LITERATURE - AUSTRALIAN - MURRAY |
Murray Four pages in the New
Yorker should be enough attention to satisfy the ego of even an
Australian poet. It is not likely that Les Murray will be basking in Dan
Chiasson’s article about him for the 11&18 June issue. As Chiasson
notes: “You have to be a little bit of a lunatic to bear the specific,
outsized grudges Murray has borne” despite the mass of attention and
praise that has come his way. “And, indeed, there is always something
demented about Murray’s poems; even at their most painstakingly
rational, it is as though, to quote [Emily] Dickinison, ‘a plank in
Reason, broke’.” Murray imagines himself
as the victim of a conspiracy. Typos in three poems in The
Age are proof that someone was out to ruin his reputation. Lesser
versifiers might suppose that a trifecta of acceptances indicated that
an acolyte was boosting you. Gerard Henderson
pointed out in the Sydney Morning Herald, 7 January 2003, that Murray sounds delusional
when he denounces the “neo-Marxist” and “politically correct”
Australia Council from which he received $339,873 between July 1983 and
July 1993. Chiasson reports that
Murray is often spoken of as one of “the three or four leading
English-language poets”, though he does not seem persuaded. He points
out that Murray’s “temperament allows for only a beat or two between
data and conclusion (synonymous too often for Murray with
‘condemnation’). This bluntness can be off-putting; Murray often
lacks a middle register of feeling.” Yet, Chiasson admires much in
Murray’s later output. Thus, it is likely that
Chiasson’s article will enter the realm of non-facts about Murray
along with the dismissal of him by the doyenne of American poetry
critics, Helen Vendler, in the New York Review of Books, 17 August 1989. Vendler pricked
Murray’s self-image as rough-hewn. Indeed, she found his poetry
“:very ladylike”. His content was Australian but his style was
colonial, in debt to American and English poetics. She suggested that
the “muddle” in his thinking sailed close to mendacity. She equated
his descriptions as “poetry’s version of ‘slides from my summer
vacation’, precious to the displayer, but stupefying to the
audience.” In all, she had “found it painful to read his hundred
pages of unmusical lumpy choppiness, turgid and unbuoyant.” Vendler’s onslaught
is not mentioned in either the plodding hagiography by Peter Alexander
(2,000) or in the critical study by Steven Matthews (2001). Is
liquidating Vendler is a condition for welcome at Bunyah? A double standard
operates towards Murray from Howard and his court. Murray published a
poem in the voice of a suicide bomber, yet has not been denounced as was
Griffith University academic David Peetz for doing the same. The
difference was that Peetz also exposed the negative impact of Work
Choices. Perhaps Murray’s bears his outsized grudge because he is aware that the Prime Minister can no more recall a line of his verse than whatshername in Tasmania. |