Overviews of the Present Impasse

Poem on his Birthday

“Out! Out! Spenser and Wyatt.

We would prefer to start a riot”

“Incoherence is Trumps”

It was my eighty-eighth year to Heaven

And in the light of increasing disorder

In all the arts and international politics

It seemed an auspicious occasion to review

The dissolving frontiers of poetry. First

To confront its current precept Anything Goes

Which like the melancholy Jacques, the poem

Must be sans this and that and sans everything

And trundle along without metre, rhyme or reason.

But might this not be an opportunity

To incorporate oddities which, while noteworthy,

Might not have been readily incorporated previously –

As arbitrary as the cartoon of a dog reading;

He is exasperated with his book and exclaims,

“See Spot run? See Spot run? Who wrote this crap?”

Long ago, in my twentieth year to Lower Earth,

The former aesthetic of “I have been

Faithful to thee, Cyanara, in my fashion”

Was being dismantled and replaced by fragments.

Petals on a wet black bough and The Waste Land

Had become the mandated Lesson of the Day.

Then Jackson Pollock was riding roughshod

Over canvases on the floor. This general invitation

Was eagerly taken up by every practitioner so that

The precept Anything Goes had been extended

Into Do What You Like And Keep On Going

As Long As It’s Unlike Anything From Before

And as long as it makes only minimal sense –

And of course follows the primrose path

Of ending the line whenever you like.

It was my eighty-eighth year to Heaven

And, among its constellations I considered

Those possibilities of infinite variety

Which those avatars have been diligent in delivering,

Developing these without concern for the past

Over a century of free-for-all free-wheeling.

Negative Capability

Someone said of Ida Lupino

As a torch-singer in The Man I Love

“She does more without a voice

Than anyone I’ve ever seen.”

Accordingly, let us consider the claim

That it is the quality of the violin

– Usually a Stradivarius – not its performer

That accounts for the standing ovation.

This notion is summarily dismissed

By Jascha Heifitz, who – at the suggestion –

Held up his violin, looking and listening,

Then said, “Funny. I don’t hear anything.”

At Sea

It is raining heavily.

The ark pitches and rolls.

Noah goes downstairs

To check on the animals.

It is strangely quiet.

Where is everyone?

He sees a large lion

And asks, “How’s everything?”

The lion says, “Not bad.

A bit of seasickness

But the buffet was excellent.

I had two of everything.”

Elsewhere on the Ark

One unicorn says to the second:

“Hi there Sexy.

My name is Greg.

Looks like you and me

Have the job of keeping

The Unicorn Race going.

What’s your name?” “Kevin.”

In these days when poetry

Seems to have abandoned

Philosophical Scepticism

In regard to Private Languages,

And lapses instead into inward gazing

With periscopes all at sea,

One is inclined to agree

With Miss Moore’s disparagement

(I too dislike it) and endorse

Her dismissal of fiddle.

Therefore, rather than join the crowds

In the airless confessional

Let us choose to review

Random selections of children’s jokes.

A Repeated Figure

I have been reading on the train

And continuing to read at home

Pasternak, Poems (1955 – 1959)

And I note a theme.

In several instances the metaphor

Is notable for embodying the day.

The day leans on one elbow

And looks out at the sky;

Or the day wakes and gets out of bed

And slowly draws aside the curtains

To contemplate the fresh stampede

Of events marshalling outside.

An Anthology of Women’s Poetry

Reading one hundred poems by women

Is not unlike reading a hundred by men,

Particularly when translated from the Greek or Portugese

Into a homogenized oatmeal mush;

And maybe a hundred poems by anyone

Will ultimately seem self-effacing

If every third page has a different author –

And a brief biography biography makes each

Sound like a version of every other.

The very idea of an anthology

In which every contributor is allowed

A shadow, a narrow lift shaft,

A gasp, a brief clearing of the throat

And each appears to be setting parameters

And hinting at directions to be taken

Suggests Mankov’s celebrated dilemma

In which unfortunates at the mouth of Hell

Note the sign Abandon hope all ye who enter here

And in smaller print If you have already abandoned

Hope, please ignore this notice.

Aleatory Alleyeatery

Depending on the day and randomness,

We might be eating potage in a mess

And taking 0n Identities at our table.

We order something from the Chef’s Special

And sitting with our light under a bushel,

Look around at other customers.

They do not know who we historically

Have today chosen randomly to be…

Today I’m scribbling on a frail serviette

Some more of Queneau’s Exercises in Style

And work on a wrenched-off button for a while

(?? Just Google “Queneau, button on a bus”)

And since he’s lately been so popular

I look around for angels at the bar

And put on Rilke’s mantle while I’m here.

The spectral vista changes constantly,

Miasma as in dreams is all I see.

I’m here or elsewhere in this fluid world –

(Old Possum) (Hands up all those who remember

Last century’s influential avatar.)

But now the world moves on with Schrödinger.

We all are everyone. The past draws near.

We’re all declaring Je suis Ginzberg – or

Whoever enters by the alley door.

Entanglement

I shot a metaphor into the air,

It fell to earth, I knew not where.

I fear it may have blocked the sun

Preventing me from moving on.

Or like a twisting parachute

Perhaps it tangled round my feet,

The airy concept turned to stone

Preventing me from moving on.

Self-Refuting Poem Displaying a Complete Absence

of Any Redeeming Formal Devices

In the Poetry Section

Fifty or sixty Free-Versifiers

Who do not scruple

To end the line just anywhere

Expect the reader to demur

And trust that there is a reason.

But after half a page it is clear

There is no reason. And the line

Ends as Ezra confessed it did

When the trigger-happy typewriter carriage

Determined it by hurtling back.

More recently the line-break

Is, like so many advertised commodities,

Just a click away,

And this encourages everyone

To keep on trucking and prioritize Content.

Content is of course not constrained.

Content comes thick and fast.

Content is as Content does.

Content fills the available space

And, once selected, demands front row seats.

The problem with The Poem As Content

Is that much more surprising Content

Is available away from the page

And that a short walk almost anywhere

Yields superior variety, forest light,

Auroras and potential anecdotes.

So that, in the Poetry Section,

The slim volumes, after a brief perusal,

Are returned to the shelves.

Fragments Relating to the Present Impasse

First Came Modernism

After which the woods fill with snow.

An Avalanche of Slim Volumes

All of which open at random

To display terminal randomness.

In The Emperor’s New Jeans

Once fashionable knee holes have grown

Like art works without limit.

The Age Demanded

And the Age was handed

A mixed bouquet.

Two Roads Diverged

Two roads diverged in a wood.

One led to prodigious obscurity,

The other to unbridgeable chasms.

Wittgenstein Denies Private Languages

And yet they are everywhere attempted.

W. talks of enquiry as a ladder

Which, after climbing, we throw down.

But in the present instance the ladder

Has fallen into a conservatory with bees,

Breaking the glass and releasing the swarm.

Modernist Haiku

Pavlov’s dog lies down

Refusing to salivate;

“Make it new!” he growls.

Windwaves

In Canada in the early Two Thousands,

Modernism took the graphic form

Of poems which looked as if

A text had been photocopied

And the page moved during the process,

So that the words were fringed

Like breaking waves in a land wind,

And difficult to read. Vestiges persist

To the present, with typographic devices

Such as rows of ampersands

Or words hidden under censorship blocks,

A reductio ad absurdum of Negative Capability.

A Curmudgeon Speaks Out

“I left the cinema after the death of Truffaut.

I prefer the Cezanne in the Art Gallery of NSW

To the entire new wing and its contents.

It is simple to find in earlier centuries

Poetry or music or art

Superior to anything in the present era.

I have not yet found any poetry worth reading

In which lines of one or two words predominate.”

First Came Modernism

First came Modernism and then the cry went up,

Freewheelers of the world unite.

You have nothing to lose but meaning

And we have learned to do without that.

Now it’s every man for himself and every man

Can happily Start Anywhere and Keep Going.

And lo! Guff descended on the world

And God saw that it was god-awful.

And God said, “I thought Swinburne was awful

But this is worse. But Who am I to intervene?

I gave them the Means, but also Free Will

To throw out the Baby with the Bathwater

And this represents a lot of Bathwater.

So I see them all Starting Somewhere

And Keeping on Going Nowhere. In the Beginning

Was the Word and then Too Many Words.”

Veranda

On the glazed veranda in full sun

In a sun-yellowed T.L.S.,

Is a letter, here paraphrased: “Sir,

Of the sixty items purporting to be poems

Which you have published in your paper

Since I took out my subscription,

Only three are poems.”

The Curmudgeon Finds Musical Analogies

About Modernism and, in particular,

The dilemma in which in music

It ran against several hidden reefs:

Music wanted to throw off cloying Romanticism;

Stravinsky, of course, struck with true éclat

So that a hundred years later the Rite

Is still convincing; Schoenberg too compressed

Romantic impulses into an ordered Apollo Mission

With successful launches and moon landings.

But lesser modernists, in rejecting what they saw

As lyrical afterglow, erred in retaining

The very aberrations they sought to dismiss.

For instance, often, despite astringencies

Involving wrong notes and what they thought

Would be epoch-changing, radical procedures,

They still, in orchestral terms, saw the lyrical

As being the work of the strings, rumination

As requiring the flute, and that the brass

Should be waiting in the wings for serious assertion.

These were clichés. And the result is that,

Time and again, despite abruptness and aggression,

They resorted to distorted versions

Of the very same worn-out conventions

Which as modernists they sought to reject.

Analogous failings may be seen in poetry

As it seeks to differentiate itself

From a moribund past. One finds

Obscurity enthusiastically embraced and yet

At crucial junctures out come the same old,

Same old, strings and flute and brass.

“The Poetry Section is Over There Adjacent to Self Help”

In the Poetry Section

Fifty or sixty Free-Versifiers

Who do not scruple

To end the line just anywhere

Expect the reader to demur

And trust that there is a reason.

But after half a page it is clear

There is no reason. And the line

Ends as Ezra confessed it did

When the trigger-happy typewriter carriage

Determined it by hurtling back.

More recently the line-break

Is, like so many advertised commodities,

Just a click away,

And this encourages everyone

To keep on trucking and prioritize Content.

Content is of course not constrained.

Content comes thick and fast.

Content is as Content does.

Content fills the available space

And, once selected, demands front row seats.

The problem with The Poem as Content

Is that much more surprising Content

Is available away from the page by stepping outside

And that a short walk almost anywhere

Yields superior variety, forest light,

Auroras and potential anecdotes.

I Spy

From his conning tower

The famous Imagist makes plans.

This trope never fails:

I’m sitting in the train

And I’m looking out the window

At something that looks

Like something else.

Why not roll this out again

And again? As long as something

Is likened to something else

And a simile is soon followed

By another simile.

That simile!

Give me excess of it.

A simile a day

Keeps the critics away.

A record-breaking number of Likes.

Oh, look! I spy with my little eye

Something resembling something else.

The Blender

The longed-for target flux is complex

Like a harbour instressing with yachts,

Some tacking, some falling, some overtaking,

With a north-easterly enthusing at the Heads,

But, alas, complexity has been poorly served

And Argument, Natural Observation and Order

Have been put through the fashionable blender

To be served up as a literary Smoothie

In which no individual flavour can be identified.

The Curmudgeon Remains Unconvinced

I have considered a thousand slim volumes

And walked through a ploughed field of words.

Yet this line from Vergil (Aeneid 1)

Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit

(Uttered after shipwreck on Carthage),

Even in a clumsy English translation

--Even these things perhaps it will be

One day a pleasure to remember –

Is arguably more beautiful

Than anything in these fluttering pages.

Sargasso

Fellow Peots,

the date is Feb 14, 2026

14 having a passing relevance

to former lost grandeur

and I wish to announce

that the Good Ship Poesy

long taking on water

has attained

buoyancy in the Ocean of Drivel.

A survey of recent peotry

today published in the SMH

confirms this attainment

tellingly on the morning

of Angus Taylor’s ascendancy

to the Top Deck Chair

as Person Able to Say Nothing

while appearing to speak.

Of course in bygone daze

John Cage, he of similar

Legendary Status

famously sayeth I have nothing to say

and I am saying it

but since then Peotry

has made significant

strides over water

(like the Venice streetwalker who drowned)

bravely questering on

to reach at last

permanent and horizon-less Doldrums.