Idea

 

‘Listen! I have an idea’ is the subject of this year’s poetry prize. How do I teach this to sixty primary school students? By reading poems aloud, but first what is an idea? And do children have ideas? I raise these questions at a dinner party on the weekend. Friends at dinner agree, it’s a great subject, but even though we all have ideas, we don’t think of them in the abstract. I said I was helped by William Carlos Williams’ saying in his poetry “No ideas but in things.” In other words, things prompt words that reveal ideas. Young poets find poetry by using images in their own language. Our host wrestled with how thoughts expressed well are kind of the start of ideas. I introduced the oft-said concern that children simply parrot the ideas of adults, in particular their parents. Wine and conviviality got us no closer to a theory about how we write poetry about ideas. Or may did, but the wine was taking effect. Next day I asked my daughter on the phone, what is an idea? She said, after some thought, walking along the street, that an idea is when two thoughts meet, at any age. Trick being, how to present this definition of Idea to a group of under-12s? I cannot, of course, because it’s too cerebral, like thoughts and ideas in general. Some older students may respond with a poem like a philosophical argument, but most wish to say something, or else even write a poem called ‘I Have No Ideas Today’. But admittedly, thoughts meeting is often the genesis of poems, so how to make that happen. By chance, whatever chance is, over the weekend a relative gave me a spare copy of Saul Bellow’s essays. I discovered that Bellow is an intellectual who hates the word intellectual. His biographical interview ‘A Half Life’ (1990) opens “I certainly wasn’t conscious of ideas as such before I was ten. I did have ideas of some sort earlier, but they were the sort of primitive metaphysical ideas a small child has.” Asked for examples, he replies: “Sitting on a curbstone, looking at the sky, thinking: Where did it all come from? Why was I here?” I started to think that the first word in the theme was as important as the last. Listening was as much the theme as ideas. I needed to find poems for reading that showed things and that drew in the listener, whether child or adult. The theme equated poetry with the need to say something to others. If children already have ideas, whether as defined by my host on Saturday night, my daughter on her phone, or the American Nobel laureate in his interview, then those ideas will form by hearing poetry and imitating its sounds, feel, word games, subjects and so forth from their own experience. My job became one of finding poems that assisted that process, reading them out carefully, and seeing what happened next. Poems would follow, and ideas, even poems about what is an idea.

Finland

 

Standing at Westgarth Station the anonymous author considers how clouds superimpose themselves on other clouds, cold as snow. The clouds are images in his mind, slowly ending up upon alpine plains. A high bridge arches across the sky in his mind. The anonymous writer wonders why Gerald Murnane never uses the name Gerald for the first-person narrators of his incremental fictions. But not for long, as he finds images in his mind are of white expanses of Finland. Snow footpaths and snow windows show at some unearthly hour and briefly the moon the same. There are ice rivers and ice rinks all day in daylight then candles in the windows when an unearthly sunset makes everywhere black and the winter sea. Westgarth platform is an arc. Large mirrors on sturdy stilts help the train driver see the back carriage exits and entrances. The anonymous author notices how superimposed clouds and a bridge in the sky are reflections in a large mirror on Platform 2. Surface glaze and white sprays of graffiti improve the superimpositions in his mind. He thinks it must be exciting for humans and wolves when the darkness breaks open with a red line that widens into pink and yellow, in Finland, in winter. Windows and exterior landscapes turn white, making space for memory. When a Hurstbridge express train hurtles through the arc of Westgarth, disappearing around the bend, the station is left feeling redundant. The anonymous author senses the loneliness experienced sometimes by characters in stories by Tove Jansson. A mirror on stilts temporarily reflects woodlands and cold lakes and pale blue skies. He sees the music of Jean Sibelius, chilly and austere sonatinas, proof, if only in his writing, that music is visible. The unnamed writer wonders why Tove rarely used the name Tove, though all the characters in her fictions were people in her life. Tove gave them special names, some of them look like clouds and the main ways to reach islands in Finland are by boat or bridge. The nameless composer in words considers it a great relief to know wolves were never introduced into Australia. He wonders if an academic living in Westgarth with nothing better to do will one day collate a who’s who key to all the people in the novels of Gerald Murnane, formerly of Macleod. He recollects images in his mind in a glass whitely on stilts of the frozen north, or is that the melting north, or the misty north, the slushy north, the pale blue north? A stopping-all-stations to Macleod rounds the bend, slows and halts along the arc, beneath the bridge in the sky. Five people get off and two people get onto the train, also the unidentified author into the second front carriage. The driver waits till all is clear then closes the long line of carriage doors.

Omnishambles

 

Omnishambles, a word that should be used more often to explain the bewildering array of evidence and opinion met in daily life, at macro and micro levels. Confronted with a situation that is beyond our immediate ability to process in all its complexity, most of us reach readily for the common expression: What a mess! A useful summation, but sometimes for truly unruly presentations of a mess, why not opt for its baroque synonym, omnishambles? This was the word used by the judge in the Bruce Lehrmann vs Network Ten and Lisa Wilkinson case this week in the Federal Court to describe the height, breadth, and depth of confusion (read, information) that met his senses during this court hearing. He was stating his task, which was to apply common sense and a knowledge of the law onto an omnishambles, the prefix omni- indicating that the shambles was everywhere and all-encompassing through several dimensions. At least from his perspective. And probably most of the jury’s, the jury consisting of a goodly proportion of the Australian population. Like us the judge, Justice Michael Lee, was being told lies and to his credit he showed great insight in calling out quite a number, especially from Lehrmann, using simple objectivity and knowledge of the type. This dispersed much omnipresent fog while gratifyingly showing none of us are omniscient. Weeks of hearings tiptoed around the certainty, because it was forever being denied, that sex occurred on the ministerial couch in Parliament. This shambling around the main subject was clearly irritating to the judge. He made clear with clinical analysis just what this discussion was really about. His verdict left none of the jury in any doubt, as the omnishambles exited stage right and a hundred cameras followed the actors in this strange farce down a busy Sydney street. His actual characterisation of the case went, “given its unexpected detours and the collateral damage, it might be more fitting to describe it as an omnishambles”, itself a fitting description of the messy night in question. That alcohol has its own verisimilitude was known to the judge. That there are any number of afterhours venue choices more private than Parliament House. That true confessions may happen years later in unanticipated places and with unlikely listeners. His every sentence spoke to a shared reality about people and life. Deliver us from subterfuge. Amen. Omnishambles started life as a British political word, apt thinks the jury given the events of the case transpired during the lifetime of the so-so ScoMo moment. Like the judge, the Oxford English Dictionary turned this mess into clear English, awarding omnishambles the Word of the Year in 2012. Its definition: “a situation, especially in politics, in which poor judgement results in disorder or chaos with potentially disastrous consequences.”