Philip Harvey
In April the Spiritual
Reading Group, which meets on the third Tuesday of each month in the Carmelite
Library, read poems by Les Murray. The presenter is given 15 minutes. As it was
my turn as presenter, I decided to list (without reference to anything outside
myself) the first 15 things that came into my mind about Les Murray. This
became the presentation itself.
1. “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for
fifteen minutes,” was an expression made by Andy Warhol in 1968, in New York,
which is the centre of the world. Les Murray is Australia’s most famous living poet,
and Bunyah is the centre of the world. Les Murray’s relationship to fame is measured,
he rejects celebrity so is in that way anti-Warhol.
2. A poem is fifteen minutes of fame, fifteen minutes of
concentrated thought and emotion. Many Les Murray poems are like this. But of
course the opposite is also true: poems are never just fifteen minutes of fame,
they go on into the future and live with us time and again. They defy the ephemerality
of immediate gratification, name dropping and instant answers.
3. Les Murray lives in the centre of the world, Bunyah. I
know more about Bunyah from the poems than pictures, but the poems tell me
about the bush world of Australia all the time. Not just Bunyah, but
everywhere.
4. Les Murray is Australia’s greatest living poet, just
like the Murray is Australia’s greatest river. Personally, I am against these
classifications of greatest. The Murray is the greatest because of all the
other great rivers that flow into it, and then what about the other river that
helps make the Murray so big, the Murrumbidgee? What is greatest? Les Murray is
great, but there have been poets in Australia before the European era that were
great or indeed greater probably, we just don’t know. It’s not important what
is great, it’s a distraction from enjoyment. It appeals to the competitive thing
in human beings, while poetry questions and breaks down competitiveness.
5. Les Murray is the greatest in size. He’s big. Hence
his celebration of sprawl: the desert, the suburbs, the bays, the coastlines, everything
sprawls in Australia. Likewise, sometimes his poems seem not to know when to
halt. ‘Les is more and more is Les’, as the name of this session would have it.
Or as John Olsen, the Australian painter, put it Zen-like in one of his
graphics books, this time in regard to paint application: “Less is more, more
or less.”
6. Les Murray has a terrible dress sense. This was
commented on by the same John Olsen after a launch once, who could not
reconcile the highly gifted craftsman with the sloppy joe dresser. But does he
have a bad dress sense? Or is dress just getting in the way, not the way he
wants to send the main message? His poems contain a vast knowledge about clothing
from every era.
7. Les Murray dedicates every one of his books of poetry
To the Greater Glory of God. A theologian would say it is impossible to be more
inclusive than that. Some people think it an affront that an Australian poet
would dedicate his books in this way. So what?
8. Les Murray was raised strict Presbyterian and is a
Catholic convert. He found Presbyterianism abstract. Catholicism is about
substance, tactile, what you can eat, what you can grab hold of. This sensual
religion was something he connected with straight away.
9. Les Murray has a kind of mind of binary opposites,
which helps in the construction of his works and sayings but is not always good
at the shades of meaning in between. Bush vs. City, Learning vs. University
&c. It is the cause of misunderstanding and even hostility amongst some of
his readers.
10.
Les Murray is a
difficult person who alienates people. Increasingly I think a lot of this
anti-social stuff has to do with him being on the spectrum. He now talks about
the spectrum as a fact, an explanation, a nice place to be, but of course the
spectrum has its down side.
11.
Les Murray gets
the black dog. Certainly this is the cue and cause of much poetry, even if he
never writes a poem directly about the black dog itself. Winston Churchill had
the black dog, but my view is that the expression was first used by James Boswell,
for whom the black dog was a form of gentleman’s melancholy. Les Murray would
not share Boswell’s clubland view of the black dog. Boswell was exploring what
we now call psychology. There is certainly a lot of that sort of exploration going
on in Les Murray.
12.
Les Murray lives
in a house where the writing desk is the central object in the main room. I saw
it once on a TV documentary.
13.
Les Murray is an
Australian. This is a useful thing to keep in mind when comparing him to poets
from other cultures and other countries that use English. It makes you see how
incredible his poetry really is, because no one anywhere else writes English
poetry like Les Murray, or a number of other Australians.
14.
Les Murray does
an awful lot of reading and does an awful lot of travel for someone who lives
on a dairy farm. It is a mistake, I think, to regard Les Murray as just your
typical bushie. There is not only no one else like him in Bunyah, there’s no
one else like him anywhere anyway full-stop.
15.
Les Murray almost
died of a heart attack.
Poems studied by the Group:
Accordion Music
Church i.m. Joseph Brodsky
The Conversations
Easter 1984
Forty Acre Ethno (August)
The Future
The Instrument
Poetry and Religion
Poems studied by the Group:
Accordion Music
Church i.m. Joseph Brodsky
The Conversations
Easter 1984
Forty Acre Ethno (August)
The Future
The Instrument
Poetry and Religion
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