Brian Kim Stefans

from The Dreamlife of Letters

Excerpt from
A Quick Graph: On Martin Johnston
Paragraphs from an Unwritten Letter to John Tranter

Creeley, O'Hara, Ashbery, Guest and, to a lesser degree, Duncan and Schuyler complicate this schema here, as there were limits to their counter-culturalism, how "outside" they were willing to be. Creeley, for instance, takes Herrick as one of his early poetic models, and indeed rarely exceeds the bounds of taste that Herrick recognizes, doing this, perhaps, both to reign in and liberate the erotic tendencies in his poetry. O'Hara and Ashbery had strong senses of taste and yet, it seemed, rebelled against it subtly, upping the ante by including surrealist, sometimes juvenile or campy imagery in their poetry, along with odd meters, broken syntax, etc., though on occasion you have to hunt for it for these breaks with decorum (they conceal meanings quite well). This subtle practice created what we now know as the "New York School" flavor, the equivalent (in my weird, historical imagination) of court poetry for New York's art and cultural world. In this way, it's not surprising to me to find that O'Hara and Ashbery have been so influential among a certain circle of poets in Australia, as they are the late modernists who most effectively combined the discoveries of modernism with an ability to address, rather than disturb or subvert, a vital, interested milieu, or perhaps even to create one. 

(What is interesting is how a poet not often spoken of in "avant-garde" circles these days, W. H. Auden, seems to be equally important, at least to Johnston, especially in his ability to address a larger cultural audience with a social contract which he complicates but never betrays, but while aware of the various strands of modernism that he either assimilates or rejects. Auden, like Pound, seems to have two distinct legacies, one among what we consider now the "mainstream" of its time - Jarrell, Lowell, Berryman - which is very apparent, and one more clouded, with the "underground" - The New York School poets, specifically, who were able to read the subtle, subversive quality of his work best). 

Martin Johnston's poems that appear in the Penguin anthology, like "The Sea Cucumber" and "In Memoriam", which I assume to be among his most popular, are also, it appears, among his least difficult, and seem to honor most this contract with the reader. They each have coherent themes, and start with the grand tone preparing the reader for deep, well-earned meanings, which openings to poems that are self-consciously trivial, ridiculous or banal don't promise. Johnston, like Ashbery, seems to have found a way to create poems that are both meditative yet opaque, daringly experimental yet approachable, though most readers don't consider Ashbery very experimental at all. The experiment, though, is there in that the window of Ashbery's poems leads to considerations - death, eroticism, the anti-social (reading Bataille these days), the transcendent, political "opposition" even (with his attention to marginal, unreedemable poets like John Clare, or the absence of heterosexual rites such as marriage in his work), etc. - which no poet as visible as Ashbery today offers. Johnston - who says in an interview that someone should always provide the "opposition", even if not a partisan one - does many of these things also, but in a different cultural context.

Johnston's sonnet, "Gorey at the Biennalle," seems to me one of the better poems in this "courtly" but counter-cultural vein. My tendency, however, is to prefer his more difficult poems among the early writing, such as "Microclimatology," over poems like "The Sea Cucumber" (and not just because of their respective titles). By the time Johnston composes the sonnet square, "In Transit"*, he is pretty much within both worlds - that of dense linguistic play and that addressing a sort of "public" which he knows but doesn't really know - perhaps because the sequence itself describes, in a formally exquisite, idiosyncratic style, his adventures as a nomad in Australia and Greece, thus putting himself somewhere within the area of one of the most interesting moments in modernism, when formal restraint was just breaking under the burden of a new content in the 19th century. 

* [You can read the poem sequence Microclimatology in this issue of Jacket, and the sonnet sequence "In Transit" in Jacket # 1.] 

Rimbaud's sonnets and poems in alexandrines typify this for me; they were the writings of a young poet in the outskirts addressed to Paris, the center, much like Johnston could be said to address the rest of the world from Sydney (or Sydney from Greece). That Johnston found his own moment in time, his private singularity or sense of himself as unassimilable detail, is what makes him distinctive among Australian poets, regardless of how this moment is set off against the more celebrated events and myths of modernism. Consequently, it's this anxious, self-conscious marriage to modernism that produced his break with the main narrative, a narrative under which, according to the Malley legacy, Australia is said to suffer. 

          ¶

Anyway, so this is supposed to be about Johnston himself, and maybe me (which is why it was to be a letter). Briefly, as I told you before, I found a selected poems of Johnston (which, alas, you also edited) in the Strand bookstore several years ago, and basically looked at the pictures and read a few lines before deciding not to buy it. But I had a sense that he was probably someone I should know, not only because of how unusual he looked in the pictures - tall, lanky, large glasses, with incredibly long hair for the eighties, one of which depicted him, with a wicked grin on his face and his back arcing into an upside-down U, playing a gravestone carved in the shape of a grand piano - but because he seemed a bit unacceptable to society, a bit of a vagabond.