Stuart Cooke: “Pastoral”
When we began throwing around ideas for this issue, the notion of ‘Pastoral’ first came up as a joke. Because ever since god knows when, for reasons that always seem to depend on one’s thoughts regarding the generation of ’68, Australian pastoral poetry has often been affiliated with the hackneyed, with the excessively sentimental, and with the sweeping visions of European imperialism.
Of course, much of this bad press is to do with the rise of the modernist sensibility, for which the most interesting work was not about the big spaces but the smaller domains of human interiors, discrete nodes detached from the surrounding world. But the pastoral poem has never been anything if not a response to the changing of the times; this issue of Cordite goes a long way towards showing that pastoral can consist of much more than just sheep and shepherds. At its very core, a poetics of farm and bush is an exploration of Western experience at the limits: taken from its urban confines, it is poetry of the human confronted with the far-more-than-itself.
The diversity inherent in the pastoral mode demands our continued attention to it. Cordite 29 presents the reader with a wide variety of styles, each of which, in its own way, has grappled with, rather than shunned, our theme. We begin with the stunning ‘To Dust’, by Berndt Sellheim, an important poem not only because of its delightful ethereality but because of its subtle placement of human perception in an historically mediated environment. Environment as historical “parchment” then becomes the cold, complex Canadian plains in Matthew Hall’s sophisticated work. We have the fresh exuberance of Jason Lee’s ‘Osmosis’ and the delightfully rugged ‘Mining the Idyllic’ by Barbara de Franceschi. Cordite’s own David Prater chomps up the old relationships between phrases and scenes to produce “clutched gauged muddy ropes”. And this is only the beginning.
But let’s pause for a moment to consider a couple of facts.
All of us, whether residents of cities, towns or Newtown, survive by virtue of the resources we take from surrounding lands. We drink from networks of rivers and water catchments. We breathe air purified by forests and oceans. In Australia, we eat food grown with the few remaining minerals in the continent’s old, drying soils. A poetry which is going to have any kind of relevance in our contemporary world, therefore, is going to talk about, in some way, how a primarily urban conglomerate of societies continues to suck life from the country-side. The city is always a black hole of environmental exploitation.
Secondly, at the basis of all of these discussions about land, and about any discussions that take place upon this land, is the fact of European colonization. This earth that we exploit, that we work on, that we reside on, is Aboriginal land. It “was never bought or sold”, to quote Yothu Yindi’s ‘Treaty’, but stolen in a condition conveniently amenable for the production of Australia’s great pastoral industries. This has tremendous implications for Australian pastoral poetics, and similar situations have similar implications in North America: the peace and solitude we can find in the bush is enforced, and arises within a particular historical context. It is, to quote Hall, “a palimpsest drawn by constructs/ and overlays of violence”. Because, should the poet be willing, it doesn’t take much effort to find that many of the original owners of such places are far from peaceful, and are still fighting to return.
The question of a (post-)colonial pastoral poetic is certainly complicated, but it has provoked an astonishing richness of answers, many of which are the best and most distinctive examples of Australian poetry. Here we might think of Judith Wright’s early poems, of some of Les Murray’s work (particularly moments like Translations from the Natural World) and of what more contemporary poets like John Kinsella, Peter Minter and Martin Harrison are writing. Indeed, to Harrison’s notion that language has a distinctive ‘smallness’ in the overwhelming size of Australian spaces we might immediately adjoin Peter O’Mara’s striking ‘…thinsky…’.
In Cordite 29 we need only look at the differences between, say, Nick Powell’s poems and Michael Farrell’s ’cold turkey’ to begin to realise that writing pastoral isn’t so much about writing towards a particular form or vision on the horizon, or about having a certain attitude or plan of approach. Rather, pastoral is precisely about this very movement towards something (where the emphasis is on ‘movement’, rather than ‘towards’): the human body stepping out, out into ever-wider spaces. When it ventures into environments absent of glassy, vertical structures it’s clear that human language can go in almost any direction. There’s something about “trawling over peculiar surfaces” (‘Variations in the Pupils’) that demands our experiments.
In his outstanding A New Theory for American Poetry (2004), Angus Fletcher comments [somewhat incidentally] that the pastoral mode tends to skew or enforce the division between city and country, or court and country, because it has always remained such an intensely literary activity. Indeed, tension between the locus of the domicile and the open space around the domicile is probably going to remain part of pastoral poetry in some way or other for ever. For it is always the home, from which the poet emerges, and to which she or he returns in order to complete the poem, that provides the necessary space for pastoral.
Edward Reilly’s ‘The House Leans’ is a stirring portrayal of this very duality. Here, it is the density of the home – a density of thought as much as of material – which ensures it is sturdy enough to protect the inhabitants from the oceanic turbulence outside. And in one of two excellent poems by Ivy Alvarez, ‘Curing the Animal’, what is so often the domain of the domestic and the feminine is bled into the surrounding country. “My husband hands me the animal”, the poem begins, allowing Alvarez to smear the frontiers between the kitchen (the feminine), the farm (the masculine) and the ‘wilderness’ (the animal). It is highly insightful, mature work.
For Fletcher, pastoral’s roots in the city and the court lead it to obscure what is for him a “fundamental question” about the “truth” of environmental experience. However it is pertinent to ask, as Joyce Parkes asks for us in ‘Overlander Ode’, what might constitute this environmental truth, and what it might imply. Uncertainty is an essential characteristic of any multifaceted system. Complex ecological and post-colonial systems are no exception. Any claim to an essential truth therefore runs the risk of flattening “freesias, ferns, friction, fiction”, of reducing what is actually a rugged and evolving topography to a flat, abstracted plane. As pastoral poets we must never stop asking, rather than defining, exactly what these environments are and to whom they belong. Such questions have proved excellent compost for poets like Wright, Kinsella and Minter; to neglect them would be to bury “the bloom labour”, to allow a single, rigid way of thinking to “claim and cover”.
We come, then, to what is perhaps that most crucial feature of the pastoral poem: that it is a human song, certainly, but also that it is a song about the human’s engagement with biologic. In this way, the pastoral poem becomes a song of our relationship with the larger, non-human world. Here, as little is true as it is solid; we only see ludicrously powerful flows of energy pushing through, onwards, through. How can we possibly deny the momentum of Jen Jewel Brown’s “halloooo coooweeeeee” as it goes “burnin down thegreengullylacedwithferns”? Isn’t this the universe of ‘Round Up. Make Nice’? Oliver Ackland’s poems are some of my personal favourites in this issue because they rip, sizzle and sing. Here’s language breaking out, bashing tin lids, rounding up, making nice. I don’t know how to grasp something so electric.
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December 4th, 2008 at 11:14 pm
Why (with the exception of a few) are so many of the poems in this collection inaccessible, over-wrought in language and therefore interesting? Which begs another question…are the poets actually writing for a broader audience or just themselves and other poets? No wonder so many people still find poetry pompous unneccessarily complicated and for the most part boring.
December 4th, 2008 at 11:34 pm
why do you call yourself curious when you are so INcurious? are you writing for a broader audience or just yourself?
December 4th, 2008 at 11:40 pm
Well you see constable comprehension, I was curious as to what the answer may be. But you obviously don’t have one.
December 5th, 2008 at 5:00 am
The question you have raised is a valid one. Poetry has lost it’s wider audience largely because of a certain pomposity and a lack of respect or concern for the general readership. However, as someone who has read contemporary poetry from Ron Silliman to the most obscure of blogs, I can assure you you have picked the wrong target. The poetry in this collection is accessible without patronising, it has vibrant language and musicality and very little unnecessary obscurity. Poetry and poets do need to start looking at reconnecting poetry to a non-poetry-writing audience through a better understanding of poetry as performance but firing shots at the wrong targets won’t help.
December 5th, 2008 at 5:45 am
Not the strongest issue of Cordite, though there’s plenty here to warrant a close read. On the whole it seems that the weaker pieces are those by newer, less established writers. Those pieces seem to lack a clear sense of place or moment, and at their worst collapse into confessionalism and bathos in the manner of the poetry of many online critique boards or creative writing classes. Many poems in this issue do, however, transport the reader, through thoughtful syntax and strong imagery, and one hopes that future editors of the BAPs look more closely at them than they appeared to for the 2008 publications.
Starting with those poems that fall flat, it’s hard to find much of interest of craft in Trish Pender’s offering, which reminds more of a diary entry than a strong poem. This comparison can also be made of about Jeffrey’s offering, which seems like it was dashed off in a hurry, and which struggles to rise above navel gazing. The centre alignment of Ackland’s offerins gets thing off to a bad start and the content as expected rarely rises above being nonsensical, particularly the opening ‘Eight headed hills sway to the mad saddle laughing’ which displays little idea of how a sentence should be put together. Elvey’s poem fails to rise above being merely experimental, and someone should really take an axe to all those parentheses. Michael Farrell’s offers little that we haven’t seen in his previous poetry, struggling to rise above a series of ‘gritty’ inner city catch phrases and expecting the rhythms to make up for the content.
Compton’s poem starts with a very promising premise, but in the 2nd stanza forgets that poetry should in fact say something- and could use some more specific insight into either of the geographies she refers to. Langer’s poem offers little to the reader, expecting him to do much of the work and offering only a series of disjointed images and syntax which achieves little. At her best, Sue Stanton is very good, but the offering here seems to lack purpose and fails to get out of first gear.
On to those stronger poems of this issue. Nick Powel’s poems are characteristically strong, developing a reasonable sense of place. Dodd’s poem is light, but at least offers a decent sense of place and leaves the reader not regretting the time it took to read his poem. Ian Smith’s piece gives the reader something more serious to latch onto, and finishes with emotional punch without degenerating into bathos as several other poems in this issue do. David Musgrave’s poem continues a recent vein of good form, creating a very strong sense of moment and place, with some startling imagery and interesting syntax offering the reader much but not telling him anything.
Edward Reilly’s is one of the strongest contributions in this issue, his voice very assured and a constant, though not over-bearing, awareness of craft shining through. Ron Pretty’s ‘Stalking Utopia’ is an interesting and accessible poem which takes a different syntactical approach, the staccato rhythm fitting well with the four line form, and succeeding in creating an internally logical world.
Prater’s poems both work well, especially in combination, but raise the broader issue of editors publishing work in their own magazine- something seen in more than one ezine- though at least in this instance the poet is widely published in other venues and one suspects the submission process was anonymous.
Rachel Thompson’s poem shows promise, but one feels she could learn much about the powers of subtlety and of creating a genuine voice through reading the works of Robert Gray or Luke Davies, two very different poets who at their best at least manage to achieve a sense of the authentic and the genuine. Which is a point which can be more broadly applied to other poems in this issue- at their strongest, these new poems manage to pull the reader into another world, giving some insight into the many ways in which ‘pastoralism’ might be defined. All too often, however, the poems here don’t feel real. Those poems claiming some understanding of bush life frequently seem to have no idea of what actually exists and happens on the other side of the Great Dividing Range, and at times too little attention is paid to the basics of craft. Several of the new poets here, if these offerings are anything to go by, would be best served by more extensive reading and editing, with attention paid to the broader context of Australian poetry, and not just a narrow circle of more academic perspectives.
December 5th, 2008 at 10:06 am
Hi The Big Mountain (great handle, btw!)
Thanks for your comments, and while I don’t agree with all of them, they certainly open up the discussion.
Just a couple of clarifications: yes, all of the submissions for this issue, and for the last five or six issues, were submitted, read and selected anonymously. This means that the guest poetry editor (note: not me) did not know the identities of any of the contributors until the release of the issue.
The issue of editors’ poems in the magazines they edit has come up before, most notably around the release of our Editorial Intervention issue in 2005 - I’m quite happy to have that discussion again but perhaps this is not the right thread in which to do so. I’d also suggest that this is not an issue unique to ezines, and in fact has a long (if dubious) tradition in print journals too.
Lastly, I just want to note that I don’t get paid for my poems or editorial work, unlike the hundreds of Cordite contributors who we have shown off to the world over the last ten years or so, and whose poetry I remain thrilled and proud to publish.
Thanks again for taking the time to read the issue …
D
December 6th, 2008 at 1:21 am
not curious any more: your statements are so hackneyed i find it difficult to derive any meaning from them
December 6th, 2008 at 2:27 am
Thanks David, I figured it was all anonymous, but also thought that others might think otherwise.
It’s a point well made too about getting funding to repay the efforts of the poets you publish- it’s a pretty rare thing among ezines- I can only think of 3 (Cordite, Mascara more recently, and the Pedestal Magazine). And the time and effort it takes to edit and publish Cordite is also important for people to realise- I’m comparing it to another of the Australian ezines which I won’t mention but which takes years between issues (and holds onto poems for ages and ages), and has been putting off the release of their new issue for the better part of a year now because of ‘a lack of staffing resources.’
December 6th, 2008 at 5:55 am
Curious,
I suppose in arguing that each poem should be a lesser complexity of articulated emotion, one is forgetting that the process of writing and the aesthetics of poetry has changed remarkably in the last fifty or so years. Today, poets should be attempting to challenge the manner in which language is used, understood, and that which it represents.
So in response to the question “are the poets actually writing for a broader audience or just themselves and other poets?”
Poets, and the most serious of them, I would think, are writing to a personal aesthetic, or working on proving a certain theoretical aspect of poetry which interests them, and to Cordite’s credit, I think that by bringing up the issue of pastoralism it facilitated the debate that poetics is not static, poetic theory is not static, nor is the human response to a constantly changing world environment held at the static point of modernist poetry. By creating this dialogue on pastoralism Cordite has proven again that progression is an essential aspect of contemporary poetics. Things change, and the manner in which we, who are poets, relate to the world, and to the pastoral, change. Hell, the idea of the pastoral changes; read Disclosed Poetics by Kinsella.
What these poems should be, is reflective of that perspective.
Steve McCaffery has recently said that the poetic voice should be an experience through language not a representation by it– which I think is a remarkably apt and challenging perspective from which assess each of these new poems. I think that though contemporary poetics does have its criticisms (much of the recent criticism directed at the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E school is that it represents an automatonic life, not an emotional one– which seems to be the argument you are making) the central thesis to this and many other branches of contemporary writing is not to extol the utmost amount of emotion, but to challenge the manner in which each letter, word and line creates a further proposition in making the poet’s assertion. What is essential to the continuation of poetry, is this progression, and constantly challenging the manner in which the poem is read.
For contemporary poets and poetic groups defined by their own great and lasting pursuit of a single idea, check out L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Russian Futurism, Quietude, or ‘the Cambridge School’ …
December 8th, 2008 at 5:05 am
Curiously Responding makes some interesting points, but I feel there’s almost something a little disingenuous about a couple of statements and that long and overly academic responses to claims of inaccessibility are somewhat ironic. Not wanting to rehash the langpo debate (which tends to divide people pretty neatly, and lead to the occasional AVO, and which has been dealt with in the new edition of Overland anyway in the debate between someone whose name I forget and Kinsella himself)), but rather to remind of the diversity of poetics in Australia and more broadly-
The assertion that ‘Poets, and the most serious of them, I would think, are writing to a personal aesthetic, or working on proving a certain theoretical aspect of poetry which interests them’
worried me quite a bit, at first, and after a few days of consideration it still does, in the sense that it seems to imply that more or less equal numbers of poets are working to each of these modus operandi-though I don’t have stats to prove it, i’m pretty sure that the vast majority of poets publishing in Australia and the UK/US are not trying to ‘prove a certain theoretical aspect of poetry.’ I mean, some are, and they are well represented in this issue of Cordite, and generally in Jacket, and certain MFA programs tend to churn them out, but generally most poets are striving for something else. Many, if not most, publishing poets don’t care very much about elaborate theories of poetry. Most, i’d suggest, fit more closely with Simic’s ‘cult of experience’- as he wrote, ‘Our poets, when one comes right down to it, are always saying: This is what happened to me. This is what I saw and felt. Truth, they never get tired of reiterating, is not something that already exists in the world, but something that needs to be rediscovered almost daily.’ It’s this engagement with the world which I think is still at the core of most contemporary poetry, and which has the ability to attract people to poetry rather than keep them at arm’s length- not the ‘denial of perception’.
It also relates to the very purpose of language. ‘the poetic voice should be an experience through language not a representation by it’ is certainly one perspective, and is in one sense accurate- as someone mentioned above, poetry should transport the reader, be an experience in itself. On the other hand, the problem with denying the representational aspect of poetry is that it denies that which Simic notes above, and seems to offer an excuse to write poetry which will alienate as many or more writers than it attracts, which require footnotes to justify, and which will cause the broad majority of people who exist at the edges of literature, as casual readers or students etc, to stop reading poetry.
December 8th, 2008 at 6:54 am
Thanks for the thoughtful responses.
Personally, I enjoy reading and attempting to write poetry that provides emotional impact and presence upon the page. Poetry that aims for originality of thought and sets out to offer the reader (whether they be well-read or otherwise) a fresh perspective and the possibility of exclaiming “HA!” too loudly while they read it on the bus.
I do not wish to be confused or feel as though I’m deciphering code. I want to be taken for a ride and charmed and wooed by your words, maybe challenged by them but not choking them down.
In my opinion, too many poets are trying simply trying way too hard to be clever and there’s no poetry - nor a real audience - for that.
December 9th, 2008 at 2:51 am
But I do think there’s a place for both kinds of poetry - the stuff that woos and the stuff that makes you work to understand it (even just a little). A bit of variety in your poetry diet could be good for you. Of course, in the end it’s all down to taste.
December 9th, 2008 at 8:57 am
I think there is without doubt a place for both kinds of poetry, and I think there is also much room for talk about poetry, the particular poems published in Cordite, and so forth. I love that the opened comments feature was so rigorously and instantaneously taken up as an opportunity to converse.
I only wonder about the merits of anonymous critique. Electronic publishing democratizes access to poetry and poetry communities, but I don’t see why that should mean the evaporation of the sort of social accountability we experience in face-to-face communication. WordPress enables us to post comments without providing our names, but this limits the poets’ right of reply, and their ability to constructively assimilate a critique.
Any mud hurled on the www is indelible and sticks indefinitely. I just wonder… if you are signing in with a handle, why is it, do you think, that you want to hide behind that? I would challenge anyone dissecting a poem here to be good enough to sign their critique with their real name.
NB: I work for Cordite, but the above is my opinion only. See the comments policy for more information on your rights and responsibilities and other niceties.
December 9th, 2008 at 11:14 pm
Sure, for big mountain, and bob, read sam byfield. I’m sometimes reluctant to sign my name as I’ve seen plenty of instances online of people getting upset and personal, and have heard of instances of stalking that have spilled over into the material domain.
December 10th, 2008 at 2:48 am
dont poets just wanna have fun?
December 10th, 2008 at 7:34 am
Bravery is honesty - be yourself and say who you are or don’t criticise I reckon. But criticism is a valuable thing if it’s done right. Very valuable.
December 10th, 2008 at 9:03 am
wonder what lurks behind some people’s poetic name
December 19th, 2008 at 1:14 am
Dear Cordite,
I find it odd that very few of the responses posted here actually mention Stuart Cooke’s bold vision: to think about PASTORAL in the context of contemporary Australian poetry and life. This is despite Cooke’s generous introduction pointing us toward some of his hopes and claims for the issue. What is the pastoral? Why has it dominated much Australian art practice? What are its shapes and possibilities in the early 21st century? How might poetries that deal with land and country have new relevance in Australia after ‘Sorry’? How do these fresh poems tackle such burning issues? Cooke clearly selected the work with some of these provocations in mind, and I think it’s a pity they aren’t being discussed.
In my view, by singling out the ‘promise’ or ’strength’ or ‘degeneration into bathos’ or ‘mere experimentalism’ of individual pieces here, rather than addressing the core themes of this issue, we risk missing a vital critical opportunity. And given Cordite’s commitment to publishing emerging poets, such an approach also risks dumping a huge historical weight upon new artists as a cipher for our own reading anxieties.
It seems disappointing and limiting to retreat to old, imaginary battle lines as soon as an editor tries to do something different and timely in Australian poetry. Knee-jerk comparisons to poetical dramas from over 30 years ago in North America can only prevent us from seeing the tall trees growing right here in our front yard… and too much beta-blocking ain’t good for the heart.
Best wishes
Kate Fagan
January 1st, 2009 at 4:24 am
I just wanted to commend Stuart on his efforts, and as Kate recommended, think it should be acknowledged as a great contribution to the current discussion of poetics, and the pastoral, nationally and internationally.
It should be noted that the pastoral issue of Cordite has been featured on Silliman’s blog, which I think highlights the strengths of the issue as well as Stuart’s ability to frame the collection within the ongoing conversation about the pastoral.
mjh