I have problems with Les Murray and, as usual, it is not so much the  
work itself (it's positive impact) as the things that are said about  
it, both by Les himself and by those who praise it.
Tim A.

On 13 Apr 2010, at 07:52, David Bircumshaw wrote:

> I notice in Robert Gray's review that time-worn observation: " I am of
> Milton's school: poetry should be "simple, sensuous and passionate".  
> which
> writers both for and against (furiously, as with Ezra Pound) have so  
> often
> trundled out. Thing is, Milton didn't exactly say that: he did write  
> that in
> contrast to 'graceful and ornate rhetoric taught out of the rule of  
> Plato,
> Aristotle, Phalereus, Cicero, Hermogenes, Longinus'  poetry is 'less  
> subtle
> and fine, but more simple, sensuous and passionate'. Notice Milton is
> decribing how perceives poetry to be relatively, he isn't offering a
> prescription on how it *should* be written, the quote comes from a  
> tract
> called 'Of Education' (1644) in which Milton applies his experience  
> as a
> private tutor to the issues of young men of sufficient means and
> expectations should be grounded in humanist arts (he's concerned  
> with how
> they read poetry, not write it) and aim of his thought in this  
> paragraph is
> that they would ' soon perceive what despicable creatures our common  
> rimers
> and playwriters be, and show them, what religious, what glorious and
> magnificent use might be made of poetry both in divine and human  
> things.'
>
> Text below:
>
>
> And now lastly will be the time to read with them those organic  
> [practical,
> instrumental—ed.] arts which enable men to discourse and write
> perspicuously, elegantly, and according to the fitted style of  
> lofty, mean
> or lowly Logic therefore so much as is useful, is to be referred to  
> this due
> place with all her well couched heads and topics, until to be time  
> to open
> her contracted palm into a graceful and ornate rhetoric taught out  
> of the
> rule of Plato, Aristotle, Phalereus, Cicero, Hermogenes, Longinus.  
> To which
> poetry would be made subsequent, or indeed rather precedent, as  
> being less
> subtle and fine, but more simple, sensuous and passionate. I mean  
> not here
> the prosody of a verse, which they could not have hit on before  
> among the
> rudiments of grammar; but that sublime art which in Aristotle’s  
> *Poetics*,
> in Horace, and the Italian commentaries of Castelvetro, Tasso,  
> Mazzoni, and
> others, teaches what the laws are of a true epic poem, what of a  
> dramatic,
> what of a lyric, what decorum is, which is the grand masterpiece to  
> observe.
> This would make them soon perceive what despicable creatures our  
> common
> rimers and playwriters be, and show them, what religious, what  
> glorious and
> magnificent use might be made of poetry both in divine and human  
> things.
>
>
>
> On 12 April 2010 23:48, Caleb Cluff <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> Les Murray: the omnivorous writer
>>
>>  - Robert Gray
>>  - From: The Australian <http://www.theaustralian.com.au/>
>>  - April 10, 2010 *12:00AM*
>>
>>
>>  - By Les Murray
>>  Black Inc, 96pp, $24.95
>>
>> *EVERYONE who feels grateful to Les Murray for his remarkable  
>> poetry will
>> be relieved that after the depressed state of much of his recent  
>> work,
>> particularly in Subhuman Redneck Poems and in his memoir, Killing  
>> the Black
>> Dog, this new book is almost entirely cheerful. *
>>
>> These poems must have been written before Killing the Black Dog's  
>> second
>> edition was released at the end of last year, so they predate a  
>> postscript
>> in that book which says that after signs of recovery he has  
>> suffered a
>> relapse of his condition.
>>
>> In the three or so years between his last collection of poetry, the  
>> rather
>> bland The Bi-Plane Houses (2006), and this one, he seems to have
>> experienced
>> an Indian summer of the emotions.
>>
>> Of course, this is to assume that one writes cheerful poems only  
>> when one
>> is
>> feeling optimistic. Perhaps Murray has adopted the traditional  
>> Japanese
>> advice on emotional health, which is that one should "adjust the  
>> outer
>> appearance", regardless of how one feels, and the inner state will
>> eventually follow. But the sustained mood of this book surely could  
>> not
>> have
>> been willed.
>>
>> I have thought that the grievance-collecting in Murray's memoir was  
>> not
>> advisable, if he was finally to recover his spirits. We were left  
>> feeling
>> as
>> Frank O'Hara did in one of his Lunch Poems when, strolling in New  
>> York, he
>> sees a newspaper poster saying "Lana Turner Has Collapsed". Our  
>> feeling was
>> akin to O'Hara's at the end of his poem: "We love you, Lana Turner.  
>> Get
>> up."
>>
>> There is a playfulness, like a brightly coloured thread, running  
>> through
>> this book. Murray's exultance in language has come to the fore  
>> again, and
>> he
>> seems once more like Walt Disney's Scrooge McDuck, cavorting in his  
>> "money
>> bin".
>>
>> The book, though, contains nothing that will rank among his best  
>> work, but
>> neither does he seem anxious it should. Having some fun was the
>> artistically
>> logical thing to do at the point at which he had arrived, and it  
>> may be
>> that
>> at least temporarily improved health enabled him to do so.
>>
>> All the poems here are short, the longest not quite two pages, and  
>> have on
>> average a three-stress line; and most of them are concerned with  
>> vernacular
>> subject matter, the stuff of urban and country yarns.
>>
>> My favourite is The Conversations, which is a sort of found poem, the
>> gathered material rewritten and given form. Someone once told me that
>> Murray
>> keeps a scrapbook of peculiar facts and occurrences, and anyone who  
>> has
>> talked with him knows he is an encyclopedia of such information.
>>
>> *A full moon always rises at sunset
>> and a person is taller at night.
>> Many fear their phobias more than death.
>> The glass King of France feared he'd shatter.
>> Chinese eunuchs kept their testes in spirit.
>> Your brain can bleed from a sneeze-breath.*
>>
>> *A full moon rises at sunset
>> and a person is taller when prone.
>> Donald Duck was once banned in Finland
>> because he didn't wear trousers ...
>>
>> The full moon rises at sunset
>> and lemurs and capuchin monkeys
>> pass a millipede round to get off on
>> its powerful secretions. Mouthing it
>> they wriggle in bliss on the ground.*
>>
>> Murray would have grown up with a syndicated comic strip that used to
>> appear
>> in the newspapers, Ripley's Believe It or Not, which must have been
>> fascinating to an intellectually avid boy in a house with not  
>> enough books.
>> He has never got over that interest in knowledge for its own sake,  
>> and the
>> more for its own sake, the better he has seemed to like it: a  
>> purity that
>> has an affinity with poetry.
>>
>> His curiosity in everything shows up in all of the most immediately
>> enjoyable poems in this book: in Science Fiction, Eucalyptus in  
>> Exile, The
>> Cowladder Stanzas, High-Speed Bird, The Drizzle of Chefs' Knives,  
>> and the
>> lovely Observing the Mute Cat, which is as relaxed as someone  
>> stroking one
>> of those creatures.
>>
>> There is an air of easy mastery here, such as one finds in late  
>> Auden, who
>> blithely re-allocated parts of speech and who revealed when he  
>> wrote a poem
>> what letter of the alphabet he had been browsing under in the Shorter
>> Oxford
>> Dictionary.
>>
>> Murray's ease of style is also reminiscent of some of the old  
>> masters of
>> painting, who late in their careers became very loose with their
>> brushstrokes.
>>
>> He starts a rhyme scheme, then drops it, and he deliberately uses the
>> broken-backed rhythms of doggerel, which are redeemed by his  
>> sophisticated
>> word play.
>>
>> Murray is employed by the Macquarie Dictionary to collect new words  
>> as they
>> appear and to define them. In another partially found poem, Infinite
>> Anthology, he celebrates the inspiration of those anonymous  
>> geniuses, those
>> "single word poets" who coin our neologisms and whom he, among  
>> others,
>> anthologises in "the Great Book of Anon, the dictionary".
>>
>> They are, he says, "by far the largest class of poets". He gives  
>> here, in a
>> "prose poem", his interpretation of some of their work. Among his  
>> entries
>> are:
>>
>> *daylight -- second placegetter when
>> winner is very superior to field
>> window licker -- a voyeur
>> fibro -- resident of a poorer suburb
>> free traders -- (19th and early 20th cent.)
>> split bloomers worn under voluminous skirts*
>>
>> As with his hobbyist collection of offbeat information in The
>> Conversations,
>> one could wish this piece was much longer.
>>
>> I do have a complaint about an aspect of Murray's work that  
>> includes, but
>> extends beyond, the present book, going as far back perhaps as 1987's
>> Daylight Moon.
>>
>> It was then that his poetry began to take on the opacity that has  
>> become a
>> settled feature of it, making whole poems mystifying at times. His  
>> poetry,
>> more and more, has acquired a riddling quality: the language can  
>> become so
>> dense that no light escapes from it, at least not in my direction.
>>
>> Some people seem to be impressed by this outcome in his work. I can  
>> only
>> think they equate a cryptic crossword with a poem.
>>
>> For my part, I am of Milton's school: poetry should be "simple,  
>> sensuous
>> and
>> passionate". (One must allow for a change in usage here: this  
>> doesn't mean
>> poetry should be simplistic or preoccupied with sex. "Direct" and  
>> "emotive"
>> may be the equivalent modern terms.)
>>
>> Much of Murray's more recent poetry reminds me of what someone said  
>> to
>> Scottish poet Norman MacCaig about his earlier work, which was  
>> heavily
>> influenced by those poems of Dylan Thomas's that thrash about in  
>> verbiage:
>> "I've read your book of poems. When are you going to publish the  
>> answers?"
>>
>> In his brief memoir, which is concerned solely with his depressive  
>> illness
>> -- a dreadful condition and not something I make light of -- Murray
>> acknowledges the excessively compacted nature of some of his later  
>> work and
>> relates this to the marginal autism from which he feels it is  
>> likely that
>> he
>> suffers. (He has a son with the fully developed condition.) Still,
>> communication in his later work is by no means entirely evaded and  
>> quite a
>> lot of late poems don't present this problem at all.
>>
>> The significant thing about Murray's obscurity is that, as poet  
>> Jamie Grant
>> has remarked, one has the conviction that there always is something  
>> being
>> said, under the highly idiosyncratic use of language. The crossword  
>> puzzles
>> have answers.
>>
>> To hear Murray read his poems often makes them clear, and to hear him
>> comment on them at a performance invariably does. But having just a  
>> book,
>> we
>> are baffled.
>>
>> A brief example of what I mean is The Springfields,, an entire poem  
>> from
>> Taller When Prone:
>>
>> *Lead drips out of
>> a burning farm rail.
>> Their Civil War.*
>>
>> I haven't the faintest idea what that is about. Nor am I cajoled by  
>> the
>> expression into wanting to find out.
>>
>> About one-third of the book leaves me with a similar feeling, at  
>> least at
>> places within individual poems.
>>
>> Whatever else is required of a poet, they ought to be a person "who  
>> notices
>> things", as Thomas Hardy claimed. Murray has shown that he is, with  
>> an
>> overwhelming richness. Who else could have made, simply in passing,  
>> an
>> observation such as this?
>>
>> *Like all its kind
>> Python has a hare lip.*
>>
>> *Robert Gray is a Sydney poet. His last book was a memoir, *The  
>> Land I Came
>> through Last*.*
>> On Tue, Apr 13, 2010 at 1:14 AM, Douglas Barbour
>> <[log in to unmask]>wrote:
>>
>>> Damn, by the time I tried, just now, it was a 404 - Page Not  
>>> Found....
>>>
>>> Doug
>>> On 9-Apr-10, at 6:42 PM, Max Richards wrote:
>>>
>>> Robert Gray offers a very balanced view of the new Murray...
>>>> MR
>>>>
>>>> TheAustralian
>>>>
>>>> The omnivorous writer
>>>>
>>>> From: TheAustralian
>>>> April 10,
>>>> 2010
>>>> EVERYONE who feels grateful to Les Murray for his remarkable poetry
>>>> will be relieved that after the depressed state of much of his  
>>>> recent
>>>> work,
>>>> particularly in Subhuman Redneck Poems and in his memoir, Killing  
>>>> the
>>>> Black
>>>> Dog, this new book is almost entirely cheerful.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>> http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/arts/les-murray-the-omnivorous-writer/
>>>> story-e6frg8nf-1225850820037
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>>>> This email was sent from Netspace Webmail: http://www.netspace.net.au
>>>>
>>>>
>>> Douglas Barbour
>>> [log in to unmask]
>>>
>>> http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
>>>
>>> Latest books:
>>> Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
>>> http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
>>> Wednesdays'
>>>
>>>
>> http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2008/03/new-from-aboveground-press_10.html
>>>
>>>                                   The secret
>>>
>>> which got lost neither hides
>>> nor reveals itself, it shows forth
>>>
>>> tokens.
>>>
>>>               Charles Olson
>>>
>>
>
>
>
> -- 
> David Bircumshaw
> "A window./Big enough to hold screams/
> You say are poems" - DMeltzer
> Website and A Chide's Alphabet
> http://www.staplednapkin.org.uk
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