Midweek Motif ~ 'Let your song be delicate' – or not

SONG BE DELICATE by John Shaw Neilson

Let your song be delicate.
   The skies declare
No war — the eyes of lovers
   Wake everywhere.

Let your voice be delicate.
   How faint a thing
Is Love, little Love crying
   Under the Spring.

Let your song be delicate.
   The flowers can hear:
Too well they know the tremble,
   Of the hollow year.

Let your voice be delicate.
   The bees are home:
All their day's love is sunken
   Safe in the comb.

Let your song be delicate.
   Sing no loud hymn:
Death is abroad . . . Oh, the black season!
   The deep — the dim!

I featured the late Australian poet John Shaw Neilson in 'I Wish I'd Written This' in August 2012, with a mysterious, haunting poem called The Orange Tree. This one is almost equally so, and the line 'Let your song be delicate' has come back to me at random moments all my life, since the age of 13 when I first became acquainted with this poet — as a sweet phrase rather than an instruction.

But let's take it as an instruction now, and attempt some writing with the delicacy and song-like qualities he both recommends and exemplifies.

So your challenge is to let your song be delicate . . . 

Or not – read on:

On the other hand, though delicate poetry can be very lovely, there's also a place for the harsh and uncompromising. Perhaps you're more inclined to fire in the belly, a poetry of strength and passion? Even the ugly and the shocking may have a place in poetry, if it has a point to make. Let another dead Aussie, Shelton Lea, also featured here, and capable himself of great delicacy, put you in a very different mood with this brief untitled piece from The Paradise Poems:

COULD YOU KILL A DOG WITH A HAMMER?

WOULD YOU STAMMER WHEN YOU CRUSHED THE SKULL OF A CHILD?

AND IF YOU FOUGHT A MAN TO DEATH WITH BOOTS WOULD YOU BE BEGUILED BY HIS BLOOD?

AND WHEN YOU'VE STABBED AND STABBED AT YOUR UNFAITHFUL LOVER, WOULD YOU FEEL MILD AND CALM, LIKE AFTER A BLOODY GOOD SCREW?

OR WOULD YOU BLUBBER TO INSANITY?

SOME PEOPLE DO.

SOME PEOPLE DO.

Nothing song-like about that! It's a yell. (Yes, it was written and published in all caps, before the internet existed.) He makes a great case for writing like John Shaw Nielson, doesn't he?Yet I know some of you, dear readers, don't shirk the confrontational either.

Perhaps there need be no contradiction; it is also possible for delicacy and strength, mystery and the mundane, to combine. You might like to try that possibility too. For instance Joyce Lee, yet another late great Australian, wrote this when she was close to dying (aged 94):

Still small voice
(from Bountiful Years)

1

An earthbound day,
thick cloud, oppressive air,
you spend hours
cleaning up spills and breakages.

Sunset
paints on cloud canvas,
bathes you
in afterglow. Reflections
of the Presence always known,
crystallise.

2

Soft warm light
filters through, unlocks
your dark recesses.

The place you dreamed
gives way
to rooms inhabited
beyond your furthest thought.

A voice advises
"Ask me in joy as well as need."

Truthfully, I'd love it if you all tried for delicate song today, as it suits my mood – but if your mood is otherwise, by all means express that.


(Images used are free from the internet.)

(Next week's Motif will be 'choices.')

Please share your new poem using Mr. Linky below and visit others in the spirit of the community.

I Wish I'd Written This

Shelton Lea was legendary in (Aussie) poetic circles, and probably some others, and I’d heard the legends before I finally met him in the early eighties. He’d been in prison. He drank too much. He got into fights. Yet there was a respect, too, in the way people spoke of him, and that was for the poetry. His colourful life, as summarised here — and do scroll down to the first Comment, a poem by Komninos with more anecdotes of Shelton — stemmed from a bizarre childhood. Both are dealt with in detail in Diana Georgeff’s biography, the well named Delinquent Angel, and outlined in the review at this link. However, that book failed to convey his importance to Australian poetry and what a friend and mentor he became to many other poets — including me. My reminiscences of Shelton would make this much too long a post, but are told on my blog, in poetry.

There were funny stories about his years as a thief, such as robbing one grand house and then stopping to rearrange the pictures on the walls because they were, aesthetically, so badly hung. He told me himself of being halfway up a drainpipe one cold night and realising he was getting a bit old for that life. So he decided then and there to stop being a thief and be a poet instead. 

He never joined organisations like the Poets Union or the Street Poets, but ran his life on similar principles. He created broadsheets and paper booklets of his poems, often illustrated by artist friends, and sold them (very cheaply). He recited his poetry anywhere and everywhere — at poetry festivals, on street corners, in bars.... His beautiful voice and theatrical manner (always with a hint of laughter at himself) won the hearts of all listeners. Rough men in pubs, who would normally sneer at poetry, begged for more — as you read in Liz Hall-Downs’s poem last week. My own elegy for Shelton concerns the publication of Poems from a Peach Melba Hat, the eighth of his ten published volumes. These and other tributes to him are in All Travellers We (2007) which is listed in one online reference as being by Shelton. Instead it was about and for him, by a number of the poets who loved him.

Loving the sounds of words, he was a master of extravagantly lyrical phrases: ‘... dead friends / who had the appalling grace / to spend some time with us’, ‘and when the soft sentinel of the starry night / the moon / sets / as languid as sleep’, ‘i dream of the soft slide of light / across the down of hair on your face’, and a reference to poems as ‘these senseless interrogations of the heart’. But the one I could most wish I’d written is one of his tougher pieces, a flawed but wonderful poem from his last book, Nebuchadnezzar, published in 2005, the year of his death from lung cancer. (He lived to attend the book launch.)

1988
for albert “ah” hayes the bidwell brother

australia, oh australia
i have seen you in your belly’s roar
that there’s nothing downwind
and the country’s offshore.
what have you done with your
mine-led recovery,
your destabilised dollar?
your people are grim
and your humour’s gone out the same door
others’ money’s come in.

where now are
the glad givers of the rape of our rivers,
those impertinent soldiers made absurd
by the black man’s dance
on his river’s curve?
and we,
we arrived on these shores
like shell-shocked pink angels
after a storm.

and deep down in sydney,
where the traffic’s roar
on a saturday night
is stilled by the heartbeat
of the city’s poor,
the bone moon shines,
shedding a light that is thin
through a sky that’s as large
as an idiot’s grin.

but i love the alleys and the highways,
the streets where it always rains;
the parkie-darkies round their campfires
in the dreaming of redfern;
the scud of clouds across the desert’s brutal sky,
the lap of words against
our gentle shores.

and there were wheat carriages,
their tarpaulined corners turned
through which a lad could slip
with his boy’s young loins.
and deep in the wheat a journey began
through this place that we call the common land.
from toorak through fitzroy;
from reform schools through jails;
from deserts to seas;
to cherbourg, redfern, toowong and sale,
this land has been trod
by a sod with a poem whose voice wants to speak
of the australia he’s known;
of this land of fences and diatribes,
where distances cannot be described by maps.
but that is the matter of this country
where we dwell,
a place where the stars are as close as a smile,
where the winds are not tempests
but a spell in the weather,
where no longer our dreams
are of penny ice-creams
but macdonalds that cost you a dollar.

and are we to be reduced to anecdote,
the time when, the time where
rather than now?
alone where we stand is a beggar’s land
were the blackfeller’s dreaming
could give us a hand.
for this is our black brudda’s country.
its bruises and wounds are now theirs
for we have made this land untenable
for even the poor on the stairs.

look around you bruddas
to leichhardt, poor buggers they were;
chewing green leather sample bags
and dying within sight of a murri camp.

they say that blaxland, wentworth and lawson
were the first to traverse
that rugged blue mountain range.
but the koorie had used the hieroglyphs
of wallaby maps
and the echidna’s scratched calligraphy
to show the way;
long before the gubba’s foot had trod this scrub
the dreaming tracks were made.

(Leichhardt, Wentworth, Blaxland and Lawson were all early white explorers of Australia. Murri and koorie are Aboriginal people's words for themselves — different in different parts of the country.)


Most of Lea's titles are out of print. The Love Poems and Nebuchadnezzar are available from Abe Books. (Nebuchadnezzar is also available from the link given previously, above.)

The brief introduction to All Travellers We ends: 'His elegant generosity of spirit, eternal optimism, and far-reaching influence on Australian poetry will echo into the future. There will never be another like him.'

Poems and photos used in ‘I Wish I’d Written This’ remain the property of the copyright holders (usually their authors).

I Wish I'd Written This

For Shelton, who always embraced ‘the seeming wonder of being alive’

and it’s comforting to know that though you’re gone

you’re never gone, have left the flowered

words on pages so even those not yet born

can know you – larrikin wit, friend to dips

and artists, patron of prisoners,

forgiver of sins

shelley, in my memory you’re always laughing,

your arm around my shoulders at the leinster arms,

eyes alight, crooning, ‘lizzie hall, have ya written us

any more of those wunnerful poems, girl?’

the more ‘respected’ elders might grope a young

poet’s tits, but all you ever cared for were the words

– their best order, exactitude, capacity for beauty –

and these you made in defiance of all

the sordid ugliness of the world

and there were wild parties at mountain view

me, dosed with tinctures brewed by your muse

and that filthy, filthy nyandi

the laughter and bullshit that accompanied

a case or three of VB, cold afternoons

by a woodstove as the wind whipped

all around, while you pulled books from shelves

to drop in my eager hands, never large enough

to hold all that self-taught wisdom at your command

‘to the sauna!’ you’d demand

and we’d rise, grab a beer

and shed our clothes, make poems

of the sweat and cedar boards

then run redskinned to the herb garden

to plunge into the old cold water bathtub,

a baptism

always, to me, you’ll be fitzroy’s king

barroom bard of underdog and crim,

of murdered girl, koori pride, throwing

your words to the street and the wind

for the price of a beer and a smile

while frontbar punters crowed ‘shelley,

mate, another poem, stay awhile’

and you do, to we who knew you,

stay, unforgettable, your tousled,

addled head, that childlike joy of living

spread across your gorgeous, defiant mug ...

i’ll bet you’re still on the lookout for adventures,

booze or drug, still spinning tall stories

to those mates you’d thought long lost, for you

will never be gone, and i expect to meet again

in poet’s heaven, (where you’ll be propping up

the bar, no doubt, and singing satchmo-style

to fallen angels), anon.

Liz Hall-Downs

dips = pickpockets

the leinster arms = a hotel in Collingwood, an inner city suburb of Melbourne. (In the USA — and, I gather, in the UK too — poetry performance venues tend to be coffee shops. In Australia they tend to be pubs.)

nyandi = koori word for marijuana

VB = Victoria Bitter beer

fitzroy = an inner city suburb of Melbourne

koori = what Aboriginal Australians in areas of south-eastern Australia call themselves

mug = face

This elegy is about a mutual friend, the much loved Australian poet Shelton Lea, affectionately known as Shelley to his friends. (Expect more about him in a future post.) She has brought him to life! The poem appears in the anthology All Travellers We: Poems for Shelton Lea (Melbourne, Eaglemont Press, 2008), available from Black Pepper Publishing and from Readings.

I first knew Liz as the young Melbourne performance poet recollected along with Shelley in the above poem. She wore lacey black mittens and carried a slim cane. ‘How elegant,’ I thought, ‘What individuality!’ — not realising the reason for them.

Her latest collection of poetry, My Arthritic Heart, was published in 2006. A review, which you can read in full here, says: 'The preface to My Arthritic Heart calls the book an autobiographical account of the poet's struggles with Rheumatoid Arthritis, but the poetry, like all good poetry, transcends its subject.' 

Yes, it’s wonderful stuff — searingly honest, powerful, even beautiful. Her own eloquent words on the book and its genesis, plus several of the poems, are here. At present there is one second-hand copy of the book available at Abe Books for whoever is first to grab it, and it is still available from the PostPressed website. 

I’m glad to know from Liz herself that she finds life good these days. She and her husband Kim Downs (writer, musician, technician and sculptor) live on a bush property in sub-tropical south-east Queensland and look after a number of native birds, particularly various kinds of parrots. Liz and Kim are both musicians. They were formerly two members of the Cathouse Creek trio; more recently have become SWAMPFISH, a roots-blues-alt-country duo. 

Online biographies say:

Liz Hall-Downs has been reading and performing poetry in public and publishing in journals, since 1983. She has been a featured reader at countless venues across Australia, has toured the USA, and has had work published and broadcast on TV and radio in both countries. As well as poetry, Liz writes fiction and essays and has worked as a community artist, writer-in-residence, editor and singer. 

To which I add: She holds the degrees of BA in Professional Writing and Literature and M. Phil. in Creative Writing from the University of Queensland. Currently, instead of poetry, she is working on a novel and enjoying her music and gardening.

Her earlier publications include Fit of Passion, book & cassette, with Kim Downs, 1997; Blackfellas Whitefellas Wetlands with B.R. Dionysius & Samuel Wagan Watson, published online 1996, released on audio CD, 2000; and Girl With Green Hair (still available from) Papyrus Publishing, 2000. (Click on poetry on the lefthand side.)

You can read more of her poems online at: 

http://www.thedrunkenboat.com/halldowns.html

http://www.angelfire.com/zine/bluefifth/Winter2003/poet11.html

http://www.othervoicespoetry.org/vol15/lhall-downs/index.html

http://www.thedrunkenboat.com/fitofpassion.html

Poems and photos used in ‘I Wish I’d Written This’ remain the property of the copyright holders (usually their authors).