement between poets and novelists. In some respects, of course, it does not matter: people just read what they will. But insofar as it affects the writer’s capacity to engage in the dialogues of his or her culture, it matters hugely. If poets have struggled for an adequate public presence, it is partly because of the way this question has been adjudicated. It also matters to the culture: the belief that our principal literary achievement lies in the novel greatly affects our understanding of what we think we should pay attention to – and that in turn inflects the culture’s imagination.

     At some stage over the last two hundred years – perhaps in the nineteenth century, when so many of the admirable rich used their wealth to write long – it was decided that one key test of literature was narrative extension. This is the critical equivalent of believing that rich people are more virtuous. Occasionally they are. But there are other criteria. Some forms make a virtue of saying only the essential things. Poetry, for example, can go straight to the heart of the matter, whereas the novel must negotiate its story before it gets there. The poem can use all the resources of language, whereas the novel usually has to back off a little, for the sake of momentum over the long haul. It is true that novelists can deal with a range of ideas and experiences. But then, if we judge poets not so much by individual poems as by books of poems, so can they. And a great deal of material can find its way into a single, complex poem.

     I am not suggesting that this book isn’t full of marvellous things, and that we haven’t produced many wonderful novels. It is just that it has been conceived from a position which privileges the novel without acknowledging – or even recognizing – the extent to which it does. But what if poetry is the central meditation of the culture? Or what if it is of even similar importance to the novel?

     Somehow, we have grown to expect that the best things will be in extended forms, and in prose narrative fiction. Why? One reason is that reading skills are not spread evenly between poets and prose readers. It is hard to imagine experienced readers of poetry who cannot read prose well, but the reverse is not true. Very few prose readers are also accomplished readers of poetry. Few, in fact, are independent readers of poetry. They will have been exposed to it, at school and university. They will have developed some tastes and preferences, and they may have pursued these a little. But they will rarely be equally at home in either form. They will, however, be expected to be as ready with their opinions on the one as on the other – and, inevitably, they will reserve their most positive opinions for the works they are most familiar with.

     One builds one tastes out of one’s good experiences. If, in fact, one is not having any good experiences amongst contemporary verse – because one’s skills prevent one, for instance, or (and I acknowledge this is a problem) because it is too hard to get hold of – one is still expected, as a reader, to have opinions on it. Unfortunately, the general response to work which one has not come across is to assume that it musn’t be as good as work which one has. And so, out of ignorance and defensiveness, forms such as poetry get short shrift. It is easier to dismiss the poem in its absence than to admit to an anxiety about one’s reading skills.

     Besides: if the poetry were any good, wouldn’t it be more visible? Even though it has small chance of being visible if no-one will admit to an anxiety about reading it?

     There are other reasons which can make it easier to reach for a novel than a poem. It remains hugely satisfying to follow the journey of a surrogate ego as it moves towards a position of greater power, or love, or sexual status.This is ritual rather than consciousness: it does not tell us anything; aspects of it are dangerous, and it is certainly repetitive. But we do it, over and over: it sets the dopamine whirring in search of its receptors. For some, it is fuel for an innocent lifetime of pleasure.

     Not all novels offer such simple rewards. To be fair, few of the titles here do. But the glow of realized potential is the staple emotion of the overall world of the novel, and it, in turn, creates an easier place for literary novels in the broader society – whereas poetry walked away from such indulgences a long time ago: there is no parallel world of bad but satisfying verse to create a welcome, and an expectation, for the better stuff.

     For reasons such as these, and the ones that accompany them – the breakdown in distribution, the lack of reviews – we have privileged the novel amongst our literary forms. But novels are not the only literary means of engaging with who we are. When I look at the list of novels in this selection, I don’t have any feeling that the novelists are here because they have said more than the poets have (to say nothing of the short-story writers, the reporters, the playwrights). But I do have a suspicion that the work of the poets is not as well-known as that of the novelists: that their exclusion is more a matter of inadvertence than critical choice.

     Ten poems have been selected: Gordon’s The Sick Stockrider, Patterson’s The Man from Snowy River, Gilmore’s Nationality, Brennan’s Lilith, Shaw Neilson’s The Gentle Water Bird, Slessor’s Five Bells, Hope’s Letter from Rome, Wright’s Woman to Child, Mudrooroo’s No More Boomerang and Murray’s Bulahdelah-Taree Song Cycle. Perhaps the first thing to note is that, with the exception of Murray, all the poets are represented by single poems. I would suggest that this is an artefact of people’s experience with reading verse. Because poems tend to be encountered in blocks of very small numbers – rarely more than two or three at a time, people think in terms of individual poems when they make selections like this. One can pass through university – one can receive a doctorate – without ever having been asked to read a book of poems by a single author. Yet such books are often multi-faceted cross-sections of a self or voice at a particular time, examining dilemmas and perspectives with an underlying coherence similar to the way in which different characters might embody the author’s obsessions in a novel. A whole book of poems, however, is almost always too much for a lecturer to deal with, for reasons of time, if nothing else. Whereas one or two poems are ideal for the length of a lecture. And so people’s memories become filled with individual poems from the classroom or lecture-hall, and with novels they have been able to manage at home. Few readers have a sense of the range and depth of a book of poems because few readers have experienced them. Our sense of the classic is shaped by our limitations and anxieties, as much as by our actual responses to texts. No doubt it was ever thus.

     All the poets, with the exception of Murray, are dead. There is a strong suggestion that poetry belongs to the safely distant past – to the world of Shaw Neilson and Mary Gilmore, and beyond that to legendary times – to the Banjo and to Adam Lindsay Gordon. There is no sense that the richest period of Australian verse began after the second war, and continues undiminished into the present. Many of the recent or contemporary poets who have been left out – Tranter, Gray, Beveridge, Harwood, Porter, Hart – have broader imaginations, and more finely-honed skills, than all but a few of the figures who have been included.

     There are, however, ten living novelists. Novelists are obviously still active. It is difficult not to make inferences about where this editor’s gaze has been directed. I don’t want to accuse Gleeson-White of deliberate prejudice. She is simply expressing the default opinion for her culture. But there is much unconscious prejudice here: of the sort that prevents a culture from seeing itself clearly, and which ultimately builds excuses and expectations to justify one’s incuriosity about that which is challenging.

     Throughout the book, there are lists of classic texts by a variety of authors. It is an interesting thing to do, and their inclusion works well, not least by reminding us how unstable such lists are. Here, in no particular order, is a poet’s list: ten books which might be proposed as central to our culture.

     The Ghost of the Cock, Francis Webb

     The Lion’s Bride, Gwen Harwood

     Peniel, Kevin Hart

     The Cost of Seriousness, Peter Porter

     The Twyborn Affair, Patrick White

     The Getting of Wisdom, Henry Handel Richardson

     The Better Parts of Fortune, Frederic Manning

     Ethnic Radio, Les Murray

     Phantom Dwelling, Judith Wright

     One Hundred Poems, Kenneth Slessor

     I would like to think that such a list was not particularly uncharacteristic: that of all the lists that might be out there, it wouldn’t stand out because there was such a wide variety of possible emphases. Unfortunately, it implies a complete revaluation of who we are, and of what we have achieved.