Critical Essays

on
KENNETH SLESSOR

SELECTED BY A. K. THOMSON

THE ONr.f27SITY OF NEW ENGLAND

...15EARY

k Q[ 6(6
THE JACARANDA PRESS
 Contents
, First published 1968 by
JACARANDA PRESS PTY LTD Kenneth Slessor: An Essay in Interpretation 1
73 Elizabeth Street, Brisbane A. K. THOMSON
142 Victoria Road, .Marrickville, N.S . W.
337 La Trobe Street, Melbourne Kenneth Slessor's Poetry 52
RONALD McCUAIG
Printed and bound by Kenneth Slessor's Poetry 59
Amor Press Pty Ltd, Brisbane HUGH MCCRAE
Review of 'One Hundred Poems 1919-1939' 62
National Library of Australia
BRIAN ELLIOTT
Registry Number Aus 68-11
Reply to Elliott 65
Registered in Australia for transmission KENNETH SLFSSOR
by post as a book Poetry with New Vision 67
L. I. SHEPHERD
The Poetry of Kenneth Slessor 70
VINCENT BUCKLEY
Vision of the Twenties 77
JACK LINDSAY
Spectacles for the Fifties 86
KENNETH SI SSSOR
Aids to Vision 91
JACK LINDSAY
Reflections on 'Vision' 93
NORMAN LINDSAY
Sound in Slessor's Poetry 95
R. G. HOWARTH
'''``The Poetry of Kenneth Slessor 104
FREDERICK T. MACARTNEY
— Kenneth Slessor 113
T. INGLIS MOORE
Kenneth Slessor 124
RICHARD ALDINGTON
Slessor Twenty Years After 128
A. D. HOPE
--- Kenneth Slessor and the Grotesque 131
A. C. W. MITCHELL
Modern English Poetry 139
KENNETH SLFSSOR
1

Writing Poetry: The Why and The How
KENNETH SLESSOR
o talk about the Why and the How of poetry is to talk about
T mysteries as profound as gum-trees or the moon or the life of the
cicada. We can express one mystery only in terms of another. If I try
to talk about the How, I can do so only by using the mystery of the word,
which means the substitution of one inexplicable symbol for another. But,
having begun with a mystery, we can dull the bewilderment and the
abasement of accepting it by treating it as practically as a chemist would
treat the miracle of boiling water, or as an astronomer hoods himself
from the terrible contemplation of the infinite by complacently doing
little sums in light-years.
I don't propose to discuss the Why—that is to say, why poets write
poetry, why men and women read it and respond to it. That would be
an excursion beyond psychology into the springs of life of which I am
not capable. I shall try to alk as lucidly as I can about the tiny area
of the How of which I know anything. But I don't want it to sound
like a talk from a laboratory. I think poetry is written mostly for pleasure,
by which I mean the pleasure of pain, horror, anguish and awe as well
as the pleasure of beauty, music and the act of living. There is only a
kind of secondary sub-pleasure in the dissection of how it works. I shall
do this with some reluctance by special reference to my own writing,
for the reason that only the author can know what he has wanted to
achieve. How far he succeeds in achieving what the reader wishes him
to achieve, or believes the author set out to achieve, is impossible for him
to calculate. But I do know what I have wanted to do, and I know as
well, often bitterly, how far I have failed to do it. And only I can know
this. Therefore, I take my examples from my own work.
The practical considerations which have guided me for many years
have been those of form and experiment. By form, I mean that shape
of a work, whether in music, words or design, which seems most nearly
to reflect the shape of emotion which produced it. Thus, for example,
a sonnet, one of the severest formal forms of poetry, is particularly
suited in its mechanism for the kind of feeling which possessed Michael
Drayton when he wrote the poem beginning 'Since there's no help, come,
let us kiss and part'. On the other hand, there is another kind of emotion
which can be matched only by the paradox of disciplined formlessness.
152
Let me take as an example a poem I once wrote called 'Fixed Opinions'.
My purpose was to study in a small way the flow of thought in a
man's mind—the ceaseless ray-bombardment of mental reactions to
the swarming stimuli of life, a waterfall of rapidly appearing, rapidly
disappearing thoughts—and to compare this fluidity with the belief
that a human being can, or should, have opinions firmly cemented
into place by tradition, upbringing and experience. I tried to do this
by a violent contrast in form. The poem will be read in two sections.
First, I attempt to show the solidity of the fixed opinions by square,
heavy, rigid lines with images of solidity, squareness and rigidity:
Ranks of electroplated cubes, dwindling to glitters,
Like the other pasture, the trigonometry of marble,
Death's candy-bed. Stone caked on stone,
Dry pyramids and racks of iron balls.
Life is observed, a precipitate of pellets,
Or grammarians freeze it into spar,
Their rhomboids, as for instance the finest crystal
Fixing a snowfall under glass. Gods are laid out
In alabaster, with horny cartilage
And zinc ribs; or systems of ecstasy
Baked into bricks . .
That was meant to produce a sensation of solidity by its shape, both
physical and emotional. Now, in the second part, the form is abruptly
changed. The lines are short and running, the images are of fluidity
instead of solidity, and the vowel-sounds are concentrated on the mer-
curial (i' sound of the vowel, as in 'din' Or 'in' itself:
Frail tinkling rush
Water-hair streaming
Prickles and glitters
Cloudy with bristles
River of thought
Swimming the pebbles—
Undo, loosen your bubbles!
In another early poem, from the sequence called 'Music', I tried
to find a form to express the monotony and the loneliness of a stream
of water running through flat, empty, manless, noiseless, enormous
plains—and I tried to do this by using a flat, monotonous rhythm with
a down-fall at the end of each line's last double-syllabIed word:
In the paw of straw-coned country
This river is the solitary traveller;
Nothing else moves, the sky lies empty,
Birds there are none, and cattle not many.
Now it is sunlight, what is the difference?
153
 Nothing. The Sun is as white as moonlight. As if the rock found lips to sigh,
Wind has buffeted flat the grasses, The riven earth a mouth to moan;
Long, long ago; but now there is nothing, But we that hear them, stumbling by,
Wild gone and men gone, only the water Confuse their torments with our own.
Stumbling over the stones in silence. . .
But form can also be used to reflect excitement, movement and colour, Over the huge abraded rind,
Crow-counties graped with dung, we go,
as in the scene from Stravinsky's fair which I tried to paint in the same Past gullies that no longer flow
sequence. The form here depends on the confections of rhyme with a And wells that nobody can find,
strong, quick, music-hall beat, and is, in fact, quite traditional in its Lashed by the screaming of the crow,
formality: Stabbed by the needles of the mind.
In and out the countryfolk, the carriages and carnival, Again, in 'Cock-crow', by using half-rhymes with an interlocking
Pastry-cooks in all directions push to barter their confections, system of repeated vowel sounds and consonant sounds, I have tried
Trays of little gilded cakes, caramels in painted flakes, to express the sense of remoteness and great distance which comes
Marzipan of various makes and macaroons of all complexions. sometimes in a dream:
Riding on a tide of country faces.
Up and down the smoke and crying, The cock's far cry
Girls with diamond eyes are flying, From lonely yards
Country boys in costly braces Burdens the night
Run with red, pneumatic faces; With boastful birds
Trumpets gleam, whistles scream, That mop their wings
Organs cough their coloured steam out, To make response—
Dogs are worming, sniffing, squirming; A mess of songs
Air-balloons and paper moons, And broken sense.
Roundabouts with curdled tunes,
Drowned bassoons and waggon-jacks . . So, when I slept,
I heard your call
With these attempts to unify a poem's emotion with its form, I have (If lips long dead
also had no hesitation in using Experiment. By Experiment, I mean Could answer still)
a considered breaking of rules where the fracture can suggest even a And snapped-off thoughts
shadow of the effect desired. The traditional grammar of rhyme, metre Broke into clamour,
and formality must be learnt by any poet as earnestly as the pianist Like the night's throats
learns his five-finger exercises. But he must not be shackled by academic Heard by a dreamer.
rules once he has learnt their discipline. The colour and texture of In the same way, the remote, unfinished, frustrated feeling of some of
vowel-sounds, the infinite rhythm of consonants, the emotional effects C.hopin's music is perhaps expressed in a poem from the 'Music' series
obtained by avoiding a rhyme, approaching a rhyme or by subtly altering by means of half-rhymes which echo with their vowels but not their
it—all these are experiments in anarchy of which poets today know very consonants. You will notice how 'channels' is matched by 'planets'
little except by intuitive feeling. 'festival' by 'emptiness' and so on:
Here, for instance, although the form is that of a traditional sonnet Nothing grows on the stone trees
shortened by one foot, I have tried an experiment in the feeling of But lanterns, frosty gourds of colour,
dreariness and solitude by using only two vowels in the rhymes—the Melting their bloody drops in water
two monotonous sounds of `,o' and Over the dark seas.
Gutted of station, noise alone,
These peaks of stucco, smoking light,
The crow's voice trembles down the sky
These Venice-roads, the pools and channels,
As if this nitrous flange of stone
Tunnel the night with a thousand planets,
Wept suddenly with such a cry;
Daubing their glaze of white. . .
154
155
 Faintly the dripping, crystal strings
Unlock their Spanish airs, their festival
Which far away resolves to emptiness,
Echoes of bitter things.
Far away music, cold and small,
Which, like a child's delight remembered,
Falls to mocked effigy for ever,
Melancholy to recall.
And in a poem called 'William Street', I have attempted to create a
neon-lit, metallic and floozy atmosphere by the deliberate use of assonance
—the kind of assonance used not so deliberately in the vulgar old comic
songs which still delight me. You will see that I have rhymed in this way
such words as 'green' and 'stream', and 'men' and 'condemn':
The red globes of light, the liquor-green,
The pulsing arrows and the running fire
Split on the stones, go deeper than a stream;
You find this ugly, I find it lovely.
Ghosts' trousers, like the dangle of hung men,
In pawnshop-windows, bumping knee by knee,
But none inside to suffer or condemn;
You find this ugly, I find it lovely . . .
Does it give you the feeling I meant? The blame is not yours if it doesn't,
for the experiment can be studied only by the writer on himself; and
no experiment can pass beyond stupid tinkering or exhibitionism unless
it has a purpose, and unless it achieves its purpose.
Sometimes I please myself by experiment, sometimes I revolt and
flagellate myself. But I must write for myself, and speak for myself,
and that is why writing poetry is still, I think, a pleasure out of hell.
156
Australian Poetry and Norman Lindsay
KENNETH SLESSOR
T WOULD BE almost impossible, I think, to give any accurate idea of
I the course of poetry in Australia without saying something about a
man who is not a poet and who has never, as far as I can discover, written
a line of poetry in poetic form.
It is a paradox, indeed, but none the less a fact that Norman Lindsay
has exercised more influence and produced more effect on numbers of
this country's poets than any other single individual in Australia's history.
For Norman Lindsay is primarily an artist and a novelist, and (although
he has written, I suppose, several million words) he has not attempted
to make use of the literary form to which he responds most deeply and
immediately—that is to say, poetry. It is true that in his early youth,
according to Lionel Lindsay, he composed 'a Roman play in the vein of
Plautus, called The Pink Butterfly', but it may be assumed that this
imitated the bustling humour of its model rather than its iambics.
At a time when half the population of Australia seemed to be rudely
stringing rhymes, Norman Lindsay restricted his writing to short stories,
novels and philosophical essays, and this, of course, may be counted as
an index of his faculty of merciless self-criticism. It is no part of my plan
to examine these works of prose, brilliant and challenging as they must be
reckoned, except in so far as they may cast some light on Norman
Lindsay's attitude to poets and poetry, on what might be called his
doctrine of poetic values. For it is undoubtedly true that this doctrine
has had more to do with a great deal of Australian poetry written in
the last forty-five years than is generally realized or admitted. The briefest
of roll-calls of poets who have been moved by it, profoundly or slightly,
directly or indirectly, would have to include such names as Hugh McCrae,
Rupert Atkinson, Leon Gellert, Jack Lindsay, Robert FitzGerald,
Ronald McCuaig, Kenneth Mackenzie, Douglas Stewart and Francis
Webb—all of these have felt its impact in one way or another, or have
been quickened, even if unconsciously, by his example, criticism or
correspondence. My own debt to Norman Lindsay's perpetual power-
house of stimulation and suggestion is obvious. For a parallel in modern
157