The Three-Body Problem

Peter Kirkpatrick begins The Wild Reciter: Poetry and Popular Culture in Australia 1890 to the Present with a confession that, in writing his book, he had to get over himself. As one of a minority of highly credentialled literary critics, he is trained in evaluating the acmes of elite cultural expression, including poetry. But that training also involves, axiomatically, the identification of variously inferior versions of poetic expression. About his own education, Kirkpatrick cites Tom Ford’s analysis of the methods of New Criticism and close reading: ‘[t]he capacity to understand how good poems worked was cultivated through negative judgements about bad poetry’. Kirkpatrick’s training is in discrimination – both positive and negative. In learning about poetry you also learn about the finely calibrated hierarchies of poetic value. In fact, that’s mainly what you learn. As an exponent of a professional literary aesthetic, Kirkpatrick knows about the feeling of disgust, as Bourdieu might say, at the facile, the cheap, the shallow. So writing about poetry and popular culture is a challenge for him; he is often ‘chafed’, as he says, by the effort. But he’s been prompted to persevere by the sense that poetry can be less severely exclusive than the advanced literary studies seminar might allow – if you look around, that is, rather than down your nose. So he wants to understand the ‘interrelationship that necessarily exists between “poetry” as a specialised genre of interest to a few and poetry as a familiar art form accessible to everybody’. It’s the understanding of ‘poetry’ common to different practitioners, different fans, and different social and historical contexts that interests him.

In this context, the Taylor Swift phenomenon is an understandable take-off point for his study. The globally popular, multi-award-winning singer-songwriter is recognised for her memorable lyrics and her literary allusions – her song ‘The Lakes’, for example, references the Windermere Peaks ‘where all the poets went to die’. Kirkpatrick cites just one of the literary critics who have confessed to being Swifties: ‘Sir Jonathan Bate, a Shakespeare scholar no less, wrote in Britain’s Sunday Times in 2023 that Swift’s songs are not “just high-class showbiz […] Taylor Swift is a real poet”.’ Other literary studies academics are busily incorporating Swift’s songs into their courses. One of the earliest was Clio Doyle, who offered a summer school at Queen Mary University, London on ‘Taylor Swift and Literature’ in 2023. Liam Semmler at Sydney University teaches Swift’s songs alongside Shakespeare’s sonnets. Kirkpatrick begins with this phenomenon in a candid admission of his worry that the popularity of singers like Swift, and Bob Dylan, ‘casts doubt’ over the value of their words. Bob Dylan’s 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature is just a further confusion of the categories. Kirkpatrick reads Bate’s response to Swift more as a provocation than a statement of fact. These layers of reception are further thickened with Swift’s recent album The Tortured Poets Department where, in the title song, she introduces her idea of the poet, in bohemian maudit mode: long-haired, bearded, dressed in a greatcoat, working at a retro-tech typewriter, whirled around with paper, self-sabotaging, even suicidal. Swift’s persona seems to be in love with him and to share his creative efforts, even while she sends both of them up for their aesthetic pretensions: ‘You’re not Dylan Thomas, I’m not Patti Smith / This ain’t the Chelsea Hotel, we’re modern idiots.’

Against this popular song scenario Kirkpatrick evokes figures from the past: the wild reciter and the ‘elocutionist’, forgotten representatives of the popular – or vulgar (in both its common and etymological senses) – performance of poetry. The effect is to embrace a certain version of poetry, not in its mythic and tortured mode, but as it has been ‘communicated and consumed within everyday life’. His book goes on to discuss Banjo Paterson, C.J. Dennis, Lesbia Harford, and Kenneth Slessor as well as recorded music, working class poetry magazines, poetry on radio in Australia, light verse in newspapers, performance and celebrity poetry, all the way up to contemporary slam poetry. His study is a version of the three-body problem: the three bodies of poetic expression – poetry (serious, pure, high), lyric (song), and verse (good bad poetry) – resemble the three-body conundrum of astrodynamics in that they revolve around each other, culturally, endlessly, in a gravitational dependence. But there is no general solution to their interrelated movements, no way out of their mutually created disorder. It’s a problem only if you want order, discrete categories, and predictability. By analogy, then, the three bodies of poetry are not autonomous, discrete, or self-contained, whatever critical discourses over the centuries have tried to maintain. There are no universal or essential qualities to any of the three, and their entanglements are multi-level, chancy, and on-going. As the Bate-effect demonstrates, popular lyric and canonical poetry are interactional. Dylan shares a literary prize with Harold Pinter and Seamus Heaney. What kind of problem is it to imagine an intersection of the Rainbow Bridge bad poem (mere verse) and the Homeric pathos of Odysseus’ feelings for his faithful, neglected dog, Argos on his return to Ithaka? After all, Homer even describes Odysseus’ wiping away a tear.

Kirkpatrick relates his initial unease with the intermingling of poetry’s three bodies in an anecdote about accompanying his mother to a folk music concert at the Coonabarabran RSL in the early 1990s. The curtain raiser was a recitation by the actor Leonard Teale of ‘The Man from Snowy River’: as ‘an academic dedicated to teaching more challenging literary texts, the prospect of having to sit through some old-fashioned bush ballads left me cold’. But, as it turns out, he was wrong to feel so disaffected. Teale’s recitation of Paterson’s poem was good enough to ‘transform’ Kirkpatrick’s relation to the poem: ‘for several minutes I was as one with the club audience, following that famous stripling on his small and weedy beast as “he raced him down the mountain like a torrent down its bed”’. The Coonabarabran moment prompts his backward glance at the history of poetry recitation, particularly in the 1920s, but up until much later in the twentieth century. ‘Recitation-friendly anthologies of poems and other texts for performance […] were in constant publication until the middle of the twentieth century’. Even as late as 1978, Faber published Kingsley Amis’ The Faber Popular Reciter. ‘Elocution’ is a synonym for recitation in this historical context, and is related to what Joy Damousi in her Colonial Voices: A Cultural History of English in Australia 1840-1940 refers to as a ‘world-wide movement that attempted to impose a set of rules on how correct English should be spoken’. This Anglocentric, colonising project is inflected in Australia by popular early and mid-twentieth-century public reciters of poetry like John Howlett Ross and The Tangalooma Tiger, but also in publications like A. G. Stephens’ The Bulletin Reciter of 1901, which went through fourteen editions and sales of 250,000. It was replaced in 1920 by The Bulletin Book of Humorous Verses and Recitations, edited by Bertram Stevens. School Readers and other school texts reinforced this role for poetry and the teaching of elocution in the fashioning of Australian identity in school education. The political spectrum of these performative and educational reproductions of English in Australia is summed up in Kirkpatrick’s comment about Teale’s performance, not cultivated or faux-English, but a resonant, ‘not too broad Australian voice, capturing its register between heroic ballad and demotic folktale’.

Kirkpatrick’s chapter on Paterson moves on from the recitation at the Coonabarabran RSL with a kind of literary-historical grapevine manoeuvre, reading the horse ballad comparatively in relation to the history of Australian and US frontiers, and transnational cultural exchange. Kirkpatrick has researched the visits of Wild West entertainments in the 1890s, such as Captain Happy Jack Sutton’s Wild West Show and Roman Hippodrome troupe. Sutton’s cowboys re-enacted scenes form American frontier life, with exhibitions of lassoing, and horse- and cattle-breaking, and a ‘downmarket version of the “Attack on the Deadwood Stagecoach” made famous by Buffalo Bill’. Another successful entertainment of this kind was William Frank ‘Doc’ Carver’s ‘Wild America’ show in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, also in 1890. This featured ‘Native Americans in a war dance, an assault on a settler’s house and, inevitably, an attack on a stagecoach’. Kirkpatrick notices that ‘The Man from Snowy River’ appeared in the Bulletin barely a month after Henry Lawson’s ‘A Word to Texas Jack’ on 26 April, 1890. Lawson’s poem was a riposte to American trick-riding horseman, Texas Jack, a performer in one of the first Wild West shows to visit Australia, George Harmston’s Great American and Continental Cirque:

Kirkpatrick conjectures that the ‘horse-mad’ Paterson, as well as Lawson, was likely to have gone along to Harmston’s circus, when it performed in Sydney in 1890 and suggests that it might have been the inspiration for both ‘The Man from Snowy River’ and Lawson’s poem. Riding ‘down a gully nigh as steep as any wall’ certainly sounds like the man from Snowy River racing his pony ‘down the mountain like a torrent down its bed’.  In fact Kirkpatrick reads this nationalist contest about horsemanship, expressed in popular verse, as an extension of an initial exercise in US imperialism. Australia, he writes, ‘had a key role in the invention of the whole Wild West phenomenon’. Nate Salsbury, ‘the showman who would make Buffalo Bill world famous, began a year-long tour of the Australian colonies with his hit musical comedy The Brook’. It was during the return passage from Sydney to San Francisco, and after an argument with a fellow passenger about the relative skill of American and Australian horsemen, that he came up with the concept of the Wild West show. It’s impossible now to think of Paterson’s poem apart from its 1982 film version, although the opening ceremony of the 2000 Sydney Olympics, memorably, drew on the ballad for its nationalist, performative style. Ironically ‘The Man from Snowy River’ movie, with its frequently criticised casting of Kirk Douglas in two roles, – the cattle baron Harrison, and his twin brother Spur, a ‘peg-legged miner and friend of the Man’ – seems to extend the Australian-US, Wild West-and-Bush tensions that have shaped this poetic narrative from the beginning.

Where the chapter on Paterson places the emphasis on cultural history, Kirpatrick’s chapter on C.J. Dennis and The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke explores one of the linguistic conundrums of popular verse. It’s long been recognised that the Bloke’s language, oddly, is not authentically everyday Australian – up until 2001, editions of the book included a ‘glossary’. Kirkpatrick draws on Philip Butters’ analysis of the Bloke – Bill’s ‘linguistic mélange’ of street slang, faux-naïf lingo, stage-cockney, non-standard pronunciation (dropped h’s, etc.) – as reflecting deep sectarian and social divisions, as well as obvious gender differences. But the three-body effect is noticeable here as well, with arguably the poem’s most memorable episode being the one where Doreen takes Bill to a performance of Romeo and Juliet. Its humour relies on playing off the reader’s knowledge of Shakespeare’s play against Bill’s rendition of the ‘show’ in larrikinese:

The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke was quickly adapted for ‘two forms of contemporary entertainment: the poetic recital and the silent movie’. And it is the film versions of the poetic sequence (by Longford and Lyell in 1919; F.W. Thring in 1932) that survive principally, as Kirkpatrick argues, because what were its peculiar linguistic attractions are ‘lost to cultural memory’.

With Lesbia Harford (1891-1927), a once obscure poet who is now, through critical attention and advocacy, part of the Modernist and feminist canons of Australian literature, Kirkpatrick is interested in the fact that she often sang her verses. He is well aware of Harford’s social activism and her feminist thematics, but the cultural orbits of poetry again shape his reading. While he is not claiming that any specific popular songs had an impact on Harford’s poems, he does suggest that ‘the ubiquity of songs in public life might well have influenced a writer of her class and education, and that her poetry shows a closer family resemblance to contemporary popular song than to page-based verse’. Kirkpatrick’s reading of Harford’s many love poems reflects song lyrics’ influence on poetic expression – an influence that includes radical political culture as well, with its use of singing to mobilise ‘protest and solidarity’. Alongside Harford, Kirpatrick also reads Kenneth Slessor’s light verse, written for the popular press (Smith’s Weekly) and excluded from most of his published volumes of poetry. The Darlinghurst Nights (1933) poems, mostly personifications of the modern cityscape in the figures of young women, drew on film as well as jazz for their depictions of life à la mode. This is not too surprising when we recall that between 1928 and 1938 Slessor was also writing hundreds of film reviews for and curating the film review pages of the paper in which his light verse appeared. Slessor is an interesting case in the field of Australian poetry for his embodiment of a binary modernism – his eminence as the modernist poet of memory and his undercover life as a popular poet and journalist. But the entanglement of high and low poetic registers is never static: Slessor’s light verse has slowly been incorporated, editorially, into understandings of his oeuvre, changing perceptions of his influence and status within the field of poetry.

One of the most interesting chapters in this book is about the monthly journal of the Australian Railways Union (ARU), Railroad. In 1921 the journal morphed out of its predecessor, the Railways Union Gazette, under the editorship of Ernest Arthur Chapman. Chapman, who worked as a union branch secretary, expanded the Railroad’s publication of poetry to include proletarian ballads, with titles like ‘The Scab’s Dream’ and ‘Your Tool Box Will Be Raffled By and By’. In 1928 the magazine published a full-page self-illustrated ballad,  ‘The Gates of 23’ by ‘Johnson’, a ticket collector on what was then the Illawarra line platform at Sydney’s Central station, one of its many railway-related poems:

Kirkpatrick uses Railroad to explore questions about working-class poetry: ‘[m]ust working-class poems only be written by full-time members of the working class?’ There are two intertwined questions here: one about social provenance – Harford’s poems about her co-workers in the textiles industry are ‘written exclusively from within working-class experience’, but she was a middle-class socialist with a Law degree – and another, more poetic, about the formalist imperatives, and limitations, of class aesthetics. Kirkpatrick’s chapter about Chapman and the Railroad usefully focuses on such questions to foreground the ‘variety and vitality of working-class literary culture in the interwar period’. It was possible to be – like John Curtin, Chapman’s contemporary – a labour journalist and editor of union journals, and a lifelong fan of Milton and Dante. And Kirpatrick is right to read the Railroad’s poetic version of modern city life alongside Slessor’s formally pyrotechnical popular verse in Smith’s Weekly: both ‘celebrate the world that has been delivered by technological change’.

With his discussion of poetry and the history of radio in Australia Kirkpatrick draws attention to the advent of the good bad poem. From the late 1930s, modernism had handed down a reductive distinction between verse as (mere) formal dexterity and poetry as that grand, metaphysical artistic achievement, downgrading the use of traditional metres and ‘old-fashioned recitation practices’ in the process. But when in 1941 George Orwell identified Kipling as ‘good bad poetry’, he saved a non-high version of poetry from the ‘hostile snigger or, at best, the sort of frozen disgust that most people feel when they hear the word “God”’. A good bad poem, Orwell wrote, ‘is a graceful monument to the obvious. It records in memorable form – for verse is a mnemonic device, among other things – some emotion which very nearly every human being can share’. Kipling may have been an embarrassing, old-fashioned imperialist but some of his poems continued to have a popular appeal. This version of ‘good bad’ poetry, middle brow in phrenological terms, is developed in Australia by John Thompson, the producer of the ABC’s long-running, weekly radio program Quality Street from 1946 to 1973, who provides the biographical centre of this chapter. Thompson was one of the editors, with Slessor and R.G. Howarth, of the first Penguin Book of Australian Verse (1958). He was also an anthologiser, published several volumes of his own poetry, and produced radio ABC documentaries including one, in 1959, on Ern Malley. He broadened his cultural programming to include television interviews with Slessor, Ian Mudie, and Judith Wright. Quality Street and Thompson’s many other poetry projects had a major role in helping to consolidate a moderate middle ground for Australian poetry after World War II.

But Kirkpatrick feels that literature and radio are ultimately inimical to each other because of the constitutive differences between the paged-based ‘understanding of poetry as “good literature”’ and the language of radio poetry. He doesn’t mention the ABC program The Poet’s Tongue, which ran for nearly 30 years from 1957 to 1986, or the ABC’s The Listening Room (1988-2003), or the radio adaptations of various kinds of later experimental poetic practice by writers such as John Tranter, Jas Duke, Amanda Stewart, and Paul Carter. Nor, oddly enough, does he mention the contribution of Thompson’s adopted son, Jack Thompson, an icon of Australian New Wave cinema of the 1970s and 1980s, to the successful extension of poetry recitation. Jack Thompson has made at least five albums of recordings of Lawson’s, Paterson’s, Dennis’, and John O’Grady’s poetry. As well as recording ‘The Man from Snowy River’, he played Clancy of the Overflow in the film adaptation of that poem. One of the notable aspects of Jack Thompson’s popular performances of Australian bush poetry is that they have expanded to include recitations, at the Garma Festival in Nhulunbuy, of Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s poem, ‘Aboriginal Charter of Rights’, voicing the rights of First Nations people. 

The life and work of Slessor’s friend Ronald McCuaig – a Sydney journalist and sometime employee at Smith’s Weekly and later at the Bulletin – provides Kirkpatrick with a focus for the history of humorous and parodic verse in the mid-twentieth century. McCuaig began his career performing impromptu satirical verse daily on Sydney radio and eventually published nearly six hundred poems with the Bulletin. McCuaig also wrote more serious verse collected in book form which, as Kirkpatrick argues, was influenced by his encounter with F.R. Leavis’s New Bearings in English Poetry (1932). His volume Vaudeville (1938), which several printers refused to typset, included poems of contemporary urban life and lovemaking with a frankness, Kirkpatrick says, ‘that’s still confronting’. Eventually, though, McCuaig’s work in humorous and topical modes – the mainstay of the popular media, both radio and print, of those years – undermined his standing as a lyric poet. The everydayness and community responsiveness that W.H. Auden identified as being characteristic of light verse in his 1937 Oxford anthology was also true of McCuaig’s prolific humorous and parodic verse. As Kirkpatrick points out, that ‘the invention of so-bad-it’s-funny poetry’, as inaugurated in an anthology like D.B. Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee’s The Stuffed Owl: an Anthology of Bad Verse (1930), ‘postdates the rise of mass literacy is hardly coincidental’. As more people could read and write, ‘more were inclined to express themselves in verse and to take advantage of ever-expanding opportunities for publication’. In this connection, Kirkpatrick draws attention to the Bulletin’s ambivalent cultivation of Joseph Tishler (1878-1956), who wrote under the pen-name ‘Bellerive’, as a kind of Australian William McGonagall. Of working class background like McGonagall, ‘Bellerive was attracted to unfortunate deaths and disasters, describing them in a similarly tone deaf and melodramatic manner descended from an older style of tear-jerking popular verse’. His poems were either rejected or ‘backhandedly’ published by the Bulletin, although a later selection was published by its literary editor, Douglas Stewart, in The Book of Bellerive in 1961. There was a minor spat between McCuaig and A.D. Hope over McCuaig’s selections in the Australian Poetry anthology of 1954, where McCuaig responded to Hope’s criticism of his personal taste in an article ‘Academicism and Poetry’ in the Bulletin. Kirkpatrick reads this moment as a ‘transition in the dominant institutional custodianship of poetry from journalism to the academy’, reflected also in the emergence of journals like Southerly and Meanjin.

Given the centrality of humorous and parodic verse to Kirkpatrick’s story of poetry and popular culture, it is curious that he makes no mention of the work of comedian John Clarke. Clarke was a very popular radio and television comedian, satirist, and film actor whose performances were literary in many ways. Clarke’s creative extension of the tradition within which McCuaig worked – for example, in his The Complete Book of Australian Verse (1989) and The Even More Complete Book of Australian Verse (1994), now a Text Classic – parodies canonical English poets in an Australian larrikin mode. In another conjunction of the popular and the ‘classic’, Clarke’s characters include Arnold Wordsworth, ‘a plumber in Sydney during the first half of the nineteenth century responsible for much of the underground piping in Annandale and Balmain. He lived with his sister Gail and his mate Ewen Coleridge, who shared his interest in plumbing, poetry and Gail.’ And Emmy-Lou Dickinson: ‘film devotees will remember Emmy-Lou as an extra in Witness (directed by fellow Australian Peter Weir) but it is as a poet that she is best known to date. A very quiet person she lives alone near Lakes Entrance and speaks only to small children on her mother’s side.’

Kirkpatrick sees a continuation of the wild reciter tradition in the events around the visit by Yevgeny Yevtushenko to the Adelaide Arts Festival in 1966, and in the intersections of counter-cultural poetry with the music and performance culture of the sixties and seventies. Yevtushenko’s ‘galvanising’ poetry readings in Russian were preceded by ‘English translations read by the actors Dame Judith Anderson and Peter O’Shaughnessy’. Yevtushenko’s supporter and translator in Australia, Geoffrey Dutton, saw the Adelaide readings, in their demonstration that ‘poetry can still arouse immense enthusiasm in ordinary people’, as part of the zeitgeist that also produced the International Poetry Incarnation at the Albert Hall in London the previous year. Surviving mostly in ‘memory and anecdote’, the readings in Australian capital cities, associated with the growth in the counter-aesthetics of little magazines and performance poetry, nevertheless remain an essential element of the culture of 1960s and 70s poetry and poetics and a ‘significant vehicle of change’. As Michael Wilding, one of the organisers of the Balmain readings, wrote, ‘This was the great revival of spoken verse. And not that tediously articulated nonsense on the ABC where they hired actors to intone and declaim in a hammy, theatrical way that missed the meaning and rhythm of life’. Here, Kirkpatrick highlights Michael Dransfield and Robert Adamson’s imitation of Bob Dylan in their earliest poetry. His comments on Adamson’s first encounter, in Long Bay jail, with Dylan’s songs is another instance of his difficulties with the three bodies of poetry: Adamson’s early ‘confusion about the distinction between lyrics and poems is […] revealing of someone of his generation, with little in the way of education, coming to terms with the difference for the first time’. He cites Ian David’s account of visiting Adamson in 1976 and seeing a shrine to Dylan on his living room wall (though some details are inaccurate: ‘Hurricane’ was a song on Desire, not Blood on the Tracks). But Kirkpatrick rightly recognises the complexities of the moment of high experimentalism embodied in Tranter’s influential and defining anthology, The New Australian Poetry (1979), and its controversial reception. While Tranter acknowledged ‘the vitality of the performance scene’ along with new printing technologies, he also wanted to ‘reforge’ the moment in ‘the image of early-twentieth-century European and American modernist avant-garde’, with all the debates in poetics that entails.

Both originating in the late 1960s, the stories of John Laws and Clive James represent a differently inflected intersection of poetry and popular culture. Before he became a conservative shock jock radio host, Laws had a career as a country-and-western singer, releasing albums of trucking ballads. After making his poetic debut in 1971 with In Love Is an Expensive Place to Die, he became one of the bestselling Australian poets of all time. He was also, in the opinion of the filmmaker Bob Ellis, ‘the worst poet in the whole history of the entire universe’. Laws modelled himself, as a writer, on the American singer-songwriter and celebrity poet Rod McKuen. Kirkpatrick allows himself a psychoanalytic reading of the affinities between Laws and McKuen; like Laws

Laws’ poetic personality is a blend of male libertinage, dreamy romanticism, and beat authenticity. And like McKuen’s poetry, it relies on the authenticity effect, the belief that poetry is a direct expression of personal emotion: ‘I am the poem’. Which can’t be critiqued because that would be to judge the person. Again, Kirkpatrick worries about his positionality as a critic in relation to writing like Laws’, although his readings are compelling: ‘Caught, as I am, in the inevitable claptrap of the chattering classes, why over-intellectualise the simple pleasures Laws offers?’ He might have recalled Oscar Wilde’s critique of authenticity from his 1891 essay, ‘The Critic as Artist’: ‘All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.’ This devastating critique takes unredeemably bad poetry out of the three-body universe altogether, because it’s neither poetry, lyric, song, verse, or even good bad poetry. The more authentic it is, the more inartistic. Don’t worry about it.

Kirkpatrick’s final three chapters are about Clive James, Dorothy Porter, and poetry slams. Like Laws, James began as a writer of lyrics for popular songs, and then moved into media journalism. By the 1980s he was a popular TV host and media celebrity in the UK. Kirkpatrick follows James from the height of his TV celebrity – in shows such as Clive James on Television and Saturday Night Clive as well as documentaries about media fame – to his retirement from television work in 2000, when he declared he’d had enough. The telling aspect of this career shift was that James turned to poetry. In the decades after 2000, James published at least six collections of original poetry, as well as a Selected Poems, a Collected Verse and a Collected Poems, a translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy (2013), and a verse commentary on Proust (2016). In the midst of this poetic work he also published the ‘intellectual magnum opus’ Cultural Amnesia (2007), and five volumes of best-selling memoirs. That other Australian expatriate, and James’ contemporary, Peter Conrad, read Cultural Amnesia as typically ‘provincial’, despite its omnific range – the project of an Australian intellectual straining to overcome his country’s geographical and cultural isolation by reading everything. The uneven quality of James’ poetry and verse – its swerves between high seriousness and what Conrad, an alert three-bodies man, called his ‘matey doggerel’ – is a product, Kirkpatrick argues, of James’ extraordinary career in late twentieth- and early twenty-first century global popular culture: his ‘performative public identity […] eclipsed his sense of a more authentic private self based in poetic expression rather than the media’.

If the challenge James set himself was to make popularity into poetry, Kirkpatrick’s interest in Dorothy Porter revolves around the reverse question: ‘how to make poetry popular’. Porter’s 1994 lesbian detective novel in verse, The Monkey’s Mask, had a moment of popularity within the culture of serious poetry, selling well in US and UK editions and in translations, winning literary prizes, such as the 1994 Age Book of the Year Award, and being adapted for stage (1998) and as a feature film (2000). Kirkpatrick suggests that part of the popularity of Porter’s verse novel was owing to its coincidence with grunge writing. Like Justine Ettler’s The River Ophelia (1995), Porter’s novel is focalised around a central figure who is a university student. The predatory and violent sexual culture of The Monkey’s Mask also includes elder figures such as university creative writing teachers and legal professionals. Its thriller elements deliberately court a mainstream audience, linking narrative and erotic desire. Kirkpatrick’s reading of Porter’s novel is well versed in critical knowledge of the crime fiction and detective genres, and he recognises the paradox, as Franco Moretti would say, between a genre that desires to exorcise literature and the association ‘between poetry and criminal pathology’. Kirkpatrick’s finesse as a critic means he can’t help seeing the contradictions of Porter’s popularity, between her desire to write in the ‘putrid language’ of grunge novels and ‘still to write poetry’. In the end, he finds, Porter’s language was ‘never all that audacious because it retained the politesse of an imagistic style that refused wholly to embrace the abject dangers – psychological, linguistic – of its own deepest, darkest poetic ambitions’. You don’t need novels for ‘putrid language’ when there’s Catullus 16, less than genteel in the imagistic style of its hendecasyllables.

As one of the major social forms that poetic culture has taken in recent years, slam poetry is of as much interest to Kirkpatrick as the other forms that poetry has moved into – social media poetry (#instapoetry, Pinterest poetry, Tumblr poetry), on-line communities of poets such as Red Room Poetry, and podcasts like Poets’ Corner, Line Break, and Poetry Says. In some cases, these digital forums are also portals for huge sales, literally millions, of hard copy books by Instapoets such as Rupi Kaur and Courtney Peppernell. American in its origins, slam poetry, including open mics, is a competitive format, sometimes involving teams of poet performers, with audience participation, judging, and improvisation. It has developed into national championships in some countries and there’s now even a Poetry Slam World Cup. True to his democratic interest in the cultures of poetry, Kirkpatrick attends the Bankstown Poetry Slam (BPS) in August 2023. The BPS was co-founded in 2013 by lawyer and poet, Sara Mansour, and is the largest regular poetry slam in Australia. Kirkpatrick’s first-hand description of the cultural ecology of the slam emphasises its valuing of authenticity: ‘there was a strong implication that poetry was good for your mental health, and that the slam space must be inclusive and welcoming, which to be fair, it was’. Manuals about slam performance, like Narcisa Nozica and Miles Merrill’s Slam Poetry: Write a Revolution (2020), also emphasise authenticity of selves and experience, with its advice to: ‘Remember authenticity is the key. You are not an actor. This is your writing […] Tap into your raw and the audience will go there with you’. Kirkpatrick wonders whether questions of identity prompted by slam sociability are revolutionary, whether they challenge, or are in fact underpinned by cultural assumptions already held. He reaches for a critique of slam’s identity project in a book-length study by American poet, critic, and multi-media artist Susan Somers-Willett, The Cultural Politics of Slam: Race, Identity, and the Performance of Popular Verse in America (2009), where she writes that ‘what is often deemed authentic by an audience is actually a norm of tried identity behaviour’. Nevertheless he seems to have enjoyed the BPS more than traditional poetry readings.

Kirkpatrick concludes his study with an interesting instance of poetry and metadata: the top ten Neilsen BookData figures in its category T3.1 ‘Poetry Texts & Poetry Anthologies’ for the period 2019-2023. This represents a very narrow perspective on the poetry sector, restricted to the national market, about volumes of sales and the dollar value of those sales. But the ‘salient aspect of these figures includes the facts that Instapoets hold half the top spots – Rupi Kaur and Courtney Peppernell – that only four authors are locals [Paul Kelly, Evelyn Araluen, Peppernell, Ben Lawson], one of whom is Indigenous [Araluen], and that Homer has been dead for nearly three thousand years’. The tabulated sales of this eccentrically broad spectrum of poets provide only a crude gauge of the contemporary consumption of poetry. But it exemplifies, at the least, how the discourse about poetry (and poetics) needs to adapt its modes and vocabularies if it is going to encompass changing and contemporary forms of poetic consumption.

Poetry has never ceased being evolutionary in form, innovative in modes of production, and polymorphic in its socio-cultural variations. But the old, uber-professionalised ways of analysing and judging it – with weaponised categories like the canon, identity, activism, and aesthetic value – have fallen into disrepair, just like the institutionalised Humanities frames that supported them. As John Guillory wrote in the final chapter of his recent study Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study (2022), sites of contemporary poetics like Jacket2, Cordite, n+1 and the The Point, as well as others, ‘disclose the widespread desire for an engagement with literature and culture that is more serious than the habits of mass consumption and that demands new genres and forms of discourse’. And Kirkpatrick’s history of poetry and popular culture in Australia, despite his professional anxieties, is a valuable contribution to such critical renovation.

Kirkpatrick ends with the well known assertion by Auden, in his elegy for W.B. Yeats, that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’, even as it ‘survives’ as a river that flows through our lives. In Auden’s verse, poetry is referenced with a pronominal ‘it’, denoting ‘a way of happening’, a ‘mouth’ that paradoxically makes nothing happen. If we take ‘survival’ in the geographical and vocal sense, rather than in its written or page-based one, Auden’s line might be taken to mean that poetry persists – in a post-extinction landscape perhaps – through its generative, performative and humanly verbal nature. Despite the perception of its uselessness. As the American poet C.D. Wright said, poetry doesn’t change anything, has never changed anything, except within.