Speaking of the un-
spoken, jokes are a smoky
subspecies.
This near-haiku is not so much a final definition of jokes
as one definition of poetry. It shows up in Peter Goldsworthy’s sequence ‘Ars
Poetica’. What he means is the wordplay of jokes we make every day is a
microcosm, a type and model of the more grandiose verbal surprise packages
known as poems. By this measure, Goldsworthy himself is quite a joker.
Quips, puns, quadruple entendres, comic allusions,
irreverent cross-references and punch
lines are the very stuff of his poetry, oft times their driving force and final
destination. Laconicism gets the better of him on a visit to the Uffizi:
About babies they were mostly
wrong, the Old Masters, even
when they stuck wings on them.
Satiric, benevolent, worldly – his humour conveys more
serious intentions, always implies an inhabited culture, and is part of an
achieved art. (Those lines expect that you know Auden’s famous sonnet.) Irony, for
example, can be a humourist’s superhighway; it can also be a dead end. Dead end
streets in Dublin are charmingly called cul-de-sacs, nice self-satisfied
corners going nowhere. Australia has the No Through Road. Peter Goldsworthy
mistrusts irony. One time he stopped writing poetry altogether because
everything was just coming out ironical. Admittedly, irony still glints and
glows in Goldsworthy but it is not enough to strike while the irony is hot. Or
string out the reader with one interminable comedy festival. Goldsworthy’s
solution, evident throughout this 21st century collection, is
paradox.
‘Quintets for Twiggy’ was the first Goldsworthy poem I ever
read, a response to Les Murray’s ecstatic encomium on sprawl, it was a parody
in praise of the thin. Counter poems are common in his work, but this early
poem was also one of self-disclosure. It revealed his belief in the virtues of
slim, his lean towards the lean. His verse shapes up this way on the page, as
does his line of argument and his syntactic shifts.
A delightful set of counter poems is ‘Decalogue’, where
Goldsworthy seems almost to treat the commandments in Exodus 20 as a set of
short poems deserving his closer attention. His ear for the vernacular, the
twists and turns of daily speech, is trusting and rewarding. Poetry usually has
an element of the child’s-eye view of adult circumstance and here the poet’s
ten-year-old self is appreciated through grown-up memory.
Honour Thy Father
and Mother?
Too easy.
And so say most of us,
not necessarily
in that order.
Admitting that ‘by mid-teens / I’d forgotten one or two, /
And broken the best of the rest’, the poet nevertheless continues to live with
the paradox of a world in which actions do have consequences and laws may be
there for a reason. His ten-year-old self explains more about modern Australia
than ancient Israel:
And what the fuck
was adultery?
No adult would ever
commit
to an answer,
even though
I was always
asking for it.
Thou shalt never
grow up? If so,
the grown-ups were all
as guilty as sin.
Likewise, in his Arian meditations ‘Son to Father: Easter
Poems’ the poet asks his own personal questions about existence while toying
with theological paradoxes. Trinitarians will observe the lack of relationship
between the three persons, roll their eyes at mention of that old chestnut
about the shape of our world, but perhaps smile at his concluding jab at
Voltaire:
Ghostly Holy Father, haunting
Your thingless heaven,
If this world did not exist
You would have to invent it.
The title sequence, more than any other part of this book,
exhibits the quandary of wit, which is how to plumb deep and meaningful while
still fishing for a laugh. Like the rest of us, Goldsworthy is highly conscious
of how we sentient feeling beings today co-exist with a highly sophisticated
digital and machine world over which we have little control and no choice. His
mockumentary of different encounters with technology, each more symbiotic than
the last, is presented with an amused, and discomforting, dispassion. The body
may be described using machine metaphors but their half-life is brief. Inviting
your lover to go through the motions can be disconcerting when you are being so
literally mechanical.
A poet with an alchemical name like Goldsworthy will focus
on how leaden words are turned into something brighter and more valuable. If
asked to explain the pleasures of reading this poet I would say his pragmatic
imagism (‘Aphrodite / rises, legless and headless, / and I am breathless, / the
goddess wears / your nakedness exactly’) his proverbial inversions, and
intellectual fertility.
Asked to identify one unifying theme I would suggest all his
poetry is intensely enthralled with the marvellous nature of relationship,
whether it be with his girlfriend, his colleagues, his body, the uncanny
objects of this world, or this world itself, floating in space: “Our Earthern
Dish is seven parts water, / one part China, and a tiny bit japanned.” It is
this last attribute, relationship, keeps us on side as we identify with familiar
things, while yet prepared for the unfamiliar. As he puts it in ‘Orpheus.
Eurydice. Schrödinger’:
I trail a hand behind
as if by accident,
a periscope of touch.
Doubt slows me in the hope
a feather of breath
might brush my neck;
but if thoughts are deeds
you are gone already,
or never there, or both
and I remain
yours, paradoxically.
This review first appeared in the Australian Book Review,
March 2016, under the title ‘The Paradoxer’.
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