The Instrument (by Les Murray)
The Instrument (by Les Murray)
Original Text
Les Murray, Conscious and Verbal (Manchester: Carcanet, 1999).
This
poem
is reproduced on the Griffin Prize Web Site
(from a volume on the 2000 International Shortlist).
1Who reads poetry? Not our intellectuals;
2they want to control it. Not lovers, not the combative,
3not examinees. They too skim it for bouquets
4and magic trump cards. Not poor schoolkids
5furtively farting as they get immunized against it.
6Poetry is read by the lovers of poetry
7and heard by some more they coax to the café
8or the district library for a bifocal reading.
9Lovers of poetry may total a million people
10on the whole planet. Fewer than the players of skat.
11What gives them delight is a never-murderous skim
12distilled, to verse mainly, and suspended in rapt
13calm on the surface of paper. The rest of poetry
14to which this was once integral still rules
15the continents, as it always did. But on condition now
16that its true name’s never spoken: constructs, feral poetry,
17the opposite but also the secret of the rational.
18And who reads these? Ah, the lovers, the schoolkids,
19debaters, generals, crime-lords, everybody reads them:
20Porsche, lift-off, Gaia, Cool, patriarchy.
21Among the feral stanzas are many that demand your flesh
22to embody themselves. Only completed art
23free of obedience to its time can pirouette you
24through and athwart the larger poems you are in.
25Being outside all poetry is an unreachable void.
26Why write poetry? For the weird unemployment.
27For the painless headaches, that must be tapped to strike
28down along your writing arm at the accumulated moment.
29For the adjustments after, aligning facets in a verb
30before the trance leaves you. For working always beyond
31your own intelligence. For not needing to rise
32and betray the poor to do it. For a non-devouring fame.
33Little in politics resembles it: perhaps
34the Australian colonists’ re-inventing of the snide
35far-adopted secret ballot, in which deflation could hide
36and, as a welfare bringer, shame the mass-grave Revolutions,
37So axe-edged, so lictor-y.
38Was that moral cowardice’s one shining world victory?
39Breathing in dream-rhythm when awake and far from bed
40evinces the gift. Being tragic with a book on your head.
RPO poem Editors
Ian Lancashire
RPO Edition
2011