2006 Judith Wright Lecture

by Fay Zwicky

I've been given freedom of choice about my topic with a hint of preference for 'controversial and challenging material.' In a country whose citizens have allowed the violation of human rights and an opportunistic disregard for truth to pass without protest over recent years, I'm no longer sure what constitutes controversy or challenge. I can only imagine Judith Wright's ghost appalled by our apathetic connivance in power's abuses and surrender to materialist values. Reading her poems decades after their publication, I've asked myself often enough what has happened to the Australia she and I grew up in, what has happened to the world we set out to make sense of as well as to celebrate.

On superficial reading at least, it seems that the world has become much less tolerant. The sectarian, literary and ideological premises for imaginative creation and critical appraisal have become far more narrow and prescriptive. To the Christian, Marxist and Freudian straightjackets of my youth, we now have to add the Lacanian, Deconstructionist and Feminist schools. In light of these inhibitors, I've become uncomfortably aware both as poet and ex-critic, how difficult it is to talk about poetry, no longer sure what the terms of reference are, realising the necessity of rigorously interrogating every word used when assessing a poem and very reluctant to offer advice to anyone wishing to publish. Learning to put aside righteous causes, to clear out the rubble of pretension and falsity, you're obliged eventually to challenge the very facility of your own rhetoric, a facility that can so easily persuade the poet of her own divinity. Writers, being more prone to self-doubt than most, are often proportionately more skilled and articulate in deluding themselves into certainty. The need to shuck off cant coupled with an aversion to the distorting power of words, of systems, of institutions and of one's own cleverness may grow stronger with age if you work at it. Awareness of mortality - the distinction between the glib concept and the actuality - now stares you in the face and you deny it at your peril. So what, you might well ask, is this woman doing getting on her moral high horse, knowing in advance all the traps and pitfalls she's exposing herself to?

Being old can provide a very useful, even non-ideological vantage point for examining the present in terms of some resurrectable past implicit in one's own life. It can give you a chance - the last one, actually - to test notions of aesthetic and philosophical continuity, a chance to find out whether points of critical reference passed on from a preceding generation are still capable of providing insight into our present situation. This isn't made easier by the feeling that one's work is no longer relevant, if read at all, and that the social politics of poetry seem to have become a substitute for the art itself, a frivolous activity that keeps you busy on the circuit instead of actually writing.

Living like a dinosaur in the most remote capital city on this continent and having no computer or web credibility, I can't help but recall Keats's words written shortly before his death: 'I have an habitual feeling of my real life having passed and that I am leading a posthumous existence.'

Surrounded by ghosts of friends whose poetic lives, like my own were, grounded early in those great lyric staples memory and mortality, my bulging bookcase is something of a memorial to some of these writers who gave me support and encouragement from among that strange beleaguered freemasonry in a country that has been largely indifferent to the preservation of its past and the resources of its language.Many of these admired writers have possessed a strong humanitarian bent, a close identification with underdogs and outsiders making them generous towards newcomers and eager to oppose injustice. The tension between the urge to participate in public life and the aesthetic impulse towards artistic detachment has always simmered away below the surface, tending to become more marked in troubled times. I remember Patrick White's passionate anti-nuclear stance and Judith Wright's protest against the rapacious logging and mining industries. Neither could be called cuddly crowd-pleasers. Far from resolving the private versus public conflict, far from achieving the calm acceptance I once believed would be old age's reward, I'm finding myself just as irascible, just as ambivalent about the writer's role in our divided society as my revered predecessors became towards the end of their lives. How can one remain detached from the daily bulletins of disaster? The bombings, the endless lies and deceptions, the breakdown of international law, the waves of homeless and displaced refugees from all over the world, the upsurge of xenophobic prejudice the tragic fate of all innocent people caught in the crossfire of tribal discord.

Like John le Carré, I believe there's no bigger sin that a politician can commit than allowing his country to go to war under false pretences. In view of the senseless slaughter in Iraq since the misconceived invasion by America and its allies, and the cavalier committal of our own young men to a hopeless cause, possibly to die for some flight of fantasy about our relationship with the United States, I find it very hard to remain detached.

As le Carré said, and I have to agree: 'I think it is becoming not just a social but a patriotic duty to attest to the shit that we're being subjected to.' The price we are paying for our silence is to live in ignorance, live complicit with pathological secrecy, corruption and greed. And, what's more, we're condemning our descendants to more of the same. Is this,I ask myself, the decent country that Judith Wright and I grew up in and had such hopes for?

I know that compassion won't- change anything. I know that the protest of one individual is hardly adequate to make an impression on the climate of ignorance, fear and brutality that sets in once men go to war. I can only express my own moral misgivings in poems, much as the dissenting English poets did from the trenches of World War I.

That's why I put my thoughts into the mouth of the Potter who made the terracotta army for his emperor in the 3rd Century BC. The Potter's soliloquy concludes a 6-part sequence about that army and its ruler in my new book, Picnic. The Emperor Chin-shi-huang, the first emperor at China who also happened to be the last word in egomania, decreed that all his followers should accompany him as an imperial bodyguard in the afterlife, and therefore had to be buried alive. In my poem, the Potter/Artist describes his feelings of impotence once 'despots pump the hearts of simpletons with endless wars.' In view of the monstrous inhumanity shown by his leader, the Potter concludes despairingly: 'What price my mouse gasps?' which expresses pretty well the way I feel about the state of things today.

Perhaps it's not given to everyone to achieve harmony. Maybe it's one more of those myths that proposes reconciliation as the mark of maturity like the conclusion of Shakespeare's The Tempest or those portraits by Rembrandt of young men made luminous with mortality's enlightenment. What about King Lear's rage on the heath? What about the disjunctions of Beethoven's late quartets? What about Tolstoy's very late break for freedom at the age of 82, running away from home to die furiously in the Astopovo railway station? What about Poe's death in a Baltimore gutter? Or Ibsen's angry last plays embodying grandiose dreams of bettering humanity's lot? These are not the works of wise and composed elderly sages sanctified by sweet reason and benign acquiescence. They are riven by rage and contradiction, beaten down with irresolution and intransigent to the end.

That ambivalence was well expressed by my old friend, Vincent Buckley, when acknowledging his feelings of guilt and impotence during the Soviet repression of the Hungarian uprising in a poem written shortly before his death:

'how useless poets are,' he said, 'how
feeble their anecdotes and promises.'

Elsewhere, he enlarged on this self-castigation:

'Poets, with their room-bound acts,
their room-soft fingers,
are aimless movers.

The soldier poets of World War I have kept dissent alive for generations of pacifists. Involvement or isolationism in World War II affected the lives and careers of poets like Auden and Isherwood who sat out the war in America immune from the London Blitz. Isherwood wrote in his diary in 1941, having declared himself a conscientious objector, 'If I fear anything, I fear the atmosphere of war, the power which it gives to all the things I hate - the newspapers, the politicians, the puritans.. .I am afraid I should be reduced to a chattering enraged monkey, screaming back hate at their hate.' It used not to be too hard to mobilise a nation's artists and intellectuals to speak out about war as they tend to believe in the individual's right to make choices, to make distinctions between just and unjust wars. I'm not so sure today's bunch are as ready to stick their necks out.

Whether or not they're capable of the grand gesture, faced with symptoms of cultural disintegration, with human barbarism, apathy and destructiveness, many poets have been driven to ask 'How will civilisation last?' unable to grant either the individual or the collective immunity from evil, no longer even sure of the meaning of the term 'civilisation.' Yeats foretold the end of innocence with his cataclysmic vision of the second coming in the 1930s:

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

During the Cold War years, some American-Jewish poets of the left who'd lived through the Depression and felt that democratic ideals had been betrayed meditated on power from the sidelines, some leaving poetry altogether for nearly 30 years. George Oppen, for example, still revered today in the United States by a small attentive following, but not included in the Norton anthologies, published his famous poem, Of being numerous in 1968, a poem which focused on the individual consciousness and its perilous survival under authoritarian pressure. The famous ironic lines often quoted from Section 7 of this poem express a form of resignation to mob rule:

Obsessed, bewildered
By the shipwreck
Of the singular
We have chosen the meaning
Of being numerous.

Together with Louis Zukovsky , Charles Reznikoff and Carl Rakosi, Oppen belonged to a group known as The Objectivists which published an anthology in 1932. At the time, Carl Rakosi, who died last year in San Francisco at the age of 100, named the three qualities that Poetry was in need of 'after years of slop', performing the same purgative function for American verse that the Movement's Larkin and Amis performed for England's but coming from the opposite end of the political spectrum. Sincerity, above all, and clarity and precision. Insincere, high-flown diction, opinionated language lacking concentration and compression had to be eschewed along with the dangers of abstraction divorced from the concrete realities.

These poets were driven into silence and disillusion by the cynical self-aggrandisements of the left and right, by the atrocities of the Vietnam War, the blurring of ethical standards concerning military methods, the sophistry arguing for the legitimacy of napalm and burning gasoline being dropped on innocent civilians. Rakosi dropped out of writing and publishing after the age of 40, saying 'In a time of injustice it is embarrassing to be discovered playing the lute.' His Selected Poems appeared in 1941 but he'd already written the last of his early work in 1939, going on to become a full-time social worker and peace activist. He didn't return to poetry for 27 years.

It was my good fortune to discover two poems of his written in his hundredth year in the London Review of Books in November, 2003. I want to read one of them called Confession, 1931. It takes him back to what made him a poet, initially wishing 'to be heard' like so many of us, but learning the freedom of the true self, which is a private and ungraspable gift only understood after all the public rhetoric has been exposed for the hollow sham that it is - modernity revealed as manifesto. Anyway, here is the poem:

And now the young followers
of Pound close ranks,
I among them,
and wish to be heard.

As a populist
I wish to proceed
with serious dignity,
thus: 'My fellow townsmen, etc.'

but I have a hornpipe
in my head,
kicking up its heels
and wanting out

but delicately,
as if a butterfly had flown
out of the English language.

The beauty and sheer light-hearted ecstatic enjoyment of liberation from the burden of public performance and the mockery of his youthful arrogance, is so subtly caught. It's a poem so free of intellectual wankery, so poignant an assent to the spontaneous joy awaiting release that I felt compelled to write a letter of appreciation to the journal. The man was a hundred years old, after all! Who, at that age can come up with such a graceful little miracle of compression? Feeling club-footed and awkward, I asked the editor in a postscript to forward my letter to Mr Rakosi if the journal chose not to publish it. This they did, and I received a reply which I'll quote:

You have sent me a valentine in which the poet and the poem and the reader are one. How perceptive of you! I am in your debt. Carl Rakosi

Who said poetry didn't bring its own rewards! Nonetheless, I was dismayed and saddened about two weeks after receiving his letter to read the announcement of his death in the next London Review of Books.

Maybe we have to wait till the hour of our going to achieve the miracle of lightness, the shedding of our cloistered and cranky mannerisms to come within cooee of imaginative truth so seemingly effortlessly wrought. Saying what, in youth, one would have loved to be able to say but was too full of words to get right. It doesn't stop you from realising you don't always need to say things, especially when your friends die. Going Round in my head were Eliot's words from East Coker, so much part of my mental furniture these days that I used to think I'd written it myself:

One has only learnt to get the better of words For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which One is no longer disposed to say it.

How well I know this sense of not needing speech any longer, this awareness of silence as a positive contribution to wisdom. The adversarial notion of conquest by language takes a dive in the presence of death. The tongue falls silent, the bell's clapper is still, and whatever truths one might have wished to capture about life begin to seem strangely irrelevant.

The key poem in Vincent Buckley's Last Poems published after his death in 1991 was called A poetry without attitudes. It left me with a similar sense of transcendence of mundanity that Rakosi's poem achieved, a sense of the poet growing into a new skin, relinquishing will, intellectual cunning, returning to a new-found simplicity, that instinctual passivity close to Blake's higher innocence that makes for the most poignant poetry. Here is Vincent Buckley's poem:

A poetry without attitudes

that, like a chance at happiness,
arrives too late, so candid
it will seem secret
and will satisfy no-one,
be useless in seminars
and will certainly aggravate critics

and force even the publisher
to speak of a New, a Mature voice

while actually you are learning
to walk with it, to lie against it,

your earth-tremor, your vibrato
turning you slowly into song.

It's interesting to find so many poets late in life turning away from language's wiles towards the non-verbal arts like music and dance which are innocent of morality and have no designs on us, make few claims and offer no solutions.

I don't want to give away too many trade secrets, but we poets will sometimes get up to all sorts of ruses to shake off the constraints of the self. I've managed it on rare occasions, one of which produced a poem called The Duck-Herd's Night Off. No life could be further from my secluded and privileged isolation in Western Australia than that of a poor young duck-herd on the crowded Yangtse River. But somehow, a visit to China in 1988 kicked off all sorts of imaginative possibilities that took years to germinate; Maybe spurred by a glimpse of that magical greeny-turquoise gusset tucked in the soft brown duck's wing on the Swan River as I looked out over its glassy stillness one fine morning. Anyway, here's The Duck-Herd's Night Off:

Lying low on the Yangtse
under a haiku moondrift,
same old moon, same old
fraying wisps of cloud
passing over the long
flat rocks starred with
plum blossoms, gleaming
sickles of yesterday's
reed-pickers laid to
rest - all, all at the end
of my nose taking
the misty air.

Like my dearest
bobbing dreamless on
the quiet current, head tucked,
so modest under the sheen
of her green wing.

Poetry itself is, or used to be, the most private of all the arts. The poetry world is small and obscure and the poet, in worldly terms, is the least of creatures. If you want to see where power lies in the arts, take a look at the contemporary art scene. I remember the poet and critic, Al Alvarez commenting on Clement Greenberg, the New York art critic who was throwing his weight around at a conference on criticism in Sydney. How, after each literary session, Alvarez said it was just his luck to be surrounded by ladies in floral dresses with poems concealed about their persons while Greenberg was whisked away in a chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce to advise millionaires about their art investments. There's always a whiff of battle fatigue hanging round male poets with too much time on their hands, when it's not outright warfare.

Anyway, what you discover quite a bit later is that the real work is done and the real satisfactions obtained long before the poem gets into print. Of course every poet would like his or her work to be read sympathetically and with pleasure, but that's just an added bonus. The ultimate pleasure is in getting the poem right, making it as true and strong as you are able and then, maybe, having it pass muster with two or three people whose judgment you respect.

Despite the tricksy allure of fine language, there have been times when its suspect glamour offers comfort and relief. Poems I read as a child have given me a lifeline to hope, relief from anxiety, escape into enchantment. Falling in love with a poem is much like falling in love with a person. It's the end of being solitary to love someone. But it's that initial solitariness that has drawn you to the poem in the first place. I don't feel in the least apologetic for still loving James Elroy Flecker's The Old Ships with its lulling rhythms, dream-like images, old-fashioned poeticisms like 'o' er' instead of 'over,' its incantatory tonalities and unabashed lyricism. It buttonholes you with its first five lines:

I have seen old ships sail like swans asleep Beyond the village which men still call Tyre, With leaden age o'ercargoed, dipping deep For Famagusta and the hidden sun That rings black Cyprus with a lake of fire;

I wasn't to know that, 60 years later on the Israeli army would be raining bombs on Hizbollah strongholds in that same city which 'men still call Tyre.' Nor did I imagine when I wrote about the violet-blue skies of Isfahan in my poem of that name, once the exotic capital of 18th century Persia, that it was going to house the bulk of contemporary Iran's nuclear reactors. To a child with an obedient, sensitive ear, the formalities of ritual, the repetitive comfort of rhymes and rhythms absorbed unconsciously provide an invaluable training ground for the nurture and development of a poet. The moral awakening and the end of innocence come later, long after you're hooked on beauty's amorality. As Yeats foretold in his poem, Coole and Ballylee, 1931, prophetic as usual about the death of the heroic age and the trappings of romance:

We were the last romantics -
Chose for theme
Traditional sanctity and loveliness...
But all is changed, that high horse riderless,
Though mounted in that saddle Homer rode
Where the swan drifts upon a darkening flood.

That darkening flood will eventually rise and become the blood-dimmed tide in which innocence, as Yeats knew, would be drowned. I still think it's permissible, armed with the double-edged sword of our eloquence and alert to its dangers, to find consolation in those early sources of nurture.

The revelation of the individual self or selves behind the social mask is what poetry lives by, the inner candour that gets disguised and distorted in categories and power play is what brings a poem alive. That aura of truth can't exist unless the poet is absolutely straight with herself in everything.

The volatile impulse to name, share and celebrate what everyone knows but what so many repress can't function in an atmosphere where points are scored by the head, not the heart. Poetry has always seemed to me a source of hope as I believe it was for Judith Wright, a means of speaking against any repressive orthodoxy be it religious, political or social. It has offered a place for the dissenting imagination that hankers to encompass not only the truth of what is, what has been, but also what might be or what might have been.

If you've decided this talk is riddled with contradiction you're right. The personality of many writers has a built-in ambivalence, awkward for the writer to live with and equally difficult for the reader to understand. The need for privacy and the need for recognition start their ungainly struggle very early. The desire to please the world fights the impulse to tell the world what's wrong with it. Starving for letters, yet reluctant to answer them, dying for the telephone to ring yet insistent on an unlisted number, a hermit who longs to be pursued into her cave - you can see how endless for both writer and reader are the opportunities for the distortion of a trusting personal exchange.

In later life, however, perspectives change and what began as private ambition and the childish desire for self-justification has given way to a strong desire to keep out of the limelight. Beginning with the wish to make an impression, one ends up wanting to erase the impression. Beginning by basking in a brief bout of attention, one ends up with a kind of gnawing impatience with what looks like a charade - all the flattering attention, every invitation to speak, every request by the media to impersonate a wise human being, every hunger of the ego - an impatience with anything that may distract from interest in the world that surrounds and dwarfs us. The great paradox is that you only become free by cutting yourself loose from the very things other people want freedom for.

We're told in Ecclesiastes 'Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.' I'm sure you know what that means, whether you're a writer or a reader or both. You can get that feeling of exhaustion simply by entering even a modestly well-stocked bookshop or library. 'Must I really read all those books? Will the world be any worse off if I never read or write another word?' The catch is, of course, that it's just this involvement in the world of commerce, this imposition of one's tiny thoughts upon the machinery of manufacture and distribution that originally inflamed the ego and that gave the writer the comforting illusion that words on a page would preserve her from extinction. So long as this illusion persists, the writer is at risk, especially when society seems to be sitting up and taking notice, even to the extent of rewarding her labours with prizes and praise.

Eliot's rather bleak lines from Little Gidding in the Four Quartets sum up a lot of things for me at this stage of life, feeling literally and metaphorically as if I'm already leading that posthumous existence Keats described. Anyway, here is T.S.Eliot:

Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age
To set a crown upon your lifetime's effort.
First, the cold friction of expiring sense
Without enchantment, offering no promise
But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit
As body and soul begin to fall asunder.
Second, the conscious impotence of rage
At human folly, and the laceration
Of laughter at what ceases to amuse...
Then fools' approval stings, and honour stains.
From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit
Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire
Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.

Looking as an artist for equilibrium between his mortal shell and his soul, connecting himself as an artist with the souls of the dead, the refining fire beckons like a mirage.

The writer starts off with that vulnerable preciously personal life she once lived before becoming 'A Writer' with a capital 'W'. If one loses one's grasp on the truth of those obscure fumblings and self-doubts, one may find oneself stuck in the role, turning into a dummy labelled 'Writer,' going through the motions of authorship. With the role come an expectant audience of sorts and a habit of communicating with that audience, telling it weakly like a tired old stand-up comedian what it already weakly knows, repeating those comforting local myths about ourselves which larger historical forces are already sweeping away before our very eyes. When this happens, the writer dies as a writer and becomes an inert cultural object, a token figure in a community that has set its seal of approval on what it thinks culture and the arts means.

If the future of literature is closely linked with the society that produces and consumes it, we'll need to keep a wary eye on the directions we seem to be moving in. I'm not saying the dollars don't matter. It's the emphasis society places on them that counts. Without art, the human spirit disintegrates into the anonymous statistics of history. If writers have a part in defining and preserving the sense of a culture, the lyric poet has a stake in reminding us how it feels to be a repository of ancestral memory. The poet not only brings to the task the singular association of sights, sounds and sense impressions that constitute a distinctive identity, but also records communal rituals and pieties which are the living evidence of her origins and moral heritage.

In the world of agitprop and political self-righteousness, private life, even when unhappy, tends to keep people sane or at least hold grandiose illusions at bay. It's poetry's business at least some of the time to remind readers of their shared and troubled humanity and to help them sustain whatever inner life is still possible. A beautiful example of what I mean comes from Czeslaw Milosz's long poem, Orpheus and Eurydice. Summoning personal memories under the guise of the Orphic legend, the voyage of Orpheus to the underworld attempting to reclaim his lost love, Milosz writes the following lines:

He remembered her words: 'You are a good man.' He did not quite believe it. Lyric poets Usually have - as he knew - cold hearts. It is like a medical condition. Perfection in art Is given in exchange for such an affliction.

Only her love warmed him, humanized him. When he was with her, he thought differently about himself He could not fail her now, when she was dead.

I hope that I've managed, among all the confusions and contradictions, to give you some sense of what I think has been gained and lost for the poet in the process of what society calls 'growing up', caught as I am between Matthew Arnold's two worlds, 'one dead, the other powerless to be born.' It doesn't follow that just because I'm old and grumpy I'm ready to throw in the towel and hand over the keys of the city to the barbarians. Matthew Arnold's ghost gave me my title and my inspiration and Judith Wright's spirit, very much alive, is cheering from the sidelines. Poetry has given me incalculable rewards and some lifelong friendships. As I said, the poetry world is small and obscure but being part of it has been a privilege above price.

I'll end with a little parable about one of those old rabbinical teachers who was observed watching a tightrope dancer with great interest. His students wondered why their master found this so unexpectedly intriguing. He replied, 'This man is risking his life and I can't say why. But one thing I'm sure about: while he's dancing on the tight-rope, he's not thinking about earning money. If he did, he'd fall.' As Milosz said, it's like a medical condition. Some survive long enough to tell the tale and I'm lucky to be one.

Thank you for hearing me out.