by John Clarke
huh?
Ogden Gnash
Ogden Gnash was perhaps the best known of the Perth poets.
PARDON ME MADAM BUT IS THAT MANDIBLE ON A LEASH OR WHAT?
Of all the tenets mentioned in discussions about levity,
By far the most important and the best of them is brevity,
So Shakespeare and Railway Timetables and instruction manuals in foreign languages apart,
Be, of all literary forms, most suspicious of the poem which is almost entirely parenthetical and despite whose Towards More Picturesque Speech homely cleverness in the Norman Rockwell manner, leaves you wondering whether you’ve left the gas on and whether you’ve got to throw another six to start.
Sir Don Betjeman
Don represented Victoria in cricket, tennis, golf and car-spotting. Wrote The Shell Guide for Victorian Motorists. He worked in television during the 1960s and released the names of every architect employed on the Albury-Wodonga Development Project. He lived in Malvern and was King of Moomba in 1972.
ANOTHER SUBALTERN’S WEDDING
When I saw you at the service,
Didn’t have the guts to speak,
Should have, can’t think why I didn’t,
Perfect oppo up the creek.
Back at the Reception Centre,
All those lovely downy thighs,
Waitress asked me if I’d like some
Herbert Adams party pies.
After bouncy hot Gay Gordon,
You and I became a pair,
What a thrill! Joy unconfined!
At Berlei stockists everywhere.
In the carpark, Jowett Javelin,
Triumph of post-war design,
Hugged the road to Mount Eliza,
Hard beside the Frankston line.
Past the Dendy, through Moorabbin,
Near St Kilda Football Ground,
Mentone, Mordialloc, Carrum,
Seaford next and homeward bound.
Off the Melway briefly, poppet,
Up the Old Road, rally style,
Let me, dear, into your secret,
Silken delta of the Nile.
ADVICE TO CHAPS FROM PARENTS
Whatever you do, don’t touch yourself down there,
And if you want to know something, ask me,
Or if I’m not available, a prayer;
For God’s sake don’t ask Uncle Dorothy.
Stewie Smith
Stewie spent most of her working life as a secretary, although she is better known for her poetry, as is frequently the case in Australia.
FURTHER THOUGHTS ABOUT THE PERSON FROM PORLOCK
There ought to be a monument
Put up in the public square,
To honour the memory of the
Unknown Person from Porlock,
Who paid the supreme sacrifice
That certain others might live.
They have got it wrong
The Coleridge people,
What they have got is wrong,
The Person from Porlock has been
Wickedly misunderstood,
It is too late now of course,
It is too late.
I yearn for the second coming
Of the Person from Porlock,
I anticipate the epiphany and have left instructions
That I am to be disturbed
The moment my thoughts are assembled.
If somebody else does not do it,
One of these frosty Fridays
I might just do it myself.
Who are these blessed people
Who complain their ideas won’t come?
Don’t they know what it is like?
May we have their names please?
They ought to unfurl a crimson runner,
They ought to welcome Him,
He is Our Saviour you see,
For he brings the precious gift
Of interruption,
World not without end,
Amen.
I can see I’m not helping,
You do not want to hear this, I know,
But how, other than with distress
Are we to respond to our thoughts?
Imagine not having an imagination.
We are trapped, don’t you see?
The way to heaven is hell.
W. H. Auding
Wisty Huge Auding published his first collection, Poems, in 1928, followed by A Whole Lot More in 1932 and When We Were Very Old in 1960. He died in 1968, 1971, and again in 1973.
MUSE OF BAUXITE
About Telecom they were never wrong,
The Old Masters, how prescient they were
About existential services;
How well they knew the mundane brutality of increasing charges for items which don’t exist,
How, while oafs deliberate, holding money
Up to the light, agreeing it should be described
Not as a profit but as an operating surplus,
There always must be, bleak-faced, random and frantic,
Victims, trying to make urgent calls on public phones dangling
From walls in a twisted piss-smelling tardis,
And in the distance a man sits on a park bench,
Explaining to his grandchild the merits of competition.
In Nolan’s Ned Kelly series, for instance, how everyone’s face
Is either hidden or green; hidden, encased
In metal, in uniform, angled, straight and hard,
Or green, and how, when Scanlon is shot from his horse
And falls, he falls up,
Unsurprised, a bystander,
He’s thinking, ‘Dearie me,
Another ballsup.’
Louis ‘The Lip’ MacNeice
Recruited from northern Tasmania in 1925, MacNeice became one of the mainstays of Australian verse between the wars.
WHAT I DID IN THE HOLIDAYS Section IX
In a week I shall return to the University
And begin again the selection of anecdotes,
Revealing the ageless to the briefly young,
Explaining the dead to the living,
Arranging the facts in a circle and playing
Simon says The Glory of Greece.
Balance your chair on the bookcase,
Study the dust in a shaft of light,
And listen to the familiar stories,
Nod with the names, salute the heroes,
The paragons, the exceptions that prove the rules;
Plato, Diogenes, Alcibiades,
The Thracian vases, Delphi on a clear day,
Liking the Spartans less because we
Could never do that with our young.
Observe the neat morals, the perfect natural laws,
The foundations of modern justice:
At least one foot must be on the floor
While towing Hector around the walls of Troy.
Gentlemen are requested to wear a jacket
During the putting out of eyes,
Lotuses should not be consumed in the upstairs bedrooms,
Persons tied to rocks and women with uncontrollable boxes
May be charged accordingly.
A code not so much to be used as admired,
To know the classical, the ordered, the decent,
From the random pillage of the horde,
And to decide whether I am part of the one
Or simply at odds with the other,
And to pick at the seam of this discipline,
Which presents the apotheosis as the norm,
Which dresses the writers, the dramatists,
The hypocrites, the philosophers and the lads
Who drew right-angles in the sand with sticks,
As the standard, the usual things
Done in the usual way.
And I think myself of the blockheads, the pimps,
The hired thugs and the imposters,
The mountebanks with imported sandals,
And the developer�
�s brother-in-law
Who spoke in the Agora securing the right
To flatten some olive groves mentioned in Hesiod
And open a π shop.
FLAGPOLE MUSIC
It’s no go the tight-head prop, it’s no go the hooker,
Wait till the bloody thing’s put in straight and review it for the New Yorker,
Wystan Hugh went up to Iceland in a shower of rain,
Addressed an epistle as Juan’s apostle and buggered a dog on a chain,
It’s no go the Willie Away, it’s no go the droppie,
Run it and draw the defence in the centre and stick up a kick if it’s sloppy,
Oliver Gogarty went for a swim and put in a personal best,
Presented the Liffey with plenty of swans and did what he could for the rest,
The appendectification of Yeats, the Celtification of John,
The Mulliganising of Martello Jim, the Newdigate Prize having gone,
It’s no go the half-time score, it’s no go relaxing,
They’ll come out of there like a bull at a gate after getting a boot in the jacksie,
Roger Casement looking to drive, splitting the men in the covers,
Caught in the lovely Republic of Irony, strung up as high as his lovers,
Bernard Shaw went to visit himself, sequestered away in a castle,
And F. E. Smith, should it please the court, fellated the late King’s arsehole,
And it’s no go Hotel du Lac, it’s no go the Amis,
The Booker is rigged and boring as shit and the publishers want to be famous,
It’s no go the final effort, it’s no go the gumption,
It’s into the showers and out of the steam and off to the aftermatch function,
It’s no go the Wittgenstein, it’s no go linguistics,
It’s no go the sober pricks, quickly becoming the pissed-pricks,
It’s no go the Cabaret, it’s no go the ball-gown,
All we want is a bang in the dark and a mate and bottle of fall-down,
It’s no go the juxtapose, it’s no go the finger,
Ladies and gentlemen join with me now in formally thanking the singer.
Norman McCrag
Norman is from a Scottish background and is concerned with things that are Scottish. He is not interested in anything that isn’t Scottish. He has spent a great deal of time in Scotland.
SOUTH UIST FROM A CORACLE
God is all forgiving. A useful lesson.
And a sure sign He is not a Scot.
Students of the Scripture find no trace
Of that essential Caledonian charm
So subtle and so soft and warm and born
Of such resentment in the Holy Lands.
There is no evidence in the early scrolls
To show that Judeans spent their evenings breaking
Each other’s hearts in pubs all over Canaan.
On the other hand Our Lord might just
Have had a Scottish mother. There’s a nice
Sardonic touch about creating both
Life and Glasgow in the same week.
The reading today is from the second book of Laing.
Life is a sexually-transmitted disease
With a one hundred per cent mortality rate.
Elizabeth Bayshop
Elizabeth Bayshop spent much of her time overseas but always felt the pull of her native land. She was ordained in Vaucluse after a long struggle in the Church between those entrusted with carrying Christ’s message to all people regardless of colour, race or creed on the one hand; and women on the other.
ONE SCIENCE
A place in history is not hard to barter,
Do just enough, care just enough and leave,
Restraint and pith and class will out in art.
I have enchanted history in three ways,
By random sea migration to Brazil,
By sexual orientation and decay.
The writer flowers when mixed with other spore,
Expatriates appeal so very much,
It works as romance or as metaphor.
And then as lectures call an exile back,
The homeland will be flattered and forgive,
Pretending that a circle is a track.
The child remembers well the way we sing,
We dare to eat a peach and we must speak
To everyone but not say everything.
Harry Reed
Harry Reed worked in radio. That’s what he did for a living. He didn’t write a lot of poetry. He mainly just worked in radio, which is a bit like television only it has pictures.
FACING OF FACTS
Today we have facing of facts. Yesterday
We had rack of lamb and tomorrow, around ten,
We have birth of the blues but today,
Today we have facing of facts. The triumph of democracy
Hangs over the century like marsh gas
And today we have facing of facts.
The position you’re charged with defending, is marked
On your maps with a cross. It is somewhere in English,
And these are the lessons of history,
Which in our case may have to be slightly reviewed,
Sixty million dead in the First World War,
Which in our case could certainly stand some minor modification.
This is the Twentieth Century incidentally, which
Can be stopped very easily at the touch of a button,
And please do not let me hear anyone quibbling about detail,
This power is entrusted to those who require it.
It can be done very easily at the touch of a button.
Sixty million more in the Second World War,
Never letting anyone hear any of them
Wasting their time quibbling about a lot of silly detail.
And these you can see are the poets and artists,
Whose God-given purpose is to stay out of trouble,
Compare and contrast, and tamper with notions of form.
Stand easy lads, smoke if you’ve got them, gather round,
Now I know this stuff about a better society
Sounds like a good idea. But orders are orders
And it’s not on I’m afraid.
No Can Do apparently,
Peace settlement worked out.
Must keep our part of the bargain.
Given our word and so on.
And these are the critics, Art for the use of
And instructions for dealing with same.
You will not say what you like,
What you like is not what you will say,
As a general rule you must not say you like something,
You must say it is not unsuccessful,
And that as to its technical aspects, it is not
Without merit, and as to its symbols, it is
Not without resonance.
This approach, while generally accepted,
Is not without horseshit and I know what you’re thinking,
You’re thinking how is it the century’s monsters
Were not spotted? Where were the artists then, you’re thinking,
Why wasn’t something done earlier,
A word in the right place,
The professional tackle perhaps?
We’ll ask them. Right you lot!
You all heard the question. Where were you?
Why no warning? Why no signal? Isn’t that
The point? I mean correct me if I’m wrong
But what are you people actually for?
You. No behind you. Yes you. What’s your name?
OK Eliot, you tell me, when fascism rose up and
It was obvious what was going to happen,
Where the hell were you? I’m not a bloody idiot Eliot.
There are no poets in foxholes son.
That’s right. You lad, Auden is it? Come here Auden,
Am I hurting you Auden? I should be,
I’m standing on your hair.
You, Thomas, who gave you permission to speak
OF COURSE YOU NEED PERMISSION TO SPEAK YOU
USELESS TUB OF LARD YOU WILL SHUT UP I NEVER WANT
TO HEAR FROM YOU AGAIN SHUT
THE FUCK
UP
RUNNING ON THE SPOT THOMAS MOVE! HUP TWO HUP
TWO HUP
Come on men, let’s have it, you must know where you were!
You can trust me. Magritte face this way lad I SAID FACE THIS
WAY DO AS YOU’RE TOLD MAGRITTE
DON’T TELL ME YOU ARE FACING THIS WAY
YOU ARE NOT FACING THIS FUCKING WAY MAGRITTE
I AM LOOKING AT THE BACK OF YOUR FUCKING HAT
ONE WEEK SOLITARY
Joyce.
Where were the bloody writers when we needed them Joyce?
Where were you for instance at 0200 hours on May 4, 1942?
Working on a new book of knob jokes Joyce YOU THINK
YOU’RE FUCKING CLEVER DON’T YOU JOYCE
That was rhetorical Joyce, there is no need to answer that
Joyce. There is no need to answer that Joyce.
Joyce. There is no need laddie.
Joyce, on the command move you will shut up.
SHUT-UP!
Just talk among yourselves the rest of you.
Joyce. Shut-up is not a question.
It does not require an answer.
Dylan Thompson
Martyr to the turps, Dylan Thompson frequently woke in unfamiliar circumstances and attempted to catch the speech rhythms of the sea.
A CHILD’S CHRISTMAS IN WARRNAMBOOL
One Christmas was so like another in those years around the sea town corner now, that I can never remember whether it was 106 degrees in 1953 or whether it was 103 degrees in 1956. All the Christmases roll into one down the wave-roaring salt-squinting years of yesterboy. My hand goes into the fridge of imperishable memory and out come: salads and sunburn lotions, the brief exuberant hiss of beer being opened and the laugh of wet-haired youths around a Zephyr 6, the smell of insect repellent and eucalyptus and the distant constant slowly listless bang of the flywire door. And resting on a formica altar, waiting for Ron, the biggest Pav in the world; a magic Pav, a cut-and-come-again Pav for all the children in all the towns across the wide brown bee-humming trout-fit sheep-rich two-horse country.
