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You are here: Home / Articles / Michael Farrell: When Arse is Class

Michael Farrell: When Arse is Class

2016-08-21 by Michael Farrell

  Michael Farrell

  When Arse Is Class, or

  Australian Poetry

Bending over in forever shorts, Australian poetry
can remind us more of a country and western song
than a rap: its urbanity’s been overrated. A rock
dove drops a straw, plastic admittedly, and flies
off in a huff, no nesting today. The muse has gone
and left me and the wifi won’t connect, they’ll
find me floating in that billabong. For example
Mary had a little sheep station, and when it died
she was painted holding it in her lap, like a mon-
opoly set ruined by an overflowing washing ma-
chine. Sometimes a poem’s problems stare us in
the face, like it’s talking to the police about bud-
gies, who rarely cause a disturbance, even when
out of their cage, high on fermented seed and pre-
tending to be bigger, uglier and scarier. Enough
birds? You can’t laugh till you’ve heard a crow
looking down on your pram below, while you re-
fuse to share the view. But you do, anyway. The
love of the shonky, and the daggy, dares to speak
its name in diction, in line, and even in Quatrain
a once notorious Sydney suburb. Surf’s up as they
say in the hotels along the coast. Perth’s sharks are
part of it, Albany’s whales are part of it, but that’s
a human-sized perspective: better to talk of sharks’
Perth and whales’ Albany, or wildflowers’ Albany
and bicycles’ Carlton. There they drink more bikes
than they do espresso. That’s where I go when some
poetry hater kicks my wheel and slashes my tyres
through, and brake cables, well it only happens once
and the tragedy is I’m stronger than the vandals and
don’t move back to St Petersburg after all, but leave
my teapot and lights in Fitzroy and get a spare stanza
in Watson, Canberra, where I can hear the galahs
more clearly. Well no one can sum up Australia
or its poetry, so we’ll just keep riding along till one
of us conks out. I’ve never been to Darwin, so I
don’t know how beautiful it is. But I look out the
window at the light and there’s the air that owns
us all, coloured blue and gold and smelling like an
unwashed sand company that hasn’t paid their
yachting tax. A company’s too complete to be a
person. A company doesn’t know what a koala is
Fur has depth, something it takes a life to realise
A rank feather falls out of a garbage truck’s back-
side, like it wants poets to keep up with the landfill
But that hasn’t been possible since the Romantics
I know what you’re thinking. Your mouth stencils
the grain of the atmosphere like you’re a band of
rubber gloves gone wrong. I was born in a tent so
I can’t close the sugar bag, and when it rains I get
all lamington devotional. I get all gumleaf dis-
positional and build a canoe from scratch, like I’m
a pastry chef and the weather’s a TV audience
Well, the bush is a kind of orchestra if you’ve ever
seen one of those looking for a public toilet on St
Kilda Road at twilight? And getting confused by
the dazzle of the artificial waterfalls and the coins
thrown by tourists who probably think all our animals
are aquatic anyway? And if you press your ear a-
gainst the Opera House you can hear Uluru they
reckon, but their mother was a big lump of cement
in Goulburn and their father was likely a bottle of
strychnine. There used to be Aboriginal shepherds
in the district to play cards with, but they all left
for casino pastures and now there’s just a servo feat-
uring red, hurting numbers on a sign. The radio
station plays Rimbaud and Mallarmé by request
you can probably guess who’s called in, and the
black and white nuns sing, Walter de la Mare, de
la Mare. He will not be rooned as long as we keep
Australian poetry off the air, but if we hide it the
kids will find it and love it the more, all the better
for not having it smeared on their bread every mor-
ning. ‘Alice Springs Eternal’ is a song on You-
Tube: I was the third view. Christopher Brennan
was never considered reading matter for Simon
and Garfunkel, and Dorothea Mackellar danced for
the horses in Trafalgar Square, but nobody cared
No more socialites and no more sun-done postcards
for us they said, yeah? But she understood the code
and sneered straight back, and they were retired ear-
ly due to a word she had in the Horsemaster
General’s ear later that year. She was only trying
to talk to Gordon’s bones with her shoes she told
reporters when it all came out. The lyrebird will be
the last to care if you steal its song, it has millennia
of practice ahead of you; you will never outdo its
show and if a fancy instrument was fashioned after
its tail, let the newfangled bloom with the old (even
the whisper of its feet sing cut and paste, cut and
paste). Poetry is cheap and will fly to the moon if
it thinks it can get free rent. The Berlin moon to be
precise. Poetry knows it can know too much, and
it takes a lot of toe-dipping and staring into the faces
of mullet to realise that education’s a way of accu-
mulating holes and string and practice in tying knots
in everything. Like my grandmother said, give a fox
a choc laxative and read your own chooks lullabies
by poetry’s matriarchs. The world mightn’t turn
into heaven’s embassy, but it might improve. Imagine
eggs, speckled tenderly, with fox-written poetry
 
farrell

Michael Farrell’s recent books are Cocky’s Joy and Writing Australian Unsettlement: Modes of Poetic Invention 1796-1945. He edits Flash Cove magazine and co-wrote the Dick Diver single Waste the Alphabet.

 

Widget IssueM Article List

Susan M.Schultz: Poetry as Attention

he is seeing the world as it is §

Peter Robinson: poems: 14 Postcards

Charles Trenet’s La Mer §

DuPlessis: Tapa-68

The 2008-2009 notebook of a US poet

A.J. Carruthers: The Long Poems of Rochelle Owens

broaden the scope for future criticism on long poems §

Adam Aitken: poem: Gestetner

A poem from the past §

Anthony Howell: 3 poems

Always the same back window climbed. §

Art Beck: Doctor Fell

Scowling in his office, Dr. Fell gave poor Tom one last chance §

Barry Gifford: Ode to Jerry

Trane learned about beauty / from Monk §

Ben Mazer: 2 Poems

Do not consume, like the flowers, time and air §

Brentley Frazer: Creative writing with English Prime

This failed; the process felt restrictive and laborious §

Charles Bernstein: poem: Concentration

Tears in Nazi-occupied Poland §

Chris Stroffolino: Crisis? What Crisis?

Hollywood and TV gained in influence §

Chris Tysh: 3 poems

pulls the plug on the lyric §

Dana Prescott: 2 poems

It’s the wrong hour for a chat. §

Daniel Fisher: Chapter Four, from The Voice and Its Doubles (200+ pages)

the mediatized voice has become a site for… creativity §

David Lehman on Walter Lehmann

There was egg on the face of the venerable editor §

Donald Wellman: God is love

God resides in the heat / generated by the sense organs §

DuPlessis: Tapa-02

The 2008-2009 notebook of a US poet

DuPlessis: Tapa-03

The 2008-2009 notebook of a US poet

DuPlessis: Tapa-04

The 2008-2009 notebook of a US poet

DuPlessis: Tapa-05

The 2008-2009 notebook of a US poet

DuPlessis: Tapa-06

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DuPlessis: Tapa-07L

The 2008-2009 notebook of a US poet

DuPlessis: Tapa-07R

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DuPlessis: Tapa-08

The 2008-2009 notebook of a US poet

DuPlessis: Tapa-09

The 2008-2009 notebook of a US poet

DuPlessis: Tapa-1, DuPlessis and Leggott: Tapa start, and Backstory

The first of Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Tapa Notebook (the front cover), plus the backstory of Rachel and Michele Leggott 2008-2009.

DuPlessis: Tapa-10

The 2008-2009 notebook of a US poet

DuPlessis: Tapa-11

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DuPlessis: Tapa-12

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DuPlessis: Tapa-13

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DuPlessis: Tapa-14

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DuPlessis: Tapa-15

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DuPlessis: Tapa-16

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DuPlessis: Tapa-17

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DuPlessis: Tapa-18

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DuPlessis: Tapa-19

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DuPlessis: Tapa-20

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DuPlessis: Tapa-21

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DuPlessis: Tapa-22

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DuPlessis: Tapa-23

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DuPlessis: Tapa-24

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DuPlessis: Tapa-25

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DuPlessis: Tapa-26

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DuPlessis: Tapa-27

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DuPlessis: Tapa-28

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DuPlessis: Tapa-29

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DuPlessis: Tapa-30

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DuPlessis: Tapa-35

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DuPlessis: Tapa-37

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DuPlessis: Tapa-38

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DuPlessis: Tapa-39

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DuPlessis: Tapa-40

The 2008-2009 notebook of a US poet

DuPlessis: Tapa-41

The 2008-2009 notebook of a US poet

DuPlessis: Tapa-42

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DuPlessis: Tapa-43

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DuPlessis: Tapa-44

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DuPlessis: Tapa-45

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DuPlessis: Tapa-47

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DuPlessis: Tapa-48

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DuPlessis: Tapa-49

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DuPlessis: Tapa-50

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DuPlessis: Tapa-51

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DuPlessis: Tapa-52

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DuPlessis: Tapa-53

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DuPlessis: Tapa-54

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DuPlessis: Tapa-58

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DuPlessis: Tapa-65

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DuPlessis: Tapa-69

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DuPlessis: Tapa-70

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DuPlessis: Tapa-71

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DuPlessis: Tapa-72 (inside back cover)

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Roberto Echavarren and Donald Wellman: Animalaccio

They hunted in the sierra, / ate in canvas chairs. §

Elaine Equi: 3 poems

not the Big Bang / this morning, §

Eli Spivakovsky: 2 pieces

and thought he was an angel so I followed him §

Elizabeth Allen: 2 poems

to become angry §

Emily Bilman: poem: Greenness

the hues of the evening / that soothe my breathing. §

Fanny Howe: poems from Love and I

I would do anything for this infant §

Geoffrey O’Brien: 3 poems

pleasure / is the appetizer and suffering / the main course §

George Evans: 3 poems

distilling vodka / for the wealthiest drunks in history. §

Graham Foust: On Ashbery’s poem ‘Myrtle’

For Ruskin, the ‘source’ is ‘real’ §

Jen Crawford: 3 poems

dale and nina stack up horizontally in the bed §

joanne burns: 3 poems

everyone seems to rush / out before the credits §

Joe Safdie: on Charles Olson

He wanted things to happen in them spiritually §

John Hawke: sonnet: Sea Priestess

Emily is throwing knives to the receding waves §

Ken Bolton: 2 poems

this image / never gets beyond the single gesture §

Kent Johnson: 4 poems

I talked to the Language Poets and they said no. §

Larissa Shmailo: Bob Holman and metre

an additional analytic tool is required §

Larry Sawyer: 3 poems

as if the quarters… we spent… were / apostrophes signifying possessives §

Laurie Duggan: 6 poems

so the testes become a leg / an elbow becomes a signature §

Lee Scheingold: The Hills Are Alive: a review of [the novel] 2017

Objects exist prior to their relations with each other §

Liam Ferney: 3 poems

no time for a shrinking violet. §

Marc Vincenz: 5 poems

roped together / by words in a thicket of senses. §

Michael Basinski: 6 poems

he came to life to lord it over me §

Michael Farrell: When Arse is Class

Bending over in forever shorts, Australian poetry §

Michele Leggott: 2 poems

so you will need to keep on moving §

Murray Edmond: The Backpacker Compromise

You have a poem too? §

Patrick Pritchett reviews Fugue Meadow, by Keith Jones

His scintillating poems are both demanding and vibrantly lyrical §

Patrick Pritchett reviews Rachel Blau DuPlessis

She… turns to the power of pointing §

Paul Hoover: 5 poems

crucifixion or / a game of tennis §

Philip Mead: poem: Ithaca Road

You’re always setting out §

Pierre Joris: On Literary Dedications

Lucretius gently imbeds the dedication… to his friend Gaius Memmius §

Rae Armantrout: 4 poems

even as I see / … / that I am / not myself §

Raewyn Alexander: 2 poems

a bus stop relic breathing §

Robert Wood: A Local History

one must ask: what is history? §

Robert Wood: an autobiography

I was not exposed to a wide range of poetry. §

Ron Padgett: poem: Mosquito Ron

But if I take a step back, I do feel sorry for myself §

S.K. Kelen: poems

Juan got a bicentennial medal §

Tom Bradley: Excerpt from Energeticum / Phantasticum

We spasmed, howled and smeared our fecal pigments §

Ward Ritchie: My Life in Printing (first quarter of UCLA interview) 170 pages

Los Angeles develops interest in fine printing §

Zhang Er: 3 poems

Is there any pattern to this labyrinth? §

Zimmermann: Link to PDF

Link to http://poeticsresearch.com/zimmermann-drafts.pdf

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