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Verse
The Nature of the Edit, from Barbarian Verse.
I know nothing about poetry. Hardly surprising, given the approach to literature found in the rural Western Australian high schools of my youth. The Lakes poets, I Love a Sunburnt Country, and that was about it.
Long days dozing off in hot and badly-lit demountable classrooms somewhere out in the sticks.
Big contrast to the Greater Public Schools association inner-city institution I had attended in an eastern states city for the first three months of my secondary school career. That too-short season proved crucial as a reminder in later years that there was more to life than the AFL football, hard drugs and alcohol so popular in the place my father’s employer had consigned us to.
I discovered Shakespeare on my own, in an anthology found beneath a pile of second-hand books on a table in a hardware store. Walt Whitman came later, through a facsimile edition of the Leaves of Grass that Edward Weston illustrated so well with his magnificent American photographs for the Limited Editions Club of New York. Then Les Murray, through his verse novel Fredy Neptune. I can really identify with Fredy Boettcher. But why is the world’s finest poet in the English language so neglected by book stores in his homeland?
I’ve reserved William Blake for when I can find a decent edition of his life’s works. So, back to me knowing nothing about poetry. Despite the reading in recent years, I still barely understand anything. I doubt if I ever will. But what I do know is that verse can be used as a kind of writing in shorthand. Especially about things sharply seen and emotions keenly felt, jotted down when the experience is still in the process of being played out.
In my barbaric manner, that is the only way I know how to do it.
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