Tonight, I had the very special pleasure of having the great Australian poet Peter Boyle attend an informal poetry workshop group I take part in, and as such I thought it fitting that I take a look at one of his poems. He read from his current work-in-progress, and though I’d heard of him and read some few poems of his before, I realised I knew far too little of it. I bought his book, and was reading it on the train home as rain spat against the metal and glass. Already, I sense a burgeoning love: you know that feeling of kinship and wonder when you instantly connect with another poet’s work? I’ve had it with Philip Levine, Langston Hughes, and Tracy K. Smith, and it is occurring again.
I may not entirely stick with ‘Robert Frost at Eighty‘ because I also love ‘Paralysis‘, another poem of his I found online. But let’s see how we go, and start with the titular work. It begins:
I think there are poems greater and stranger than any I have known.I would like to find them.
There are multiple things I admire about this opening: the acknowledgment that great and strange poetry beyond his ken exist in the world, even though it comes with the doubtful qualifier ‘I think’, and the fact that it is swiftly followed up by his desire to find them, doubt be damned. This is, after all, what I do on this blog, what I search for every week, the great and strange poems I know to be out there. Finding them, of course, is the issue:
They are not on the greying paper of old booksor chanted on obscure lips.They are not in the language of mermaidsor the sharp-tongued adjectives of vanishing.
Right here lies the source of kinship I mentioned earlier. In my recent interview with poetry journal Meanjin, I talk about my early fiction influences and how they skewed toward the fantastic – the Roald Dahls, Ray Bradburys and Gabriel Garcia Marquezes of the world. With my poems, however, it has been fairly straightforward to date. Imaginative and whimsical at times, to be sure, but really, nothing like the fiction I love to read and to write; only now am I beginning to stretch those muscles in poetry.
A key element to practicing that effectively, though, will be reading excellent poems that manage the fantastic at the level of craft I hope to achieve, and this is why I feel so ecstatic about coming to Boyle’s work at this point in time. I simply haven’t been reading enough of it, which makes this a beautiful and necessary confluence of events. Look how easily and readily he slips in the languages of mermaids without remark! Without irony or self-consciousness. It is what it is, that hallmark of the strange made ordinary that lives in the worlds of Kafka and Murakami.
Though I bury all I own or hold closethough my skin outlives the treesthough the lines fall shattering the stoneI cannot catch them.They have the lilting accentof a house I saw but never entered.They are the sounds a child hears –the water, the afternoon, the sky.
It would not be polite for me to tell you the lengths I would go to, the depths to which I would sink, to have written this line: ‘they have the lilting accent / of a house I saw but never entered.’ Fuck! Superb. Just fucking superb, damn his hide. And those next two lines, a kind of spectacular synaesthesia, merging the aural with the physical and ephemeral all at once. I’m straight up falling over myself at this point, I love this passage so much, so I better shut up before I embarrass myself further. I don’t want to spoil the whole thing, so I’ll just say that you should read the last lines, and then return to the opening, to that statement of desire. Therein, as with so many poems, lies the key to the thing.
With all that said, I’m just really stoked that I have his entire back catalogue to go through–truly, there are so many great and strange poems out there for me to read! And since I’m reading Tales from Ovid by Ted Hughes and Talking Dirty to the Gods by Yosef Komunyakaa at the same time, I am simply awash with it at the moment. Though I doubt I will ever come close to any of these luminaries, and I feel ashamed to even include this link in the same paragraph, one of my own poems did go up online this week, and I would be remiss not to include it. You can read that here, if you like.
