Poetry is presence
Daniel, Missy
POETRY IS PRESENCE AN INTERVIEW WITH LES MURRAY MISSY DANIEL es Murray is, simply, Australia's greatest liv Ling poet. He lives with his father, his wife and three of their five children, on...
...I just didn't have any technique...
...I quite like them...
...Are you a hedgehog or a fox...
...Most of the poets have in fact stayed in Australia, and have got on with their writing...
...MURRAY: I belong there...
...Murray has also published two collections of articles and essays, Persistence in Folly and Blocks and Tackles, and has edited both The New Oxford Book of Australian Verse and An Anthology of Australian Religious Poetry...
...He said, "Catholic...
...as well as The Boys Who Stole the Funeral ($20, 71 pp...
...His other verse collections include The Vernacular Republic and The Daylight Moon...
...I was just thinking historically...
...I began to look into it, and I thought, "Oh, I belong to that...
...I discovered that poetry was about presence...
...It's only in my generation we've been able to get our work out to England and America and places...
...I didn't like getting paint on me...
...It's something that's been made immortal but is quite ordinary at the same time...
...I was just finishing high school and two teachers who believed in teaching outside the curriculum showed me a few things that I had not seen before...
...It may figure as a painting or a sculpture or a building...
...Did you have some sort of epiphany, some conversion experience...
...Yet he has also said, "I am interested in one thing only, and that is grace...
...The process of fusion of those three things in ourselves-the body, the dreaming mind, and the conscious mind-is as likely to produce an invention, or motorcar, or a philosophy, or a fine quilt, or a marriage, as it is to produce Commonweal 22 May 1992: 11 art...
...They alerted me to Hopkins, and also to the existence of Australian poetry (which was not then taught anywhere except Leningrad and Toulouse...
...DANIEL: In D. H. Lawrence's novel Kangaroo, set in Australia, he wrote that "the vast continent is really void of speech...
...Except he went in for sin...
...It was a fair time ago...
...I think they're a poetic species...
...I just thought to myself one day, well, it's time to do that...
...also, you note, Catholicism gives your poems their spirit, lightness, and generosity...
...MURRAY: To be a long-lasting mark, it can be a word...
...I didn't leave those people with any kind of dislike...
...He was an Englishman, you know...
...Even aircraft flying over a piece of farmland will spot where the foreigners were, hundreds and hun MISSY DANIEL is a Boston-based free-lance writer...
...I didn't care...
...It seems to be provoked by an integration...
...I don't think humans are a rational species...
...Which might be why people are suddenly getting scared of the idea of evolution and of progress...
...MURRAY- I don't know...
...Not if it's evolution...
...We were going to be the soldiers of the Third World War...
...They split up about five or seven years later...
...I thought, yes, yes, the absolute transformation of ordinary elements into the divine...
...I think I'm the only person in the history of that church who ever got a mark of 1200 out of 1200 for scriptural knowledge...
...Most secular mythologies seem to be anxious to close the possibilities of life down and delimit them...
...One, the English master, had the feeling that I would like Hopkins, and bang, I suddenly discovered this language with a live electric current through it-you know, powerful stuff...
...I started trying to write a novel, and it was rubbish...
...He just preferred to leave that one alone...
...MURRAY: He actually forgot how to read...
...MURRAY: With me the action mostly comes before the words...
...It's been placed one small, decisive step beyond the mortal...
...There was no joy whatever in the strange white light of Protestantism that I'd seen...
...Do you feel that identification yourself...
...I am only interested in everything," he said in Boston, where this interview took place...
...They're in a kind of fusion...
...Mind you, the strange white light of Protestantism I'd seen was a very pure one...
...We had this military fantasy in our heads...
...Humans seem to need that fusion-what I call whole-speak, as distinct from narrow-speak, which is just head talk, just reason...
...So you're stuck on a train that will go toward your enemy's station...
...I know about that...
...MURRAY: He reads a bit of it...
...MURRAY: Lawrence talked a lot of absolute horse manure about that sort of thing...
...Like all the boys of the 1950s, I was brought up military...
...Brodsky calls him "the village explainer," and Walcott has written of his work, "There is no poetry in the English language now so rooted in its sacredness, so broad-leafed in its pleasures, and yet so intimate and so conversational...
...Any work of art, while any of it is still visible, has that quality about it...
...He lives with his father, his wife and three of their five children, on forty acres in a valley in the bush north of Sydney, up the coast of New South Wales...
...DANIEL: There's a lot of humor in your poetry, for example, your poem on St...
...That business of learning the Bible by heart very much parallels Islam's learning the Koran by heart...
...The sad thing is that their own ideology is its own punishment...
...I later found out how to express it-that poetry was about essence, about making things real and present to yourself and the other readers...
...Vincent de Paul, and you have said one of Catholicism's attractions over Free Church Presbyterianism was humor...
...I said, "Next time I'll write an elegy...
...But those fragments still have that quality...
...You know, [it's] according to where the sun is when I get up...
...We were far too tough to look at poetry...
...And then I was turned round...
...What a poem is at its best is a quiet little removal of death from ordinary circumstances...
...They all seemed to know the rules, and I didn't...
...I don't know when I started doing it...
...0 12: 22 May 1992 Commonweal...
...DANIEL: Does he read your poetry...
...A few months ago the London Observer pronounced him Australia's "demotic" poet, an apt description for a poet frequently compared to Walt Whitman...
...Damned if I'm going to have them run me out...
...You can sort of sympathize with him, but only as the reaction of a European looking at Australia...
...There's been a bit of a subterranean rumbling in the Green Movement...
...I've struck that a lot more times since, but that was the last time I saw it religiously...
...This one opened out...
...Nothing's true that figures in words only," you wrote in "Poetry and Religion," and "Things are so wordless," in "Noonday Axeman...
...DANIEL: The Australian novelist Janette Turner Hospital has said your work evokes for her the Hebrew Bible and the psalmists...
...Hopkins was the chap who turned me on to poetry...
...Our real problem was distribution, getting our work out...
...It was] about patterns, too...
...MURRAY: Right...
...Although he has been a major literary figure for several decades in England and Australia, only now is his work becoming readily available and familiar in North America...
...One time I used to know a lot of the Bible by heart, so when they gave us our quiz on the matter, I just recited...
...I thought, I'm not likely to die in a hurry, so I'll put it off...
...I'd heard a little bit of it when I was a kid, you know...
...DANIEL: Has there been any poet other than you since Gerard Manley Hopkins who dedicates his books to the glory of God...
...That doesn't make any difference to you, does it...
...One day, when I was eighteen, I was talking to a friend...
...People pour scorn on the English trans 10: 22 May 1992 Commonweal lations...
...I'll tell you a sad thing, though...
...I saw it next in secular terms-you know, political correctness...
...If you know a bit about words, you know how much can't be said...
...Being a bit of a solitary, I wanted to know what the rules of reality were...
...The continent also scared the daylights out of him...
...DANIEL: What are your observations of American Catholicism...
...He was a wonderful writer and a rotten researcher...
...Their only recreations were dancing and going to cricket...
...I'd never heard of persecution of Catholics, or dislike of Catholics...
...It seemed to me that Protestantism was declarative and Catholicism was a matter of presence, that it was closer to poetry...
...It was pure seventeenth-century Calvinism...
...It was the first week at university, and I said, "What religion are you...
...MURRAY: Probably both...
...Poetry is just one of the many poems that might be produced by that experience...
...I also thought it was time somebody stayed, so others would stay...
...It was just an idle question...
...It took him about a week to get the trick of it back...
...I'd been casting around for an art form for a year or so...
...News & World Report, and the Boston Phoenix, among others...
...I was writing once about the poetry of Sappho-we've got very little of it, you know, just fragments...
...DANIEL: You are a rarity in a way, an Australian who stayed home...
...I've got a theory myself that Protestantism, or the original impulse toward Calvinism, at least, came back with the crusaders and is in fact a derivative from Islam...
...I was fascinated by people who could joke about the sacred things of their religion-who could sing "Dominoes and Biscuits...
...He got a novel delivered into his lap by sheer blind good luck, and didn't bother to look at the local literature at all, or any of the art, and reckoned it wasn't there...
...It would be distinctly ungrateful not to...
...It's nothing to do with the reality of Australia or the way that we see it...
...That's not really a demand for world fame, or anything...
...A poem has got to be danced in, and dreamed, at the same time as it's spoken...
...But I was struck by this slightly defensive reaction...
...DANIEL: I'm told also that your father does not read...
...There's a whole lot of big things I suspect to be so, and a whole lot of small things that I've noticed to be so...
...But it leads to God...
...LES MURRAY: The simplest thing to do, I suppose, would be to show you one which talks about it...
...DANIEL: I think many people would say progress and modernity have taken us away from God...
...DANIEL: Immortality and poetry, or immortality and the written word, came to mind reading your epithalamion, "Towards the Imminent Days...
...MURRAY: I think the two go together...
...I didn't take much notice of it...
...It was the religion of a few of my cousins, and that was all...
...I later learn how to express it...
...It's ultimately a puritan kind of impulse...
...This year Farrar, Straus, and Giroux is publishing Murray's collected poems under the title The Rabbiter's Bounty ($25, 322 pp...
...It's taken that little momentous step over the line, and it's as if you could put your hand through the glass of death and touch it...
...I didn't want to go...
...He is a "good mate" of such distinguished poets as Seamus Heaney, Joseph Brodsky, and Derek Walcott...
...I wouldn't feel at home in any other country, and it was time that the vast majority of Australians, who are not the intellectual elite, had their poet right there who wrote to them...
...Our minister was a really lovely, saintly person, which is as clear a proof of the grace of God overcoming man's dogmas as I ever saw...
...MISSY D A N I E L: What is it that makes a poem a religious poem...
...We've got a horrible world of critics and academics in Australia, mostly political-the diehard left-wingers who behave like Free Presbyterians: terribly censorious, bullying, political criticism and jealousy...
...DANIEL: For one's mark to be immortal, can it be a word, a written word...
...Murray, fifty-four, became a Catholic when he went to university in Australia, and Catholicism, he has said, is "the spirit in which the poems are bathed...
...You can always detect when that's happened and it has that kind of immortalizing effect...
...MURRAY: I will say that for the old Free Presbyterian church: It induced me to read the whole Bible, and I enjoyed it no end...
...Our literary/intellectual world is pretty well poisoned, from top to bottom...
...DANIEL: "A poem is an afterlife on earth," as you've written...
...When people go away, mediocrity takes over...
...MURRAY: Not if it's progress...
...And that is, where can evolution or, indeed, progress be heading, but toward God...
...It's an archaeological fact: If you dig ground up, thousands of years later archaeologists can still tell what you did...
...It was just that [Free Presbyterianism] had a bad habit of turning people into spiritual bullies: they went in for competitive holiness...
...He doesn't read, but he can...
...I understand how people can miss Latin terribly...
...It didn't strike me as unlikely, and it opened such illimitable prospects of life...
...DANIEL: Isaiah Berlin, in his book about Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, made use of the ancient quotation: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing...
...See if they can get out of that...
...Next day he was plowing with horses...
...And it might not even be a poem...
...I used to drive my fellow students crazy in high school working out the rules...
...I recognized immediately that I belonged to it...
...Although it had this great barrenness and rigor, it also produced a few saintly people...
...Humans need that experience, and they'll have it in some form or another...
...They are absolutely dependent on evolution as an argument against Christianity...
...And that's still true, according to the kids...
...What his guileless, intense, impetuous, and visionary poetry makes clear is that both are true...
...MURRAY: I know nothing of it...
...DANIEL: Then why haven't you left...
...MURRAY: That's a mortal mark, yes...
...MURRAY: Yes, yes...
...Catholicism was quite unreal to me...
...I really wasn't interested that much in character and plot...
...It's a poem that's open to God, rather than closed to God...
...I couldn't have explained it to you when I read it, but that was the thought...
...Catholic friends could make affectionate fun of sacred matters, and that helped lead you back to Christianity...
...There's something that's delivered out of death...
...He finished school when he was fourteen, which was the legal age...
...That poem lasted a lot longer than the marriage that it was about...
...A few of us put it into words and make actual, literal poetry out of it...
...DANIEL: You have such a command of words, but you also have a deep appreciation for wordlessness...
...The Mass seems to be much the same translation...
...It has many of the same features-the great love of bareness and spareness and abstraction...
...I was actually formally baptized at the age of twenty-four-sort of shilly-shallied around a long time before I finally joined up, because I was afraid I'd make my father feel miserable...
...Occasionally, a comment from him will indicate that he's read something and has thought about it...
...I was struck by the line about how "it is the earth that holds our mark the longest...
...MURRAY: I identified with the Eucharist...
...You integrate in any work of art the life of the conscious mind, the dreaming mind, and the body...
...I was too shy for sin...
...I finally joined up, and Dad has never mentioned it...
...Or a smashed statue, if you've only got a head and a bit of torso, it's still got that quality of deathlessness, of beyond-deathness...
...He was a timber worker, a bullock driver-a chap who drives oxen in the bush, a terribly hard worker...
...MURRAY: I wasn't meaning anything sectarian by that...
...If we had the best of our people back home where they belong, where we need them, it would do a great deal to improve the intellectual and artistic life of the place...
...You might have come across "Poetry and Religion...
...I'd never struck anything like that...
...And if God chooses to take part in it, so much the better...
...DANIEL: What did you identify with...
...Her articles have appeared in the Toronto Star, U.S...
...I think that's ultimately it...
...But most people put it into, say, their hobby, their marriage, their ideology, their whatnot...
...Commonweal 22 May 1992: 9 dreds of years later...
...DANIEL: You've written a little poem called "Distinguo": Prose is Protestant-agnostic, story, discussion, significance, but poetry is Catholic: poetry is presence...
...In our Free Presbyterian church they had these old theories about wicked priests and nuns, and old scandals of that sort...
...MURRAY: There wasn't a lot of humor in Free Presbyterianism...
...That was just a kind of mortal longlastingness in the earth that I was talking about...
...a long poem described as a novel sequence...
...I had a rattler of a big idea the other day, and I can't see a hole in it yet...
...I'd just met him...
...You open your poem to the possibilities...
...When he got married at twenty-eight he picked up the newspaper, I think it was on his honeymoon, and said he couldn't read it...
...His verse revels in Australian idioms and landscape, and evokes an aboriginal sense of place...
...DANIEL: You turned to Catholicism when you went to university...
...MURRAY: You know, it does us terrible harm that more didn't stay home...
...I just dodged it for Dad's sake...
...That's just a demand for normal distribution...
...First time I struck political correctness it was called Calvinism, and I think that's the mother of all of it...
...I'd gradually been moving away from military fantasies...
...I tried painting and I knew I'd never be any good at that, because basically I didn't like it...
...DANIEL: Like Augustine...
Vol. 119 • May 1992 • No. 10
