Year 11 English: Oz poetry unit: Prose or poetry?
Some students ask: "But why put it in poetic form? These poems don't rhyme!" These three poems by living Australian poets challenge our preconceptions about poems. They arise in a postmodern era when life and poetry, event and legend are not separated but occupy a literary continuum. In them, we see postmodernist freedom where anything is up for grabs, even the hallowed canons of poetry can be 'broken'. These poets break through any expectations we have about set forms and appropriate content for poetry. These three poets experiment by contesting form with content in surprisingly successful ways.
In a long line of seers, prophets, poets and critics, poets offer surprising insights: they can throw new light upon the familiar, and make much out of the seemingly mundane and ordinary. These three poets show that the ordinary is not off-limits for poets and for poetry. They challenge the assumption that poetry is for heroic legends, for special occasions, for even worse, is sequestered entertainment for the literate. These post modernist poets challenge those assumptions. These poems are accessible; they describe the ordinary and still preserve the poet's traditional role to alert, inform, raise awareness, and even evoke emotions. Like the Australian cartoonist Leunig, Dawe Porter and Murray reassert the traditional poets' role as having a distinctive view upon events - they view them within a larger frame to make us more aware, more reflective and perhaps more moral. The three poems will be discussed individually, then general comments will conclude.
Bruce Dawe's "The Not-So-Good Earth" (Sometimes Gladness, Collected Poems 1954-1982) is an experimental poem that reads like prose. In one stanza of 26 irregular unrhymed lines, Dawe creates a little gem of social criticism. The voice is clearly that of a 1950s Australian suburban family, occupied viewing the deaths of starving Chinese on TV. The speaker's voice is unsympathetic (even racist?) on their plight, and is relieved of any response at all by the Dad accidentally tripping on the extension cord thus cutting off the broadcast and knocking the TV set to the floor in a wisp of smoke. I say "relieved" because any sympathy is not apparently a part of their habitual behaviour.
Reading this again in August 2002, it's surprising how many details date so quickly: the black and white TV has become colour; the contrast knob (if now available at all) may appear on the remote control; the 25 inch convex screen has become the 60 cm. or 95cm. flat screen; Confucian philosophy is a la mode; and now the Africans not the Chinese are starving. But the ironic edge is still not lost. Dawe knows that awareness leads to sympathy if not empathy. Dawe is drawing attention to our society's cossetted apathy about Third World suffering (as exemplified in that most iconic grouping of middle Australia in the 1950s, the traditional family gathered round the television set). Dawe plots what has become known as disaster fatigue, a syndrome peculiar to First World audiences from an over-exposure to images of suffering and death. (Click for further link on consumerism.)
The question arises: Is a poem the correct, or most appropriate vehicle for Dawe's sardonic tone? This is not poetry for entertainment; this is poetry with teeth. The tragicomedy in juxtaposing an Australian household against a Chinese family starving as entertainment cannot be lost. But surely this is the stuff of political pamphleteering, or Time magazine news stories or a preacher's sermon script? The form and content are definitely at odds. (to see also a vry brief discussion, scroll down to TNSGE. (see HSC discussion notes)
Peter Porter's "Your Attention Please" (c Cuban missile crisis 1976?) plain text version appears as one demanding stanza of 61 lines of irregular length without any rhyme. The form seems to have no 'poetic' function as the sentences are interrupted by line breaks, dashes and bracketed parentheses. The sheer prosaic message given by an imaginary robot PA system can be read in the natural prose rhythms. Reading the poem is easy, with a steady insistent beat such as one would expect in calling such an alarm. The instructions aim to be practical, intelligible and relevant. Is this a prose just forced into poetic form? Students ask: Is this another one of those prose poems?
What's Porter doing here? The language is not 'poetical': there is an abundance of topical, technical and technological terms like DEW, Civil Defence Code, Atomic Attack, wavelength, geiger barometer, sealing switch, CD green container, No 1 Survival Kit. The robot's script would not appear in a poetic genre in fact. Is the poet warning us of a real possibility in a Cold War era, shocking complacent readers with a detailed futuristic scenario, real in all its details? Is the poet abating our deep fears with humour by undercutting the political fear rhetoric of the times? Or is the poet just experimenting with form and content, challenging our pre modern expectations about what is suitable material for a poem? Would we necessarily include this in an Australian anthology? Here again we have an experimental tension between form and content - we have what I have loosely called a prose poem.
Thirdly, Les Murray's The Burning Truck (1985?) appears as a description of a real or at least a likely to-have-been-real event in an unspecified but familiar streetscape, when without warning some warplanes, while straffing coastal sandbars and their town, set a truck alight and sent it careering out of control through the streets into the night. The prosaic description continues without 'poetical' paradoxes or devices to overlay a simple experience. There is no high sounding rallying call, philosophic reflection or social criticism here. It records a moment of tension felt by a community of residents when the burning ruck would not stop, when each was "begging that truck between our teeth to halt" (line 21).
The poem lacks a climactic ending or authorial observation which is usual in such pieces, and so defies convention and our expectations and denies us some satisfaction. It fails to record satisfactory meaning for the participants, or for the author or indeed derive any for us readers. Its scant treatment of the event is just like a fleeting memory recalled: something happened, is remembered but no special significance applies. Reading this poem is like reading the paper: the event stands - it's for the reader to grow the meanings and associations. No headlines interpret, no one dies, few applications can be made. The poem reads like prose although it is structured in five stanzas of six lines, without any rhymes, using few 'poetical' devices.
This is poetry for our times; poetry for the ordinary bloke. Murray here plays a joke on the literati, for the ballad-like form raises narrative expectations and they are only somewhat well met; the lack of a climax of any significance reverses the traditional vector to a tragic punch line; and the ordinariness of the event teases, tantalises and denies readers any specifics that tie it down to a particular time and place or attribute a relevance. This poem defies academic categorisation. Some have surmised that it is an autobiographical account of life in a coastal town in wartime New Guinea, or an imagined event in a Queensland seaport during the Battle of the Coral Sea or even that it is a peacetime aerial exercise gone wrong. Murray would guffaw loudly at all these attempts to tie it down, to give it sense, to poeticise the poem into something conventional. It's best to let it be what it is - a simple moment in time when disorder disordered a coastal community's ordered life.
Is the poem an appropriate vehicle for social criticism? Apparently these three poets think so. This is poetry off the pedestal, poetry working in the engine room. They each draw attention to meanings attached to ordinary events, both real and imagined. They refuse to be pigeonholed in their role into writing about traditional romantic love or other idle entertainments. They use poetical forms to convey their robust messages. This is proletarian poetry: accessible, vernacular, and part of the prose tapestry of everyday life. Prose poetry is not an oxymoron; it is a variant but not mutant gene gone abroard. Each of these three poets nonetheless retains his special voice in his role as critic, seer or prophet. As McLuan said in that era, the medium is the message: form will shape content to its purposes, for communication is primarily in the novelty of the packaging. #
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