New Verse Review opens for submissions on July 1.
More tourism advertisements, like the one above from Australia in the 90s, should feature poetry…and poets reading their poetry. In this one, the late great Les Murray reads his summer classic “The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever.” Right around the 38-second mark, Murray flashes a mischievous little boy’s smile.
I have long wanted to watch Don Featherstone’s 1991 documentary The Daylight Moon: A Film About the Poet Les Murray. For years you could only find a couple of tantalizing clips on YouTube. It was unavailable even on the documentary streaming sites. I was astounded and grateful to discover that Featherstone recently uploaded the film. The poem readings and the shots of the New South Wales countryside did not disappoint. I grew up on a small dairy farm in central Pennsylvania, so I was delighted by Murray’s reflections on the meter of hand-milking in a pail and by his reading of “Infant among Cattle” at 18:10. Not all great poets are great at reciting their poetry. Murray is a great reciter. Especially strong are his readings of rhyming poems such as “The Smell of Coal Smoke” (21:20).
If you’d like to learn more about Murray, his 2005 Paris Review interview is a good place to go. (It is paywalled, but there is a healthy preview.) The bush-raised Murray bristled at being described as an “outsider” poet of the periphery:
Often spoken of, along with Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott, as one of a select group of major contemporary English-language poets who emerged from outside of the established literary centers, Les Murray told me that, while feeling "some fellowship" with Heaney and Walcott, "it irks me that that category of outsiders is still forced on us, as if the 'centers' had some sort of validity."
Murray struggled with serious depression for long stretches of his life:
INTERVIEWER
You mention the "withdrawal symptoms" associated with not writing. Did the depression you suffered for years interfere with your writing—or did it sometimes stimulate it?
MURRAY
If inspiration stays away for too long, I begin creating nets of words in the hope of catching it, hanging bottles on low bushes to attract it. I may not be able to see whether or how depression interfered with my writing, in the years when it gripped me. I suspect it did make me a bit stupid, slow to learn things, slow even to see that depression was what had me in its grip. When I got sick enough, I took the only weapon I had, the poetry, and started trying to write the bad stuff down, and out. Poetry can work as the highest form of talking cure, but you have to tell the absolute truth, so far as you can dredge that up. I'd always disapproved of the idea of poetry as therapy; but get sick enough and you'll shed any such snobberies! I said to the Black Dog: "You bastard, you make me cry, I'll make you sing . . . "
Like Jane Kenyon, another of my favorite poets, Murray wrote unflinchingly about his struggles with depression, especially in his book, half prose and half poetry, Killing the Black Dog: A Memoir of Depression.
Another wide-ranging interview is this one from 1992 with Barbara Williams in Australia’s Westerly Magazine. Murray’s contrarian and contentious streaks surface in both interviews (as they do in the documentary).
I’ve been on a bat poetry kick since listening to A.E. Stallings’s Oxford Professor of Poetry inaugural lecture. The Westerly interview begins with Murray’s own bat poem (be sure to click the link and listen to Murray’s reading) and several questions about it. Here’s his response to one of those questions:
What really peeps forth in that poem, I think - as well as the enjoyment of something difficult; it's a sort of a "high-wire" poem - is also my childhood love of animals. I'm very fond of animals, and getting out of the human world, getting to that other, absolutely timeless world in which the eagle's never heard of America!
Ishion Hutchinson offers some reflections on first reading Murray on the FSG “Work in Progress Blog.” This paragraph stood out:
The triumph of Murray is that he takes the classical music—meter and rhyme—out into the open, back into the environment and exposes it to the tumult of sun. Not as a nature poet or a shaman-farmer—big machineries quake frequently in his poems, none greater than the scudding, luxuriant “Machine Portraits with Pendant Spaceman”—but simply by being the leviathan within that word-horde of “life-enhancing sprawl / that require[s] style.”
“Word-horde” points to the linguistic virtuosity that marks Murray’s poetry. (Patrick Kurp has another good piece on his language.) Some of that virtuosity comes from the influence of Gerard Manley Hopkins, idiosyncratically absorbed. One of my favorite Murray poems, “Recourse to the Wilderness,” ends with the Hopkins-esque line “and the is-ful ah!-nesses of things.”
Like Hopkins, Murray was a Catholic convert. He drew his usual book dedication from 1 Corinthians 10:31: “to the glory of God.” “Poetry and Religion” is one of his most famous poems, and justly so. Here are the opening stanzas:
Religions are poems. They concert our daylight and dreaming mind, our emotions, instinct, breath and native gesture
into the only whole thinking: poetry. Nothing’s said till it’s dreamed out in words and nothing’s true that figures in words only.
Murray passed in 2019. Here is a moving piece in Honi Soit by one of his younger relatives, Freja Newman, who didn’t discover his work until after his death:
I’ve even found parts of my own life in Les’ poetry through his writings of Sydney and his travels. As he describes the Australian bushland I’ve driven through every year since I was young, I find myself wishing I had the chance to meet him. My younger self remembers the “dream of wearing shorts forever in the enormous paddocks”, the unbearable humidity and the “cool night verandah.” My present self knows “performance”, of “queuing down bloody highways all round Easter”, of saying “last hellos”, lamenting a “forest, hit by modern use” and listening to “birds, singly and in flocks hopping over the suburb.”
Some Murray books (in descending order of required reader commitment)
Fredy Neptune: A Novel in Verse
The Best 100 Poems of Les Murray (The title of this one annoys me on behalf of the many excellent poems that did not make the cut. Why not “100 Great Poems of Les Murray”? Murray selected them himself, but still…)
Don’t miss NVR’s review of J.C. Scharl’s debut collection Ponds