C. J. Dennis and the Bird Poems

PS:
A mention was made in the previous post about the bird poems of C. J. Dennis.
Several people have since asked about this and I have to thank my poetry reading friend ML for alerting me to this several years ago.
Although I've never seen it in print the book is beautifully represented on this website which shows all the poems the book contains and will keep you happy for hours!

http://bushpea.com/bd/pg/all/bdbook01.html

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Reciting Poetry

Recently I attended a presentation where a young woman spoke about poetry and the concept of finding your own rhythm by reading and modelling other people’s poetry as a starting point to writing your own. Mention was made of the past practice of making children learn poetry ‘off by heart’, and how this may go some way to explaining why a lot of people groan at the mention of poetry today.

I’ve since been wondering if this is true.

Oh I know it’s something we often made jokes about, the forced recitations of My Country by Dorothea Mackellar for instance, which had to be spoken with feeling, and sometimes hand gestures to boot. So the first two lines became:

‘I love a sunburnt country

A land of sweeeeping plains...’ – arms widened to the front as in swimming breastroke.

Being curious about the whole subject of reciting poetry I did a small email survey of 10 random people to explore some attitudes. I doubt if the methodology would stand up to scrutiny but here’s a few outcomes. Most (7/10) had learned some poetry by heart (what does that phrase mean??) at school, most (7/10) said it was a positive experience and didn’t turn them off poetry at all. 8/10 said that their parents and/or grandparents used to recite poetry and many still did, including one 92 year old who still studies American poetry with the U3A. Only 2 said they could recite any poetry now and only 4 said they ever read poetry nowadays.

I was one who loved to learn poetry at school and had a mother who was a bit famous for her ability to recite poetry even into her 80’s. Her scaring the daylights out of us with her rendition of Up the Airy Mountain is an enduring memory. 

My first memory of poetry at school was learning, writing out in an exercise book and illustrating September in Australia by Henry Kendall. ('Grey winter hath gone like a wearisome guest...'). After that, all the adventure ones  - How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix, Paul Revere’s Ride etc. Lawson & Banjo Paterson - featured at high school, being read to us by various much loved English teachers. And the day Mr Dean sat on a front desk and read to us ‘The Passionate Shepherd to His Love’ was probably the first time I fell in love. Luckily Mr Dean didn’t notice.

Once I asked a fellow teacher who was also a great actor, to come into my Year 10 class and read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner to them. To my, and their, amazement, he recited the lot. Fabulous! And never have I seen such rapt attention. Goose bumps all round.

Brad Leithauser, writing in The New Yorker a while back said this of learning to recite poetry in an age where every poem is just a search engine away:

“The best argument for verse memorization may be that it provides us with knowledge of a qualitatively and physiologically different variety: you take the poem inside you, into your brain chemistry if not your blood, and you know it at a deeper, bodily level than if you simply read it off a screen. ....... If we do not learn by heart, the heart does not feel the rhythms of poetry as echoes or variations of its own insistent beat.”

Despite this, I won’t hold my breath for verse memorization coming back into vogue any time soon, more’s the pity.

Back at my little survey, some of the poets people still love to read include: Wilfred Owens, Siegfried Sassoon, Frederic Manning, (it was near Anzac day), Carol Anne Duffy, UA Fanthorpe, Mary Oliver, Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, French poets Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Jacques Prèvert, Spanish Poet Machado, John Donne and Judith Wright & the bird poems of CJ Dennis and Judith Wright. I’d endorse John Donne and add Tennyson and Gerard Manly Hopkins (of whose Windhover I can now only recall the first 5 lines.)

 THE WINDHOVER

For a lovely oral version of The Passionate Shepherd to His Love (no match for Mr Dean’s) watch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWatdJKS068

And for the full script of the Brad Leithauser article, see

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/why-we-should-memorize

So maybe go learn to recite a poem, even if it is Mulga Bill's Bicycle.

Words & Robert Macfarlane

Sometimes friends give me books about words, those magical mystery elements that make up what we read, what we say and what we write. There's no accounting for the words we love. For me, crystal, latitude, starlight, compelling roll off the tongue with such gladness. Others, for unfathomable reasons, make me shudder - purse, moist, pleasant, amusing. Urrrggh!

Sometimes there are no ideal words for special things that might deserve a word of their own - those glassy drops of dew that enclose tiny rainbows of colour when the sun first strikes, or the distinctive, combined colours of sweet peas.

The most recent book I received is The Story of English in 100 Words, by David Crystal, the godfather of English linguistics. "Every word has been selected because it tells us something about the way the English language developed". It’s fun to pick it up and see the contribution made to our language by even simple words such as 'and', 'out', 'loaf' and 'taffeta'. I’m loving dipping into it every night before sleep.

Before that a prized gift from a friend up north was Mark Forsyth's The Elements of Eloquence, so witty and full of startling information that I've since bought copies for quite a few other friends who have in turn bought it for others - word-lovers all.

But yesterday I came across something very special. In February Robert Macfarlane, British academic and travel writer, wrote an article for The Guardian on 'rewilding the language of landscape'. (No, that’s not a typo). In it he cites a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary in which, he says, "there had been a culling of words concerning nature, words that Oxford University Press felt were no longer relevant to a modern-day childhood. The deletions included acorn, adder, ash, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar, otter, pasture and willow.” All gone. But new words had been added, among them attachment, blog, broadband, bullet-point, chatroom, celebrity and blockgraph.

Much of the lost list is quintessentially English but even in Australia we must surely mourn the turfing out of bluebells to make way for blockgraph (whatever that is).

I know that language must change, that it is a living, evolving creature over which we who love it have almost no control. The rapid Americanisation of our own Australian idiom is a trend that seems relentless. We now have buddies and sidewalks, flashlights and rush-hour and – heaven help us, homeland security.

But to escape all that for a while and to reflect on the beauty of the language of landscape, do read Robert Macfarlane’s February essay and maybe contemplate a list of Australia’s own lost words.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/27/robert-macfarlane-word-hoard-rewilding-landscape

The Golden Box

One night last week someone asked ‘what is the one precious object you’d never part with?’

Well, I can see it from where I sit. The cupboard, glass-fronted, tall with pale wooden shelving, holds many things. Endless crystal ware that has moved from one family crystal cabinet (remember those?) to another over the years; a posh silver jug that always seems to need cleaning when I think of using it; plates, French, with matching saucers and little wide cups, the kind you might use for hot chocolate or café au lait in a French farmhouse. Many things, all beautiful, mostly unused.

But here, right at the front, is my precious possession which I show to someone once in a while if the occasion is right. It is painted gold, a cardboard cube about the size of a teapot. Just a box really. It has a lid and a silk ribbon tied in a bow at the top. If you lift the lid carefully the whole box falls apart at the seams, to reveal – but wait. Let me go back.

We’re a bit soppy about dogs in our household, The Resident Songwriter and I. We measure our history in dogs. ‘That was when we had Phoebe and Grace’, ‘That was before Otto came’, ‘That was just after Vincie died’. Some years ago we had a different three dogs from those we have now, two spaniels and a small terrier-cross who thought he was a spaniel.

Tessa at Petrel Cove, S.A.

His role model was Tessa and I loved Tessa to a point which some may have thought excessive. When she died, after fifteen years of unconditional love between us, I really thought I may as well go too.

Friends understood and sent cards, emails, flowers and poems and one, Maureen, made me the gold box. When it was handed to me, unwrapped, I wondered what could possibly be inside that I might want, value or even care about at that stage. It was as light as air as I carried it to the table and sat down to open it.

When I lifted the lid all sides of the box fell open like some flower in time lapse photography. Inside, in meticulous handiwork, were multiple photos of Tessa. Each side displayed a tiny collage – Tessa at the beach, Tessa as a puppy, Tessa with me, Tessa sleeping, playing and scooting along on her belly on the green Spring grass. On the bottom of the box, a close-up of Tessa, ecstatic, long golden ears flying out behind in a sea wind somewhere.
Too beautiful for words, and the thought that someone would take such care to create this for me, at that time, still fills me with wonder.

Would I part with this treasure?

Let's just say that if our house was on fire

the golden box would be the first inanimate thing I'd rescue.

No contest.

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Haiku from Harmers Haven

My friend Sue Canders lives at a divine location on Bass Coast called Harmers Haven. It's an inspirational place for anyone, especially Sue who is a poet and an enthusiastic photographer whether the subject be birds of the air, fish of the sea or the cows over the back fence.
Occasionally she sends me her latest Haiku to keep me inspired. Lucky me! Here's a few to share:

Oyster Catchers dance

Ballerinas on the beach

Leaping to the clouds

Young Hoodies hip hop

Strutting their stuff in sunshine

Making Harmers home

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Penelope Lively on Friendship

In one of her early works Penelope Lively wrote:

'Friendship is the love that is ignored; people don't theorise about friendship, write poetry about it. It just goes quietly along, sustaining. Passion spends itself ... but friendship is always there. Like a good marriage, it survives attack. ' (Perfect Happiness)
(We know that plenty of good relationships survive attack, not only marriage, but it was written in 1983.)

She later goes on:

'There are days which succeed one another, and in which we do what has to be done and in which time runs level; passing, simply, bringing with it pleasure and irritation and satiety and tiredness and all those ordinary furnishings of life. And then rarely, and unpredictably, there are fragments and passages from days which are of another order altogether. They are beyond and without chronology; they hang together, suspended, possessions for all time. To be called up out of darkness.'

I had some days like this in November last year when 7 of us - women who had met at one workplace or another and stuck together ever since - took ourselves off to a luxury apartment block on the waterfront at Metung Victoria, to spend 4 days exploring the lakes, bird-watching, walking, talking, eating, sleeping and laughing. There was a lot of laughing. Helpless, tears-down-the-face, can't-speak kind of laughing. None of which would be more than vaguely amusing in the recounting. But as we prepare to head off again, Port Fairy this time, with 2 more in tow, it got me thinking about which books of fiction best portray friendships. Hundreds for children (Remember Bridge to Terabithia? Have you recovered from that ending yet?) some for men, but women?

I thought of these, below, and they are probably in order of my loving them.

Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

by Rebecca Wells

The Secret Life of Bees

by Sue Monk Kidd

The Thirteenth Tale

by Diane Setterfield

The Robber Bride (maybe)

by Margaret Atwood

But surely there are more recent ones that haven’t sprung to my mind?

I don’t read much non-fiction but maybe the pickings are better there, and I plan to begin with Ann Patchett’s memoir about her friendship with the writer Lucy Grealy, Truth and Beauty: A Friendship. It's been out a while and I've loved all of Ann Patchett's fiction so don't know why I haven't got to it before this. Watch this space....

Writing About Mother

What is it about mothers? 

Get chatting with another woman who aspires to ‘write’ and chances are, when the barriers are down, when you’ve both ’fessed up to your lofty ambitions - think Alice Munro, Amanda Lohrey, Chloe Hooper - and you ask politely ‘So, Cassandra, (or whoever,) what’s your story about?’ Cassandra will reply, ‘Well I’m trying to write the story of my mother. She was such an interesting person.’ And Cassandra won’t be the only one. In every writers’ group of ten people there’ll be three or four women planning to write about mother.

Once I would have been all ears because, by some amazing co-incidence, I too was thinking of writing about my mother! What are the odds? But a decade or so later it’s hard not to let my eyes glaze over and hope for someone to say, instead, ‘I’m thinking of writing the story of that drainage contractor I wanted to run off with when he was working on our septic system.’

Drusilla Modjeska started it all with Poppy.  She has a lot to answer for. The blurb on the back cover of my old edition says:

In this book, Drusilla Modjeska sets out to collect the evidence of her mother’s life. But when the facts refuse to give up their secrets, she follows the threads of history and memory into imagination.

That is, when she could neither remember, nor find evidence for, the facts about her mother’s life which would give meaning and continuity to her story, Drusilla made it up. With stunning results.

When my mother died more than a decade ago and my sister and I were struggling to make sense of some of the things we subsequently learned about her, this approach seemed just the shot. Very liberating indeed. Oh, we loved her dearly, our Mum, but she could be contrary and she had more secrets than the KGB. So, inspired by Drusilla, liberated from the confines of truth and accuracy by her brave mix of facts and fiction and sure that this would lay all my demons to rest, I too set about writing about Mother.

Here was my chance to celebrate the trials she had borne with strength and a wry good humour, the poverty and narrowness of her world which she had overcome, her capacity to recite poetry and make up stories that made us, as children, flee squealing in excitement from the ghosts and goblins that had hunkered down since her terrifying childhood to re-emerge and haunt ours. Here too was my chance to honour her bravery in sitting for months with a dying friend saying yes, I will help you die if it becomes too terrible, while also memorialising her respect for every living thing from black snake to butterfly.

But wait. Here also was my chance to explore those times when she had ridiculed us for experimenting with make-up, laughed at us with her friends because we couldn’t swim (no-one had taught us and we weren’t allowed near the creek), rejected the gifts we had made for her as feeble efforts to buy her love.

So, back then, I wrote. Reams of it, mother love, mother revenge, mother-the-mystery. Ninety thousand words of purging - some facts, great slabs of imagination, whatever gave continuity to her story. In haste I printed it and sent it off to a major publisher. Oh, how I now cringe at the thought! But they were kind and you know what they said? Something along the lines of – we were very interested in your story etc etc blah blah, but – and these weren’t quite the words though the meaning was clear – we have enough material about mothers already.

But hey, I was satisfied. Amazingly, someone had read it all, there were little ticks and a few long lines down the side of various passages which could have meant anything – ‘Must show this around for a laugh!’ or ‘Step aside, Alice Munro.’ I was not to know. And there my effort ended.

In the meantime I continued to hear, without any instigation on my part, other women talking with bewilderment, rage, love or passion about their mothers. There were mean mothers, adored mothers, saintly mothers, unfathomable mothers, flaky mothers, martyred mothers and many of them the intended subjects of about-to-be written memoirs or new works of creative fiction.

Many years later I find myself writing again. I have more time now and I’ve shed all of the angst that drove that first embarrassing manuscript.

The current manuscript is fiction. No, really. My mother’s not in it. She tries to be from time to time, muscling in to different characters with her sage green eyes, her habit of singing to herself every morning, her inborn resolve to ‘just get on with it’. But that’s about it. I’ve exorcised her and come to terms with her, loving her and understanding her a whole lot better than before I spent all those tortured years on that first manuscript. I’m okay with Mother now.

So when a dear friend rang me from afar a while ago and said ‘I’m thinking of writing a story,’ I said ‘Great! Just find a punchy opening and go from there’. And she said ‘I have already. Listen to this… I can remember exactly where I was when I decided to kill my mother.’

My heart skipped only a beat or two and then I said ‘Go Girl! You’ll find out heaps about yourself and loads about your mother. And it’s way cheaper than five years of psychotherapy.’

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