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Since graduating in medicine from the University of Adelaide, Peter Goldsworthy has divided his time equally between medicine and writing. His novels have sold more than 250,000 copies in Australia alone and have been translated into most European and Asian languages. Among his many literary awards are the 1982 Commonwealth Poetry Prize and the Australian Bicentennial Literary Prize for poetry (1988). His novel, Honk if you are Jesus was a Times Literary Supplement International Book of the Year. Other major works include the novel Maestro, the novella Jesus wants me for a sunbeam, four books of short fiction, four poetry collections and libretti for the Richard Mills operas, Batavia and Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. He was appointed Chair of the Literature Board of the Australia Council for a three year term from 4 December 2001.

Why is it so difficult to remember a string of telephone numbers when a little poem, say a football quatrain called The Centreback:

The Big Number 4
Splits the Pack
Wearing his IQ
On his back

Can easily be remembered and recalled, reasonably accurately. I've had to summon back those lines here myself, because I can't find them anywhere in Philip Hodgins' posthumous Collected Poems, and I think he suppressed them. What I remember might not be quite what he wrote - but is a reasonable Chinese Whisper version of it. And definitely has the same rhyme scheme.

How such poems are memorable - they have little hooks and burrs called rhyme, rhythm and assonance that make them stick in our brains - is easier to explain than why. A possible 'Why' first struck me about ten years ago at a Quiz Night at my childrens' school. After the various teams of parents were settled around our hampers of food and wine the quizzing began. A music question came first. The first line of a song was played form a CD, and the teams had to write down the next line from memory. That first line?

There she was just a-walking down the street.

Two hundred people immediately jumped to their feet and sang rather than wrote the next line, waving their hands and stomping their feet.

Singing       doowadiddydiddydumdiddywah.

Most of us hadn't heard Manfred Mann for twenty years, but we still remembered the entire lyric, syllable perfect. I got to thinking about this. A list of 100 All-Time Greatest Hits was published shortly afterwards in a local daily. Confined largely to Fifties/Sixties rock/pop, the list was clearly the invention of a Baby Boomer. Sharing that same birth-date and bias, I counted 80 odd songs that I could still sing, and more than a few whose lyrics I could probably recite, rhyme-perfect, given time.

A waste of useful brain-space? No wonder names and telephone numbers - and tax-file numbers - fail to appear when summoned. Too many gigabytes of precious (and shrinking) memory have been occupied for thirty years with the lyrics of Good Golly Miss Molly, You Make Me Dizzy Miss Lizzie and other information crucial to personal survival and the survival the species. But I got to thinking a bit more about Why Is This So?

Capacities for music and poetry both evolved, together, as mnemonic devices: techniques that helped pre-literate brains to remember vast quantities of information. Evolution - as Daniel Dennett among others, has pointed out - has saddled our brains with memories that are not as reliable or as quick or random access as the 'dry' memories we can now build with silicon. The human wet-brain is fallible, and often requires intense rehearsal and repetition for sequences of words to stick. Or evolving brains therefore developed various tricks to help - setting words to rhyme or rhythm or music among them. Of course poetry and music both serve countless other purposes as social adhesives, as religious liturgy, as consolation, as revelation, as fun ways of passing the time - but a key common quality of most poetry seems to be its unforgettableness.

The building blocks of poetry are, in short, part of our common human nature. Its structures are hardwired, like Chomsky's deep structure of language, into our brains. Which structures? Well - rhythm and rhyme obviously, as I have mentioned. Speaking of tax file numbers, when we need to remember numbers we sometimes use those structures. The rhythmic chanting of multiplication tables, for instance.

One's one is one. Two one's are two. Three two's are…

Which reminds me of a memorable poem by Judith Wright, Counting in Sevens:

Seven ones are seven.
I can't remember that year
Or what presents I was given.

Seven twos are fourteen.
That year I found my mind,
Swore not to be what I had been.

Seven threes are twenty-one.
I was sailing my own sea,
First in love, the knots undone.

Seven fours are twenty-eight;
Three false starts had come and gone;
My true love came, and not too late.

Seven fives are thirty-five.
In her cot my daughter lay,
Real, miraculous, alive.

Seven sixes are forty-two.
I packed her sandwiches for school,
I loved my love and time came true.

Seven sevens are forty-nine.
Fruit loaded down my apple tree,
Near fifty years of life were mine.

Seven eights are fifty-six.
My lips still cold from a last kiss,
My fire was ash and charcoal-sticks.

Seven nines are sixty-three; seven tens are seventy.
Who would that old woman be?
She will remember being me,
But what she is I cannot see.

Yet with every added seven.
Some strange present I was given.

I sometimes think that we might remember our phone numbers more easily if we sang them to their own little tone-bleep melodies.

Of course music began removing itself from the embrace of words as early as the first bone flute, and headed off to become what Les Murray has called 'the great nonsense poem' - although it keeps reconnecting to the sense of words throughout the history of song. The most widely heard poetry today is Hip Hop, which is the one form of music in which the word is still paramount. It's often a bit limited by the fact that there aren't a lot of English words that rhyme with motherfucker, but we remember what we hear. Hip Hop lyrics have plenty of those sticky little burrs.

Rhyme and rhythm are cross-cultural universals. But so are assonance and alliteration - just as useful as mnemonic aids: 'Carn the Crows.' 'America - Love it or Leave it.'

Slogans are usually built around the poetic effects of simple rhymes or rhythms. And of course advertisers know the mnemonic power of this sort of poetry well, their incomes depend on them. 'All the Way with LBJ.' 'Use it or Lose It.' 'Been There, Done That.' 'The Fickle Finger of Fate.'

Book titles are prime examples. There's a Peter Porter title - Once Bitten Twice Bitten. A Les Murray book - Lunch and Counter lunch. These titles are small sub-haiku poems themselves. They are also epigrams - and the epigram is another word-form that our brains seem be formatted, or pre-stressed, to receive, glove over hand. All cultures store knowledge in the form of proverbs, or sayings, or slogans or epigrams. Or in haiku. A lot of human wisdom is formatted in this way in our wet-brains.

There was only one
tree in all that space and he
drove straight into it.

That's Philip Hodgins again, his Five Thousand Acre Paddock. On the subject of death, here's an unforgettable couplet from another prematurely dead poet,

...but what gets me is how compulsory it is -
'he was never a joiner' they wrote on his tomb.

The last lines of John Forbes' Death - an Ode, which starts with another epigram I have never quite got out of my head:

Death, you're more successful than America,

In preliterate societies, remembering poems or songs can be a matter of life and death. Important geographical knowledge, medical knowledge, religious wisdom and moral instruction - it all had to be remembered, passed on from mouth to ear. But of course poetry has a power beyond the merely pragmatic, beyond what is necessary hunter-gatherer survival information. Or - at least - the pragmatic uses of poetry might be more subtle.

Poetry has - clearly - great sacramental and revelatory power. Great power to move us. Most of us, like most people in the world, probably have a rough idea of the poetry and music we want or are going to get at our funerals, or in our obituaries. A few weeks before Philip Hodgins death from leukaemia in 1995, I prepared a newspaper obituary after a request from Philip had been passed on through a mutual friend. Philip had finally decided to discontinue the chemotherapy which had caused him much suffering for many years. I sent him the obituary - he was curious to read it - and a few days later received a bottle of his favourite wine, Passing Clouds, accompanied by a congratulatory note: it was an obituary to die for. This seems to me one of the great aphorisms, deserving of a place in any collection - and a perfect distillation of Philip's stoic courage and style.

But when we start talking about the emotional power of poetry, we start talking about metaphor above all. Metaphor is the key basic building block of poetry. And this is no surprise - because metaphor is a kind of pattern-seeking - and our brains are formatted at seeking patterns. Logic doesn't come naturally to the human brains. Our brains have to be trained - Pavloved - into logic. Culturally constructed, if you like. But our brains very naturally seek patterns. That's what they do best.

The first poem created by another species that I know of is a short poem by the chimpanzee Washoe, most advanced of the apes who were taught to communicate some decades ago using a rudimentary form of American Sign Language. Annoyed with her teacher, Washoe signed the insult 'shit' at him, using the word, or handshape, in a way which was - at least for chimpanzees - completely new. Washoe and her friends had previously adapted known Sign words in new, composite ways - labelling a radish a 'cry-hurt-food', and citrus fruits 'smell-fruit', a duck a 'water-bird'. Such imaginative naming is extraordinary, but to call something that is not a shit a shit is something else again: a knights' move creation, a jump from one frame into another. A poem.

Washoe's shit-metaphor came to her during a moment of high emotion, suggesting what is perhaps obvious: that metaphor carries a special emotional charge, whether in the form of crude insults -'prick', 'cunt', 'piss off', - or in the most powerful and resonant poetry.

Koko the gorilla took the metaphoric capacity a step further. The usual poetic juxtapositions of Signs were shaped by Koko -'white tiger' for zebra', 'bottle match' for cigarette lighter, and 'bottle necklace' for a six-pack of beer-cans. I'm not sure if this last counts as a metaphor in gorilla-think, or as realistic description - but surely the day she was forced to drink water through a straw, after being denied fruit-juice, and described herself as a 'sad elephant', resulted in another primate poem. These usages are oddly like the 'kennings' of Anglo-Saxon poetry, compound words in which the sea - will be a 'swan-road' (swanrad) or a 'wind-home' (winegeard).

The sign-speech of Washoe and her friends has been used to cast doubt on Chomsky's notion of a deep structure for language, hardwired into the human brain, part of the actual brain anatomy, One of the signing chimps was even christened, memorably, Nim Chimsky. But the implication of her shit-sign is in the opposite. The basis of thinking, at least in the common mammal-brain, which forms a large part of our own, is to some extent inbuilt, or instinctive, and its purpose is comparison, matching like with like. This goes with that, which was the title I chose for a book of my poems. 'The sun is like an orange.' 'The moon is a pearl.' 'Death is a crow.'

Here's another relatively recently dead poet, Gwen Harwood.

Crow-Call

'He lives eternally who lives in the present' - Tractatus, 6.4311

Let this be eternal life:
light ebbing, my dinghy drifting
on watershine, dead centre
of cloud and cloud-reflection -
high vapour, mind's illusion.

And for music, Baron Corvo,
my half-tame forest raven
with his bad leg unretracted
beating for home, lamenting
or, possibly, rejoicing
that he saw the world at all.

Space of a crow-call, enclosing
the self and all it remembers.
Heart-beat, wing-beat, a moment.
My line jerks taut. The cod
Are biting. This too is eternal:
The death of cod at twilight.
And this: food on my table
Keeping a tang of ocean.

So many, in raven darkness.
Why give death fancy names?

Corvo, where have you settled
Your crippled leg for the night?

Grammatical language was a late-comer in our evolution, arriving well after the big growth spurt in the brains of early hominids. Language had to be jury-rigged by evolution onto an already existing organ, which was constructed more for tasks such as (in Daniel Dennett's words) -'food-seeking, face-recognition, and the ballistics of throwing and catching', than for speaking. Evolution often makes do with what is at hand, with what might even be second - or third-best - rather than mutating an entirely new apparatus. One example might be the small bones in the mammalian ear which transmit sound from the ear-drum to the inner-ear - developed from the jawbones of reptiles.

The QWERTY keyboard is a nice metaphor, used by Dennett and others, for these evolutionary processes - and their legacies that remain with us, and which we can never quite escape. QWERTY keyboards evolved in the early mechanical clunky typewriters as a method of keeping the most commonly-used keys separate, thus preventing their frequent jamming. As the mechanics of typewriters improved, this quickly became superfluous - even more so now, with electronic keyboards - but the cost of changing to more rational keyboard system is prohibitive. QWERTY is with us at least until voice-activation. Evolution often leaves us with such legacies, allowing a temporary gain in fitness perhaps, but in the long run not the best fork to choose in the choice-tree of development options. We're stuck with poetry like we're stuck with the QWERTY keyboard. We're going to be stuck with it much longer than the keyboard, which is why it's not so much for the people but part of us.

Of course it can be very energising to break the rules - including the laws of human nature. It's also often necessary - civilisation depends on it. There was a huge anti-metaphor movement especially in the Eastern Europeans after the second world war. 'No poetry is possible after Auschwitz', Adorno wrote, and minimalists such Tadeusz Rozewicz, Enzensberger, Brecht for a time, the Chilean Nicanor Parra reacted against the horrors they had lived through with a kind of anti-poetry. All were to some degree opposed to many of the rhetorical effects and structures that I am claiming are part of our genetic make-up.

They especially shared a suspicion of metaphor, although perhaps the ultimate statement against metaphor came from the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who was no anti-poet, in fact quite the opposite:

The blood of the children
flowed out into the streets
like…
like the blood of the children.

But anti-poetry can only go so far. It only exists finally, in an ironic relationship, to what it criticises. It has limited reach, and variation. Eventually there is no substitute for metaphor for sheer emotional power, for the ability of a poem to make the hairs stand up on the back of our necks.

Here are the last lines of John Forbes' Speed, A Pastoral on the death of Michael Dransfield:

Well, I think he died too soon,
As if he thought drugs were an old-fashioned teacher
& he was the teacher's pet, who just put up his hand
& said quietly, 'Sir, sir'
& heroin let him leave the room.

I find that quite hair-raising. I remember clearly the first time this happened to me. I opened a poetry magazine in my early twenties because it contained one of my own first-ever poems. I glanced idly at a sequence by someone I had never heard of, called Les Murray.

At the hour I slept
Kitchen lamps were sending out barefoot children
Muzzy with stars and milk thistles
Stoning up cows.
They will never forget their quick-fade cow-piss slippers
Not chasing such warmth over white frost, saffron to steam.
It will make them sad bankers.
It may subtly ruin them for clerks.

Those lines made me a sad doctor. I still know them by heart. Walking To The Cattle Place changed my life. I was floored by those quick-fade cow-piss slippers, as surely as being decked by a king-hit. It was one of those formative, life-changing experiences that we all have as readers. I instantly forgot my own juvenile poem; it was immediately obvious, even to self-preoccupied still-adolescent me, that this was the work of a great poet, and not just because he was describing a world I grew up in.

Which brings me back to Judith Wright. Because Les Murray told me recently that it wasn't till he read Judith Wright that he realised it was possible to be a poet in Australia. She was the first poet he had read in his teens who set the world he knew to the music of poetry.

She was the only one the small Dead Poet's Society that I have quoted today didn't know, but I do know her poems. Here's one I don't know if Les has by memory, but it's one of my favourites, and full of the kind of burs and prickles that make it stick to the brain.

Eroded Hills

These hills my father's father stripped;
and, beggars to the winter wind,
they crouch like shoulders naked and whipped -
humble, abandoned, out of mind.

of their scant creeks I drank once
and ate sour cherries from old trees
found in their gullies fruiting by chance.
Neither fruit nor water gave my mind ease.

I dream of hills bandaged in snow,
their eyelids clenched to keep out fear.
When the last leaf and bird go
let my thoughts stand like trees here.

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