Newsreel Essay: Poetry and the Future

‘I can call spirits from the vasty deep,’ declares Shakespeare’s Owen Glendower: to which Hotspur replies, ‘Yes, but will they come?’ Glendower is a Welshman, an archaic Celt, still associated with the cultures of poetry and magic, whereas Hotspur is only a soldier. Shakespeare is tempted by the former position, that of the poet’s powers of transcendence and insight, right to the end, when he has Prospero, his Other, give up all magical powers.

In some ways, even now, poetry transcends the factual and claims insight. You could say it is a verbal craft of modest enchantment, which is at the same time economically diminished and archaically privileged. Hardly anyone reads poetry after secondary school and its vicissitudes (exercises, exams, lust, a broken heart, and so on), yet to be a poet still sounds like something serious and lofty: part-sybil and part-philosopher, if you like. But I’ll swim back to this.

Poetry has the misfortune to be written in language. Why do I say misfortune? Well, because the same medium is commonly employed in gossip, in storytelling, in parliamentary debate, even in text messages. So we don’t notice the fabric of it. Our danger is that the habits developed in reading transparent prose, like that of the political news, are at odds with how we read modern poetry. And this can disconcert us. We happy concentrating few, we band of brothers …

My colleague Peter Doherty has sketched the crisis of our century, the prospect of any civil future, in these graphic terms: ‘We’ve never had to think like this before. It just wasn’t a problem.’ We are dealing already with what the Melbourne poet Lisa Jacobson has dubbed ‘this broken thing we call the world’. And we are all trying to prevent this broken rock on which we live from becoming a final battlefield of destruction, a shifting battlefield of the desperate on which—at worst—our great-grandsons will be killed and our great-granddaughters raped. Under extreme pressure of loss, devastation and threat, human beings may well stop at nothing, in the hope of survival.

I am taken back to what that great, civilised poet Andrew Marvell wrote on the brink of the English Civil War:

Tis not, what once it was, the world,
But a rude heap together hurled,
All negligently overthrown,
Gulfs, deserts, precipices, stone.

In part he was voicing the universal lament—which goes back at least as far as chapter one of Genesis—that paradise or an innocent natural world has been lost; but now we face a far grimmer sense of ‘all negligently overthrown’.

What can poetry do? is the question I ask here. With its small readership and fairly modest listenership, it will not sway federal or state electorates, even if it has a big, practical point to make. But it can, here and there, sway thinking, especially the reflection of influential figures. For what might such figures respect poets? For two qualities in particular, I would suggest: for our capacity to notice (and not to pass over the local or the familiar). Peter Minter, for example, has an acute perception of modulating landscapes; Lisa Gorton teases out the intersection of farm life and children’s games; and Judith Beveridge? understands the transactions between nature and culture that make up professional fishing. None of the three is a blunt-nosed propagandist, but each makes us see, feel, hear and understand more.

I like the remark of the English poet David Constantine that ‘Poetry will not teach us how to live well, but it will incite in us the wish to’, but also Ezra Pound’s appropriately brief remark that poetry is chiefly a matter of gists and piths. A poem will not spell out a linear argument, constructed from steadily empirical evidence; yet it will not ignore evidence: it is artistic, rather than autistic. In late-modern times, the genre tugs in three different directions.

Poetry as prophecy is unusual in the postmodern world: a William Blake is truly rare. Judith Wright was an unusual case of Australian poet as prophet or sibyl. In general, though, it must be admitted that poets are even worse as historical readers of the future than economists are. We are artists of language, rather than analysts of statistical evidence. Perhaps our view of the big picture takes such a rhetorical form as in Philip Salom’s line, ‘I am a native of Shaken’.

Poetry as loving perception of nature and of the cultural environment. It is crucial that we continue to act as witnesses: as witnesses to the valuable, the beautiful, the humane, and to what might be effacing them. We dramatise perception, give our music to noticing. Colour and action carry the day, ever so often. And their little dramas drag us back into carefulness, into maturity of response. We have to be the kind of people who, as Hardy said, ‘notice such things’.

Poetry as the art of language. It enjoys the freedom of metaphor, as against the linear bondage of metonymy. The curious distinction of poetic language resides in its fierce wedding to sound, rhythms, form and metaphoric interplay. In a poem, a single word can change everything, I’m delighted to say. But the art of language drifted into a cul-de-sac in the 1980s and early 1990s, I’d have to say, as academic sceptics fiddled while the planet burned, casting clever doubt on the capacity of language to deliver anything essential. Above all, they would have hated Wallace Stevens’ transcendent claim that ‘In the absence of a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place in life’s redemption.’

But we live in a new century, if hundreds are what matters. (That’s another kettle full of yabbies, of course.) Peter Porter has written of our late-modern age, thinking of Shakespeare’s inspired, inspiring spirit, Ariel: ‘And Ariel’s new words must be designed / Among the broken letters of the alphabet.’ But we should not turn back. We bear aesthetic witness. A lyric poem works close and hard to release what Nietzsche called ‘the slow arrow of beauty’.

However the poets behave, and they can be as silly as Rimbaud or d’Annunzio, poetry matters, because it distils its native language for the attention of a true reader, one who resembles Sir Walter Ralegh’s ‘judicious sharp spectator’: one who really cares for language and its truths. Oh dear, yes, unlike footloose music, poetry has to care about truth, even if Shakespeare and Auden were ironically right in allowing that ‘the truest poetry is the most feigning’.

When I talk about poetry, of course, I mean the modern, lyric medium, not that ancient, easier genre which told all the stories of the aural tribe. Modern poetry tends to be dense, relatively difficult and sometimes—paradoxically—‘pure’. You could say it is to everyday speech as cognac is to a bunch of grapes. It has been worked over, refined, intensified. And it’s quite often minatory, like this very recent poem of our time and place: not only minatory, darkly warning, but at the same time attempting to express our love of everyday experience. I call it ‘The Different Scales of Morning’:

Oyster-grey sky can only enhance a day
When the street briefly smells of cinnamon toast,
Punctuated by parrot-squeal high up;
They’re dopey enough to sing while soaring:
Very unlike the lark ascending, though.

From micro-morning out into macro,
I can feel us doing our destructive job
Along the edges of smoky Indonesia, like
Pallidly picnicking in a minefield.
Sweaty-cool with civil smog

We absorb disorderly information
Skimming over all disturbing items and
Beating upstream for the big picture
Past a new-trimmed lavender hedge,
Hondas parking, and the dog-walk park

Where a blonde extends her lumbering keeshond
With a gnawed-upon tennis ball.
How is anxiety assuaged, and
What do local perceptions add up to?
The gene will tell us nothing at all

While our answers adhere to archaic progress.
We refuse to notice, or try to, while
Warm Gaia has grown sick of our
Casting the usual vote for selfishness
And flipping credit cards instead of thought.

As a poet I try to speak against ‘the usual vote for selfishness’ and write in the hope that this dear planet will remain a home for human beings and their odd cultures.