Homepage
Poetry post-1900
This author’s Contents page
This piece is 1,600 words or about five printed pages long. It was first published in The Ardent Sun 1 (2002): 12-17.
A kind of geography
which isn’t, finally, a nationalism
— isn’t a wallchart for a mining company —
announces there’s more out there
than we can take in.
(‘Pastoral Poems’, The Great Divide, p. 31).
And with that cocky farmers’
attempt at etiquette
the young gents ask the barmaid her name
and fail to give their own.
(‘Drinking Socially’, Blue Notes, p. 20).
‘Every day we navigate the incomprehensible’
(Ghost Nation, p. xxii)
***
Duggan has a genius for quotation. His history of Gippsland, The Ash Range, is largely quotation from newspapers, letters, diaries and history books. ‘East’, the eponymous first poem of Duggan’s first book prefigures this (the kind of felicity of which Duggan would be suspicious), using found texts, quotations, a clipping from a 1912 edition of The Argus, to interweave autobiography, family history and the regional history of Gippsland. In ‘Crawling from the Wreckage’ (from The Great Divide) bricolage is used to political effect.
Particularities are important, but no grand claims are made about their significance. The importance of place and placement is not about the poet, or the exotic, or a mining-company nationalism, but about singularity, how one sees. No Australian poet could be less solipsistic than Duggan. Carl Harrison-Ford noticed in his review of The Great Divide that observation subsumes the persona of the writer (pp. 246-47). ‘The poet’ is present as a perspective, an individual in place and time. Duggan could be an anthropologist of suburban Australia except he has no theory. Particulars, however ‘incomprehensible’, help make provisional, sometimes-comic, sometimes-convincing, generalizations (as in ‘Drinking Socially’). Duggan’s first-person poems are more documentary than confession. This is true even in ‘Adventures in Paradise’, a kind of verse autobiography.
The me decade had begun. The age of subsidies,
safari suits, sonnet sequences, and the death of art.
The houses in the Glebe estate got repainted,
rents went up, people were psychoanalysed,
but all this seemed to happen very slowly. (New and Selected Poems, p. 64)
This is not simply parody. It’s funny and it has a kind of zany accuracy.
Quotation, bricolage, intertextuality, pastiche, translation and found poetry (modernist heirlooms handed down to postmodernists) undermine simplistic notions of originality. In Duggan’s hands they lead to a personal style, a documentary aesthetic. In ‘The Minutes’, a long prose poem, Duggan writes: ‘Rosemary is reading A Passage to India and falling asleep. It is a second-hand copy of the book, in which, on the twenty-fifth page, the sentence “One electric fan revolved like a wounded bird” is underlined. Next to it, in the margin, is a single word: “simile”‘ (p. 75). I always laugh when I read this — there is a sense of recognition of reality here, but this recognition also points to reality’s generic structure. In Memorials and ‘The Minutes’ — works in which Duggan takes his documentary approach to its extreme — the world itself is the source of quotation. Anything can be used for collage: the art is knowing where to glue it.
***
Readability is one of Duggan’s greatest assets. In ‘Living Poetry’ (extracts from his journals), Duggan writes that ‘most of the established pantheon have never realised that in literature there are no rules. that what’s of primary importance is readability & and even this is not obligatory’ (p. 269). The caveat is characteristic.
***
When viewed over time, Duggan’s career, like David Bowie’s, seems less one of conspicuous, and numerous, stylistic turns and more a putting together of a battery of approaches and techniques for required effects. Duggan, like Bowie, has no ‘style loyalty’. But his work can be broadly grouped as formalistic (from epigram to epic), diaristic (Memorials, Under the Weather), translation (Martial, the Futurists), documentary (‘New England Ode’, ‘Crawling from the Wreckage’), and — for want of a better term — ekphrastic (works concerned with representation, such as the ‘Blue Hills’ sequence).
***
In ‘Living Poetry’: ‘I’d like poems to have a “documentary” quality; to be structured in a late-20th century way; to be as accessible — and as difficult — as a movie’ (p. 279).
***
One reason why writing about Duggan is difficult, is that his documentary aesthetic is immensely artful. Memorials is a far more ‘constructed’ book than first appears. While he might appear to be getting ‘life on the page’, Duggan is also highly allusive. This is clearly one condition of writing parody and satire. But for all allusion and parody might make problems to do with ‘accessibility’, Duggan never hides his interests or influences. He leaves notes to the reader everywhere: not as an impossible (and authoritarian) Poundian reading list, but as illuminating hints and suggestions (such as the references to Kenneth Rexroth in Memorials). One of the joys of reading Duggan is the ‘further reading’ it inspires. From his artful quotations I’ve discovered Philip Whalen, William Bronk, W. G. Sebald, Morton Feldman, and renewed my interest in Miles Davis. It’s better than going to night school.
***
Duggan is the least hectoring of poets. He has no pretensions about the importance of his poetry (or even poetry). This is especially noticeable in his parodies and translations of Martial. In the latter we find:
Those about to die young,
the insane, the criminal,
they encourage them all
to write poetry. (p. 29)
For all his parodies’ astringency, there is a sense of delicacy, even vulnerability, to Duggan’s poetry. In ‘Living Poetry’ he writes: ‘My poetry — a life watching curtains flutter — & what kind of story is that?’ (p. 272).
***
‘The Minutes’ is an answer to that question and shows diaristic and documentary elements fusing, as in ‘I can tell I’m getting old by the yellowing books I bought new, two decades back’ (p. 75). The title is a pun, since the poem notes the passing of time, and is also a record of something (the poet is taking the minutes of his own life). There is also a pun in terms of the word being a homonym for time or size. The things here are small, put into the box of a poem in the manner of the real boxes made by Joseph Cornell.
***
‘The Minutes’ shows that for all his humour, Duggan’s documentary aesthetic ghosts an elegiac one. Philip Mead noted this in his essay on The Ash Range: ‘this poem is fundamentally an elegy’ (p. 37). In Memorials things are recorded because they’re on the way out. The title seems at first glance (and on one level is) ironic. These diaristic entries of the quotidian, the inconsequential, seem a long way from the monumental. But the word refers to memory generally, as well as commemoration, memoirs, a memorandum, and a petition.
The second section, ‘Well You Needn’t’, illustrates the way elegiac conventions are simultaneously evoked and undermined. The jazz references, including the title, point to Miles Davis who died in 1992. But the tolling bell at the beginning signals not death, but is a sign of appetite and the corporeal nature of continuing life: ‘The bell rings / tea is ready!’ (p. 7).
The elegiac is most apparent in the book’s final section, ‘Ornithology’. Opening with ‘a service today for Bob Harris’, the section is haunted by dead poets. As well as Robert Harris, there is Martin Johnston (whose ‘In Memoriam’ is missing), Jas Duke and (briefly) Charles Buckmaster. There is a quote from ‘Five Bells’, the great Australian elegy, and a memory of the day Elvis died. The final image is one in which the elegiac convention of apotheosis is parodied, but in a way that comically celebrates the failure of art. Sitting in a bar in Fitzroy the poet muses on a bad, unfinished mural painted by an amateur artist:
...was it abandoned years ago when the artist
enlisted on the other front
(i.e. joined A. A.)?
Over all this, Channel 9’s quiz programs proceed uneasily
high on a bar T.V. in the grip of the Gods. (p. 105)
***
For many years Duggan published no poetry, working instead on Ghost Nation, his critical work on space and Australian cultural identity. While not poetry, it is decidedly poetic for a work of its kind, and it develops Duggan’s emphasis on the local and particular as ways of understanding where we are. Since returning to poetry (assuming he ever really left it) Duggan’s new poems (as seen here and in a forthcoming edition of The Literary Review [USA]) show a continued interest in place, and a marked tendency to memorialize. The sequence entitled ‘Sites’ (represented here by ‘Darlinghurst 1970’) renders the ‘texture’ of the past through discontinuous autobiography (but, again, confession is not really what is at stake). In poems like ‘At three in the afternoon’ there is a painterly sense of getting a moment on the page. In ‘Art’ the long lines of Memorials have become Williams-thin, and the memorializing has become more thematic, less concerned with the diurnal. The poem’s final lines, another apparent throwaway, suggest that the work is something of an ars poetica (were such a thing not so risible).
***
Duggan is a poet of doubleness. From Memorials: ‘We are condemned to write as we please’ (p. 97).
Duggan, Laurie. The Great Divide: Poems 1973-83. Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1985.
——— . The Epigrams of Martial. Melbourne: Scripsi, 1989.
——— . Blue Notes. Sydney: Pan, 1990.
——— . ‘Living Poetry’. Meanjin 53.2 (1994): 267-82.
——— . Memorials. Adelaide: Little Esther, 1996.
——— . ‘The Minutes’. Otis Rush 12/ 13 (1996): 74-95.
——— . New and Selected Poems 1971-1993. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1996.
——— . Ghost Nation: Imagined Space and Australian Visual Culture 1901-1939. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2001.
Harrison-Ford, Carl. ‘Laurie Duggan: Poetry of Circumstance’. Scripsi 3.2/ 3 (1985): 245-53.
Mead, Philip. ‘Topopoesis: Laurie Duggan’s The Ash Range’. Scripsi 4.4 (1987): 23-40.
|
David McCooey is a poet and critic and is a senior lecturer in literary studies at Deakin University. |
http://april.edu.au/duggan-l/mccooey-re-duggan2001.shtml