I said to my dog this morning, freezing in the backyard at 6.07am, ‘If you eat your own poo, you’ll probably spew!’ It is a basic rhyming couplet, not unusual in the playground, in rap music or in advertising jingles. Yet here I am, 63 years and eleven-twelfths, semi-retired uni lecturer, retired ad land Creative Director – and that’s all I can come up with for my wisdom of the dawn.
So, what’s with the rhyming couplet? I’ve been dropping rhymes on the ears of the unsuspecting since I was a pup – like ‘shave, shower, and smell like a flower’. Painful stuff, but perhaps more pleasurable than my other long-term habit, punning.
Anyway, this is a pre(r)amble without purpose. My main subject here, which I was hoping to segue into nicely but it ain’t gunna happen, is this week’s self-inflected homework. This week, at my Wednesday morning Creative Writing class at Tom Collins House, Swanbourne (10am to Noon. If you’re not busy, drop in) I set homework of writing a narrative situated within a job you have held. As part of the project, we all had to make a short list of our occupations. I listed three – uni lecturer, Creative Director, and rubbish tip scavenger. It took me until this morning, Saturday morning, to realise that I had not listed my raison d’etre: writing poetry. I am a poet. I won’t change the world, I probably won’t win a Pulitzer Prize, but I am a poet. It means the world to me. I am depressed if I’m not writing, and over the moon if some words of mine are graced with printer’s ink.
So, why don’t I list it as an occupation? Poet.
I once put it on a Commonwealth Employment Service form as my occupation when I was about 18 years, annoyed that no-one ever saw it as a valuable act. They told me to be serious. And now I’m neglecting it in a similar vein. (Will the cock crow three times before dawn?) It’s the forces of society, isn’t it: everything is indexed to the Holy Dollar. (The USAmericans even had ‘In God We Trust’ on their dollar at once stage – a holy item.)
Now, to get back on task, my homework should search out an incident in my career as poet and tell that in a narrative style. Yes, I have a few anecdotes, stories I trot out at the drop of a hat in the company of attentive students or at literary parties.
AN EARLY LESSON IN CONCRETE IMAGERY AS A VEHICLE FOR EMOTION IN POETRYI was a bearded, bongo-playing Beatnik at eighteen years old. Kerouac had supplanted Saint Francis of Assisi as my hero about eighteen months before, and I had consumed as much Beat literature as I could lay my hands on in Perth, the world’s most isolated capital city. It was 1962 and my home town on the west coast of Australia was a country town with pretensions. Contemporary jazz and Beat lit were scarce. Invisible would be closer.
So, my best mate Viv Kitson (poet and surfer) and I decided to hitch to Sydney. Long story short, we arrived in Adelaide, capital of South Australia, and a desert and two days drive away from home. We hit the booze one afternoon, and met up with two other strangers in town: two Scottish folksingers who were travelling the world courtesy of their vocal cords. Amazing. We were in awe of them, their bravery and their stories. But likewise, they liked us, and our crazy claims to be poets. I pulled out my exercise book in which I had painstakingly transposed twenty four of my best poems in copperplate handwriting. It was entitled “24 Poems”.
We yakkety-yakked and drank all afternoon until they had to get ready for a gig at the Catacombs, a folk club in town. We left them and went to a pub to drink more, then wandered through town until opening time for the club.
It was the days of the folk boom, so little imitation Pete Seegers and plastic Bob Dylans vied for the spotlight with out-of-tune Joan Baezs … We were still drinking, cheap wine by this stage, and I was well away. At last, our Scottish friends were announced and got up to sing. They wowed everyone with true whaling songs sung a capella, interspersed with tales of their travels in broad accents. We were so proud to be their friends. All of a sudden I heard my name, Andy, said with an original origin accent.
‘Come on up and treat us to a couple of ya poems, Andy, lad. Come on! Wouldn’t you like a few poems, hey?’ they asked the audience. The audience indicated ‘Yes!’ and I shrank further down into my coat. After some fruitless cajoling, one of the Scottish boys leant forward and grabbed my exercise book out of my hands.
‘Okay, if Andy won’t read his own poems to us, I’ll give ‘em an airing.’
The light was dim, if you can picture it, about one and a half watts I reckon. Smoke filled the room. Scotty started to read my favourite poem which I had read to them that afternoon. It was called ‘
This Body, World’, and I was very proud of it. I can’t remember it all but some of it went like this:
My God, a Muse jumped on me
From a Darkness and the World
Did the Big Act with a shuddering
Orgasm. Between the lovelegs of life,
My senses bright – the rain is real!Etcetera. It was about sixteen lines long (I had studiously avoided such a pedestrian thing as a sonnet).
Scotty began reading:
My God, a nurse jumped on me …Ahh, I lost the rest of the poem, ashamed of his gaping gaff. What would they think! My masterpiece ruined!
… But they loved it. And me. I was a hero, a living poet, just recently returned from the heights of Mount Parnassus.
I learnt a big lesson about poetry that night: use the concrete and not the abstract. Write with images of the five senses and avoid abstract posturing.
I have written a million poems since then, and luckily I have lost ’24 Poems’ along the track, but if you are writing poems, the best way to progress is to keep listening to the reactions of those you respect and trust.
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