The Best Australian Poems 2011 (2 page)

Each year (since 2003) Black Inc. has asked Australian poets to submit a selection of their work for this anthology. This year it was my turn to read through the two or three thousand poems that were sent in and choose the best.

I'm not sure that we can trust the word ‘best' when we're talking about poetry – there are so many different kinds of poetry, from Homer to rock and roll, and then there are millions of readers with their individual tastes and prejudices – but in any case I chose a little over a hundred of what I felt were the most vigorous, varied and interesting poems for this book.

And any honest anthologist should offer a further disclaimer: though I have tried to be widely representative, of course I have my own blind spots and may have failed to recognise wonderful work; some poets may have missed the deadline for any of a dozen reasons, some may have chosen not to offer poems to an anthology claiming to showcase ‘the best' (this has happened), some of our best poets may have had no ‘best' poems this year but may have next year, and so forth. As different editors publish their choices from year to year, any personal bias or imbalances should be cancelled out.

But what a rich, strange and diverse lot these poems turned out to be. Look at this list below, a gathering of some of the brightest images, transformations and unbelievable events that litter this collection. I suspect that these baroque and potent imaginings can only have come into existence as fragments of dreams or nightmares:

Bent hot-dogs talk to strangers. Still, the oak trees flower above us, a canopy of lust; an academic scholar talks about whoring his mind, a poetry editor apologises for not accepting a sentimental poem about a lost ant, a well-known fiction writer snoozes on the sofa, an empty brandy bottle in her lap, Boofhead's Egyptian style of ambulation and a vast mural of Fred and Wilma are discussed, mothers wonder how tiger snakes got into the linen cupboards, an unknown baby skeleton, a word in Arabic that means a tree that befriends doomed travellers, the irony of green rain, the devil on holiday in Tasmania, Picasso's one red eye, Ezra Pound's brilliant rottenness, the Master of Stomachs, a skyscraper as a babel of crockery, dawn as the clock-face of the heavens, the feedback loop of amazing grace and dead birds, phantoms on the home stretch, a woman who's doing the accounts with one hand and killing a snake with another while she gets an armful of wood, Rupert Bunny's women waiting for a take-away pizza, two shopping bags full of stuffed bears etc, a shop where dresses were hanging like marked-down lungs, an apoplectic monkey and a monkey who practises sermons too green to transcribe, gods crawling through trumpets to get here, a miracle on Blue Mouse Street (in Dublin, of course), a wolf sack filled with of courses, perhapses, and maybe, the boots of Nazis misunderstanding stairs, God smoking a pipe, love like police presence, History with its morphine headache, a new neighbour swathed in her pet python, a man who looks forward to looking back on this moment, a mincing lion and an indignant unicorn and a dragon wind, a convention of lapidarists, a gluey saraband, murder at the poetry conference, a man with echidna gloves, a love that is an inscrutable monster, tickets to the monster trucks, a beer-drinking pig, a holidaying tycoon who has popped an artery on a sodden golf course, human beings as the tennis-balls of the stars, the memorable vanilla windows of Miss Moore, a Jungian bus trip and an absinthe sea.

The American poet John Ashbery is one of the most widely read and intelligent people in the world of writing. He has thought deeply about what it means to create poems, and in an address to the Poetry Society of America in 1995, he said:

Every poet who reads his or her poetry before an audience is accustomed to the question and answer period that follows, which often ends with the question, ‘Are there any questions that haven't been asked that you feel you would like to answer?' The underlying thrust of all these questions is something like: ‘Please explain your poetry to me.' Now it may be true that composers and painters and cineastes are also asked to explain their work, but if so their task is lightened somewhat by the fact that there is something there to explain. With a poem there is nothing, or there should be nothing if the poet has done his job successfully, and that is because the act of writing the poem was an explanation of something that had occurred to the poet, and demanded to be put into words which in turn formed a poem. To explain an explanation is a much more difficult, and in the end perhaps a hopeless task because it's doomed to redundancy. Yet I'm fully aware that I'll have to go on making repeated stabs at it for as long as I'll be asked to speak in public, and that this impossible feat is also a necessary one if only because people expect it, and it is normal and proper to give people what they expect.

As he suggests, there's not much point in trying to explain how poems work or what they ‘mean'. But as with public talks, so with anthologies of poetry: readers expect an Introduction that will explain each of the poems, or if not that, then explain why they should bother reading all this stuff, which means ‘Please explain why poetry matters.' If you're reading this page, you have the anthology in your hands, so you already have some suspicion as to why poetry might matter – matter to you, at any rate. So thank you.

But what kind of meaning do I think poems have? After all, I've written more than a thousand of them over the last half-century: I should have some idea.

Well, to be frank, I don't really know, but I have made some guesses, and I should like to share them with you.

Let's go back a while. A book I wrote twenty years ago – The Floor of Heaven (1992) – consisted of four long narrative poems, and was based partly on a story device employed in Luis Buñuel's funny and clever movie The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), which features a sequence of dreams one within the other. It occurred to me many years ago that the meaning of a poem is like the meaning of a dream: intense, important, difficult to unravel and full of the energies of the unconscious mind.

And – though I have generally avoided the Juggernaut of Academia – I recently weakened (I needed the money) and completed a Doctor of Creative Arts degree at the University of Wollongong. Writing the doctoral thesis allowed me to explore this idea further. I won't drag you through all the details – the exegesis part of my thesis (where I reveal everything) is thirty thousand words long – but in brief, building on the work I did for my 1971 BA degree in Psychology, I followed Freud and Lacan through their various mirror-mazes and theories about dreams. Movies came next, and there the trail led from Slavoj Žižek to Alfred Hitchcock and back to Buñuel. In 1953, nearly twenty years before he made The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, he said:

Film is a magnificent and dangerous weapon if it is wielded by a free mind. It is the finest instrument we know for expressing the world of dreams, of feeling, of instinct. The mechanism that creates cinematographic images is, by its very function, the form of human expression most closely resembling the work of the mind during sleep. Film seems to be an involuntary imitation of dream … the darkness that gradually invades the auditorium is the equivalent of closing our eyes. It is the moment when the nightly incursion into the unconscious begins on the screen and deep inside man.

I know no better way of exploring the movies I like – Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, for example, or Hitchcock's own favourite among his many movies, Shadow of a Doubt – than to read them as expensive, complicated, multi-authored, beautiful and sometimes terrifying dreams.

And what better way to interpret the oeuvre of Australia's most interesting poet, the non-existent Ern Malley? His every poem is a melange of incomprehensible images wrenched into an unwilling cohabitation, a process that liberated the vengeful unconscious fantasies of the collaborator hoaxers, the young poets James McAuley and Harold Stewart. The fecundity of those violent nightmares is still producing poems, plays, movies and paintings based on Ern Malley's invented life and writings, half a century or more after Ern's death, mainly by creative artists who weren't even born in his lifetime. In fact just as I was writing this Introduction a major new academic study of the Ern Malley affair landed on my desk.

To speak more calmly about the creative urge, Henry James's enigmatic story ‘The Figure in the Carpet' (1896) comes to mind. In his well-known tale, James tells how a young critic seeks to unravel the secret theme or key that the famous (fictional) author Hugh Vereker says lies at the centre of everything he has written. It's visible, Vereker says, but hard to discern, like a subtle pattern woven into a carpet. Alas, after many plot twists and turns, no secret is found. The Bulgarian-French critic Tzvetan Todorov comes to an enlightened conclusion about this quest in his 1977 book The Poetics of Prose (translated by Richard Howard):

If Henry James's secret, the figure in the carpet of his work, the string which unites the pearls of the separate tales, is precisely the existence of a secret, how does it come about that we can now name the secret, render absence present? Am I not thereby betraying the fundamental Jamesian precept which consists in this affirmation of absence, this impossibility of designating truth by its name? But criticism too (including mine) has always obeyed the same law: it is the search for truth, not its revelation, a treasure hunt rather than the treasure itself, for the treasure can only be absent. Once this ‘reading of James' is over, we must then begin reading James, set out upon a quest for the meaning of his oeuvre, though we know that this meaning is nothing other than the quest itself.

As John Ashbery suggested in 1995, there's not much point in trying to explain poems or to search for the meaning of a work of literature. But if it's true that poems are really dreams in disguise, neither is there any stable frame of reference from which to view and judge a parade of dreams. The dreamer is the last person to ask, which is why people who have baffling dreams often go to psychiatrists to ask the meaning of what they are going through. Sometimes the psychiatrist, with her or his independent viewpoint and long experience in such matters, hits the nail on the head; sometimes not. That's the role I seem to be stuck with, and as you can see I have been making the most of the opportunity without getting very far. Of course if you don't agree with my line of thinking, you can always ask for a second opinion.

Meanwhile, enjoy these fragments of dream-work, as Freud called it. And when you wake up tomorrow, if you're lucky, you'll have some dream-work of your own to think about.

 

John Tranter

The lovers strolled in a city

Park under the branches of smudged trees,

Ample sun leaked down the sky –

Autumnal oak-leaves fell

Scattering fragments of calligraphy.

 

All this, locked away, when a bell

Rings. Memory leaks, touching sunlight,

Though with a kind of ease

My hand draws back –

The sky isn't blue it's abstract.

 

Those who walk this modern

Avenue, do so to pay the rent in paradise.

No takers, no shared accom.

A man sells diluted methadone twice

From a garish mobile bar;

 

Burbling vapours from

His fuel, used cotton oil, curdle in the air;

Bent hot-dogs talk to strangers.

Still, the oak trees flower above us,

A canopy of lust – look over there,

 

The sparrows chitter just far

Enough away from a cat, who chitters back.

This, so you know who'll still be here,

As time repeats its fact.

When you come, bring Echo and Thanatos,

 

finally, you might raise a cheer.

 

The history of tango has been cancelled

due to the sheikh's plunge. Mourn

 

for his apocryphal drowning

in a lake in Morocco. I'm joyous

 

at the prospect of this jacket

outliving my jumpers. Ecstatic

 

hookers amass savings, US$ 3,500

per job. I make nothing vaguely comparable

 

from whoring my mind. The history

of philosophy reduced to a memory

 

of a real conversation. Glider

accident. Rotund corpse floats. At least I'm warm.

Did I once believe in the power of poetry?

Was I swaddled like a baby

in a blanket of words?

 

Did they whisper me awake

and lullaby me to my dreams?

 

Now I stand, awkward, vertical,

in static and glare.

I cannot hear the silence

 

or the words that linger beneath it,

echoes of some unremembered Arcady.

 

To those who have me by the throat

and would rather I didn't hear

even the simple rise

 

and fall of my own breath,

I say, ‘You misunderstand

 

if you think that any poet

ever lived in a golden age.

Every one lived in this world

 

under house arrest. The only gold

they ever knew was the music

 

of their imaginations,

when, for a few brief

unfathomable moments,

 

they mistook the prison bars of their minds

for the harp strings of the heart.'