Linger not, stranger. Shed no tear.
Go back to those who sent us here.
We are the young they drafted out
To wars their folly brought about.
Go tell those old men, safe in bed,
We took their orders and are dead.
‘Inscription for War’ – AD Hope
How to cheer the kids up I’ve been thinking. Why of course – read poetry! The oddest of the bods always lifts the mood. Read Hope, as example. No beatnik, this critic of the Vietnam War. A practitioner of arcane style, obscure classical references and sometimes startling imagery. Reputed puppeteer of the Ern Malley Hoax and later the counterrevolutionary Canberra Poets, caught by David Campell as an aged prog rocker performing to ANU youth:
They follow him
To Hellenic snows where terror and beauty sit
Over live chessmen. He bows. The crowds go home,
On their knees, in blue-jeans girls throng his feet.
‘Poetry Reading’ – David Campbell
No Hope these days for the kids at ANU. God I’m getting bored with ‘Politics’ and ‘History’. Been lost myself for months in the military section, trying to understand this country. Trapped as it were in our endless trenches: Bathurst, Crimea, South Africa, Belgium, Palestine, Iraq, Singapore, New Guinea, Greece, Germany, Italy, Korea, Vietnam, Iraqi, Bosnia, Timor, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Iraq. Crawled hard right into Michael Cathcart’s history of Victoria’s secret paramilitary White Army, feeling like one his shell-shocked colonels jumping at shadows. Staring at its boy’s own adventure cover, wondering whether it was Cathcart or his publisher Hilary McPhee who came up with that title Defending the National Tuckshop? Which of them convinced the other militarism is frightfully funny?
The poets are our only tonic. Better said by Bernard O’Dowd in his rousing 1909 manifesto ‘Poetry Militant’ on the artist as evolutionary/revolutionary reactor: ‘true permeator, the projector of cell-forming ideals into the protoplasmic future. He is a ferment who alters for the better the ordered, natural, inert sequences of things. He is a living catalyst in the intellectual laboratory’. What vim! I like these ideas. Christopher Brennan’s night city in 1908, his trams that ‘stare phantasmal, weirdly new / In the electrics ghastly blue’ as cell forming ideals manifesting decades later in Albert Tucker’s Images of Modern Evil.
Lesbia Harford was another sly cat. Graduating in law at the University of Melbourne in 1916 in the same year as Robert Menzies, contrarian Harford ‘signed up in a rebel band’, the outlawed International Workers of the World, protesting against war, Empire and her ‘Suburban dames’:
‘Insatiable, you eat up all the hours
And sun and love and tea and talk and flowers.'
Worked in factories and dreamed of being Sapho. Bisexuality and revolution carried by a delicate lightness of voice. It’s clever. No eye rolling bombast and overwrought male hysteria, the radical made ordinary, female, rationale:
If you have loved a brave story
Tell it but rarely;
And with due faith in its glory
Render it barely
(December, 1915)
O’Dowd wasn’t entirely wrong. Her poems were projectiles into the future/our present. Dead at 27. Before Sir General Harry Chauvel, our Hero of Beersheba, led the huge Anzac Day Parade of 1931 on his fine black stallion Digger, the year the White Army said the revolution was just over that hillock. Our Tiresias foresaw it all, even if she couldn’t alter the ‘inert sequences’ which is Australia. Our fault. We didn’t listen.
The kids also need to read Julian Smith. He’s very buoyant. A pioneering prose poet, Smith was the pseudonym of Tom Fitzgerald, child reporter, later editor of the lefty rag Nation, to conceal his authorship of On the Pacific Front, his tribute to Czech Communist Ergon Kisch, driver of the new style of on-the-ground reportage. How the Government tried to ban Kisch’s entry into Australia and speaking at a 1935 Peace Conference is a ripper of a story. Once a legend all good folk knew. Now forgotten. Cloaks if not daggers. Paranoia being sanity through the second RED Hysteria. As to Smith’s status as poet, listen to this:
The captain believed Kisch was a prohibited immigrant because the Act also says that any person declared by the Minister (for the Interior) to be, in his opinion (from Information received from the Government of the United Kingdom or any part of the British Dominion, or from any foreign government – through official or diplomatic channels), undesirable as an inhabitant or visitor is a prohibited immigrant.
Sea sick from Smith’s breathless rolling pitch am on that ship with Kisch. Those powers of the Minister! Contemporary.
Ania Walwicz is a much better-known prose poet, another fine example of O’Dowd’s ‘intellectual laboratory’. Even with five eyes the Government missed the ‘cell forming ideals’ little Ania carried inside her from post-war Europe. Customs tried its best. Books as material objects, like people, can be banned, confiscated or deported to keep us pure. But as yet migrants, refugees or returning expats can’t be screened for ideas on art.
Walwicz sat herself within the old European Avant Garde. Make it NEW Ezra Pound screamed at his tailor. To be in advance of time. Funny to think of O’Dowd here saying similar stuff much earlier on art for the future. Ah, sweet modernism. Of course, art of or for the future might lead us to the yawn of dystopia and winning the Booker Prize. Better to look backwards, like Walwicz on that War held in our imagination to be beyond Time itself: never in the past, ever in our present; and further back still at Proust on memory in Searching for Lost Time. That’s the thrill. How stripped of those stale madeleines off-beat Walwicz reclaims the old codger and makes him NEW:
In Germany, I’m a little boy again in Germany. I’m a cut little boy in Germany. My mother beats me, I’m a hurt little boy in Germany. I lost the war, and my childhood comes back to me, just one night, I cut myself, and it does. Just like that. Suddenly
‘Proust’ – Ania Walwicz
– J.G.