What the hell am I doing reading poems? Try it. You’ll thank me

Some days, when I’m stuck for ideas, I read a poem or two to get me going. Billy Collins, Auden, Larkin, Ada Limon. This morning I took a collection of Les Murray’s poems off a high shelf at home. Dog Fox Field is its title. I blew the dust off it and opened it and found I’d once cut a letter from The Age and stuck it on the title page. The letter must have been published at least 30 years ago.

It reads: “Perhaps it is just me because I am old, but it seems female tennis players nowadays have thicker necks and are far more menacing than in the days when we chaps sighed at the grace of Miss Goolagong as she bounded effortlessly about the court and Dan Maskell cried, ‘Oh, I say’.” John Dorman, Carnegie.

Thicker necks. Indeed. The man makes his point. Late last century when women began turning up to play tennis with their necks thickened only a dimwit couldn’t see the sinister arc of the future. But anyone who feels it necessary to write to a newspaper about the looming menace of bull-necked Navratilovas must surely have written thousands of letters, so I guess this John Dorman was what the letters sections call “a bombardier”, and that his missives rained in like catcalls on a lisping soprano. Why would I cut such a letter from a newspaper? I don’t cut anything from newspapers. Why was I pasting it in a book? And why choose Les Murray?

I suppose I was amused by the Wodehousian “chap” sighing at the grace of Miss Goolagong while a tennis commentator cries, “Oh, I say”. In hindsight I’ve decided John Dorman was a Wodehouse himself, a humorist rather than a wistful soul without a day job. A satirist who played an epistolary Sandy Stone.

I can see him deep in his armchair in Carnegie, his typewriter in his lap and a whisky at his elbow, giggling to himself as he types out, “Oh, I say” while in the sunroom his wife frowns at the sound of her husband’s autogenic hilarity, knowing he’ll have penned some wily bombast to provoke the sensitive Age readers to return fire.

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I like the thought of John – slippered provocateur in a Carnegie cul de sac. But forget his letter now – the letter is a distraction. It’s poetry we’re addressing here. Ask yourself what the hell I’m doing reading poems. Good question. Well, it’s because poets offer a weird brilliance, they think up gorgeously skew-whiff ideas, make unlikely connections, brew salty metaphors, and find different ways to see and think of things.

They are, at their best, practitioners of an opaque magic akin to music. All writers steal, but a writer who isn’t stealing from poets is a mere pickpocket destined to become a marginal entity.

I’ve just been reading a collection of poems called The Cyprian, by Amy Crutchfield. She’s good, sad, wise, surprising … and a living Australian. But if she weren’t the friend of a friend I would never have found her. Because, I mean … name a living poet.

Some days, when I’m stuck for ideas, I read a poem or two to get me going. Billy Collins, Auden, Larkin, Ada Limon. This morning I took a collection of Les Murray’s poems off a high shelf at home. Dog Fox Field is its title. I blew the dust off it and opened it and found I’d once cut a letter from The Age and stuck it on the title page. The letter must have been published at least 30 years ago.

It reads: “Perhaps it is just me because I am old, but it seems female tennis players nowadays have thicker necks and are far more menacing than in the days when we chaps sighed at the grace of Miss Goolagong as she bounded effortlessly about the court and Dan Maskell cried, ‘Oh, I say’.” John Dorman, Carnegie.

Thicker necks. Indeed. The man makes his point. Late last century when women began turning up to play tennis with their necks thickened only a dimwit couldn’t see the sinister arc of the future. But anyone who feels it necessary to write to a newspaper about the looming menace of bull-necked Navratilovas must surely have written thousands of letters, so I guess this John Dorman was what the letters sections call “a bombardier”, and that his missives rained in like catcalls on a lisping soprano. Why would I cut such a letter from a newspaper? I don’t cut anything from newspapers. Why was I pasting it in a book? And why choose Les Murray?

I suppose I was amused by the Wodehousian “chap” sighing at the grace of Miss Goolagong while a tennis commentator cries, “Oh, I say”. In hindsight I’ve decided John Dorman was a Wodehouse himself, a humorist rather than a wistful soul without a day job. A satirist who played an epistolary Sandy Stone.

I can see him deep in his armchair in Carnegie, his typewriter in his lap and a whisky at his elbow, giggling to himself as he types out, “Oh, I say” while in the sunroom his wife frowns at the sound of her husband’s autogenic hilarity, knowing he’ll have penned some wily bombast to provoke the sensitive Age readers to return fire.

Loading

I like the thought of John – slippered provocateur in a Carnegie cul de sac. But forget his letter now – the letter is a distraction. It’s poetry we’re addressing here. Ask yourself what the hell I’m doing reading poems. Good question. Well, it’s because poets offer a weird brilliance, they think up gorgeously skew-whiff ideas, make unlikely connections, brew salty metaphors, and find different ways to see and think of things.

They are, at their best, practitioners of an opaque magic akin to music. All writers steal, but a writer who isn’t stealing from poets is a mere pickpocket destined to become a marginal entity.

I’ve just been reading a collection of poems called The Cyprian, by Amy Crutchfield. She’s good, sad, wise, surprising … and a living Australian. But if she weren’t the friend of a friend I would never have found her. Because, I mean … name a living poet.