Alan Wearne: Mixed Business

Waratah, NSW: Puncher and Wattmann, 2024, 322pp.

Alan Wearne’s new book stands somewhere between his other two books with unified narratives. The Nightmarkets was a set of dramatic monologues reflecting on a single story while The Lovemakers investigated the stories of a large set of characters. Mixed Business is seven monologues covering a number of different stories but put together they make up a kind of history of political and social life in the suburbs of Victoria from just before the first World War to just about the present day: let’s say a span of a century. Wearne’s poetry is always about this kind of documenting but the precise topic and the precise mode of approaching it vary.

Mixed Business begins with a portrait of a seminal figure in the whole narrative: Jean. She describes herself as a bluestocking with a bluestocking’s motto: “virago ever harpy never”. She isn’t, though, the voice of her monologue. That comes from an unnamed Englishman sent on a tour of the “Four Dominions” – Australia, Canada, South Africa and New Zealand (subtly distinguished from “the Colonies”) – to provide materials for journalism. He finds Jean the most interesting of the women he meets (she has three sisters as well as a brother who is soon to die in the war) and even, at one stage, proposes. But the lady is not for marrying and the monologue follows their relationship – an intense sympathetic friendship – right through until her death in the 1970s. The two interlocked issues are Australian identity and the role for women. Unlike her older sister – a representative of those seeing England as a mother country – Jean is a modern Australian. Her attitude to the English is interesting. In a letter she describes how her nieces ask how her “Englishman-beau” accommodated her views (code for “put up with her argumentativeness”) and she recalls telling them: “He is . . . that kind of Englishman who looks out, / sees beyond, tries understanding. Any other sort of Englishman, / or anyone, must be avoided”.

At twenty pages, this initial monologue is only a small part of Mixed Business but I’ve described it at some length because it sets up the entire book. It’s not entirely a loose metaphor to speak of her as a seminal character and it may be a deliberate piece of symbolism on Wearne’s part to make her father – the mayor of the area but definitely someone “in trade” – a seed-merchant. At any rate, many of the strong women who occur at different time periods in the book look like avatars of Jean. In most cases this might be through a genetic connection – Cath, the narrator of the third section in the book, “Post-War or My First Husband”, is her niece and Helen, the narrator of the fifth section, “Moonlight in Vermont South”, is Cath’s daughter. These two narratives are, incidentally, the core of the book and they are amazing achievements which constantly surprise by their inventiveness. Mixed Business is no po-faced exploration of politics and gender roles.

The second section, “The Gumsuckers”, follows Jock. In his youth he was a friend of Jean’s family providing musical entertainment. He is a friend of her brother but, unlike Teddy, he survives the first World War. The poem follows him on his first visit back to Australia in 1960 after a life as a composer, firstly of “serious” music and later of film scores – music is one of the threads that runs through Mixed Business. He is on a concert tour with his most recent wife, a world-famous concert pianist specialising in Mozart. Although he meets up with Jean, this is a section largely devoted to the issue of what Australia is as a country. He thinks of himself as Australian although he is infuriated by a lot of what he sees. Not as infuriated, however, as he is by ignorant English condescension:

. . . . . 
             Or should I tell them how
three, four, five times during those years
a film might arrive in London and I started knowing again
those trees, those plants, those kinds of houses,
some of the words and how they sound; except
what I was seeing and what I was hearing
were being conjured through British or American
eyes and ears, and I’d stamp into and out of the foyer
with my mock demands: “Please understand there is a way
for that country, that country there where I was born,
to be seen and heard! Not as yet another novelty land:
a form of Albania with amusing English,
an approximate Uruguay with odder fauna . . .” . . .

In a sense, he’s a failed artist, his career descending from difficult music – his second symphony is a hidden threnody for his friend Teddy – to film music which he describes as “tunesmith foolery, which paid the rent, / or some of it”.

The third section is one of the three long ones in the book and it, together with “Moonlight in Vermont South”, the fifth section, is one of the great achievements. Its structure is as complex as its characters. One way of describing it is to say that, at its core, it is the story of a couple, Cath and Lew, though focussing more on their individual lives than on their marriage. Cath, the narrator, though private schooled, wants to teach at a school in the new outer-western suburbs. Lew, a brilliantly successful advocate wants to enter politics, or perhaps, more accurately, wants to find a leftist party in which he can be at home. Cath’s experience as one of a number of women teachers at her school is very funny and a reminder of Wearne’s great sensitivity not only to women but to women teachers – perhaps teachers in general. The principal – “a man who thinks / he’s running Melbourne Grammar” – is a fine comic portrait of someone who is all ideals and no results. There is a running gag about the graders (probably a pun on teaching) which, after three years, have done precious little landscaping. When Cath eventually moves back to part-time teaching at her old school, the class distinction is emphasized:

. . . . . 
                “So,” I’d be quizzed,
with that brand of sympathy some women have been
bred to impart, “so how bad was it?”
                                                                  No, it wasn’t bad,
my colleagues all tried to be professional,
if likable the children hardly extended one,
and if I tried The Boss remained forgettable.
“Of course there were the graders . . .”
                Whatever they thought these graders were
they never asked so I never answered:
“As we have grounds staff, they have graders.”

Cath’s husband, Lew, is seen from the perspective of two of his friends, Will and Darky. His friendship with Will is founded in wartime experience in the RAAF and bridges very different social classes. Lew is the only child of a widow in Northcote, Will is from a wealthy family and was educated at Scotch College. They form – and here is part of Wearne’s genius that stops his work from being solemn explorations of various current issues – a jazz group called, “The Ding Dong Daddies”. It’s an utterly unexpected turn for the narrative to take and one can’t imagine it happening in, say, The Nightmarkets. It has its symbolic value – jazz being a freer form of music than the conventional parties are used to, involving co-operation and flexibility – but it also serves as an expression of that part of Will and Lew’s lives that lies outside what might be expected, the part that makes them, to some degree at least, mavericks. Will’s weakness is emotional – an odd marriage and an affair mark his card – and Lew’s flaw (apart from an increasing alcohol dependence) is a genuine, non-partisan belief in mateship: if someone is your friend, it hardly matters what their political position is. And the communist, Darky, is a maverick as well, famed for offering a spy, monitoring his activity by parking outside his house, some breakfast. It doesn’t go down well with the rigidly set rules of the post-war communist party and leads to interviews and threatened punishments. The scene in which the characters of all three men is laid out occurs when Lew arranges for the three of them to meet at the football. Lew and Darky support Collingwood and Will is a Melbourne supporter; another example of Wearne’s precision (as well as his devotion to Australian Rules football). The meeting is an assertion of mateship but an infringement of the unwritten laws of Labor, Liberal and Communist parties. In a sense the crisis point of this entire section occurs in 1960 when all three suffer career disappointments. Will and Lew are passed over for pre-selection and the more stable elements of their parties – called “The Cement-Heads” in the poem – triumph. The section ends with the important cultural event of the year 1960: the West Indian cricket tour where Australians learned to relove the game after an appallingly dull Ashes tour and where they also learned how to love an ethnic identity that wasn’t English, that was, in fact, black. It’s fitting that Lew should turn up at the Melbourne Town Hall reception for the tourists and sing. As I’ll say later, this move towards farce could be said to be enacted by the book as a whole.

“Post-War or My First Husband” is a brilliant extended piece and, with “Moonlight at Vermont South” – the fifth section – forms the core of the book, I think. Here we move to the next generation: the narrator, Helen, is Cath’s daughter. And the time has moved on through the Whitlam government (where Lew served as a minister “for something once” and is now “the Shadow Minister for Lurks, Perks and Jerks”) to the eve of the election of the Hawke government. The seat containing Vermont South is run by a smooth Liberal – fittingly called Bland – whom the Labor party has been unable to unseat. In this sequence we meet another maverick politician, Ingrid Curnow, who gains pre-selection and has enough style and energy to win the seat. But she turns out to be one of those political figures (I can think of a Labor Party leader at the beginning of this century) who impress initially but eventually run off the rails or who can be pushed off the rails by skilful opponents. Bob Hawke’s visit to Curnow’s house to meet all the election workers a week before the election is a fascinating piece of realpolitik. He comes at the request of Lew to whom, within a week or two, he will owe a favour: old, maverick figures like Lew are not going to be members of cabinet despite his standing – largely sentimental – within the party. We are also given a much-returned-to description of another of Lew’s escapades: after the dismissal of the Whitlam government, he jumped on the back of a ute to harangue the “bosses” and their minions. The themes of “Post-War or My First Husband” are pursued in this later time-frame. How are decent, committed activists to deal with the machines of the parties through which change is effected? And, though not explicitly, how are parties to deal with popular mavericks: we get to see Labour, Liberal and Communist party in action here, though only through the results of such actions. And just as in “Post-War or My First Husband” the climax is farcical rather than tragic. Ingrid Curnow (busy having sex with her campaign manager in a toilet while Hawke’s visit progresses) is caught by the press in “a drunken pub fracas” and loses the seat while the Labor party wins the election. Lew finishes the section by, as in “Post-War or My First Husband”, singing one of his songs: “Woe is me, shame and scandal in the ALP”.

Interspersed between these two major sections and the hundred page-long final, seventh section are two smaller pieces both of which have appeared before. “Breakfast with Darky” is a wonderful piece which gains a lot from appearing after “Post-War or My First Husband” because we have so much context to place it in. The narrator is someone who wrote realist fiction acceptable to the Party but who abandoned it, leaving a MS called “Breakfast with Darky” in his drawer. At Darky’s funeral, the narrator’s daughter asks about the Liberal party’s equivalent of mavericks like Darky. And the answer: “What do the bosses do / with all their Darkys? Parliament, Kim.” “Mixed Businessmen” which is placed between “Moonlight at Vermont South” and the final, “Yarraville Confidential or The Boyfriend Experience” looks out of place at first because it deals with a using teacher’s visit to the trial of his supplier. But he does take with him a friend – the more sober teacher, Bob – who will be an important figure in the final section. It also revisits the harmonies between the drug world and the political world which were so much a part of The Nightmarkets and The Lovemakers.

So, finally, to “Yarraville Confidential or The Boyfriend Experience” a monumental piece done if ottava rima, an interesting choice of Wearne’s part. It’s connection, in terms of characters, with the preceding pieces is slightly oblique. We meet the Deputy Premier of Victoria, Angela, and her husband and two daughters, one of whom, Hailey, provides the material of the section. It’s only half-way through that we find out that Hailey’s boyfriend, Lewie, is the son of Helen, the narrator of “Moonlight in Vermont South” which, I suppose, removes the structure of family saga from the spectrum of possible shapes for Mixed Business. The climax of the plot, a wrestling match between Marko, Labor candidate and developer of Tradie Town (in every sense an unusual Labor candidate) and his opponent Eddie Moon and the fact that Labor wins on the preferences of another candidate – Raen Bo (!) – who interprets the brawl as Marko’s attempt to preserve her honour and directs her preferences towards him, is high farce. As is Eddie’s spell as one of the hosts of the BoganFM breakfast show (his fellow-hosts are Dropkick and Fee-Bee).

And the choice of ottava rima – which I think Wearne loves as much as I do – is a good one. Ottava rima works by having a conventional quatrain which, in the fifth and six lines, is extended before the stanza is rounded off with a couplet: ABABABCC. There are many effects achievable in this form but the most common is a sense of expansion – in time, narrative or theme – in the fifth and sixth lines before the stanza is finished with a bathetic couplet. One of my favourites in this mode is Byron’s “Vision of Judgement” a comic piece about the death of George III. During that poem, Satan makes his way to the gates of heaven to make a bid for George’s soul:

. . . . . 
As he drew near, he gazed upon the gate
     Ne’er to be entered more by him or Sin,
With such a glance of supernatural hate,
     As made Saint Peter wish himself within;
He pottered with his keys at a great rate,
     And sweated through his Apostolic skin:
Of course his perspiration was but ichor,
Or some such other spiritual liquor.

A perfect example of a sardonic concluding couplet and entirely suited to Byron’s stance. The same can be said of his great long poem, Don Juan. Byron is distanced from his characters even when feeling warm towards them and so the sardonic key in ottava rima suits him perfectly: it’s a “pedestrian muse”, not suited to the flights of someone like Coleridge, but it has its place. It’s certainly matches Byron’s poetic personality better than the Spenserian stanzas of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. And it suits Wearne in this long section of Mixed Business where there is a mix of “serious” characters and idiots. And not only does Wearne quote Byron, to establish the link, he also exploits Byron’s dedication to Don Juan by allowing himself to enter the poem in its introduction. Whereas Byron’s opening stanzas very much about his poetic contemporaries, Wearne uses the opportunity to talk about his own poetry and its aims when he sends an imaginary email to Hailey, asking her to co-operate on his new project.

. . . . . 
I’ve followed your career and your romancing,
so please forgive such literary stalking
but that’s a risk I am forever chancing:
to capture modes of thinking and of talking,
the poet’s art which, if it works, enhancing.
We’ve different minds to , let’s say, Stephen Hawking,
a Galileo, Newton or an Einstein;
plus better moral than a Harvey Weinstein. . .

Looked at as a whole, Mixed Business is, as its title says, mixed. Not in the sense of quality (“he had mixed success”) because it is brilliant, but rather in its structure. It could be described in a number of ways. As I’ve said, it avoids the unity of a saga through a family – Forsyte style – that’s something that might be attempted in a novel but its plan – to cover nation, gender, politics etc through the experiences of a number of generations sounds boring even as I write it. It could be seen as a three act piece with two poems of introduction and two other short pieces interspersed between the three major sections. To me, the thing that stands out is how unpredictable the narrative is. There are strong women and interesting, flawed men. The men are all mavericks, but mavericks can be established in a novel in very conventional ways. Wearne’s maverick men, especially Lew, are, in contrast, established in maverick ways. Who would have thought that two young friends from different backgrounds, on leaving the RAAF would form a jazz combo, or that Lew’s political immolation would involve jumping on a ute after the dismissal to harangue the bosses?

Alan Wearne: Near Believing: Selected Monologues and Narratives 1967-2021

Waratah, NSW: Puncher and Wattmann, 2022, 252pp.

So large is Alan Wearne’s collected body of work, exploring the lives of Australia’s under-, working-, and middle-classes that Near Believing: Selected Monologues and Narratives 1967-2021 isn’t at all a traditional selected poems, the sort that tries to collect the best-known and most important examples of a poet’s work and present them in such a way that a new reader can get a compressed overview. True, this could be said of the last two sections of Near Believing, the one selecting from the short poems of The Australian Popular Songbook and the other, “Metropolitan Poems and Other Poems” selecting from among reasonably recent mid-length narratives and monologues. But Wearne’s poetic activity in the last quarter (or perhaps even third) of the twentieth century was dedicated to two very large works, The Nightmarkets and The Lovemakers which, put together, amount to nearly a thousand pages. The former is represented in Near Believing by a single long monologue and, although the latter gets nearly fifty pages, including Kevin Joy’s long monologue “Nothing But Thunder”, it’s only a fragment of the enormous and complex whole. In the case of these two mega-works, in other words, readers get not so much a selection as a sampler, something that might give one a faint sense of these books and perhaps, hopefully, lure one to explore their complexities further.

One of the things that Near Believing does is confirm the ambit of Wearne’s interests. He is, basically, a poet observing his own postwar generation. There are glances at the generations after this and something more substantial than glances at a generation or two before. In The Nightmarkets, for example, much of the interest in the love affair between leftist journalist Sue Dobson and the patrician politician Jack McTaggart derives not from the different worlds they inhabit – that of a dope-smoking inner-urbanite and that of a patrician landowner – but from the generational difference. And standing behind McTaggart is his mother, Elise, a representative of the generation born in the late teens or early 1920s. (Wearne seems to have a special affinity with this group – women reaching adulthood in the late 1930s – and this may well be because it’s his mother’s generation.) I don’t think that Wearne ever strays, generationally, outside these boundaries, though his work is so substantial that I could be wrong. At any rate, at least up to this point, he has never done historical reconstructions: there are no renaissance painters or bishops (pace Browning) and certainly no voyaging Australian explorers, all alone or otherwise. So much for temporal limits. In terms of space, Australia, especially Melbourne, is strongly the centre, as one might expect, and there is an emphasis on the postwar suburbs like Blackburn, Wearne’s own locus familiaris, although the Mr Asia Syndicate dimension of The Lovemakers means that the poems do make trips to south-east Asia.

Newcomers will be amazed by the extraordinary complexity and detail of the lives that are on show in these poems but admirers and critics may be able to use Near Believing as the kind of overview that makes it possible to ask some basic questions about a brilliant career spanning more than half a century, questions which haven’t perhaps been able to be answered in any satisfactory way before. They are what might be called “second-level” critical concerns which are really beyond the ambit of reviews which, after all, are required to look closely at a book immediately it is published. When there was, briefly, at least the skeleton of a scholarly critical community in Australian literature, one used to be able to say that they were topics later students might take up in their postgraduate theses. Now they look rather like questions that a reviewer poses but can’t really answer: in today’s language, cans being kicked down the street.

At the risk of writing a review which is a set of questions rather than a set of observations, I’ll begin by listing some of these issues and then have a look at one of them in some – if inadequate – detail. One of them is the need to see what patterns of progression there are in Wearne’s poems. In other words, what does that phrase, “as his powers developed”, mean in this instance? How are the most recent poems, “Near Believing” and “Press Play, different to “Eating Out” and the selections from “Out Here” from Wearne’s second book, New Devil, New Parish? Are they better – whatever that might mean? Then there are the characters themselves. Do his women characters seem more developed and less likely to be stereotypes than many of the male characters and if so why? Are the large, aggregated works like The Nightmarkets or The Lovemakers the formats in which Wearne’s genius is shown to best advantage or is it the more minimalist portraits such as are found in the sonnets of The Australian Popular Songbook? (Again, readers can slot in all my reservations about value judgements in the world of creative activity here.) What is the poet’s stake and his role? Is it a dispassionate responsibility to document; is it a humanist responsibility to allow characters to express something of the fullness of their personality, especially in the monologues; is it a desire to analyse underlying social patterns in Australian society (especially in the cultures of prostitution and drugs and their interaction with personal and political lives)? Or is there fundamentally a moral vision – as was the case with Dickens – describing character and social constructions but having a very strong judgemental view of aspects of them? If there is this evaluative component, is it aligned with those generally accepted by the intellectual/creative class of today or is it opposed to them? What is the function of the growing predilection for comic doggerel? Why is it that Wearne himself appears as one of the characters of the long narrative sequence, “Operation Hendrickson”? How are the enormous cast of characters differentiated: do they have different speech patterns, for example, or does their individuality only lie in the complex interaction of family, sex, suburb (always important in Wearne), friends etc – an interaction that produces the ideas and opinions that the character is keen to share with us (in the case of the monologues) or that the narrator wants to explore (in the case of the narratives)?

I’m especially interested in this last question, and the first thing to say about it is that it isn’t a simple issue. One always has the sense that there is a basic “Wearne style”, that he is, in other words, parodyable. The same can be said of Browning, surely the founder of the specific genre that Wearne works in. One of the features, in Browning’s case, is a kind of bluff energy that animates even a depressed old painter like Andrea del Sarto. It’s an energy deriving from the desire to express oneself fully that often keeps monologues poetically alive, pumping through enjambed pentameters. And that energy can lead to a kind of gigantism that is difficult to rein in. Every student thinks that Bishop Blougram goes on too long and the same can be said of Sue Dobson’s two monologues in The Nightmarkets and especially of Therese Lockhart’s in the same book (it runs to well over two thousand lines). At any rate, a poetry which is driven by energy is likely to have the same powerful pulse whether the speaker is an inner-urban activist from The Nightmarkets or a drug-running Kevin Joy from The Lovemakers. And this pulse seems to determine repeated syntactic structures so that a passage from Near Believing’s second-last poem:

                     And if on Saturday evenings
that station’s Sexuality Show was somewhat fatuous
(though for those times and on its terms well meaning)
often it seemed we both were giving
differing answers to quite similar questions . . .

seems identifiably a passage by Alan Wearne with its “and if” opening, its deployment of “somewhat” and the balance of the last clause. Wearne is obviously sensitive to this issue whereby characters, no matter how different, sound “somewhat” the same and a note at the end of Near Believing explains that certain passages have been omitted when he found himself “announcing to his creations: “Truly, this isn’t you speaking . . . it’s me!”. There are also quite a few slight emendations to “Climbing Up the Ladder of Love”, Sue Dobson’s second monologue from The Nightmarkets, and the one included here. Again. I’ll bequeath a detailed study of these amendments to some imaginary scholar of the future but one of their functions is clearly to make Sue sound more like herself and less like her creator. To take a single, not necessarily representative, example, the original,

Yet, even if portions bore, I thought, love some to last.
This starts my career, it must. But was about to get cast
by John in some wilting bloom role. . .

becomes

[“]Yet even if such portions bore,” I knew, “love some to last.
This starts my career, it must. . . “
                                  Though was I set to be cast
by John in some “wilting bloom” role? . . .

The original has two very Wearnian compressions: “love some to last” – ie “I would love some of them to last a long time” – and in the next line, “but was about to get cast” – ie “but I was about to get cast” – and presumably the existence of two so close together makes Sue sound more as though she is speaking a kind of Wearne-speak than the author is comfortable with.

This underlying style doesn’t inhibit verbal differentiation though; it can just provide a context in which it can occur. For me the strongest part of this Selected is the last section made up of individual narratives of medium length and the first of these, “Chatswood: Ruth Nash Speaks”, is one of my favourite Wearne poems. It is built around the Bogle-Chandler mystery of the early sixties where two of the guests at a New Year party for CSIRO scientists, Gib Bogle and Margaret Chandler, went off together for some extra-marital shenanigans. Their poisoned bodies were later found at the Lane Cove River but no murderer was identified and there have been many theories about the deaths ranging from a prank gone astray to a sudden eruption of hydrogen sulphide from the river floor. The party was held by Ken Nash, another scientist, and his wife, Ruth. The whole poem is a monologue which Ruth delivers in lolloping, bathetic couplets and it has a wonderful opening:

. . . and we are, in best sellers or movies, near press-ganged to pretend
how simple, bland beginnings might prologue a ludicrous end,

so there’s Gib on arrival lightfooting it down our hall,
and there’s Gib a day later lightfooting bugger all.

We think we know the limits? We’re merely to follow this text:
Lives unfold lives fold, here’s one hour here’s the next.

And where in a plot place “the heavens”, their ever-expanding No?
Well you barely ask such questions of the CSIRO,

for (lab coats, leather patches, pipes and British cars)
my other half worked with boffins who rarely trusted the stars. . .

It’s a gorgeously precise evocation of Ruth Nash who is clever in her own way and rather outside the male domain of the scientists at the party. She must, incidentally, have been born in the early twenties and is thus a contemporary of Elise McTaggart who, with her friend, Molly, has a similar position vis a vis the male political world of the postwar Menzies government. She is thinking, through the poem, about the mysteries of the events of people’s lives, rather as a narrative poet must and she’s quite removed from the mental processes of science: as she says, “Well you barely ask such questions of the CSIRO”. She’s less uptight than her husband – who objected to Margaret Chandler’s husband’s Hawaiian shirt – and there’s a slightly larky quality about her conveyed especially beautifully in that phrase “lightfooting bugger all”. All of this is transferred to her tone of voice in the poem itself. We aren’t told about her parents, suburb and school as we might have been in a longer monologue, and so this has a minimalist quality. But her personality is as strongly conveyed as Kevin Joy’s or Sue Dobson’s. As a poem it’s a masterpiece in miniature with a sharply individuated speaker.

Another poem worth exploring from this point of view is “A Portrait of Three Young High School Teachers”. We aren’t told the date of the portrait but it feels like the sixties or even, conceivably, the decade before – a period when the three young women “in full, pleated, white or floral-patterned skirts” are not allowed to wear slacks. The poem opposes female friendship to the way in which the high school “does things” and thus to the way in which prevailing social structures do things. The idiom of the poem sounds like reasonably familiar Wearne narrative:

. . . . .
And if outside, starting at Holland Road
(after which they’ll circle out into those whatever-beyonds)
the instant museum of jingles and choruses, slogans and chants
continue their parade:

a Peace Congress for both civic-minded and pest,
or for the troubled, the naïve, the plain inquisitive,
Revival Crusades making sure of merely nothing . . .

As the poem says, “friendships can at least delay these dour, sour uncertainties” and it’s the friendship of Ruth, Frances and Yvonne which is the subject of the poem. The power of the last stanza is that the language moves from that of conventional narrative to direct speech in the form of a very elegant invitation:

            So, walking to their staffroom
Ruth, a young woman at her most formally informal
tells Frances: “A few folk are coming over
this Saturday. Yvonne and her fiancé will be there.
You and your husband are very, very welcome.”

It could be argued that this is not so much the individuated speech of a precisely defined character so much as the clichés of a particular class but it doesn’t feel that way to me. The contrast with the third person narrative ensures that it seems to the reader immensely human and really quite moving. It’s the mark of an author with a sure and very delicate touch and just as Ruth Nash stands outside the world of the scientists, so these three friends stand outside the structures of school and wider society.

One way of investigating both the processes of individualisation and the issue of Wearne’s development of a poet might be to pick similar figures appearing in early and more recent poems. “Waitin’ for the Viet Cong” is a piece that chimes with Sue Dobson’s experiences in The Nightmarkets. A leftist activist (admittedly from a middle-class background and with an academic father) finds herself in a situation which challenges the values she has evolved for herself. In The Nightmarkets, as in the earlier “Out Here”, the plot is deliberately rather tenuous and the author leaves you in no doubt that it is the characters that are to be highlighted and the function of events is to challenge and define these characters. In a sense this happens in “Waitin’ for the Viet Cong”, but the situation is so good and so full of ironies that it is hard for a reader (at least, it is for me) not to be much more interested in it than I am in the central character who is, after all, just another activist facing social change. To summarise: the central character falls in love with a French girl while they are both in school but when, older, she travels to France to renew the relationship, she finds that things have moved on for Antoinette:

. . . . . 
       Nothing I would ever do had been so planned,
so mis-planned.
               Candidacy and scholarship were certainties
whilst French would never be a problem:
wasn’t it all mine, not as a kind of loan
but the zealous gift which, steeled and committed,
I thought had chosen me, such being that on-cue bravado
History and love both offer.
                            Shy, arrogant girls,
hadn’t we kept each other’s photographs
“Moi sur Les Barricades”, “Me and my Collective”?
Maybe. But what hers had hardly shown
was all the ground she’d filled, she’d travelled,
which wasn’t, I knew, mere breasts and a boyfriend
. . . . . 
          Then catching this right-through-me look of hers
I knew what she was seeing Here’s that Australiene again
(some place like that)  a pest from my past,
and how right now in the compost of our caprice
and paranoia, my Antoinette was truly blooming . . .

The Australian sums this experience up as “She cut me and I caught a chill” but the chill turns into something much more life-threatening. So far, the poem exploits the ironies of the way in which changed times and conditions challenge previous experiences and values, not entirely different to the questions Sue Dobson faces when she finds herself in love with a member of the privileged rural elite. But the next irony of “Waitin’ for the Viet Cong” is more delicious. Her life is saved by the unremitting efforts of her parents and Australian consular staff, exactly the people she has spent her activist life fighting against:

. . . . .
         Week after shaky week I’d little else but sweated,
though now someone was saying my name and I caught that
monotonal national voice diplomacy never could dispel.
Whilst all those manner of people I wished exterminated:
governments, Foreign Affairs, specialists, flight crew, anyone
wanting the world purged of every Antoinette-and-I
were helping to lift, mend, fly and propel me
through Customs and out, school girl ruthless still . . .

It’s an irony worthy of Henry James (who would surely have hailed it as a “germ” suitable for expansion into a Jamesian novel) and it reaches some kind of resolution at the conclusion when the character shares a joke with her father. It’s too complex an issue to go into here, but one would like to spend some time comparing this woman’s idiom with that of Sue Dobson, even if the issue is complicated by the fact that Sue’s monologues are imagined as occurring almost immediately after the events she describes whereas the character in “Waitin’ for the Viet Cong” is looking back on her life from a much more mature viewpoint – she’s described as “recently retired”.

“Waitin’ for the Viet Cong” raises another issue which perhaps I should have added to the list of issues that one would like to see examined in Wearne’s poetry. The final section of the poem, after the daughter’s laughing with her father, is a strange imagined poem/song in a tricky rhyme scheme:

We knew Struggle, we knew Truth,
          Knew Hué and Hai Phong,
Served such causes in our youth,
          Waitin’ for the Viet Cong.
Whilst Johnson, Nixon strafed the North,
Bellowed each July the Fourth:
“Longin’ for the Viet Cong to win girls,
          Screamin’ for the Viet Cong!”

And so on for another five stanzas. I’ve quoted it simply because to try to describe it in a way that made sense to a reader who doesn’t have the book would take a lot of space. It’s really hard to know what it’s doing as it seems so out of keeping with the monologue style of the poem and its proliferating ironies. It can certainly be said of it that it stops the whole poem from being too po-faced and it isn’t something Henry James would have been able to do. Perhaps it ties in with Wearne’s obvious delight in comic poetry seen in poems like “Dysfunction, North Carlton Style or, The Widow of Noosa” or “All These Young Australianists . . .” from Prepare the Cabin for Landing. (Interestingly, the first of these occurs immediately after “A Portrait of Three Young High School Teachers” in that book as though to say that there are more registers available to the poet than the solemn, sensitive tone of that poem.) The whole technique appears first (I think) at the end of The Lovemakers where Barb and Neil’s relationship – one of the running themes of this nearly seven hundred page book – is concluded in a tone which is the opposite of what a reader might expect:

          Neil was in Melbourne attending a funeral,
he called up his old flame to check out her scene.
          She was delighted and jumped at a meeting,
before he’d fly out from Tullamarine.

Her heart was kickstarted, it wouldn’t stop thumping
with part of what happened and part might’ve been.
Then she panicked; if Neil has a touch of the cold feet
won’t he run off to Tullamarine? . . . 

And so on for another eighteen stanzas all finishing with Melbourne’s airport’s name providing a rhyme. At the time it struck me as a daring experiment, a way of avoiding the solemn rounding-off that a long narrative poem might be expected to have – as Ian Metcalfe’s final section of The Nightmarkets has, for example. Perhaps its appearance here and in “Waitin’ for the Viet Cong” is a sign that it is part of Wearne’s long-term thoughts about tone and conclusions.

Wearne is a great poet with a freak hypersensitivity to people, their inner lives, relationships and conflicts, and the familial, educational and suburban elements that make them what they are. This sensitivity allows him to tap into the almost infinite complexity of our subjectivities. Michelle Borzi, in her excellent introduction, quotes Sue Dobson’s remark, “Take any normal street of average length . . . / Simply concentrate on / a street of a suburb: that’s mindblowing!” Admittedly, in this passage from the first of her two monologues in The Nightmarkets, Sue is talking about the sex going on in that street but sex is only a part of the infinitely complex interactions of human beings. It may be that there are other people around the place equally as sensitive to human subjectivity as Wearne and one should really focus only on Wearne’s unique powers of giving imaginative expression to this material. I made a brief list at the beginning of some of the questions that a mature literary culture would be asking of such a poet. Another one to add to the list might be the question of the extent to which he is a social or a biological determinist, answering Ruth Nash’s question about the role of the heavens, perhaps. Deciding which of his vast cast of characters is able to make the freest choices might take a long time.

Alan Wearne: These Things Are Real and as editor: With the Youngsters

These Things Are Real, Artarmon: Giramondo, 2017, 126pp.
With the Youngsters: Group Sestinas and Group Villanelles, Flinders Lane, Vic.: Grand Parade Poets, 2017, 90pp.

Here are two books which, put together, show Wearne in three of his most important poetic roles: as maker of the best verse narratives Australia has produced, and as satirist and as teacher. Perhaps this final role should be modified slightly since With the Youngsters is not a book about how to go about teaching the writing of poetry at university level but rather an anthology of what students and their teacher have, over the years, produced when faced with the task of writing something collectively in two of the most demanding fixed forms. If anything, then, it might be more accurate to speak of Wearne in his little-commented-on role of explorer of fixed poetic forms. The big verse-narratives – The Nightmarkets and The Lovemakers – never seem happy to operate entirely in Wearne’s distinctive blank verse and are always ready to rise to the challenge of one of the available forms.

At any rate, of the three roles the one I value most is the verse narrative. Wearne’s two earlier extended narratives are made up of monologues and third person narratives but in the case of The Nightmarkets these are extended pieces. The Lovemakers is rather more complex narratively speaking and interweaves an immense number of shorter narratives into an enormously complex whole documenting postwar Melbourne and Sydney and exploring the relationship between sex and politics, the media and drug cultures: a kind of postwar Australian Comédie Humaine. The shorter narratives in Wearne’s previous book, Prepare the Cabin for Landing, and the five that make up the first section of this book can be seen as either distillations of the longer ones or as examples of the kind of stories which could, imaginably, be woven into something ambitious and thematically wide-ranging, like The Lovemakers.

In These Things Are Real, the five narratives make up a section the size of a conventional book and though the satires, grouped together as “The Sarsaparilla Writer’s Centre”, run to fifty pages, it’s hard not to see them as little more than a light addendum to the book’s narrative core. I’ll have more to say about “The Sarsaparilla Writer’s Centre” later, but, for the moment, I want to focus on the first part of the book which is where Wearne’s genius is to be found. Though they are in no way interlinked, they do have thematic and structural resonances. Two, for example, could be said to be about varieties of violence – domestic and drug-culture – while another two explore the way individuals born in one cultural environment are forced, as they age, to accommodate newer times and the judgements those times pass on the culture of the past: a pregnant theme which Wearne deals with brilliantly.

And then there is “They Came to Moorabbin”, which is placed first. I think it is the subtlest of them and contains a relationship (between Keith and Nance) which is very complex and quite challenging. The characters are born in the twenties (and thus presumably belong to Wearne’s parents’ generation) and inherit the postwar boom years. It’s a period we have met in The Nightmarkets when the narrative steps back from the immediate issue of politics and prostitution and looks at the parents of the politician, Jack McTaggart, in a long monologue in which his mother, Elise, recalls her life with his father, John, one of Menzies’ postwar, ex-military ministers. One way of looking at “They Came to Moorabbin” might be in the light of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier which is built on the relationships between two couples who form a friendship after bumping into each other at a spa: it’s just that in “They Came to Moorabbin”, one of the four is already dead. Iris, an AWAS cypher clerk, marries Keith, a soldier opinionated enough to have extensive, but ultimately limited plans for their postwar future. At Half-Moon Bay, a decade or so after the end of the war, she runs into Nance, whom she had known in the war, who married a major later to become a diplomat after the war (serving in Wellington, Edinburgh and then Cape Town). When he discovered he was dying, he bought a house for his future widow and four children in Moorabbin – Mars as Nance calls it. The core of the poem explores the relationships between Nance and Iris and Keith (and, to a lesser but still significant extent, between Nance and her dead husband). Keith constantly breezes in to Nance’s place doing her tax for her. He seems an embodiment of Australian littleness and the poem suggests that he perfectly represents one aspect of his period while Tony (the diplomat) represents a more ambitious, disciplined, outwardly focussed component of fifties Australia. At any rate it’s a non-love affair and when Nance breaks with Keith it is over his treatment of Iris who bears the brunt of his opinionated whining. Ultimately she isn’t prepared to sacrifice her friendship and stands by Iris in a kind of unspoken woman-to-woman loyalty. Intriguingly, the poem doesn’t stop at the moment that the relationship breaks down (though it is more a slow drifting apart than a melodramatic “scene”) but continues into the future. I don’t think that Wearne often does this: usually the future is suggested at the conclusion of his narratives, a vista, good or bad, predicated on the characters he has been dealing with. The end of “They Came to Moorabbin” is especially bleak: Iris dies, Keith absconds with “some ageing bowling club girlfriend / nobody guessed he had” and we last see Nance, a chain-smoker and drinker “tubed-up for emphysema, a granny in a granny flat, / out the back of her daughter’s”.

Since Keith’s treatment of Iris is a kind of low-level sniping that can conceivably be put under the umbrella of domestic violence, there is a thematic connection between “They Came to Moorabbin” and “Anger Management: A South Coast Tale” which chronicles the relationship between a single mother and an itinerant busker, a “burly, stubbly muso in his thirties”. Whereas the anticipated affair between Nance and Keith never happens, here the anticipated violent outbursts do and, as a result, this is a less subtle poem but still a ruthlessly forensic one:

This could’ve worked except he’s sick 
and stupid. Once is a shock,
twice you’re a failure, but three times
that’s a pattern and three times mate,
matey, sport and Sonny Jim you’re out . . .

“Mixed Business” where violence might be seen as a context seems like an addendum to the world of drug dealing which forms such an important part of The Lovemakers. Its central character is an ex-teacher with a habit and a divorce, living alone on a pension. His dealer, together with his pack, all of whom might be described in terms from Wearne’s earlier “The Vanity of Australian Wishes” as “lulus”, murders a thirteen-year old junior pusher and the central character, together with Bob, a friend from his teaching days, goes to witness the sentencing. The structure of the piece is designed to place the protagonist in between the two visions of the future that his world seems to offer him: a solid, trustworthy sobriety (the kind of person who “never let his parents down”) that part of him wants to access and the incipiently insane world of the user become pusher. Interestingly, whereas the other four narratives cover an extended period of time, so that we can watch the character’s developments or the developing relationship between their character and the rapidly changing one of their society, “Mixed Business” is compressed into three years. It could be because the drug user’s world simply operates at a more frenetic pace or it could be because this is a poem that wants to portray a pendulum-like stasis.

The other two narratives, “Memoirs of a Ceb” and “Waitin’ for the Viet Cong” are portraits of two characters, a man and a woman, both of whom are gay. The first focusses on the character’s love life while the second focusses on the character’s activist history, shaken apart by an affair with a French girl, begun at school age and leading to her rejection when, rather like the central character of Christina Stead’s For Love Alone, she makes a pilgrimage to Europe to renew the relationship only to be snubbed by someone who has changed with the times:

. . . . . 
                            Shy, arrogant girls,
hadn’t we kept each other’s photographs
“Moi sur Les Barricades”, “Me and my Collective”?
Maybe. But what hers had hardly shown
was all the ground she’d filled, she’d travelled,
which wasn’t I knew mere breasts and a boyfriend.
Much worse she couldn’t, wouldn’t announce
Don’t you understand, we’re hardly like that now!
. . . . . 
     Then catching this right-through-me look of hers
I knew what she was seeing Here’s that Australiene again
(some place like that) a pest from my past . . .

Eventually she is rescued from pneumonia by the very forces of middle-class parental conservatism and care that her activism is opposed to. Wearne has a history of being fairly gentle with the activists he portrays and there is something more than merely contemptible about this character who finds that, though she feels free to reject whom she wants, she still has to suffer rejection herself. Times and activist targets change (she moves from a leftist anti-imperialist position to a feminist one as she ages) but so does love: it isn’t the central out-of-time experience that she took it for.

“Memoirs of a Ceb” follows the life of conventional character, Peter, from his adolescence – where he has his “Brokeback Mountain” moment – to a stable adult career (as engineer) and a stable adult relationship with Cameron. Interestingly the meaning of the acronym (a member of the Church of England Boy’s Association) is only explained late in the poem and thus acts as a kind of nagging reminder to the reader that we are dealing with different tempores and different mores. Also interestingly, Wearne chooses to take his narrative, which is structured as a row of decade spaced glimpses, into the near present (2006) when Cameron is waiting to die in a hospice. I think the reason for this is that Peter’s broad perspective on his own life is that it isn’t the discovery of his homosexuality which is the core event of his life but the framing, accepting and accommodating of this. And this is done when, as an adolescent, he meets another member of the congregation, a doctor, who recommends him to a counsellor he knows:

     “I’m Bev,” she announced. “I gather Bob Dalzeil
said how you would never change
and why should you?” Bob told correct . . .

The initial meeting with Dalzeil is brilliantly done – Peter finds him dancing in a conga-line of little kids on his daughter’s eighth birthday – and reminds us how good a conventional story-teller Wearne is, but the point of the entire poem, I think, is that the meeting with Dalziel is more important than the meeting with the first lover (a bodgie met on an “Outreach” mission). When, at the end, a friend asks what would have happened if he hadn’t gone, he says, “I’d have got married, had children, cruised / and spent a life sensing there was something . . . incorrect”.

One feature which “Memoirs of a Ceb” and “Waitin’ for the Viet Cong” share is the incorporation of some verse in Wearne’s comic mode. In the former it is the acerbic Cameron who at a holiday house with mutual friends disappears to produce a set of couplets about lesbian Catholic schoolgirls. More importantly, “Waitin’ for the Viet Cong” concludes with a comic piece –

. . . . . 
Some played Dylan, some played Ochs,
     And others Cheech and Chong.
Whilst some just played at (said their folks)
     Waitin’ for the Viet Cong . . . 

It’s a very odd thing to do but is probably a healthy antidote to my tendency to see these narratives as luminous, extremely subtle portraits of people defined by time and place. It’s a kind of sophisticated doggerel – if that’s a tenable oxymoron – and it may be an important feature of Wearne’s style, telling us that there are other ways of looking at this material. It’s worth remembering that something similar happens near the end of The Lovemakers where the otherwise very serious relationship between Neil and Barb finishes up as a set of quatrains full of excruciating rhymes on “Tullamarine”.

This makes a serendipitous segues to the second part of the These Things Are Real, “The Sarsaparilla Writers Centre”, because the satirical pieces there are full of “sophisticated doggerel”. As its title suggests the targets are mainly fellow poets though there are political (and religious) attacks later on. There are also some very genial ballades: one addressed to Alan Gould and celebrating the Christian name they share and another celebrating Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s reaching his eightieth year. And there are also some wonderful, gently satirical prose dreams: I especially like the one in which Alvaro de Campos (speaking with a Scots accent) claims that Pessoa is one of his heteronyms rather than the reverse: “Since he has spent time in Glasgow I ask him his opinion of Robbie Burns. I am told that Burns too is one of his heteronyms”.

Someday someone will write about the satirical element in Wearne’s poetry, beginning, perhaps, with especially important ones like “The Vanity of Australian Wishes”. It’s a complicated issue. The conventional definition – that satire is the ridiculing of human vices and follies – is fine as far as it goes but it forces us to ask: who decides whether something is a vice or a failing to be pitied? What right does a poet have to set him- or herself up as a judge of such matters and whom does the poet represent? This is a twenty-first century Australian question, perhaps, rather than second century Roman or eighteenth century English or French one. Under this spotlight, the least equivocal vices and follies are those which contain some inherent contradiction – such as hypocrisy – since there the failing is independent of any viewer’s judgement: it’s a mathematical issue rather than a morally determined one. But even hypocrisy could, conceivably, be judged more sympathetically as a frightened, willed blindness.

There is a very interesting essay by David Foster on satire which, though I’m not sure I agree with it, has stayed in the back of my mind since I first read it in his collection Studs and Nogs more than a dozen years ago. He divides satirists up into two classes: the “toothless” – those “willing to wound yet afraid to strike” – and the “biting” who, in Foster’s terms, are the true satirists, the desperate wounded fighters. Fair enough, but the intriguing element is the recognition that the latter are damaged and that the satire arises out of a personal wound. It’s an interesting position because, in a single step, it renders the question, “What gives anyone the right to set themselves up as an arbiter of acceptable behaviour?” irrelevant. It establishes, for the writer, a stake in the issue.

Wearne, in the light of this essay, wouldn’t appear to be a satirist at all. Partly because there’s often a kind of loving intimacy, born of curiosity, between him and his more extreme characters taken from the media, sporting and drug worlds (there’s not much room for curiosity in Foster’s sense of an extreme satirist) and partly because many of the poems in “The Sarsaparilla Writers Centre” come into the category of sharp epigrams (Martial gets excluded from being a satirist in Foster’s classification). But one couplet might well come out of the kind of wounded outrage that Foster requires. A couplet about the 1987 Victorian Premier’s Prize for poetry says: “What you see is what you get: / Runner-up to Lily Brett”.

Whatever distress may or may not be hidden behind Wearne’s satires, With the Youngsters is a celebration, a celebration of collective verse-making. It collects twenty-three sestinas and twenty-two villanelles made by writing students mainly at the University of Wollongong as part of Wearne’s poetry classes. Wearne’s “Afterword” describes how the sestina exercise was set up. Each student provides three words, the words are collected and then an outsider is roped in to draw six of them from a bag. This six, in the order drawn, will form the last words of the first stanza. The remaining stanzas can have their last words laid out in the correct sestina pattern and then each sub-group within the class is given the task of writing one stanza. It sounds a lot of fun, especially as the emphasis is on playing with and bending the rules: none of the resulting poems are at all solemn accomplishments.

One’s immediate impression is that Wearne’s method of eliciting the final words – “From you I’ll have a colour, a piece of fruit and something associated with your home . . . from you a verb ending in ing, a movie star and an adverb . . .” – isn’t designed to make a difficult form any easier. Pound, speaking as a war-hungry Bertran de Born in “Sestina: Altaforte”, could choose “peace”, “music”, “clash”, “opposing”, “crimson” and “rejoicing” which doesn’t pose any insuperable problems, but you feel sorry for the class that were stuck with “taa”, “inoculate”, “seventeen”, “wallowing”, “reckon” and “Nazism or for those who got “Bryan Cranston”, “eating”, “bracelet”, “android”, “starry night” and “blimp”. Still, presumably the difficulty is part of the fun. You get an interesting result in a poem like “Marilyn Sestina” where five of the words chosen are reasonably easy to accommodate into what might have been a perfectly conventional poem (“Monroe”, “jumper”, “blues”, “net” and “Rio Bravo”) but one, “water polo”, is extremely resistant and brings a necessary surreal touch to the finished poem.

The villanelle exercise is a little different but allows students to choose lines from other student poems which they think might survive the constant repetitions of that form. I think the results are not quite as satisfying as the sestina exercises. It may be that I’m prejudiced against the villanelle with its oh-so-obvious syntactic variations to accommodate its repetitions but I think it’s a little more significant than this. The villanelle has always seemed a closed form. Its repeated lines are separated by a single line at the beginning but appear together at the end. This gives a sense of it spiralling inwards towards its conclusion. It’s good in that it always provides a sense of an ending but limiting in that it always feels the same. The sestina, despite its rigid rules, seems much more open: it spins out into meanings but always touches base with the form at the beginning of each stanza which has to repeat the word at the end of the previous stanza (surely the most difficult issue of both these forms is to bring that off without drawing attention to it). To lapse into metaphor for a moment: if a villanelle is like a (usually blunt) arrowhead, the sestina is like an unpredictable balloon, ready to set off in unusual directions and only held back by its six repeated words which come together to make a kind of provisional knot in the final three line stanza.

At any rate, With the Youngsters is the kind of book that will be important when criticism finally begins to come to grips with the issues involved in the professional teaching of the act of writing poetry at tertiary level. It is a tribute (or a slightly quirky monument) to Wearne’s impressive achievements in the field. But it also has a profounder connection with Wearne’s own poetry because he has always been an explorer of fixed forms. There are Meredithian sonnets and syllabic count poems in The Nightmarkets and both sestinas and villanelles in The Lovemakers. The villanelles are brilliant in that book because they are spoken by a defence counsel and thus the dramatic situation supports the repetitive nature of the form. The sestinas in the “Making the World Revolve” section of The Lovemakers are brilliant and brilliantly daring in the way they play with the form: dividing it in half, assigning the final three lines to be the opening of a new poem, and so on.

With the Youngsters and both sections of These Things Are Real are prefaced by a large number of quotations. The result isn’t pompous since many of these are whimsical but my favourite is the comment made by Shostakovich to his (then) student, the serialist Sofia Gubaidulina, at his retirement party: “I wish you to continue on your mistaken path”. It would be a good motto to have inscribed on buildings where Creative Writing is taught.

Alan Wearne: The Australian Popular Songbook

Artarmon: Giramondo, 2008, 93pp.

To readers used to Wearne’s previous massive poems (The Nightmarkets and The Lovemakers), this new book will come as something of a surprise. It is made up of three parts. In the first, which gives its name to the book, there are four sections each of seven poems, all variously rhymed sonnets (apart from two villanelles and a set of triplets). The second part is a set of eleven “Metropolitan Poems” and the third is a seven page dramatic monologue, “Breakfast with Darky”. That is: forty short, individual, unconnected poems. The structure seems to be that the poems of the first part are inspired by the popular songs that become their titles, while those of the second part are inspired by individual suburbs in Melbourne or Sydney – generally, these suburbs form at least part of the title.

Wearne is Australia’s great master of poetic narrative, but one wouldn’t want to treat his work as a consistent whole. The monologues from his first book, Public Relations, brilliant, small poems like “A Molester’s Fortune”, “Warburton, 1910” and “After Adultery” are, in a way, closer to the monologues here than are those of his first two full-scale narrative poems, “Out Here” (of 1976) and The Nightmarkets (of 1986). But in other ways, these poems do reflect the kind of developments going on in The Lovemakers. One of the (very many) remarkable things about that enormous tour de force was the comic poem of the second last section in which the love-lifes of two of the book’s major characters were tied up. The Nightmarkets had been very serious and po-faced and would never have accommodated the kind of slightly manic grotesquerie of:

     Neil was in Melbourne attending a funeral,
he called up his old flame to check out her scene.
     She was delighted and jumped at a meeting,
before he’d fly out from Tullamarine.

And so on through twenty stanzas each finishing with the “lovely liquid” name (to quote an earlier Prime Minister) of Melbourne’s airport.

But there is a lot of this in The Australian Popular Songbook. Indeed any poem which is not a full monologue, rigidly in character, is likely to have a least a touch of this larky style. Patrick White’s typical though imaginary suburb of Sarsaparilla is celebrated by a comic poem done in calypso style (the music is included in the book):

Fifty years past, for a fact,
on some semi-rural tract,
lived a man whose prayers asked, “Boss,
what on earth can follow Voss?”
Question answered, thus he wrote
(as my ballad shall denote)
in his hardly elfin grot:
Riders in the Chariot.

Riders in the Chariot,
ev’ry page a new bon mot,
't's to cross and 'i's to dot,
Riders in the Chariot.

and so on through eight comic stanzas. “Poem for Cathy Coleborne” an equivocal celebration of Fitzroy in the nineties is another comically rhyming piece. This process of allowing the grotesque in to what might otherwise be profound Wearnian meditations on the implications of not only what city his characters live in, but what suburb, even what street, they live in, intrigues me. While “Out Here” was done in impeccable blank verse (the default mode for the dramatic monologue), The Nightmarkets was full of different verse forms, some syllabic, some accentual. But the latter poem was never less than deadly serious. In this new book, either Wearne’s interest in odd verse forms has encouraged the humorous and bathetic, or the desire to be humorous has legitimated the choice of some challenging forms. And complicating this is the fact that for poets of Wearne’s generation, form itself is not the sine qua non of poetry. When such poets do write in complex forms – sestinas, villanelles, and the ever present and irritating (at least to me) pantoums – there is always a postmodern sense of mocking performance about what they do. It is as though they were saying: “I am writing a sonnet but I am just using the formal requirements in a mechanical way. Don’t take them too seriously, the soul of the poem does not lie in them. And expect some deliberately bathetic fulfilling of the formal rules. It’s a game”.

Although The Australian Popular Songbook seems a long way from the epic dimensions and ambitions of The Lovemakers, it does carry over a lot of its concerns. The first poem, for example, inspired by “Down Under”, a pop song even I know, is about the Mr Asia drug syndicate which figures so prominently in The Lovemakers. It also recalls The Lovemakers technically because the speaking voice hovers somewhere between character and author. One of the devices of The Lovemakers was the use of a voice which gave the impression that it had been affected by the world in which it was operating – using its slang, for example, but still with the underlying accents and syntax of the author. In “Down Under”, someone is getting inspired enough to think about importing drugs from South East Asia:

. . . . .
                               And, if here the law
Is “Fit in Western Freak”, well, a brain may yet take off
to one stoned night you tripped into their pigshit trough
but rose back grinning at the tribesmen; or that pleasing twelve hour lockjaw
session and how “With gear like this” you mused,
“not merely fortunes but our souls are made!”
     So how?
                    Well, one mate’s ex-in-law’s this dodgy nark,
whilst another (he’s fevered with the prospects!) reckons on someone who’s
“Like something someplace in some gemstone trade . . .”
     “G’day,” you’ll hear a sardonic Kiwi mutter, “I’m Terry Clark.”

Another poem about the same evil organization is “Neutral Bay” from the second part of the book. Here we are in the much more conventional world (technically speaking) of the monologue. The speaker is one of the young women who couriered the heroin back to Australia in their luggage:

         I’d get in from the airport after midnight
and wait a day, till someone came around,
unloaded me and made me Thanks sweetheart
$15,000 richer. Then I’d hardly be noticed,
not till Allison called, or Kay, and we went off to buy
all those incredible clothes.
. . . . .

Interestingly, it is this simpler mode which is the one chosen to bear the brunt of the ethical perspective on the drug syndicate. When the speaker flies home to see her parents the gossip is of how “someone’s kid was ‘into drugs’, / always someone’s kid and always drugs”. The courier, seeing the results of the trade, wants to escape but is addicted to the money in the same way that the kids are addicted to the drugs:

Who knows what The Organisation’s doing
right now: cutting, grinding and packing;
delivering, collecting and waiting
and how I never wanted to feel damn special again.
But Thanks a lot sweetheart of course I did.

“Neutral Bay” is preceded in the Metropolitan Poems section by “Chatswood: Ruth Nash Speaks”. Here the subject is, ostensibly, the notorious Bogle/Chandler murders of New Year’s day, 1963, and the speaker is the hostess of the party that the doomed pair left, never to be seen alive again. In a way, it recalls the structural techniques of earlier Wearne narratives like “Out Here” and The Nightmarkets. In both of these, there is a central narrative event, but it is no more than a focus for studies in people’s lives and how these relate to all those determining features – city, suburb, school, etc – that Wearne is obsessed by. Since the death of Bogle and Chandler is an unsolved crime, we know that this is not going to be a narrative which proposes a solution. It is not going to finish with Mrs Nash saying, “And, just to teach those randy buggers a lesson, I slipped some dog-worming pills into each of their drinks to give them the runs”. Instead, its interests are in the way that the unseen, violent future event structures everything leading up to it into a narrative:

. . . . .
so there’s Gib on arrival lightfooting it down our hall,
and there’s Gib a day later lightfooting bugger all.

We think we know the limits? We're merely to follow this text:
Lives unfold lives fold, here’s one hour here’s the next.

And where in a plot place “the heavens”, their ever expanding no?
Well you barely ask such questions of the CSIRO,

For (lab coats, leather patches, pipes and British cars)
my other half worked with boffins who rarely trusted the stars.
. . . . .

Mrs Nash’s concern over the shape of fate is given added poignancy, of course, by the fact that she died exactly on the eleventh anniversary of the murders and that her husband suicided exactly on the thirteenth – though neither of these events is foreshadowed in the poem. “Chatswood: Ruth Nash Speaks” is a brilliant meditation and might even be called a meta-narrative. Again, as in the poems I began with, this can be balanced by one with ethical considerations. “Breakfast with Darky” is a “straight” dramatic monologue whose speaker, serving out his time in a Melbourne high school in the late seventies was, in his younger days, the author of a book of stories in the socialist-realist mode. A new, young staff member recognizes his name and wants to know why there was only one book. The title of that single collection, Just Doing My Job: Stories from the Struggle, is worth pausing over for a minute. It is very funny and cruelly accurate. I’ve always suspected that novelists have a particular ability to imagine the titles of books they would not have wanted to write themselves. After all, if you can imagine an alternative reality, peopled by alternative characters, you should be able to imagine that reality’s fiction and the kinds of titles its books would have. Anthony Powell, an author whom both Wearne and myself admire, was a master of this and one of the running gags in the Dance to the Music of Time novels is the row of titles of books by a pretentious old writer of high-flown romance, St John Clarke: Dust Thou Art, Match Me Such Marvel, Fields of Amaranth.

At any rate, “Breakfast with Darky” is an attack on this particular, leftist mode mainly because it approaches reality through ideology:

Mike was so sincere, so fragile with it,
I couldn’t bother to advise:
“In the end I only wrote what the party
wanted. Quitting that much of my life
required . . . how much heroics?
Just one. One on a day I would not
be labelled. Simple? Yes, simple."

In the end, “Breakfast with Darky” is more about the ethics of writing than it is about the ethics of politics. The speaker’s unpublished second volume sees the great battle of the classes as being played out like a game. Once people accept their part, reality unrolls. I think it says, finally, that that is fine for all except the writer.

Among the sonnets of the first part of this book there are some very fine achievements. Some are comic (the general tone is comic), like the monologue of the girl whose father has run off with her best friend. This is perfect, right down to the speaker’s high-rising terminals:

. . . . .
So, when I get to see him and he’s all earstud ’n’ lovebite
(hoho, who’s been helping you co-dependent through the night?)

and familial interaction seems the least of his chores:
“Err how’s y’mother, Princess?” Jeez Pop, jeez Pop, how’s yours?

The embarrassment! He’s fifty-one, she’s twenty-four,
so wouldn’t you move further than Maroochydore?

There’s better, it’s worse but, the Get this! fun begins.
They run this motel, see? And she’s expecting,
     she’s expecting . . . twins?

Others, like the two poems about his mother’s younger life in Brisbane during the war, or the poem about the Argonauts Club are modest and somber. I think the best of them is probably “I Go to Rio” which modulates suddenly from the mad world of Peter Allen, Judy Garland and her daughter to the real Rio de Janeiro in which the author saw, before a match at the Maracana, the players holding a banner, aimed at the police death-squads and saying “Please Stop Murdering our Children”.

Wearne is, as everybody who reads Australian poetry knows, a one-off. Better than our novelists he gives a sense of what it is like to live at one of many times in one of many places. His sensitivity to and inquisitiveness about all the issues which determine us as individuals is unparalleled. Paradoxically, he is not somebody who has radically changed Australian poetry. What he has done is stretch it by taking it into the world that novels usually inhabit: the world of registering the infinite detail of social life. The trouble (if one wants to look for serpents in this particular garden) is that he is so good at the narrative poem or the dramatic monologue – both based on the suggestion that only a fraction of an entirely detailed imaginary world has been revealed – that it makes it harder, not easier, for any poets wanting to tag along in his footsteps. There are plenty of poems being written as narratives or monologues today but they all look stagey or coy or self-focussed in comparison to Wearne’s work. If the function of literature is to make some kind of sense of what a place is and how its people live within it, then Wearne is one of Australia’s most precious literary treasures.