A three-day conference on poetry and poetics held on the 5th to 7th of December 2022, at the University of Canberra.
T I M E & P L A C E
Jennifer Harrison & Mark Tredinnick present A Panel for “Out of the Ordinary: On Poetry & the World”, joined by Jacob Goetz.
So, the world happens twice,” William Stafford writes in “Bi-Focal.” In its first life, the world, he explains, is “what we see it as”; in its second life, “it legends itself deep: the way it is.” His thought is that what we see or think we see is much less than what is—in land, in a moment, in love, in loss, in a life. But poetry has a part to play, I think Stafford wants us to intuit, in fashioning the second coming, in divining the second dawning, of the world.
For, the world passes fast—faster and less coherently than we can grasp as it goes. Poetry lets us have the world and keep it, too (bits of it, anyway). Poetry gives the world a second life, a second chance, a second birth in language, a life which outlasts the moments in which the world, in its first articulation of itself, transpires. The world—those parts of it each of us gets to experience, to enact or encounter—happens once in ordinary time, and sometimes—for a poet who writes such a moment, and sometimes for a reader who recognises in a poem a metaphor for a moment of their own that almost passed them by—the world gets to happen a second time, outside time.
A lyric poem, then, carries lived experience out of ordinary time and returns it later, transfigured into a habitable coherence, a moment made mythic, a reality legended deep.
Poetry makes time over into place—into country, into small rooms (stanzas), into hearths where one may stay and start to understand what one missed.
“Once, I thanked a man who had sponsored a poetry event I took part in. He was Iranian, a Farsi speaker, a reader of Hafiz. No, he said, you owe me no thanks. It is you we must thank. For you poets carry the world on your backs.” (Mark Tredinnick)
When the world—place, earth, love, death, trauma, delight, tragedy, country, desire, hope, despair, cold summers in high country—is said in poetry, it is stays said. Poetry carries the world back to the world.
There is a problem, though, for poets. This second birthing business can carry you out of your life. On the one hand, poetry, a poetical way of being, schools you in attention, trains you in deeper presence. For, if you can’t catch the world in its second life (and its first) you won’t get much memeorable poetry written. On the other hand, as Mark puts it, “living poetically can also steal you from every moment you might otherwise get to have. Poetry dooms one to detachment. I’m only halfway present in most of my life; I have my moments more successfully later—on the page.”
And then there’s this: the second birthing of the world won’t happen unless a poet can cultivate and sustain a second life, a second world within the quicker one she lives. For that is where and when and how the poems happen, those stillings of the rapid world; this second life is slow and silent and lonely. Call it interiority. Call it solitude and space to have it in and the money to afford it. Seamus Heaney called it an attic life. Let’s not hurry the poems, then; the world goes too fast in its first life, as it is. Let’s not hurry the poets. Let’s help them finance the silence on which the rebirthing of the world depends.
Jennifer Harrison has published eight poetry collections and co-edited three anthologies of Australian poetry, including Motherlode, Australian Women’s Poetry 1986-2008 (Puncher & Wattmann 2009). Her many awards include the Anne Elder Poetry Award, the NSW Women Writers Prize, the Booktopia Grieve Poetry Prize and the Martha Richardson Poetry Medal. Her ninth collection Sideshow History will be published in 2022 by Black Pepper, Melbourne. In 2012, she received the Christopher Brennan Award for sustained achievement in Australian poetry. Jennifer is a child and youth psychiatrist working at the Alfred Hospital, Melbourne. In 2011 she founded and continues to manage The Dax Poetry Collection, part of The Cunningham Dax Collection of art created by those with lived experience of mental illness and/or psychological trauma. She is currently chair of the World Psychiatry Association’s Section for Art and Psychiatry.