Hockey and the Armidale poets

I started watching my girls play sport in Armidale when they were very young. I still watch when I get the chance.  

This piece was written in 2009 after watching Clare play at Little Bay , a Sydney suburb. I have included it here because I like it, it brings memories back. I have included it too because it introduces the Armidale poets. 

Push, girls, push: Hockey call.

I finished Sunday Essay - obsessions with reading - wondering just what book I would select next. As it happened, I had to take Clare to hockey at Little Bay. To pass the time, I grabbed a few small books of poetry off the shelf.

No shots, girls, no shots. Don't let them in.

The three books I chose were all published in Armidale in 1980 or 1981. I read them in breaks in the hockey. It was quite an exciting match.

Slow it down, girls, slow it down.

Next hockey match I am going to take a note pad. I really need to get the cadences down. Hockey is visual, but this was poetry in action.

Talk to her girls, talk to her.

As I said, I read the poems in breaks. These are very short books. I read each a number of times.

Fuck! That was our ball.

As I did, patterns emerged. These are generally expatriate poets brought to Armidale by circumstance. Their poems reflect the circumstances of the time. There are memories of different homes, of local life, of their opposition to Sydney.

Feeling posthumous in Bondi
After tablelands' dawn and the death of poetry
Sydney existential and drear,
I decide to remember friendships
Rather than renew them here
Greg Shortis, First Ode

This was the time the Armidale poets were challenging what they saw as the intellectual dominance and pretensions of Sydney’s Balmain push. They did so through writing, readings and their own small presses.

Keep with her girls, keep with her.

You will not find an entry in Wikipedia on the Amidale poets. They were and still are. Their poems appear in anthologies. The dream of creating an alternative view still, I think, continues. Yet their presence as a collective seems lost.

The game ends. Clare has done really well as goalie in keeping it to a draw.

I come home and in the midst of lunch preparation wrote Introducing the Armidale poets, the first in a possible series. You see, I know these poets. I was there at the time these books were published. One is signed by the author.

The problem the Armidale poets face is the one that influenced some of their writing in the first instance, the difficulty in this country of providing an authentic alternative regional voice when so much is controlled by and set within cultural patterns dominated by metro cultural elites.

My own writing may not have much impact. But at least I can review their work for my own pleasure.

Note to readers: Every Wednesday I am bringing up one draft chapter of New England Travels, the book I have been working on. Each chapter is self contained and varies in length from 500 to 3000 words. I am not including images. I will add those later. This chapter forms part of a bigger section tentatively entitled writers and writing. 

Monday Forum - has poetry lost its centrality?

In the high  cool country,
Having come down from the clouds,
Down a tilting road
Into a distant valley,
You drive without haste. Your windscreen parts the forest,
Swaying and glancing, and jammed midday brilliance
Crouches in clearings...
Then you come across them,
The sawmill towns, bare hamlets built of boards
With perhaps a store,
And perhaps a bridge beyond, 
And a little sidelong creek alive with pebbles 

Les Murray "Driving Through Sawmill Towns"

My mind was a complete blank this morning thinking of Monday Forum topics. I suppose that we could have another as you will, we do that anyway, but I also like to put up something as a departure point.

This is not necessarily the best of Australian poet Les Murray's poems, although it comes first in a book entitled The best 100 poems of Les Murray  (Black Inc 2014). However, it certainly appeals to me because it is a New England poem. I come from that high cool country, the country immortalised by another New England poet, Judith Wright, in South of My Days.. I knew those sawmill towns, although most have now gone.

In Cultural Amnesia, Clive James argues that a knowledge of poetry is central to good writing. He goes further, asserting that the absorption of poetry, its remembrance, provides part of the glue that gives Western intellectual life its continuity over time and between countries. To both James and Murray, they were at Sydney University at the same time, part of poetry's strength lies in the form and sound of words. Poetry is meant to be sounded, both concepts and lines become stuck in memory.

Poetry has been in sad decline. To go into a bookshop as I did Saturday and find a section devoted to poetry is quite unusual. I think that both James and Murray would argue in part that that decline is connected with the way in which poets have lost sight of the importance of sound in their pursuit of new forms. For my part, I would be inclined to argue that all forms of writing are losing their centrality in a world in which the visual has replaced the oral.

I wondered what you thought. Do you still read poetry? Are there particular poets that you really like, particular lines that stand out in your mind?

As always, go in whatever direction you want. I know that you will!    

Two Australian poetry resources

Both Lynne and Neil referred me to the just launched Australian Poetry Library. This contains tens of thousands of Australian poems by several hundred Australian poets. There is some good material there, although I spotted a few errors in the biography sections. 

Judith Wright was born at Thalgarrah Station not Thalgaroch Station, while Les Murray's home town of Nabiac is on the Mid North Coast, not Central Coast. That said, it is a valuable resource.

While on poetry resources, I also wanted to mention the international Lyrikline site. This has a number of poems by Australian poets including Les Murray and Judith Wright in both text and as read by the author.