Chris Wallace-Crabbe

Search for a word or phrase in this book …

Biographical note:  Chris Wallace-Crabbe is Emeritus Professor in the Australian Centre at the University of Melbourne. A poet and critic, his most recent collection of verse is By and Large (Carcanet, 2001) and his forthcoming long poem, The Universe Looks Down (Brandl & Schlesinger). Imagining Australia, co-edited with Judith Ryan, was published from Harvard in 2004. He produced artists’ books with the painter Bruno Leti.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844710584
ISBN-10:  1844710580
ISBN-13:  9781844710584
Author:  Chris Wallace-Crabbe
Title:  Read it Again
Series:  Reconstruction
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTK
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Sep-05
Extent:  160pp
Height:  228 mm
Width:  152 mm
Thickness:  9 mm
Weight:  240 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 14.99
Price:  USD 21.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  This is a wide-ranging, incisive study of contemporary poetry, its predicament and its rich traditions. While it focusses on Australian cultural conditions, it sees them in terms of the English-language ecumene, for example setting an Irish poet beside an Australian, and ranging from Keats, as our strong forebear, to the modern Polish poet Zagajewsky. In this book, Wallace-Crabbe examines the role of poetic discourse in the face of both popular and high cultures. He also asks what remains for us of the sacred, that wizened category of attention. Among his Australian protagonists are A.D. Hope, the Mallarméan John Forbes, and the painter, Sidney Nolan, whose images of the bushranger Ned Kelly have become powerfully iconic. These critical essays are coloured both by the abiding traditions of a formative landscape and by the postmodern city, with its dwindled, acerbic gaze. They should seize the attention of anyone concerned with the fate of poetry in a PlayStation age.

Table of contents:
Acknowledgements
Introduction
The Language of Poems
Poetry and the Common tongue
Poetry, Prophecy and Vestiges
The Escaping Word
In the Pop AgeOr the Battle Between the Weak and the Strong
The Exile’s Luminous Journey
The Personality of Keats
True Tales and False Alike Work by Suggestion
Nolan, Kelly and Co.
Strangled Rhetoric and Damaged Glamour
Inside Outsiders: From Mud to Malraux
Gang Wars and Freudian Romances
The Escaping Landscape

View excerpt as PDF:

Click here to view a sample (520 KB)

Excerpt from book:  

Introduction

I am a poet. Being so, I practise a verbal art which is at the same time much diminished and archaically privileged. Hardly anybody reads poetry after secondary school and its vicissitudes; yet to be a poet sounds like something serious: part–sybil and part preacher, if you like.

Poetry has the misfortune to be written in the medium of language. Why do I say misfortune? Well, I do so because the same medium is commonly used in gossip, in story–telling, in newspaper articles, in parliamentary debate, even in e–mail messages. And the danger is that the habits developed in reading transparent prose, like that of the sports page, bear no relation to how we read modern poetry. And this can disconcert or distance us. We happy few, we little band of botherers..

This book begins with chapters addressing the curious difference of poetic language, its wedding to sound, form and metaphoric interplay. The organization of a lyric poem, at best, means that every item, every syllable, is at work in the construction business. Modulation is meaningful. When Housman writes,

The tree of man was never quiet:
Then ’twas the Roman, now ’tis I.

The slide from “’twas” to “’tis” proves intrinsic to the meaning. The narrowed vowel signals a passage of time, but it also enacts the shift from a generalized Roman–Briton to the isolated modern speaker. And, yes, my very use of the verb, enact, locates me in the critical generation which brought me up; which in turn throws light on the fact that for several decades I survived as both poet and university teacher, making my delicate way, pas de loup, pas de chien, between mutually suspicious parties.

Poetry is unpopular not only in the supermarketplace but even in the academy. All too often, current critical practice is hostile to the way in which poems reach toward essence, to the metaphysical, toward “what God was”. How pointedly verse can or needs to do this underlies a couple of chapters here.

Again, I look at the roles of several important forebears, setting Dante, whose universe was orchestrated by the glory or justice of God, and Keats, who was profoundly modern in his lack of any nostalgia for Christianity or for its scheme of meanings. Other modern poets who feature here, particularly Hope, Heaney and Peter Porter, seem to me still to be, however awkwardly, in touch with streams and patches of a western literary tradition. Alongside them, or after them, we find many poets for whom that lanscape is pretty much out of sight, no longer “between two ages cast”, but fully committed to that will–o’–the–wisp, the New. Such was John Forbes, when he wrote, “Why not forget everything/ Patrick White ever wrote?”

In this age, then, writers will be affected, Malraux–like, by almost any figure from a random gallimaufry of forebears of our modernity. I have chosen here to look at the way in which a reconstructed Mallarmé and Sidney Nolan’s powerful versions of the bushranger Ned Kelly play upon our imagination.

What this randomness, this stimulating entropy, brings about is the poetic world we now inhabit: partially, eccentrically, coolly, hysterically, or with some kind of post–modern joie de vivre. Poetry has many houses, disconcertingly different in every way. It can include the works of verbal artists as different as Jorie Graham and Vincent Buckley, Jacob Rosenberg and Carol Ann Duffy — yes, and J.H. Prynne. At the far end of the scale from, say, Prynne, it reaches out to include performance poets at their work in pubs, though I have paid little attention to them here.

Yet I give readings with them in their venues, and enjoy it. But oral poetry slips away from the critic’s pen, much like the swallow Bede imagined, flying rapidly in and out of the thronged and lighted hall. These oral poets do, however, often play their part in the modest gang warfare which I evoke late in the book.

There can be no strong rule for what is poetry and what is not, though each ardent generation thinks there is. As I have written before, the shapes of truth so often melt away, remaining inaccessible, while the ultimates of matter change every few years.

And the new will become the fusty soon enough, in most cases. All we can say for sure about poetry is what Evan Jones admitted years ago:

It need be neither beautiful nor true
(How could you tell?), but it must represent
Something of life that might have been lived through.

Yet poetry clearly differs from fiction, despite the puzzling verse–novel, practised by writers as diverse as John Foulcher, Vikram Seth and Dorothy Porter. A poem is densely univocal, whereas in V.S. Prichett’s words,. “the novelist is drowned in other people.” The poet has to think about what syllables say, even as the lines add up, consolidate, complete their thronged vase of harmonies. And the poem will have been webbed of puns, metaphors, and echoes: even drawing upon what Rilke dubbed a language of word–kernels.

But this book also acknowledges that we live in a different cultural space from that comfily inhabited by Rilke, one from which hierarchy (except that of sheer money) has largely vanished. Weak postmodernism may irritate genuine readers in its indifferent handbag–ism these days, but the slippages which stronger postmodern artists have identified and musingly employed are part of the sets of meanings which we continue to face. The globalized cities aim to devour our uniquenesses; the forests of absent–mindedness are full or ironic strategies, and sleights. So there we are, as my aunt Violante used to say.

Speaking of forests, at the end of the book we come back to a consideration of landscape and its traditions, its tellings. As Eliot’s tiny “Landscapes” revealed seventy years ago, impressions of nature have an intrinsic dynamism in the theatre of culture, long after the original vegetation myths and animal gods have quit the scene. What we half–perceive in, and half create from, the non–human world around us
continues to be an essential nutrient of literature. Tragically, it will outlast us, too.

Unpublished endorsement :  If poems were the visions of certified saints, or even extracts from the notebooks of Vlad the Impaler, we would not need assessors like Chris Wallace-Crabbe to help us appreciate them. As it is, we still need a sure guide through the entanglement of contemporary verse. This collection of essays surveys world poetry today along a line from Hermeticism to the Vox Populi. The sheer sense of Wallace-Crabbe’s assessments is enriched by his continuous originality of view. D.H. Lawrence said “trust the art, not the artist”, but there are some artist-commentators you can always rely on. Read Wallace-Crabbe and then read him again and you’ll discover why poetry matters and poets keep on writing.

Peter Porter

Unpublished endorsement :  In Read it Again – with its worldly essays on poetry, art and Australia – everything comes up rich. Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s sparkling criticism ranges from Dante’s exile and Keats’s puns to Sidney Nolan’s bushranger and John Forbes’s syntax. This is writing marvelously open to the multiplicity of things, to ‘the ache and zest of language’.

David McCooey

Review quote:  Read It Again establishes Wallace-Crabbe’s position as a major cultural commentator; the book demands to be read again and again. Not surprisingly, its main focus is on poetry, and in particular on the ways in which poets use language. Hardly a new subject? No: but what is new and refreshing about some of these essays on language is the incisiveness of their analysis; the distinction made in the first essay between ‘wisdom’ and ‘mimesis’ is one of many illuminations. The reader is often given fresh insights and encouraged to make new connections as the argument moves from Derrida to Davie, from Bachelard to Buckley, Hope to Heaney, Heaney to Porter.

Greg Kratzmann
Australian Book Review